by Meg Donohue
“I’ll be on the business end of things,” I explained. “Annie will do the baking. You know the Save the Children benefit my mother threw? Annie made the cupcakes for it and they blew me away. It’s crazy she doesn’t already have her own bakery. Those cupcakes are going to take this city captive.”
“If anyone can tap into the pulse of a city, it’s you, baby,” Wes said. “Sounds exciting.” When he leaned over and kissed me, I felt myself relax a little. He seemed to notice this change and smiled. “You look good. I think being a small-business owner will agree with you.”
“Well, nothing’s official yet. We still have a lot of details to hammer out. And, about that ‘small’ part . . .” I shot him a good-natured warning look.
He laughed. “Oh, with you at the helm, there’s no chance this business will be small for long. You could out-strategize Mrs. Fields, Auntie Anne, and Little Debbie combined any day of the week and twice on Sundays.”
“Those old broads?” I scoffed. “They’ll never see us coming.”
We both looked ahead at the bay view as Curtis nosed the car down the steep slope toward Union Street.
“Still,” Wes said. “I have to admit I’m a little surprised. I knew you and Annie grew up together, but I didn’t realize you two were still close.”
I’d told Wes about my childhood with Annie and Lucia, and he knew that Annie and I hadn’t been in touch in years. I’d always implied this was due to a general drifting apart over time, and had avoided going into specifics. “Oh, we’re not close anymore, but we’re still friends,” I said breezily. Where’s the harm in one more white lie? “We’ve had our differences over the years, but I think if I can avoid bringing up some of the sore spots, we’ll make excellent business partners.”
I felt grateful when Wes didn’t press me for details. His inherent patience, not at all indicative of a lack of curiosity or empathy, both heartened and baffled me. If I took things one day at a time the way he does, I admonished myself, maybe the unknowns in life wouldn’t drive me so crazy.
As we turned onto Union Street, a sharply dressed couple with a toddler daughter in tow exited an ice cream shop that Annie and I used to frequent when we were kids. The father swung the little girl onto his shoulders, and a long chocolate drip from her ice cream cone immediately fell down his forehead.
Wes tapped on the car window. “That’s us, baby, give or take a few years. Except I’m willing to bet there will be cupcake crumbs on my forehead instead of ice cream.” He looked at me with an expression so heartbreakingly eager and kind that it was all I could do to quickly smile and look away before my true emotions overcame me.
I kept my gaze pinned to the window until we reached the restaurant and I felt confident that I’d regained my composure, if only temporarily.
Chapter 5
Annie
Still feeling a tingle of electricity from my afternoon with Jake earlier in the week, I hopped off the 22 bus at Broadway and Steiner and began walking toward the St. Clair mansion. Julia and I were meeting to discuss the first steps we needed to take to get the cupcake business off the ground, but in all honesty, I didn’t have a clue where to begin. The process seemed overwhelming—there was retail space to be found, equipment to be purchased, permits to obtain, employees to hire and manage. It was enough to make my head throb. But I figured Julia’s experience with those logistical things was the singular bright spot of having her involved. No, not singular. There was, after all, the not-so-small matter of money.
I squinted down the street. It was one of those gray summer days for which San Francisco is famous and the fog gave the sky an oddly bright, bleached-out look. When a damp breeze swept up the hill from the bay, I pulled the belt of my crimson coat a bit tighter, unconsciously slowing my pace as I neared the St. Clairs’.
Each house I passed seemed bigger than the one before it, an architectural hodgepodge of the finicky tastes of the rich over the past century—there were the dark, shingled Craftsmen, the Queen Anne Victorian wedding-cake houses with intricate, pastel-painted curlicue details, the elegant Italianate homes with tall windows of thick, antique glass, and the sleek, contemporary ones where you’d be hard-pressed to locate a front door. I’d walked by this particular row of Pacific Heights homes hundreds of times before my eighteenth birthday. The Lorensteins, with their three boys, Irish setter, and Portuguese au pair, had lived in the towering glass, concrete, and steel structure with the dramatic waterfall-like fountain running down its side. The Chens, an older couple who lived alone in a squat brick mansion with white shutters, had had the pristine landscaping in their side yard tended to weekly by a muscular young gardener named Raul who, if Julia and I timed our walk-by ogling just right, would toss us ice-cold Cokes from his cooler. At a certain point in time, my mother and I had probably known more people on that block than anyone else—we knew the parents, the kids who went to the neighborhood playground and later Devon Prep, the housekeepers and nannies and drivers who were my mother’s friends and confidants.
Mom had loved living on this block. The views, the magnificent homes, the well-dressed neighbors, the suburb-within-a-city feel never lost their luster for her. Everything remained new and sparkly and surreal for her, but as I grew older, I began to realize just how much was lost in translation. Where Mom saw glamour and beauty, goodwill and gaiety, I saw bulimic fourteen-year-olds and a perilous social ladder littered with casualties and boys who already behaved as if they owned, had somehow earned, the world. I’d known I was different from the other kids at the small, private elementary and middle schools Julia and I had attended, but it was only once I entered the halls of Devon Prep—to which the St. Clairs had shepherded my acceptance and paid my tuition—that I understood just how differently I was viewed. I don’t think it was so much that I was of Ecuadorean descent as that I was the daughter of the St. Clairs’ hired help. For example, I was pretty certain that if I’d been the first-generation American daughter of some Ecuadorean mining magnate, or even just the daughter of an exiled Ecuadorean politician, I would have received many of the same glittery party invitations I saw pinned to Julia’s bulletin board. But my family didn’t own a vineyard in Napa, a second home in Pebble Beach, or even a chalet in Tahoe. We didn’t have season tickets to the opera; I didn’t ride horses in Marin; there wasn’t a wing named after us at SFMOMA. I lived with those people, but I wasn’t a member of their club. We didn’t speak the same language.
There were only two occasions on which I tried to explain the truth about Devon Prep to my mom. Both were during our senior year, and the first was right before the annual all-school spring dance that Julia had been obsessing over for months. As class president, she needed one hundred signatures for her petition to hold the dance at the Palace Hotel’s opulent Garden Court and she enlisted her top minion, Caroline Rydell, to strong-arm the underclassmen into signing. And by strong-arm, I mean boobnotize. Julia, whose own chest fit into classy B-cups, knew that Caroline’s D-cups were the way to freshman boys’ hearts. I heard Caroline had gathered one hundred signatures by first period. I didn’t go to the dance, but I’m sure the Garden Court was a fantastically over-the-top venue, with its domed glass ceiling and sparkly chandeliers. I’d made the mistake of watching Carrie in the weeks leading up to the dance, and let me tell you, there is no quicker way to get a social outcast to decide not to attend a school dance than the sight of Sissy Spacek covered in pig’s blood. I’d tried to explain to my mother how I felt about my classmates, but when I saw her wounded face, I dropped it and just told her I didn’t want to go because I had a stomachache. I decided I needed to buck up and let her believe in my happy, golden childhood and my lifelong friendship with Julia. She had worked so hard to give me that life.
Later that spring, I was compelled to try again. This time was more serious: I needed to tell my mom my side of all the rumors that had been spread about me. But almost as soon as I began, I saw a flicker of so
mething dark in her eyes that was all too easy to interpret as a sliver of doubt.
“How will anyone believe me if my own mother doesn’t?” I shouted, hurt to the point of anger.
“Annie, I’m just listening.” My mother’s face was pained. She reached out to me and I pushed her away.
“You’re not listening, you’re deciding!” Suddenly, all of the anger I felt toward Julia and my classmates and teachers at Devon Prep funneled down into one hot point of fury that I directed at my mother. “You’re deciding, just like you’ve always decided everything! You decided to run away from home. You decided we were going to live at the St. Clairs’. You decided I needed to be friends with Julia and go to Devon Prep. And look where your decisions have gotten me! You think you know what’s best for me, but you don’t! All you know is how to kiss Lolly’s ass and keep your head down so you don’t get in trouble! You don’t know what it’s like to grow up here! You don’t know anything about my life! You don’t know anything about me!” I’d ignored her little gasp and the tears that sprang to her eyes, swatted her hands from me, and stormed out of the carriage house.
Almost immediately, I felt remorse. The worst part was that I didn’t even believe half of what I’d said. My mother hadn’t run away from home—she’d been kicked out. She didn’t spend her days kissing Lolly’s ass—in fact, over the years, Lolly had become as close a friend to my mother as any in her life. And of course my mom knew me—she knew me better than anyone in the world. Which was why, I suppose, the look I’d seen for just an instant in her eyes stung me so badly. Each time over the next few months that I found myself walking to her room to apologize, the memory of that look I’d seen on her face surfaced and reignited my anger. It was a long, lonely summer without my mother’s company and with all of the unknowns about my future hanging over my head.
On the August day that my diploma from Devon Prep finally arrived in the mail—I had not been allowed to attend graduation that spring—I decided it was time to cut through the impasse. Crossing the courtyard from the carriage house to the mansion, diploma in hand, I felt that odd anxiety-induced tension straining at the muscles in my legs. I hoped that the diploma would be an olive branch of sorts and planned to invite my mother for milk shakes down on Union Street, an end-of-school-year tradition that she had instated when Julia and I were kids. That June—suspended from Devon Prep, my acceptance to Cal still under review with no hope of news anytime soon—the end of school had come and gone without my mother mentioning the tradition. Already, the summer was drawing to a close and we’d barely spoken to one another for months, and it was all the fault of my temper and pride.
When I walked into the St. Clairs’ kitchen and showed the diploma to my mother, she fingered its edges with her small brown hands and sighed. It was a hard sigh to interpret, but before I let its ambiguity stoke my anger I quickly asked her if she wanted to walk down to Union Street for milk shakes.
She lifted her gaze from the diploma to me, her face softening. “That sounds wonderful, Annie,” she’d said.
Even as the words came out of her mouth, Julia strode into the kitchen, her long blond hair freshly straightened and impossibly shiny. She shot me a saccharine smile. At school she was cool, dismissive, and curt; but at home all summer she’d been acting demure, nearly deferential. The juxtaposition tired me; in her presence, I felt almost physically ill. But I had no desire to fight with her. The events of that spring, the rumors and accusations, had deflated me, knocking the wind out of my proverbial sails. I held my breath, hoping, against odds, that my mother would wave good-bye to her so that we could be on our way. I knew my mother well enough to know that this would never happen. Out of respect for her job or actual love for the girl she’d had a significant hand in raising or some complicated combination of both, she was perpetually vigilant—overly vigilant, I thought—to include Julia in every activity.
“Annie and I are going to get milk shakes!” she said. “Will you join us?”
And Julia had looked at me carefully, almost calculatingly, and said yes. My heart sank. With Julia accompanying us, I would never have the chance to apologize to my mother. The next week, with no reason to hold out hope for word from Cal, I accepted a waitressing job and began taking classes at City College. The distance between my mother and me hardened into something rigid and sharp and crackling, like the torched top layer of crème brûlée. Our stilted interactions began to seem more and more like the norm. Still, I knew with all of my heart that at any moment I would conquer my pride, crack the wall between us, and make things right with her. And I kept on believing that up until the day, weeks later, that she died.
Chapter 6
Julia
I could see Annie had a bee in her bonnet from the moment Jacqueline led her into the kitchen. She seemed jumpy, biting her lip, her cheeks still shining from the cool, sodden air outside. Instead of taking off her red coat, she pulled its belt tighter around her waist. Her small, heart-shaped face—with her light brown, wide-set eyes and honey-colored skin—was framed with her wild dark hair above and the coat’s fake fur collar below; a clump of missing fur on the lapel gave her the look of a mangy, yet plump, street cat.
“Oh, hi!” I said brightly. “I didn’t realize that was you at the door. I figured you’d come in the kitchen, like old times.”
“Nope,” said Annie, eyes flashing. “I came in the front door, like new times.”
“Okay.” She clearly planned to make this meeting as difficult as possible. “Either way, I’m glad you’re here.” The maid, meanwhile, was standing awkwardly in the door frame, and now cleared her throat. I gestured in her direction. “Jacqueline can take your coat, if you like.”
With some reluctance, Annie slid her arms out of her coat, revealing a sunshine-yellow, houndstooth-print, seventies-style jumper that contrasted humorously with the pinched look on her face. Where does she find these outfits? I wondered, hoping that wherever it was, she washed those “vintage” numbers before wearing them. I smoothed down my own milk-white cashmere sweater and nodded toward the kitchen’s built-in breakfast booth where my laptop sat open and aglow.
“I thought we could work in here,” I said. “It’s about as close to the espresso machine as we can get without sitting right on the counter.”
Annie paled. She opened her mouth and then shut it. “Fine,” she said at last. The craggy treads of her leather boots crunched loudly against the tile floor as she strode past me.
Oh, of course she doesn’t want to be in the kitchen! I realized, feeling my stomach flip. I’d had ten years of chocolate croissant nibbling and fridge grazing and coffee sipping in my parents’ kitchen to distance it mentally from the place where Lucia had collapsed, but for Annie, the feeling of shock and loss must still hang in that room as though her mother had just died yesterday. Thirty rooms and I decide this meeting should take place in the kitchen? I felt myself reddening.
“Oh, Annie!” I said. “I should have thought . . . I’m sorry.”
“For what?” she asked thinly.
“For this.” I made a sweeping Vanna White gesture over the kitchen’s center island. “Should we move? What a way to kick things off. I’m so sorry.”
Annie’s eyes narrowed and I could tell she was thinking that I’d done this on purpose—that I’d wanted to upset her. She looked at me like she could see right through me, and her steady gaze gave me a rare jolt of nerves.
“It’s fine,” she said, settling into the booth.
“Okay. If you’re sure.” I turned away to fiddle with the espresso machine, talking over my shoulder all the while. “So what have you been up to all these years? I feel like we didn’t really have a chance to catch up at the party. Obviously, you’re a baker. A master of all things cupcake.” I set a plate of Sonja’s chocolate-dipped macaroons and two nonfat vanilla lattes on the table and slipped into the bench across from her.
“That
’s it really,” she said, taking a sip. “Lots and lots of baking.”
“My mom told me you studied pastry.”
She nodded, her dark, flyaway—almost feral, I thought unkindly again before I could stop myself—curls shaking around her face. “At the San Francisco Culinary Institute.”
“How fabulous. It sounds like you’ve been leading a very romantic life. Very Chocolat.”
Annie sighed. “It would make it a little easier to roll into work at five a.m. if I knew Johnny Depp was going to be there.”
I laughed and then stopped abruptly when I heard how loud it sounded in the room. “Are you seeing anyone?”
Annie hesitated for a moment before saying, “Not right now.”
“Oh, I see. You’re playing the field. How fun!” I said. “People are getting married later and later in life. I wouldn’t even be thinking about marriage yet if I hadn’t met Wes. You know what they say: it’s all about meeting the right person. And it only takes that one.”
Annie pressed her lips into a sarcastic smile. “Yes,” she said, “there is a remarkable amount of clichés on the topic.”
I flushed. Why was I trying so hard, beating back every potential moment of silence with inane chatter? It was the sort of behavior that irritated me to no end when others displayed it, and here I was polluting the already fraught air between us with my overly energetic voice. Annie was clearly becoming more and more annoyed; her fingers—which were still surprisingly childlike, small and plump—drummed steadily along the side of her latte glass.
The truth was that ever since she had agreed to open a cupcakery with me, I’d grown increasingly attached to the idea. Each morning that week, I’d awakened a little earlier, plans for the shop buzzing through my mind. My emotions still felt dangerously close to the surface, a huge, essential part of myself still felt irrevocably changed, but I could already sense how these very concrete, pressing thoughts of budgets and marketing plans and branding strategies would help me cling to some semblance of the person I’d been, a person whom I had liked—or at least respected—quite a bit. That very morning, in fact, I’d awakened at 6:45 on the dot, no alarm needed. I couldn’t risk the chance that Annie might back out now.