The Sweetness of Forgetting (7 page)

Then my mother’s cancer returned, Mamie’s memory began to ebb at the edges, and there was no one to save the bakery but me. Before I knew what had happened, I had become the keeper of a dream that wasn’t mine, and in the meantime, I’d lost my hold on everything I’d ever dreamed of.

It’s nearly five in the morning, and dawn is still two hours away. When I was in grade school, Mamie used to tell me that each new morning was like unwrapping a gift from God. This used to confuse me, because she wasn’t a big churchgoer. But in the evenings, when my mother and I would visit for dinner, we’d sometimes find her on her knees at the back window, praying softly as the light fell from the sky. “I prefer to have my own relationship with God,” she told me once when I’d asked her why she prayed at home instead of at Our Lady of the Cape.

This morning, the smells of flour, yeast, butter, chocolate, and vanilla dance through the kitchen, and I breathe in deeply, relaxing into the familiarity of it all. From the time I was a little girl, these scents have always reminded me of my grandmother, for even when the bakery was closed, even after she’d showered and
dressed at home, her hair and her skin still carried the perfume of the kitchen.

As I roll out piecrusts and add more flour to the industrial mixer, my mind isn’t on the tasks at hand. I’m thinking about Mamie’s words last night as I methodically go through the motions of the morning preparations. Check the timer for the chocolate chip meringues in oven 1. Roll out the dough for the almond rose tarts Matt Hines likes so much. Layer the baklava and slide it into oven 2. Put the softened cream cheese for the lemon-grape cheesecake into my second bowl mixer. Fold the layers of croissant around little squares of dark French chocolate for the
pains au chocolat
. Braid the long ropes of whole wheat challah, sprinkle it with raisins, and set it aside to rise again.

There is nothing wrong with you, dear,
Mamie had said, but what does she know? Her memory is all but gone, her senses completely off. Yet there are times when her eyes look as clear as ever, and when I’m sure she’s looking directly into my soul. Although I never doubted that she and my grandfather loved each other, theirs always seemed to be a relationship of function more than romance. Had I had that with Rob and thrown it away because I believed there was more out there? Perhaps I’d been a fool. Life isn’t a fairy tale.

The timer on oven 1 goes off, and I move the meringues to a baking rack. I turn the oven on and prepare to slide the
pains au chocolat
in. I’ve started making a double batch of those in the mornings; they go more quickly now that it’s autumn and the air has turned cool. Our fruit tarts and pastries are more popular in the spring and summer months, but the denser, sweeter confections seem to bring people comfort as winter approaches.

I started helping Mamie in the bakery, the way Annie helps me now, when I was eight. Every morning, just before the sun came up, Mamie would stop what she was doing and lead me to the side window that looked due east, over the winding ribbon
of Main Street. We’d watch the horizon in silence until dawn broke, and then we’d go back to our baking.

“What are you always looking at, Mamie?” I’d asked her one morning.

“I am looking at the sky, my dear,” she’d said.

“I know. But why?”

She’d pulled me close, hugging me against her faded pink apron, the one she’d been wearing for as long as I could remember. I was a little scared by how tightly she was holding on.

“
Chérie,
I am watching the stars disappear,” she said after a minute.

“Why?” I asked.

“Because even though you cannot see them, they are always there,” she said. “They are just hiding, behind the sun.”

“So?” I asked timidly.

She released me from the hug and bent down to look me in the eye. “Because, my dear, it is good to remember that you do not always have to see something to know that it is there.”

Mamie’s words from almost three decades earlier are still echoing in my head when I hear Annie’s voice in the doorway to the kitchen, startling me out of my fog.

“Why are you crying?” she asks.

I look up, surprised to realize that she’s right; there are tears rolling down my cheeks. I swat them away with the back of my hand, streaking wet, sticky dough across my face in the process, and force a smile.

“I’m not,” I say.

“You don’t have to, like, lie.”

I sigh. “I was just thinking about Mamie.”

Annie rolls her eyes and makes a face at me. “Great,
now
you decide to show some emotion.” She throws her backpack down in the corner, where it lands with a decisive thud.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” I ask.

“
You
know,” she says. She rolls up the sleeves of her pink
long-sleeved shirt and grabs an apron from a hook on the wall, just to the left of the racks where I store the trays.

“No, I
don’t
know,” I tell her. I stop what I’m doing and watch as she gets a carton of eggs and four sticks of butter out of the stainless steel refrigerator and grabs a measuring cup. She moves as fluidly through the kitchen as Mamie once did.

Annie doesn’t answer until after she has creamed the butter in the stand mixer, added four cups of sugar, and cracked the eggs in, one at a time. “Maybe if you’d been, like, capable of feeling anything when you were married to Dad, you wouldn’t be divorced right now,” she says finally, over the whir of the mixer.

My breath catches in my throat and I stare at her. “What are you talking about? I showed emotion.”

She turns the mixer off. “Whatever,” she mutters. “Only to, like, send me to my room and stuff. When did you ever act like you were happy to be with Dad?”

“I was happy!”

“Whatever,” she says. “You couldn’t even tell Dad you loved him.”

I blink at her. “Did he say that to you?”

“What, like I’m not old enough to figure things out on my own?” she asks, but from the way she avoids my gaze, I know I’ve hit the nail on the head.

“Annie, it’s not appropriate for your father to be saying bad things about me to you,” I say. “There are a lot of things about our relationship that you don’t understand.”

“Like what?” It’s a challenge, and she gazes at me coolly.

I weigh my options, but in the end, I know it’s not appropriate to drag our daughter into an adult battle that isn’t hers to fight. “That’s between me and your dad.”

She laughs at that and rolls her eyes. “
He
trusts me enough to talk to me,” she says. “And you know what? You ruin everything, Mom.”

Before I can reply, the front door to the bakery chimes. I
glance at my watch. It’s a few minutes before six, our official opening time, but Annie must not have locked the door behind her when she came in.

“We’ll continue this later, young lady,” I say sternly.

“Whatever,” she mutters under her breath. She turns back to the batter she’s mixing, and I watch for a second as she adds some flour and then some milk, then a dash of vanilla.

“Hey, Hope, you back there?” It’s Matt’s voice, from the front of the store, and I snap out of it.

I hear Annie say “Of
course
it’s him” under her breath, but I pretend not to as I make my way up front.

Mrs. Koontz and Mrs. Sullivan come in at 7:00 a.m. as usual, and for once, Annie rushes out to wait on them. Usually, she’s happier to be in the kitchen, baking cupcakes and miniature pies with her iPod on, effortlessly ignoring me until she has to go to school. But today, she’s sunshine and smiles, whisking into the main room and pouring their coffee before they even have a chance to order.

“Here, let me help you to your seats,” she says, juggling two coffee mugs and a little pitcher of cream as they trail behind her, exchanging glances.

“Why, thank you, Annie,” Mrs. Sullivan says as Annie puts the coffees and cream down and pulls out her chair for her.

“You’re welcome!” Annie replies brightly. For a moment, she sounds exactly like the girl who inhabited her body before the divorce. Mrs. Koontz murmurs a thank-you too, and Annie chirps, “Yes, ma’am!”

She hovers while they each take their first sips of coffee, and she’s practically hopping from foot to foot by the time Mrs. Sullivan takes a bite of her blueberry muffin and Mrs. Koontz picks up her cinnamon-sugar doughnut.

“Um, can I, like, ask you a question?” Annie asks. I’m tidying up behind the counter, and I pause, straining to hear what she wants to know.

“You may, dear,” Mrs. Koontz says. “But you mustn’t use
like
in the middle of a sentence that way.”

“Huh?” Annie asks, confused. Mrs. Koontz raises an eyebrow, and Annie’s smart enough to correct herself. “I mean,
excuse me,
” she amends.

“The word
like
is not a space holder in a sentence,” Mrs. Koontz tells my daughter seriously. I duck behind the counter to hide my smile.

“Oh,” Annie says. “I mean, I know.” I peek over the counter and see her face flaming red. I feel bad for her; Mrs. Koontz, who’d been my tenth-grade English teacher years ago, is a tough cookie. I think about coming to Annie’s defense, but before I have a chance, Mrs. Sullivan jumps in.

“Oh, Barbara, give the child a break,” she says, swatting her friend on the arm. She turns to Annie and says, “Ignore her. She simply misses being able to boss children around, now that she’s retired.” Mrs. Koontz starts to protest, but Mrs. Sullivan swats her again and smiles at Annie. “Did you say you had a question for us, dear?”

Annie clears her throat. “Uh, yeah,” she says. “I mean, yes, ma’am. I was just wondering . . .” She pauses, and the women wait. “Well, you knew my great-grandma, right?”

The women glance at each other, then back at Annie. “Yes, of course,” Mrs. Sullivan finally replies. “We’ve known her for years. How is she?”

“Fine,” Annie says instantly. “I mean, not totally fine. She’s having some—problems. But, um, mostly fine.” Her face is flaming again. “Anyways, I was just wondering, do you, um, know who Leona is?”

The women exchange looks again. “Leona,” Mrs. Sullivan says slowly. She mulls it over for a moment and shakes her head. “I don’t think so. It doesn’t sound familiar. Barbara?”

Mrs. Koontz shakes her head. “No,” she says. “I don’t think we know a Leona. Why?”

Annie looks down. “It’s just something she keeps calling me. I was just wondering, like, who she is.” She looks horrified for a second and mumbles, “Sorry for saying ‘like.’ ”

Mrs. Sullivan reaches out and pats Annie’s hand. “Now you’ve gone and scared the child, Barbara,” she says.

Mrs. Koontz sighs and says, “I’m just trying to correct her grammar.”

“Yes, well, this isn’t the time or place,” Mrs. Sullivan replies. She winks at Annie. “Why is this so important to you, dear? The question of who this Leona is?”

“My great-grandma seems sad,” Annie replies after a minute, in a voice so low I have to strain to hear her. “And I don’t know that much about her, you know? My great-grandma, I mean. I want to help her, but I don’t know how.”

A pair of customers come in then, a gray-haired man and a young blonde woman I don’t know, and I miss what Annie and the women are talking about while I help them. The blonde orders a piece of carrot cake, after asking if we have anything diet—we don’t—and her male companion, who looks a few decades too old to be squeezing her hand and kissing her ear, orders an éclair. By the time they leave and I glance back at Annie, she’s seated with the two older women.

I glance at my watch and consider reminding Annie that if she doesn’t leave in the next few minutes, she’ll be late to school, but the look on her face is so earnest that instead, I freeze for a minute and just look at her. I’m used to her sneering and rolling her eyes lately every time she’s around me, but in this moment, she just looks innocent and interested. I swallow the lump in my throat.

I walk into the dining room with a rag and a spray bottle so that I can eavesdrop under the pretense of cleaning up. The women, I realize, are telling Annie the story of how Mamie came to live in Cape Cod.

“All the girls in town used to be in love with Ted, your great-grandfather,” Mrs. Koontz is telling her.