The Odd Loaf

Ren pulled up outside the old house on Marine Row at half past nine, exactly when Lars had told him to be there on Tuesday. The building was three stories of grey brick with a faded shopfront on the ground floor, and a sign over the door said Second Tide in letters that had once been gold. He was forty-two years old and too old to be doing favors for people, he told himself, and then he got out of the car anyway.

Lars owed him one from way back, and now Lars was calling it in. Not for himself, though. For Tina Hodges, who Ren had met exactly twice, five years ago at a concert and then two years ago at a party where they'd flirted for an hour before she left with her friends. He remembered she was funny. He remembered she was sharp. He remembered thinking, at the time, that he'd blown it by not asking for her number.

The shop was open. Through the window he could see racks and racks of old coats and dresses, and a woman on a step stool with an armful of hangers.

"Tina?" he called through the door. "Ren! Lars sent me!"

She came around the corner of a rack with a dress draped over one arm and looked him up and down. She was forty now, he figured, same as she'd been thirty-eight at that party, and she looked good, grey threading into dark hair pulled back with a rubber band.

"Lars sent you," she said flatly. "Of course he did."

"Nice to see you too!"

"You shouldn't be here. I told Lars I don't need help." She hung the dress on a rail and stepped down off the stool. "I especially don't need help from a man I danced with once two years ago and never saw again."

"That's a bit cold. I remember it as a very good hour of dancing."

"It was a good hour," she admitted. Then she pointed a finger at him. "But I can handle this. My mother's house is my mother's house, and her mess is my mess, and I'm sorting it out myself before Friday."

"Then let me just carry boxes. You don't even have to talk to me." He held up his hands. "I'll be like furniture. Quiet furniture."

She studied him for a long moment, and he could practically see her doing sums in her head. The house needed a final inspection before the sale, the estate agent had told her. Every room empty and clean, or the deal could stall. And she was on leave from the lab, up here in Dunmore alone, with a warehouse to run and a houseful of her mother's things upstairs.

"Fine," she said at last. "Boxes. Furniture. And you don't get an opinion on how I organize anything."

"Wouldn't dream of it."

"Everyone has an opinion. The estate agent has an opinion. Lars has an opinion. The woman from the charity shop has an opinion." She grabbed her coat off a hook. "You'll have one by Thursday, I promise you."

* * *

The flat above the shop was reached by a staircase behind a curtain, and Ren had been in a lot of houses in his life, but nothing quite like this. Every surface had things on it. Not rubbish exactly, though there was some of that, but newspapers, tins, jars, clocks, ornaments, four teapots on the dresser alone, and a full set of Encyclopedia Britannica stacked in the hallway like a wall.

"She kept everything," Tina said, in a voice that was trying hard to be flat and mostly failing. "After Dad died she got worse. I kept telling myself she was fine, she was managing, and then she went and died on me and I found out what managing looked like."

Ren didn't say anything. He picked up a box and started filling it with the encyclopedias.

"You can't just box those," she snapped. "They have to be sorted. The later volumes go to the secondhand shop in town, the early ones might have value, and there's a card in volume H with Grandma's recipe for dumplings that I need."

"Okay. Sorting it is." He put the box down. "See? No opinions."

"That was an opinion adjacent activity and we both know it." But she was almost smiling, and for the next hour they worked in something like peace, or at least a truce. He carried. She sorted. She narrated the history of objects he'd never have noticed, and it turned out she knew a lot, because she'd grown up in this building, running through the warehouse below when it was still her mother's fabric shop.

"So you lived over the shop. That's kind of lovely, actually."

"It was lovely until it was suffocating." She set a teapot in a crate marked KEEP. "Everyone in Dunmore knew everything about everybody. That's why I left. Manchester, labs, anonymous people, lovely."

"And now look at you. Back in Dunmore, boxing up teapots."

"Life's got a sense of humor like that," she said darkly, and went back to work.

* * *

Around one o'clock she said the word that changed the day. "Lunch."

"Ah, I was wondering. I brought sandwiches, actually, in the car, because Lars warned me..."

"Forget your sandwiches." She was already heading for the kitchen. "I baked bread. Mrs. Doyle from the estate agent is coming Friday, and everyone says you butter up an inspector with a homemade lunch, and my mother's recipe for soda bread is the one thing in this house that always worked, so I made it this morning as a sort of trial run."

Ren followed her in and watched her pull open the oven door, and then he heard the sound she made. It wasn't a scream. It was more like the noise a kettle makes just before it boils, low and rising and furious.

"Oh, you absolute cow of an oven." She pulled out a loaf that was black as coal on the bottom and pale as a ghost on top, split down the middle in a way that seemed cruel. "What the hell. I followed the recipe exactly. I checked it at forty minutes, I swear I did."

"Maybe the oven runs hot?"

"The oven does not run hot, the oven has run perfectly for forty years, my mother baked in this oven every Sunday of my childhood." She set the loaf on the top of the stove and glared at it like it had personally insulted her family. Then she grabbed the little thermometer from the drawer, stuck it inside, and waited, tapping her foot. "Two hundred and forty. The dial says one eighty. It's lying to me. The dial is a liar."

"So it's out of whack."

"It's out of its mind." She ran her hands through her hair, dislodging the rubber band entirely, and for a second she looked like she might cry, and then she looked like she might laugh, and she did both at once, which Ren found unfairly attractive. "Three days until the inspection. I have one working appliance in this house and it's the kettle, and Mrs. Doyle will arrive Friday to a burnt loaf and a house full of boxes and I'll be forty years old and defeated by bread."

Ren picked up the ruined loaf and turned it over in his hands. He snapped off a corner of the black crust, sniffed it, and raised an eyebrow.

"Okay," he said slowly. "Before you throw this at me, hear me out. My nan ran a tea room in Whitby for thirty years. I spent every summer of my childhood in that kitchen. I can fix this."

"You can fix an oven?"

"I can fix the bread. The oven needs a new thermostat, but we'll manage with the wooden spoon trick for now. But the bread, Tina, the bread I can do by Friday, no thermometer required." He set the loaf down and grinned at her. "So. Do we have a deal, or do you want to keep glaring at that poor loaf?"

She looked at him, and then at the bread, and then at him again, and Ren could see the whole argument happening behind her eyes, the one about not needing help, the one about strangers in her mother's kitchen, the one about how this man was furniture and furniture didn't grin at you like that.

"You'll have formed opinions by Thursday, I said," she muttered. "I didn't think you'd have them by Tuesday."

"So that's a yes?"

"That's a maybe," she said, but she was already pulling a tea towel off the rail, and Ren knew he'd won.

"So what's the plan, then? You just going to wave your hands at flour and hope?" Tina pulled the rubber band back into her hair, tighter this time, like she meant business.

"The plan is simple. Tomorrow we do a test loaf. Wednesday we do another. By Friday we've got one that Mrs. Doyle will weep over." Ren opened a couple of the cupboards until he found the flour. "Have you got strong flour? Please tell me you've got strong flour."

"Top shelf, behind the tin of buttons. She kept the buttons in the flour tin and the flour behind the buttons, God knows why."

"Because your mother was a hoarder with a sense of humor?"

"Because my mother was a menace," Tina said, but she was smiling when she said it, sort of. She dug out the bag and set it on the counter with a thump. "Fine. Tomorrow. But I'm watching every move you make, so don't get clever."

"I would never."

"You absolutely would. I remember you at that party, Lars's birthday, two years ago. You played darts like it was a blood sport."

"That's different. Darts is a blood sport."

She snorted and started clearing a space on the counter, and Ren weighed the flour in his hands and thought about how strange it was, that a man could spend an afternoon boxing up a dead woman's teapots and end up feeling lighter than he had in months.

***

Wednesday morning he turned up at half past nine again, because that was when he'd arrived the first time and apparently he was a creature of habit now. Tina answered the door with flour already on her sleeve, which he chose not to mention, because he valued his life.

"Right," she said, standing aside. "Teach me, oh great one. But I want it on... no, I want it understood that I still think this is unnecessary. My mother's recipe worked for forty years."

"Your mother's recipe works fine. Your oven is a liar. That's the whole difference, and I've told you twice." He set his bag on the counter and started pulling things out. Butter, milk, the flour. "Also, where's the recipe card?"

She hesitated. Ren noticed the hesitation.

"Tina."

"It's in the hallway."

"The hallway."

"In volume H of the encyclopedia."

"You keep recipes in the encyclopedia?"

"She kept recipes everywhere. There's dumplings in volume H and there's a scone recipe inside a hatbox upstairs and I have stopped asking why." She threw her hands up and went to get it, and came back holding a battered index card softened with years of thumbs, flour ghosted into the paper. "Here. Handle it gently. It's the only thing in this house I actually want."

Ren read it. Four ingredients and a sentence of instructions in faded blue ink. "This is a good recipe. This is a genuinely good recipe. Your mother knew her soda bread."

"She knew everything except how to stop," Tina said, and then she went quiet, and Ren understood that they'd wandered into a bigger room than bread.

He measured out the flour anyway, and let her pour it in the bowl, and gave her the job of rubbing in the butter because cold hands beat warm hands every time, which was true and also got her off the topic.

"Can I say something and you won't bite my head off?" he asked while she worked the butter in.

"You can try."

"You hate this house."

"I don't hate the house." She stopped, butter clinging to her fingers. "I hate that it ate her. After Dad died she just... got worse. More things, more boxes, more everything. And I'd ring from Manchester and she'd say everything's fine, love, and I'd believe her because believing her was easier than the train fare. And now I'm on leave from the lab, sorting through four decades of a woman who couldn't stop, and every box is a guilt trip with packing tape on it."

Ren nodded and said nothing, which he'd learned somewhere along the way was the hardest useful skill a man could have.

"And don't you dare be nice about it," she warned.

"Wouldn't dream of it. You're a perfectionist with guilt, that's all. You'd have run this whole house yourself in a fortnight if you could, and you're furious that you can't."

"I am not furious."

"You threw a loaf at a wall yesterday."

"I set the loaf down near a wall with some force."

"There it is." He grinned and tipped the buttermilk in, and she swatted him with the floured towel and he caught her wrist, gently, flour and all, and for a second neither of them moved. Then she pulled her hand back and turned to the sink, ears going pink, and Ren decided that the safest place in Dunmore was the dough.

"Knead it soft and quick," he said, with enormous dignity. "Soda bread doesn't like fuss."

"Neither do I."

"You're fussing right now. Look at you, you're kneading it like it owes you money."

"Oh, shut up." But she laughed, really laughed, and the dough came together under her hands, and the kitchen smelled like flour and butter and something almost like peace.

***

The test loaf went in at noon, oven propped with a wooden spoon left ajar because that was the trick, heat out the top, no thermometer required, and it came out at one looking like actual bread. Golden. Cracked crown. Tina tapped the bottom and it hollowed, and her face did something complicated and wonderful.

"It sounds right. It actually sounds right." She held it against her ear like a seashell. "Oh, you clever horrible man."

"I have many qualities."

"We'll see if Friday agrees. And don't get smug, the oven's still broken and Mrs. Doyle is still coming and the hallway is still full of encyclopedias."

One problem at a time, Ren thought, and sliced the heel off the loaf, and buttered it, and they ate it standing up at the counter like a pair of thieves, and it was good, it was genuinely good, and Tina made the small closed-eyes sound of a woman who had been braced for defeat for weeks and got bread instead.

***

Thursday was the bad day. They were doing the second loaf, the dress rehearsal, when Ren heard a car on the gravel and Tina went rigid.