But that’s not why she bakes.
Or you might think she bakes because it’s something she can control. She couldn’t protect her husband or her friends, her neighbors or her town or her daughters, but through precise measuring and careful assembly and attention to detail, she can make muffins that teeter at the serrated edge between sugar and butter, pillowed perfect sweetness you taste at the sides of your tongue like an afterthought, like you imagined it but imagined it vividly. If you’re careful, and she is, muffins are entirely in your control.
But that’s not why she bakes either.
Nora bakes because baking doesn’t involve water.
Before a cow becomes a hamburger, it drinks a dozen gallons of water a day. Before a chicken and a bunch of onions and carrots become stock, you have to add a potful. Fish made it their home. Vegetables and fruits have to be rinsed in it before consumption, and that’s a lot of bottled water literally down the drain.
Whereas what’s wet in a batter is probably nothing more than melted butter and whipped eggs. The water that made the wheat that made the grain that made the flour happened so far away as to be another planet. So to ensure our good health, to keep us well and strong, Nora insists we eat cake. Cake and cookies, muffins and crumbles, danish and donuts and croissants. Some Saturdays she feeds us nothing but brownies and a multivitamin. When she relents, we have dinner from a box or can.
Timeworn wisdom prescribes food whole and unprocessed, slow and locally grown, low on sugar and light on butter. But Nora loves us, and if she boils boxed macaroni and cheese in bottled water then adds yellow beans from a can and bakes a cake, nothing involved has anything to do with our river or our soil. We all choose the terms of the desperate bargains we make with the powers that may be, which baseless beliefs and decaying wisdoms we cling to, and which we discard as superstition or sorcery or the ravings of misguided zealots. Which is to say: it may not make sense all the way, but it makes sense enough.
Some days Nora has to tear coffee cake into tiny pieces and feed it to me like a bird. Or she sits on a bag of potato chips and places the crumbs on my tongue where they dissolve one at a time. Some days that’s all my system can manage. Some days I subsist on the smells from her oven alone.
That is what I am doing all afternoon while my sisters stew, sitting and smelling as our mother cooks, redolence as nourishment. And then the doorbell rings.
On the front porch, soaking and sorry, is a boy I can only presume is River Templeton.
Mab is right that he looks exactly like his grandfather, so much so that Nora seems barely to be breathing.
Mab is right that he is perfectly attractive and whole-looking.
Mab is right that there is something deeply unsettling, and not unexciting, about how new River Templeton is, how odd it is to see a person you have never seen before.
Nora can’t get her breath back.
River can’t decide what to do with the panting, speechless adult whose pasted-on greeting smile is falling slowly past shock to scorn.
“I’m, um, here to…” River stammers. He peers around Nora, for help presumably, for a hint as to what to do next, but sees only me, stares, looks away, stares again. Nora pants.
“Is, um, does Mab live here?” he tries. “Or Monday?”
It’s that “or” I think that does it. It is pity and newness and his cheeks covered in rain and his hair soaking tendrils down his face, but mostly it’s that “or.” Like either girl would do as well as the other. Like maybe Mab and Monday don’t even live together. Like maybe we three are three and not one. With that one tiny word, all at once, I am in love.
Just so you don’t get the wrong idea, I am not usually so easily beguiled. The Kyles both wooed me for years, but I remained unenthralled, probably because their displays of affection mostly manifested as wrestling with each other, and a girl wants wit as well as charm. At least this girl does. Technically, I went to the fifth-through seventh-grade dances with Rock Ramundi, but really everyone just stood along the walls and felt shy of one another. Rock and I still text sometimes though. It’s not Abelard and Hélo?se as far as passionate correspondence goes, but then she was cloistered in an abbey whereas I am only cloistered in Bourne. The point is I’m not one of those girls whose head is turned by every boy who shows up at her house, though not that many boys do show up at my house, but nor am I a total newbie to the tangles of the heart.
But before I have a chance to process my own alarming and probably misguided emotions, I have to deal with Nora’s.