A Measure of Happiness

by Lorrie Thomson

  Zach glanced over his shoulder. “Hey, big guy,” he said to Christopher, and then turned back around. “What a cutie.”

  “That he is.”

  Sometimes Katherine wondered whether she’d daydreamed her pregnancy, the birth, and the man who had set the story in motion. Other times, her whole life sat on the tip of her tongue, dangerously close to release. On those rare days, she worked extra hard to keep her hands busy and her mouth shut. Over the years, she’d kept track of her son’s age, imagining him a shaggy-haired boy in elementary school who favored finger paints and art class, a long-limbed runner in high school, the first in her family to earn a college degree. She had a relationship with that artistic, athletic, scholarly boy. She loved him to distraction. She would’ve laid down her life to save his.

  Celeste came out of the kitchen, and Zach’s gaze wandered across the room, his expression reminiscent of a hungry boy browsing Katherine’s bakery cases and zoning in on his favorite treat. Eyes big, mouth slack, hands opening and closing. This one. This one now.

  This young man? Katherine didn’t know him from Adam.

  Celeste, on the other hand, Katherine could read like a memorized recipe. She didn’t need ESP to intuit whatever had happened in New York; Celeste didn’t need any romantic complications. One look at Celeste’s face told Katherine she was one stressor away from a full relapse.

  Over at the counter, Celeste dropped muffins into a waxed bag and rang up Mrs. Jenkins. Although the woman was barely sixty, Mrs. Jenkins wore a full-length trench coat, rain or shine, and came in twice a week for half a dozen muffins—two corn, two lemon poppy seed, and two blueberry. The door jingled, Mrs. Jenkins vacating the shop. Her clear bonnet-covered gray pin curls bounced from sight.

  If the day ever came when Katherine felt inclined to cut her hair and strap on a plastic bonnet, she’d give Celeste the combination to her safe, permission to make use of the .22, bring her out back, and put her out of her misery.

  Celeste sent her gaze across the shop and then came over with a blueberry muffin centered on a plate, like a crown on a cushion. “Try it, you’ll like it.”

  And, Katherine imagined, if she were to ask Celeste today, she’d shoot first, ask questions later.

  “Did you tell Mrs. Jenkins you altered the recipe?”

  “And give her a heart attack?” Celeste asked, her tone ripe with annoyance. “Of course not.”

  Celeste’s voice lowered and sweetened. “One bite?”

  “Not now. Later, when I’m hungry,” Katherine said, even though she was pretty much always hungry. She was an emotional eater. If sales were up, she was inclined to celebrate with a slice of devil’s food cake or an extra helping of apple pie. She’d polish off the leftover cannoli filling with a spoon and a grin. Way to toot her own horn, ring her bell, and tighten her waistband. A bad day? What was better to salve sadness than a good old chewy, gooey chocolate chip cookie dunked in a glass of iced milk? Some impulses were better off ignored.

  Like Celeste’s insistence on changing up recipes, ringing Katherine’s bell, and pushing her buttons.

  “Zach liked the muffin. Didn’t you, Zach?” Celeste directed her question at Zach, but the little display was for Katherine alone.

  Zach didn’t seem to notice. Instead, he bit at his lower lip and beamed at Celeste, a guy equivalent of batting his eyelashes. A guy used to impressing girls with a wink and a nod. “Best I’ve ever had.”

  Celeste had grown up with three older brothers who taught her how to shoot the hell out of a bull’s-eye, land a punch, and hold her own against obvious come-ons. In short, she didn’t impress easily.

  “Damn straight,” Celeste told Katherine, and set the plate atop Zach’s job application. Then Celeste headed off across the café. The wiggle in her walk was meant for Katherine’s eyes but held Zach’s attention until Celeste’s behind, along with the rest of her, slipped into the kitchen.

  Katherine set the muffin to the side and returned her finger to Zach’s myriad list of odd jobs. “Well, looks like you’ve worked everywhere except bakeries.”

  “I’ve, uh, eaten my share of my mother’s cookies. Does that count?”

  “Baked cookies alongside your mo-om growing up, did you?” The word mom lengthened and split in two equal halves and then caught in her throat.

  Zach flashed a grin, but then the sides of his smile sagged. “Sure. Me and my annoying little brothers fought over the mixing bowl. Typical kid stuff.”

  Little brothers.

  More than Katherine and Barry could’ve given her son. Three rounds of IVF had taught her how to pockmark her stomach with four shots a day of ovary-stimulating drugs, how to lie still and wait for anesthesia to hum through her veins so that a trans-vaginal ultrasound could guide a needle through the back of the vaginal walls and aspirate her follicles. All the healthy eggs fertilized in the test tubes and then withered in her body. Three rounds of IVF had tapped out her ovaries, ruined her marriage, and trampled her ability to hope.

  The thing about hope? Remnants grew.

  If Zach had brothers, she’d done right by him. She’d done right by letting him go.

  Next booth over, baby Christopher laid his head on his mother’s shoulder. The two other toddlers, Sam and Jones, sat on their mothers’ laps and busied themselves with their sippy cups, throwing their heads back to get the last drops. Mere weeks past picking up the boys’ first birthday cakes, their mothers nibbled the edges of their lemon bars, each of them gunning for baby number two.

  Common knowledge claimed having kids close in age guaranteed similarly close sibling relationships, the makings of a real family. Other people deserved such a blessing.

  Other people shied away from dares.

  In middle school, Zach had taken the bait of a bully and eaten a mishmash of cafeteria mystery meat, spice cake, and something icky that went crunch, just for the bragging rights. High school kids were marginally more creative, and he’d lifted the answers for his tenth-grade calculus final, even though he’d never needed to cheat for high marks. Math inherently made sense. And college? He’d dared kids to dare him. Dare me to lock the RA in a bathroom stall, Silly String the chancellor’s office, “haunt” the dorm on Halloween as the Ghost of Christmas Past. The chains and moaning had lent a nice old-fashioned touch.

  Zach wasn’t a coward. So why was he acting like one? Holding his tongue when he’d waited a decade to be heard?

  “You’re from Arlington, Mass. How did you end up here in Hidden Harbor, Maine?” Katherine asked.

  “My parents kicked me out of the house.”

  “Oh?” Katherine’s left hand fluttered to her neck, as though she were taking her pulse.

  “Kidding! They strongly suggested I get my act together and take it on the road.”

  Nearly six years ago, on Zach’s eighteenth birthday, his parents had offered to give him nonidentifying information for his birth mother. But despite their support, he’d never taken the bait and grown up.

  Until three weeks ago, when they’d forced his hand.

  Zach squelched the urge to press his fingers to the pulse hammering his throat. He’d come home from an all-nighter to find his camp trunk and two suitcases by the front door, his mother’s handwritten note slipped under the plastic of the luggage tag: Find her.

  Inside the suitcase, he’d found the nonidentifying information for his birth mother. Clue number one for his Casco Bay scavenger hunt. Nothing about his biological father.

  Somehow, that had made it worse.

  Katherine took a breath and leaned back. A smile played at the corners of her mouth. “You’re hardly a child. They must’ve had their reasons. Kids, adult kids, aren’t supposed to live at home forever. I’ve been on my own since I was nineteen.”

  Zach shrugged, suddenly sheepish. Some people took longer figuring out what they wanted to do with their lives. Some people came home from five years of college and a double major without a single degree, looked up old high school buddies for
a round of bar golfing, and tried to relive their childhoods.

  Who was he kidding? He’d never gone bar golfing in high school. “Your degrees are in criminal justice and psychology,” Katherine said. “Why do you want to work in my bakery?”

  Zach shook his head. “I attended UMass Lowell. Never finished either degree.”

  “Why not?” she asked, curious, withholding judgment. Polar opposite of his father’s words when Zach had dropped out of school and materialized on his parents’ doorstep: “What the hell is wrong with you, Zach?”

  “I guess you could say I like to keep my options open.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah, sure. Figure this is a good time in my life to see more of the U.S. Who knows? Maybe I’d like to become a baker. How can I know until I try it, right? I’m a hands-on kind of guy. Sitting in a classroom doesn’t do it for me. I mean, how did you know you wanted to own a bakery?” God, he sounded like a loser. A shiftless, homeless dude who wandered the streets. Was that the way the Fitzgeralds saw him?

  Was that the way he saw himself?

  “Strangely enough,” Katherine said, “that’s kind of how I ended up here myself.”

  Two men entered the shop. Guys looked like they were in their thirties, wearing cookie-cutter suits, their shoulders hunched from desk work. While Celeste counted out change, the taller of the two guys bit into his blueberry muffin, and his shoulders notched down. “You’re the best,” the customer at the register told Celeste, and his buddy nodded, crumbs slipping from his grin.

  Probably the only joy in their day. They probably chewed slowly to delay getting to an office, where they crunched numbers in five-by-five cubicles inside square gray buildings. A box within a box would suffocate Zach.

  He’d rather dangle over Clarendon Street or sweat it out in a bakery kitchen.

  “So . . . Katherine . . . you were on a road trip, traveling around the country, when you ended up in Hidden Harbor?”

  Katherine closed her eyes and shook her head. When she raised her gaze to him, she somehow managed to look both happy and sad. “I was a wanderer.”

  Chills prickled up the back of Zach’s head and across his shoulders. “All who wander are not lost,” he said, the same phrase he’d offered his mother in response to her complaint about his aimlessness.

  “I was,” Katherine said.

  “You are,” Zach’s mother had said, her eyes shiny with tears.

  Katherine’s eyes were dry. “Oh, sure, I had a plan. Hit every state in New England, and then continue across the country. Free as a bird, until I took a job working here. I was going to stay a few months, one season in each locale.”

  “So why’d you stay?”

  “I fell in love.”

  Zach imagined Katherine decades ago, the fine lines around her eyes erased, her hair down around her shoulders. He imagined a guy, his biological father, walking into the bakery and falling to his knees.

  “When?” Zach asked. “When did you fall in love?”

  Katherine inhaled and held her breath. For a second, her brow knit and her chin dimpled, and Zach thought she might apologize. He could practically see the words I’m sorry forming on her tongue. Then her features smoothed, unreadable. “Twenty-five years ago,” she said.

  Perfect timing.

  The conversations in the shop jumbled and blurred to a hum. Zach’s head spun with the sudden shift and the impossible sensation of movement. “What was his name?”

  “Who?” Katherine’s hand went to her cheek. “Oh! You thought. Ah, no. There was no man. I fell in love with this place. Hidden Harbor. Maine. Lamontagne’s.” She shook her head. “Only the bakery was called Hazel May’s, back in the day.”

  Katherine’s words and actions didn’t jibe, the sort of tells you looked for in a criminal investigation. She held her hand to her cheek, the way Zach’s mother touched her face after his father swooped in for a kiss. Every single night after work.

  How could a couple feel that way about each other after decades of marriage? Every secret revealed? Nothing left to learn?

  How could Katherine feel that way about a place where she worked?

  “You found what you were looking for?” Zach said. “Working here?” Had Katherine chosen a bakery over a boy? A place over a person?

  Her heart was big enough to wrap around the entire state of Maine but too small to fit an infant?

  Too small to love him.

  He’d seen the way Katherine responded to Celeste, the girl trying to please the woman, the woman’s quick rebuff. He’d noticed how Celeste’s expression hinged on Katherine’s approval. He’d appreciated the girl’s attitude, sarcasm as defense.

  All these years Zach had thought the fault lay inside of him. That his birth mother had taken one look at him and deemed him unworthy of devotion. Or worse, that she’d decided way before he was born that he wasn’t going to be worth the trouble. Maybe Katherine, if she was his birth mother, hadn’t wanted to keep a kid she’d made with Mr. No Name.

  Maybe his birth mother hadn’t written down his father’s name because there had been too many fucking candidates.

  Literally.

  Katherine’s chin tightened, and she glanced around the café. Her eyes watered and she took in the pastry-filled glass cases, the carafes lining the coffee station, the tables full of early morning customers. Then her gaze returned to Zach, but she didn’t look him in the eye. She nodded in his general direction. “Work is security, another kind of freedom. I found what I was looking for, and more.”

  Before today, Zach hadn’t considered that maybe, just maybe, the fault lay not in him but in his birth parents. What if 50 percent of his DNA came from she who couldn’t be bothered? What if the other half was a gift from what’s his name? What if Zach was a 100 percent loser? Genetics might fail you, but math, good old math, inherently made sense.

  A wail issued from behind Zach’s head, as high-pitched and insistent as any fire station’s alarm. Katherine homed in on the cute, screaming toddler in the next booth.

  The toddlers sitting across from the screamer focused on their buddy with their tiny brows furrowed, as though deciding whether to jump in and sing a round.

  The mother of the crying baby turned and mouthed, Teething, to Katherine, and Katherine’s eyes flashed on the word. “Hang on,” Katherine told the mom. “I’ll be right back,” Katherine told Zach, and she race-walked past the bakery cases and into the kitchen. Her emergency stride, long and purposeful, made Zach think of his mother and all those mad dashes from their driveway and into the house for Band-Aids and bacitracin. It was a miracle Zach had any skin left on his knees.

  Seconds later, Katherine returned with a white bakery bag in hand. She reached into the bag and pulled out some kind of hard-looking cookie. “Would Christopher like a banana oat teething biscuit?” Katherine asked Christopher’s mother.

  “He’d love one.” Christopher’s mother took the biscuit from Katherine and handed it to her son. Without missing a beat, the baby clamped down on the edge of the biscuit, whimpered, and quieted. Leftover tears trickled from his big blue eyes and down either shiny cheek. Zach imagined soreness leaving the boy’s gums, relief taking its place.

  Katherine Lamontagne, the baby whisperer. Who knew?

  Christopher’s mother kissed the top of her son’s ear. “Thank you, Katherine! You’re an angel to bake homemade teething biscuits. You don’t have to—”

  “That’s what I’m here for.” Katherine waved away the praise, but her smile, the way she tilted her chin down, said she was taking it all in. Moments ago, Katherine had claimed she’d found what she was looking for at the bakery and more. Was this what she’d meant?

  “Would Jones and Sam—?” Katherine asked.

  “Yes, please,” the other two mothers sang out. One of the babies banged his plastic cup against the table. The other little guy opened and closed a sticky-looking hand in Katherine’s direction.

  Katherine gave the cookies to the mom
s and then slid back into the booth across from Zach. Her voice came out breathy, the way Zach’s mother sounded when she was doling out praise. “Now, where were we?”

  Zach offered Katherine the truest statement he’d uttered all morning. “Beats me,” he said. “I haven’t got a clue.”

  CHAPTER 3

  For Celeste, junior year in high school had been a series of firsts. Her first boyfriend, Justin, had led to first sex, first breakup, and the first time she’d suffered the assault of vicious gossip. Another first? Letting her best friend, Abby Stone, take care of her. Abby, who rarely swore, had been the first to tell Celeste it was okay to haul off and tell Ed—aka Celeste’s eating disorder—to shut the fuck up.

  Shared DNA wasn’t the only way to measure family.

  When Celeste’s brother Lincoln had brought her out back of their whitewashed Cape and encouraged her to point his. 22 downrange and balance a photo of Justin’s face in the middle of the sight, Abby had shown Celeste how to dodge harsh words and barbed looks. When Celeste had wanted to run away, Lincoln had provided her with a suitcase, a road map, and a how-to lesson on breaking into empty motel rooms for free stays. Abby had taught her how to settle down, take life in stride, and stay in Hidden Harbor. When Lincoln had teased her about her first baking frenzy and then her refusal to taste test her own baked goods, Abby had reminded Celeste how to nurture herself.

  To this day, Celeste didn’t fully understand how one of her greatest pleasures—food—had become her greatest fear.

  From outside Briar Rose, Abby’s bayside bed-and-breakfast, three in the afternoon could’ve been mistaken for three in the morning. Cars with license plates from Maine to Maryland crowded the darkened parking lot. Since Celeste’s return to Hidden Harbor, the low-lying skies had progressed from partly cloudy to in your face and ready to burst. Celeste’s inhalation rattled in her chest.

  At least she’d gotten her job back.