The Sweetness of Forgetting (3 page)

“You can’t be rude to customers,” I say to Annie as I come through the double doors into the kitchen. Her back is to me, and she’s stirring something in a bowl—batter for red velvet cupcakes, I think. For a moment I think she’s ignoring me, until I realize she has earbuds in. That damned iPod.

“Hey!” I say, louder. Still no reply, so I walk up behind her and pull the earbud out of her left ear. She jumps and whirls around, eyes blazing, as if I’ve slapped her.

“God, Mom, what’s your problem?” she demands.

I’m taken aback by the anger in her face, and for a moment, I’m frozen, because I can still see the sweet little girl who used to crawl onto my lap and listen to Mamie’s fairy tales, the girl who came to me for comfort after every skinned knee, the girl who made me Play-Doh jewelry and insisted I wear it to Stop & Shop. She’s still in there somewhere, but she’s hiding behind this icy veneer. When did things change? I want to tell her I love her, and that I wish we didn’t have to argue like this, but instead, I hear myself coolly say, “Didn’t I tell you not to wear makeup to school, Annie?”

She narrows her overly mascaraed eyes at me and purses her too-red lips into a smirk. “
Dad
said it was fine.”

I mentally curse Rob. He seems to have made it his personal mission to undermine everything I say.

“Well,
I’m
telling you it’s not,” I say firmly. “So get in the bathroom and wipe it off.”

“No,” Annie says. She puts her hands on her hips defiantly. She glares at me, not yet realizing that she’s streaked red velvet batter on her jeans. I’m sure that’ll be my fault too when she figures it out.

“This isn’t up for debate, Annie,” I say. “Do it now, or you’re grounded.”

I hear the coldness in my voice, and it reminds me of my mother. For a minute, I hate myself, but I stare Annie down, unblinking.

She looks away first. “Whatever!” She rips her apron off and throws it on the floor. “I shouldn’t even be working here!” she yells, throwing her hands in the air. “It’s against child labor laws!”

I roll my eyes. We’ve had this discussion ten thousand times. She’s not technically working for a paycheck; this is our family business, and I expect her to help out, just like I helped my mom when I was a kid, just like my mom helped my grandmother. “I’m not explaining this to you again, Annie,” I say tightly. “Would you rather mow the lawn and do all the chores around the house?”

She stalks out, presumably heading for the bathroom on the other side of the double doors. “I hate you!” she yells back at me as she disappears.

The words hit me like a dagger to the heart, even though I remember screaming them at my own mother when I was Annie’s age.

“Yeah,” I mutter, picking up the bowl of batter and the wooden spoon she left on the counter. “What else is new?”

By seven thirty, when Annie is about to leave to walk the four blocks to Sea Breeze Junior High, all of the pastries are out and the shop is full of regulars. In the oven is a fresh batch of our Rose’s Strudel, filled with apples, almonds, raisins, candied orange peel, and cinnamon, and the scent is wafting comfortingly through the bakery. Kay Sullivan and Barbara Koontz, the two eightysomething widows who live across the street, are gazing out the window, deep in conversation, while they sip coffee at the table closest to the door. Gavin Keyes, whom I’d hired to help me make my mother’s house livable again over the summer, is at the table beside them, sipping coffee, eating an éclair and reading a copy of the
Cape Cod Times.
Derek Walls, a widowed dad who
lives on the beach, is here with his twin four-year-olds, Jay and Merri, each of whom is licking the icing off a vanilla cupcake, even though it’s only breakfast time. And Emma Thomas, the fiftysomething hospice nurse who’d tended to my mom while she was dying, is standing at the counter, trying to choose a pastry to have with her tea.

I’m just about to pack up a to-go blueberry muffin for Emma when Annie strides past me, her coat on and her backpack slung over one shoulder. I reach out and grab her arm before she can get by.

“Let me see your face,” I say.

“No,” she mumbles, looking down.

“Annie!”

“Whatever,” she mutters. She looks up, and I see that she’s put on a fresh coat of mascara and reapplied the hideous lipstick. She also appears to have added a layer of fuchsia blush that comes nowhere near the apples of her cheeks.

“Wipe it off, Annie,” I say. “Now. And leave the makeup here.”

“You can’t take it from me,” she retorts. “I bought it with my own money.”

I glance around and realize that the shop has fallen silent, except for Jay and Merri chattering in the corner. Gavin’s looking at me with concern, and the old ladies near the door are just staring. I feel suddenly embarrassed. I know I already seem like the town failure for letting my marriage to Rob end; everyone thinks he’s perfect and I was lucky to marry him in the first place. Now I appear to be a failure at parenting too.

“Annie,” I say through gritted teeth. “Do it now. And this time, you
are
grounded, for disobeying me.”

“I’m staying with Dad for the next few days,” she shoots back, smirking at me. “You can’t ground me. Remember? You don’t live there anymore.”

I swallow hard. I won’t let her know that her words have
hurt me. “Fantastic,” I say brightly. “You’re grounded from the moment you step into
my
house.”

She curses under her breath, glances around, and seems to realize that everyone’s looking at her. “Whatever,” she mutters as she heads for the bathroom.

I exhale and turn back to Emma. “I’m sorry,” I say. I realize my hands are shaking as I reach for her pastry again.

“Honey, I raised three girls,” she says. “Don’t worry. It gets better.”

She pays and leaves, then I watch as Mrs. Koontz and Mrs. Sullivan, who have been coming here since the bakery opened sixty years ago, get up and hobble out the door, each of them using a cane. Derek and the twins are getting ready to go too, so I come out from behind the counter to pick up their plates. I help button Merri’s jacket, while Derek zips Jay’s. Merri thanks me for the cupcake, and I wave as they leave.

Annie emerges from the bathroom a minute later, her face blissfully makeup free. She slams a mascara tube, a lipstick, and a pot of blush down on one of the tables and glowers at me. “There. Happy?” she asks.

“Overjoyed,” I say dryly.

She stands there for a moment, looking like she wants to say something. I’m steeling myself for some sort of sarcastic insult, so I’m surprised when all she says is, “Who’s Leona, anyway?”

“Leona?” I search my memory but come up empty. “I don’t know. Why? Where’d you hear that name?”

“Mamie,” she says. “She keeps, like, calling me that. And it seems to, like, make her real sad.”

I’m startled. “You’ve been going to see Mamie?” After my mother died two years ago, we’d had to move my grandmother into a memory care home; her dementia had rapidly taken a turn for the worse.

“Yeah,” Annie says. “So?”

“I . . . I just didn’t know you were doing that.”

“Someone has to,” she spits back.

I’m sure the guilt plays across my face, because Annie looks triumphant.

“I’m busy with the bakery, Annie,” I say.

“Yeah, well,
I
find the time,” she says. “Maybe if you were spending less time with Matt Hines, you could spend more time with Mamie.”

“
Nothing
is going on with Matt.” I’m suddenly acutely conscious of Gavin sitting a few feet away, and I can feel my cheeks turning warm. The last thing I need is the whole town knowing my business. Or lack of business, as the case may be.

“Whatever,” Annie says, rolling her eyes. “Anyway, at least Mamie loves me. She tells me all the time.”

She smirks at me, and I know that I’m supposed to say
Honey, I love you too,
or
Your dad and I love you very much,
or something along those lines. Isn’t that what a good mother would do? Instead, because I’m a horrible mother, what comes out of my mouth is “Yeah? Well, it sounds to me like she’s saying ‘I love you’ to someone named Leona.”

Annie’s jaw drops, and she stares at me for a minute. I want to reach out, pull her into a hug and say I’m sorry, I didn’t mean it. But before I have a chance, she whirls on her heel and strides out of the store, but not before I see the tears glistening at the corners of her eyes. She doesn’t look back.

My heart aches as I stare in the direction she disappeared. I sink into one of the chairs the twins vacated a few minutes earlier and put my head in my hands. I’m failing at everything, but most of all at connecting with the people I love.

I don’t realize Gavin Keyes is standing above me until I feel his hand on my shoulder. I jerk my head up, startled, and find myself staring directly at a small hole in the thigh of his faded jeans. For an instant, I have the strangest urge to offer to mend it, but that’s ridiculous; I’m no better at using a needle and thread than I am at being a mother or staying married. I shake my head and pull my
eyes upward, over his blue plaid flannel shirt to his face, which is marked by a thick shadow of dark stubble across his strong jaw. His thick shock of dark hair looks like it hasn’t been combed in days, but instead of making him look unkempt, it makes him look really good in a way that makes me uneasy. His dimples, as he smiles gently at me, remind me just how young he is. Twenty-eight, I think, or maybe twenty-nine. I feel suddenly ancient, although I’m only seven or eight years older. What would it be like to be that young, with no real responsibilities, no preteen daughter who hates you, no failing business to save?

“Don’t beat yourself up,” he says. He pats me on the back and clears his throat. “She loves you, Hope. You’re a good mom.”

“Yeah, uh, thanks,” I say, avoiding his eye. Sure, we’d seen each other nearly every day during the months he was working on my house, and when I returned home from work in the afternoons, I often fixed us lemonade and sat on the porch with him, doing my best to avoid looking at the tanned swell of his biceps. But he doesn’t
know
me. Not really. Certainly not well enough to judge me as a mother. If he knew me that well, he’d know what a failure I am.

He pats me awkwardly again. “I mean it,” he says.

Then he too is gone, leaving me all alone in my giant pink cupcake, which suddenly feels very bitter.

Chapter
Two

I
close the bakery early that day to run a few errands. Although the sun hasn’t set yet when I get home at six fifteen, it feels dark and depressing inside the cottage I’m trying hard to think of as my own.

The silence inside is deafening. Up until last year, when Rob surprised me just before Christmas by announcing he wanted a divorce, I’d looked forward to coming home. I was proud of the life we’d made together in the solid, whitewashed Victorian overlooking Cape Cod Bay, just east of the public beach. I’d painted the interior myself, retiled the kitchen and hall, installed hardwood floors upstairs and in the living room, and planted a garden dominated by blue hydrangeas and pink salt spray roses that looked crisp and beautiful against the sail-white clapboard.

And then, just as I was finally done with everything, finally ready to relax in the dream home, Rob sat me down and announced in a soft voice, without meeting my eyes, that he too was done. Done with our marriage, done with me.

In the space of three months, while still reeling from my mother’s death from breast cancer and the decision to put Mamie in a memory care home, I found myself moving back to
my mother’s place, which I hadn’t been able to sell anyhow. A few months later, exhausted and discouraged, I’d signed all the divorce papers, eager only to have it all over and done with.

The truth was, I felt numb, and for the first time, I understood something I’d wondered about my entire life: how my mother had always been able to stay so cold about the men in her life. I’d never known my father; she’d never even told me his name. As she once crisply explained to me, “He left. A long time ago. Never knew you existed. He made his choice.” And when I was growing up, she always had boyfriends whom she would spend all her time with, but she never let them get close. Not really. That way, when they’d ultimately leave her, she’d just shrug and say, “We’re better off without him, Hope. You know that.”