“That’s not good.”
“No.”
“So what are you going to do?” I say.
“What do you mean?”
“Well, you’re obviously miserable and you’re obviously craving something that’s your own, something personally fulfilling. What are you going to do about it?”
Kate laughs. “That’s the difference between you and me, Waverly. There’s nothing I can do—I don’t have the choices that you have, being on your own. You have nobody to worry about except yourself. Your life is so much simpler. You don’t know how lucky you are.”
I don’t know whether to laugh or to hurl my dish of food at her head. “Yeah, being a struggling small-business owner is one big party. It’s simple, all right. That’s exactly the word I’d use to describe it.”
Kate sighs. “I guess what I mean is that the stakes are different. Your bakery is great. Obviously. I’m there almost every day. I know you work hard to make it what it is, but it’s not like running for governor.”
“I can’t believe you just said that.”
“What? Isn’t it true?”
“It’s two totally different things!” I shriek. “It’s like comparing being a police officer to being a surgeon. Each has its own set of challenges and pressures—and believe me, my job has plenty of pressure.”
“Yeah, but…” She shakes her head.
“But what?”
“It’s just different. You know, forget I said anything.” She’s backpedaling now. She knows I’m pissed off.
“Do you want to know pressure, Kate?” I say.
“Waverly, come on. I didn’t mean to make you angry.”
“I’m about this close to losing my business. How’s that for pressure?”
“Oh, come on. You are not.” She shakes her head. “Every time I go in there, it’s packed.”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” I say, silently cursing the way that my voice is cracking as I speak. I can feel the tears welling up in my eyes.
“Okay, okay!” she says. I can tell that she’s surprised by my reaction. “So tell me, then. What’s going on?”
I take a deep breath. I could tell Kate about the overdue bills, the salary freeze, the potential layoffs…But looking at her across the room, in her cashmere loungewear—because Kate’s the kind of person who owns pajamas you have to dry-clean—I know that it’s pointless. She could never understand what it’s like to be me right now, and I don’t want her pity.
“It’s nothing,” I say, pressing my thumbs to my temples and pausing to take a deep breath. “I’ll figure it out.”
“Are you sure?” she says.
“Yes, I’m positive. I just had a long day. It’s been stressful after being gone all weekend.”
“I understand what that’s like,” she says.
I close my eyes, centering myself. I wish that I had the energy to tell her that every time she tries to commiserate with me—to play the “who’s more stressed?” game—I want to slap her across the face.
Instead, I clear my throat. “So Amy and Mike,” I say, knowing unequivocally that I’m changing the subject so that I can stop thinking about my own problems. “What do you think we should do about that?”
CHAPTER TEN
I am standing at the worktable behind the front counter in the bakery, adding heart-shaped candies to a tray of Valentine’s cupcakes, when Amy and Emma walk in. “Well, hey!” I say, putting down my spatula. I haven’t seen her in the week that’s passed since our trip and I haven’t bothered to call. I could say that it’s because I’ve been busy, but I’ve actually been avoiding her. I haven’t decided if or how to confront her about Mike.
Kate said the other night that I should definitely share my suspicions with Amy. Her interest in Amy’s life would have surprised me if I believed that her primary concern was Amy’s well-being, but I know better. She was more excited by my speculation than worried about its implications. It’s not that I think that Kate wants Amy and Mike to break up—she’s not so mean-spirited that she would wish a divorce on anyone, especially someone with a kid—but I think she’d welcome the opportunity to definitively extricate Mike from all of our lives.
Emma is dawdling, dragging her Dora backpack behind her. “Emma, come on,” Amy says. “Let’s go say hi to Aunt Waverly.”
“Just come from picking her up at school?” I say.
“Yeah, and some errands—dry cleaner, grocery store, post office…my glamorous life.” She laughs, smiling. “I’ve been craving one of those cheddar biscuits,” she says, pointing to them in the bakery case. “We can only stay for a minute. I have groceries in the car. Emma, say hello to Aunt Waverly.”
Emma smiles coyly up at me and sways shyly from side to side.
“Can she have a cookie?” I mouth. Amy nods yes.
“Look what I have for you, little Emma,” I say, reaching into the glass jar on the counter. I wrap a napkin around the cookie and reach over the counter to hand it to her. She grins back up at me. She has her father’s big brown eyes.
“Say thank you,” Amy says, playfully tousling Emma’s hair. “So how’s it been since we got back?” she says to me. “Wish we were still in Florida?”
“Yeah, you know.” I walk over to the stereo to turn down “Purple Rain.” It’s the lazy hour between lunch and the coffee-break / after-school crowd. Besides two gray-haired men sharing the paper at a table by the window and a college student hammering away at her laptop, Amy and Emma are my only customers. “It’s always good to see that this place won’t fall apart without me, even though I like to think I’m indispensable.”
I decide not to mention that I discovered that a hundred dollars had disappeared from the cash register while I was gone, and that Randy and I spent most of the week doing detective work before firing the person who did it, a mousy high school senior who was working for free because her dad, one of my regulars, said she was thinking about culinary school and wanted some experience.
“I have something for you!” Amy says, beaming. She opens her giant bag and digs around the coupon book and sippy cup and container of Wet Ones that’s threatening to spill onto the floor. “Ah! Here it is,” she says. She pulls out a little vial of perfume. “It’s orange blossom. I saw it in a little shop that opened up near the house a few days ago.” She winks. On the trip down to Florida, I’d noticed a perfume article in Kate’s Vogue and mentioned that I loved the scent.
“Amy, that’s so thoughtful!” I say. And so typically Amy, I think. I reach over the counter to give her a hug. “Thank you.”
“It’s nothing,” she says. “I hope you like it. I have to confess, I’ve spritzed it on myself a few times since I bought it.”
“Well, thank you,” I say, and put the perfume aside so that I can pick a biscuit out of the case for her. “Do you want me to warm this up?” I hold it up for her to see.
“No, no, it’s fine just like that,” she says, pulling off Emma’s mittens so that she can better manage her cookie. “I don’t want to interrupt you,” she says, pointing at my tray of half-frosted cupcakes. “We’re just going to sit over here and eat our treats. You keep doing what you need to do.”
“Amy, you can keep talking to me,” I say. “I’m just frosting cupcakes. It’s not like it’s advanced calculus.”
“Yes, but Valentine’s Day is in three days. You must have a ton to accomplish before then.”
“I wouldn’t mind a little more, actually,” I say.
“What’s that?” Amy says.
“Nothing,” I reply. Early this morning, when I was apparently still too sleepy to know better, I made the masochistic decision to spend the first hour of the workday comparing this week’s sales to the last five years’ during the same time period. Despite the usual orders for chocolate cakes and heart-shaped cookies, my sales aren’t close to what they’ve been in previous Februarys. There hasn’t been a single catering order for a Valentine’s party (or an anti-Valentine’s party
, like the one I did three years ago when I was asked to design a cake that featured Cupid shooting himself in the head with his own arrow), and the extra merchandise that I’d ordered for the store—balloons, boxes of chocolates, saucy greeting cards—isn’t selling like I hoped. I just pray that the actual holiday will bring in the last-minute rush of boyfriends and husbands that I used to be able to rely on, and probably took for granted.
I watch as Amy leads Emma to one of the mosaic-topped café tables in the center of the room and it reminds me of the Saturday before the bakery opened when Amy and Kate helped me tile and glaze the tops. I’d been such a lunatic in the weeks leading up to the bakery’s opening that it was silly to add an unnecessary project to my mountain of to-dos, as Kate—never one to make something that she could just buy—needlessly reminded me throughout the day. But now, each time I notice one of the tables, I think of how the three of us spent the day laughing and daydreaming in this once-empty space. It was one of the rare moments of calm I’d had during that period.
The funny thing is, with the way that things are going these days, I actually feel justified that my anxious alter ego kept second-guessing my decision to open a bakery in the first place. Is it stupid to give up a regular paycheck? I’d wondered. Yeah, maybe it was, now that I don’t have a paycheck, period. Did Maple Hill really care about whether or not I could make a good scone? Maybe not. Was it too risky to use my home as collateral to fund the start-up of my business? It’s hard to let my brain even go there. I can’t go there. And I can’t believe that it’s fucking cupcakes and chicken salad sandwiches that might determine my fate.
I watch Amy tug Emma’s coat off. My friends may have their relationship troubles, but I can’t help but envy their grown-up lives. It sometimes seems like they are following the instructions in some secret, celestial manual that never found its way into my hands. Amy and Kate have always seemed to know what they need to do next, as if making the decision to get married or leave a job or have a child is as simple as following one of those old dance-step footprint posters. Just the other night, Kate said that she was going to talk to Brendan about taking a few weeks off from the campaign, just to get some rest and reboot before the primary in June, as if it’s just that easy to take a break. And then I realized: For her, it is. She can just change course. No repercussions. Or none like mine, anyway.
Amy turns and catches me staring at her.
“So it sucks to come back to this cold weather,” I say.
“Ugh, definitely.” She rolls her eyes and turns back to Emma. Usually, when she comes into the bakery, she doesn’t bother to sit. We always stand at the counter gabbing away, and we’d normally be deep into her fifth or sixth anecdote by now. I wonder why she’s bothered to come in if she doesn’t want to talk to me.
“So how did Mike do playing single parent while you were gone?” I say, hoping this might get her going. Amy enjoys talking about Emma over anything else.
“Hmmm?” She looks at me as if she didn’t hear me.
She heard me.
Just then, the bell over the door clangs and a crowd of teenaged girls spills in, their giggles and shouts rousing the room from its midafternoon slumber. They all wear the same warm-up suits, bright blue with “Maple Hill Varsity Basketball” printed on the backs of their jackets. I glance at Emma, who’s scrambled out of her seat. She is mesmerized, staring at the girls and absentmindedly swinging her right foot around her left leg like a drunken ballerina. She licks cookie crumbs off of one palm.
“Aw, she’s so cute,” one girl says, noticing Emma and elbowing the dark-haired girl standing next to her.
“Awww! Hi!” the girl says, waving to Emma, who rushes to Amy and buries her face in the crook of her elbow.
I take their orders. Biscuits and cookies, slices of cake and bagels with cream cheese. One girl asks shyly for one of the cupcakes I’ve just finished frosting. Their voices thread over each other’s.
“But what about their point guard?”
“Did you know that he said no when she asked him to the dance, and then said yes to that freshman?”
“I hope Coach Brewer isn’t in one of her shitty moods. I really don’t want to run suicides today.”
“I would die if that happened to me! I mean, di-ie!”
“Do you have a game today?” I ask a gangly redhead as I hand her a Diet Coke. You can tell that she’s going to be a knockout by the time she hits her twenties.
“Yeah, we’re playing the best team in our division,” she says, stuffing her change into a Hello Kitty coin purse.
“Good luck!” I smile. The girls barrel out just as quickly as they entered, waving good-bye to Emma on their way.
“Say bye-bye, Emma,” Amy directs, holding Emma’s arm up to help her wave.
“Bye-bye!” Emma calls out after them, brave now that they’re leaving.
The door closes behind the last girl. Through the window, I watch them shuffle out toward the street, all of their mouths seeming to move at once as they look both ways before jogging across, some of them arm in arm, one tugging on the back of her friend’s jacket, another racing ahead.
“Ah, to be young,” I say.
“Yeah,” Amy says.
I look over at her. She is entirely somewhere else, but whatever memory she’s sunk into doesn’t look like it’s a good one. The corners of her mouth droop and she’s hunched into herself like she’s trying to keep warm. Emma wanders across the bakery, talking to herself in a singsongy voice.
Enough’s enough, I think. I wipe my hands on the rag in my apron—my wooby—and walk around the counter.
“Hey,” I say, sitting across from Amy. She doesn’t notice that I’m there until I scoot my seat up close to the table.
“Oh, hey,” she says. “God, I spaced out for a second.” She turns to check on Emma, who’s climbing into one of the booths against the far wall. “Honey, be careful,” she calls out. Her eyes look glassy, I notice now that we’re closer.
“So, do you and Mike have big plans for Valentine’s Day?” Amy adores Valentine’s Day, what with all of the pink and the flowers and the sugar sweetness. Before Mike came along, she used to give Kate and me big heart-shaped boxes of chocolate each year. She decorated the door of her apartment building like she still lived in a dorm.
“Valentine’s Day. Hmmm,” she says, as if she’s just considering it for the first time, which I know she can’t possibly be. “Yeah, I’m sure we’ll do something. I haven’t really thought about it, to be honest. I guess with being away and all, it just slipped past me.” She twists around in her seat to check on Emma. Again.
I know that she’s lying to me. Nothing “slips past” Amy. She is a color-coded-calendar kind of a girl.
“Ame, what’s going on?”
“Huh?” She turns back to me, acting, once again, like she hasn’t heard me.
“Are you okay?”
“I’m fine,” she says, smiling wide, her cheeks blooming pink as she shakes her head at me. “I’m just tired. I tossed and turned all night for some reason.” She pushes her hair behind her ears and scratches her nose.
I watch her for a moment and I think of Kate, who told me, in her delicate way, to “stop being such a pussy and just ask her already.” I clear my throat. “Listen,” I say, my hand escaping into my apron to fiddle with the fraying edge of my rag. “I don’t want to be nosy,” I say, “but you don’t seem like yourself lately.”
Amy doesn’t say anything. She looks at the table where my other hand rests; my mother’s opal ring on my left middle finger, the orange sports watch that I’ve had since college. I notice that she’s nibbled just the tiniest corner off of her biscuit. “Want something else?” I point at it.
“Oh, no,” she says. “I guess I wasn’t as hungry as I thought. I’ll save it for later.” She looks back down at the tile tabletop, tracing her finger around a red triangle of broken pottery. “Mike and I have been fighting a lot lately,” she says quietly. Her eyes stay froze
n on the table.
“Do you want to talk about it?” I reach across the table and squeeze her hand. “Amy, you kind of look like you’re carrying the weight of the world on your shoulders.”
“It’s just—” She bites her lip. She looks over at Emma and I follow her gaze. Emma is lying on her back on one side of a booth, making shapes with her hands at the ceiling. “We got in a horrible fight last night and I didn’t sleep at all.”
“Do you want to tell me what it was about?” I tread carefully.
“Ugh.” She shakes her head.
“Ame, come on. You know you can talk to me about anything.”
“I know,” Amy says. “I know.” With the way that she says it, it’s hard to tell whether she’s trying to reassure me or convince herself. “It was just a silly fight. I don’t know why I’m letting it get to me. I was telling him how I’d missed him while we were gone, and that turned into me telling him that I wished we spent more time together. We never really do anything datey anymore, not since Emma.” She looks over at her daughter again and I wonder if she keeps checking on her just to avoid looking at me.
“Does Mike agree with you?”
“Agree with me about what?” She looks confused.
“Does he agree that you could use some more time together?”
“Um.” She takes a deep breath. “He just…he doesn’t want to talk about it. A typical guy, you know?” She forces a laugh. When I don’t return it, her smile straightens and she keeps talking. “He feels overwhelmed with work, he was exhausted from being alone with Emma all weekend, and then I came in complaining. It got overblown.” Her eyes flit around the room, dancing everywhere but in my direction.
“Yeah, but Amy, if you’re upset, you’re upset. You shouldn’t make excuses for him.”
“I know, you’re right,” Amy says, nodding a little too emphatically, like she’s trying to convince herself.
Neither of us says anything for a minute. I’m not convinced she agrees with me.
“Listen, I don’t mean to snoop,” I start. “And I hope this doesn’t offend you.” I swallow, pausing. “But Mike does seem different lately.”
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