Kneaded to Death

by Winnie Archer

  I listened, enthralled. Her words seeped into me, and I understood completely. It was all about passion. Mine was photography. I had left California to go to college in Texas and had stayed there for many years, building my business. Circumstances had brought me back, I was starting over, and turning to the lens was the only thing I knew how to do. I imagined the display cases in Yeast of Eden overflowing with the day’s offerings every morning, and I had a sudden hankering to photograph them. I made a mental note to myself to bring my camera in the morning and take a few shots, excited to see how the light would be and thinking about how best to capture the delicacy of the bread.

  As Olaya continued filling us in on her history as a bread maker, the back door opened and a woman in a knee-length jean skirt and a floral blouse breezed in. “Sorry I’m late!”

  “Late?” Olaya said, not missing a beat. “Jackie, five more minutes and I would have locked the door. You would have been stuck outside, with not an ounce of bread. You would have been . . . How do you say it?” She drew a finger across her neck. “Out of luck.”

  Clearly, Olaya didn’t like tardiness with her classes. Duly noted. But I’d detected a light touch in her voice, and there was the faintest hint of a smile on her lips. I suspected that Jackie wasn’t often on time and that Olaya had learned to accept this about her.

  Jackie looked around and frowned, but Olaya ushered her to her workstation. She grabbed an apron off a hook and handed it to her. “But you are here now. You might as well stay.”

  “I had my own class to wrap up. Not as meaningful as baking bread, of course, but my livelihood.” Her eyes glinted mischievously as she pushed her name tag aside, tied on her apron, took a drink from her ice water, and bit into her petit four. “Did I miss the talk about you baking bread as a child in Mexico?”

  “She was just finishing,” Consuelo said, and the two women’s gazes met.

  Jackie mouthed, “Phew!” and a knowing grin crossed each of their faces. Evidently, they had both taken the bread-making classes before and had heard Olaya’s stories.

  Olaya ignored her sister and her friend. She scanned Jackie up and down, and her gaze settled on the wedge heels. “Very nice shoes you are wearing,” she said. “Perfect for baking.”

  Jackie burst out laughing and boisterously kicked up one leg behind her in an old Hollywood starlet manner. “That’s exactly what I thought. You know my philosophy. One should always look her best, and shoes are the instant wardrobe definer.” She fluttered her hand. “Carry on, Olaya.”

  I stood back as the women chattered, taking it all in, absorbing the energy in the kitchen. Memories of being in my childhood kitchen with my mom settled over me like a layer of gauze cloaking me. We’d cooked. We’d baked. She’d taught me everything I knew about being independent, about being strong, about being a woman. The memory slipped and cracked, and once again sorrow leached through me.

  I drew in a deep breath, stilling my racing heartbeat, tucking the memory of my mom and me in her kitchen into a back corner of my mind. I wouldn’t think about it right now.

  Olaya reached her hand into a large plastic bin and let a handful of flour cascade through her fingers. “Baking bread is an art,” she was saying. “I come in at four thirty every morning, and I produce top-quality breads on a daily basis. Consistency is key. When you bake, you get one shot. You don’t know for certain if the bread is going to turn out the way it should until it comes out of the oven. It must look right. It must taste right. There are no additives. There are no shortcuts. My goal is for it always to be perfect, and that takes time. That is the payoff.”

  My heart beat a little faster, a niggling worry about producing a flawless loaf of bread working its way through me. This was supposed to be fun, not stressful.

  Olaya must have sensed the pressure building in the room, because she smiled and patted the air with her hands, as if to calm us down. “You will learn to let your experience guide you. You will learn what to look for, what to feel for, and how to work the dough until you produce bread to be proud of.”

  I closed my eyes and let Olaya’s words and voice float around me. Let my anxiety fade away. If my bread didn’t turn out quite right, well, I’d be okay with that. I was doing something new. Doing something I wanted to do. Doing something challenging. And I was excited about the prospect.

  Olaya continued. “Do you know my sisters and I come from a long line of brujas? Witches,” she explained when Jolie asked what that meant. “Family legend has it that a bruja, many generations past, had been wronged by a man—”

  “What else is new?” Jackie snarked.

  “Is there any other way?” Consuelo added. She winked at Jackie.

  Martina, the quiet one, piped up. “Cállate, both of you. You choose badly, so what do you expect?”

  Consuelo and Jackie sniggered to each other, and Olaya continued as if there hadn’t been an interruption at all. “To protect the future women in her line, the bruja in our familia made it so that mothers and daughters, abuelitas and nietas, aunts and nieces, madrinas and comadres—these relationships would last and sustain themselves better than any other. She blessed the women in my line with the ability to cook. To bake. And that is how this tradition started in my family.”

  She continued, “Me? I have no choice. I must bake bread. You?” She pointed at each of us. “You are each here for your own reasons. I will be your guide. I will show you how to create your own bread, and you will form your own traditions. You will come to understand the power of bread. No. The power of baking. Of creating with your hands. Your mind. Your soul. We women are strong, and bread is healing. It can give you strength you did not know you had.”

  I didn’t know what to make of the Solis women, the magic they put into bread making, and the fact that they thought they came from an ancient line of witches. But I went with it. There was something about them. I liked them all, especially Olaya, and being in her kitchen . . . in her cocina . . . gave me a sense of peace I hadn’t felt since my mother died.

  We spent the next hour measuring and mixing the ingredients for conchas.

  “Mexican sweet bread is an easy way to start the bread-making process,” Olaya said.

  We went through the lesson by mixing the yeast and warm water, adding the milk, sugar, butter, eggs, and flour, and finally kneading the mixture until a soft, pliable dough formed.

  “Much of the bread I make here is to be long cultured,” she continued. “Forty-eight hours or more, to get the best rise and flavor possible. But the sweet bread, the conchas, can rise much more quickly.”

  We left the dough in our greased bowls covered with a thin dishcloth and went to the front of the shop, where Olaya walked us through the different breads still remaining in the display cases, telling us the history of her experiences making sourdough loaves, French baguettes, boules, brioche, tartine country bread, challah, festive breads, and so much more. Part way through the bread tour, Jackie’s cell phone rang, sounding like the harsh ring of an old-fashioned phone from twenty years ago. Jackie answered, avoiding Olaya’s disapproving glare.

  “I can’t,” she whispered into the smartphone. “I’m in the middle of a class.”

  Whoever was on the other end of the line said something that caused the color to drain from Jackie’s face. She turned a ghostly white and glanced around, her spooked gaze skittering over each of us. Turning her back to us again, she cupped her hand over the phone and lowered her voice even more. “No. She’s not. It was my decision. My life, not yours.”

  She talked for another minute, but her words were muted. Unintelligible.

  Finally, she pressed the OFF button and shoved her phone into her pocket. The next instant, her phone rang again. “Kids,” she said when she’d looked at the caller ID. “I told you, I’m busy, Jasmine,” she said, but she looked at Olaya, rolled her eyes, and pushed through the swinging doors, disappearing back into the kitchen.

  The three sisters gave each other some sort of knowing look
, as if they knew something about Jackie’s phone calls from Jasmine that gave them all pause, but Olaya picked up right where she’d left off in her talk.

  “Artisan bread is handcrafted. They are hearth-baked loaves, and now I am going to tell you the secret. Are you ready?” she asked, a twinkle in her eyes.

  We all nodded. I’d heard the stories about Yeast of Eden and the magic in the bread here. If you had a cold, people around Santa Sofia said that a loaf of traditional French bread from Yeast of Eden could cure it. If you’d had too little sleep, the five-grain bread was sure to wake you up. Heartbroken? Choose the sundried tomato and black olive or the fig and almond loaf. Either would mend the sadness. I wanted to know the secret to Olaya’s magic as much as everyone else did, but part of me wondered if knowing would lessen the impact the bread could have or, worse, somehow take away altogether the magic it held. My daily visits had helped me cope with losing my mother; I didn’t want that to stop.

  Olaya forged on. “The secret,” she said, her voice low and conspiratorial, “is wet dough.”

  I laughed spontaneously. I’d been expecting some mystical truth, but Olaya, although she might well be a bruja, was a realist. Wet dough. Okay, then.

  “But the conchas dough wasn’t wet,” Becky, one of the younger class members, said.

  Olaya nodded. “True. Bueno. That is a good observation. Conchas are lovely sweet breads, but they are not artisan breads. I do not want to scare you away too fast. You must learn the basics first, and then slowly you can increase your repertoire.”

  After another few minutes, we took a ten-minute bathroom break and then followed Olaya back into the kitchen and resumed our places at our stations with our bowls of sweet bread dough. Mine was a creamy white and had doubled, the previously dense dough now light and airy.

  Olaya stood at the island, and we all looked at the mirror that was positioned above it, angled so that we could see exactly what she was doing. She’d told us how she’d had the mirror installed the previous year so she could teach others the art of bread making. As I watched her reflection mix the topping ingredients for the conchas, I could honestly say that the mirror was a great tool. We could all see everything she was doing so clearly, and we effortlessly followed her every move.

  I followed her directions, step by step, beating the sugar and butter, stirring in flour until the mixture was the consistency of a thick paste, and then mixing in cinnamon.

  Next, she turned her conchas dough out onto her stainless-steel counter. I followed suit, then rolled the dough into a log and cut it into twelve even pieces. After rolling the pieces into balls, I placed them onto the greased cookie sheet I’d already prepared. Olaya led us as we divided the topping paste into balls, then flattened each one, placed one on top of each of the conchas balls, and patted each one down lightly with our open palms.

  “The last step,” she said, “is to take your knife and cut grooves into the topping. Like a clamshell,” she added. “Y lista. It is ready. Now it must rise again for about forty-five minutes, and we will bake.”

  It was at that moment that Consuelo looked around and asked, “Where’s Jackie?”

  I turned to Jackie’s baking station. She wasn’t there. I’d been so wrapped up in the baking process that I hadn’t noticed. Neither, apparently, had anyone else.

  “Hijo de la chingada. Of course it is Jasmine,” Olaya said. “Now she wants to talk, and Jackie jumps. The girl cannot have it both ways.”

  “She is her daughter,” Martina said softly. She definitely was the quiet sister, as Consuelo had said, but if she had an opinion, she seemed more than willing to share it.

  A bowl crashed to the floor, breaking the tension.

  “Sorry,” Becky said.

  Jolie dropped to her knees to pick up the ceramic fragments. “No, no. It was my fault.”

  But no one paid either of them any mind. Olaya and Consuelo headed out the back door of the kitchen. It had grown dark while we’d been baking, but the typically peaceful beach sounds of Santa Sofia weren’t what we heard. Instead, the sound of male voices floated in the air. And then, like rolling thunder in the sky, at first distant, but growing louder, familiar yet at the same time ominous, an old, familiar voice crept into my consciousness. Memories from high school. Memories of my broken heart being torn apart and stomped on. Memories of the face behind all that old pain.

  My heart seized. It was Miguel Baptista . . . and he was still right here in Santa Sofia.

  Chapter Two

  After stepping outside with the other women in the bread-making class, I saw trouble with a capital T. Miguel Baptista and I had dated during my junior year (his senior year). I’d fallen head over heels, and I’d thought Miguel had, too, but his desire to get out of Santa Sofia had been greater than whatever he’d felt for me. He had graduated from high school and had taken the next bus out of town. I didn’t think he’d ever looked back. I’d been nothing but a blip in his love life, but I’d always wondered if he was the one that got away.

  Except here he was, arguing with a man I didn’t know in the parking lot behind Yeast of Eden, their figures illuminated by the old-fashioned streetlights around the perimeter of the lot.

  Seeing him reaffirmed something for me. He was the one I’d never fully gotten out of my system.

  “Is that Randy Russell?” Sally asked, peering at the man Miguel was arguing with.

  “What’s he got in his hand?” Becky drew in a sharp breath and took a step backward. “Oh my God. It’s a gun!”

  A shot of panic surged through my veins. A gun?

  There was a burst of lavender and hydrangeas in the planter beds on either side of the door, and we all instantly dodged behind them, trampling the columbine, bellflower, coralbells, and daisies that were also planted there. Of course, I realized too late that the fronds and flowers of these pretty planter beds wouldn’t actually do anything to stop a stray bullet that might happen to come our way.

  I peered through the lacy flowers and saw a man waving what looked like an old pistol. The light was dim, but the streetlights illuminated the scene well enough. I could see that his cheeks were ruddy, the color creeping up from his neck. “Who is he?” I said under my breath to the other women hiding beside me in the flower bushes.

  “Randy co-owns the antique store across the street with Gus Makers,” Jolie whispered.

  Sally pulled apart two enormous hydrangea blooms to peer more closely. “What is wrong with him?”

  I couldn’t hear what Miguel and Randy were saying to each other, but Randy’s voice was raised. He was definitely upset about something. Miguel patted the air with his open palms, working to calm him down. We all recoiled as Randy waved his arms around. Something seemed off. I peered into the waning light, trying to get a better look at the weapon in his hand. Realization struck me.

  “It’s not a gun.” I heaved a relieved sigh and repeated, “It’s not a gun.”

  In fact, it looked more like an antique billy club. How any of us could have mistaken the short brown club for a gun, I was not sure. All I knew was that I heaved an enormous sigh of relief.

  Olaya seemed to realize the same thing. She muttered something in Spanish, blew out a loud breath, and suddenly charged forward. “Enough. Randy Russell. Qué pasó? What are you doing?”

  Randy stopped and slowly turned around. “Back off, Olaya,” he said with a hiss.

  “I will not, Randy. You interrupt my class, and you act like a crazy person.”

  He flung his head this way and that, as if he were looking for someone. Then he raised his hand, the billy club clenched tight.

  I and the women flanking me in the flower beds gasped in unison.

  “Oh my God,” Jolie said.

  “What’s he going to do?” Becky muttered.

  Sally suddenly clasped her hand on my shoulder.

  I willed them all to relax, and at the same time, I willed Olaya to back away and not bait him anymore. Even though it wasn’t a gun, a lot of damage
could be done with a club. Unfortunately, I didn’t have the magical ability to communicate telepathically with her. Instead of retreating, as I’d hoped, she advanced on him.

  “Randy Russell, you hothead, you need to put that stick away, go home, and sober up. Gus and Jackie are not your business. They are old news,” she told him.

  Behind him, Miguel seemed to make eye contact with Olaya. She continued to distract Randy Russell, and as I watched, Miguel crept forward like a panther. In one lightning quick move, he threw one arm around him and grabbed his wrist with his other hand. “You don’t want to do this, pal,” he said, and the next thing I knew, Miguel had yanked the man’s hand down until it was behind his back and the club was no longer in his grip. In ten seconds flat, Miguel had disarmed the lunatic, a siren blared and grew deafening as a police cruiser skidded into the parking lot, and Randy Russell broke free and took off running. Stumbling. Running.

  A female officer jettisoned out of the police car before it even stopped, and took up chase. Moments later, she tackled Randy Russell and it was over.

  Just as we had made a collective gasp a minute before, the four of us in the bushes let out the breaths we’d been holding, releasing sighs of relief.

  “Did you think the lavender would protect you if he’d actually had a gun?” a voice said.

  I looked up to see Olaya staring down at me and the other wannabe bakers still crouched behind the flowers. The white apron she’d had on all evening still covered her clothing.

  “I already realized the folly,” I said, “but hiding was instinct. This was the best we could do.”

  “Let us hope your baking talent is better than your self-preservation skills,” she said. We unfurled ourselves from our crouched positions, and she ushered us out from behind the hydrangeas and lavender.