How to Eat a Cupcake (3 page)

The sight of my old living room was like a punch to the gut. Here, too, as in the mansion, Lolly and Tad had not changed a thing. I picked up a framed photograph from the table beside the couch. There was my mother, her dark brown eyes molten with joy as she crouched down to hug an elfin version of me and a coltish version of Julia tight in each arm. I could almost smell my mother then, all warm sugar and vanilla and a hint of something citrusy and tart, like lime. I set the photograph down carefully in the same spot and tried hard to keep myself firmly planted in the present.

Now where the hell could that recipe book be? The last time I looked for it was the day of my mother's funeral, and over the years I'd come to wonder if perhaps the blinding fog of sorrow had prevented me from finding it.
Maybe
, I thought,
just maybe, I'd simply overlooked the book in my hurry to finally be out of that house for good
. Each time Lolly had contacted me over the previous decade, a part of me had hoped she was calling because she had found the book. But Lolly had never mentioned it.

My mother's book was more than just a place she stored her favorite recipes, though since she was an accomplished baker and chef, her book would have been precious to me even if that's all it were. But I knew that my mom had used the recipe book as a journal as well, a place to write down her thoughts on the day, her daughter, and the family of which she took such heartfelt care. The image of my mother bent over the book each evening, her pen marking the pages with careful, flowing script, her dark hair falling around her face like a privacy curtain, was ingrained in my memory. I suppose in some small way it had been a relief to not find the book ten years earlier—I hadn't really felt ready to read my mom's private thoughts so soon after her death. Wouldn't it have been breaking her trust to do so? But those recipes! The meringues, the
empanadas dulces
, the coconut flans of my youth! I had tried to re-create them, but without the book the resulting desserts were pale imitations of the confections my mother had made with such precision, patience, and love.

And so I had long ago given up on re-creating and started reinventing. I began baking in college in the years after my mother's death, and, no, I didn't need a therapist to tell me it was a coping mechanism, a way to feel closer to her. Once I realized I would never be able re-create my mother's specialties exactly, at least not without her recipes, I had taken to interpreting my memory of those desserts with a modern twist. The pastries I created made me feel both closer to my mother and further away than ever. I had no family—I'd never known my father, had no siblings, and even the cousin my mom had once lived with in South San Francisco had long since moved back to Ecuador. To taste my mother's passion fruit meringue one more time would have made me feel a little less alone, if only for one or two bites' worth of time.

The shelf beside the carriage house's stove still held a few cookbooks—
The Joy of Cooking
,
Mastering the Art of French Cooking
—but there was no sign of my mother's recipe book. I opened every last drawer and cupboard in the kitchen and even checked the refrigerator. I sighed, leaning against the narrow, tiled countertop before working up the nerve to walk down the hall to my mother's old room.

Her bed was made up with crisp white linens, as though at any moment she might return and need a clean place to rest her weary body after a hard day's work. The closet was empty. After the funeral, I had kept a few of my mother's clothes and told Lolly she could donate the rest to her favorite cause of the moment. The bedside tables, too, were empty. I was peering under the bed when I heard the sound of a faucet running in the kitchen.

“Hello?” I called, making my way back down the hall.

There, filling a glass with water from the sink, stood Curtis, the St. Clairs' longtime driver, handyman, jack-of-all-trades—whatever anyone needed, big, dependable Curtis was your strong and silent man. He looked so much older than when I had seen him last. Now in his fifties, his ruddy forehead was lined with age, his eyes darker and more sunken than I remembered, his brown hair nearly overtaken by coarse gray.
Mom, too, would surely have had a few gray hairs if she'd lived past the ripe old age of thirty-four
. Before I knew what I was doing, I had thrown my arms around Curtis and buried my face in his broad chest.

“Annie.” He sighed, patting my back awkwardly. “I thought I spotted someone walking up here, but then I figured I was just seeing things. You scared the bejesus out of me.”

I pulled away. “It's just little old me, Curtis,” I said, swiping at my eyes. “Not the Ghost of Empanadas Past.”

Curtis shrugged sheepishly. “What are you doing back at the St. Clairs'? It's been a long time.”

“Oh, you know, getting Lolly and the crew hopped up on sugar for old time's sake. I thought I'd try to find my mom's recipe book while I'm here. You haven't seen it, have you? Black, leather-bound, remarkably skilled in the art of camouflage?”

Curtis shook his head. “Sorry.”

“It's okay. I'll live.” Even as I said the words, I realized how disappointed I was. I hadn't understood until that very moment just how much my decision to cater the St. Clairs' party had been tied to the hope, the expectation, even, of finding that book.

Curtis walked me out to Becca's car. It cheered me somewhat to pass through the St. Clairs' gate with him by my side. I felt buffered for a moment from the pounding emotions of the previous few hours. Out of all of the people I'd seen that night from my old life, I was happiest to see him. After all, he was one of us—or maybe it's more accurate to say that I always thought of myself as one of
them
: the help. There were the St. Clairs—Lolly and Tad and Julia. There was the help—my mom and Curtis and a small army of other household employees. And then there was me, stuck somewhere in the middle, attending fancy private schools with Julia and living out in the carriage house with my mother. When it came down to choosing a side, I decided pretty early on that I would always have more in common with the Lucias and Curtises of the world than the St. Clairs.

At the car, when we hugged good-bye, I thought I spotted the glimmer of a tear in Curtis's usually stoic eye.
Jesus
, I thought.
What's with everyone and the waterworks today?

“See you around, Annie,” he called hoarsely, lifting his hand as I rolled down the car window and turned on the headlights.

Not if I can help it
, I thought. But I patted his big hand and smiled before pulling out into the street and heading toward my tiny apartment in the Mission. I think I realized even then, in the cool darkness of the car, sealed off from the swelling orchestra of the city around me as it segued from the quiet mansions of Pacific Heights to the brutish housing projects in Western Addition to the still-bustling bars and restaurants of the Mission, that I would be back. That the St. Clairs' grip wouldn't be so easy to slip out of a second time.

Chapter 2

Julia

I
t was only in the weeks precipitating my move back to San Francisco from New York that I found myself, for the first time in my adult life, needing to rely on an alarm clock to rouse me from bed. Previously, I'd always considered it a point of pride that I didn't require the jarring buzz of an alarm, or even the gentle notes of classical music, to alert me that the day had begun. My body simply knew. No matter where I was in the world, my eyes would flip open at 6:45 a.m. local time, my mind already racing through the list of things I planned to accomplish that day, my stomach rumbling for my usual breakfast of freshly cut fruit, Greek yogurt, a chocolate croissant, and green tea. In the weeks leading up to my return to my parents' home, I was ashamed to find my eyes opening leadenly later and later each morning, until finally, rebuked, I began setting the alarm on my phone. Even with its tinny melody in my ear, I lay in bed a few extra minutes each day, my body no longer one I took much pride in.

Lying there in my childhood bed, it required an enormous amount of effort to keep myself from sinking into the dark thoughts that seemed to be the only ones I was capable of thinking those days.
So this is depression
, I thought, my lips curling sourly at the word. As if in response, my body turned and curled, too, until my knees touched my chest and my hip pressed into the firm mattress. I'd always, secretly, while expressing much sympathy for friends who had bouts with depression and sleeping disorders and migraines, felt sure that such conditions were a choice. Either you decided you were happy, or you decided you were not. And to decide you were not? Wasn't that just laziness? I mean for
my
group of friends, of course, women who were thin and pretty and well educated and whose parents still took the whole lot of us out to dinners at posh restaurants whenever they visited the city. What right did any of
us
have to feel depressed?
You are
, as my favorite economics professor at Stanford liked to intone,
responsible for your own experience
.

But this feeling—this sense that I could not possibly get out of bed and face another long, tedious day of pretending to be okay when I most decidedly was not—was
not
something I had chosen. Irritated, I swatted this thought away.
Just be still and clear your mind
, I ordered myself, uncurling my body until I lay flat on my back. I didn't really believe such peace was possible, but despite everything that had happened, my faith in discipline had not yet waned. I watched the ceiling fan turn again and again and again. All week, the fan's loud, monotonous whir had given me dreams of breathing under water, swimming down into murky depths for a shimmering something just out of reach.

As I lay there, working to clear my mind—
an oxymoronic statement if ever there was one
—something remarkable happened. It wasn't that I actually managed to wipe away all thoughts of that horrible morning I'd spent in the hospital weeks earlier—those thoughts were never really gone for long. But for the first time since that day, my efforts to clear my mind were punctuated not only with dark thoughts, but also with light, fluffy, lemony thoughts. Thoughts, to be precise, of Annie Quintana's cupcakes.

The moment I'd bitten into that Meyer lemon cupcake at the benefit the night before, I'd been transported through time. Suddenly, I was seven years old and back in the kitchen with Lucia and Annie, standing on a stepstool at the counter and using an ice cream scoop to carefully transport batter from a large bowl to a cupcake tin, my mouth already watering for the finished product.

“Okay, Julia. It's Annie's turn,” Lucia said gently in my ear, her Spanish accent blurring the edges of her words.

I nodded at Lucia, ever eager to please her, but glared at Annie as I handed over the scoop.
Why did I have to share? My scoops were perfect, just like Lucia's!
My anger with Annie could never hold long though. We were inseparable then, spending our afternoons hanging from the monkey bars at the playground, performing elaborate skits of make-believe, and digging in the garden. At night, we would sneak back and forth between the main house and the carriage house, devising whispered plans for the next day until Lucia or my mother would finally threaten to enforce our curfew. I suppose you could say we had a yin-yang friendship, each of us perfectly balancing out the other—at least until high school, when our careful, if naïve, equilibrium failed us miserably.

Taking that scoop from me, Annie hopped up on the stool with both feet at once and began spooning out the cupcake batter quickly, with joyful abandon, in a way that made me laugh hysterically, but also made me a little nervous. Lucia caught my eye and gave me a little wink, a gesture that never failed to make my heart sing. She'd been my nanny for as long as I could remember, and it was into her arms I ran when I was upset, tired, or hungry. Even at that young age, I sensed that my mother, who was very beautiful and very busy with her steady rotation of benefits and galas and dinner parties, was always a bit befuddled by my myriad needs—it seemed, somehow, that a space remained between us even when we hugged. With Lucia, that gap was closed; her soft arms enveloped me fully, filling my nostrils with her vanilla scent (which I much preferred to my mother's Givenchy perfume), and she was never the first to let go.

No one is perfect, of course, but Lucia managed to come exceedingly close. She seemed to know an endless catalog of songs—both English and Ecuadorean—that she sang in her soft, accented, slightly wavering voice. She always remembered to slice grilled cheese sandwiches straight across for me and diagonally for Annie. She had a way of listening that made me feel like I was the most important person in the world—she didn't own a sparkly watch at which to cast covert glances while I recited my times tables, and no telephones ever rang for her in my presence.

It was only as I got older that I realized, with a small swallow of shame, that those women who always called and interrupted my time with my mother were the very ones who would ensure I received invitations to all of the desirable parties, and that walking down the street with my elegant mother at my side made me swell with pride in a way walking with Lucia decidedly did not.

W
hile my mother preferred to start her day with a glass of ice-cold water and a power walk by the bay, my father—from whom I'd inherited not only a stellar internal clock, but also a head for business, a near obsession with current events, and a serious sweet tooth—had joined me for breakfast every day that week. We'd taken to spending our mornings poring over the day's newspapers, reading to each other from the occasional article, and slowly working our way through an oversized croissant and a double slice of coffee cake, respectively. On the morning after the Save the Children benefit, by the time I finally compelled myself to get out of bed, pull on black pencil jeans and blousy cotton top, and make my way downstairs, my father was well on his way through a third mug of coffee.

Sonja, my parents' chef, strode out of the kitchen with my green tea as I entered the dining room. My father looked over his paper at me and gave a low whistle.

“I know, I know,” I said, forcing myself to sound lighthearted. “One week after leaving my job and I'm already getting lazy. What's happening in the world? What do I miss when I oversleep by five minutes?”

“Oh, the world just kept on spinning. No harm done,” Dad said, shaking the paper until a page turned freely. Tall, broad, and boisterous, my father was like the sixty-five-year-old human version of an eight-year-old golden retriever, big, love-filled brown eyes, bellowing voice, insatiable appetite, and all. At home, this personality manifested itself as a sort of boozy, blustery devotion to my mother and me, but I'd heard enough of his work-related calls to know that in business, Thaddeus St. Clair was a larger-than-life force with which to be reckoned.

“Shoot,” I said. “It's always so disappointing to realize the world goes on without me.” I poured myself a cup of tea, nibbled on a croissant, and stared at the front page of the
Wall Street Journal
without reading.

“That was a big sigh,” my father said after minutes of silence had passed.

“What?”

“You just sighed, my dear. Loudly. If I hadn't already read that paper, I'd be worried about economic catastrophe.”

Had I sighed? I couldn't remember. But the look of concern on my father's face was enough to make me avert my eyes for fear of the sudden torrent of tears that I seemed barely capable of holding at bay these days. And I'd never been a crier before! I mentally added that to the list of ways my body seemed to be telling me it was no longer functioning under my control. Each time over the previous few weeks that I had found myself blinking back tears I'd felt equally devastated and annoyed.
St. Clairs
, I admonished myself,
don't
dwell.
We don't
dwell
and we don't
cry. My mother and father were each, in their own way, comprised of stoic stock that could be traced back to the industrious gold-prospecting outfitters found on the uppermost branches of our family tree. My parents, I knew well, rarely let their emotions get the best of them. For all their faults, I admired them greatly. Each was remarkably successful: my father had parlayed inherited millions into more millions through savvy new technology investments; my mother had raised millions,
literally
millions, for various charities and social programs in the Bay Area. The path to such success seemed clear: strategize, focus, and don't take no for an answer. Needless to say, we'd never been the sort of household in which A minuses were greeted with a smile and a sticker.

“Julia?” my dad prompted, eyeing me.

I straightened in my seat and waved vaguely at the air. “Oh, I'm fine. The wedding, you know. Silly stuff.”

Dad nodded sagely and cleared his throat. “A three-hundred-person event is nothing to sneeze at. But if anyone can handle it, you can.” He paused. “And if it turns out you can't, I'm sure your mother would be more than happy to take the reins.”

I forced a laugh, and my father cocked an eyebrow at me.
Shit
, I thought.
When exactly did I become so terrible at hiding my emotions?
I placed a heaping spoonful of berries in my mouth and tried to chew with gusto.

“Unless, of course, it's Wesley you're concerned about?” he asked, a hint of fatherly protectiveness edging into his voice. “Did something happen?”

“No! No, Dad. Everything with Wes is fine. Wes is great.”

I had met Wesley Trehorn a year and a half earlier at a holiday party in Manhattan thrown by a friend of mine from business school. Wes was thirty-five and handsome like a man, not a boy, with the broad-shoulders-square-jaw-and-black-glasses look I loved—
your Clark Kent fetish
, Jason, my Columbia friend, had joked. But it was not love at first sight, though I was as charmed as anyone by the combination of his sweet, Southern boy manners and sharp intelligence. It was more like love-at-third-date, which was when Wes revealed more about the company he was in the process of founding, a company that would build small, inexpensive, nearly indestructible computers he believed would be powerful educational tools for children in third world countries. I'd heard hope and passion in his voice and saw ambition in his eyes as he spoke, and felt a slow turning sensation in my chest as though my heart were settling into a new, more tenuous position.

Some of Wesley's attributes were ones I recognized in myself as well—I, too, was ambitious, some might say to a fault. After I'd graduated from Columbia with my MBA, I'd joined Lane Thomas Ventures, a top VC firm in New York City, and had quickly proven that I'd inherited my father's uncanny ability to identify early on which high-tech start-ups would be successful. But it was the small differences between Wes and me, more than the similarities, that made me fall in love with him. He was like Julia St. Clair 2.0—ambitious to a fault, yes, but his ambition was to
do good
. Still, he wasn't some bleeding heart liberal. I could not have tied my life to someone who didn't believe in the importance of daily showers and a good suit, no matter how sweetly he drawled. No, even as Wes was envisioning the way his company could change children's lives, he was also envisioning the way his company would change his own. He had big plans for the fabulous life he would build for himself, and it didn't take long for his plans to become ours.

A
fter breakfast with my father, I took a wedding magazine out to the patio and flipped through it idly. Photograph after photograph after photograph of perfect, smiling brides. Even in the photographs of real weddings, the ones that showed
actual
brides posing on their
actual
wedding days, the brides looked almost absurdly joyful.
Smug
, I thought, dropping the magazine down to the ground beside my lounge chair. Where were the brides who, yes, loved their new husbands, but who also dared to show a sliver of the uncertainty they surely must be feeling? Was it possible that all of these women knew exactly what their futures held? Or was it that they didn't know, but didn't mind the not knowing? Surely I wasn't the only control freak to face the end of a wedding aisle?

The morning air was still cool but the sun was bright so I closed my eyes as I reclined in the chaise. The sun painted flickering red patterns against my eyelids and I felt my mind begin to wander. Within moments, I was back in that hospital bed, awakening groggily to a middle-aged nurse standing over me. Someone was sobbing, a low and primitive sound.
The expression of sorrow
, I thought,
has been the same since the beginning of time
. A vast, hollow ache filled my stomach as I realized the cries were my own. I rolled over onto my side, my eyes swollen with tears, my heart splintering with grief.