Bon Appetit by Sandra Byrd

the school instructors and administrators would take note.
    We removed our chef’s
toques blanche
and took our bread to the dining room, then sat at tables for eight. It was fun for the baking students to mingle with the cooking school students.
    “The bread smells delicious!” one of the cooking students said. “Nicely done!”
    We bakers smiled. I looked at the table. “Is there butter?” I asked.
    The rest of them looked at me quizzically.
    “You baked it,” a cooking student pointed out. “You know there is no butter in bread”.
    “Of course!” I commented, remembering the French didn’t put butter on their bread. I wanted butter on my fresh bread. And a Coke.
    But the soupe and salade—to-die-for. The French definitely won there.
    After school, I asked Anne if she wanted to have coffee. We walked to a café and sat down.
    “No work today?” she asked.
    “No,” I said. “I have to work on Sunday this week, so I have the afternoon off”. I ordered café crème and she ordered an Orangina. No ice.
    “Did you go to your Anglican church last Sunday?” Anne asked, tilting her face to the autumn sun. The people at the table next to us were engaged in a heavy argument complete with finger wagging, shrugging, and unprovable accusations. I smiled. They must like each other. It was the French way.
    “I did go,” I answered, moving forward like a woman walking on freshly frozen ice. “I liked it. And I saw someone I knew there”.
    “Non!”
Anne said. “Another American?”
    I smiled and took a sip of my café crème. “A Frenchman”.
    “At an English church?” she asked incredulously.
    I nodded. “He’s the baker at the Rambouillet bakery,” I said. “Philippe Delacroix”.
    “Ah,” she said. “One of the owners. What was he doing there?”
    I explained about his late wife being English and her desire for their daughter to learn the language. I sipped my coffee slowly. In France, there are no coffee refills, so if you want to stay and chat at a café, you have to draw the drink out.
    “I wish I spoke better English,” Anne said. “It would make it easier to get a job. I could go to other places in the EU and work. As it is, if I don’t find a job after school, I will have to go back to Normandy and live with my parents again, and be cooped up. My fatherand mother both smoke. If I stay in that household, I will lose the sense of smell I need to be a good baker”.
    I sensed there was more than that going on, since most of the French bakers I knew smoked, but I said nothing more about it. “You could come to the English class with me at church,” I said.
    “Non. “
She shook her head. “Church is not for me”.
    “But that’s not true,” I said. “I’m reading the book of Jean right now, and it’s all about bakers”.
    She scoffed. “It can’t be!”
    “Yes, it is,” I said. “I was just reading it last night. Jesus said,
‘C’est moi qui suis le pain qui donne la vie. Celui qui vient à moi n’aura plus jamais faim, celui qui croit en moi n’aura plus jamais soif.’ ”
    I am the bread of life. He who comes to me will never go hungry, and he who believes in me will never be thirsty
.
    “Bah,” Anne said. “That’s not for bakers”.
    I grinned, and she grinned back.
    “How about we practice English at the café one day a week,” she said, “when you’re not working. And I’ll help you with French. So you can avoid the
faux amis”.
    I’d told her I’d made a few
faux amis
mistakes, but hadn’t told her exactly which ones.
    “Bon,”
I agreed.
    Désirée walked over to the table, having spied us, I suppose, as she left school.
    “My two friends!” she said. “Can I join you?”
    It would be nice to have two friends
, I thought.
Wouldn’t it?
But the thought of Désirée as a friend unsettled me somehow.
    Friday was our bread test. We spent the first few hours on the written test, covering everything from what happens when we overmix to what happens when