Good Grief: A Novel

I move on to the baseboards, crawling along the floor on my hands and knees, sponging away black sludge. Who cares that I awoke after sleeping with him feeling happy and rested for the first time in a year?

  Ruth helped me flesh out my good-riddance list, adding that Drew was a procrastinating commitment-phobe who didn’t appreciate me. She didn’t say “I told you so.” She said I was right—there was no reason to be overly suspicious and paranoid like her. Drew had said Ginger was engaged.

  After cleaning the front of the store, I move to the kitchen, where the previous tenants left behind an old pockmarked copper kettle encrusted with chocolate. While I’ll probably never use it, I scrub the kettle until my fingers are raw and a shiny layer of copper finally emerges.

  In the middle of the kitchen there’s a small table with a marble slab top for cutting fudge. I try pushing it against the wall, but it’s heavy and obstinate, as if to say Who are you to think people will want to buy cheesecake instead of fudge?

  I wish I had a helper: Dad or Ethan or . . . not Drew. Add this to the list: Who the hell keeps books in his dishwasher? And who wants to eat with someone whose teeth clack as if they’re wooden when he chews? At first it didn’t bother me, but somewhere around our fifth meal together I wanted to squeeze Drew’s jaw shut to make the noise stop.

  Tomorrow I’ll enlist Crystal’s help with the cleanup, get her to heave her scrawny hundred pounds into a mop.

  I tug open the drawer under the marble tabletop. It’s full of cracked wooden spoons, fudge knives, and a wooden paddle for stirring chocolate. Nothing very useful for cheesecakes. A few mouse droppings fleck the back of the drawer. Suddenly this place seems too dirty and funky for a bakery. I’m overwhelmed by everything that needs to be done before I can open: cleaning, inspections, permits, a new exhaust system, paint, varnish, curtains, tables, a sign and a logo, and printed menus. Sampling and advertising. What if Chef Alan’s right and I’m making a terrible mistake? What if I don’t even turn a profit in the first year? I’ll sap my nest egg and wind up living in a rented room over the bus station with a bunch of cats.

  I pull a stool up to the marble slab and sit down to take a break, squeezing my eyes shut and trying to will optimism into my bloodstream.

  It’s completely dark outside the bakery now, the empty street shining with rain, the only light a dim glow in the bookstore window across the way. I try to remind myself that life often seems unmanageable at night. Then somehow, as sunlight finally streaks the sky in the morning, everything seems possible again.

  I grab a pad and pen out of my bag and start a list. Paint. How much? Color?

  I flip through the paint samples in my folder and consider Pineapple Crème, a yellow that’s as satiny as cake batter. Even when it’s raining for days, the bakery will look sunny and Ashlanders will be tempted to wander in for a slice of pear pie and a cup of tea.

  My mind wanders back to Drew, but I force myself to focus on the shopping list: drop cloths, ladder, masking tape, brushes, rollers, nose hairs. Despite Drew’s good looks, weren’t there nose hairs? I fight to recall long, black, homely nose hairs. Not just slow dances and flannel sheets, deep dimples and his sweet knack for making kids laugh.

  When life gives you lemons, you make lemonade. When guys break your heart, you conjure nose hairs. Good riddance.

  25

  Crystal climbs to the top step on the ladder and yanks down the brown paper covering the bakery windows; it crackles and cascades over her head like a giant ribbon. The grand opening party is one week from today, but we’re technically open for business this morning. I want to get a little experience before the mayor, newspaper food critic, Chamber of Commerce president, and the rest of the town show up for the opening.

  “Careful!” I shout, dizzy as I look up at Crystal.

  She clambers down the ladder and runs through the bakery, still favoring the leg she burned. “I’m a mummy!” she shrieks, wrapping herself in the paper.

  While I wash the windows with Windex and paper towels, Crystal makes a sign with colored markers.

  Grand opening party this weekend, she writes, the tip of her tongue pointing out of the corner of her mouth as she concentrates. Underneath: Come in for a free sample now! She runs out of room on the paper and has to scrunch several letters into one corner. I wish we had a more professional-looking sign, but I don’t want to hurt her feelings.

  “Great.” I hand her the tape. “Hang it in the window.”

  I flip over the OPEN sign, and Crystal and I stand behind the register, waiting for our first customer.

  During the weeks I was preparing to open—haggling with the health department, meeting with the graphic designer, perfecting the pie dough recipe—it seemed this day would never come. Now, the sidewalk outside is empty. A car slowly splashes by in the street. Sometimes the Oregon weather makes the whole day look like four in the afternoon. Inside the bakery seems sunny, though, and the place looks edible to me: buttery yellow walls and crown molding as glossy white as marshmallow icing. The refinished wood floors shine like honey, punctuated with chocolaty knots.

  Over the register I’ve hung a framed picture of me as a kid standing with my mother beside a new Suzie Homemaker oven on Christmas morning. Mother’s wearing a white apron over a red-and-green-print dress, her beautiful mouth outlined in red lipstick. You’d never guess that she was a terrible cook or that a week after I got the oven, an evil neighbor boy named Jeremy bullied me into letting him bake a frog in it. The house filled with a putrid stench, and Dad tossed the oven out onto the curb.

  Crystal helps me load a tray with free samples to put by the register: miniature cherry cheesecakes, walnut brownies, slices of lemon butter pound cake, and wedges of ollallieberry muffin.

  Finally, our first official customer shows up—a mother with twins who wrestles a gigantic stroller through the door. I bolt across the room to help her, then adjust my speed en route, not wanting to seem desperate for business. The woman’s eyes widen as she surveys the cookies and muffins.

  Crystal stands at attention on the other side of the case, holding a sheet of waxed paper in one hand and an empty white bag in the other. I convinced her to swap her jeans and giant sweatshirt for pressed khakis, a pink T-shirt, and a white apron. She looks much more approachable now. The twins tip their chins back to look up at her, fluttering their fingers over their heads as though playing castanets. Their mother chooses two maple moons, two sugar cookies, and a blondie.

  “Will that be all?” Crystal asks with Miss America poise I never knew she had. “The angel food meringues are very light and nonfat.” She’s a great low-pressure salesman. Rows of pink and blue barrettes line either side of the zigzag part in her hair. You’d never imagine that she would have the capacity to give herself a second-degree burn with a teakettle.

  Our customer plucks a miniature cherry cheesecake from the sample tray and takes a tentative nibble.

  “Oh,” she moans. “Mmmmm.” She licks crumbs of crust from her lip.

  Crystal points to the full-size cheesecakes in the case, and suddenly the woman is committing to a New York style that serves ten, and blackberry topping.

  “You have a nice day,” Crystal trills as the woman heaves the big stroller through the door.

  “You sold our first cheesecake!” I give Crystal a high five, and she takes a bow.

  Last week I called Crystal’s school guidance counselor to tell him how helpful she’s been to me in opening the bakery. I wanted him to know that Crystal’s time off from school has been productive. She’s even better than I am at maneuvering the high-strung cash register. I felt like a bragging parent as I explained this.

  “Dude! My first paycheck ever,” Crystal said when I handed over a check from my business account. She closed her eyes and kissed the check. I worried that she would blow her earnings on junk food, CDs, and firecrackers. But she bought only one thing: a mail-order taxidermy kit.

  “Are you sure you want that?” I asked, looking over her
shoulder at the kit in the catalog, shuddering at the description of the glass eyes included.

  “Sometimes animals, like, die by accident and you want to fix them so you can look at them later,” she explained, filling in the mail-order form in her loopy handwriting.

  Weird kid, I thought. “Okay, sounds good,” I said.

  Around lunchtime two giggling teenage girls crash through the bakery door. Even though it’s barely sixty degrees outside, they wear halter tops that expose wide stripes of bare white belly over their tight, low-rider jeans. Tiny silver hoop earrings shimmer in their belly buttons.

  “Oh, Crystal,” one of them says sarcastically when she spots her behind the counter. “I didn’t know you, like, had a job.” Neon green and orange rubber bands flash in the braces on the girl’s teeth.

  “It’s my aunt’s bakery,” Crystal says, her back straightening as she rearranges a row of carrot-raisin muffins. “She owns it.”

  I duck behind the kitchen wall so the girls can’t see me, afraid I might embarrass Crystal.

  “Cool,” the other girl sniffs indifferently.

  They choose peanut-butter chocolate-chip brownies and cans of Coke from the cooler, and Crystal rings them up. As she hands them their change, one of the girls looks over the counter at Crystal’s feet and giggles.

  “What?” Crystal says.

  “Nothing,” the two chime in unison, bumping against each other as they pop open their Cokes.

  “You look like a nurse,” one girl teases. She wrinkles her nose and points at Crystal’s squishy white shoes. Now I regret forcing the shoes on Crystal.

  “Later,” the other one says.

  “See you at school,” the first one says. “Oh yeah, you can’t go to school.” They both giggle, their cheeks bulging with brownie, and clomp back through the door onto the street, doubling over with laughter.

  “Whatever,” Crystal says quietly to herself, apparently out of her cutting comebacks.

  I poke my head around the corner. “Don’t tell me. Amber and Tiffanie?”

  She nods and wipes the already clean counter with a rag. I want to run outside and throttle those two snotty girls. As I watch them turn up the street, I can’t believe what I’m seeing: black thong underwear riding above the ridiculously low-slung waist of one of the girls’ jeans.

  “They don’t seem particularly pretty or smart or nice,” I tell Crystal, wishing I could come up with a more clever jab. Teenage plumber’s crack!

  Crystal shrugs. “Everyone likes them.”

  Later in the afternoon, Crystal leaves for the first of the horseback-riding lessons that I gave her as a birthday gift. I start a new batch of cheesecakes. It’s as warm as summer in the kitchen, and I peel off my sweater and work in my T-shirt. Closing my eyes for a moment, I breathe in the scents of butter, sugar, and vanilla. The bakery smells like a safer time to me, a time before Ethan died and Johnny Carson went off the air, and there was that hole in the ozone. It smells like a time when you’d come home from school and your mom would be baking cookies. Actually, my mom wouldn’t be baking cookies, since she didn’t bake. There were always warm slices of cinnamon toast, though, and a cup of cocoa. While I ate she sat with me at the table, reading her big Art Through the Ages book, fantasizing about a trip to the Parthenon the way some people might fantasize about meeting their favorite celebrity.

  “How’d you learn to cook like this?” Drew asked one night at my house, tasting a spoonful of spaghetti sauce from the pot with admiration. Good question, I thought, since I barely passed home ec, got kicked out of Girl Scouts, and my mother couldn’t cook. Maybe it was just the love of eating and the search for comfort since the time of her death.

  “Self-taught,” I told him.

  Now, I grate lemon rind and measure sugar.

  After Drew dumped me, I had to buy new sheets so I could lie in my bed again. I’d owned the former sheets for years, and they reminded me of sleeping with Ethan and sleeping alone and sleeping with Drew. The new sheets are splashed with bunches of blue hydrangea with bright yellow centers—happy, single-girl bedding.

  “Madame?” a voice calls out from the front room.

  I switch off the mixer and step through the kitchen door to discover Chef Alan standing stiffly in front of the bakery cases. He’s wearing jeans and a T-shirt, and his thick hair is wet and slicked back.

  “Chef.” I figured I’d run into him in town at some point, but certainly not in my bakery.

  He makes his signature little bow.

  “George would like to keep your cheesecakes on the menu.” He avoids eye contact, cracking his knuckles as he peers into the bakery case. “And I agree. They are . . . adequate.” Before, Chef praised my savory cheesecakes. “Perhaps I will be your first commercial customer.”

  I figure this is as close to an apology as I’m going to get. “Thank you,” I say. Maybe I can persuade other restaurants to carry the cheesecakes.

  “I want to offer the Brie-and-porcini as a first course and the New York style for dessert.” He furrows his brow at the case. With Chef, ordering food is serious business. He prides himself in choosing just the right amount of everything, allowing little to go to waste.

  Finally, he peers over the top of the case and makes eye contact with me. His eyes are nearly black, without pupils, and he seems tired and hungry for something beyond food. “I am ready to place my order.”

  “Sophie?” Drew’s voice echoes through my answering machine one morning as I’m heading out to the bakery. I freeze, clutching the front door handle.

  Drew pauses. “I’m sorry,” he continues.

  Squeezing a stack of cookbooks to my chest, I creep back down the hall to the kitchen, holding my breath as if he might hear me through the answering machine.

  This better be good.

  “I’d like to talk to you. Are you there? Will you pick up?”

  Why? So we can go have coffee?

  “Some things happened before you moved up here that I’d like to explain.”

  Things? By any chance sex-related things? I tiptoe closer to the machine.

  He clears his throat. For an actor with perfect diction and delivery, suddenly he’s fumbling. “It’s all over now.” He pauses. “With Ginger.”

  I lean toward the answering machine as if to sniff it. Clean laundry smell, broad shoulders, narrow waist, callused warm hands. None of my good-riddance list items come to mind.

  “I’d like to see you.” His voice lowers. “Soon. Please call me.”

  Fat chance, Mr. Coffee.

  He sighs, hangs up.

  I set my cookbooks and purse on the counter, open the refrigerator, and stare inside. This is me not calling Drew Ellis back. The air is cool against my face and arms. A bottle of Drew’s Bloody Mary mix stares at me. I pour it down the drain and torpedo the bottle into the recycling bin. It pops and shatters.

  I drink a little milk from the carton, then close the refrigerator door and calmly cross the room to the phone. I’ve forgotten how dating bestows your answering machine with such power. How you yearn to drive an ax through the thing just because the little red light isn’t flashing. Once you’re married, you could care less about the light. If it’s blinking, it’s probably some other married couple calling to ask you to a barbecue.

  As I stand over my answering machine, I imagine my handsome fantasy husband with the prosthetic leg in Santa Fe. He will serve me tall glasses of iced tea by the pool with fresh mint and sugar cubes. I will put his name down in case of emergency.

  Crystal hovers over the long wooden table in the kitchen at the bakery, pounding her fist into her science book.

  “Shit!”

  “Watch the language.” I slide a tray of oatmeal cookies out of the oven, closing my eyes. I’m overwhelmed by the amount of work left to do for the opening. My feet and back hurt today, and I’m actually tired of the thick, sweet smell of the bakery. The loan, the lease, the insurance payments. It all feels like too much.

  “I
hate summer school!” Tears fill Crystal’s eyes.

  The social worker at Big Sisters warned that Crystal might become more agitated after the cutting stopped. “However inappropriate it was, her self-medication has been taken away,” she explained. “But the rage is still there.”

  “I know it’s not fun,” I tell Crystal. She has to complete three courses before she can join the ninth grade next year, and the condensed summer school classes seem even harder for her.

  “I don’t want to go back to school anyway.” She scratches at the last scab on her arms. It breaks open and bleeds a streak of bright red.

  “Don’t.” I take her hand, squeeze it, close the textbook. “Forget about it now. The tutor’s coming tomorrow.”

  She nibbles the edge of a cookie. “I don’t give a shit about the Earth’s core anyway. I don’t like minerals. I like animals. How come there’s no class about animals?”

  I try to steer the conversation in a more positive direction. “What’s your favorite animal?”

  “Marmoset. I want one. They’re so small and they’re, like, totally—”

  Crystal’s interrupted by a loud knock at the front door of the bakery, which is locked, since we’re closed for the day. I peer out of the kitchen and see Drew cupping his hands around his face, peeking through the glass. He smiles and waves when he sees me. I duck back behind the wall, sucking in my breath.

  “Crystal,” I say mechanically. “Unlock the door.”

  She heads to the front of the bakery, spinning back toward me when she sees Drew. Her mouth drops open and she stops in protest.

  I glare at her. “Go.”

  She backs toward the entrance, eyes on me the whole way. She snaps the lock open but lets Drew struggle with the sticky door. The bell rings cheerfully.

  “Hi,” he says, extending a hand to Crystal. “Drew Ellis.”

  “I know.” She folds her arms over her chest. “Whatcha want?”

  “Here to see Sophie.”

  “About what?” She forms a blockade in the doorway to the kitchen, her feet spread wide.