She’d always been a picky eater. Jemma would nibble on something to make sure it wasn’t poisonous, and if she liked it would almost inhale it. Eventually, she’d fixate on that specific food, having it with every meal in a variety of different ways until she invariably got sick of it.
Then the cycle would start all over again.
There was a stretch of five months when she was nine that she put ketchup on everything. And I do mean everything. Waffles, pancakes, mac and cheese, even her ice cream. Just the thought of the pink sludge at the bottom of her bowl made my stomach clench uncomfortably.
And yet here she was, taking a bite out of everything on the plate. Maybe pastries were a wide enough category that she considered it all one food?
I shook myself from my reverie. Clearly, my own mind was trying to distract me from the one topic I absolutely didn’t want to talk about. Ever.
Jemma took her mug from me. I got out the milk and creamer, pointed to the sugar bowl in the bamboo caddy between us, and said, “How do you even know it’s her?”
She shrugged, defensively hunching her shoulders up to her ears. She looked a bit like a turtle and I held back a smile while Jemma stirred in heaps of cream and sugar.
She and Thomas had that in common. They both liked their coffee sweet.
“I saw her at the funeral,” she said. “Looks a lot like the photos Dad had. Especially in the eyes. She has our eyes.”
I ducked my head and stared into the dark pool of coffee in my hands. “Yeah,” I said, voice barely above a whisper. “That’s what Dad used to tell me. Said we both got her eyes.”
“Well, she wants to talk to you.” She flinched at the sudden glare I gave her.
I dialed it back. I wasn’t mad at Jemma. She didn’t deserve that.
“I’m sorry, I’m just…. Dad’s barely gone and she comes back? Now? Where was she all those nights I cried to sleep when I was told I couldn’t go to the mother-daughter fashion show because I didn’t have a mom? What about those mother-daughter bake sales we couldn’t attend?”
I was clenching my fists and forced them to relax. My nails had dug curved depressions into my palms. I was so angry. I never realized just how angry I was until that moment.
Jemma didn’t say anything, she just sipped her coffee, eyes full of shining tears. “I know, and I told her we didn’t want anything to do with her, but she was insistent. She said she always meant to come back, to reach out but...”
“But what?” My voice jumped an octave and I wrangled it down back to normal speaking volume. “Too busy to call for one of the twenty-plus birthdays she missed? Was she out saving the world as a super-spy or something?”
Jemma colored at that and a sob broke out of her. I realized what I’d done and felt terrible instantly. My hand reached out and covered hers. I squeezed it reassuringly. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to bring that up.”
When we were little Jemma was obsessed with James Bond, the movies not the books. I’d tried to get her to read Ian Flemming’s work but she wasn’t much of a reader. The movies and the games she loved.
One night she’d come up with this crazy story about how she was sure that Mom was a secret agent like Bond. She had left because she wanted to make the world a safer place for us.
So every night while we were sad and missing her, she was out there saving the world so we could have a better home to grow up in. A better chance at life for us and all the other little girls out there.
It was complete bullshit, and being the angry preteen I was then I had told her.
She cried for a week and refused to speak to me for nearly two months after that. I learned not to poke bubbles in her theories from then on.
“I know,” she said scrubbing angrily at her tears. “You aren’t wrong though. There’s no excuse for what she did, but besides each other, we’re all she has. Do you really not want to hear what she has to say, even if it’s just to apologize to our faces and then leave?”
“I don’t know.” I was being honest. I really didn’t.
Of course I had the typical fantasies of my mother coming back into my life with an excellent explanation and effusive apologies about how much she missed me and was sorry for all the pain.
Who hadn’t been abandoned, either by a parent or lover and wanted that sort of closure?
But Jemma also had a point. Now that Dad was gone, we only had each other. I was fine with that but what about my little sister? What was it that she needed? In fact, what was it she was doing here?
Was she here to convince me, or did she feel like she could only do it with me at her side? The very last thing I wanted to do was see that woman again. At least now I know why I got a strange vibe during the funeral, it must have been her and I was just too out of it to properly recognize her.
Then again, I couldn’t blame myself, could I? I was five or six when she left us.
I took a deep breath and cut to the chase. “Do you need me there when you go talk to her?”
She started and curled her fingers around mine. We stayed that way for some time before Jemma bit her lip and nodded. Tears fell from her eyes to splash and sparkle against the tabletop. “You knew?”
Call it sisterly intuition, or just reading her right. Whatever it was, I knew she had already agreed to talk to her. She was too young to remember the shouting matches between them. Dad wondering where she was going when she’d come home in the dead of night.
She wanted to see Mom ever since she left and she was certain she would. I guess that certainty never left her. Maybe it had been tempered by the harsh realities of adulthood and the less-than-easy life she had been living since, but that childish hope lingered at the center of her heart still.
I was beginning to understand it was what made my sister special. Unique. I wouldn’t take that away from her. I couldn’t.
“Tell me.” I already had a good guess at what she was going to say. Either our mother had managed to convince Jemma that she wanted to talk to both of us, or Jemma had used me as a bargaining chip.
I was willing to bet the latter.
It made sense. If I was willing to talk to her, a woman I’ve more than established I hated, then it gave Jemma some justification for how she felt. That maybe our mother wasn’t entirely irredeemable.
“She came by a couple of hours ago. I don’t know how she found where I was, but I guess it wouldn’t have been hard considering everybody in town knows where Dad used to live.”
“Perks of living in a small town.”
Jemma squeezed my hand and gave me a teary smile. “She looked so sad, Claire. At first, I was mad, but she just took it. Accepted it like she believed she deserved it.”
“She does, Jemma.”
Her lip trembled. “I-I know, but she’s not the same person anymore. She got help, she’s been clean for ten years now. She showed me the chip.”
I let go of her hand and folded my arms under her breasts. As much to hug myself as to ward off the sympathy for my mother. I hadn’t known she was an addict. Dad never talked about her much after she left.
As far as I knew, he never divorced her.
“You can probably buy those online now.”
She shook her head, more tears fell. “No, it was worn smooth. I could see where she would take it out sometimes and worry it like a talisman when she got emotional. She said she wanted to talk to you too, but didn’t know where you lived. Thought maybe we’d both be at Dad’s I guess.”
My face must have betrayed the fear that she knew where I lived now. It was the furthest thing from what I wanted.
“I didn’t tell her! I would never. As far as she knows you’re back in New York. I said I’d talk to you, see if I could arrange something. Maybe we could sit down somewhere and talk…if-“
“If what?”
“If you were willing.” And there it was. The hook. Not that I blamed Jemma. I certainly didn’t have the heart to be upset at her for it.
Several long moments stretche
d between us. I felt scoured out by my anger, hollow and empty. What was that bullshit quote that Thomas used to say about anger? Oh yes. Holding onto anger is like drinking poison and expecting the other person to die.
He’d explained it was falsely attributed to Buddha but that the teaching was sound enough on its own. And I had to say, at this moment it felt exactly like I had poison in my stomach. I felt sick and the only thing I wanted was to be rid of it.
I hung my head in defeat.
If I was going to have any closure over this I needed to hear her out. More than anything, I needed to do this for Jemma. She was the one who really needed it and she came to me with this. I wasn’t about to make her miss out on something that she obviously needed.
“I’ll do it.” For Jemma.
12
Thomas
“You’re a dingus, Thomas.”
I pushed Sam out of the way and returned to my piping. “Stop calling me that.”
“Would you prefer I talk like I usually did?”
“Point taken.”
Pastry piping was something I had the hardest time with.
My control with a pastry bag wasn’t exactly precise. And one of the hallmarks of a great patissier is the elaborate piping of pastry cream in and around various pastries.
Judging by the dozen or so failed -but still tasty - pastries littered around me, I still had a long way to go. I was improving though. When I first started I used to only have one in ten presentable enough to consider selling.
I usually gave the rejects away or ate them. Now, Sam commandeered them for her own usage. She plucked another from the failed pile and dropped it into her mouth. “Why do you care about how pretty they are anyways? Can’t you just wipe it off and try again?”
“No, Sam. I can’t just ‘wipe it off and try again’ that’d leave a mess, not to mention that it’s dishonest.”
She scoffed. “Honesty? Man, you’re running a business, not some sort of competition. Your goal is to make money, or did you forget that?”
I looked over my shoulder at her. “Would you be here if I couldn’t afford to pay you?”
The uneasy look in her eye didn’t give me the whole picture until she scuffed her shoe on the floor and said, “Probably! God knows I’m a fucking sucker for guys who can’t seem to catch a break, and you’ve been going on three or four years of a mean streak.”
“That’s very sweet of you.”
“Shove it up your ass, Weller.”
I chuckled, barely managing to keep my hands steady enough to continue the piping and finish another pastry with perfection. “See? I’m getting better.”
She leaned past me, swiped her finger through the cream and licked it off with a wicked look in her blue eyes. “Looks to me, that you fucked up. Gimme.”
I handed it over and she popped yet another pastry into her mouth. “I’m going to dock your pay if you do that again.”
“Really?”
“No, but I could.”
“Nah.”
“Don’t think I’d do it?” I glanced at her. She was standing there with her hands laced behind her head looking up at the ceiling lights. A thoughtful twist to her lips.
“You wouldn’t do that to a poor young, impossibly attractive girl that just couldn’t turn her life around without the money she was getting from her cushy new job.”
“Spare me,” I said, setting the pastry bag down a moment before the oven dinged. I had a near sixth sense about my kitchen. I was in my element here and I knew precisely how everything ran. “Toss me that towel.”
I snatched the towel out of the air with one hand as I opened the oven with the other and slid out the tray of chocolate chunk cookies, transferring it to a cooling rack and shutting the door with my elbow.
I had worried that having somebody else in the kitchen would throw me off my game. This was a private place for me and it had been a big thing for me to have Claire here.
With Sam, I realized I wasn’t as put off as I thought I might be. In fact, her constant obscenity strewn banter was something I had missed. She didn’t treat me with reverence and adoration like Claire. I loved her to death and I loved the way she made me feel, but we were together.
Sam and I weren’t. We were friends. She treated me like an equal. Not like a guy she wanted to bang, or somebody she was worried was trying to get into her pants. We hung out, and work was a lot more fun than I ever remembered it being.
The shop’s bell tinkled in the distance.
Out of habit I started to move towards the swinging door that separated the back from the front. I barely got two steps before Sam was there and out, greeting the guest with a surprisingly pleasant, “Hi, what can I get ya?”
So far she hadn’t cursed at a single guest, at least not to my knowledge. I finished up piping and didn’t see Sam again for the next hour as a surge of guests came into the shop. I risked a peek out the door and found that it had started raining.
What was it with people flooding into shops during the rain? It was just water. It’s not going to hurt them. Not that I minded that people took shelter out from the storm but it always seemed a bit odd to me.
Maybe I was the odd one.
Going for a walk or a run in the rain was one of my favorite things to do. Living in a valley had its perks, steady rain showers during spring and fall being one of my favorites.
The rest of the day I worked to get a head start on some pastries, cookies and a few loafs of sourdough that had flown off the shelf earlier in the day. The sourdough had been Sam’s idea a couple years back when she came into town out of the blue.
She’d been to San Francisco and heard about their legendary sourdough bread and somehow managed to talk a baker there into giving her some of their starter. Unlike typically yeasted dough, sourdough used natural bacteria to leaven the dough, which is what makes it rise.
The thing is, the bacteria are very specific to their original conditions. Starter, which is a sort of thick bubbly sludge of water, bacteria, and flour takes on all the characteristics of its home.
It was one of the reasons sourdough from San Francisco is so good and how it’s hard to find its equal anywhere else. You literally need the same starter as them and have to keep it alive by feeding it regularly.
I kept mine in a row of jars, six strong. That way if anything happened I had a backup or five. I wasn’t about to go out to San Francisco to get more, though now I probably had the money to do it.
Though I didn’t want to think what would happen if I left the shop unattended for even a couple of days.
Sam and Claire probably wouldn’t get along very well. They were polar opposites. Then again, she was a bit like Jemma in some ways so maybe there was hope if Claire and her sister could forge a true connection.
I hoped so. I wanted them both in my life. I had few friends as it was and it would mean a lot to me that they liked each other.
The sky had started to darken further and the rain showed no signs of letting up when I came in from the back. I’d prepped as much as I could and it was just about time for Sam’s shift to end.
“Time for me to fuck off already?” she asked, seeing me take my apron off and fold it at the middle where I let it hang still tied around my waist.
“Just about, you wanna knock off early?”
She hopped up on the counter and kicked her legs in the air. “Nah, if it’s all the same to you I’d like to stick around a little bit.” The shop was empty for now. It usually died out just around five or six. With the steady all-day rain, I wasn’t surprised to see it empty a bit sooner.
I raised an eyebrow at that. She never struck me as a particularly hard worker, I always chalked it up to her never finding the right fit. I somehow doubted that bakery shop clerk - her official title - was the right fit.
“I’m still staying at the hotel,” she said by way of explaining.
So that was it. Awkward run-ins with her old boss. “What time does he go home?”
&nbs
p; “Six is usually when the night clerk comes.”
“You’re welcome to stay,” I said. “It’s likely to be dead for the next few hours anyways unless the rain lets up. I’d enjoy the company. You want something to eat?” I motioned to the glass display cases.
That earned me an appraising look. “I didn’t think you were serious about that.” Sam dropped off the counter and slipped past me to get to the other side of the shop. She dropped into a polished wooden seat with a small table on the far wall.
We didn’t have much seating for in-house eating but it was enough most days when the shop hadn’t been doing so well that people could come on their lunch break and wouldn’t have trouble finding a seat. Now most people had to get their orders and leave.
I’d like to fix that one day.
“So, you going to keep staying at the hotel?” I asked, picking up some random pastries and setting them down on her table.
“Know anybody looking for a roomie?” she asked with a little chortle.
“If you’re looking, I could ask around. Claire might be able to find something too.”
Sam brandished a french twist at me. “So how are you two lovebirds anyhow?”
“We’re good.” I leaned on the counter and couldn’t help but smile. “Actually, we’re really good. Not perfect, nobody is but damn near enough.”
“Gross. You’re gross, Thomas.” Despite what she said, I could see the small smile playing across her lips. At her heart, she was just as much a romantic as I was. The only difference was she knew how to hide it.
“Yeah, well what about you? Find anybody to hold your fancy lately?”
She took a crunchy bite of the french twist and examined the flakey brittle thing. “You know me, I come back to Sunrise Valley to lick my wounds and then go back out into the wide world.”
“So that’s why you came back. Because something happened?”
“Yes. No. I mean not really. Why do you care?”
“Don’t answer a question with another, Sam. I’m curious. If you don’t want to talk about it we don’t have to.”
Baking Up Love Page 9
