The first time Audrey had felt the arm of God encircle her shoulders, during their first winter in the Great Central Valley, she and Geoff were baking bread.
They baked bread every Tuesday because it was something they had done together since the early years of their marriage. It was an easy habit to maintain, Tuesdays falling when the church office closed and complaints about the Sunday sermon from the dear hangnails and bunions of their precious “body” had been addressed. Audrey loved the members of Grace Springs Church because they were so unapologetic about their own humanity. On the downside, her role as the pastor’s wife seemed like an eternal, unsatisfied audition for the part of June Cleaver.
It took Geoff and Audrey most of the day to bake whatever variety they’d chosen for the week: whole wheat or peasant bread or semolina rounds or sourdough-rye. Ed understood that he was on his own for breakfast and lunch and could enter the kitchen on Tuesdays only after his parents had left it. They rose before the crickets stopped chirping, weighed and kneaded the ingredients, then made coffee in the French press. They carried coffee mugs and walked up and down the rows of the hundred-acre orange orchard behind the parsonage while the yeast did its early work on the dough.
Yeast, Audrey thought, didn’t get much good press in the Bible, so she particularly liked Jesus’s singular comparison: “The kingdom of heaven is like yeast that a woman took and mixed into a large amount of flour until it worked all through the dough.” A good thing, a wonderful thing, a small creation doing great and wide work.
In San Francisco, land of the American sourdough, rumor had it that some commercial bakeries used a yeast starter that had been in existence for more than 150 years. Surely that represented “a large amount of flour.”
The words were recorded in Matthew, right after Jesus’ remark about the greatness of faith no bigger than a mustard seed, the tiniest of seeds. But yeast, though the disciples couldn’t know and science wouldn’t be able to explain for another eighteen hundred years, was smaller still: a living, single-celled organism destined to have far-reaching effects. Set in motion by the sensitive fingertips of a woman, no less.
Geoff allowed her the pleasure of getting feminine credit for this. Every Tuesday, their personal sabbath, God’s sense of humor and his promises restored them both.
They would return from their walk, punch down the massive glob of dough, and divide it into crude loaves. Then the dough rested, and so did they. Everyone ought to have such recovery time after a pounding, Audrey always thought. The lumps took a nap under kitchen towels, and they returned to bed, stealing half an hour of bliss before their son rolled out of bed and placed his feet on the floor for the day.
Then they gave the loaves their final, intentional shape and ran their empty dishwasher through a rinse cycle, turning it into a miniature sauna. When it finished, they set the loaves inside on a special rack Geoff had made to fit, then closed the door for a final proofing. They preheated the tile-lined ovens, one in the kitchen and, in the garage, two from a refurbished-appliances store. Audrey read the day’s headlines aloud while Geoff scored the loaves—her cuts were clumsy and unartistic—just before they’d doubled in size. While she flipped pages he spritzed the ovens’ interiors with water, and then the bread baked.
In spite of Audrey’s stealing credit for working yeast into the dough, the art of creating bread was Geoff’s passion and skill. There was something very biblical and sexy about that ability, Audrey thought. Not everyone could make golden, weightless loaves out of flour, water, salt, and yeast. And though she loved every moment alongside her husband in the close quarters of their kitchen, her love of food had more to do with feeding people.
She planned the evening meal around the scent of rising bread as if it were wine worthy of a perfect pairing. Dense millet-and-oat loaves called for hearty vegetable stew, glossy rosemary-buttermilk dinner rolls for fish, torpedo-shaped Vienna rolls for leftover-turkey sandwiches. This was the family’s California-style, midweek Sunday dinner.
Audrey and Geoff had been installed at the Grace Springs church for two months the first time she felt the weight of God on her neck. The sensation was peaceful and warm, and she stopped fashioning the loaf between her palms to experience rather than examine the moment. She closed her eyes and took a deep breath, and then a stabbing headache and upending dizziness took her to the floor, where she blacked out for a few seconds.
According to Ed, who was fourteen at the time and interested in his parents’ hobby in the coolly detached way of adolescent boys, she swiped the bread board off the counter when she fell. He rushed in at the sound, helped his dad bring her around, then assured them that he could handle the bread’s final stages while Geoff took Audrey to the ER.
The attending physician told her she had high blood pressure, which she didn’t believe for a second, and also that she would have a nice bruise on her right knee where she hit the corner of the cabinets on her way down. He gave Audrey a prescription for the hypertension and instructions to see her physician the next day. Geoff made the appointment for her on their way home, against her protests.
When they arrived at the house, three gorgeous boulé loaves of blond-colored Tuscan bread were cooling on the counter, and Ed was watching TV as if he’d done nothing remarkable at all. Audrey gave him a double helping of her garlic-white-bean soup at dinner, which was interrupted by a phone call from one of the church members.
Mrs. Dawson asked Geoff to come sit with her husband, who had been hospitalized after a heart attack, a complication of his high blood pressure.
Audrey blinked at this news and let her spoon sink slowly into her soup. “Take the Dawsons a loaf of the bread,” Audrey said to Geoff, rising from the dinner table to wrap one up and wonder. “The Tuscan is made without salt—it’ll pass muster with his doctors. Tell them Ed made it. They’ll love that.”
Audrey took the other loaf to her own doctor the next day. She’d hoped it would be something of a joke to lighten her disbelief in her own diagnosis.
“But this is salt-free bread!” she insisted, holding out the loaf to him when he came into the room. “There’s no way I can have hypertension.”
“I’ll second that,” he said, looking at her chart. “Your blood pressure is as low as any athlete’s.”
This was confusing news. “Then how . . . ?”
“Probably stress,” he said. “You’re new to town, new to the church. Family-size transitions take a toll on go-getters like you. We’ve seen anxiety mimic hypertension like this from time to time.”
“I haven’t felt stressed at all. And yesterday I was baking. For me, that’s like getting a day off. It was our day off. From the church.”
“Try to pay attention, then, or fluke events like that can become a regular thing. Thanks for the bread. It’ll get the wife and me through a few meals without going to the store. She’s off her feet for a while—had a misstep yesterday and injured her knee.”
For five years the Bofingers baked bread and Audrey tried to pay attention. Not to the high blood pressure, which never reared its head again, but to God’s leading with a gentle touch, especially while baking.
Most of the time she felt the way she always did. Content, focused, and accomplished at the end of the day. After the blood-pressure incident she talked Geoff into making six batches instead of only three. It was important for her to be giving more of their bread away. She’d put up two loaves for her family, then slip the other four into muslin pouches, tie them off with colorful grosgrain ribbon, and decide whom to give them to.
Sometimes she knew who’d receive them long before she got to this stage. During a sleepless night she thought of Katie Thompson, who was taking care of four children during her husband’s third deployment. That morning Geoff and Audrey made sweet sugar-dusted stollen for the Thompsons and three other families with young kids. After twisting her ankle during one of the Tuesday morning walks, she limped home thinking of Billy James, her son’s basketball teammate who’d torn a ligament in his ankle and been sidelined for the season. She and Geoff made cinnamon rolls for the team, and a dozen just for Billy. One winter morning when the fog was so thick it was unsafe to wander in the orchard, the gloom filled Audrey with an irrational sadness, and she thought of Richard Mickey, whose wife had passed the week before, the day before their forty-fifth anniversary. Geoff agreed to help her make loaves of dense multigrain sunflower bread that day, heavy and sustaining, because that’s how sadness felt to her. She gave Richard two loaves divided into six freezer bags for him to eat when his appetite returned.
Come Tuesday evenings, she grew used to sitting in warm kitchens or on breezy back porches sipping whatever drink had been offered, talking one-on-one with people who never seemed to lack for words when there was a loaf of bread sitting between them.
Geoff knew about these places where it seemed her life intersected with others. Except for the sure sensation that the Lord was guiding her, she might have feared she was looking for connections that didn’t actually exist. But Geoff called her sensitive, and admiration filled his voice when he said it.
For five years the kingdom of heaven was like the life she had. And then it changed.
In March, when Cora Jean Hall’s grief over the old family portrait had become her own, Audrey took a step back. After that, she entered a person’s pain only from a safe distance. She realized she was doing it, but she felt helpless to fully engage. She was kind, a good listener, and that should be enough. For her own well-being she needed to hold suffering at arm’s length.
Then in June, Jack accused Geoff of the unthinkable. On the Tuesday after the church body took a public, nearly unanimous vote asking Geoff to step down, the couple rose at their usual time because it seemed dangerous to avoid doing what filled them with hope and pleasure. They made a dark sourdough rye in the morning, the usual six loaves, and Audrey silently prepared corned beef for supper.
That night, Ed didn’t touch the food on his plate. Geoff ate only politely. Spontaneously, as sometimes happened around a basket of bread, they took calm turns asking questions none of them had dared ask during the prior week, because of the heartbreak the answers would cause.
Geoff said to his son, “Was the baby yours?”
Ed leaned on his elbows and covered his eyes with his hands. “I think so.”
Geoff nodded, and a ball of chewed bread jammed deep in Audrey’s throat.
“Did you know Miralee wanted an abortion?” Geoff asked.
Ed shook his head. “Not until after she’d done it. Spring break. She didn’t even tell me about the baby until after the fact.”
“That’s why your grades took such a hit in the last quarter,” Audrey said, understanding something that had perplexed her for months.
Ed exhaled noisily. The slide had cost him his planned entrance to the state university. “I’m really, really sorry.”
Geoff said, “Why didn’t you tell us?”
“I thought . . . I don’t know what I thought.” Then after a minute, “I thought it wouldn’t ever affect anyone but me.” Still unable to make eye contact with his parents, Ed asked his father, “Is it true, what Miri said? Did you pay for it?”
“No.”
Audrey never again wondered how Jack had been able to produce a cancelled personal check made out to Miralee Mansfield and signed by Geoff in the exact amount charged by the clinic to end the baby’s life. Asking how it had happened seemed both unanswerable and pointless. Audrey wept for her son, and for the grandchild she’d never know.
It was harder to feel sorrow for the baby’s mother. Audrey felt the pain of injustice run like a spear through her husband’s career, through his very heart. And hers.
Audrey believed Geoff. And Ed. Someone was lying, but not anyone under her roof, and that was all that really mattered at the time. She wasn’t so sure that the men of her household had the same faith in each other though.
That night, no one returned Audrey’s voice-mail messages asking what might be a good time for her to stop by to deliver a loaf. She felt foolish for having called at all.
The following week they made only two loaves of whole-wheat sandwich bread and, during their walk through the orchard, decided to give God as much time as he needed to point them in a new direction. She would support this by looking for a job. While the sandwich loaves proofed in the dishwasher, she browsed Craigslist, which took her to a most unexpected venue: the old Yummy Crumb bakery had filed for bankruptcy, and the bank was looking for a new owner.
By September the Bofingers owned it, in part because Audrey dropped everything in order to present Geoff and God with a seven-year business plan explaining how it would work.
“Okay,” Geoff said after she’d spread all the papers in front of him at their dining room table and walked him through each one.
“Okay? Just okay? You don’t need to pray about it first?”
“Already did.” The sad countenance he’d been wearing since the excommunication was overtaken by a grin.
“When?”
“When we stopped baking.”
And that was when Audrey realized she and her husband hadn’t placed any bread pans into their ovens for more than three weeks.
“We did, didn’t we?” She laughed. “Didn’t mean to scare you.”
Geoff said, “I’ll recover. Where do I sign?”
In Audrey’s opinion the bakery would have been the end of them all if not for the good business sense of Estrella Torres. Geoff had the entrepreneurial spirit that had informed his vision as a minister, plus magic fingers that could turn any grain into life-sustaining food, and Audrey had the passion of a caregiver, but it was Estrella’s crazy obsession with perfection that convinced customers to forgive the Yummy Crumb’s spotted past of weak coffee and dry pastries and tough loaves.
They found Estrella when they found her husband, Cesar, a local wheat farmer who also milled his grain and agreed to sell it to the Bofingers for a reasonable price. At the time Estrella worked for a commercial bakery that sold bread to retailers throughout the valley and Southern California.
“You are loco,” she had sternly warned Audrey after their introduction to each other lasted more than an hour. When the Bofingers told Estrella they proofed their loaves in the humid dishwasher, the grandmother threw her hands in the air.
“Thees bakery thing ees no hobby. Commercial baking ees not what you do at home. A dishwasher! Where ees your controlled temperature—you let the water heater do that? How can bread rise nice and slow in such heat? You get different result every time. Bread is an art, yes, but a successful bakery ees a science, sí? You do what works, you follow the formulas, you sell bread. You can do art in your spare time, which you will not have. You learn what you can, you make new bread. But you don’t sell thees new bread, no. You don’t sell it until you can turn it into a formula.”
“Maybe we’re in over our heads,” Audrey admitted.
“Ah, no no no. Your Geoff has good talent. And you have the right amount of crazy to make thees work! When I call somebody loco, ees a compliment. But you need help. You want help? My employer doesn’t want my best help. He wants me to be just robot. I have my own head, sí?”
Audrey said to her husband, “I think we need to hire her away.”
“Can we afford her?”
“We can afford two full-time employees,” Audrey said. “I think she’s worth two.”