Semi-Sweet

by Roisin Meaney

  She didn’t look behind her as she strode toward the door. Once again she’d let her mother get under her skin. She always swore it wouldn’t happen, and it always did. It was unfortunate that Fiona played bridge with Hannah’s mother, but it was hardly the end of the world. Relationships broke up all the time—Geraldine Robinson knew that as well as anyone—but Leah’s mother was determined to make a song and dance about it.

  The pregnancy of course had been a gamble, and Leah had hated lying to Patrick about the Pill not working, but it had paid off. He was with her now—and he was happy about the baby. He kept telling her how happy he was. Nothing her mother could say would change that, and in time she’d have to come around to the idea of being a grandmother.

  Leah walked quickly through Clongarvin’s busy lunchtime streets until she reached the pretty lavender-painted, window-boxed frontage of Indulgence. She let herself in and leaned against the door, breathing in the subtly scented air, her hands coming to rest on the stomach that was just beginning to swell.

  At ten minutes to five, Hannah untied her yellow apron and hung it on the blue, star-shaped hook behind the counter. She leaned wearily against the display cases and yawned as her mother counted the unsold cupcakes.

  “Twenty-seven,” Geraldine announced. “How many did you say you started with?”

  “A hundred and forty-four. My feet are killing me.”

  “So that’s…a hundred and seventeen gone on the very first day. That’s just wonderful.”

  Hannah smiled tiredly. “Not bad, I suppose.”

  Not all sold, some given away—a fair few given away—but still, not bad for her first day in business. People, quite a few people, had actually come into the shop and paid money for her cupcakes.

  Geraldine indicated the leftovers. “What do you want me to do with these?”

  “Bag them in assorted sixes and put them in that basket.”

  “Six times four is twenty-four; there’ll be three left over.”

  “You can bring them home.”

  Hannah emptied the money drawer—a few customers had remarked on it, and there had been lots of comments, too, about the chair on the wall—and bundled the cash into her satchel. Geraldine arranged the bags of leftovers in a green basket that announced, on another of Adam’s signs, yesterday’s bake—ALMOST AS NICE, HALF THE PRICE: 6 FOR €5.

  They mopped the floor and wiped down the shelves. They unplugged the kettle and switched the door sign back to SORRY, FRESH OUT OF CUPCAKES. They loaded the van with the trays, and they turned off the lights and slid down the security grille before locking the front door.

  And as they rounded the corner to get back to the van, they came face-to-face with Patrick Dunne, editor of the Clongarvin Voice.

  It was the first time Hannah had seen him since he’d walked out, just over a week earlier. His pale green tie was new. Her heart turned over as she took him in. She looked a mess—she must look a mess after the long day, in her flat black shoes and wide gray trousers and black top. The outfit she’d chosen so carefully for her first day in the shop felt terribly dowdy now.

  Her old brown satchel was slung across her body, not matching anything. No hint left, probably, of the lipstick she’d slicked on hours before—chewed off, no doubt, by nine o’clock. Her hair must be lying flat on her head, no time to do more than aim the dryer at it for half a minute this morning. And the skin under her eyes would be bagging, she was sure, with tiredness.

  Her cheeks prickled with heat. Great—a red face was all she needed to look her absolute worst.

  “Hannah.” Patrick’s smile was forced. “And Geraldine. How are you both?”

  He carried the briefcase she’d given him for his last birthday. He smelled the same. He was horribly hearty. He was nervous. They’d shared hundreds of nights, she’d lain in his arms so many times. They’d made each other laugh and cry. She’d thrown a bowl at him once. He’d switched to boxers for her and taught her to play chess. And now he was nervous and hearty.

  “Fine,” she told him. “We had a good day.” She was surprised at how normal she sounded.

  His polite smile remained in place.

  “Hannah’s shop opened today,” Geraldine said, her voice icy.

  “Yes,” he said immediately, “of course it did. It went well, I hope?”

  He’d forgotten. Hannah had been planning this for months, he’d heard her talking about it forever, and he’d forgotten. She didn’t matter to him anymore. Nothing she did mattered to him.

  She turned to her mother. “Let’s go.”

  “You’re in a hurry,” Patrick said, moving off. “Good to see you both. Take care.” And he was gone, his aftershave lingering.

  “Well,” Geraldine began, “he’s got some—”

  “Don’t,” Hannah begged, and her mother was silent.

  She drove to her parents’ house, where her father, who’d left work an hour early, was under orders to have the shepherd’s pie heated up by half past five. And somehow, miraculously, she managed to sit through the dinner she didn’t want, listening to her mother giving her father an account of the day. She managed to answer his questions and nod and smile in all the right places. Somehow she managed to hold it all together until she got home and closed her own front door.

  And then, before she’d taken off her jacket, she sank onto the bottom stair and put her head in her hands and cried bitterly at the thought that she’d been forgotten.

  “Bestseller so far?”

  “Chocolate-vanilla, easily.”

  “So you have those every day, as a staple. Write it down. Worst seller?”

  She thought. “Not sure…maybe forest fruits, or apple-cinnamon; I definitely had a few of both left over.”

  “So you only do those once in a while. Go on, write it down.”

  They were in Hannah’s kitchen. It was half past seven on a Friday evening, and pitch black beyond the big latticed window. Cupcakes on the Corner had been open for three days. Adam was making coffee, Hannah was scribbling in a notebook. Some woman was singing “Famous Blue Raincoat” on the radio.

  “Mam’s been brilliant,” Hannah said. “I don’t know how I’m going to manage on Monday when she goes back to Glass Slipper and I’m on my own. She welcomes everyone who comes in, makes sure they know I’m just starting off and that I bake everything myself. She practically gets them to sign a contract promising they’ll come back.”

  “Good. That’s our Geraldine.” Adam lifted the kettle off its base and poured water into mugs. “Now, are you making any money?”

  Hannah shook her head. “Hard to say for sure—I haven’t done a proper breakdown of outgoings and incomings yet—but I suspect I’m just about breaking even, if that.”

  Adam brought the coffee to the table. “Breaking even is fantastic. Time enough for profits. What you want to do now is keep your head above water.”

  “Well, I suppose I’m doing that, just barely. Nothing’s been disconnected yet, and no sign of a bailiff, and I haven’t gotten a bill in at least two days.” She closed the notebook and lowered her head onto the table. “But, boy, I sure am tired.”

  “Poor you.” Adam ruffled her hair. “I’d offer to help, but my cupcakes would close you down in a week.”

  “I’ve been making them in my sleep,” she mumbled. “Did I tell you? Every bloody night, as soon as I nod off. You think I’d get a bit of a break in my sleep. If I never saw another cupcake, I’d be happy.”

  “Well,” Adam said, selecting one from the plate that sat between them, “I’m still a big fan.” He peeled off the paper and bit into the soft beige sponge and coffee-colored icing, decorated with pieces of lavender angelica. “By the way,” he said, “I don’t think I told you—Nora and Jackson are officially over.”

  Hannah lifted her head. “Oh, Adam, you’re not serious?” She picked a piece of cherry from another cupcake. “I remember you saying they were having problems, but I didn’t think it was that bad.”

  He shr
ugged. “I wasn’t too surprised myself. Nora’s been hinting that things weren’t going well for a good while now.” He and his twin sister talked several times a week, computer to computer.

  “So they’re definitely splitting up?”

  “Yeah—she’s going to come home for a while.” He took another bite of his cupcake. “Pity. I liked Jackson.”

  Hannah sipped her coffee. Another relationship ended. “Is she terribly upset?” She wondered if Nora had been the one to finish it and guessed that she had.

  “Doesn’t seem too bad. She hasn’t said anything to the folks yet.”

  Since their retirement Adam’s parents had moved fifty miles away from Clongarvin, back to the tiny village where they’d both grown up and where Adam and Nora had spent all their childhood summers.

  “D’you think Nora will settle back in Ireland?”

  He shrugged again. “Dunno…hard to say. You never know with Nora.”

  “I forget how long they were married.”

  “Just over four years.” He drank coffee. “Ah, she’ll bounce back. My sister is nothing if not resourceful.”

  Hannah could think of plenty of words to describe Nora O’Connor (or Nora Paluzzi—wasn’t that her married name?) and “resourceful” wouldn’t have been the first to spring to mind. Adam’s sister had been a year behind Hannah in school and had hung around with girls who didn’t look twice at the likes of Hannah Robinson, since she wasn’t pretty or slim enough to interest them.

  Nora had her twin’s green eyes and russet curls, and there the similarity ended. She’d been spared his freckles, and her nose was smaller and her lips fuller. She was also half a head taller—and the last time Hannah checked, at least thirty pounds lighter—than her brother.

  Adam was perfectly presentable, though not even Hannah could call him handsome, but Nora had always been striking—and blessed with the confidence to make the most of her looks. She’d moved to the States a week after her eighteenth birthday, much against the wishes of her parents and without a single qualification. In almost fourteen years, she’d been back just a handful of times.

  Jackson Paluzzi, a pediatrician, was her second husband. Her first marriage, to an older university professor, had ended after less than a year. Whether by design or by accident, neither relationship had produced children. Hannah imagined that the news of another divorce wouldn’t go down too well with Nora’s parents.

  Adam drained his mug and stood up. “Better get off and let you make tracks for bed. You’ll be looking forward to a lie-in on Sunday.”

  “I sure will.”

  “What about coming out for an hour tomorrow night? A drink somewhere, just to relax you?”

  Hannah shook her head. “Thanks for the offer, but I already have a plan—hot bath, face pack, good book. If I have any drink, it’ll probably be warm milk.”

  “Just an hour,” he said. “Why don’t we check out that new wine bar?”

  “What new wine bar?”

  “Vintage, down by the quays. It’s only been open a couple of weeks, where Delaney’s Hardware used to be. Someone said there’s live music at the weekends.”

  “Delaney’s is gone?”

  Adam smiled. “You definitely need to get out more.”

  “Maybe…I’ll see how I feel tomorrow night.” She pushed her chair away from the table. “There’s something I haven’t told you,” she said, getting up.

  Adam was pulling on his leather jacket. “What?”

  “I met Patrick on Wednesday, on the way home from the shop.” She took their two mugs over to the sink.

  “You did? You never said. How was it?”

  “Not good. Awkward.” She turned on the tap. “He was so…formal, as if he hardly knew me. He’d forgotten that the shop was opening that day, can you believe it?”

  “Bastard,” Adam said lightly.

  “My mother was there, which I suppose was just as well.” She rinsed the mugs and put them on the drainboard. “I cried my eyes out when I got home.”

  “You know what?” Adam said. “That’s the worst over. The first time you meet them is the worst.”

  She took the tea towel from its hook. “I know…There’d been flowers delivered to the shop in the morning, and the first thing that occurred to me when I saw them was that he was having second thoughts and wanted to come back.” She tried to laugh. “How sad is that?”

  “Who were they from?”

  “Alice and Tom, sweet of them.”

  “All the very best with your new venture,” Alice had written, and Hannah had buried her face in the hothouse roses that smelled of nothing and swallowed her disappointment. “I try not to think about him, honestly, but it’s easier said than done.”

  Much easier said than done when she kept bumping into reminders around the house. Yesterday she’d thrown his half-full jar of Marmite into the bin. Last week it had been his prawns from the freezer. The handmade mug she’d brought him back from a trip to Dublin would be harder to let go.

  She took the unsalted butter from the fridge and left it to soften. She set her utensils and baking trays on the worktop, all ready for the early hours. “You know, I thought his timing was horrible—dumping me just before the shop opened—but imagine how much worse I’d feel if I weren’t so busy now. Maybe he planned it that way.”

  Up to her eyes in recipes and vanilla essence and poppy seeds and dried cranberries and chocolate chunks. No time to think about what he might be doing or whether he missed her at all. Asleep as soon as her head hit the pillow—which she’d moved to the middle of the bed.

  “I deleted his number,” she said quietly, “from my phone.”

  That had been hard. She didn’t want to think about that, about his name disappearing. She searched for something different to say. “I’m considering getting a cat,” she told Adam, filling the kettle again for her hot-water bottle, “to keep me company.”

  “What about getting a housemate,” he asked sternly, “to keep you solvent?”

  She sighed. “I know, I know. I must run the ad. I will, honest. Next week.”

  “Swear?”

  “Swear…maybe.”

  Apart from all the negative connotations of replacing Patrick, she still shrank from the idea of sharing her house with a stranger. She’d been lucky with Annie, the housemate she’d had before Patrick, but who was to say she wouldn’t end up with a monster this time around? Financially, though, she knew that it was unavoidable.

  Adam crossed the kitchen and kissed her cheek. “Right, I’m off. I’ll call you tomorrow evening to see if I can drag you out.”

  “Don’t hold your breath—I probably won’t go.”

  When he’d left, she took the hot-water bottle from its drawer and filled it. Not even eight o’clock and she was on her way to bed. At least it was dark—what would it be like in the summer, when she was going upstairs in broad daylight?

  Time enough to worry about that. She switched off the light and left the room and plodded upstairs.

  “It’s Leah Bradshaw.” Geraldine’s voice floated in from the hall as she hung her coat.

  Stephen didn’t turn from the computer. “What is?” he called back.

  Geraldine walked into the sitting room, rubbing her hands together. “God, it’s chilly out tonight. Leah Bradshaw is the girl Patrick left Hannah for.”

  Stephen looked across the room at his wife. “Who is she? Do we know her?”

  Geraldine poked the fire before tipping in coal from the scuttle. “I wish you’d keep this going when I’m out. She’s Fiona Bradshaw’s daughter.” She waited for a reaction and getting none, she added impatiently, “Fiona Bradshaw, who I play bridge with. You know her—she has some environment job with the town council. You met her at Aoife’s cocktail party in November. Tall, dyed red hair. Too thin. And she came here when I did the Alzheimer’s tea thing—she brought those orchids that died. I remember you asking her about them.”

  “Oh, yes,” Stephen said, knowing that it di
dn’t matter in the least that he had absolutely no memory of Fiona Bradshaw. “So it’s her daughter.”

  “And to think,” Geraldine said angrily, pushing the poker through the fresh coals, “that I supported that girl when she opened her salon. I paid good money for a manicure, and I wasn’t well out the door when one of my nails smudged; they weren’t dry at all. I should have gone back, only I didn’t want to embarrass her.”

  Stephen felt the conversation slipping away from him. “How are you so sure it’s her? Did her mother tell you?”

  Geraldine snorted. “Of course she didn’t tell me—she hasn’t come near me since it happened. Too ashamed of what her brazen daughter has done, no doubt. Maureen Hardiman told me, delighted to have a bit of scandal to report, as usual. Naturally, I let on I knew already.”

  “Good for you.” Stephen’s fingers crept back toward the keyboard, reluctant to abandon the first Scrabble game in ages that he was showing any signs of winning.

  “Small slip of a thing,” Geraldine said, settling onto the couch and picking up the remote control. “Don’t know what he sees in her. Dyed hair, of course, like her mother. Can you see Hannah ever having to dye her hair?” She pressed a button on the remote, and the television flicked on. “Oh, not that fellow again—he’s always on the Late Late. Must have written a book.”

  “Mm-hmm.” Stephen typed in “cousin” as quietly as he could, and his score jumped to 176.

  “I’ll have to tell her,” Geraldine said, still watching the television.

  Stephen swung toward her again. “Tell who? Hannah?”

  “Of course, Hannah. She’ll have to hear it from me.”

  “Why? Won’t that only upset her?”

  Geraldine looked at him, incredulous. “Stephen, do you really think she wouldn’t find out? In a place the size of Clongarvin, it’ll be all over town in no time. I’d prefer she heard it from me than from some gossip like Maureen Hardiman.”

  Hannah’s father returned to his Scrabble game. He’d long since given up trying to understand the workings of his wife’s mind. Far easier to figure out what to do with a q, a b, three e’s, and a couple of p’s.