The Cake Therapist Page 9

  I’m home. I must have fallen. I’m cold.

  And then it all came back, and Edie started to cry. She wrapped her arms around herself, trying to stifle the sobs. She didn’t want Olive to hear. And she couldn’t stay on the floor where Olive might see her.

  Edie crawled to the bathroom, dragged herself up on her knees, and filled the claw-foot tub with hot water until the bathroom was steaming. While the water was running, she tore off her clothing, stained with blood and mud. She gathered it all up in a ball and limped naked through the dark house to toss it on the back porch. In the morning, she would get rid of it. Maybe she would give the clothing to Shemuel, the ragman’s son. Shemuel could keep a secret. And the paper mill didn’t care whether rags were clean or soiled.

  She locked the back door and wedged a chair beneath the handle.

  Edie climbed in the tub and submerged herself in the water. When she pushed back her wet hair and wiped her eyes, she almost screamed. The water had turned a brownish pink. She drained the tub and filled it up again. She soaked until she was not cold anymore. She scrubbed herself clean until her skin turned pink and the hot water ran out.

  She wrapped herself in a towel and tiptoed upstairs. She took a clean nightgown from the dresser drawer, pulled it over her head, and climbed into bed beside her sister.

  “You’re late,” mumbled Olive.

  6

  Sunday was my day off. I hadn’t been to see Gran in two weeks, so I agreed to go with Aunt Helen up to Mount Saint Mary’s.

  The convent grounds on the crest of the hill had been overlooking Millcreek Valley since the 1860s. Long gone were the mansard-roofed school buildings and the basilica-style church. The newer complex—Mount Saint Mary High School, a residence for older nuns, a preschool, and a nursing home—had a modern, functional look. Even the iron scrollwork gate, at the end of the old circular drive that wound down the hill to the town, had been padlocked. Everyone used the hilltop entrance now.

  My mother and Helen were Mount Saint Mary Academy alums, but had been in different grades. After eighth grade, they’d gone to Millcreek Valley High School. They didn’t hang out together back then, and that was really no surprise. My mother got her sense of duty, deportment—and a nervous tic, I always teased her—from her years in convent school. Helen went the other way—she drank, smoked, fooled around with boys, and generally had a good time. “I knew I was going to burn in hell anyway,” Helen always joked.

  When Mom married my dad, Helen’s brother, the two women gradually got to know each other. After we lost our house when Dad left, Mom stayed on at Gran’s only long enough to see me off to college. Mom still somehow blamed Gran for Dad’s defection, but Helen was determinedly neutral. Still, nobody thought Mom and Helen’s living arrangement would last as long as it had.

  Mom needed routine, stability, and neatness. Helen thrived on chaos and was an unrepentant slob. But they were both hardworking and practical. And they both liked rules—Mom to follow them, Helen to break them. Maybe that was what made it work.

  When Helen and I pulled up outside the covered entry of the nursing care facility, a goose and a gander dressed up like George and Martha Washington offered a silent but lighthearted greeting. Although this was a warm and caring place, it was still hard to see those you loved in decline.

  Helen punched in the security code to the memory care wing. Sister Agnes, the nun from Emily’s preschool, was talking calmly to Gran, who looked like a bewildered doll sitting in a chair that was too big. I knew that the nuns who still lived at Mount Saint Mary’s went back and forth between the nursing home and the preschool, so I wasn’t surprised.

  Sister smiled at us. “She has been a little agitated this morning,” she said. She smiled at Gran. “But I kept telling Dorothy that her two favorite people were coming to visit.” She reached over and patted Gran’s hand. “And here they are.”

  “Thank you, Sister,” Helen said gently. “Mom, let’s walk a little bit. You were always the best walker around.”

  “Walk,” Gran repeated weakly, as if she wasn’t quite sure what that meant.

  We both helped Gran up from the chair and held on to her until she became steadier on her feet. Gran seemed to think more clearly when she was moving.

  We meandered down the hall, while Helen chattered on.

  Gran shuffled to a stop and turned to me. “It’s an orange day, isn’t it?” she asked.

  An orange day?

  Helen shook her head sadly. “Mom, let’s keep walking.” Helen gestured to me to take Gran’s elbow to get her moving again.

  But I was starting to taste it, too. Orange. I squeezed Gran’s hand and we both smiled.

  Suddenly she was younger. I was younger, maybe eight years old.

  We were in her kitchen at the back of her house that was now mine.

  It was a snowy day. She stood at the big enameled sink in the corner, washing dishes and putting them on the draining board to dry.

  “Go into the pantry, Claire, and get the box grater for me, will you, sweetie?”

  The tiny pantry smelled of spices and danced with color from the small stained glass window high up in the wall. I had to climb onto a stool to reach up into the cabinet where Gran kept her baking utensils.

  When I swung the pantry door back open, it was like I had stepped into a good dream. My father was sitting at the kitchen table, smiling into his coffee mug.

  Smiling.

  Gran wiped her hands on her apron, then took a blue bowl of pillowy dough and turned it out onto a floured pastry board in the center of the table.

  “Remember these sweet rolls, Jack? The ones with the cinnamon filling and the orange icing?”

  My father looked up at Gran, and his eyes twinkled.

  When he saw me hesitate, he reached out to pull me close and nuzzled my ear. I could feel his scratchy whiskers. “Are you going to help Gran make Daddy’s favorite rolls, Punkin?”

  I put my arms around his neck and held on tight.

  “It’s not every day your daddy starts a new job,” Gran said. “That’s an orange day.”

  Gran rolled out the dough, spread it with softened butter, and sprinkled on the cinnamon and sugar. She rolled it up into a cylinder and Daddy cut the rolls with a bread knife, sawing through the dough so gently that each roll was a perfect spiral.

  While the rolls baked, he helped me grate the orange rind and squeeze the juice into a bowl of powdered sugar to make the icing.

  We frosted the warm rolls, the aroma wafting through the kitchen like a bright orange scarf that loosely bound us together.

  An orange day, a happy day, a brand-new day in the secret language that only the three of us seemed to understand.

  “Mmmmm,” Daddy said, taking a bite of his roll. “Orange wakes you up, but cinnamon makes you remember. I guess you can’t have a future without a past.” The brightness started to dim.

  “The past is past, and nobody can change it. It’s what you do with your new day, Jack.” Gran looked at him seriously.

  “I know it will work out this time, Ma. I’m putting all the other stuff behind me. Right, Punkin?” he’d said.

  “Right, Claire?”

  Helen was almost shouting.

  “I heard you, I heard you,” I said.

  The orange band faded and then vanished. Gran had a vacant look about her again.

  But I felt calmer. Although I had a million other things to do, just being with Gran, slowing down, and sharing our special bond had helped. I hoped it had helped her, too.

  In the hallway outside the nursing care wing, we passed Sister Josepha, Helen’s teacher from grade school who was now retired. Sister was decked out in a mint-green blouse and a skirt that looked like a patchwork quilt. She had short, silver pixie hair and a medal of Saint Joseph around her neck. In fact, she looked better than Helen, who wore her
mom jeans and Fighting Irish sweatshirt, neither of which did her lumpy figure any good.

  “We’re looking for the Infant of Prague,” Helen said, out of the blue.

  Sister Josepha rolled her eyes in my direction and laughed. “You may not know this, Claire, but Helen was always the one who wanted to change the outfits on that little statue.” I must have looked blank again because she added, “The Infant of Prague is Jesus depicted as a toddler. We have that little statue perched on a marble stand somewhere.” Josepha looked up and down the hallway. “The cleaners must have moved it for some reason. Anyway, the colors of the Infant’s robes reflect the seasons of the Church. You know, red for Pentecost, white for Easter and Christmas, rose for Laetare Sunday, purple for Advent and Lent, and so on. Helen was always lobbying hard to change those little outfits.”

  “Aunt Helen lobbied to dress the Infant of Prague?”

  “Better than cleaning erasers from the chalkboard,” Helen said. “Unless you could clap them together and get chalk dust all over some kid you didn’t like.”

  “Oh, Helen.” Sister Josepha laughed. “You never change.”

  Helen grinned.

  Sister Josepha left us to our rambles.

  “I know it’s here somewhere,” Helen said as we slowly walked by the preschool rooms. “You can’t have a bunch of old convent nuns living together without that statue somewhere.”

  We didn’t find it, but it was so like Helen to try to turn our stroll with Gran into an adventure.

  On the way home, Helen said, “Mom seemed all right until she started talking about that orange stuff. What was that about, anyway?”

  “I remember Gran always made those orange cinnamon rolls that were so good.”

  Helen agreed. “They were good.”

  “Maybe she just imagined a happy time and that’s how she was trying to explain it.”

  Helen seemed to accept that explanation. “Mom always did have a vivid imagination.”

  Imagination and vision. I was beginning to appreciate those qualities more and more now that I was back home. Sometimes you had to look past what was and imagine what could be.

  At one time, you could head west from where we had been up on the convent hill to the Miami and Erie Canal. I imagine that in the early days of the canal in the 1820s, when boats were towed by mules and the pace of life was just as slow, Lockton had looked picturesque and bucolic. The lockkeeper’s cottage and a few farms on either side of the canal. But after the Civil War, the Machine Age finally arrived, mules were replaced by motors, and factories displaced the farms, taking advantage of the available waterpower.

  In the 1980s, the Machine Age went. It took the rosiest of rose-colored glasses to look past the vacant paper, shingle, and mattress factory sites now. These “brownfields” awaited federal cleanup money for asbestos and petroleum contamination. The huge Simms & Taylor complex was being demolished, brick by brick. The canal had become part of I-75.

  In comparison, blue-collar Millcreek Valley had given itself a much-needed makeover. It had always had a mom-and-pop, cottage-industry sort of downtown. Now it had a theme, one that would not go out of style—weddings. As we drove in companionable silence, we passed boutiques, florists, and travel offices. Luckily for all of us, here came the brides.

  The front of my bakery even looked like a wedding cake, or a massive old Victorian headboard painted white.

  “I won’t ask what your plans are tonight because I know you won’t tell me,” Helen said as she got out of the car. “Just don’t sit home by yourself and think about your old life in New York and what might have been. You can always come with your mother and me to the Legion.”

  I tried to edit my horrified expression, but I wasn’t quick enough.

  Helen grinned. “Gotcha!” she said, then got serious again. “She worries about you, you know.”

  I was going to respond, “When doesn’t Mom worry?” but that was childish. I smiled and shrugged. “I know. I’m okay. Really.”

  But really, I wasn’t. My showing up to watch the Super Bowl at Finnegan’s was going to be a game-time decision. Was I strong enough to brave the “Why is she here and not there?” stares from people I knew, but not well? Or even worse, was I strong enough to see Luke with someone else on national television? Was I strong enough to go to Finnegan’s and pretend my life was just fine, thank you very much?

  Yes, I was. I’d had years of practice already.

  By the time I was sixteen and Mom and I were living with Gran, we didn’t have a car anymore. My mother had to get a job and walked to work. I hiked up Benson Street hill to high school or got a ride from Gavin. But then I got my dream job at the Fairview Pastry Shop two towns away.

  After school, I would run down the hill, grab my bike, then pedal to work from Millcreek Valley through Lockton and on to Fairview.

  It was a mile and a half, but two worlds, away. Blue-collar Millcreek Valley to no-collar Lockton to white-collar Fairview.

  Fairview was all broad, treelined streets with gracious Queen Anne–style homes, many of them with carriage houses. Long ago, factory and mill workers may have lived in Millcreek Valley and Lockton, but the owners built their mansions in Fairview.

  Fairview households had maids and housekeepers, whom they often sent to pick up their bakery orders—miniature Danish, crinkle-top spice cookies, and rococo birthday cakes in a fantasy of roses, leaves, and borders piped with a frosting that tasted faintly of coconut.

  Early one Saturday morning in the pastry shop, right before Mother’s Day my senior year, people were standing in line and we were already on number sixty-two.

  “Claire, do you think you can wait on customers now?” owner Mrs. Merz had asked me in her typically passive-aggressive way. Hadn’t I just carried in trays of Danish and replenished the stack of bakery boxes? Wasn’t that me scrubbing out the icing that had stuck to the interior of the inwardly slanting glass display case? And before that, who took the phone order when she was busy with a customer? Didn’t I always do as she asked?

  I heaved an internal sigh and pulled the chain that changed the number on the old-fashioned sign, calling out, “Sixty-three!”

  I knew I looked flustered. My hair was pulled into a topknot and a few strands escaped over my ears and down my neck. I had on jeans and a T-shirt with a limp bakery apron in a washed-out brown and yellow sunflower print. I stuck out my lower lip to blow air upward and get the bangs out of my eyes. If I touched my hair with my hands, I’d have to leave the customer to go wash them and get another snide comment from Mrs. Merz.

  But I was in luck. A tall, muscular guy stepped up to the counter. “Well, it must be my lucky day,” he said in a deep voice.

  Startled, I looked into his green eyes, noticed the smirky grin, watched the way his sun-streaked light brown hair fell over his forehead.

  I kept staring, wide-eyed. I couldn’t speak.

  “Uh, I think I have an order to pick up. Davis.”

  I nodded and turned to look at the orders lined up on the shelves behind me. Davis. Davis. Davis. DAVIS!

  The Davis who threw six touchdowns to beat Millcreek Valley in last November’s game. Luke Davis. Preacher’s kid. The one all the guys talked about. Mr. Football himself.

  “Found it,” I said, trying to act normal, as if this kind of thing happened to me every day. “Let’s see, here. A loaf of buttercrust. Cinnamon-apple streusel coffee cake. A dozen Parker House rolls. Anything else?”

  He kept watching me as he paid and I gave him his change.

  “Will you be here next Saturday?” he asked.

  “I’m here every Saturday.”

  He winked at me and was gone.

  The next Saturday, the bakery wasn’t as busy.

  “If you want to sit down for a while, I can tidy up here and wait on customers, too,” I suggested to Mrs. Merz. She gave me a n
arrowed-eye look, as if she were searching for something to criticize but couldn’t find anything, took her coffee mug, and trudged back to her cluttered office.

  And just in time.

  “Don’t tell me. . . . Davis.” I smiled as he came up to the counter. I retrieved the order, along with a little white bakery box I had filled at home.

  “You just happen to be our ten thousandth customer,” I lied, “and this is our special thank-you.” I slid the bakery box across the counter to him.

  “Hmmmmm. Usually, I prefer to be number one, but I guess I can make an exception this time.” He grinned. “What’s in here?” He snapped the red-and-white-striped string on the white bakery box and opened the lid.

  A little greedy, too, I thought. Wanted to enjoy life now.

  He downed the cupcake in two bites—all moist devil’s food with a dark truffle center, spread with a white-chocolate-and-coffee frosting I made with confectioner’s sugar, the easy kind of buttercream. He grabbed a napkin to wipe the crumbs from his lips.

  “That was some cupcake, Cupcake.” And I knew I had gotten him right. Strong, dark, and handsome chocolate truffle—that masculine “shoulder to lean on” fix that women loved. Risk-taking devil’s food. Gregarious white chocolate, because it’s boring alone, but good with almost any other ingredient. And take-charge coffee.

  Yet in baking, as in life, proportion was everything. I may have gotten him right, but he had turned out to be Mr. Wrong.

  That night at Finnegan’s, I didn’t have to pretend alone. I had Roshonda, Mary Ann, Gavin, and Ben. Flat-screen televisions on every wall helped deflect any possible interest in Mrs. Luke Davis, runaway wife of a popular NFL quarterback who was a spectator at this year’s Super Bowl.

  Pitchers of beer foaming on every table also helped.

  I was getting a little peeved at myself for thinking this night was going to be all about me. So narcissistic.

  And then, all of a sudden, it was all about me. Luke’s famous grin flashed on the screen during the pregame show.