Sourdough Starter

The night shift at the Nelson veterinary clinic is mostly me and a radio turned down low, walking the ward at two in the morning to check on the dogs who came in after being hit on the highway. Most of them sleep through it. One of them, a retriever with a broken femur, always lifts his head when my boots squeak, so I've started wearing the rubber-soled pair and he's stopped bothering.

I'm thirty-four, and I've been doing this shift for about two years now, ever since the day vet agreed to let me move off days. People assume it's because of grief, that I took nights so I wouldn't have to talk to anyone at a front desk, and maybe that was part of it at the start. But mostly it's because I like the quiet, and because dogs at night are honest in a way people aren't. They either want you there or they don't.

The thing about living in Cedar Hills, the trailer park just outside of town with the view of Kootenay Lake if you stand on a milk crate in your yard, is that the walls are thin. You learn your neighbors through the wall whether you mean to or not. Old Don on the other side used to watch the same fishing show every Saturday, I could tell by the music. Before him there was a couple who fought about money in a loop, same words, same volume, every month like a tide.

Since June the trailer on my other side has been Whitney's, and Whitney is different. She works long haul, so some weeks there's nothing at all through the wall, just the wind moving the awning. But when she's home, she keeps strange hours. She'll be up at two in the morning doing something in her kitchen, and her radio is always on. Podcasts, mostly. And she laughs at them, out loud, this full laugh that comes right through the paneling like the wall isn't even there.

The first few times it happened I rolled my eyes. It was two in the morning, I'd come home off a shift where a woman cried on my shoulder over her fourteen-year-old beagle, and all I wanted was sleep, and next door some stranger was listening to two men argue about hockey history and laughing like it was the best thing she'd ever heard. I lay there with a pillow over my head and thought uncharitable things.

Then somewhere around the third week I caught myself smiling. She wasn't laughing at anything cruel, was the thing. It was just a person alone in her kitchen at two in the morning, happy. I hadn't been that in a long time and I recognized it the way you recognize a shape in the dark. I stopped minding. I started, embarrassingly, listening for it. There were nights I'd come home and stand in my kitchen with the light off, waiting to hear whether she was home, and if the radio came on faintly through the wall I'd feel something loosen in my chest that I didn't have a name for. (I did have a name for it, actually. I just didn't like the name.)

Because here's the other thing about Whitney. Sometimes, while the dough was going or the coffee was going or whatever she did at that hour, she hummed. Off-key, unhurried, half a tune and then she'd lose it and pick up another one. My husband Robert used to hum like that. He's been gone three years now, cancer, and I hadn't heard anybody hum in a house next to mine since him. The first time Whitney did it I sat down on my kitchen floor, which is not like me, and cried for about four minutes, and then got up and made tea and went to bed. I decided after that that I was allowed to find it nice. Grief gives you weird permissions and you learn to take them.

* * *

On a Tuesday in September I came home at six in the morning, dead on my feet, and found a jar on my doorstep. A mason jar, half full of something gray and bubbly, with a piece of masking tape on the lid that said FEED ME in block letters, and under it, smaller: I'm sorry in advance. There was also a loaf of bread on a cutting board, still warm through the cloth wrapped around it. Somebody had stood on my step not long before I got home and I'd missed them by minutes.

I knocked on her door, because it seemed rude not to, and after a long minute she opened it. Up close, the first time really up close, Whitney is taller than me by a couple inches, dark hair pulled back with a pencil through the bun, wearing flannel pants and a tank top and looking like she'd been up all night on purpose rather than by accident.

"Oh hey, you're home," she said. "I heard your truck. I was hoping you'd knock, actually, I left you a note on the jar but notes are a bad way to ask things."

"The bread is warm," I said, which was not a question but she understood it as one.

"Made it last night. Couldn't sleep before a haul, so I bake. Look, I leave tomorrow for Winnipeg, three days there and back, and I've killed two starters this year by leaving them. This one's a good one, it came from a lady in Castlegar. Would you feed it? It's honestly easy, you take out half, add flour and water, that's it. It just likes attention."

She was holding her coffee mug with both hands and watching me in a way that said she'd rehearsed this and was hoping I wouldn't say no. I thought about how I'd been standing in my dark kitchen listening for her radio like a weirdo, and how saying yes to a jar of flour water was a much more normal way to be neighbors.

"I can do that," I said. "I'm on nights, but it doesn't care what time you feed it, right?"

"Nope. It's a night owl's dream pet." She grinned, and there was a gap between her front teeth I hadn't been close enough to see before. "Thank you. Seriously. There's a slice of the loaf in there for you too, that's a thank-you in advance. I'm Whitney, by the way. We've been wall-to-wall since June and I don't think we've said ten words."

"Meghan." We shook hands, which felt formal and stupid out on a trailer step in September, and then she went back inside and I carried my jar and my bread home and ate two slices standing at the counter with butter, at six in the morning, in my clinic scrubs. It was the best thing I'd eaten in months, which I think was the bread's doing, but I suspect it was more complicated than that.

* * *

Feeding a starter turns out to be exactly as stupid and satisfying as she said. You take out half, you add flour, you add water, you stir. The discarded half I felt bad about throwing away, so I put it in a container in the fridge and then googled what to do with it and ended up making terrible pancakes at four in the afternoon before my shift. The starter itself got bubbly and sour-smelling and I found myself checking on it more often than necessary, lifting the cloth, watching it rise a little in the jar. On the second night, around midnight, it produced an actual audible bubble sound, a little burp, and I laughed out loud alone in my kitchen, which is also not like me.

So before I left for my shift on day three I wrote on a Post-it: Starter burped. I would like a slice. M, and slid it under her door. Then I stood there feeling like an idiot for a second, because it was a joke and she might not take it as one, and then I left anyway because my shift starts whether I feel like an idiot or not.

When I got home at six the next morning there was a note taped to my screen door, folded in half, weatherproofed under a strip of clear packing tape like she'd thought about rain. It said: A slice is PROMISED and promises will be kept. It also said, on the back, in different pen: The burp means it's happy. You're a natural. Thanks for this, seriously. W

I stuck it to my fridge with a magnet shaped like a salmon. I don't know why I'm telling you that, except that it felt like a thing a person does when something has started, and I noticed myself doing it.

* * *

She got back on a Friday, and I knew because the radio came through the wall that evening, and then Saturday morning there was a knock. She was standing on my step in daylight for the first time, in jeans and a flannel shirt with the sleeves rolled, hair down, holding a fresh loaf like an offering plate.

"Bread delivery," she said, holding it out. "And, um. There's a second part, if you're interested. The community theater is doing The Ash Girl, opens Thursday. I have two tickets because I bought them in a moment of optimism about my social life, and my social life is basically you feeding my yeast. Would you want to come? As a thank-you. As neighbors. As whatever."

I stood there with a warm loaf in my hands and felt something flutter around in my chest that I hadn't felt since before Robert got sick, this stupid nervous hope, and I said yes before I'd fully decided to.

"Thursday, then," she said, backing down the step with a grin. "I'll drive. Wear whatever, it's Nelson, everyone wears whatever."

I stood in my kitchen after, holding bread, and caught myself already wondering what I'd wear, and rolled my eyes at myself, and smiled anyway.

I spent an unreasonable amount of Thursday deciding what to wear, which is a thing I thought I'd finished doing sometime in my twenties. I have exactly one dress that still fits, a dark green one Robert bought me for his sister's wedding in 2016, and I put it on and took it off twice and then put it back on because the alternatives were clinic scrubs and a sweater with a loose thread I always end up pulling. Whitney said wear whatever, and I did not wear whatever, I wore the green dress, and I put on lipstick for the first time since before Robert died, which sounds like a bigger moment than it was. Mostly it was me standing at the bathroom mirror wondering if my hand had gotten shakier or if mascara had always been this annoying.

She pulled up in her personal truck, a smaller one than her rig, an actual pickup with a dented fender, and when I got in she had on a dress. That was the part that got me. I'd only ever seen her in flannel and jeans and once in coveralls in her yard at seven in the morning, and here she was in a blue wrap dress with her hair pinned back, and my stomach did something I was not