Malia's Oven (Part 1)

Malia’s bakery is on the corner of Ash and Fourth, between a phone-repair shop and a laundromat, and it is not big. Eleven feet of counter. Six kinds of bread. A sign in the window that says Teta’s. Teta means grandmother, and it was what she called the woman who taught her to make manoushe on a hot stone in a village outside Beirut.

Malia came to this city nine years ago with a suitcase and a cousin’s phone number. She worked six years in other people’s kitchens. Then, for two years, she saved. Nobody gave her the money and nobody tells her what to bake, and she says both of those things in the same flat voice: she is independent, and that is the good news and the bad news.

Manoushe is flatbread with za’atar on top — thyme, sesame and sour red sumac, mixed with oil. Her grandmother’s mix. She will not tell anyone the amounts.

On a Tuesday in September, a woman from the city’s baking festival came in for coffee, ate a manoushe standing up at the window, and came back the next morning with a form.

“It’s fifty stalls in the park,” she said. “Individual bakers, no big companies. There’s a short introduction on the Saturday morning, and then five judges walk around and taste everything. You should enter.”

Malia looked at the form for a long time. Then she wrote her name on it, and the name of her shop, and manoushe za’atar in the box for what she would bring.

The festival was in eleven days.

That night she turned the oven off at ten, the way she did every night. As the fan slowed down, the oven made a small click, somewhere low at the back.

She had heard it before. She told herself it was nothing.