I pedal past Devonshire Estates, a development of cookie-cutter houses that were built on top of my grandparents’ farm back in the mid-2000s. My grandfather died just after I was born, and when the real estate developers came knocking, my grandma didn’t really have a choice. The farm where she grew up, where she raised my mom, was ripped right out from under her. She lived in the town houses until she passed away.
I stare at a golden retriever sunbathing in a sprawling backyard, wondering what part of the farm used to lie underneath him. Wondering if my grandma was just as devastated about losing the home she had grown up in as I am about losing mine.
Saint Michael’s Church comes swinging into view, with its stoic brick and stained-glass windows and ancient wooden door, and the playground next to it where I used to jump off swings and play tag and hang upside down on the monkey bars with Kiera.
Admittedly, I probably won’t miss this part of the ride all that much, since when I slow to a stop at a big red stop sign, I find myself trying, like I always do, to ignore the black sign looming in the distance just in front of me, HUCKABEE CEMETERY painted in thick gold letters.
I duck my head and pedal quickly past, the black sign and the wrought-iron gates whizzing by me as the center of Huckabee pulls me safely inside. Yet even when I can breathe again, there’s still a crater inside me that feels like I’ve left her behind. Again.
The business district, or, really, the heart of Huckabee, hasn’t changed a single bit in my entire life. Sure, a few of the buildings have been renovated and modernized, likely because they had lead paint from the fifties, but it still has the same feel, good and bad memories around every corner. Memories I don’t want to think about.
I see Judy through the window at Hank’s Diner, where my dad and I went almost every day for three months when we just didn’t have it in us to make dinner. She blows me a kiss, and I can already feel the bone-crushing hug she’ll give me when she finds out we’re selling the house. Judy is the cornerstone of Hank’s, having worked there since she was a freshman at Huckabee High. She’ll be seventy-five this fall.
The Coffee Bean is a few doors down, followed by a slew of other shops, like O’Reilly’s Used Books and a hardware store my dad frequents. I wave to Mr. O’Reilly as he unlocks the door to his shop, his carefully maintained mustache turning up at the corners as he gives me a smile, even though I haven’t set foot in there in years. The creaking wood floors and the smell of old books are still too much three years on.
As I pedal down Main Street, I watch the giant clock in the center of town tick slowly closer to seven forty-five, the morning sun already shining brightly in the sky behind it. I slide onto the sidewalk, hop off my bike, and walk it over to the rack at the bottom of the library steps. Taking my U-lock out of my bag, I glance up at the huge old building with its wide windows and century-old red brick. And sitting in stark contrast across the street from it is…
Nina’s Bakery. Relief washes over me at just the sight of it.
Whitewashed brick gives way to a large circular sign, spelling out the name in a loopy black cursive.
I catch a whiff of the heavenly pastry smell that forms a cloud around the building, luring passersby in for a donut or a cupcake or an apple tart made with fresh apples from Snyder’s Orchard just a few miles north.
I’ve spent so many days and nights here since Kiera’s mom quit her nursing job when my mom died, and decided to chase her lifelong dream of owning a bakery. “Live your life how you want to live it, ladies,” she said to me and Kiera after she signed the lease for the building, the two of us tucked safely under her arms. “Tomorrow is never guaranteed.”
I usually hate it when people say stuff like that, but not Nina. I click my lock into place, then jog across the street and push open the door. The bells jingle noisily as I slide inside.
Nina’s is one of my favorite places ever. Aside from the hundreds of baked goods, every corner of this place feels special. From the white walls we all spent hours painting, to the wooden industrial-style shelves my dad hung with practiced precision, to the kitchen in the back we slowly put together one oven and fryer at a time.
But more than that, it also feels new. Sometimes I feel like there’s not a single inch of space in this town that isn’t saturated with old memories. Nina’s is different, though. It’s a product of the after. It’s a blank slate. It’s safe.
The people inside the building help with that feeling too.
“Hey, Emily!”
I look up to see Kiera’s older brother, Paul, sitting behind the cash register, twirling a pen effortlessly in his right hand. His curly black hair is pulled back into a small ponytail; his nose piercing, a small diamond stud, glints brightly against his dark skin.
“Hey, Paul,” I say, unclicking my helmet, the door closing noisily behind me. “Any news from Kiera? Did she get the box?”
Every summer Kiera goes to Misty Oasis, a no-cell-phones-except-for-Sunday-evening, long-letter-writing, let’s-relive-pioneer-America style sleepaway camp. Nina went, and, in turn, Kiera’s gone religiously since she was eight and a half years old. This summer she was promoted from CIT to junior counselor, a job she is apparently taking very seriously.
“Nah. Haven’t heard from her.” He drops his pen onto the napkin he was doodling on. “She’s too busy making fires and, like, trying to make sure her campers don’t die.”
“That sounds awful,” I say, sliding behind the counter. Paul and I are decidedly not the camping type. We’ve each done a one-week stint at Misty Oasis and are still traumatized from it.
“What’d you put in it this year?” he asks.
I make Kiera a homesick box every single summer, filling it with small trinkets that make the month away a little easier. I tick the items off on my fingers as I list them all for him.
“Three packs of her favorite gum, a vanilla candle that smells just like your mom’s Very Vanilla Cupcakes, four different shades of red nail polish, the latest copy of Seventeen, and twenty-five notes, one for every day she’ll be gone.”
To be honest, I don’t think she gets homesick anymore, but it’s tradition.
And this year I’m extra homesick for her. Not only do I wish she were here to help with the move, but she’s the only one who stood by me when shit hit the fan with Matt.
I glance at the napkin in front of Paul and see he’s drawn an intricate machine, a cake sitting underneath what looks like a fancy waterspout. He’s a mechanical engineer in the making, working toward his BS at Carnegie Mellon, on the other side of the state.
“What’s this one do?” I ask, leaning over his shoulder to get a better look at it.
“Streamline cake icing.”
“You trying to put me out of work?” I say, nudging him playfully. Cake icing is my specialty. I always get tapped by Nina to do the birthday and graduation and wedding cakes. Yeah, it takes hours, but it’s worth it. There’s nothing more rewarding than seeing the designs in my head come to life.
“That’s the plan!” he says, giving me a wide grin. “Free you up to have the wild summer you’ve always dreamed about having.”
I roll my eyes at him. “Very funny.”
I head toward the back office to drop off my stuff, passing Nina on my way. “Hey, baby!” she says as she looks up from the dough she’s mixing. “How are you doing this morning?”
“Good! Only sixteen more days,” I say as I push open the office door. Sixteen more days until Kiera comes home from Misty Oasis and I won’t be all by myself, smack in the middle of the worst summer in history, rotating between packing and waiting for the junior prom aftershocks to settle. Which they aren’t. At all.
I hang my helmet in the closet under my self-decorated name tag, swapping my backpack for a black apron and my pink Nina’s Bakery hat. Tying my apron as I go, I head back out into the kitchen, eyeing the bowl of dough Nina is mixing.
“Are those—” I start to ask.
“You bet!” she says, pouring so
me more chocolate chips into the mixture. “Secret Ingredient Chocolate Chip Cookies!”
I steal a little bit of the dough, tasting the sweet, but not too sweet, chocolatey goodness. “Is it nutmeg?”
She gives me a warm wink. “Em, I told you it’s—”
“Love. Yeah, yeah, so you say. Nina, I know there’s something else in there!” I laugh, giving her a quick hug.
“Nutmeg?” I whisper to Paul as I pass him to make sure the napkin dispenser is fully stocked.
He snorts. “The woman gave birth to me, and it took me eighteen years and a blood oath to get ahold of that thing,” he says loudly, shooting a quick side-eye at Nina before lowering his voice to a whisper. “Think a little sweeter.”
We start to get everything set up for the morning rush while I tell him about bingo the night before, from Johnny’s and Blake’s arrival to the unexpected appearance of my friend group. I’m still not used to having Kiera gone, and I find myself holding out trays of donuts or a stack of bags to the open air, to the place where she should be, empty. We have to work twice as fast to get everything done without her, the entire morning flow thrown off.
The most important part of the preopening setup is making sure the donuts are on display, the pink Nina’s Bakery bags sitting poised just next to them. Nina is known for her donuts. We always sell out of them before noon, and on Saturdays we’re lucky to have any left by ten. She has to make an extra four dozen every Sunday so the churchgoers don’t forget their teachings at the door and square up near the glass display case.
“Everything ready?” Nina asks, wiping her hands with a towel as she walks to the front from the kitchen, her eyes scanning the pastries to make sure everything is neatly in place.
“Ready!” Paul says, saluting confidently, but sweat lines both our brows.
She rolls her eyes at him, the corner of her mouth twitching up into a smile as she pushes open the windows. Slowly, the scent from her Secret Ingredient Chocolate Chip Cookies wafts through the bakery and out onto the street. It’s like a siren’s song, drawing out the donut lovers and the baked-good regulars from every corner of Huckabee.
Practically the second she turns the sign to open, the front door of the library busts open and Mrs. McDonell, the head librarian, begins trotting eagerly down the steps for her two glazed. She’s surpassed being just a regular and is now a certified addict, pairing her Nina’s with a cup of coffee and a book every single morning. Somehow though, she’s still barely more than ninety pounds, her tiny, elderly frame all sharp angles and knobby knees.
The bells on the front door jingle as she comes in, and they don’t stop jingling for the next two hours straight. The noise is almost constant, as customer after customer comes inside, eagerly eyeing the display case. I work the cash register as Paul grabs the donuts and slides them into the pink bags, handing them out to everyone with a toothy smile. Nina sticks to the kitchens, churning out the goods.
It’s a blur of people from around town until the clock lands on ten, and I couldn’t be happier. I’m so busy moving at light speed, I don’t even have time to think about Matt or my friends or the move. Instead, I focus on the people right in front of me: Annie from Hank’s, Mr. Schmidt, the principal at Huckabee High. I do my best to put a name to every face, which always earns a warm smile and the clattering of change in the tip jar.
Luckily, it’s pretty easy to do when you’ve lived in the same small town your whole life.
When there’s a lull, Paul slides a stool over and sits down next to me with a long exhale, his shoulders slumping.
“Stop playing. You missed it,” I say, nudging him.
“Working with you? Absolutely not,” Paul says, grinning back at me.
The three of us, Paul, Kiera, and I, would work every weekend together during the school year before he went to college. On Sundays we used to plot some new variety of pastry or some funky cookie combination to cook up. If Nina taste-tested it and gave it the stamp of approval, she would put whatever we made out and let us keep all the profits from it. It was harder to find time to do it after he left, especially when the rush at Nina’s became more and more hectic with each year that passed.
The bells on the front door jingle, and we both look up, plastering artificial customer-service smiles on our faces. But I’m surprised when I see Blake standing in the doorway, a white Ron Jon T-shirt making her arms look even tanner than last night.
“Blake? What are you doing here?” I blurt out, my brain and my mouth working on two different wavelengths. Luckily, she cracks a smile. Her golden-streaked hair is pulled back into a ponytail, full and wavy and swinging gently as she moves.
“Nice to see you, too,” she says, closing the door carefully behind her. “I Yelped the best place to get a donut in Huckabee, and this was the only place for, like, twenty-five miles.”
“That’s almost true,” I say with a nod toward the window. “There’s a gas station about ten minutes down the road with a whole display case of them. I think they put new ones out once a month, just to keep them fresh.”
“Once a month? What am I doing here, then?” she asks, throwing her hands up with fake exasperation.
I laugh, quickly fixing my hair and smoothing out my Nina’s Bakery shirt as her eyes dart down to look at the cupcakes on the other side of the glass. I glance over and catch Paul looking at me, a faint smirk on his face.
I roll my eyes. With Kiera gone, he knows Blake is my one chance at having a friend this summer. There’s no need to rub it in.
“I think I’ll just take a glazed donut,” Blake says finally, both of our heads whipping back around to look at her. “Is that lame?”
“Nah,” I say as Paul dramatically pulls a single sheet of waxed paper from the box. “They’re the cornerstone of Nina’s.”
“You’re in luck!” Paul says from behind me. “You got the last one.”
He puts it carefully in a bag and holds it out to her. “I’m Paul, by the way,” he says when she takes the bag from his blue-gloved hand. “Brother of Emily’s best friend, the better-looking sibling, former resident gay of Huckabee.”
Blake laughs, her entire face lighting up in the morning sun, trickling in through the storefront window. “Nice to meet you. I’m Blake.”
She doesn’t even raise an eyebrow at his gay comment. It’s good to know she isn’t homophobic. It can be pretty hit or miss around Huckabee, but I guess where Blake grew up things are probably a little different.
“Are you here visiting?” he asks her.
She shakes her head, the bag in her hand crinkling noisily. “No, I just moved here with my dad.”
“Oh my gosh. I’m so sorry,” Paul says, shaking his head mournfully.
Paul is not a fan of Huckabee. Which is absolutely fair, because Huckabee has been really hard on him. He was always a little smaller, a little quieter, a little darker, and a little gayer than anyone at Huckabee High, and people weren’t shy about letting him know that. When he came home for Christmas break last winter with a boyfriend, it was like meeting an entirely different person. Like he came into his own the second he put his suitcase in the car and drove past the town limits. It’s honestly no wonder he drives back to visit his boyfriend every chance he gets.
Sometimes I wonder what that would be like. To go somewhere where no one sees someone else when they look at me.
“It doesn’t seem too bad,” she says, pulling her wallet out of her back pocket, her eyes flicking to me. “I mean, there are a lot of cows.”
I laugh as she pulls out a couple of ones, crisp and free of crinkles.
“How much for the donut?” she asks.
“Don’t worry about it,” I say, waving my hand at her. We get a free baked good of our choice every day, and I feel like being generous.
“For real?” Blake asks, surprised.
“Yeah.” I nod to Paul. “Think of it as an apology donut from all of Huckabee.”
“Thanks,” she says, smiling down at the bag.
“Don’t mention it,” I say with a shrug. She reaches out and puts the money in the tip jar. “I’ll see you in a few hours,” she adds as she heads for the door, flashing a big smile in Paul’s direction as she pulls it open. “Bye, Paul!”
“Bye! Come back soon!” he calls, waving until the exact second the door clicks shut. He lets out a low whistle as we watch her walk down the street, her outline disappearing around the corner and out of sight. “What is she doing stuck in a place like Huckabee? I mean, why on earth would Johnny Carter move back here?” He pulls off his blue gloves with a snap and tosses them into the trash can.
I shrug and reach out to adjust the stray napkins spilling out of the dispenser. “I don’t know. Something to do with her family.” At least that’s as much as my dad mentioned. He was predictably light on the details.
When I push a stray hair behind my ear, I realize he’s raising his perfectly even eyebrows at me. “Well, she definitely wants to be friends with you,” he says as he grabs the empty donut tray.
“What? No.” I shake my head. “She probably just wanted a donut.”
“Emily, come on. You know Nina’s Bakery sure as hell isn’t on Yelp. Nothing in this fart of a town is on Yelp,” he calls over his shoulder as he heads for the kitchen sink. “She definitely just came to see you.”
Huh, he’s… right. I glance out the window, at the corner Blake disappeared around, and wonder if that’s the truth. If this might not be the loneliest summer after all.
4
A few hours later I push open the door to my dad’s bedroom, lugging a big, empty cardboard box behind me.
Carefully, I creep across the space, a reflex from my usual secret trips in here. I close the distance to my mom’s closet door, and my hand reaches out to wrap around the silver door handle.
I’ve been putting this room off since the house went up on the market three weeks ago. I knew it would be the hardest one.
The Lucky List Page 3