Bone and Bread Read Online Free PDF Page A

always said you could bake love right into something,” said Mama with wonder in her eyes, scraping her fork along the side of the flowered china plate. “He said you could taste the difference.”
    Other facts about Papa were harder to pin down. The strength of his hands or the way he used to smell were things Mama tried to describe when she was putting us to bed. “Like flour,” she said, climbing between the sheets with us, “and eucalyptus, and the sweetness of chopped basil.” On either side of her, Sadhana and I each had a cheek on the pillow as she closed her eyes to conjure Papa. “And sometimes he smelled like a raft in the ocean, just a few feet from shore, about to be pulled in by the tide.”
    We didn’t always understand what she was talking about.
    â€œMama?” said Sadhana.
    â€œLike seawater,” she said, lashes curling down her freckled cheeks, “and fresh breezes. Like the most lonesome shipwrecked sailor at the first sight of land.”
    Sadhana and I nodded, and nuzzled her neck, and threw our arms over her so that she would stay until we all fell asleep. When Mama called Papa’s laugh a sneeze full of tulips mixed with a river of swans, it was hard to tell if we were already dreaming.
    While we both gathered stories to carry forward, like explorers face to face with a vanishing tribe, Sadhana became focused on what was going to happen next. She did not like me to sit in Papa’s chair at the table, and when Mama got dressed one day before breakfast, Sadhana wept and refused to eat. As for the hukam , which had stopped altogether in our father’s absence, Sadhana insisted that it be reinstated, and Mama agreed.
    At the beginning, Sadhana and I fought over who would do it, until Mama settled it by taking over. She read from the Guru Granth Sahib, and then sometimes from other holy books, the Bible or the Koran or the Tao Te Ching. Other times, she pulled the hukam from Shakespeare or George Eliot. On the longest and most silent of days, she would just close her eyes and point to a book and read from it, no matter what it was.
    The mercy in interpretation, we discovered, was an excess of information. The more we took in, the easier it was to let go of the parts we didn’t like. The eerie time we got “Meantime we shall express our darker purpose” from King Lear , or the unfathomable “Can a man take fire in his bosom, and his clothes not be burned?” from Proverbs. And whatever it was that the astrologer had told Mama. We let it all wash over us and pass away.
    But the less we were concerned about specific omens, the more worried we became about all of them in general. A list of superstitions had been scared up from some of the employees at the bagel shop. Mama had been encouraging us to run down for visits, probably so we wouldn’t grow to dread the place. We were small enough then that we could slip right by the customers and pass under the counter.
    â€œMirrors,” said Jean-François, who had a beard like Papa’s and rangy blue eyes. “Don’t break them.” He had been working there the morning Papa died. Jean-François, like the rest of the employees, was always willing to humour us. “And black cats, ladders,” said Jean-François, his palms and fingers never stopping their rapid work of rolling thin slices of dough and joining them into circles. A loose fluorescent light buzzed above his head.
    â€œWhat else?” asked Sadhana. She was looking at his face instead of his hands, paying absolute attention for once. I was flapping loose the front of my shirt where it was sticking to my stomach. The white-painted brick walls shimmered in the heat above the deep black openings to the ovens.
    â€œAsk Lefty,” said Jean-François. By then he was throwing the pale dough circles onto one of the long wooden oven paddles.
    â€œYeah, come here, kids,” Lefty called from the