What My Grandmother Knew About Bread

My grandmother made bread for eleven people for most of her life, and she never once wrote down a number. Not flour, not water, not how many. She just knew.

I thought that was the whole trick. Turns out it wasn't even close.

We lived in a narrow house with too many people in it. Mom, Dad, me and my two sisters upstairs. Uncle Ray, Aunt Carol and their twins downstairs. Aunt June in the back room after her divorce, which nobody was allowed to call a divorce, so we called it "June's back room." And Grandma in the kitchen. Always the kitchen. I have maybe one photo of her in the living room, at my sister's engagement party, and she looks lost in it, like someone took her chair away.

Her wooden board had a crack right down the middle. Uncle Ray bought her a new one twice. Both times it went in a cupboard and stayed there. The rolling pin was worn thin in the centre from fifty years of her hands, and the iron pan was so black you couldn't tell where it ended and the stove started. From seven o'clock she'd stand there, apron knotted at her waist, and talk to whoever came in. Flip, press with the cloth, puff, basket. Flatbreads, one after another. She never looked down. Not once.

I used to sit on the counter (not allowed) and count them going into the basket. Thirty-four. Thirty-eight. Forty-one on a Friday.

"Why forty-one, Grandma?"

"Forty for the family."

"And one?"

"One for whoever comes."

And a lot of nights, somebody did come. The electrician. Uncle Ray's friend from work who was "just passing." Danny from next door whose mother did night shifts. Once a man selling brushes door to door ended up eating at our table, and he cried a bit, and nobody said anything about it. Grandma just put another piece of bread on his plate.

That's the story we all tell every year on the day she died. The extra bread. People nod, it's a nice story. But it's not what she actually knew. I found that out about a year after she was gone, in a one-bedroom apartment, eleven at night, flour all over my phone.

After the wedding Sarah and I moved out. We bought bread from the bakery down the street until they put the price up twice in three months and started making it so thin and dry it tasted like the bag it came in. Sarah said, half joking, "Didn't your grandma teach you anything?"

She hadn't. Not really. I'd watched maybe ten thousand flatbreads get made and never made one.

So I tried. YouTube was useless, everyone on there says "add water as needed" and that was exactly the bit I didn't know. Mom said "add water as needed." My sister Lily said, "Just feel it." Thanks, Lily.

First week they came out shaped like maps. One was Sri Lanka, I swear. Sarah took a picture. Hard at the edges, raw in the middle, and one stuck to the pan so bad I scraped it off with a spatula like old paint. Third week, they started puffing. Not always. But when one blew up over the flame like a balloon I felt like I'd built a bridge.

And I started counting. Obviously. Counter habit.

Sarah ate three, usually. Me, four. Five if it was soup.

Then one Monday she ate one and a half. Said she'd had a muffin at work. Fine. Tuesday, two. Wednesday, one, and she kept pushing the second one round her plate like it had said something rude to her.

I didn't say anything. Not proud of that. I just kept the number.

Thursday I asked how work was. Fine, she said. I said, "You're eating like a bird." She laughed, then stopped laughing, and then it all came out. Her manager. A review that went badly. Twenty minutes every morning sitting in the parking lot before she could make herself go up. Three weeks of it. I live with her. I didn't know.

That night I couldn't sleep, and I kept thinking about Grandma's basket.

She counted. Not the forty and the one, I mean she counted who ate what. She was the one putting it on everyone's plate, so of course she did. Uncle Ray ate six every April, tax month for the shop. Anna went down to one piece the year she was fifteen and the girls at school were being horrible to her. Anna never told anybody. Grandma took her shopping that summer, just the two of them, and we all thought it was random.

And me. The year I failed my first semester and lied to everyone, Grandma started making me pancakes on exam mornings. Once, putting the plate down, she said, "Fail is just a word, kid. Eat." I was so scared of getting caught I didn't even hear it.

Next day I phoned Mom and asked her, did Grandma keep track of how much everyone ate?

Long pause. Then: "Why do you think I never lied to that woman about being sick?" She laughed so much she had to put the phone down.

I still make bread most nights. Mostly round now. Sarah's on a new team and she's back up to three, four on Fridays just to annoy me. I count every one. I don't say a word.

I make one extra as well. Every night.

Nobody comes, though. Fourth floor, the front desk calls before they let anyone up, and the electrician only shows when something's broken. So most mornings there's one cold piece wrapped in a towel, and I tear it into my tea and eat it standing at the counter before work.

Took me a while to see why that felt familiar.

When I was a kid I'd come down early before school, and Grandma would already be at the counter with her tea, a cold piece of bread torn up in it. I asked her once why she didn't just make a fresh one.

"Oh, this is left over," she said. "Nobody came."

Forty-one a night, for about thirty years. And nearly every morning, one left over.

I don't think that one was ever for whoever comes.