Read Online Stones for Bread by Christa Parrish - Free Book Online

the Good Food Channel and find a past episode of Bake-Off to watch online. I’ve seen pieces of it previously but force myself to sit through an entire show now. I don’t hate it, almost appreciate the respect shown for those participating and their abilities, unlike other cooking competitions. I click over to Jonathan Scott’s bio.
    He apprenticed in a Parisian boulangerie .
    I suddenly want France so badly it fills my mouth in a rush of saliva. My mother had been there once as a child but remembered nothing of the trip, except for slipping on the uneven cobbles in the rain and scraping her knee. Grandmother, there too, recalled much more. And while fully believing all things German superior, especially the bread, she had a baker’s admiration for the pain des Françaises . She told her daughter, and later me, about loaves in every shade of earth, with flavors just as deep and armors of crust around them. My mother saved for years to return, putting away what she earned selling her bread and any little extra she could scrape together buying store brands and going without new panty hose. Not long before my grandmother died, all those pennies added up to more than enough for a round-trip plane ticket to Paris.
    And all those pennies ended up given to my father.
    He needed the money to get out from under yet another failed business venture. For years resentment grew within me over this transaction between husband and wife, something I wasn’t supposed to know about but learned by overhearing my mother speaking on the telephone to a friend. She sounded defeated, and I hated my father and his ineptitude for robbing her of a dream when she had so little of them left. Once, while I was in high school, I told him so in a venomous rant, spilling all those things I’d kept inside since finding my mother dead in the garage when I was twelve. Would she still be alive if he hadn’t stolen that money from her? “You left her with nothing,” I said.
    My gentle father, who began wilting the day he lost his beloved andwould never again straighten, said, “Do you think I could make her do anything? If I had that kind of power, she would be with us now.”
    I didn’t believe him then, and I saved so I could go in her stead. In the beginning it was to honor her, and then it grew larger than that. The bread called. I quit my job. I planned a three-month tour of France and Germany, mapping out both famous and little-known bakeries throughout the countries. I would travel by bicycle and train and bus. I would sleep in hostels. And I would feast and learn and come home changed.
    And then I, too, had a choice to make.
    Less than a week before my flight from JFK to Charles de Gaulle, I was given the opportunity to open Wild Rise. The rent was reasonable, there was an apartment above the store I could live in, and the former pizzeria was already outfitted with a wood-fire oven—something I would never be able to afford on my own. The start-up cost? Enough of my travel fund to worry me. I’d need some sort of income within three months of opening.
    Yes, choices.
    I took it. I knew the chance would not come again. I trusted God in it, both the business opportunity and the reconciliation of my relationship with my father. Sometimes understanding is long coming.
    But I still want Paris. I will, I decide, sell out for it.
    Selecting Patrice Olsen’s e-mail, I click Reply and let her know I am honored to accept the invitation to be on Bake-Off .

Five

    They take a trip without me, to the ocean again even though it’s November. My father brings me down into the basement, amidst his springs and scrap and wire, and asks me to understand. Because she’s sad about Oma , he says. Not because we don’t love you or want you along . He gives me five dollars and tells me I can use it for ice cream in school or for a Fanta at the corner grocery. Just remember to brush your teeth afterward .
    The grief sticks to my mother, coating her, like dirt on the