How to Bake a Perfect Life Read Online Free PDF Page B

comfort.
    Milo is a rescue, an elegant blue-eyed Siamese who showed up on my porch, wet and skinny and starving, only three or four months old. Even then he was one of the most beautiful cats I’d ever seen, with a soft squeak of a meow instead of an obnoxious yowl. He’s aloof and skittish and not terribly friendly with anyone but me. I wonder how he’s going to take the arrival of the dog, who will be here in the morning.
    Probably not well.
    “I’m sorry we have to bring a dog in, baby,” I say conversationally. “If it were just me, you know I’d never do that to you,but this little girl needs somebody in her corner, and dogs are good at that kind of thing.” Milo nuzzles into my palm, asking for a face rub, and when I do it, he licks my palm delicately, as if I am his kitten.
    It had taken my mother nearly three hours to get the dog’s transportation straightened out. Merlin had no vaccination records. Without them, he would not be allowed to fly. A vet agreed to come to the airport to administer the shots, and an airport employee would give the dog food and water overnight.
    In the morning, he will fly in a new soft-sided $200 kennel to Colorado Springs, where my brother will again be pressed into service, since he is the dog person of the family. My credit card was screaming by the end of the arrangements, but what alternative was there?
    I took Katie on a walk of the neighborhood earlier tonight, showing her where things are—7-Eleven and the post office and the tourist strip on West Colorado Avenue, cluttered with boutiques and galleries and bars, and the hilly backstreets populated with Victorians and bungalows with grassy yards. “It’s pretty here,” she said in some wonder. “I don’t remember Colorado Springs looking like this.”
    “Did you live here?”
    “Yeah, I was little. We were at Fort Carson, I think. I don’t remember it all that well.”
    When we got home, she asked to get on the Internet, and I set her up at the kitchen nook with her own ID. She chose a picture of a dog as her icon. She already had an email address, of course—that much is easy these days—and wanted to email her best friend about Merlin. I asked if she had emailed her dad. She shook her head, not looking at me. I didn’t push.
    Now I can no longer bear to lie here and think of the expenses I can’t afford, the disaster that has befallen my daughter, or the challenges of a girl who is as tense and aloof and as skittish as my cat. Gently nudging Milo aside, I tug on some yogapants and a sweater and tie my long hair away from my face with a scrunchie. Milo tucks his long black tail around himself like a fluffy scarf and returns to sleep.
    I patter down the back stairs to the bakery kitchen. Moonlight comes in through the windows and glances off the stainless-steel island, and I think of Sofia sitting there less than two days ago.
    The overhead fluorescent lights will be too harsh just now. I turn on the small lights—over the range, over the sink, above the counter. Nearby is the bank of side-by-side fridges.
    Stored in the fridges are my sourdough starters, of course. The bakery is built on them. At the moment there are three different sponges made with various ingredients—potato starter and rye; a buttermilk-and-wheat-flour starter I’ve been experimenting with; a heavy dark barley mash, which makes a bread so rich and tangy that it impressed an anonymous travel writer enough to write it up in New York magazine. That article led to other stealthy tasters and even better coverage.
    And an even deeper rift with my family. They expected me to fail, and I have not. Yet.
    On the counter is the fourth jar, which I have left out overnight. This is the luminary of my starters, mother dough from my grandmother, which has been in the family for more than a hundred years, ever since Bridget Magill, my grandmother’s grandmother, carried it with her from Ireland, to Buffalo, then to the mining camps in Cripple