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.
If these people tasted her bread, they would definitely allow her to stay. If the fact that she was Micah’s sister didn’t give her special status, then her talents would.
She’d been distracted by this little fantasy when her knife sliced into her finger. “Ow,” she said without wanting to, and brought her finger to her mouth.
Anika was next to her in seconds. “You all right?” she asked.
Frida nodded. She felt like a little girl, sucking on a lollipop. “Just a little cut,” she said. “I’ll live.” She showed Anika the wound—a torn flap of skin. “Thin as those potatoes,” she said, but Anika didn’t laugh.
Blood seeped into the cut, a diagonal red line, and Anika turned away.
“Do you have a rag or something?” Frida asked. She remembered the tin of Band-Aids the Millers had brought her, so long ago. She’d only used a couple of them.