Sweet Expectations (A Union Street Bakery Novel)

by Taylor, Mary Ellen

  “It won’t happen again, Ms. McCrae.”

  “Thanks, Sandy.”

  I hung up and, sighing as I stood, my gaze settled on Jenna’s recipe box. Hadn’t I left that with Rachel? She must have brought it back up last night. Lately I slept like the dead, so I could easily have missed her.

  Picking up the box, I thumbed through the cards. Rachel had mentioned Dad had old bakery records. As much as I didn’t want to think about Jenna, she kept creeping back into my thoughts.

  “So much work to be done, and I want to play history detective.” But then what could it hurt to carve out a half hour. I’d take a peek at the records and return to work.

  Downstairs, I checked in with Jean Paul, waved my cell as a signal I could be reached by phone. He held up his finger as he drove the drill deeper into a stud, halting when he’d punched through the wood.

  He removed his finger from the trigger and the drill went silent. “My friend Gus has wine.”

  “Wine?”

  Jean Paul pushed back a thick lock of dark hair with his typical must-I-explain-again glance. “Gus. He owns a restaurant that is not to be. He has lots of wine. We can buy it from him, and we can sell the wine at the bakery.”

  Right. Gus. “I don’t have much cash.”

  “He will sell the wine to us for three dollars a bottle. We can sell it for fifteen dollars a bottle.”

  “Nice profit margin. How many bottles does he have?”

  “One thousand.”

  “Three thousand dollars.” A sum once insignificant was now a fortune.

  “He will take half now and half in a month.”

  “He is that desperate?”

  Jean Paul reached in his back pocket and removed a cigarette pack. “Oui.”

  “And the basement could be a wine cellar?”

  “Oui.”

  “I’ll need shelves.” My mind played with the possibilities as it added and rearranged numbers.

  He shrugged. “Of course. Wine must be stored on its side.”

  If I bought the shelves, I could do them on the cheap. And a wine cellar would set us apart. Bread, wine, and maybe cheese. It was a risk, but a risk with a high payout. “I’ll do it. But it will have to be half now and half in sixty days. It will take me time to get a liquor license.”

  He nodded. “I will tell him.”

  “And he delivers?”

  “I will ask.”

  “Okay.” A little deeper in debt, I headed out the front door to my parents’ house. “Have you seen Rachel?”

  “She went for a walk.”

  “Where?”

  “I am not in charge of her.”

  No doubt she needed a break, a day to breathe and regain her footing. Fair enough.

  My folk’s town house was next door to the bakery. Real estate in Old Town Alexandria had remained high despite the economy, but my folks had been in the neighborhood over forty years and thirty years in this house. When Dad pitched the idea of buying the house it had been cheap, but it had been a real reach for my folks. Dad had had to do some fast talking to get Mom to agree to the purchase. Because of his risk, they were sitting on some very pricey real estate.

  Let’s hope Gus’s wine would do the same for me.

  I climbed the front steps of their narrow brick townhome outfitted with wrought iron window baskets filled with red geraniums. The house had been built in the 1820s by a sea captain who’d made his money trading spices and slaves. The windows, original to the house, had a beveled wavy look that added a misty, watery quality. I dug my keys out of my pocket and opened the front door. Quickly, I moved to the alarm and punched in the year of Margaret’s birth—my parents’ universal security code. I’d tried to get them to vary the code, but the times we’d tried they’d forgotten the code and had to call me to help them reset it. I’d given up and reset them all back to Margaret’s birthday.

  The entryway was long and narrow and cut through the center of the house. Immediately in front of the door a slender, tall staircase climbed to the second and third floors. The walls, trimmed with waist-high wainscoting, were painted a creamy white and extended a good twelve feet. Pocket doors separated the hall from the first parlor. With an eye always on resale, Dad and Mom had chosen simple classic colors and finishes. However, when it came to furniture they chose what they liked. So the fireplace had been restored with a sleek marble and the floors were a light pine but the furniture was a couple of decades-old La-Z-Boys, end tables piled high with magazines, and a very wide-screened television.

  I climbed the stairs to the second floor and glanced in my parents’ room. Mom and Dad slept in a four-poster bed that had belonged to my dad’s parents. Mom rarely made her bed, the exception being when they had company or she was on vacation. Mom had a fear of dying on the road, and the idea of everyone tromping through her house and seeing an unmade bed was too much for her. She wanted her last impression to be a good one.

  I moved to the end of the hallway and opened the door leading to the attic. Thankfully it was a walk-up attic, so no pull-down rickety stairs. I switched on the light and climbed the roughly hewn stairs.

  Dad had relocated the old bakery files to his attic about twenty years ago so that he had more room in his bakery office, which I was now having removed so we could add freezer space.

  Halloween and Christmas decorations crowded the right side of the attic. My mother’s favorite holiday adornments included a light-up snowman (with a bad right arm), a dozen careworn wreaths with red bows, assorted lights, and electric white candles for each of the town house’s windows.

  Dad had commandeered the left side of the attic, arranging his bakery files neatly in metal file cabinets. Dad had always been a good record keeper/historian of the Union Street Bakery, and as he’d gotten older the past drew him more and more. He’d talked about writing a book about the bakery’s history but so far had not been able to sit still long enough to write the first page.

  This early in the day, the attic temperatures were bearable, but by noon, the heat would be unmanageable. And if I’d waited until late July, heat plus the kid would have made this outing impossible.

  Head bowed so I didn’t bump into the rafters, I moved past the file cabinets designated for the 2000s, past the nineties, eighties, and then skipped quickly to the forties. The deeper I traveled back in time, the less space was dedicated to files. I knew if Dad had been alive one hundred years ago, he’d have saved every scrap of paper connected to the bakery. He grumbled often enough that his ancestors hadn’t been the best archivists.

  Like me, Dad favored organization because it gave him a sense of control. My birth mother had abandoned me at age three, and his father had died suddenly when he was fourteen. Both of us suffered a loss that ran so deep, we’d convinced ourselves if we were organized and orderly we could control the universe. Of course, neither of us had been widely successful. Dad had a heart that wouldn’t tick much longer, and I was underemployed and pregnant.

  I found the drawer marked 1940s in the very back row. My grandfather would have kept these records. After this file cabinet there were only two more. The first one hundred years of the bakery garnered three cabinets, whereas the subsequent fifty had twelve. I glanced back toward the front to the five empty cabinets Dad had delivered weeks ago. These were going to be my cabinets. He’d anticipated I would be as dedicated a recorder as he. And honestly, he was right. I’d amassed more files in the last two months than Rachel and Mike did in their seven years of running the bakery.

  With a hard tug, I pulled open the top file drawer. The marker read January–December 1940. I wasn’t sure when Jenna came to work at the bakery, but her last recipe card was dated 1944.

  These files, kept by my grandfather, were dusty and brittle. The handwriting on the tabs was bold, thick, and impatient. I understand impatient. Seems a baker is always stealing time.
Time at the desk keeping records is time away from production, and no production means no money.

  I pulled the first dozen files and moved back to the attic steps where the light was better and the air a touch cooler.

  Smoothing my hand over the first file, I opened it. I was expecting to see the files and forms my dad used. Taxes, business license. But the first page contained a bill of sale for flour: forty pounds at twenty-five cents per five-pound bag. There were more receipts, and I marveled at the cost of butter, eggs, and sugar. There were ration books that my grandmother, like the wartime women, used to buy precious items such as sugar and butter. As a baker’s wife, she’d have enjoyed extra rations through the business. By the end of file one all I’d gained was a lesson in inflation. Digging through the next three or four more files I found letters from my grandfather, a bank loan agreement to pay for the oven we used today, and information about local shopkeepers and merchants. But there was no mention of employees.

  I neatly stacked and returned the files to the cabinet before grabbing more files to be searched page by page. As I went through the pages I imagined the grandfather I never knew. The bread, his customers, and the seasons ruled his life as they now directed mine. My father said his father had had a beautiful singing voice and customers marveled at his talent. Grandfather McCrae had dreamed of singing in New York on a grand stage. My father had a tin ear and his dreams were of joining the army and flying planes. Both had surrendered dreams for the bakery.

  My dreams had changed over the years. First it had been college and then a master’s. Then a top job. Then to make big bucks. And then, well . . . since my return to Alexandria, my dreams had ceased to matter. Maybe one day I’d make new ones.

  Maybe.

  Or was I going to be like my father and sacrifice the rest of my life for the bakery? And what about the kid? Was he going to grow up here with a mom frazzled by lack of sleep, shaky finances, and long hours behind the retail counter? I didn’t exactly yearn for a return to finance. The money was good but lately the idea of getting on a plane in a suit didn’t thrill me so much. But the bakery wasn’t enough.

  “Damn.”

  I opened the last set of files dated 1943 and discovered the first set of employee files. My grandfather notes he’s advertising for new employees, a clerk to run the front counter: Clean, reliable, good with people.

  There were no applications, only names with notes on a blank page. Christopher is too brash. Rosa is too short. Willa—my wife doesn’t like her. And finally Jenna. A pleasant girl, nice smile, can bake. There is a check beside her name. This was my first bit of information on Jenna.

  Pleasant, nice smile, and can bake.

  I kept digging through the papers and found a black-and-white picture of six women and my grandfather. My grandfather’s hair is dark and his body lean and fit. He’s holding a plate of cookies and grinning at the camera. All smiling, young and slim, each girl wears a skirt dipping below the knees, a sweater, socks, and dark shoes. The girls have their arms linked together. A USO banner hangs in the Union Street Bakery window and snow on the ground suggests it’s winter. I leaned in and studied the smiling faces. It wasn’t hard to spot Jenna. She is the third from the left.

  In this image her uniform hugs a narrow waist. Her face is slimmer than I remembered so I pulled the other picture of Jenna from my pocket. The first image, from the recipe box, appears to have been taken after this newly discovered image. The group photo of the girls taken in January and the picture of Jenna and the soldiers snapped later in spring. In the spring photo Jenna’s face has definitely filled out.

  “Working in a bakery is hard on your waistline.”

  For the first time I moved my hand to my belly, which now strained the snaps of my pants. Weeks of telling myself I’d put on weight because of the bakery seemed absurd. For a moment I kept my hand there, still wondering if I’d feel a flutter or a kick. But the kid was still. Definitely not going to move until he was good and ready. Stubborn. A chip off the old block, I thought with a bit of pride. Gordon had admired my stubborn streak.

  Pushing aside a jolt of sadness, I focused on the photo’s discovery. I returned to the cabinet, hoping to find some other scrap of the woman who’d hiden her recipes in the wall.

  But a search of the entire decade reveals no more details. Jenna appeared twice. Once in the form of a scrawled note: A pleasant girl, nice smile, can bake. And in the photograph. Then she vanishes as if she’d never been at the bakery.

  I fixated on the changes in her body from winter to spring. I didn’t have hard and fast dates but I was guessing they were taken about four months apart. Four months. In my case a time of great, great change.

  For reasons I cannot explain, as I looked at the spring image I got the whisper of an idea. At first I brushed it away as nonsensical. But the more I stared the deeper its roots grew.

  Jenna was pregnant.

  Or was she? Or am I looking for a kindred spirit?

  The assumption of her pregnancy opened a host of questions for me. Was she married? Who was the baby’s father? Was he one of the soldiers in the spring picture? What became of Jenna and the baby? The baby would be close to seventy now.

  I wished Margaret were in town to do her historical-digging magic. She’d take a name and a photo and if given a couple of days would unearth all that had been written about the person.

  What would Margaret do? WWMD? Assuming Jenna was pregnant and the baby was born at the end of 1944 and the baby was baptized, I could check the newspaper. Birth records. Church records. The 1950 Census records.

  “All right, Jenna, let me see what I can find out about you.”

  * * *

  “What do you mean there is a problem?” Five minutes back at the bakery, and I had trouble.

  Jean Paul pulled a cigarette packet from his breast pocket, caught my irritated glare, and he tucked it back in his pocket. “The wiring in this place is ancient. I will need to do more to bring it up to standards. And I am worried about the floorboards and whether they can support the freezer.”

  Dollar signs danced in my head. After leaving Mom and Dad’s I’d driven to IKEA and purchased shelves for the basement winery. The more I thought about the addition of wine and cheeses, the more I liked it. The profit margin on Gus’s wine, if I could survive the cash outlay, would be tremendous and might enable us to come out of this renovation a bit ahead of the game. “How much and how long?”

  He shrugged. “A thousand for the wiring and the floor.”

  “Can you be very specific? I’m counting pennies here.”

  He sniffed. Shrugged. “It is hard to tell now.”

  “Why? You said you’ve done this before.”

  “It’s an old building. There are always surprises.”

  Dad had always said when you opened up an old building you never knew what you were going to find. I’d been hoping we’d catch a break.

  “I need this bakery open and running in eleven days. If I am closed longer I will lose money I do not have. And I got a call from your pal Gus. He’s headed this way with a thousand bottles of wine in two days.”

  Jean Paul ran the unlit cigarette under his nose, inhaling the tobacco. “It will all come together. Do not worry.”

  Easier said than done. This bakery supported Rachel and her girls, but it also had to feed the kid now. It had to make it.

  “Jean Paul, you are going to get this job done. On time. And on budget. Figure out what must be cut from the budget to make this work.”

  “Of course.”

  “That’s all you have to say?”

  He rolled the unlit cigarette between his fingers. “What more is there?”

  Clenching and unclenching my teeth, I held on to my temper as it struggled to break free. “Your answers are too quick and easy for me. I want more thought, more anguish.”

  He arched a brow. �
��Americans love their drama.”

  “The French have had their share.”

  He shrugged. “I do not have time for this. I have work.”

  “Right.”

  Jean Paul was a mystery to me. Not much riled him. He was even philosophical about my smoking ban as long as he could retreat to the alley for his smoke.

  Jean Paul turned back to his wires threaded through the exposed studs. “Leave.”

  My skin bristled. “What?”

  “There is no work for you here now and the stress is not good for you or the baby.”

  My heart pounded in my ears. “The what?”

  He looked back at me, an eyebrow cocked. “Please.”

  A trio of arguments elbowed their way to the front of my brain, but logic quickly cast them aside. What am I going to say? “Is it that obvious?”

  “To me, yes.”

  “Am I getting fat?”

  He hesitated as if sensing he’d entered a minefield of fat questions. “There is a glow.”

  “A glow?” Artful dodge.

  “Of course.”

  I’d never thought I’d had any kind of glow. Jaundiced or green around the gills, yes. It’s nice to think I’m glowing around someone. “Yeah, well don’t tell anyone. At least for now.”

  “Don’t tell me. Tell your belly.”

  “I am getting fat!”

  Again he weaved out of the loaded question’s path. “No. Now go.” He mumbled in French and waved me away.

  “Fine.”

  Outside the bakery the warm afternoon air greeted me with a soft breeze. With a queasy stomach refusing to let me paint or assemble shelves, I cut across Union Street toward the meandering waters of the Potomac River. The waters were offset by the clear blue sky stippled with clouds.

  The tourism season was in full swing and the bike and walking paths along the river were growing congested. As a kid I didn’t like the summer season, hating to share my city with strangers. But now when I saw the buzzing streets I thought of income for the bakery. The more, the merrier. My regret was that the bakery wasn’t open.