Stones for Bread Read Online Free PDF Page B

nibbles a corner and places the remainder on her saucer. My father finishes the first piece and takes a second, peels the foil off a little plastic pot of margarine. Have you tasted this? he says. It’s just like yours .
    My mother’s face doesn’t change.
    The waitress brings our food, and in the shuffle of dishes I break the corner off my bread and sneak it into my mouth, a puff of warm, moist cotton ball. Tasteless, like the time I licked my fingers after sticking them into a torn bag of bleached all-purpose flour at the grocery store.
    Beneath the table, I reach out and rest my hand on my mother’s thigh. She doesn’t respond and I think I’ve made a mistake. My fingers tremble. I begin to pull my hand away, wiggle my tongue around my closed mouth to work up enough saliva to excuse myself to the restroom, but as soon as my lips part my mother blankets my hand with her own.
    My father never notices we don’t finish our bread.

    On the last Sunday of every month, Wild Rise offers sanctuary.
    I’d been open nearly two years when the pastor of the communitychurch on the outskirts of town called, one of three churches collecting my leftover bread. He asked if I’d be interested in hosting the fellowship meal, and his question captured my undernourished spirit, famished for connection in ways the rest of me hadn’t realized. Or ignored. Yes , it said, but my flesh wanted no part of it. Sunday was my only day off, and I told him so.
    “We’ll make it easy for you,” Ryan said. “We’ll open, close, clean, and provide the food. You don’t even need to be there. We’d just like to use your space.”
    “Who said no already?”
    “I haven’t asked anyone else.”
    “Fine, but you can’t use the kitchen.”
    “Not even the sinks?”
    I sighed. “Only the sinks.”
    Ryan calls these Sundays Sanctus dies Solis— sacred Sunday. Bread is passed and broken. Simple foods are served. There’s a blessing and a five-minute message, but mostly people talk to one another, sharing life in groups of three and four around the tables. And in a year it has grown from a dozen members of his own congregation to sixty people each week. Some come from area churches, some make the trip from an hour away or more. Some are tourists leisurely strolling the sidewalks of Billingston who walk into Wild Rise expecting to order lunch and instead find the hospitality of strangers. Some are people of the community—curious, seeking, occasionally antagonistic—all handled with grace, their questions welcome. And some come only for the free meal.
    I’m there too.
    I tell myself it’s because it’s the bakehouse, and no one but Xavier and I are allowed in there alone. Half-truths are easy, but they’re always only half. Eventually the other side bobs to the surface and demands attention.
    The room fills quickly. I nod to Ryan as he shakes hands andwelcomes each person who comes through the door. He smiles and waves me over, but I hover near the counter, watching plates fill with fruit salad and triangles of turkey and ham sandwiches, today’s offerings. In the center of each table a loaf of my bread—extra from yesterday—has been placed.
    I lean into the kitchen door; it opens for me, accepting me into the solitude of the back room. More self-imposed isolation. I’ve been doing it since I was twelve; after twenty-one years it’s my body’s natural response, those neural pathways firmly established, and I tell myself I can’t expect to act differently.
    I’ve only been navigating this faith thing slightly longer than I’ve been running Wild Rise, and I’m much, much better at bread. But these Sundays make me hungry for more.
    Monday through Saturday I have no time to be empty. From the moment I wake in the still-dark early hours to the moment I fall asleep each night, my hands stay busy, my mind churns with business and baking, and if a wisp of loneliness somehow manages to invade my day, I brush it away with a wave, like