by Shirley Jump
Maybe she was trying to hold on to the magic her grandmother had seemed to embody.
Now Bridget stood on the sidewalk outside Charmed by Dessert and inhaled the familiar, sweet scent of vanilla. It seemed to fill the very air around the little shop, like some confectionary version of the cloud over the Addams Family’s house.
She hadn’t been here in three years, but everything looked just as it had before. Charmed by Dessert had sat in the same location in downtown Dorchester for three generations, a converted home on a tree-lined block. It was housed in a small, squat white building topped with a bright pink and yellow awning, flanked by a florist on the left and an ever-rotating selection of lawyers and accountants who rented the space on the right. The street was peppered with old-fashioned streetlamps and wrought-iron benches beside planters blooming with flowers.
Once upon a time, Bridget had thought she would work here until she died, side by side with her grandmother, her sisters, and her mother. Baking pies and frosting cakes and sifting flour into clouds. But then Gramma had died, and Bridget had met Jim and—
Everything had changed.
Bridget had taken a job writing a food column for a local paper, but it wasn’t the same as working here. Not at all.
The small silver bell that had once sat on a shelf in Gramma’s hutch tinkled as Bridget opened the door and stepped inside. Nora looked up from the tiered cupcake display she was refilling, and her brows lifted in surprise.
For a second, Bridget expected to see Abby behind the counter. But Abby had quit the family—and quit the bakery. She was working at a Williams-Sonoma at the mall, the last Bridget had heard. She used to think Abby was her best friend, but the scene on her wedding day and the ensuing three years of silence said differently.
All these years, she had kept Abby’s secret from the rest of the family. And in doing so, she’d lost her sisters. Lost the bond she used to have.
For what? For a marriage that had been fractured for a long time. A marriage Bridget had once vowed to do anything to repair.
“Bridget? What are you doing here?” Nora asked.
“I…I don’t know.” It was one of the most honest things she’d said in days. All those hours of pretending she was okay, that she wasn’t feeling lost and alone and scared. Hell, she’d been feeling that way for years, but she’d told herself that planting some flowers and getting pregnant would set her world to rights again. Would prove something. To herself, to her family.
“Uh, okay.” Nora dusted off her hands and slid the empty tray onto the counter behind her. She looked unsure of what to say, how to act, without the buffer of a funeral and Netflix playing in the background. “Uh, can I get you anything?”
A giant rewind button for my life. “Coffee?”
Nora nodded, her face slackening with relief at having something to do, something to put off the awkward conversation for another moment. She disappeared into the back, returning a moment later with two steaming mugs of rich, dark coffee. “Here.” She gestured toward one of the bistro tables at the front of the shop. “Let’s…let’s, uh, sit for a minute. If you want to.”
Now that Bridget was here, she wanted to leave, forget she’d ever walked inside. But where was she going to go? Back to the church? Hell no (and that thought made her whip through a quick mental Hail Mary just in case). Back home? Her house was a mile away, walkable, even in these ugly, sensible shoes, but no. She couldn’t walk back into that empty space again because if she did, she’d curl up in that bed and never leave again. As much as she’d hated going to church, she had to admit her mother was right—she needed to get out of that house.
Move forward. Focus on the future. Somehow.
“Why are you here?” Nora said.
Bridget didn’t want to say the truth, because she wasn’t quite sure what the truth was, so instead she said the first thing that popped into her head. “I was thinking I should get a cat.”
Nora arched a brow and took a sip of coffee before she spoke. That was how Nora worked—she thought about her words before she said them. She was the least chatty of the three O’Bannon girls, and the most serious one. Ma called Nora the umbrella of the family, because she was practical and dependable and the calm one in the midst of any family storm. “A cat? Okay. Sounds…good.”
“Should I get two?” Nonsense words poured out of Bridget like a leaky tap, filling the too-sweet air in the shop and the empty cavern in her heart and all those questions about tomorrow that she couldn’t bring herself to answer. “You know, in case one of them gets…lonely? I don’t think I could stand to hear one of them crying because it was all…a-alone.” Then her voice broke and the river of words jerked to a stop.
Nora covered Bridget’s hand and gave it a little squeeze. “Ma made you go to church, didn’t she?”
Bridget nodded. She almost cried, thinking how good it was that Nora hadn’t thrown her out, that she had reached out and comforted her, and for five seconds not mentioned Jim. Or said anything about Abby. “How…how can you tell?”
“You’re wearing that dress you hate, topped with a nice little shawl of Catholic guilt.” Nora smiled. “Two cats? Really?”
“I don’t know what else to do. I mean, what am I going to do with all of Jim’s clothes? And the house? Oh, God, Nora, what am I going to do about all that stuff? How am I possibly going to handle it all a-alone?”
Nora’s hand tightened on hers. “First, you’re going to ditch that dress. No, not just ditch it. Fucking burn it in the backyard. It is uglier than hell.”
The curse cut through the air, unexpected from the normally perfect Nora. It seemed to break the tension between them somehow, a crack in the wall. All these years Bridget had spent away from her sisters, her mother, and for just this second, she couldn’t remember why. Didn’t want to remember why.
But in her head, she heard Jim’s voice. Remember how they hurt you, babe. That’s why we were an island, just you and me. Don’t let them get close again.
She wanted to argue back, to tell Jim he wasn’t here anymore and what was she supposed to do about that? That maybe he’d been wrong, and maybe if she hadn’t shut her family out for all those years, this wall between them wouldn’t exist.
Instead, she tugged her hand out of Nora’s and put it in her lap. “I hate this dress. I forgot I even had it in my closet.”
“I swear, Ma has her homing instinct for outfits that make you look like Doris Day on acid,” Nora said. “Remember the polka-dot skirt debacle of 2003?”
That made Bridget laugh again. God, it felt so good to laugh. Just as quickly, a wave of guilt hit her. Jim had just died. His body was hardly cold in the grave. How could she be laughing?
Nora’s hand lit on Bridget’s arm. “It’s okay to laugh and run out of church and eat dessert, Bridge.”
“It doesn’t feel okay.”
“Yeah.” Nora sighed. “Maybe it will. In time.”
Time. Bridget wanted to slow down the hours as much as she wanted them to pass in a blur. She wanted a second to catch her breath, to absorb what had happened, to accept this new normal. At the same time, she wanted to skip ahead to the days when hearing Jim’s name didn’t feel like a knife serrating her lungs.
Until then, Bridget had to do something. For so long, her life had been wrapped around the world she had created with her marriage, and now she wasn’t sure where to step next. This widow world felt like a minefield. “What am I going to do, Nora?”
“I don’t know, Bridge. I honestly don’t know.” Nora drew in a breath and let it out, as steady as a slow leak in a tire. “What do you want to do?”
“Go to bed. And stay there for forty years,” she scoffed. “But then I’ll become like Aunt Esther, and I don’t want to do that.”
A little laugh escaped Nora. “Nobody wants to end up buried by the Globe.”
“I’d at least like to go out under the Herald. Better headlines: ‘Hoarder Hunched under Heap of Heralds.’” The joke made both of the
m laugh, and the sound lingered inside the shop for a long, sweet moment.
“You know,” Nora began, while tracing a circle in the laminate, “you could try getting back to the life you left. You’re going to need an income and…well, something to do.”
“You mean come back to work here.”
“The door is always open,” Nora said. “And Lord knows I could use the help, with wedding season coming up.”
A wave of guilt washed over Bridget. She’d abandoned the shop, shortly after Abby had quit, and left Nora to run things on her own. Their mother stepped in from time to time, but she was getting older and didn’t have the energy to last all day on her feet in a busy bakery. Nora had taken the reins without complaint, relying on a couple of part-time helpers to get through busy seasons.
There’d been a day, when the sisters had started working at Charmed by Dessert, when Bridget had been the chief baker. She’d developed a line of pies that got noticed at a Best of Boston competition and, for a while, put Charmed by Dessert on Must-See lists. Bridget had left the recipes behind when she walked away from the shop, but the pies had never been the same, from what she’d heard and read. Business had dipped a little more each year, and there were times when Bridget could read the stress in her mother’s shoulders.
“You had that special touch,” Nora went on. “None of us have ever come close to replicating that.”
Bridget fiddled with the coffee cup. “I think it was luck.”
Nora didn’t say anything. The chef-shaped clock on the wall ticktocked the seconds with a busy wooden spoon. “Do you remember the day you made the chocolate pies?”
The three of them had been together in the kitchen, slipping in and out of each other’s spaces like deftly woven braids. It seemed like they’d always been like that, ever since they were little girls, and even as high schoolers working after school, they’d been a team. Magpie had been too young to do much more than wash dishes, which had left the other three in the kitchen. Abby the director, Nora the planner, Bridget the dreamer. “You know what we need on the menu?” Nora had said. “A really good chocolate pie.”
“One that’s so good, it’s better than sex,” Abby had added in a whisper.
The three of them burst into giggles, and Ma had admonished them from the front of the store to get to work and stop playing around. They’d blushed and giggled some more, their heads together like three peas in a pod.
“I have an idea,” Bridget had said. A vague idea, one that mushroomed into a recipe as she bustled around the kitchen, gathering a little of this, a lot of that. The other girls had drifted away, leaving Bridget to create. Bridget had hardly noticed because the world dropped away when she baked. Her mind was filled with flour and sugar, butter and eggs, cocoa and vanilla. Tastes and scents and measurements and possibilities.
An hour later, she’d opened the oven, pulled out the chocolate base, and then drizzled a layer of salted caramel on top and dropped dollops of fresh marshmallow around the edge. A few seconds with the flambé torch and the marshmallow toasted into gold.
“Your grandmother would be proud,” Ma had said when she’d seen the finished pie, her highest level of praise, offered as rarely as comets. To mark the occasion, she’d flipped the sign to CLOSED, gathered her girls around a table, and dished them each a hearty slice. They’d sat at the table and eaten and laughed until their bellies were full and the sun had disappeared behind the horizon.
“That was a great day,” Nora said softly.
“It was a long time ago,” Bridget said, thinking of all that had been said since then, words that couldn’t be taken back, hurts that couldn’t be bandaged. “I don’t think we can get back there.”
“Maybe not. But you need an income now, and we need the help and—”
“Protecting the bottom line as usual.” Bridget shook her head and cursed. “Of course.”
Nora’s face pinched like a shriveled apple. “This isn’t about money, Bridget. We’re family; we take care of each other.”
“You know why I’m not working here.” Being here every day would mean being around her mother, and Bridget knew that was a war she wasn’t strong enough to battle right now. It would mean dancing that tightrope of I’m just fine. “I just can’t do it. It’s too much on top of everything else.”
“Stop thinking about yourself for five friggin’ seconds, Bridget.” Nora clapped a hand over her mouth and shook her head. Her eyes filled but, in typical Nora fashion, she blinked away the tears. “Damn it. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have—”
“No, you shouldn’t have.” Bridget shook her head. “You’re still Miss Perfect Nora, judging the rest of us screwups. You never do a damned thing wrong. You have the husband and the kids and the perfect house and you run a bakery and probably manage to make dinner every night, too, while the rest of us are…less.”
“I never said that, Bridget.”
“You didn’t have to. You’re just this”—Bridget waved a hand—“impossible to live up to Stepford wife. Who seems genuinely surprised that the rest of us aren’t as perfect. I stopped working here because I wanted to. Because I was sick and tired of you and Ma and everyone else in the world telling me what to do. And because—”
But no. Those were the words Bridget didn’t speak aloud. The family secret that she left buried under a pile of lies. The one thing she ignored because she knew, if she said the words aloud, it would shatter what remaining bridge she had with her sisters.
“I can’t do this,” Bridget said. “I just can’t.”
Nora rose and reached for her. “Bridget, wait.”
Bridget shook her head and headed out the door and back into the sunshine. She kicked off her shoes, flung them into the grass on the side of the road, and walked home. Barefoot and sweaty. And alone.
FIVE
The thick Sunday Globe hit the concrete front stoop with a solid thunk. Abby stepped into the dark morning, zipping her fleece sweatshirt closed as the cold hit her. Across the street, Joey O’Brien sat on his bike, his breath frosting puffy clouds in front of his mouth. A cotton messenger bag stuffed with curled papers hung heavy across his shoulders. “Mornin’, Ms. O’Bannon.”
“Hey, you managed to land it on the steps for once,” Abby said.
He grinned. The nineteen-year-old had an affable face with a thick mop of brown hair that tended to droop across his brow. He was too big for the bike, all arms and legs and lanky body, which meant he rode it looking like a skinny Hunchback of Notre Dame. “I’ve been practicing. You got my tip?”
“Look both ways before you cross the street.”
Joey rolled his eyes. “It’s way too early for shitty jokes.”
“And you are way too old to still be riding a bike built for a twelve-year-old.”
He shrugged. “I like the bike. You don’t notice the world so much in a car.”
Deep philosophy from the paperboy. That was what she liked about Joey. He liked his life, just the way it was, skating by on a part-time job in a coffee shop and the paper route. He said it gave him time to play with his band and spend sunny days in the public gardens.
Abby did the same thing, only she took her peace in the quiet dark of the early morning while Jessie was still asleep, curled into the bed like a bean. Abby pictured Jessie there, one hand spread across the mattress, as if keeping the space warm for Abby’s return. She liked that about Jessie, the anchor for Abby’s world. She had been the wild one when they’d met, angry at the world, angry at her family, angry at herself. Jessie had smoothed those rough edges with soft words and brown eyes that understood without judgment.
But there was still a part of Abby that craved freedom, like a once-feral cat that purred against the fireplace but still yearned for time to prowl the streets. So she got up early and walked until the sun rose, easing that need deep inside her.
Abby came down the rest of the stairs, stopped before Joey’s bike, and pulled a little ziplock bag out of her pocket. “White chocolate maca
damia nut.”
Joey grinned. “Awesome. They’re my favorites.”
“That’s what you said about the chocolate chip last week and the macaroons the week before.”
He shrugged. “What can I say? I don’t discriminate when it comes to cookies.” He raised the bag and gave her a nod. “Thanks, Ms. O’Bannon.”
“You can call me Abby, you know. I’m not that much older than you.”
Joey’s nose wrinkled but he tried to shrug it off, as if he thought anyone over twenty-five was ready to sign up for AARP. “See ya tomorrow, Ms. O.”
Abby waved and turned down the street. The pavement was shiny onyx, wet from an early morning rain. The streets were dark, speckled with the yellow puddles of streetlamps and the square slash of the occasional lighted window. Abby pulled her hood up against the cold and hunched into the fleece.
She took two rights and a left, past silent cars and shuttered apartments. Then, at the end of the last street, she closed her eyes and drew in a deep breath. And there it was, the sweet, yeasty scent that carried on the air, rising above the warm, rich notes of fresh-baked bread. There was a faint soft white glow from the kitchen behind the plate-glass window of the Maistrano Family Bakery, with one lone figure inside, hunched over a counter, her gray hair spun into a bun under a hairnet, her ample body wrapped in a white cotton apron. The bakery had sat on this corner for sixty-five years, two generations of Maistranos making bread for restaurants throughout Dorchester and Boston. The elderly Maistranos took turns being the early bird, both of them now wizened, hunched, and gnarled. But they could create magic with their hands, still working as efficiently as they had decades ago.
It was their hands that Abby watched. She leaned against the lamppost, the cold forgotten, the time nonexistent, and watched as Mrs. Maistrano cast a handful of flour across the breadboard, like scattering seeds to the wind. Then she nudged a thick pillow of dough out of a glass bowl and began to work it, gently at first, as if they were just meeting.