Barry’s gaze wandered back to Zach. This time, Zach looked up from his task. Celeste straightened and stretched her back, reminiscent of Katherine.
Katherine was sure Celeste would be horrified to have unintentionally picked up one of her quirks.
“Does the young guy—?”
“Zach.” Now that she knew his name, she couldn’t allow him to go nameless. A few hours after he’d been born, a nurse had come into Katherine’s room with the paperwork. To her surprise, she was asked if she wanted to give her son a name. Even though there was no way she’d ever know whether the adoptive parents would keep the name, not naming her son would’ve seemed like an insult.
Katherine liked the name Zach. She wished she could tell Zach’s parents that she approved of their choice.
As if they’d ever approve of her.
“Does Zach have any restaurant or food service experience?”
“Nope.”
“Any relatives who live in the area? Friends or family we know personally?”
Katherine’s pulsed tripped over its own feet. “Not that I’m aware of.”
Barry dropped the clipboard act. “Peculiar response.”
“Only one I’ve got.” Katherine slipped behind the showcases and examined her stock.
Barry fisted his hands and set them atop the bakery case. He flicked his gaze to Zach. “I know why you hired Zach.”
Doubtful, she thought, but her pulse chose to believe otherwise.
“He looks a little bit like you,” Barry said. “And we tend to trust people who look familiar.”
“I don’t see it.” Katherine kept her gaze on a row of black-and-white cookies, and her face warmed.
“He’s a good-looking young guy.”
“Barry!” Katherine said, and Daniel, the guy who wasn’t too young for her, glanced up from his newspaper.
As if Barry had raised his voice, he now lowered it. Another shrink trick? “What I meant was, he’s in good shape.”
“What do you think of me?” She wasn’t one of those over-forty ladies who wore skintight clothes to cinch her expanding waistline, flocked to doctors to tighten her sagging skin, and went after men young enough to be their sons in a desperate attempt to shore up their sagging egos. She didn’t have a sagging ego. And the rest of her she was too busy to notice.
Barry steepled his hands atop the bakery case. “He’s staying through closing, after Celeste leaves for the day. Am I right?”
“So?”
“You want to know what I think of you?”
“Don’t Jung me,” she said, referring to the method of echoing the patient’s concerns.
“I know you’re human,” Barry said.
Katherine held out her palms, shook her head.
“I know you’ve been anxious . . .” Barry said. “Nervous in the bakery alone.”
Katherine gave a quick, sharp laugh. Barry thought she’d hired Zach as a bouncer for the bakery. She almost wished she could explain to Barry how hilarious that was. Almost.
“I’m not anxious. Why should I be anxious?” Katherine said, although her gaze wandered across the room to the yellow booth cushion that was lighter than the rest. The inability to match the original shade served as a reminder, cruel in its subtlety. A quick glance, and the yellows appeared to match. No customer could tell the difference. No one had noticed Katherine had covered up evidence of a crime, the violation. That itself felt like a violation.
Celeste headed across the café toward the coffee station.
Barry made big, sweeping motions with both hands, ushering her over. “Celeste will settle our disagreement.”
Celeste mouthed, Of course, crossed her heart, and headed their way.
Katherine widened her eyes in a way she hoped Barry would notice, but Celeste would ignore. Katherine turned her head from side to side, every so slo—
“Has Katherine seemed out of sorts to you,” Barry asked, “a teensy bit anxious?”
“Why would she be anxious?” Celeste asked.
Nooo.
“Because of the break-in?”
“What break-in?”
Belatedly, Barry registered Katherine’s wordless plea and clamped his mouth shut.
“What the hell?” Celeste said, and then looked to Katherine, as though she’d spoken her name. “There was no break-in. If there was a break-in, Katherine would’ve called me.”
“Even if I had your phone number, which I did not, I wouldn’t have called you. What possible purpose would calling you have served? What could you have done, other than worry? You were hours away.”
“I’m here now,” Celeste said, somehow managing to look like both a three-year-old dropped off at nursery school for the first time and a fierce, capable young woman. “So tell me.”
Katherine slid her gaze to the ceiling and shook her head. She waved her hand through the air. “There was an incident, minor damage—”
Celeste looked to Barry for confirmation. Medium, Barry mouthed.
“Black graffiti on the walls and a booth. Childlike, really. Like a tantrum. A disorganized tantrum.”
Celeste’s eyes narrowed and then widened. “The booth by the bread shelves? The one farthest from the door?”
“That would be the one. But like I said, nothing to worry about. I took care of it. I took care of everything.”
Celeste tapped a bakery clog against her shin.
“What are you doing?”
“Kicking myself for not asking you about the booth. I thought it looked different. I noticed the red trim. But then I didn’t trust my own memory. Maybe you’d always had one booth with red trim instead of green.”
Damn. Red? Green? The two colors appeared muted and often similar to Katherine. She shouldn’t have trusted her own eyes.
“And then I forgot about it,” Celeste said.
“Then you remembered,” Barry said.
“Always listen to your gut,” Katherine said. “Otherwise, your gut stops talking to you.”
“Or I could’ve waited for the owner of the bakery I’ve worked at since I was sixteen years old to tell me about the robbery herself. No, wait, your gut told you not to call me.”
Katherine pressed a forefinger to the center of her lips. Her customers didn’t need a serving of gossip along with their morning coffee. “There was a burglary, not a robbery,” she said, her voice lowered to a three-foot range. “A robbery means a break-in, while the home or business owner is on-site. I wasn’t on-site.”
Zach continued to transfer loaves of sourdough onto the bread shelves, his head bent into his task. The grouchy construction worker, Jeff, sipped his coffee, indifferent. His cheerful compatriot, Daniel, alternated from pretending to read the paper to glancing across the room.
Katherine doubted anyone could hear her and Barry’s conversation, but vibes were contagious. Talking about anxiety made her anxious. Was it any wonder she’d never gone to a shrink?
Barry glanced at Daniel. Then he reached a hand up to Katherine’s face and slid a lock of hair back into her cowlick. “My work here is done.”
She’d never paid for a shrink.
“Your work as a troublemaker? Your work stirring and muddying calm waters?”
“Sometimes you need to stir the waters to see what rises to the surface,” Barry said. “A wise woman once told me that.”
“A shrink friend?” Katherine asked.
“You.” Barry held Katherine’s gaze until the rest of her saying surfaced.
Otherwise the surface is deceptively smooth, and all you can see is a reflection of your own image.
“See you tomorrow,” Barry said, and went out to the storm. The door jingled in his wake. The sound of the rain pounding the pavement amplified and softened. He passed by the window and through a circle of light, as though an early sunup had pierced through the storm. He looked younger, maybe a dozen years younger, the age he’d been when they’d first married and before everything had complicated and caved.
&nbs
p; But of course the trompe l’oeil was nothing more than the predawn streetlight’s illumination and wishful thinking.
“What if you’d interrupted the burglar?” Celeste whispered, her concern a mirror of Katherine’s when she’d found the bakery trashed and she’d worried for Celeste.
But, of course, Celeste had been at school, miles away, safe and sound. “Then I suppose he, or she, would’ve become a robber.”
At first, the police had assumed the intruder had hoped to find money in the till, or a safe that was easy to pick. But the open and empty cash register drawer had remained untouched, and no prints had wreathed the safe’s numbered wheel, save for Katherine’s.
Unable to take anything of value, a burglar would’ve, at the least, left with a keepsake. Something, anything, to prove he’d been there, if only to himself.
The intruder had broken into Lamontagne’s to vandalize, to let Katherine know he’d traipsed through her sacred space. He’d left her evidence, made a statement, given her proof of his powers. Nothing was removed from the bakery except for Katherine’s peace of mind.
“Have the police figured out who broke in? Who’d do such a thing? It’s not like you have any enemies,” Celeste said, having come around to another of Katherine’s misguided assumptions. “It must’ve been a stranger, someone from another town?” Celeste said, but her statement sounded like a question.
“Actually, the police think it must’ve been someone who knows me, due to the damage.”
Celeste shook her head. Her hand covered her mouth. “I should never have left. What if someone had hurt you?”
“No one’s going to hurt me. If someone broke into the bakery again, I’d handle it myself.”
Celeste grinned. “What would you do? Challenge them to a bake-off?”
Katherine gave Celeste a good, long stare. What in the world did Celeste see when she looked at her? A divorced, childless, middle-aged woman whose world began and ended at the door to her eponymous bakery? Katherine could take care of herself; she’d never had a choice. “Come in the kitchen with me for a minute.”
“Zach—”
“Will be perfectly fine.” Zach, Katherine was certain, could handle himself. “He’ll find us if he needs us.”
Inside the kitchen’s stockroom, Katherine turned on the light—a pendant with a single bulb—and shut the door behind them. The dimness of the space and the need for secrecy brought to mind a tiny bathroom and the sharp smell of fear. “I have a gun,” Katherine told Celeste.
Celeste laughed, as if Katherine had delivered the punch line to a joke.
“It’s a Smith & Wesson .22,” Katherine said. “Loaded and locked in the safe.”
“I don’t believe you.” Celeste stared at Katherine, stone-faced, as though waiting for Katherine to change her story. Then Celeste broke into a crazy-eyed grin. “You’re serious,” she said, and gave her head a quick shake. “It’s in the locked safe? Locked?” Celeste flapped her arms. Flour motes scattered and glimmered around them. “What good is a loaded gun in a locked safe?” Celeste emitted a combination between a growl and a snort.
Katherine folded her arms, hoping the stance would shore up her dubious argument. “It’s for self-defense. I don’t want to really shoot anyone. I just want to scare them.”
“Okay. For the sake of argument, let’s say you walk in on someone—a burglar or a robber—”
“A vandal.”
“A skateboard punk rocker—whatever—and you ask them to wait for you to unlock your combination safe.And then you whip out your loaded gun and point it. But not at them, just in their general direction to scare them off because you really don’t want to shoot anyone.”
Katherine took a slow, steady breath. “Change your tone if you want me to hear you. Otherwise this conversation is over.”
Gone was Celeste’s indignity over Katherine’s assumption about her and Zach, or at least set aside. And in its place? Frustration.
Long ago, a cracked bathroom mirror had reflected the same expression on Katherine’s face: the pleading eyes, the determined set to her jaw. Celeste wrapped her arms around her stomach, as sick with frustration as Katherine had once been, trying to talk her mother into leaving her father. Trying to talk sense into she who refused to defend her boundaries.
Two gentle taps echoed through the stockroom door, and Katherine startled. “A customer’s asking about Celeste’s Wild Blues,” Zach said, his voice even-keeled and upbeat.
“I’ll be right out,” Celeste called through the door, mimicking Zach’s tone.
She and Katherine held their breath until Zach gave the door a single tap. “See you out there,” he said.
“I’ll teach you how to shoot,” Celeste whispered, “so you don’t shoot yourself in the foot.” She nodded, but Katherine refused to play along.
“Go chat up your muffins. I’ll be out in a minute.”
“At least give me the combination to the safe,” Celeste said.
For a second, Katherine thought Celeste had said to be safe. That combination Katherine did not have.
“Go,” Katherine said, more gently, she hoped, more the way she meant the word. But words were so inexact, so open to misunderstandings.
Celeste opened her mouth, as if to protest. Then she slipped from the stockroom on a sigh, leaving Katherine alone with her memories of another room, a closed door, and two women who could not agree.
On the day of the last big talk, Katherine and her mother had huddled in their tiny bathroom, the only room with a door that locked. Back then Katherine had never heard of verbal abuse, but she’d nonetheless tried to explain it to her mother. Living things deformed when exposed to ugly words and blossomed beneath expressions of love, gratitude, and hope. Katherine had reminded her mother of the peach tree in the yard that ten years prior, when they’d first rented the cottage, had yielded healthy fruit but now sat shriveled and rotting. Surely her mother would make the connection. All life responded in kind. In this house, nothing beautiful could survive.
Instead, Katherine’s mother kept bringing up the number of years she and Katherine’s father had been married—twenty-five—and the two daughters they’d brought into the world. Katherine couldn’t argue against the math. But none of it added up to a reason, a logical reason, why her mother would stay with her father.
Then Katherine’s father knocked on the door, making Katherine and her mother jump and squeeze hands. “What the hell you girls doing in there?” her father asked. “Painting your stupid fingernails? You’d better be scrubbing that filthy toilet, you goddamn lazy, good-for-nothing . . .”
Leave, Katherine had mouthed, her eyes widened in a way she hoped her mother would translate into, Leave him.
And then, seeming to understand, her mother had done the strangest thing. She’d hugged Katherine to her chest, tight enough to steal her breath. The sharp angle of her mother’s collarbone dug into Katherine’s chest, and her mother’s pulse thrummed through Katherine’s body, as if they shared one heart. Her mother pressed her lips to Katherine’s ear and offered an explanation for why she stayed with her father that trumped all good reason. “Because,” Katherine’s mother had told her, “I love him.”
Love was a kind of sick obsession.
CHAPTER 7
Zach was a little obsessed.
He awoke with the seat belt buckle digging into his hip and his shoulder folded in a warped way no healthy shoulder ought to fold. His head tucked into his sleeping bag, the sharp smell of his own body odor burning his nose hairs. His sweaty toes didn’t seem connected at the ends of his cold feet.
He poked his head from the darkness of the sleeping bag. The eyeball-aching assault of the parking lot light reminded him of the way a cop’s flashlight beam had caught him with his pants down. Twice. The first time he’d been parked at Lookout Point after the prom and a cop shone a flashlight through his back window just as he and his girlfriend were getting to the good part. Thirty more seconds he’d wanted to reques
t, but he’d thought better of turning his embarrassment into a full-out stand-up comedy routine. The second time he’d been at the receiving end of a cop’s high-beam flashlight and a falsely cheery Good morning! was the last time Zach had had sex. A few hours before he’d stumbled home to the suitcase on the porch and his mother’s find her note.
He was here to find his birth mother, to ask Katherine the question he’d yet to dare: Are you my mother?—reminiscent of the children’s book his adoptive mother used to read to him and his not-adopted brothers. A million times he’d turned over the words in his head. A million times they’d sounded dumb as dirt. A million times he’d clamped his mouth shut and taken mental notes on Katherine’s life, as though that would tell him how to broach the subject. Stacking bread, busing tables, and “marrying” the pastries gave Zach a front-row seat to Katherine and her customers—the way she simultaneously held them close and yet kept her distance. Katherine and Celeste weren’t related—as Zach’s father liked to say, thank God for small miracles—but they acted like mother and daughter.
Zach was here to reunite with his birth mother. And yet Celeste awoke his curiosity, among other things. Beneath the sleeping bag, not everything was cold.
He inhaled the blanket she’d loaned him. Sugar cookies, vanilla frosting, and something else. Nutmeg? Cinn—“Good morning, sunshine.” Celeste peered through the side window. Some kind of bakery kerchief thing corralled her hair.
On Sunday, the one day of the week Lamontagne’s was closed for business, Zach, Katherine, and Celeste were all working the Hidden Harbor Harvest Festival. Katherine and Celeste would stop by Lamontagne’s to bake and organize, and he’d drop in an hour later to help them ferry baked goods to a booth on the town green. He’d asked Celeste to wake him up when she was heading out. He’d totally forgotten he’d asked her because he was busy thinking about her and—Slowly, he slid his hand from his boxers. The elastic waistband slapped his stomach. Inside the sleeping bag, he broke into a sweat. His pulse thrummed his armpits, making them itch.
“Can you roll down the window?” Celeste asked.
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