Five AM Bread

The bakery opened at six, which meant Jean-Pierre arrived at two, which meant he went to bed at seven in the evening, which meant he had not watched a sunset in twenty-one years. He had seen many sunrises. He had opinions about them. They were overrated. A sunrise was just the sky changing colour while he was trying to get the oven to the right temperature, and the sky could do what it liked as long as it didn't affect the humidity. The bakery was in Rennes, on a side street near the market. It was called Boulangerie Duval, because it had always been called Boulangerie Duval, and because changing the name would require new signage, new paperwork, and an explanation to his mother, and the last of these was the most expensive. His mother was alive, eighty-nine, and visited the bakery every morning at six-fifteen to buy a baguette she did not need. She had a baguette from yesterday. She always had a baguette from yesterday. She bought a fresh one because the walk from her apartment to the bakery was twelve minutes and gave her a reason to get dressed, and because buying bread from her son was a form of supervision she had been conducting since he took over the bakery in 2003 and which she would continue until one of them stopped, and she had made it clear she would not be the one stopping. "The crust is pale," she said on a Tuesday. "The crust is correct." "Your father's crust was darker." "Papa burned everything." "Your father had character." This conversation, or a variant of it, happened weekly. The crust was not the subject. The subject was that his father was dead and his mother missed him, and the crust was a place where she could put that feeling and have it handed back to her in the shape of a disagreement, which was more comfortable than grief. Jean-Pierre made bread. This was the whole of it. He made baguettes and pain de campagne and fougasse and, on Saturdays, brioche that people drove from the other side of Rennes to buy and that his apprentice, Thomas, had once described as "transcendent," a word Jean-Pierre had told him never to use again in a bakery because transcendence was for cathedrals and bread was for eating. The process was the process. Flour, water, salt, yeast. Four ingredients. The simplest food in the world and the hardest to make well, because the variables were invisible — temperature, humidity, the age of the flour, the mood of the yeast. Yeast had moods. Jean-Pierre was certain of this. Some mornings it was eager, rising fast, foaming in the bowl like it had somewhere to be. Other mornings it was slow, reluctant, needing persuasion. You couldn't rush yeast. You could only provide the right conditions and wait. "You talk about yeast like it's a person," Thomas said. "Yeast is better than a person. It does what it's supposed to do if you treat it correctly." "And people?" "People buy bread. That is their function in my life. I am at peace with this arrangement." Thomas was twenty-two and thought Jean-Pierre was joking. Jean-Pierre was not joking but did not correct him, because letting your apprentice think you have a sense of humour was a form of management. The oven was a deck oven, gas-fired, three decks. Jean-Pierre had wanted a wood-fired oven. The building regulations had wanted him not to burn down the neighbourhood. The building regulations had won. The gas oven produced excellent bread. It did not produce the romance of a wood-fired oven, but Jean-Pierre had long ago decided that romance was the enemy of consistency, and consistency was what a bakery owed its customers. By five, the first baguettes were out. He tapped the bottom of one. Hollow sound. Correct. The crust was golden, crackled, the slashes opened cleanly. He broke one. The crumb was open, irregular, the air pockets distributed unevenly, which was how you knew it had been shaped by hand and not by a machine. Machines made even crumb. Hands made bread. At six, he opened the door. The first customers were already there. They were always already there. A bakery created its own gravity. People orbited it. At six-fifteen, his mother. "Bonjour, Maman." "The crust looks better today." "The crust is the same as yesterday." "Then yesterday was also better." She took her baguette. She paid, though he had told her a thousand times not to pay, and she paid anyway because buying bread from your son was one thing and accepting charity was another, and Maman had survived the century thus far by maintaining distinctions that other people considered unnecessary. She left. The morning continued. More customers, more bread, the day following the shape it had followed for twenty-one years, since Jean-Pierre had taken the keys from his father and opened the door at six and discovered that the life he had chosen, or that had chosen him, was this: flour and water and salt and yeast, and a room that smelled like the thing everyone wanted in the morning, which was warmth, and the proof that someone had gotten up before them.