Flour and Fiction

I want to tell you this story right, so let me start at the beginning, which for me is standing in a hotel parking lot at eleven at night holding my phone and reading the third cancellation email in a row. My name is Cyn, I'm twenty-eight, and I bake for a living, or I try to, and I was supposed to be on a 6 a.m. flight to Portland for a baking conference that I had been looking forward to for eight months. The airline said weather, which around here in March means ice, and the ice did not care that I had paid for a nonrefundable ticket like an idiot.

So there I was, scrolling through my contacts, trying to figure out who I could call at eleven at night in a city I had moved away from two years ago. My cousin lived forty minutes out but she had a newborn and I was not going to be that person. My old roommate had moved to Chicago. And then my thumb, apparently operating without my permission, stopped on Eli.

Eli Jenson, twenty-nine now, my boyfriend for two years back when I was twenty-four, mechanic, owner of a one-bedroom apartment near the airport, which suddenly felt like the most convenient address on the planet since my morning flight had departed from exactly that airport. We had ended things two years ago in the gentlest way either of us knew how, two people who loved each other and whose lives just kept pointing in different directions. He stayed here and got into salvage work. I left for a bakery job and then a better bakery job and then a conference in Portland that was now not happening.

I called him. He picked up on the third ring, voice fuzzy with sleep, and I said, "Hi, it's me, I know it's late, my flight got cancelled and I'm stranded and I was wondering, I mean, is there any chance your couch is free tonight?"

There was a pause long enough that I almost hung up, and then he said, "Cyn? Uh, yeah, yeah, the couch is yours. But the thing is, I'm not home. I'm out at a salvage yard three hours north, this Chevelle came in and I won't be back till sometime tomorrow. Key's under the mat. Eat whatever you find, just, uh, don't judge the dishes."

"Too late, already judging," I said, and he laughed, that same easy laugh, and told me to drive safe, and I sat in my rental car outside the hotel feeling weirdly warm about a man I hadn't seen in two years.

* * *

His building was exactly the way I remembered it, kind of shabby and kind of charming, three stories of brick with an unshoveled walkway and a bike chained to the railing that had been there so long it had become furniture. The mat said WELCOME in flaking letters and under it was the same brass spare key he'd kept there the whole time we dated, which meant either he'd never changed the lock or he'd changed the lock and replaced the hiding spot, and I honestly didn't know which of those said more.

I let myself in and stood in the doorway while the smell hit me, coffee and engine grease and something underneath that was just him, his apartment the way it always was, warm and a little stale and completely, stubbornly Eli.

The place was a disaster. That part was also honest. Two mismatched chairs, a couch with a blanket wadded up at one end, a coffee table buried under car magazines, dishes in the sink that had clearly been there since some previous geological era, and a kitchen counter doing double duty as a mail sorting facility. I had forgotten how he lived, or maybe I hadn't forgotten, maybe I had just spent two years around men with matching dishware and I'd forgotten what it felt like.

Here is where I admit something. The last year of my dating life has been a series of men who were perfectly nice and knew absolutely nothing about me. There was a guy named Eddie who thought sourdough starter was a type of bread you could buy, bless him, and a guy named Dev who was lovely but who I caught checking his fantasy football app at a dinner I had cooked, and a sweet bearded fella whose name I honestly blanked on once, mid-date, which tells you everything. They didn't know that I hum when I knead. They didn't know I get weepy at bread documentaries. They knew my job and my drink order and that was sort of it. Standing in Eli's kitchen, I felt the difference like temperature. This room knew me. The burn mark on the counter was from the night I taught him to make caramel and we both gave up and ate it with spoons.

And I did not want to sit with that feeling, so I did what I always do when a feeling gets too big. I started cleaning.

* * *

I want to be fair to myself, I really did intend to just do the dishes. But you know how it goes. You do the dishes and then the counter looks bad next to the clean dishes, so you wipe the counter, and then the stove looks bad, so you do the stove, and somewhere around the time I found the vacuum in the closet, I was on my hands and knees on his floor at one in the morning with my conference blazer thrown over a chair, deep cleaning an apartment that was not mine, for a man I was not dating. The dishes took forty minutes because half of them had to soak. The mail got sorted into three piles that I labeled in my head as bills, probably bills, and why. The magazines I stacked by month because apparently I've become a person who stacks magazines by month.

Somewhere in there I found it, wedged between the couch cushions while I was fluffing them, a photo, an actual printed photo, which nobody does anymore. It was from the farmer's market, our old Saturday thing, and I was laughing at something off frame with flour on my sleeve because of course there was flour on my sleeve, and Eli was looking at me instead of the camera with this soft, completely unguarded expression. I remembered that morning. I remembered the peach seller teasing us. I sat down on the cleaned couch with the photo in my lap for longer than I want to admit, doing that math you do, all the years since, all the men since, and the specific weight of being looked at that way by someone who knew what flour on your sleeve meant.

I put the photo back in the cushions, which felt wrong, so I took it back out and stuck it on the fridge under a magnet shaped like a wrench, and then I felt like I'd broken into somewhere I didn't belong, and then I felt like maybe the fridge was exactly where it belonged, and I stood there in his quiet apartment arguing with myself about a magnet.

* * *

Which is when I opened the fridge looking for butter and found the jar.

Now, look. I need you to understand that I left him a sourdough starter. This was not a plan on my part, it was simply a fact of who I was at twenty-six, a woman who named her starters and wrote feeding schedules on index cards. I had left a jar of my starter, the good one, the one I'd babied for three years, with a note saying please feed her on Sundays and forgive me in advance when she gets moody. That was two years ago. Every guy since had watched me maintain starters with the polite bafflement of a man watching someone talk to a houseplant.

And there she was. His jar, my starter, alive. Fed recently, too, the level marked with a rubber band like I used to do it, sitting on the middle shelf next to a bag of shredded cheese and three cans of beer. He had kept her alive for two years. He had learned the feeding schedule. I stood there holding a jar of flour water and bacteria and I felt my throat go tight, which is an insane thing to have happen over a sourdough starter, and yet.

So obviously I fed her. And obviously, once I fed her, there was no version of the night where I didn't bake with her, because what was I going to do, waste a fed starter, in this economy. I found his flour, the cheap stuff, fine, and his salt, which he'd clearly bought at some point and never opened. I mixed the levain at two forty in the morning on his only clean counter surface, the one I had just scrubbed, and set the timer on my phone, and texted my conference group chat that I was stranded and would miss the first day, and got back a string of sad emojis and one message from Celeste that just said "stranded WHERE" and I did not answer it.

While the levain did its thing I snooped a little, I'll own that. Top shelf of the closet, the box where he kept stuff, and I found my old scarf and a birthday card I'd made him and a folded piece of paper that turned out to be half a letter, his handwriting, addressed to me, that stopped midsentence in a way that made my chest hurt, but that's for later in this story because right at that moment my phone timer went off and the dough needed me and honestly the dough was easier to face than the letter.

By four a.m. I had shaped loaves on a sheet pan covered in his one clean towel, and I sat on the floor of his kitchen, back against the cabinets, waiting for the overnight proof, smelling like his apartment and covered in flour, and somewhere in the exhausted dark I understood that baking that bread was not going to be casual. Feeding her starter was one thing. Baking with it, in his kitchen, filling his home with the smell of it, was a confession I hadn't planned to make. I fell asleep on the couch at five with the oven timer set for seven, and the last thing I remember thinking is that his couch was exactly as uncomfortable as I remembered, and that I had missed it.

The oven timer went off at seven in the morning like a fire alarm, and I came off that couch with my heart in my ears and flour on my face, and I swear I did not remember where I was for a solid three seconds. Then I smelled the bread, because the apartment had filled up overnight with that warm sour smell that I would know anywhere, and I remembered, and I shuffled into the kitchen half asleep to pull the sheet pan out.

I was leaning over the oven in his college sweatshirt, hair piled up with a wooden spoon stuck through it, when the front door opened.

I need to be honest about the sound I made, which was not a scream exactly, more like a noise a cat makes if you step on its tail in church. I came up so fast I cracked my head on the range hood, and there in the doorway was Eli, twenty-nine years old, three days of salvage yard on him, duffel bag still on his shoulder, staring at me like I was a ghost he'd been meaning to call anyway.

"Hi," I said, from the floor of his kitchen, holding a hot pan of croissants.

"Hi," he said. Then, "I have a key, I want that known, I did not break into my own home."

"I know, there's a spare under the mat, I used it." A pause. "The brass one. Under WELCOME."

"You used my spare key."

"You were three hours north! I called! You said crash here!"

"I said crash here meaning, like, sleep here, Cyn, not, you know," and he waved a hand at the whole scene, the cleaned