“Wouldn’t she tell you if she did?”
“I don’t know,” I say, polishing off my toast. I reach to put the plate on the coffee table and get my tea. “People can be funny about that kind of thing, you know? Maybe they’re trying to work through it. Maybe she’s embarrassed. Or maybe she’s in denial.” I drum my fingers against my mug. “I mean, Emma’s young. Amy might be trying to work it out to keep their family together. I need to figure out the right way to approach her.”
“For sure,” Larry says. “Wish I had some advice for you.”
“Yeah.” We sit there quietly for a few minutes and Larry puts my feet in his lap and starts rubbing them. He’s been handsy since I walked in the door. I know he wants to have sex, and I know that I also should, but…I sit up and cross my legs underneath me and put his hand in mine. Now would be the perfect time to tell him about the meeting with my accountant tomorrow. To just tell the truth. “So what did you do last night?” I say instead.
“You know, actually, it was weird,” he says. “I wanted to watch this new HBO series about Teddy Roosevelt, but when I went to turn on the TV, the cable was dead. Then, when I called the 800 number, they told me that our service had been cut off because our bill was overdue.”
Fuck.
Fuck, fuck, fuck.
Larry and I split the bills and the cable is one that’s my responsibility. I’ve been meaning to switch the bill to another credit card since the one I usually use to pay it has been near my limit for more than a month now. Had I bothered to open the mail, I probably would have caught this, but I’ve been letting myself just throw the bills into my bag when I get them out of the mailbox. I keep telling myself I’m going to go through them when I get a break at work, but I don’t exactly get a break at work, so…fuck.
“I went ahead and paid it,” he says. “They said your credit card was denied?”
“Shit, I’m sorry,” I say. “I don’t know how that happened. Maybe the card that I use to pay it expired or something. I’ll have to check.”
“It’s no biggie,” he says, and reaches again to pull me toward him. “Come here. I missed you.”
“I missed you, too,” I say.
He starts to kiss me and I kiss back, giving in. As his lips start to move down my neck, I reach my hands around him and under his shirt and try to relax, but my head is spinning. I tell myself that everything’s going to be okay. I’ll meet with my accountant tomorrow, figure some things out, and I’ll tell Larry everything this week. I will, I tell myself again. I really, really will.
CHAPTER EIGHT
This coming September marks my fifth anniversary as a bakery owner. Whenever the subject comes up, Larry says that I should throw a party—do something to mark the occasion—but I keep waving him off. Celebrating doesn’t feel right at all. I can’t imagine clinking glasses of champagne and giving a thank-you toast to a staff that I can barely support.
It’s ironic, isn’t it? I’ve often thought that the very essence of my business is to help people celebrate. There are so many milestone “say cheese for the camera” moments that center around the food—and, specifically, the cake. What would a family photo album be if not for the picture of the bride and groom cutting one, or the one-year-old in her high chair blowing out her first candle? These sweet, celebratory moments are my currency, if not, at the moment, my personal reality. And God, wouldn’t I love something to celebrate?
Before Maggie’s became Maggie’s, the building had been a bar. When I was a kid, my mother and I used to pass it on our way to the grocery store on Saturday mornings. The facade was covered with what looked like cheap lumber from an abandoned construction project. There was one window, so high up that it was impossible to see inside, with a neon Miller Lite sign that blinked fitfully like somebody’s nervous tic. In the passenger seat of Mom’s VW bug, I’d wondered what went on in a place like that. I never could have predicted that it’d become my second home someday.
Larry had actually found it. He’d circled the ad in the back of the Maple Hill News & Record—“Restaurant Space for Lease, Full Commercial Kitchen, 64 Ford Street”—and left it for me on top of the fraying backpack I used to tote my stuff to and from work. The idea of opening a bakery was something I had toyed with for a while, mentioning it now and then in a wistful way. But I was always baking, so every time I plied Larry, Kate, and Amy with whatever I’d made that week—pumpkin muffins, lemon bars, chocolate chip cookies with sea salt—they prodded me to think seriously about it. In time, the wispy clouds of my daydreams started to take form, and the idea became so solidly obvious that it was impossible to ignore.
I’d have to give up my job, and though I loved being a teacher, I knew deep down that I wasn’t passionate about it in the way that I should be. I’d majored in English because I’d always liked to read and writing assignments came easily to me, but in my last year of college, I didn’t really know what I wanted to do with my life. I was still coping with the loss of my parents, and thinking about my future in any way, much less embarking on a career path like so many of my classmates, wasn’t something that I had the energy for. Babci advised me to just pick something “that paid a decent salary and would help make the world a little better,” and added that whatever I chose, I didn’t have to do forever. All of my fellow English majors were either going to grad school (no thanks) or law school (being from D.C., I’d met enough lawyers to know better) or becoming teachers. So that’s what I did.
On a Tuesday afternoon, I left school right after my last class and Larry and I went to meet the owner of the restaurant space. The bar was nasty, with a gluey linoleum floor, decades of tobacco stains around the ceiling fans, air thick with the syrupy scent of spilled beer. But the kitchen was in decent shape—probably from disuse, as far as my inexperienced eye could judge—and the eight hundred square feet of space out front was more than enough for a few tables, a display case, and a cash register. A week later, after several long discussions with Larry and the girls, I handed over a check for the deposit and first month’s rent and took out a home equity loan on the brownstone to help fund my start-up costs. The next day, I told my boss that I wouldn’t be returning after summer break.
I never, ever, ever could have opened Maggie’s without Larry and the girls. Larry, who’d become a semi-expert on construction from working in his parents’ hardware store, helped me find the contractors who tore out the bar and replaced the covered-up storefront with floor-to-ceiling windows. Kate helped me run the numbers, sometimes literally holding my hand when I stared, stunned, at what it was going to cost to outfit a bakery, buy supplies, hire a staff, and contract with suppliers. Amy pulled paint chips at the hardware store, enthusiastically corroborated my furniture choices, and applauded my menu ideas.
In the weeks leading up to the opening, I worked around the clock, stopping only long enough to doze off, have an anxiety-driven nightmare (I give the entire town food poisoning; someone discovers a pubic hair in her apricot torte), and wake up frantic, ready to get back to work. Larry, as sweetly faithful as the dog I was naming the place after, helped me scrub the floors before he went to work in the morning and returned at the end of the day, a change of clothes under his arm, to help me work. One night we were wiring light fixtures, doing the work ourselves so that I could save some money. At some point well after two a.m., I was standing at the bottom of the ladder that Larry was perched on, shooting questions up into the air: “Do you think that charging for coffee refills is cheap? Will that piss people off?” “Are you sure that I shouldn’t offer more than a cup of fruit salad with the lunch sandwiches?” “What about people to bus the tables—do you really think that when we’re cooking and ringing people up and doing dishes, we’ll have time to make sure that the front is always cleaned up, too? I don’t want to have the kind of place with sticky tables and crumbs on the floor…”
Larry looked down at me, squinting in a certain way, and stepped off of the ladder. “Hold on a second,” he said, wiping sweat from his
hairline. He was wearing a faded T-shirt over an old long-sleeved thermal one. His jeans were splattered with the pale blue-gray that we’d painted the walls a week earlier. He walked to the boom box we kept in the corner, in the space where I planned to install the stereo I’d splurged on, and fiddled with the dial until he found the blues station out of D.C. Then he came back to me, peeled my hand off of one of the rungs of the ladder, and pulled me toward him to dance. I surrendered my weary head to his chest, closed my eyes, and let him lead. There was still sawdust on the floor and only two of the light fixtures worked. Muddy Waters sang through the empty space: “You can’t lose what you ain’t never had.”
The song is stuck in my head as I sit across the desk from Gary, my accountant, and wait for him to wrap up a call so that we can start our meeting. He’s holding a Styrofoam Dunkin’ Donuts cup, and maybe I’m oversensitive, but it annoys me that he didn’t think to buy his coffee from me today. His phone call is taking forever, and he keeps shrugging and rolling his eyes and mouthing that he’s “so, so sorry” between sips of his drink. His desk is OCD orderly. The neat stacks of paper look like they were arranged with a ruler.
I press my palms against the seat of my chair. My hands are clammy, leaving faint damp marks on the burgundy leather. I keep telling myself that I’m not nervous.
My thoughts drift back to my opening-night party. It was two years before Amy had Emma and became a stay-at-home mom, and she actually took the day off work to help me. The two of us, along with Kate and three college students who’d answered my Craigslist post, spent the day sweeping the floors, straightening the framed photographs on the walls (most of them ones my dad had taken), and arranging platters of food with the kind of precision that I imagine someone might have used when preparing a still life for Paul Cézanne. At six o’clock, having changed into an emerald green dress that Kate helped me pick out at a little boutique in Georgetown, I opened the doors and greeted my guests: neighbors, the other storeowners on the block, childhood friends, old pals of my parents, former coworkers. Each time one of them complimented what I’d done to the place or told me how good the food tasted, I got the most delicious, heart-swelling confirmation that I’d been right to take this risk.
I didn’t have a liquor license but we got champagne anyway, reasoning that I wasn’t officially opening until the following day so this was sort of a private party. It was so worth it. Larry knew how nervous I was about everything going right, so he stuck close to my side, refilling my glass whenever it went half-empty. Kate circulated among the crowd, whispering pointedly into my new employees’ ears whenever she noticed a stray glass on a table or a near-empty tray of food. Amy kept the music loud and dragged Mike out to dance, even though I hadn’t pictured it being a dancing kind of party. I can still remember how their laughter rose above the noise of the crowd, and how he twirled her around and around until it seemed she might spin right up to the ceiling if she let go of his hand.
At the end of the night, it was just the five of us—Larry and me, Kate, and Amy and Mike. The last bottle of champagne was popped and passed around. When I look back at it now, the scene seems so unlikely, so barely familiar, that it’s like when you watch a rerun on TV that you think you’ve seen but aren’t totally sure. Mike kept walking back to the buffet table for more snacks, each time telling me again how much he loved the artichoke and feta crostini. Kate and Amy danced in the corner, the two of them drunk enough to put their fading friendship aside. They kept calling me over, but I was happy where I was, sitting on Larry’s lap, his arms tight around my waist. He kept smiling up at me, saying wordlessly that I had “done good,” which is exactly what he said later, and that he was proud of me. I was proud of me, too. Just look at how happy everyone was, in this place that I’d created, with my father’s photographs on the walls, my mother’s recipe box in the kitchen.
It occurs to me now that the five of us have never been together in a room like that again.
So much has changed.
Gary finally ends his call. “So,” he says, swiveling in his chair and clasping his hands together on his desk. He’s a prominently balding redhead with a mustache to match. He kind of reminds me of Ron Howard, which somehow makes him less intimidating. “We have a lot to talk about.”
I just nod. I fear that if I open my mouth, something pleading and awful will come out. Something like, Help me.
Gary clears his throat and continues. “I’ve spent a lot of hours this past week looking over your financials. As I mentioned on the phone, there isn’t enough cash coming in for you to continue without taking some serious cuts. And as we’ve talked about recently, there just plain isn’t much left to cut.”
During one of our recent phone calls, proving just how little he knows about food, he suggested I switch to a “cheaper cheese” for all of the products that require it, as if I could just slip sliced American into my goat cheese tart. Months and months ago, I’d started adding menu items that were a little easier on my budget—more rice and pasta salads at lunch, fewer chocolate desserts because the cocoa I prefer isn’t cheap—but there were only so many sacrifices I could make before I worried I’d start compromising my work.
“Waverly, I’ve been over and over it, and there’s just no other solution that I can come up with other than that you need to stop taking a salary.”
I nod again. I hate the pitying way that he’s looking at me. It reminds me of the way people look at me when I tell them how my parents died.
“So the next question is whether you think you can handle that, and for how long. I think that if we cut your salary, you’ll have just enough coming in to pay for everything else that the business requires—your rent, your supplies, and your employees’ salaries, though we may need to keep talking about cutting your staff.”
“You know how I feel about that,” I say. Gary and I talked about it months ago. I’ve had to let people go before—the younger kids can just be unreliable, and there have been a few serious cases, too, like the addict who was a whiz in the kitchen (probably because of all of the amphetamines) and stole money out of the cash register. But it’s a whole different thing to have to cut someone loose because you can’t afford to pay him or her. Plus, I already have what feels like a skeleton crew. I need every hand that I’ve got.
“Waverly, we’re unfortunately in a situation where your business is at stake. You’re going to have to do things that are uncomfortable.”
I throw my head back and laugh. Gary is the only person who knows exactly what’s going on with my money—the maxed credit cards, the dwindling emergency savings account that hasn’t seen a new deposit in nearly a year because I keep drawing from it, and scariest of all, the fact that I barely have enough after I pay my business expenses to pay my home equity loan and the personal bills that Larry doesn’t cover. He knows I’m already quite uncomfortable—sharks-circling-me-in-deep-water uncomfortable. “Gary, I don’t need tough love right now.”
He nods.
“What’s your opinion?” I say. “How long do you think I’ll have to stop paying myself?” My salary goes directly to paying down my overdue bills. I can’t hold off on those payments.
“I wish I could give you an answer. As long as it takes. Your credit is already stretched. You’re really not in a position to even qualify for a loan now should you need one.” He shrugs matter-of-factly and stares blankly at me. I often wish he would work on his bedside manner. Accountants should have offices like therapists—a comfortable couch, a handy box of tissues, New Age-y spa music in the background. Gary has a Dilbert calendar on the wall behind his desk. The fluorescent overhead lights hum like a swarm of angry bees. “So let’s stop paying your salary. Use that money to pay for your business expenses, to try to pay off some of the credit card debt and other personal expenses, and to make sure that you stay caught up on the home equity loan payments.”
“Because it’s just that easy? I make sixty thousand dollars a year, Gary. I know it’s not nothing, bu
t it’s hardly enough to pay for my business and my personal stuff. Not with all of my debt.”
“I know. But this is the situation we’re in now.”
His use of we is probably meant to make me feel better, but it doesn’t—he’s hardly a passenger in my sinking ship.
“Gary, you’re like the know-it-all older brother I never had.”
His shoulders drop. “Waverly, I know this is hard.”
“You have no idea.”
“We’ll just do the best we can.”
“Yes, I will,” I say, emphasizing the I.
“Let’s see how it goes over the next few weeks and we’ll stay in touch.”
“Yup,” I say, standing. I loiter there for a minute, waiting for…what? I just wish there was something else that Gary could do. He looks up at me expectantly.
“We’ll figure this out,” he says, and then his phone rings, leaving me no choice but to go deal with my life.
After I leave his office, I race back to the bakery to get ready for the lunch rush. Jeannette is my primary helper in the kitchen today, which is highly unfortunate. She’s a dumpling-cheeked singer-songwriter who performs moody love songs in area clubs and has a tattoo of Billie Holiday on her forearm. She’s been with me for almost four years now. While she is by far my most conscientious employee—always arrives early, is phenomenally popular among the regular customers—she is slow, slow, slow. When she decorates a cake, the finished product is magazine-cover perfect but it takes her three times as long as it takes Randy, who is my other main cook when he’s not fulfilling his managerial duties. I quickly wash my hands and survey the kitchen to see what needs to be done. Jeannette is making chicken salad wraps. I watch out of the corner of my eye, cursing her sluggish precision.
I walk out to the display case in front of the store to make sure that the various salads and quiches are ready to go. I have an emotional hangover from my meeting and I can’t concentrate. I flit around, arranging and rearranging platters of cookies and brownies, checking the supply of sodas and bottled water in the drink case, and watching to make sure that Donovan and Bryant, my other two employees, aren’t ignoring the handful of customers who’ve come for late morning coffees or early lunches.
How Lucky You Are (9781455518548) Page 8