When I think of the bakery, I think of all of it together.

The crunch of fall leaves piled up on the threshold of the back door where they’d blown down the alley and stuck.

The gleam of the mixing bowls and countertops underneath the banked fluorescents when West finished cleaning and locked up.

The smell of baking bread, the crumbling clay of live yeast between my fingers, West’s voice behind my ear as he leaned over my shoulder and watched me drop it into the bowl, saying, “Just like that. Exactly.”

The way he moved his arm in short, sure strokes when he sliced open the tops of the loaves right before he pushed the rack of trays into the oven.

Winter came late. October turned into November, and I spent a long, crisp autumn of flour-strewn countertops and rising dough, sticky fingers and loud music and West working with his ball cap turned backward, an apron tied around his waist, and that smart-ass grin on his face.

West is the bakery. I can’t imagine the point of it without him in it, and I can’t imagine him—the best version of him, the one he rarely lets people see—without that kitchen as the backdrop for his movements.

West bending down to measure out a scoop of grain.

West nudging the oven door closed with his shoulder, setting the timer.

West kneading with both hands, flour dusted all the way up to his elbows, moving to the easy rhythm of some cheesy club music Krish had picked out.

There, in the bakery, while the rest of the world was sleeping, time buckled and we found something outside it. We became us in that kitchen. Long before he kissed me, I passed a whole lifetime with West, bathed in yellow light, baptized in lukewarm tap water, consecrated at sunrise when we broke a loaf open and looked. Dug our hands into it. Tasted what we’d made.

It wasn’t perfect, what we made. One night I forgot the salt. Another time, the water I put in was too hot, and I killed the yeast. There were nights when West forgot to tell me some vital thing and nights when he decided not to remind me, just to see if I’d remember.

He held himself back, and I wasn’t always brave enough. I didn’t trust myself.

We failed as often as we succeeded, West and me.

But I think about what would have happened if he hadn’t come out to get me.

I think I might have stayed in my car forever. I might have made only right turns.

I might never have learned how to stop being afraid, and those men would have kept chasing me around, always.

I can’t be anything but glad that’s not the way things went.

Instead, West came out, and I went in.

Дата добавления: 2015-11-16