The Cake Therapist Read online

  Now I could dream about a mysterious identity thief. All that junk mail and bills and my personal info. I tried to remember what I had thrown away that week. Why didn’t I have a shredder?

  And there, propped up at the front door, was a large FedEx box. I got bakery deliveries at the bakery, not here. But I hadn’t ordered anything. The sender’s address was in New Jersey.

  I would think about all of that later. I had work to do now.

  I sighed as I walked into the house, and let its calming atmosphere do its work. I took the FedEx box back to the kitchen, preferring to keep it out of sight.

  I placed the miniature unfrosted cupcakes on the tiered stand in the parlor, spooned dollops of the different flavored mousses on my artist’s palette, brewed coffee, and made tea. I scooped a few different buttercream frostings into small china bowls.

  When the doorbell rang, I was ready. I took a quick look at my mobile device again: Thomas Edgerton and Roberta Canfield. A December wedding.

  They both seemed to be in their early forties.

  Thomas was pleasant and plain, with sandy hair and a receding hairline, a freckled complexion, and clear frames on his glasses. Slightly plump, he was dressed in a brown sport coat, plaid shirt, and khaki pants. According to my notes, he was a self-employed accountant.

  Roberta, on the other hand, was a stunning brunette, taller than her fiancé, with mahogany skin that looked like dark chocolate mousse. Were those Manolo Blahniks she was wearing? She was a marketing specialist for a Fortune 500 company.

  We sat down, and I explained the tasting procedure.

  Roberta looked over the little cupcakes on the tiered stand. “Don’t you have carrot cake, too? I read a review online that your carrot cake was good.” She was the most well-groomed person I’d ever seen, but something seemed a little off about her.

  “Well, carrot cake would be great for a groom’s cake, but it doesn’t slice cleanly—all those little carrot and raisin pieces in it. That’s why it’s not usually done as a formal wedding cake,” I explained. “But we can certainly include a groom’s cake if you’d like.”

  Thomas took Roberta’s hand. “Whatever makes you happy, sweetheart.”

  Sweet. Just sweet. My mind formed the word before it registered that I actually tasted just that. Sweet.

  Okay.

  That was what had made Thomas happy over the years. Anything sweet.

  Now, if I could just get a taste of what Roberta was all about.

  I turned to her and smiled. As I spread a little raspberry filling on two chocolate cupcakes and dabbed them with a little chocolate buttercream, I let my mind relax, hoping it would all come to me.

  “We can do a really stunning chocolate cake, if you like bigger flavors,” I told the couple as they sampled. “The raspberry has a little drop of rosewater in it to bring out the berryness of the fruit. Raspberry and chocolate is a classic combination.”

  “No, I don’t want chocolate for a wedding cake,” she decided, putting her half-eaten cupcake on the service plate. Thomas just nodded as he finished his.

  “All right. How about this, then?” I dabbed both apricot and almond fillings on browned-butter vanilla cupcakes and smoothed on just a bit of vanilla buttercream.

  She took a bite, patting her lips with her napkin. “Too much going on.”

  This half-eaten cupcake joined the other one. Thomas looked at the discards yearningly.

  “Maybe a more seasonal touch, perhaps? Pomegranate and pistachio will be our signature flavors for December.”

  “Ooh, that sounds interesting. Let’s taste that combination.”

  “If you’ll excuse me for a moment, I’ll be right back.” I went to the kitchen and poured a little salt into a ramekin.

  Roberta had a secret. A big secret. What it was, I didn’t know yet.

  The salty flavor I was getting from her was all about her fear of being discovered. Carrot cake had a saltier flavor from both the batter and the cream cheese frosting. I should have guessed that right away.

  “I’m not sure I’ve got enough salt in this pistachio buttercream, so I’ll just sprinkle some extra on,” I said as I chose a white cupcake, spread on a rosy pomegranate mousse filling, dabbed it with the palest of pistachio-green buttercream, then sprinkled on a little salt. Of course, the buttercream didn’t actually need salt. Thomas could taste that, and tried to suppress a grimace. For once, he left something on his plate.

  But Roberta wolfed hers down. “I think we might have a winner,” she said.

  “Let’s just taste a few more to be sure,” I said. I hope this worked.

  I offered her cupcake after cupcake, filling after filling, all kinds of buttercream, and a sprinkle of salt on each. Thomas had called it quits after the pomegranate, but she ate on.

  Her voice seemed to get lower, and lower, and lower with each sample. She had had enough salt to feed her fear, and now she was letting go a little bit, getting careless.

  Thomas looked at her with the beginnings of alarm.

  And I got a glimpse.

  Black men at a neighborhood barbershop, one getting a shave, others sitting and joking with one another in the shabby waiting area, the linoleum floor worn through in spots. A handsome teenager in the second barber chair—Roberta’s brother, maybe?—kept saying, “No, I want to keep it longer on the top.” He fluttered his hands to indicate volume. “I need volume.”

  “You’re as damn fussy as a girl,” one of his friends cackled.

  “You don’t mess with his ’do,” another friend joined in.

  “Can I use your bathroom?” Roberta suddenly asked, her voice gruff, and I pointed the way. She got up from the table with her handbag over her arm. “Just one more bite. I can’t stop.” She reached over to pluck another salty cupcake from the stand, then click-clacked her stilettos across the wood floor to the hallway bathroom.

  “They’ve all been delicious,” Thomas said. “But I think planning this wedding is making her a little nervous.”

  “Weddings can be stressful,” I said, pouring him another cup of coffee. I smoothed filling and frosting over another chocolate cupcake, left off the salt, and passed it to him. He smiled gratefully.

  I made him three more cupcakes before Roberta finally returned.

  Her shoulders drooped. Her makeup was smeary. It looked as if she had been crying. She sank into the chair.

  “Sweetheart, are you all right?” Thomas asked her, taking a folded handkerchief from his coat pocket and offering it to her.

  I looked at Roberta, and she knew that I knew something was up. I didn’t need to know her secret, but I wasn’t the one who mattered.

  She slumped back down in her chair. “I don’t know what’s come over me.”

  I did. The salty pistachio buttercream had fed her fear to the point that there was no hiding it anymore. But fear of what?

  Thomas took her hand in his. “What’s the trouble, honey? You can tell me.”

  “Why don’t I leave you two alone for a bit,” I said and stood up, but Roberta grabbed my arm and pulled me back to my seat. That woman didn’t know her own strength.

  “No, please stay with us for a moment,” she said.

  Thomas looked from her to me, concerned.

  No one knew what to say next.

  She reached for another salted cupcake, closed her eyes as she ate, and then sighed. She turned toward her fiancé. “You deserve the truth, Thomas. Whatever happens next, I want you to know that I love you. I love you and I want to spend the rest of my life with you, but you may not feel the same way.”

  “Nothing you can tell me will change the way I feel about you,” he reassured her.

  She looked at me, woman to woman, as if she’d heard that all before.

  This was making me very uncomfortable. “Why don’t I give you two some privacy?”
I tried again, and started to back out of the room again.

  “No, please stay.” Roberta grasped my hand this time and gave it another hard squeeze. Yet she looked softer and sadder. “Please. I realize we barely know each other, Mrs. Davis. I understand we’re not friends. But you seem kind, and I could use a woman here with me when I do this.”

  I nodded.

  She turned to Thomas, who looked bewildered.

  “I have become the woman I always knew I could be,” she began, “the woman I have dreamed of being since I was a teenager. But it hasn’t been easy. . . .” She delicately wiped away a tear with his handkerchief.

  “And then I met you, and I was so happy,” she sniffed. “I am happy.”

  Thomas squeezed her knee.

  That made her cry more.

  “You are the best man I have ever known, and I’m so sorry I have to do this.” She opened her handbag and lined up several pill bottles. “I want to show you something, Thomas.” The first brown plastic pharmacy bottle looked plain against her perfectly manicured fingers as she held it up for Thomas to see. “This is the estrogen hormone that I have to take with a progestogen,” she said, then pointed to the second bottle. “And an antiandrogen,” she added, pointing to the third one. “These drugs help my skin stay soft, my voice stay sweet, my figure stay rounded. And this”—she indicated the fourth bottle on the table—“helps me be less anxious about the changes I’ve made.”

  “You’ve already told me about your hormone therapy and your infertility,” said Thomas, shaking his head. “And if you need anti-anxiety medication every once in a while, so what? You have a high-stress job. And we’re planning a wedding.”

  “That’s not what I mean,” Roberta said. She took a deep breath and closed her eyes, gathering her resolve. “The reason it hasn’t been easy, the reason I take all those pills, the reason that I haven’t been able to be completely honest with you is . . . I started out as a man.”

  Whoa. The teenage boy I had thought was Roberta’s brother was actually Roberta?

  The color had drained from Thomas’ ruddy face. His breathing became shallow, as if he were starting to panic.

  “Are you sure . . .” I started to ask again, half rising from the table.

  “No. Please.” Roberta placed her shaking hand on my arm. I sat back down and took her hand in both of mine, giving her what I hoped was a silent message: Be brave.

  Where Thomas had looked freckle-faced and robust, he now seemed pale and weak. He stared off into space.

  I closed my eyes and felt the colors flash. The unpleasantly briny flavor was gone, much like the relief of spitting and rinsing after a saltwater gargle.

  Roberta sat with her hands folded in her lap. She had faced her fear.

  Now it was up to Thomas.

  I cleared my mind again. Almost at once, I sensed a warm cocoon of feathery pink cotton candy. The first wisp melted on my tongue as cotton candy does. Sweet. This was Thomas.

  But each successive taste became a little abrasive, more burnt and bitter, as if the sugar had cooked too long past a pleasing caramel to a dark and inedible sludge. All things sweet fed his optimism and kept bitter disappointment at bay, but this wasn’t working for him anymore. Roberta had seen through the brown sport coat and plaid shirt to the kind, loving, and faithful person he was inside. She was the sweet he craved now.

  But could Thomas accept that he had been intimate with a man who had become a woman?

  “But you’re not a man,” he finally sputtered, as if he had heard my thoughts. “We’ve been together. I’ve seen your body. You are a woman. You’re a beautiful woman.”

  She looked at him hopefully.

  “How long has it been?” he asked, his voice barely a whisper.

  “I should have told you in the beginning,” Roberta confessed.

  “No, I mean how long has it been since . . .”

  “Since I became a woman? I started at one university as a male and got my degree at another as a female. Twenty years or so.”

  Distractedly, he reached for the sugar bowl, spooned some in his coffee, and took a sip. He scowled and placed his cup back on the saucer with a clatter.

  “Damn it, Roberta.” He looked at her, at all of her, with a fierce expression. “I can’t do this.” He rose, threw his napkin on the tea table, and walked out. We heard the door slam.

  I turned to face Roberta.

  “I should have told him sooner,” she admitted. “I should have told him before he even kissed me—that took forever. So, if he waited a month before he kissed me, I thought I had plenty of time before, you know. And then we got serious so fast,” she said dully. “And I didn’t want to lose him.”

  I squeezed her hand.

  I let myself drift for a moment and we were back at the barbershop.

  Robert was sitting in the barber chair. His eyes followed another young man, who paced the waiting area, talking on a cell phone that looked as big as a space station. The young man carried a backpack heavy with books. His prominent black eyeglasses were taped in one corner. “What is this, Ranelle?” he yelled into the phone. “You don’t want help with chemistry, like you said at school? You have something else going tonight?”

  “I need help with chemistry,” the boy who became Roberta called to him. “Forget Ranelle.”

  The boy gestured for everyone to be quiet so he could hear above the noise, but he lost the call. “She hung up. Damn,” he muttered. He pressed several buttons, pulled up the antenna, listened in again, then shook his head in disbelief. He unzipped his backpack and jammed the cell phone in, opened the barbershop door, and stormed out.

  This time, with Thomas, Roberta had come so close to letting a person she loved see her true self—but not close enough. I sat with Roberta until our coffee got cold.

  “I shouldn’t take up any more of your time. I know you have a business to run, and it’s not psychotherapy,” she said with a wry, watery smile.

  “Sometimes it is.” I took Roberta’s card and gave her mine. I urged her to stay in touch. I genuinely wanted to know she was going to be all right.

  Back at the bakery, Maggie’s shock registered in her raised eyebrows. “They didn’t book their wedding cake? That’s a first.”

  “There were issues,” I said vaguely.

  “Here’s another issue. Somebody has taken the bakery trash,” she said. “Whyte’s doesn’t come until tomorrow. Who would want our garbage?”

  “I wish someone would take mine,” Jett said as she came in the door, swathed in multiple scarves over a bulky jacket. In one ear, she sported a hot-pink feather earring, in the other a silvery disco ball that swayed like a metronome when she removed her earbud. We could hear the tinny, thumping sound of the Lumineers’ “Ho Hey.” Surprisingly upbeat for a Goth girl.

  “Ever since my mom finally kicked her drunken boyfriend out, my lazy-ass brother forgets to put out the garbage or puts it out so that the dogs get in it. White trash. That’s us. But—news flash—at least we’re white trash without stalker ex-boyfriends anymore. Thought you’d like to know.” She filled up her coffee mug, saluted Maggie and me, and clomped back to the workroom.

  “I’m on those little puffy thingies you wanted,” Jett yelled from the back. We could hear her opening plastic tubs and clattering metal cake-decorating tools on the stainless steel counter.

  Maggie looked at me for a translation.

  “Remember that girl who brought in a vintage chenille bedspread as inspiration?” Maggie nodded. I tapped my phone and showed her the photo I had taken of a tufted white spread with a central flower outlined in a wrapped yarn stitch. “Those are the ‘puffy thingies,’” I said, and I pointed to the raised designs. “Jett is making them out of royal icing. The cake will look great; you’ll see.”

  It would all be great. Jett’s problem was resolving itself. Maybe min
e would, too. I just had to keep thinking that.

  Otherwise I would be freaking out about that FedEx box from Barney’s full of high-end perfumes, creams, and body scrubs, along with a brochure about a spa weekend in Sedona. Luke must have had the team secretary send it. No way was I going on a spa weekend with him. No way was I going anywhere with him.

  I was beginning to realize that I had been under the spell of my own magical thinking. When I told myself that Luke would have been faithful if I had stayed at home, or focused on his career and not mine, I was deluding myself. Just like Thomas, Luke had made his own choice, despite what the woman in his life wanted.

  It was my choice, now, to stay right where I was.

  DECEMBER 8, 1941

  Bundled in her father’s old cardigan, Edie shivered as she pumped the treadle of the sewing machine, forcing the needle faster and faster through the thin, striped cotton of her mother’s dimity petticoat. The fine embroidered muslin gown that Grace Habig had worn over it—captured forever in the wedding photo—had long ago been used to make a christening robe for a good customer’s grandchild. Mama could not afford to be sentimental.

  And neither, really, could Edie. When they buried their mother, she and Olive had had to grow up fast. They were still paying off their mother’s funeral, a dollar a week.

  Mr. Amici was kind and sometimes tucked something extra into their bag of groceries—a jar of Ovaltine, a sleeve of crackers, a can of Vienna sausages. Edie sometimes wondered whether Frankie Amici liked Olive, but he was so shy, it was hard to tell.

  Edie stopped to tie off a seam with fingers stiff from the cold, and absently stroked the glass of her parents’ wedding photograph propped up on the little shelf above the sewing machine. She knew every detail by heart. The damask drapery in the background. How her father was seated in an ornate wooden armchair and her mother was standing behind him, a pose to better show the simple lines of her tea-length white dress. They were not smiling. In her left hand, Mama held a tiny bouquet of lilies of the valley—“the return of happiness,” Mama said they signified—picked the morning of the wedding from neighbor Mrs. Seebohm’s shady front yard. Edie could just see the outline of the beautiful ring that Papa had been lucky enough to find glinting in the muck by the banks of the canal. Her father liked to tease that the universe had delivered the fiery sapphire right into his rough fingers at precisely the right moment. The ring was meant for Mama, he’d said, because she was a jewel herself.