5. Kinsley #2
I dump flour into the pot by the mugful.
Three, I decide. Three feels right. A cloud of white powder rises and settles across the front of Jakob's flannel.
I add powdered milk. A generous pour. Then baking soda, which I measure with my palm, tapping it off my hand into the pot.
Then lard, scooped from the container with my fingers because there is no spatula and I've decided that utensils are a construct.
It's cold and waxy and deeply unpleasant, and I work it into the flour with both hands, squeezing and pressing and crushing the fat into the dry ingredients the way my grandmother showed me once when I was nine, before she died and before my mother decided that carbs were the enemy and baking was a waste of billable hours.
"You're getting flour on everything."
I look down. He's right. The counter, the stove surface, the flannel, my forearms, the floor in a semicircle around my feet. A fine white dust has settled over the immediate vicinity like I detonated a small, gentle bomb.
"Yes," I agree, and keep going.
I add condensed milk straight from the can, tilting it in a slow, thick stream into the pot.
Too much. The dough goes from shaggy to sticky to something that clings to my hands in heavy, elastic ropes when I try to lift them.
I scrape it off one hand with the other, which just transfers the problem.
Both hands now wear dough gloves. I stand there for a moment, arms raised, fingers splayed, looking like a surgeon who prepped wrong.
A laugh comes out of me.
It's not a polite laugh. Not the controlled, professional, I'm-so-delighted-to-meet-you laugh I've perfected over a decade of networking events and client dinners and performance reviews where I smiled through critiques that made me want to scream.
It's a real laugh. Ugly, startled, too loud for the small cabin, and once it starts, it won't stop.
I look at my hands, caked in gray-white dough that drips onto the floor in long strings, and I look at the pot of what was supposed to be biscuit dough and is instead something closer to paste, and I laugh until my stomach hurts, until my eyes water, until I'm bent over the counter wheezing because I can't remember the last time I failed at something so spectacularly and it didn't feel like the end of the world.
More flour. That's the answer. I plunge my dough-gloved hands back into the flour container and work more in, and the dough begins to tighten, to pull together into something that resembles an actual substance rather than a science experiment.
I tear pieces off and shape them into rough lumps on the flat surface of the woodstove, which I've greased with more lard.
They're uneven. They look nothing like biscuits.
They look like something a child would make out of clay and present to a parent with beaming pride.
"Those aren't going to cook evenly."
I turn around. Jakob hasn't moved from his position by the door.
The knife is still in his hand, the whetstone balanced on his knee, but his hands are still.
He's regarding me with an expression I can't read.
Something shifted in the hard lines of his face while I wasn't looking.
The furrow between his brows has loosened.
His mouth, barely visible above the dark beard, is set in a line that is almost, not quite, something other than a scowl.
"They're going to be beautiful," I tell him, brushing flour off my cheek with the back of my wrist, which only adds more flour to my cheek.
"They're going to be the best doomsday biscuits anyone has ever made on a woodstove in a cabin in the great wilderness with no eggs, no butter, and no measuring cups. "
He grunts. But it's a different grunt. Softer. And he doesn't look back down at his knife.
I turn back to my lumpy creations and adjust them on the stovetop, nudging the small ones closer to the heat source and the large ones further away, because he's right, they won't cook evenly, but I refuse to give him the satisfaction.
The woodstove throws warmth against my bare legs under the flannel and the flour dust drifts through a thin beam of gray daylight from the single window.
The rain has not stopped but it has quieted from a roar to a steady drum, and the fire crackles, and my hands are a mess, and I'm smiling.
Actually smiling. The kind that starts in my heart instead of being arranged on my face for someone else's benefit.
I haven't smiled like this since before the burnout.
Before the eighty-hour weeks and the panic attacks in the supply closet and the morning I sat in my parked car outside the office for forty-five minutes because I physically could not make my hands turn off the ignition.
I'd forgotten what it felt like. This loose, warm thing in my ribs that has nothing to do with productivity or performance or proving anything to anyone.
"They're burning."
I spin back to the stove. The smallest lumps have gone dark brown on the bottom, smoking faintly, and I grab for them with my bare hand before my brain catches up and pain registers, bright and immediate, across my fingertips.
I yelp, jerking my hand back, and behind me I hear the heavy scrape of a chair.
Not a chair. Him. The sound of his boots crossing the cabin in three long strides, and then his hand is around my wrist, lifting my burned fingers to the light.
He examines them with a clinical efficiency that tells me he's assessed worse injuries than singed fingertips.
The pads of my first two fingers are angry red, already tightening with the promise of blisters, and he pulls me wordlessly to the basin of cold water in the corner and submerges my hand without asking.
The cold bites and then soothes, and I stand there with my hand in a bowl of mountain water while a six-foot-four man with a knife still in his belt glares at my fingers like they've personally offended him.
"Use the rag next time," he says. Not a suggestion.
He releases my wrist. Goes back to his post by the door. I rescue the remaining biscuits with a folded cloth and set them on the table to cool, and the structure fills with a smell that is imperfect and wonderful and mine.
He eats four of them without comment.
I count.
The morning stretches. The rain persists.
Jakob announces he's going out to chop wood and I see him shrug on an oilskin jacket and step into the downpour like weather is something that happens to other people.
Through the single window I catch glimpses of him at the chopping block.
The axe rises and falls in a rhythm so steady it sounds mechanical, the crack of splitting wood punching through the rain at even intervals.
His back is to me. The jacket pulls tight across his shoulders with each upswing.
I stop looking because observing a man chop wood for longer than ten seconds is something, and I'm not prepared to examine what that something is.
Instead I clean. The flour situation has reached critical mass.
It's on the stovetop, the floor, the flannel, my forearms, somehow in my hair.
I find a rough broom in the corner and sweep the floor in wide, satisfying arcs, pushing the white dust toward the door.
I wipe down the counter with the only cloth I can find, which is already stiff with use.
I stack his canned goods back in their precise rows, labels out, the way he had them.
I wash the enamel pot and the tin mugs and set them on the shelf.
The cabin resists my efforts. It is built for function and survival, not for the domestic fussing I'm inflicting on it, but by the time I hear boots, the space looks marginally less like a flour mill exploded in it.