California(69)

“I’m not going to give you bread duty out of pity or obligation.”

“Who would you be obligated to? My brother, you mean?”

“Nepotism has never been a problem around here,” Anika said. Frida waited for her to say, Until now, but she didn’t.

“Why am I awake then?” Frida asked. She tried to keep her voice low, to control its quiver, but she knew it was giving her away.

“Relax,” Anika said. “I want us to bake a cake. You know how to do that, don’t you?”

“Of course,” Frida said, swallowing a tide of spit. “I love baking cakes.”

It was true, though she hadn’t baked one in years. In L.A., she and Cal didn’t have money to waste on things like baking powder and sugar, and then the electricity stopped working, which meant their oven became a glorified cupboard to store the extra candles they used, sparingly, at night. Soon after they met, August had tried to get her to trade for eggs and flour, but she’d have been nuts to go for it; he’d wanted their coffee and Cal’s heavy coat. Even though she would’ve only been able to batter fish with the flour, she sometimes regretted turning August down and imagined all that she might do with it. She could feel its dust in her lungs.

“What’s wrong?” Anika said. “You look like you might faint.”

“You have everything to bake a cake?”

“Cake is probably the wrong word. We have to use this oven, so I want to do something simple. It’s more of a clafoutis.”

Frida could have laughed. She hadn’t heard that word in a long while.

“Think of it as a sweet pancake,” Anika explained. “It’s French, and traditionally made with cherries.”

“I know what it is, Anika.”

“Do you now?” Anika shrugged, as if to say, You cannot impress me. “I need to get the baking crate from the cellar. Wait here.”

Baking crate. She’d said it as if this were a thing that people all over the world had.

A moment later, Frida was alone, the two candle flames emitting an uneven, wobbly glow across the kitchen. She had spent enough time in this room that she didn’t need to rely on the sunlight to arrange its details. There was the hand-scrawled sign above the dishwashing trough that read DAYDREAMING WASTES TIME! and the umbrella stand next to the woodstove held barbecue tongs, shovels, and metal tools to stoke the fire. The two cellar doors, made of beautiful pinewood, and the big black smoke stain on the ceiling. On the windowsill, a line of pumpkin seeds; some benign troublemaker had pushed them into the most recent coat of paint before it had dried. It amazed Frida that not one seed had been pried off.

“Taking it all in?”

Anika stepped up from the cellar with the baking crate on her hip. She shut the doors with one hand, just as she’d done when Frida had first met her. They closed with a definitive thwap.

“I guess I’m trying to figure this place out.”

Anika hardened her eyes in that combative way she had and put down the crate. Before she began pulling anything out of it, she grabbed for a metal bowl that had been on the table all along. It was covered with a dingy white dishtowel, and Frida hadn’t noticed it.

Anika removed the towel to reveal a pile of brown eggs, speckled with shit. “Have you met the chickens yet?”

Frida hadn’t, but she’d heard about them from Sailor. He told her about the first time he was assigned to butchery for Morning Labor. He’d been afraid he would vomit at the sight of the dead animals hanging from a post behind the barn, draining blood, but he’d signed up anyway, because he wanted to challenge himself. What happened next surprised him. He was stunned by the beauty and simplicity of the process, he said. “Invigorated even.” Sometimes it felt to Frida as though Sailor were chatting her up at a bar, telling her whatever stories would keep her listening, make her suck down her liquor faster. Other times, she was less cynical; it was just that he’d truly welcomed her to this place, to their life out here.

“My favorite is Suzanne,” Anika said, not waiting for Frida to answer. “Her eggs are divine.” She reached into the baking crate and pulled out a series of Mason jars, each of them filled at least halfway and labeled with masking tape and thick black pen: FLOUR, SUGAR, BAKING POWDER, BAKING SODA, SALT. If Cal saw all this, he’d flip.

Before asking her next question, the one Cal would want her to ask, Frida steeled herself, like she used to do before running across a four-lane boulevard, the break in traffic impossible to measure, dangerously unpredictable.

“Where did these come from?” she asked.

“You just saw me go into the root cellar.”

“You know that’s not what I mean.”

“What do you mean, then?” Anika asked. She paused and reached for a brown container at the bottom of the crate, its label still intact. Frida didn’t need to see the other side to read what it said: HERSHEY’S. It was cocoa powder. It was chocolate.

“Oh my God,” she whispered. She could already smell its rich, slightly chalky scent.

“We have a saying here,” Anika said as she placed the container on the table. “Don’t get involved if you’re not ready.”

Frida wasn’t sure what Anika meant but couldn’t take her eyes off the brown container with its plastic top, its nutritional information printed along its side in black and white, and the big bold letters across the front. Back in L.A., chocolate, even the mass-produced kind, cost more than a week’s wages. If you lived in a Community, you could get it easily; that’s what Toni had told her once. She said some were still producing it behind those impenetrable walls.