California(54)

When one of the women saw how slowly the boy was working through the first potato, she said, “It’s not easy to cut them as thin as we want them.” The woman had told Frida her name was Betty. Her hair was a cloud of dark ringlets, and her large brown eyes reminded Frida of a doll’s. “We need a mandoline,” Betty added.

“Noted,” Anika replied from the washing trough.

The boy shot Betty a fierce look, and both of them glanced at Frida. She immediately went back to her onions, which were making her nose run, her eyes water.

Eventually, she stopped resisting and just let the onions do what they would do. Her eyes were stinging so much they seemed to spasm, and the tears ran down her face. But she didn’t stop dicing. This knife was sharper than any she and Cal used, and she liked its weight.

Time slipped by. When she finished with the onions, Anika complimented her technique and handed her bulbs of garlic to mince. The guy with the feather tattoo had the same job, and they stood side by side, in silence, pushing the cloves with the flats of their knives so that the skins cracked open. Frida’s back began to hurt, the way it used to when she’d been baking all morning, but she didn’t even stop to roll her shoulders or hang her neck forward for a little relief, though she saw others doing so, even Anika.

Someone started humming a song. A lullaby. Rock-a-bye baby, on the treetop. After the first phrase, a couple of others joined in, including feather-tattoo man, which made his friend shake his head and snort like a pent-up animal.

When the wind blows, the cradle will rock.

Morning Labor. Was that supposed to make her think of having a baby?

No kids, Cal had pointed out. She didn’t want to talk, let alone think, about it. Because if these people couldn’t have kids, or if they didn’t allow them, what would that mean for her own child?

Cal thought Micah knew about the pregnancy or, at the very least, that August did. He had no idea that there was a secret to keep, that she and Cal were the only two people on earth who knew about the tiny human inside of her. There was something beautiful about that kind of secret.

She knew she’d have to tell her brother. That’s what Cal would advise. Maybe they did have a urine test here, and she could find out for sure. Oh, please, that was unnecessary. She was almost three weeks late, and that had never happened. She was pregnant; she just knew. Wasn’t that how it worked? Before long, smells would turn her stomach, as would certain foods. She might have to carry around a bucket, maybe a barf bag, which the Land no doubt had a box of. She’d need crackers to calm her belly; if they let her bake, she could prepare them as she preferred. By then, there’d be no hiding her malady. Not that being pregnant was an illness or a handicap.

If she was pregnant, she’d raise the baby here, on the Land…if she survived the birth.

Stop it, she told herself. Stop it. She was enjoying herself, and she didn’t want to ruin the morning with anxiety. It felt good to cook like this. So what if she was pregnant? So what if her brother had treated their reunion so casually and didn’t seem to want to be alone with her? She was back in a kitchen cooking with others, in a room with windows. She was grateful.

Sometimes, a conversation would begin at one end of the kitchen and, just as quickly, extinguish like a match in the wind. A few would start giggling about something Frida couldn’t hear, and then Anika would announce something briskly to the whole group—an encouragement or a technical reminder about how to hold a knife—and the mood would turn serious again.

She liked being part of the routine. It reminded her of the Canter’s kitchen at 4:00 a.m. when it was just her and the other bakers and a few prep cooks who would pass behind her warning, “Por detrás,” as they balanced cutting boards of sliced tomatoes, their slippery seeds sliding off the edges.

As it had been back then, it was easy to focus on each rote task given to her. She didn’t mind that Anika eventually assigned others more complicated work: scaling and deboning fish that a man named Charles had caught in the nearby river and brought in through the back door, for instance, or conferring with Anika over the menu, discussing substitutions and portion sizes. She could tell them later about her skills; for now, she would bend over the table and cut cloves of garlic, one after another: like waking up to a new day, every day. Her fingertips were sticky.

“You can relax a little, you know,” Fatima said from behind her, a tray of deboned trout in her hands.

“I’m relaxed,” Frida said. “Just communing with my garlic.”

“Sailor said you’ve worked in a kitchen before.”

Feather guy looked up. “Oh yeah?” he said.

Anika was across the room and didn’t seem to notice them talking.

“I was a baker, at a deli in L.A.,” Frida said.

“Bread? Can you do bread?” he asked.

“Of course,” she replied.

Fatima explained that they had a small bread operation in place. Their wheat harvest had turned out beautifully the last two years, but no one was really very good at baking.

“The sourdough’s bland,” Feather Boy said.

Fatima rolled her eyes. “Burke is very hard to please.”

Burke shrugged like a dad in a sitcom, and Frida wished he or Fatima would call out to Anika and announce that the new girl, Mikey’s sister, was a professional, that she could bake, that she could do bread. She hadn’t baked in years, and the idea of using the woodstove made her nervous, but already she could smell the dough, hear it rising (it did have a sound, she swore it did, it was like a gathering of energy). The leave-it-alone mantra, coupled with that urge to knead, and the way the loaves felt just baked, warm as breathing bodies.