Baking Up Love

by Simone Belarose

  I loved him dearly. He did the best he could and I knew that but there was no substitute for a mother. Some days I was keenly aware I had only half a parent. Not even a full single parent.

  In trying to be a bit of both, he had only been part of himself. I never knew that bright, adventurous young man that traveled the world and took crazy risks.

  I only ever knew the dad that made me hold his hand crossing the street until I was thirteen and even then he was recalcitrant.

  Sleep came easily that night. I’d cried myself hoarse, laughed until my stomach cramped, and hit Jemma over the head with a pillow hard enough to make it burst into a flurry of white down.

  The next morning came and I found my Mom sitting at the small round table near the window with the curtains pulled back just enough that she could peek out. We were up on the third floor so I didn’t think she was looking for somebody.

  The early morning light lit her face and in its soft glow, she looked decades younger. In that face I could find the mother I had lost. The beautiful woman that I wanted to be when I grew up before I understood what she had done. How sick she had been.

  It was amazing to think how little I grasped back then. How much bad shit had been normalized.

  Didn’t everybody have a mom that went out at all odd hours of the night like mine? The answer was, no. They didn’t. But a child doesn’t know that. They only know their little world.

  I stretched and shoved the covers off me. Jemma was still asleep, splayed out in such an odd angle that my back hurt sympathetically.

  “You’re up early,” I said by way of greeting. Things were still a little awkward. For all that she was my mom, she was still practically a stranger. I didn’t even know if she planned to hang around.

  I didn’t know if I was going to stay in Sunrise Valley anymore come to think of it.

  “I’ve always been an early riser.” She lifted her mug. “Want some?”

  Scrubbing the sleep out of my eyes I nodded and threw my legs over the edge of the bed. When I looked back, she was frozen with misty eyes that didn’t see me.

  When she noticed me looking, she quickly set her mug down and went to grab me a cup of coffee from the pot situated on the long dresser the TV was placed on.

  I had always thought about how weird hotel rooms were. And yet at the same time they seemed so completely normal since most of them were set up in a similar way. This one was particularly old, all the rooms had the telltale signs of the late nineties.

  Rotary phone on the nightstand, incandescent bulbs, an old tube TV. Most of the hotels I stayed in were relatively modern. Then again the agency often footed the bill for a suitably professional room when I went away.

  Mom crossed the room to hand me the mug.

  “Thanks.”

  “Do you mind?” she asked, indicating the empty space of the bed beside me. I shook my head and she took a seat. The bed barely moved. She weighed almost nothing. Once I had gotten a good look at her and she told us about the addiction, I wondered if she was still using.

  And then when I got over the snap judgment and listened to her story, I worried she was dying of some horrible illness and this whole thing was about making amends before her death.

  I’d get to know her, maybe even forgive her and find a way to love her just in time to bury another parent. I pushed the thought away, I should give her the benefit of the doubt.

  “How do you feel?” she asked, holding her own mug in both hands.

  I set the mug in my lap and stared at the dark liquid. My heart seized with a pang of longing for Thomas. Even after he’d hurt me, I missed him. I wanted him back. At that moment, despite my mom and sister there, I never felt more alone.

  It was the first morning in a long while that I had woken up without him. Without his strong arms around me, his sculpted muscles at my back. The ridge of his manhood pressed against my ass. A small smile curved my lips at the memory of how I could wake him up by getting him hard, just a little wiggle was all it took…

  I shoved hard at the thought. Put it into a box and locked it.

  “I don’t know, Mom.” I heaved a deep sigh, part longing, and part regret. The sad thing was that if he came through the door that moment, I would take him back. I needed him on some fundamental level and like an addict I was ready to take any abuse so long as he stayed in my life.

  That wasn’t the person I wanted to be.

  “That’s understandable. You’ve been through something pretty hard.” She paused a moment to sip her coffee and maybe to consider her words carefully. “Are you going to talk to him?”

  “Why would I do that?” I countered.

  She lifted her shoulders and let them fall like she gave up the motion halfway through. “Relationships are difficult and life is often hard and unfair. We owe it to each other to talk it out.” Her eyes gazed into her mug as if she could see something I couldn’t. “It’s what I had wished I’d done with your father.”

  I looked into my own mug, thinking of Thomas’ dark eyes. Wondering what he was doing now. Was he still with that girl? Was he opening the bakery? I didn’t voice any of that. “He would have forgiven you.”

  Mom looked up, slightly startled then she looked down into her mug somehow sadder than before. “You don’t know that.”

  “I do.” I reached out and put my hand on her long sleeve. “He never remarried, never even dated again. He loved you.” Like I love Thomas, I realized.

  “He was a better man than I deserved.”

  “He was better than a lot of us deserved,” I added, hoping to take the sting out of the words by rubbing her arm.

  It was true. He was better than she deserved, but he loved her and it should have been his choice whether he wanted to stay with her. She had no right to take that from him. From all of us.

  “So, are you?”

  I worried the edge of the blanket with my free hand, tugging at the fuzzballs there.

  “Claire?”

  “I heard you. I’m thinking.”

  “Think any louder and you’re going to wake your sister,” she said with a wry smirk quickly hid by a hasty sip from her mug.

  “It’s not that easy. He cheated on me. He broke my trust.”

  Mom reached across me and set her mug on the nightstand near me and half-turned to face me, one leg curled up on the bed. “Trust is not what most people think it is. It’s not some chain that once a single link is broken the whole thing is useless. Trust is a living, breathing thing. It breaks, you rebuild it strong, it breaks again, and you make it stronger.”

  I gave her a rather dubious look.

  “Or not,” she said with a manufactured shrug. “You can choose to end it because of one night’s indiscretion or you can be the bigger person and talk about it. Maybe there’s more to the story than you know. It was dim, you said yourself, you could have seen something that you just assumed was the worst-case scenario. In the end, this is a choice. It’s not about Thomas, sweetie. It’s about you.”

  “I don’t follow, how is this about me? All of it’s about him and how he could do this to me, to us. I love him, Mom. I wish I didn’t but I still do. I knew he’d end up breaking my heart. Knew it would end this way because nothing good ever comes of giving yourself wholly to one person. It’s just asking to be hurt. But he did the hurting. Not me. This is about him.”

  A small, sad shake of her head. “No, sweetie. It’s about what kind of woman you want to be. Do you want to be somebody who forgives people who make mistakes, who are human?”

  “Of course I do, but this is different!”

  “How is it different?”

  And just like that, I saw what she was doing. Watched how she gingerly took me by the hand and led me to the conclusion she wanted me to see like it was some wildflower in the field.

  The words fell from my lips like stones. “Because it happened…to me.”

  Her hand came out and pet my hair, smoothing it to my head. “My sweet girl…” I never knew ho
w much I craved a mother’s touch. I just laid my head down in her lap and cried as quietly as I could while she stroked my hair and murmured reassurances to soothe me.

  20

  Thomas

  Early that morning before work we went back to the park where Sam camped, packed up her tent and hauled everything back to my place. Which would have been a lot easier with a car and two working arms.

  I thought she had a car. In fact, I specifically remembered an old rusty VW Kombi. One of those quintessential hippie cars from the sixties she’d found somewhere.

  I could only guess she’d lost it somehow.

  While Sam opened the bakery, I headed to the clinic to get my arm looked at. Turned out, the wound was shallow enough that it only needed a few wound closure strips and a large piece of gauze with antibiotic ointment.

  Try as I might, I couldn’t think of a way to explain to Claire what really happened. I was coming up blank.

  There were no answers in the morning. None at lunch. And none by the time I sat dejected at the dining room table in my apartment while Sam cooked the only meal she knew how.

  “I know it’s not fancy like your normal stuff, but you can’t beat a classic.” She ruffled my hair and set the plate of grilled cheese in front of me with a small bowl of steaming tomato soup. Sam plopped in the chair opposite mine and tried her best to give me a cheerful smile.

  It didn’t work the way she intended but I appreciated it nonetheless. I’d been pretty down since I couldn’t find a way to fix things. I didn’t even know if Claire was in Sunrise Valley anymore. For all I knew she could be back in New York.

  There was a life waiting for her back there. One I noticed she had been suspiciously silent about what she was going to do. I didn’t want to push her, but the longer her vacation lasted the more concerned I became. I wanted to stay. This was my home, or so I thought.

  But I would have gone anywhere she was because what I had begun to understand was that Sunrise Valley wasn’t my home. Claire was. And no matter where I went, so long as it was with her I would be happy.

  Sam had watched me like a hawk all day, there was something protective in her sidelong glances and constant excuses to go out of her way to be around me. Had I not known how worried she was about me, I might have thought she was into me.

  Rather than leave at six or seven as she usually did, she stayed with me until closing. Following me like a shadow from place to place as I shuffled about doing the rote tasks I knew by heart.

  Her spoon clinked against the sides of the bowl as she stirred around the ruby liquid. “You still do that running stuff?” she asked trying to catch my eye with her blue gaze.

  Of course I did, and she knew it. It was how I had found out Sam was homeless and sleeping in a tent. There’s no way she already forgot. “I do.”

  “Think you could teach me?”

  That got my attention. As relatively in shape as Sam was, it was almost entirely due to genetics. She definitely had no intention of working hard physically if she could avoid it. It was kind of funny the lengths she’d go to just to avoid it.

  The fact that she was asking me about it, not only asking but wanting to learn meant she was really trying to reach me. To connect with me about something I was relatively passionate about.

  “About thirty minutes after dinner we could go out if you like.”

  She bit her lip and gave me a nod.

  I must have really been worrying her if she was willing to go on a run with me. It made me miss Claire and our runs together. She was one of the few people I’d met that could keep pace with me. We didn’t talk on our runs most of the time, both of us put in our earbuds and ran to our favorite music.

  It was the company that we both enjoyed. Knowing that I had somebody by my side the whole way was a comfort I hadn’t known I was missing out on until then. Now I realized it was gone all over again.

  Sam tried a few more times during dinner at half-hearted conversation, but I couldn’t rouse myself enough from my depression to engage with her. Eventually, she let it rest and we ate in silence.

  While I was clearing up the plates I watched her. Saw the way her shoulders sagged. I felt like such an asshole. She had her own problems she was dealing with. She had only recently opened herself up to me when all my drama unloaded in her lap. It wasn’t fair.

  So when we were lacing up our shoes, getting changed into our running clothes, I put on my best face and tried to remember that I wasn’t the only one going through something here.

  Sam, of course, didn’t have any workout clothes. Instead, she wore a shirt and booty shorts because she only had jeans and yoga pants, neither I warned her, were very good for what we were going to do.

  I made a mental note to make sure she got some more clothes.

  We went through the various stretches, most of which Sam was barely able to do. By the time we were done with the warm-up, Sam was practically wheezing. I could tell from the look in her eyes that she was already having serious doubts about this.

  “We’ll go easy,” I told her as I passed the blue and silver bike Claire had gotten me. It was a replacement for the one she’d ran over when she came back to Sunrise Valley.

  She’d been so afraid of love, of rejection and ultimately the betrayal she thought I was guilty of now, that she’d broken things off with me before they’d gotten started.

  In the end, she had realized she was worthy of love. She chose to be vulnerable and in love than be safe without it. I couldn’t help but wonder if she was regretting that decision now.

  The bike wasn’t what was important, though it was a nice touch. What had been important was that she was willing to declare her love for me openly, in front of dozens of strangers.

  The image of her standing there, rain-soaked in the middle of the crowded bakery still made my heart swell. But now it only made my current predicament all the more painful.

  I pushed the thought out of my head. I couldn’t let myself go down that road right now. I needed to clear my head.

  We left the apartment and headed out onto a Third Street. “Just a nice walk to start with and then we’ll pick it up from there.”

  Sam had her hands on her hips. “I’m ready doughboy, gimme your worst.”

  “I’m not going to be responsible for giving you a coronary,” I told her. “That’s the problem with people and exercise. They want to go all out the first time, then they feel like their whole body is broken and never do it again. I’m going to instill running as a healthy habit in your life if I have to die trying.”

  “Ugh, did I ever tell you how much I hate running?”

  “Many times.”

  “Good, then you won’t mind me repeating my complaints. You know, since you’re so hard-up to teach me and all.”

  Heaven, help me.

  Despite her constant complaining, Sam did put in a serious effort. We reached the park at a slow jog. Her cheeks were puffing out with each breath. She’d stopped complaining, and that most of all told me that she was hitting her limits.

  For me, that was my favorite place to be. Where the only things I could think of was putting one foot in front of the other and breathing. It was closer to controlled falling than actually running at that point. It was my form of meditation.

  We pulled up a few dozen yards into the park and slowed to a walk. “Here, twist like this and lift your head up, don’t lower it or you’ll have a harder time breathing.”

  Sam shot daggers at me with a look but did as I instructed. Her labored breathing eased and the pinched look on her flushed, sweat-slick face vanished. “Shit, that really helps with the stitch in my side.”

  “It’ll get better if you work through it.”

  “If I work through it anymore, you’ll have to carry me on your back.”

  “You’ll like this next part,” I said motioning to the water fountain just off the paved trail. “We’ll grab something to drink and head back. You did really well today. I knew you could put in the effo
rt if you had the mind. I’m proud of you, Sam.”

  The emotions played openly across her face, I think she was too tired to put up much of a front. She swelled a little with pride, her back straightened and her shoulders pulled back. She walked a little taller.

  It reminded me of a stray cat that used to come around my childhood home sometimes. It’d come up for a pet, clearly love the attention and then out of nowhere start hissing and try to claw my hand off.

  Sam reminded me of that cat. She enjoyed the praise and attention, the love given, but for some reason I could never quite figure out she didn’t want to enjoy it.

  Tucking a strand of blonde hair behind her ear she leaned down to drink from the fountain. It was one of the better public works in my opinion and during the heat of summer, it was really nice.

  Normally I’d have to bring a bottle which was awkward to jog with for any length of time but with these, I had a steady supply of water every thousand feet or so. Provided I stuck to the paved trail.

  I leaned down to the taller adult fountain of the two, noticing with a smirk that Sam had automatically chosen the smaller child’s fountain because it was more her height.

  Once we were done we headed back at a slower pace. The street lamps were already lit. Glowing warmly in the darkness to light our way home. I marveled at the way I felt. Even though I hadn’t exercised nearly as hard as I usually did, it still changed me.

  I didn’t know if I would find an answer on how to patch things up with Claire but I no longer felt like it was impossible. It was a problem that could be solved if I just attacked it from the right angle.

  But first, since Sam had helped me I ought to return the favor. She was going through her own problems and I’d be a poor friend if I ignored her now.

  “So,” I said lacing my hands behind my head and staring up at the cloudy night sky. Every so often the glittering stars peeked out to check in on the valley below. “Are we going to talk about it?”

  “Talk about what?”