At 2 a.m., my husband of 46 years texted our neighbor: “I miss Brenda so much it hurts.” We were staying at our daughter’s house in Arizona for six weeks. Harold thought I was asleep. Who was Brenda? We don’t know a Brenda. I scrolled up. Weeks of messages. “How is Brenda today?” “Is she eating?” “Don’t let her get cold at night.” And Gary next door, sending back: “She’s gotten so big, Harold. You won’t recognize her.” I didn’t sleep a wink. At breakfast, I set his phone on the table without a word . Harold turned red as a tomato. “Dorla, I can explain. Brenda is…” Then the doorbell rang. Gary had driven 400 miles. He was holding something wrapped in a dish towel, and Harold leaped up and shouted.
“BRENDA!”
He grabbed the bundle out of Gary’s arms like it was a newborn baby. He cradled it. He unwrapped the dish towel with trembling hands.
And there she was.
Brenda.
A large glass jar of bubbling, sour-smelling, beige goo.
I stared at it. Gary stared at me. Harold stared at the jar with tears in his eyes.
“Harold,” I said very slowly, “is that a sourdough starter?”
“She’s forty-one years old, Dorla,” Harold said, offended. “Show some respect.”
My daughter Wendy came into the kitchen in her bathrobe, saw her father cradling a jar of dough like a long-lost child, and walked right back out without a word.
It took about twenty minutes, two cups of coffee, and Gary laughing so hard he had to sit on the floor, but eventually I got the whole story.
Brenda had belonged to Harold’s mother. She started it in 1985, in a mason jar, from flour and water and, as far as anyone can tell, pure stubbornness. Mother Pinchbeck baked bread with Brenda every Sunday for thirty years. When she passed, Harold took a scoop of Brenda home in a pickle jar and put it in the back of our refrigerator.
I knew there was a jar back there. I just thought it was something that had gone bad. I’d been meaning to throw it out for six years.
“You never threw it out,” Harold said. “Thank God.”
“I didn’t know it had a name!”
Apparently, Harold had been secretly feeding Brenda every week for six years. Flour and water, every Saturday morning while I was at my garden club. He’d also been secretly practicing his mother’s bread recipe. He wanted to surprise me on our forty-seventh anniversary in December with a loaf of the bread I’d fallen in love with at his mother’s table the first time he brought me home in 1979.
“You said it was the best bread you ever had,” Harold said. “You said that on our first date. I never forgot.”
I had said that. I’d forgotten I said it. He hadn’t.
The problem was the trip. When Wendy invited us to Arizona for six weeks, Harold panicked. A starter has to be fed, he explained, or it dies. He couldn’t bring her on the plane. And he couldn’t tell me, because then I’d ask why, and the surprise would be ruined.
So he asked Gary next door to babysit.
Gary, it turned out, had never fed a sourdough starter in his life. He’d been doing it twice a day instead of once a week, with a whole cup of flour each time, because Harold’s instructions said “feed generously.” Brenda had grown out of her jar, into a mixing bowl, out of the mixing bowl, and finally into a five-gallon bucket in Gary’s garage.
“She’s gotten so big,” Gary said, wiping his eyes. “I wasn’t lying. That’s only a sample in the jar. The rest is at home. She’s taken over my laundry room. My wife won’t go in there.”
“So why did you drive four hundred miles?” I asked.
Gary looked sheepish. “Because Harold called me at 2 a.m. crying and said if Brenda died it would be like losing his mother all over again. So I put her in the car and drove.”
Harold put his hand on Gary’s shoulder. “You’re a good man, Gary.”
“I know,” Gary said. “Can I have some coffee now?”
