Bonus Scene — The Starter

A free scene from New Beginnings at Mercy General (Mercy General, Book 2), told from Helen Wahlund’s side of the counter. This is the morning Olivia first walked into the bakery before the bread was out. You read it from Olivia’s chair in Chapter Six. Here is the other chair.

— Clara Langford

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Helen Wahlund had been awake since four, which was not early for her and had not been early for her in thirty-one years. The ovens came up slow in the old building. A person learned to come up slow with them.

She had the first rye proofing and the cardamom loaf in and the coffee going for nobody but herself when the bell over the door gave its small flat ring. It had given that ring since 1989, when she and Walter had hung it crooked and then argued about whether to fix it and then left it crooked, and it had outlived the argument and it had outlived Walter, and Helen had decided some time back that she was not going to be the one to straighten it now.

She did not need to look up to know it was too early for a customer. She looked up anyway. That was the other thing a person learned, baking for a town for thirty-one years. You looked up. You saw who came in the door, and you saw what they were carrying, and most mornings the second thing told you more than the first.

It was Olivia Bennett. She was carrying a canvas tote with something square in it, held a little away from her side, the way you carry a thing you are not sure of.

“Mm,” Helen said.

“Helen.”

“Sit.”

She pointed Olivia at Carl’s table, because it was the table, and watched her sit down in it. Olivia Bennett sat the way she did everything, which was like a woman who had been on her feet since before the rest of the world got up and had learned not to waste the chances she got to be off them. Helen knew that sit. She had a version of it herself.

She wiped her hands on the apron and came around the counter and looked into the tote without being asked, because at her age you stopped asking for the small permissions. There was a Pyrex in there with a green lid. There was something living in the Pyrex.

“You went to Italy,” Helen said. It was not a question. The whole street knew Olivia had gone to Italy. Marge had told the diner and the diner had told the bakery, which was how the town moved information, the way it had moved information about Walter, the way it would move information about Helen one of these mornings when the bell rang and somebody else had to look up.

“I did,” Olivia said.

“And you brought home a baby.”

Olivia almost smiled. Helen saw her decide not to, and then do it anyway, a small one, at the corner. “Her name is Beatrice.”

“Of course it is.” Helen set the Pyrex on the table and took the lid off and bent down over it with the care she gave the things that mattered, which was a short list and getting shorter. The starter had a good dome on it. Whoever had taught Olivia to feed it had taught her by weight and had taught her the right hours, because you did not get a rise that clean by accident and you did not get it from a woman who was guessing. The smell was right. A little sharp. A little sweet under the sharp. Alive.

Helen had seen a great many starters in thirty-one years. People brought them to her the way people brought sick things to a vet, with that same face, half hope and half please-don’t-tell-me. She had learned to read them fast and to read the person faster.

She put the lid back on.

“What do you want me to tell you about it,” she said.

Olivia opened her mouth and Helen watched her get partway into an answer and then stop, because it was a fair question and Olivia Bennett did not give unfair answers. That was the thing Helen had always known about her, across thirteen years of Saturday rye, across the night in the storm when Helen had stood in the doorway of Trauma Two and said he was a good one to the air and Olivia had been the one standing close enough to hear it and had not said anything, which was the right thing, which most people did not know was the right thing.

“I don’t know,” Olivia said finally.

“Mm,” Helen said. “That’s honest.”

She straightened up. Her back told her she had straightened up. She ignored it. She looked at the woman at Carl’s table, who had come in before the bread was out, on the first Saturday she’d had off in seven weeks by the look of her, carrying a jar of living dough she did not know what to do with, and Helen understood the whole of it the way she understood when a loaf was done by the sound it made when she knocked on the bottom. You did not need a timer for the things you had done ten thousand times.

The woman did not want a lesson in feeding a starter. The woman had the starter handled. The woman wanted somebody to tell her it was all right to want the thing she had not let herself say out loud yet, and Helen was not going to tell her that, because it was not Helen’s to tell. But she could leave the door open. At eighty-five you got fairly good at telling the difference between pushing a person through a door and leaving it open behind you and going back to your work.

“I’ve been thinking about the bakery,” Helen said.

Olivia looked up.

“Not selling it. I own the building. Walter and I bought it in eighty-eight and I am not handing it to a stranger so they can put one of those machines in that makes the coffee taste like a candle.” Helen went back around the counter, because she had a cardamom loaf that did not care about anybody’s feelings and would burn if she stood here being meaningful at it. “I’ve been thinking I’d like to teach somebody. Before I can’t. That’s all. I’m not asking you anything.”

“I’m a nurse,” Olivia said.

“I know what you are.” Helen pulled the cardamom out. It was right. It was always right. She set it on the rack. “I’ve watched you buy rye on a Saturday for thirteen years. I watched you stand in a doorway and not say the wrong thing to me on the worst night of my life. I have a fair idea what you are.”

She let that sit. She did not look at Olivia while she let it sit, because some things landed better when you gave the person the privacy of not being watched while they landed.

She cut the heel off a fresh rye, the small good end piece, and put it on a square of paper and carried it over and set it down in front of Olivia next to the Pyrex.

“You’ve got the hands for it,” Helen said. “That’s all I’ll say. Some people’s hands don’t mind being floured and some people’s do, and you can’t teach the difference, and you’ve got the kind that don’t.”

Olivia looked at the bread. She looked at her own hands, which had spent twenty-five years on other people, on wrists and shoulders and the backs of necks and the hands of the dying, and which were, Helen could see her noticing, also the hands she had been measuring flour with for three weeks at five-thirty in the morning before her shifts.

“Eat that,” Helen said. “It’s better when it’s still warm and you’re not going to get it warm again.”

Olivia ate it. She ate it slow, the way Helen had taught herself to eat things slow after Walter, because fast was for people who still believed they had an unlimited number of mornings and slow was for the rest of them. Helen went back to her ovens and her rye and her list of the day, and she did not say anything else about apprentices or hands or doors, and she did not have to.

The bell would ring at 7:30 when the first real customer came. It would ring all morning. One of these years it would ring and Helen would not be the one to look up. She had made a kind of peace with that. But it was a better peace, she found, standing at the back counter on a thin Saturday in May with a woman eating warm rye at Carl’s table, if there was somebody coming along who would look up the right way when it did.

“You can feed her Tuesdays here if you want,” Helen said, not turning around. “I’m closed Tuesdays. The starter won’t know the difference and you’ll have the place to make your mistakes in private.”

Behind her, after a moment, Olivia said, “Okay.”

Helen knew the okay. The town was full of Olivia Bennett’s okays and she had taught half of them to the rest of them without meaning to. This one was the real kind. Helen had buried a husband and run a bakery alone for a year and a half and she knew the real kind when she heard it. “All right then,” Helen said, and went o