The Cake Therapist Read online

“Luke Davis, you had a Pro Bowl year as a quarterback, but somehow that didn’t lead to a Super Bowl appearance,” the tall blond reporter began.

  He leaned down to the microphone. “I’d trade the Pro Bowl for the Super Bowl any day, you know,” he said, and flashed his trademark grin. Then he seemed to get serious. “We had some adversity this year, as many teams do, and we just couldn’t seem to rebound from it. Personal and otherwise.”

  My heart stopped.

  The reporter smiled. One crook of a pretty finger, one smile or a wink, and Luke’s brain shut down. If the NFL let good-looking women play football, he would never throw an accurate pass.

  The reporter ramped up the sexy charm. “A lot of personal, it seems,” she purred, and touched his arm, faking an intimacy that he always fell for. “Besides the injuries to players, Jay Jacobs’ father died, Jamarcus Robbins and his wife lost a baby, and there are also rumors your wife has left you.”

  For Luke, that verbal jab seemed to come out of nowhere. I could see his eyes widen in surprise, but he recovered quickly. “It’s no secret that professional football can take a toll on family. But not on mine. Football has been my dream come true. That’s why it was important that my wife have the time to make her own dream happen. She’s happy; I’m happy. That’s all that matters.” He pulled back from the reporter and gave a big smile and a thumbs-up to the camera. “Next year, man, next year.” And then: “Keep the light on for me, honey.”

  He was good. I had to give him that.

  But what a liar.

  LATE OCTOBER 1941

  Shemuel hated to leave the warmth and comfort of Mrs. Handorf’s farm kitchen, but the autumn sky had darkened and there was still the horse to feed, water, and bed down for the night. He scraped his plate clean with a slice of bread, capturing every last bit of the tangy gravy. He downed his third glass of cold milk.

  “I’ve got sauerbraten for you to take to your poor mother, too, Shemuel,” Mrs. Handorf said, indicating the small bowl covered with a round of waxed paper secured with string. A few slices of bread rested on top. “You bring the bowl back, I give you some more.”

  He could eat that bowl and all the bread, too. The taller he got, the hungrier he became.

  If it weren’t for the kindness of the women he visited on his after-school rounds, they wouldn’t eat, Shemuel knew.

  Ever since his father dropped dead and was brought home doubled up in the small cart, his mother faded more every day.

  Shemuel didn’t understand. His father had cursed at her, demanding hot food or drink at any hour. She had spent her days almost tethered to the stove.

  Now that Shemuel was seventeen, and a man, his mother didn’t have to worry about that. He knew he could make a better life for them. Shemuel brought her food.

  But day after day, his mother sat near the stove in the one-window lean-to, feeding the fire with chunks of coal that Shemuel collected every morning. She left the room only to use the outhouse or dump the coal clinkers that could burn no more.

  She forgot to eat. She forgot to bathe. And when she was too tired to sit anymore, she took to her pallet bed in the corner of the dim room. But always, she kept the little stove going.

  Maybe Mrs. Handorf’s stew would cheer her up.

  Mishka, the horse, nibbled on the scant grass around Mrs. Handorf’s elegant old iron fence that had once fronted the towpath of the canal. The path was just wide enough now for the horse and cart. The canal bed was full of weeds and stagnant water. Shemuel scanned the shallow depths for anything to salvage, but he could see nothing in the gloom.

  He secured the old copper boiler, the roll of chicken wire, and the tin vents from the roof of Mrs. Handorf’s old barn in the bed of the cart. When he finally snapped the reins to move Mishka forward, his thoughts were on the money he would get from the copper. Even the snips of pipe in his pocket. If there was one thing he had learned from his father, it was that nothing goes to waste.

  Soon the dirt road joined the brick street leading past the mattress factory. The massive old brick buildings on either side created a wind tunnel, and Shemuel had to take one hand off the reins to keep his cap from flying off.

  Suddenly, he smelled something burning.

  Lockton was not the place to go for fresh air, he well knew, as there was always something carried by the wind—coal smoke, paper mill exhaust, horse droppings, the fetid aroma of the canal. On a good day, the breeze would blow the clean smell of freshly cut wood from the lumber mill.

  But this was different. When he guided Mishka onto the main street, he saw a reddish-orange glow in the sky a few blocks away. Sparks flew high in the air above a billowing cloud of smoke.

  Just as he and Mishka plodded past the fire station, the siren sounded. The horse, startled, reared up, and it was all Shemuel could do to get him back under control. The fire truck roared by, bells clanging.

  Toward the salvage yard.

  And his mother.

  With furious snaps of the reins, Shemuel whipped Mishka to life again and the cart careened down the street.

  Shemuel brought Mishka to a hard stop near the salvage yard. Between the houses, he could see that the yard was filled with people in a bucket brigade trying to put out the fire. He dropped the reins, jumped down from the cart, and started to run.

  Later, when he tried to piece together the events of the night, this part was a blank.

  The next thing he knew, he was sitting on an overturned bucket with a horse blanket draped over his shoulders. He raised a tin cup to his face and it smelled like bourbon. He smelled like bourbon and the odorous canal water they had pumped to fight the blaze.

  From the blackened, steaming ruins, he watched the firemen bring out a stretcher and what he assumed was his mother. They looked over at him grimly, shaking their heads. Doc Cunningham quickly examined what was left of the body, then covered it with a blanket.

  “She should not have been left alone like that,” Shemuel heard the doctor pronounce. “She was not in her right mind.”

  Shemuel’s cup clattered to the pavement.

  “That’s a hebe for you,” a firefighter muttered. “They only think about money.”

  Money . . . money . . . money . . . The word landed repeated blows where Shemuel least expected them.

  When the yard finally emptied at dawn, Shemuel ached all over. He had mud on his boots. How had that gotten there? The smell of wet ash clung to his damp clothes. He shivered.

  He made himself get up, shake off the filthy blanket, and walk to the burned-out ruins. He picked his way around the blackened debris.

  There was nothing and no one to save here.

  But there was Mishka. He had forgotten all about Mishka.

  As he turned to leave, Shemuel saw something in the corner of the room on a metal stool his father once found by the side of the road. The tiny mother-of-pearl button glowed softly, like a pale moon in a troubled sky. As he picked it up, a scorched tatter from a woman’s dress floated away.

  Shemuel put the button in his pocket.

  Nothing goes to waste.

  7

  VALENTINE’S DAY

  Instead of romance at the bakery, the mood was more “keep calm and carry on.”

  While other people—especially our brides-to-be—probably had bubble baths, romantic dinners, and champagne sipping on their to-do lists today, everyone at Rainbow Cake was just trying to get through the afternoon.

  Norb had his usual long-suffering air about him. He told me he would stop on the way home to pick up a heart-shaped box of chocolates and grocery-store flowers for Bonnie and be rewarded with a frozen dinner zapped in the microwave.

  True love.

  But the rest of us weren’t faring too well, either.

  Jett had come in early, deep circles under her eyes. Judging from what she was wearing, she chose her mismatched a
nd wrinkled outfit from clothes scattered all over her bedroom floor. Good thing nobody would see her working in the back.

  “Do you want a latte or some tea or something?” I asked her, trying to keep the worry out of my voice.

  She closed her eyes tight, pressed her lips together, and exhaled heavily through her nose, as if I was getting on her last nerve. Then she collected herself. “I’m kinda off caffeine right now. I’ll stick to water,” she said, and then mumbled, “Thank you.”

  I handed her the little cellophane bag with a heart-shaped sugar cookie in pink icing. “Edible valentine.”

  She gave me a weak smile and trudged to the workroom.

  As for me, I was just glad to be busy. Saturdays had been generally crazy for us, with lots of brides-to-be and their friends or moms dropping in. But this one literally took the cake.

  We had fifty-seven special orders that customers were picking up throughout the day. Most of those were already packaged, but I had four more rainbow cakes to assemble.

  With an assembly-line strategy, I could have them ready before we opened in an hour.

  Norb was busy baking the breakfast cupcakes. I had made extra tubs of various buttercream flavors and baked plenty of heart-shaped cookies, but it turned out that our signature Rainbow Cake was the number-one seller this weekend.

  After a double shot from the old Marzocco and an extra spoonful of sugar in my latte—the milk tasted nasty again, although Norb said it was fine—I put my earbuds in and cranked up my iPod to get in the mood.

  I chuckled to myself as the IZ ukulele version of “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” played. How appropriate.

  I hoisted one plastic tub of the robin’s-egg blue buttercream up on the counter and set my cake-decorating turntable right in front of me. When doing cakes, even small ones, it was all about making the most of every movement. I shingled rounds of each flavored and colored cake layer down the stainless steel counter to the left of me and an empty tray to my immediate left.

  In their turn, I spread each cake layer with the buttercream—lavender cake on the bottom, then coral, lime green, lemon yellow, and raspberry pink—and stacked one on top of another. Then I frosted the top and sides. I still wasn’t sure why rainbow cake with sky-blue frosting made me happy just to look at it, but it did. Judging from our orders, a lot of other people felt the same way.

  Maybe rainbow cake signified our yearning for a pot of gold in deficient parts of our lives. Physical? Yes. Financial? Yes. Emotional? Hell, yes. And I was just getting started. Maybe my own personal rainbow cake needed a few extra layers.

  I was making great time, so I refueled with another latte, triple sugar this time, and then went back to the rainbow rhythm.

  Maggie came in at seven thirty. My mom had volunteered to keep Emily for the day, so it was all working out.

  We hardly had time to talk until the Professor came in with a bouquet of red carnations. Not anybody’s favorite flower, exactly, but the thought was nice.

  Before he ordered his latte and breakfast cupcake, he held the bouquet out to Maggie. I wished I had a photo of the look on her face.

  “You are always so sweet to me when I come in here every morning,” he said shyly.

  Sweet? I wouldn’t exactly say that.

  Maggie found her manners just in time. “Well, you’re sweet to give me these. They smell so good. Sort of spicy. Thank you.”

  He cleared his throat and stammered out his order. We all knew it by heart.

  “Why don’t you try something new this morning? Our treat,” Maggie coaxed. “These orange-glazed cinnamon rolls are to die for, and I mean that sincerely. Want to try one?”

  Maggie sweet-talking the Professor? I wondered whether there was a full moon tonight, too.

  By late morning, most of the special orders had been picked up. And I refueled for the umpteenth time at the trusty Marzocco.

  A florist’s truck double-parked in front of the bakery, and out from the back of the truck came a huge box for somebody. I sighed. Gone were the days.

  “Claire Davis?” the delivery guy called out.

  “I’ll take it,” said Maggie, coming from behind the counter to grab the box and shoo him out. “And I’ll see that she gets them.”

  It was a good try, but I was right behind her. With a wry and understanding smile, she handed me the long white box tied with red ribbon, and I retreated to the workroom, where Jett had her back turned to me at the stainless steel worktable, oblivious. She wasn’t swaying and humming to her usual dark, creepy music, but rather sat quietly on a stool, sculpting sugar jonquils in a pale yellow and green. It looked like a mini spring meadow around her. I could swear I heard a little Pachelbel’s Canon escaping through her earbuds. Jett continued to surprise me.

  Her black eye, fading this past week to a yellowish green, had almost disappeared—and was expertly concealed by her usual Goth garishness. She still refused to go into any detail about the night she was attacked; I would try to talk with her later this afternoon.

  But I had to get through the day myself.

  I put the box on the marble-topped area where we do our chocolate work. It must have been the lattes making my fingers shake a little bit.

  The long-stemmed roses in the pale pink I loved best brought tears to my eyes. The card said, “I’m still yours if you’ll have me. Be mine again.”

  That old feeling came rushing back, even though I tried to fight it. I felt myself flush with pleasure. It was almost as if Luke were standing right here, willing me, in that intense way he had, to surrender and let myself be carried back to him on a wave of longing. It had happened before.

  We had always had some distance built in to our relationship. In college, we would break up, get back together. Break up, get back together. He was the risk taker; I wanted a surer thing. When Luke left for an uncertain career in the NFL, I went to pastry school and then worked in artisanal bakeries and high-style patisseries, honing my craft.

  During the times we could be together, he focused on me, learning my playbook with the same intensity he applied to studying for a game. Luke understood I was determined to further my own career, on my own steam, even though he was soon making enough money to fund a small Third World country. I guessed my mother’s helplessness had affected me more than I was willing to admit at the time.

  And so, when Luke finally proposed, he bought me the simple diamond solitaire I had admired in a shop window weeks before. “The jeweler assured me that buttercream will rinse right out,” he had joked.

  He knew me so well.

  He was the only one who could make me feel as if the world were right once again, and I was loved and cherished and known and he would never, ever leave. Maybe all girls whose fathers had left them needed that. If my dad had not disappeared, would I have married someone like Luke? I didn’t know.

  Even at a distance, Luke could read me. He could find that vulnerable spot and say the right words, do the right things, that brought me back time after time.

  Time after time.

  I gave the roses one last glance, then snapped the lid back on the box and quickly replaced the ribbon. Luke could read a lot of women well, I reminded myself. He was so good at this because he was so practiced. Charm came natural to him. Courtship was what he did best.

  He almost had me there for a minute. And in that short span of time, my joy turned to anger once again.

  Maybe Luke should have used his free time more wisely. Maybe he should have thought with his brain instead of . . . Maybe he should have loved me enough to stop.

  I didn’t want the roses in my bakery or in my life. They were just a reminder of what could not be. I grabbed my coat.

  “I’m taking these to Mom and Aunt Helen,” I called out to Maggie.

  “Good plan.” She handed me three Valentine cookies in their little bags and opened the door for
me.

  When I got to Mom’s, she was snuggled up with Emily on the couch, reading a story. As I put the flowers in a vase on the dining room table, Mom told me about their day so far.

  “We just got back from the antique mall, Claire, and I found an old reader we used at Mount Saint Mary’s. It’s pretty bad when your schoolbooks are considered antique,” she sniffed. “But it was only two dollars. So I bought it to read to Emily. We didn’t really have anything here, since I had to get rid of a lot of your childhood things when we lost the house.”

  Yet another person wasn’t having a good Valentine’s Day. Best not to go there.

  “Well, I hope the roses and the cookies tell you that I love you and Aunt Helen and little Emily.”

  Emily beamed at me, but zeroed in on the cookies.

  “Can we have one now, Mrs. O’Neil?” Emily asked.

  “Let’s read another story first—how about it?” Mom said, picking up the book again. “I loved this one, Emily, when I was a girl,” she added as she patted Emily on her chubby knee. “‘The Dimity Dress.’”

  I was about to ask, “What’s dimity?” but they settled back in, so I dashed out again before Mom could ask me any questions I’d rather not answer.

  Back at the bakery, I put on my apron and looked in the mirror. I had a wedding cake tasting in a little while. I didn’t look too bad for such a hectic morning. I tamed my hair and swiped a little lipstick on. And good thing, too, because when I walked out to the front, Ben was making his way to the counter.

  “So you finally decided to take me up on the coffee and doughnuts?” I teased him.

  “Actually, I was wondering, at this late date, if you have dinner plans tonight?”

  I was shocked. We’d seen each other socially a few times in the last month or so, always in the company of other friends. And while Ben was unfailingly polite in a group setting, he wasn’t exactly comfortable, either. It was clear he still hadn’t forgiven me for choosing Luke. I wasn’t past hoping the chill between us would someday thaw, but, under the circumstances, the last thing I was expecting from Ben was a date. Especially on the biggest date night of the year.