If Bread Could Rise to the Occasion

by Paige Shelton

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “Well, time went on and then six years later we moved into town, and we got a house right next to Gent’s family’s house.”

  “Oh, good.”

  “Gent and I were sixteen by then, and sixteen is a very different world than ten. Suddenly, the whole boy-girl thing became an issue. A real issue. We were both confused because we still liked each other but couldn’t make sense of liking each other just as friends. I’m an old woman and this all seems so silly now, but I still remember the feelings.”

  “Uncomfortable.”

  “Yes, but we were figuring it out, Betts, and whatever the two of us might have become together ended up being tragically denied.”

  “What happened?”

  “Gent and his family were all killed in the bakery fire.”

  “Wait . . .” I said as I switched my brain into gear. I knew about the fire, of course. It was a part of Broken Rope lore but it wasn’t mysterious as much as it was just tragic. Its cause had been determined as coming from a faulty oven, something electrical, I believed. The two partners who’d started the bakery two decades earlier when they’d been young men had been killed, but they were the only ones. The fire had also demolished half the building, but it had been rebuilt. Unfortunately, the Puff Pocket could never regain the popularity it once had. The “lore” part of the story contained the superstitious idea that the magic of the Puff Pocket died with the owners. Not long after the rebuild, the bakery was shut down and many Broken Rope residents, many who’d come to Broken Rope for employment at the bakery, were left without a job. If I suddenly remembered correctly, the real reason Jake didn’t fight to keep the building standing was because even though he thought the place was beautiful, he thought it was also somehow more bad luck than good. I’d have to ask him for more details.

  But, I was certain that the owners had been the only ones who’d died, and even though I couldn’t remember their names offhand, neither of them had the last name of Cylas, I was sure.

  “Gram, I don’t understand. The owners died, but no one else did.”

  Gram shrugged and kept her eyes away from mine.

  “It was horrible, truly horrible,” she said. “I didn’t meet Gent’s ghost until many years later, long after I’d met many other ghosts. I was twenty-seven then and he was still seventeen. He told me that his family had died in the fire. I believe him. Betts, I keep telling you that you can’t become attached to these ghosts. They aren’t people, but they are parts of people and they can—well, you know, they can become more important than they should. You need to be able to let them go, because they always do go. They don’t stick around; I don’t even really understand why they’re here in the first place except that it’s Broken Rope and it’s what we do.”

  There was no doubt that she had really cared for Gent, and still did. I’d never seen Gram struggle much with anything, her emotions included. I’d seen her bury two husbands, and though she’d been sad, she was always so solid and resilient. Her obvious emotions about Gent were unexpected at the least.

  “I know. It’s not so easy sometimes, though,” I said with a mixture of sympathy and curiosity. “But, Gram, I really don’t understand. I’ll check with Jake, but I’m positive that it was only the owners who died.”

  She shrugged again and said, “Some of Broken Rope’s stories aren’t totally true, Betts, you know that.”

  “But . . .”

  “Every time that boy comes back, he gets to me a little more. It’s not a romantic feeling, of course; it’s just that he represents many things in my own personal past—friendships, youth, unsolved mysteries. It’s much easier to let go if you didn’t know the ghost when they were alive, but apparently there are no real rules with all this. Anyway, I’ll be fine. It’s just always such a jolt to see him. I told him you could communicate with him, too. He’ll be back and I’m sure he’ll want to talk to you.”

  She was lying. She was keeping the real reason that seeing Gent bothered her so much hidden, feigning friendship and youth. She valued these things, but she was also realistic enough to know that sometimes friendships don’t make it and youth never sticks around for very long.

  “I’m surprised he didn’t stay.” So far, the other ghosts I’d met had been happy to have someone else to talk to. I was as novel to them as they were to me. “I’d like to know more about his family dying in the fire, too.”

  “There’s something else you need to know about Gent, well the entire Cylas family, that is.”

  I nodded.

  “Though his family can’t come here to the school, or really go anywhere, when Gent comes back, his family comes back, too. They are in the bakery building.”

  I sat up straight and looked toward town. The bakery was around a curve and down a hill of the two-lane highway, and though I couldn’t see it from where we sat, I knew I was only a few short minutes away from a family of ghosts. It was difficult not to jump into my old blue reliable Nova and head to town, but the students would be arriving any minute.

  “I’ve never told Gent that the bakery building won’t be around forever. Do me a favor, Betts. Don’t tell him, either, don’t tell his family. They don’t know and what they don’t know won’t hurt them.”

  I blinked and swallowed the protests that were forming in my throat. Of all that Gram had just told me, of all that she hadn’t shared, she wanted me to keep from Gent and his family that the bakery building wouldn’t last forever? That part hadn’t even occurred to me yet. How was that a priority over understanding his family’s deaths? What did the building coming down someday mean to them anyway? I’d call Jake as soon as I could, but I was certain there was no record of the Cylas family’s demise. How did Gram get to where she got—asking me to keep a secret that had a bunch of other stuff in front of it that I wanted to understand?

  Unfortunately, for the moment and the many foreseeable hours and perhaps days to come, I couldn’t take the time to think about the twists, turns, and unanswered questions. Two cars pulled into the parking lot.

  “Here we go,” Gram said before she stood and went to greet our arriving students.

  “Yes, here we go,” I agreed.

  Chapter 4

  It didn’t take long to figure out which student I would like the best. Roger Riggins was a character. He was big but not in a heavy way. He had a head full of bright red hair, broad shoulders, and was really tall, so tall that everyone asked him where he played his high school and college basketball. The second day of the term, I heard him say at least five times, “I never played basketball. I was a big chess player, though.”

  No one, including myself, got the joke until I finally overheard a conversation he had with another student.

  “So you’re good at chess?” Brenda Plumb said.

  “No,” Roger said.

  “I don’t get it . . . Oh, wait. You’re a big person, so when you play chess, you’re big, but you’re not big into it.”

  “Exactly.”

  Brenda had paused and then added, “That’s kind of stupid.”

  Fortunately, Roger laughed off her insult and then walked away from the conversation. I liked his style.

  Though he was barely thirty-four, he also reminded me of my dad, in that math teacher way. He wore wire-rimmed glasses, and for the last two days, at least, he’d shown up in button-up, short-sleeve shirts and ties, which probably meant that’s what he always wore. Dad was now the high school principal, but he’d started his career in education by, among other mathematical things, trying to explain the Pythagorean theorem to a bunch of kids who didn’t care much to learn it, and his wardrobe was chock-full of the same sorts of things I’d seen Roger in.

  Then there was Brenda Plumb. I thought she would prove to be our most challenging student, but by the middle of the second day, Gram wasn’t ready to agree with me. And the other students, with the possible exception of Roger—though I witnessed he and Brenda later laughing together about something—
seemed to like Brenda, or like her enough to keep it cordial. But, it was early yet.

  I caught her shooting snarky looks at the other students when they weren’t looking her direction, when they were asking a question or making a comment. I saw her writing things in a small notebook that she never left out in the open for long. She would write something down, close the notebook, and put it in her pocket or in her purse. After each note, a sense of satisfaction pulled at the corners of her mouth.

  Brenda had come from Mobile, Alabama, and she looked kind of like me. She had long, wavy-ish, probably prone to frizzy—though I hadn’t seen one flyaway yet—auburn-almost-red hair. She could have used a couple extra curves, just like I could have. I estimated that she was probably an inch or so shorter than me, but from behind we probably looked a lot alike. Her eyes were brown, though, and mine were green so that kept the front view different enough.

  She’d heard about Gram’s habit of wearing Tshirts or sweatshirts in support of any and all colleges and universities, so when she arrived she gave Gram a University of Alabama T-shirt. Gram wasn’t swayed by bribery so I didn’t think that’s why she didn’t notice the curious behavior I observed. I even pointed out to her a moment when Brenda jotted down a self-satisfactory note, but Gram waved it off as me being too critical too soon.

  Gram and I often discussed how we felt about certain students, but only to each other. And if either of us felt like we were taking something too far, delving into a deep gossipy well, we’d put a stop to the conversation. As teachers, you weren’t supposed to have favorites, and if you did, you certainly weren’t supposed to announce who they were.

  And it never failed; every year there’d be a large group of students you couldn’t help but like and root for, and a smaller group you still rooted for but in a different way. You wanted that smaller group to change something: their attitudes, their inability to follow instructions, their egos, something. Sometimes, by the end of the nine-month course and their participation in the contest that kicked off the Broken Rope summer tourist season, the Southern Missouri Showdown, those students, the ones who were somehow the most trying, would change and shine like no one could have predicted. Sometimes not, though.

  As I watched Brenda make another note, I looked forward to that possible transformation but I doubted she’d be able to pull it off.

  “So, my father had this sourdough starter that he got from his own father. This was, um, about a hundred years ago.” Jules Broadshed laughed. “Oookay, so maybe not a hundred years, but a good fifty or so. A long, long time ago.”

  I smiled at Gram. Fifty years ago didn’t seem all that long ago to her, but we both definitely liked Jules. She was the perfect definition of a ditzy blonde, except that she was a brunette who packed an overload of personality into her petite frame. She’d come to Broken Rope from Phoenix, Arizona, and she had the dark tan to prove it. She was thirty-two and had tried college twice but, and this was how she put it, “the whole college thing had rubbed me the wrong way.” All she wanted to do was cook or bake. The only jobs she would consider were those around food. She was even happy to work in fast-food restaurants until the time when her real dream of master chef was fulfilled. She claimed that she was the star of the McDonald’s when she worked there because she had such a good attitude about everything. She hadn’t made a lot of money, but she still got to work with food even if it wasn’t in a creative way. She was an unusually chipper and easygoing person.

  “Anyway,” Jules continued as Brenda put the notebook in her back pocket, “it died. My dad was devastated. He’s never been able to reproduce the same flavor of the sourdough food that he loved so much. He made the most amazing pancakes. Yum.”

  “I’ve actually heard about that happening with a restaurant. Sort of. Someone sabotaged their starter,” Roger said. “They were famous and could never reproduce what had made them so famous. They had to shut down. It was really sad. No, wait! Someone was actually murdered, too. I’ll have to look up the details, but it was tragic.”

  “That’s terrible,” Gram said. “Where was this?”

  Before he could answer, a loud crash rang through the long kitchen. It was followed by the shuffle of a stool, a few curse words, and then a puffy cloud.

  Freddie, his face sheepish and red with embarrassment, looked up from where he’d dropped the bowl full of flour. “So sorry.”

  “No use crying over spilled flour, Freddie,” Gram said. “I’ll grab a broom and we’ll get it cleaned up and then get back to the bread.”

  The plan wasn’t to make sourdough bread that day, but just some plain old-fashioned white bread. Gram had been giving a general overview about the different types of bread and what made them do what they did—have a hard or soft crust, a softer or chewier center, etc. We’d become sidetracked by the sourdough discussion, but that was normal and welcome. Gram knew how to stay on task and make every sidetrack relevant to the conversation.

  “Here, let me help scoop,” I said as I crouched down next to Freddie.

  “I’m so sorry, Betts,” Freddie said. “My elbow just flung out or something.”

  His words were so sincerely pained that I looked at him. “It’s okay, Freddie. Stuff gets spilled here every day. It’s part of being in a cooking school. Don’t worry about it.”

  He nodded. Evidently, he was concerned that he still might get kicked out. Neither Gram nor I had taken the time to check his references. In fact, we hadn’t left the school since yesterday morning. That happened every year. We think we have a great lesson plan but then we meet the students in person and find we have to switch things up a bit. We usually spend the entire first night reworking the year. Gram often said, “Someday we’ll have enough of these ‘reworks’ that we can just reference something we’ve done before.” I wasn’t sure that would happen. I didn’t mind, though, even if there was a ghost I was anxious to meet hanging out at the bakery building. With his family, apparently. Unless Gent would hold the record for staying the shortest time possible, he’d be there in the next day or so. Making the year right for the students was the number one priority, and there was something about the group of them that made Gram decide we needed to start the year out with bread instead of the original idea of creams and sauces.

  “You’re fitting in nicely,” I said to Freddie, hoping to help him relax a little.

  He nodded again and smiled weakly. A part of me wanted to tell him that we wouldn’t kick him out, but I couldn’t—not yet. We would definitely have to check his references. That was only fair to everyone else. I hoped we’d find good things. I liked him, Gram liked him, everyone liked him. He was friendly, happy, and knew the right questions to ask. Even in the two short days we’d had with the students, I knew he’d be missed if he had to go.

  “Here, let me help, too.” Jules hopped off her stool and joined in the scooping.

  A few seconds later, Gram, foregoing the broom idea, brought out the DustBuster and took care of the flour in a quick and noisy manner. As she worked, I stood and stepped back. I looked up just in time to see Brenda finishing another note. What in the world had been so interesting that she’d felt compelled to write it down?

  Once the DustBuster and Brenda’s notebook were put away, Elian Sanchez picked up the sourdough conversation again.

  “My mom has a starter that was first created during the Civil War,” Elian said. “She calls it her ‘Scarlett O’Hara’ because it came from a woman whose Georgia plantation was burned to the ground at the beginning of the war. The woman got away with the clothes on her back and her own mother’s starter—it was that important to her. They, she and the starter, traveled north, and once her family was all gone, it passed through many families until it somehow reached my mother’s in Boston. It’s quite a story but I don’t remember all the details. It’s probably become larger than life over the years, but it always gets everyone’s attention.” Elian stood out from the crowd only because he mostly didn’t. His unusual name called for an accent
and an exotic look instead of just simply being cute like Elian truly was. Elian was short with bland brownish hair and bland brownish eyes. He listened intently but didn’t ask a lot of questions. He must have been fond of the color orange, because he’d worn an orange shirt both days, but even that bright color hadn’t made him stand out. I was interested to see if the trend continued. His contribution to the sourdough stories caught me slightly off guard, and I hoped that his previous quiet contemplation was just his way of getting comfortable before jumping in. Participation was always good.

  “You know, you can purchase starters,” Gram said. “But, it’s good to know how to do them yourself. There are some excellent ones out there, some even that you can get by just sending a self-addressed, stamped envelope to non-profit groups. There are options, but as you are all beginning to see, creating and having a sourdough starter is like beginning a story that might be passed on for years to come. If anything says country cooking, it’s stories that can be passed along to future generations.”

  “I’m actually surprised so many people know anything at all about sourdough starters,” Shelby Knot said. “I didn’t know one thing about them before today—I’ve had sourdough bread, of course, but I never even thought about the starter part of the equation.” Shelby was in her early thirties and from Oregon. She owned and operated a vegetarian hotdog truck that had become so popular that Gram had called her before we accepted her application to ask if she really wanted to leave her extremely successful business for nine months. Did she have someone reliable who could cover for her? She really wasn’t thinking of closing that business just to go to school, was she?

  Shelby had created the recipe for the veggie dogs she cooked and served, and her creation was a huge success. Large food companies had offered her big money for the recipe, but she wasn’t interested—Gram really wanted to know why.

  Shelby’s answers had been reassuring enough for us to accept her into the program and interesting enough to make us look forward to meeting her. Her significant other would handle the business just fine. Her “significant other” was the term she used for her boyfriend. Even though Gram hadn’t asked for details, Shelby told her that they didn’t believe in marriage but had been together since high school. Their ultimate goal was to open and operate a number of different restaurants throughout Portland. They understood cooking and baking from a vegetarian standpoint, and while they didn’t eat meat themselves, they wanted to understand it and be able to prepare it deliciously. Gram’s country cooking methods were skills she wanted to add to her repertoire as well as her resume.