Flour and Water

I picked up the bread. It was my routine. Every Tuesday around 4pm, I’d clap my laptop shut, grab my water bottle and surrender myself to the 100-degree Arizona sun. I’d swing by the post office, organic markets on Skyline Drive that curved around the Catalinas, and then the “piccolo” Italian café for their famous focaccia. One loaf, sometimes two, depending on if I had a spare propped up against the ice cream sandwiches in the freezer. It was – without question – the most ethereal hearth-baked carbohydrate I had ever devoured: Sweetly charred where the flames had tickled the crust and subtly glazed with rosemary, olive oil, and a shy sprinkling of sea salt. The inside remained so moist and chewy that when you pulled it apart the gluten resisted like elastic. Flour and water - in symbiotic harmony. I craved that bread with a palpable savagery normally attributed to hyenas in heat on the Nature Channel. It was obsession at first bite.

I heard of the place when I first moved to Tucson and polled every person I met about the city’s hidden gastronomic gems. “Quaint little place. Only a few tables, so go early. Pasta is all homemade, but the bread...Oh, the bread!” This was inevitably conveyed with a certain drunken delirium – a smacking of the lips, rolling back of the eyeballs, with arms raised in the air. “Absolutely orgasmic. You must go.”

And so we went. Friday night dinner at the petite café in a disconcertingly drab strip mail devoid of all ambiance. We had been warned, “Don’t let the location fool you.” That afternoon, I had read online how the store’s owners, Massimo and Margarita, a young couple from San Francisco, had migrated west in search of a place to conceptualize and conceive their Italian café. A lone ravioli in a town of rellenos.

The modest room was brightly lit and separated part-store and part-restaurant by a precariously high stack of canned San Marzano plum tomatoes. Every item was authentic – imported kalamatas, infused balsamics, dried pastas in every contorted shape – peeking out from their cellophane windows like eager orphans waiting to be claimed. Sautéed garlic and lemon zest smacked you in the nostrils when you first stepped in the door, but after a while the wafts matured into rich boar ragus and eggplant caponatas. The colors in the deli case were mesmerizing – bulky tubes of beet-red salamis, polka-dotted with peppercorns, grilled calamari tossed with purple capsicums, and almond-toned panna cottas expertly molded into moon domes. We regularly devoured several baskets of bread and I was never shy about asking for refills.

It became our go-to spot - the local treasure we took visitors after the obligatory first meal at one of many spicy Southwestern joints. Sometimes, if we weren’t completely engorged, we’d round out dinner at the artisan gelato shop across the street that decorated each flavor with edible embellishments. After a few months, stopping by for a to-go loaf of the focaccia was tacked onto my regular Tuesday schedule. Gradually, I got to know Margarita and recognize her thick walnut hair pinned back with turquoise-rimmed sunglasses. She was always perched at the bar, bent over her purveyor orders, calculator in hand as a lemon wedge frolicked around the bubbles in her San Pellegrino. We exchanged small pleasantries, usually about food - What elaborate new recipe I had attempted that week or how quiet the town was since the snowbirds headed north. She always laughed and shrugged when I begged her to relinquish the trade secrets of her dough, “It’s pretty much just flour and water. It’s the pecan wood and oven that do all the magic.”

I’d like to think she was flattered that I drove four miles every week to pick up a loaf of her $4 focaccia. I’d like to think she thought of me as a local – a neighbor – a friend. But, maybe she was just being kind, gauging my loneliness. My listlessness. Maybe she knew all along what I hadn’t yet discovered. That I was busying myself, running futile errands, whipping up gourmet meals on weekdays - all to provide purpose – to fill in the gaping holes of a marriage that was turning porous. Maybe she sensed I was keeping my life glued together with her bread.

* * *

Three years later, I am curled up on my love seat in Chicago to watch the NBC Evening News. I spot a familiar storefront in the background of the makeshift TV set. The blood drains from my face and I drop the remote from my fingertips. I know as soon as I read the caption scrolling beneath the broadcast, Gunman opens fire this morning at a political gathering in a L-shaped Tucson shopping center. Six confirmed dead. Fourteen wounded. The sidewalks are already littered with teddy bears, votive candles, and pollen-dusted lillies. A “Get Well, Gabby” banner blows gently, tied with string between two Agave stalks. Before transitioning to commercial, the camera zooms in on poster leaning up against a brick wall, “God Bless America.” - child’s scrawl in red and blue crayon. And there – just behind Brian Williams’ left shoulder is my Italian café.

How many times had I driven through that center, toggling over speed bumps, waving on pedestrians pushing grocery carts, before I took an automatic right onto Ina and accelerated for home? How many Tuesdays did I reverse out of my parking space, tearing into that bread before spitefully tossing the whole thing in the back so there’d be some left for dinner?

That night I sit up in bed and think a lot about timing and chance and mortality. I wonder how a place that once brought so much comfort to me, so much normalcy, could suddenly evoke such heartache. I weigh how much more complicated the world gets as you get older - how you begin to understand questions that start with ‘why’ don’t always have satisfying answers. How some holes are just too massive to be mended by something simple.

I think of Margarita and wonder if she is still making her focaccia or if routine is something that was sacrificed that morning in Tucson. And for the first time since I left, I can’t quite recall how it tasted. I swallow and my mouth feels thick and viscid and gummy. I am reminded of paste. All that comes to mind is flour and water.