The Sweetness of Forgetting

by Kristin Harmel

  “I was happy!”

  “Whatever,” she says. “You couldn’t even tell Dad you loved him.”

  I blink at her. “Did he say that to you?”

  “What, like I’m not old enough to figure things out on my own?” she asks, but from the way she avoids my gaze, I know I’ve hit the nail on the head.

  “Annie, it’s not appropriate for your father to be saying bad things about me to you,” I say. “There are a lot of things about our relationship that you don’t understand.”

  “Like what?” It’s a challenge, and she gazes at me coolly.

  I weigh my options, but in the end, I know it’s not appropriate to drag our daughter into an adult battle that isn’t hers to fight. “That’s between me and your dad.”

  She laughs at that and rolls her eyes. “He trusts me enough to talk to me,” she says. “And you know what? You ruin everything, Mom.”

  Before I can reply, the front door to the bakery chimes. I glance at my watch. It’s a few minutes before six, our official opening time, but Annie must not have locked the door behind her when she came in.

  “We’ll continue this later, young lady,” I say sternly.

  “Whatever,” she mutters under her breath. She turns back to the batter she’s mixing, and I watch for a second as she adds some flour and then some milk, then a dash of vanilla.

  “Hey, Hope, you back there?” It’s Matt’s voice, from the front of the store, and I snap out of it.

  I hear Annie say “Of course it’s him” under her breath, but I pretend not to as I make my way up front.

  Mrs. Koontz and Mrs. Sullivan come in at 7:00 a.m. as usual, and for once, Annie rushes out to wait on them. Usually, she’s happier to be in the kitchen, baking cupcakes and miniature pies with her iPod on, effortlessly ignoring me until she has to go to school. But today, she’s sunshine and smiles, whisking into the main room and pouring their coffee before they even have a chance to order.

  “Here, let me help you to your seats,” she says, juggling two coffee mugs and a little pitcher of cream as they trail behind her, exchanging glances.

  “Why, thank you, Annie,” Mrs. Sullivan says as Annie puts the coffees and cream down and pulls out her chair for her.

  “You’re welcome!” Annie replies brightly. For a moment, she sounds exactly like the girl who inhabited her body before the divorce. Mrs. Koontz murmurs a thank-you too, and Annie chirps, “Yes, ma’am!”

  She hovers while they each take their first sips of coffee, and she’s practically hopping from foot to foot by the time Mrs. Sullivan takes a bite of her blueberry muffin and Mrs. Koontz picks up her cinnamon-sugar doughnut.

  “Um, can I, like, ask you a question?” Annie asks. I’m tidying up behind the counter, and I pause, straining to hear what she wants to know.

  “You may, dear,” Mrs. Koontz says. “But you mustn’t use like in the middle of a sentence that way.”

  “Huh?” Annie asks, confused. Mrs. Koontz raises an eyebrow, and Annie’s smart enough to correct herself. “I mean, excuse me,” she amends.

  “The word like is not a space holder in a sentence,” Mrs. Koontz tells my daughter seriously. I duck behind the counter to hide my smile.

  “Oh,” Annie says. “I mean, I know.” I peek over the counter and see her face flaming red. I feel bad for her; Mrs. Koontz, who’d been my tenth-grade English teacher years ago, is a tough cookie. I think about coming to Annie’s defense, but before I have a chance, Mrs. Sullivan jumps in.

  “Oh, Barbara, give the child a break,” she says, swatting her friend on the arm. She turns to Annie and says, “Ignore her. She simply misses being able to boss children around, now that she’s retired.” Mrs. Koontz starts to protest, but Mrs. Sullivan swats her again and smiles at Annie. “Did you say you had a question for us, dear?”

  Annie clears her throat. “Uh, yeah,” she says. “I mean, yes, ma’am. I was just wondering . . .” She pauses, and the women wait. “Well, you knew my great-grandma, right?”

  The women glance at each other, then back at Annie. “Yes, of course,” Mrs. Sullivan finally replies. “We’ve known her for years. How is she?”

  “Fine,” Annie says instantly. “I mean, not totally fine. She’s having some—problems. But, um, mostly fine.” Her face is flaming again. “Anyways, I was just wondering, do you, um, know who Leona is?”

  The women exchange looks again. “Leona,” Mrs. Sullivan says slowly. She mulls it over for a moment and shakes her head. “I don’t think so. It doesn’t sound familiar. Barbara?”

  Mrs. Koontz shakes her head. “No,” she says. “I don’t think we know a Leona. Why?”

  Annie looks down. “It’s just something she keeps calling me. I was just wondering, like, who she is.” She looks horrified for a second and mumbles, “Sorry for saying ‘like.’ ”

  Mrs. Sullivan reaches out and pats Annie’s hand. “Now you’ve gone and scared the child, Barbara,” she says.

  Mrs. Koontz sighs and says, “I’m just trying to correct her grammar.”

  “Yes, well, this isn’t the time or place,” Mrs. Sullivan replies. She winks at Annie. “Why is this so important to you, dear? The question of who this Leona is?”

  “My great-grandma seems sad,” Annie replies after a minute, in a voice so low I have to strain to hear her. “And I don’t know that much about her, you know? My great-grandma, I mean. I want to help her, but I don’t know how.”

  A pair of customers come in then, a gray-haired man and a young blonde woman I don’t know, and I miss what Annie and the women are talking about while I help them. The blonde orders a piece of carrot cake, after asking if we have anything diet—we don’t—and her male companion, who looks a few decades too old to be squeezing her hand and kissing her ear, orders an éclair. By the time they leave and I glance back at Annie, she’s seated with the two older women.

  I glance at my watch and consider reminding Annie that if she doesn’t leave in the next few minutes, she’ll be late to school, but the look on her face is so earnest that instead, I freeze for a minute and just look at her. I’m used to her sneering and rolling her eyes lately every time she’s around me, but in this moment, she just looks innocent and interested. I swallow the lump in my throat.

  I walk into the dining room with a rag and a spray bottle so that I can eavesdrop under the pretense of cleaning up. The women, I realize, are telling Annie the story of how Mamie came to live in Cape Cod.

  “All the girls in town used to be in love with Ted, your great-grandfather,” Mrs. Koontz is telling her.

  “Oh my.” Mrs. Sullivan fans herself with her newspaper. “I used to scribble his name and mine in a notebook every day during our senior year of high school.”

  “He was older than us,” Mrs. Koontz says.

  “By four years,” Mrs. Sullivan agrees. “He was off at college—Harvard, you know—but he’d come home every few weeks to visit. He had a car, a nice one, which was a big deal out here in those days. And the girls would just swoon.”

  “He was so kind,” Mrs. Koontz agrees. “And like so many others, he joined the army the day after Pearl Harbor.”

  The women pause in tandem and look down at their hands. I know they’re thinking about other young men they’d lost, so long ago. Annie shifts in her seat and asks, “So then what happened? He met my great-grandma in the war, right?”

  “In Spain, I believe,” Mrs. Koontz says, looking to Mrs. Sullivan for confirmation. “He was shot down somewhere in northern France or Belgium, I think. I never heard the whole story; everyone here spent months believing he was missing in action. I was sure he was dead. But he somehow escaped to Spain, and your great-grandmother was there too.”

  Annie nods solemnly, like she knows this story by heart, although my grandfather died twelve years before she was born.

  “She’s French of course, your great-grandmother Rose. But the way I understand it, her parents died when she was young, and she wanted to leave France because the countr
y was at war, right?” Mrs. Sullivan picks up the thread of the story, glancing at Mrs. Koontz.

  Mrs. Koontz nods. “We never found out exactly how they met, but yes, I think Rose was living in Spain. But it was, what, 1944 when we heard he was back in America, and he’d married a girl from France?”

  “Late 1943,” Mrs. Sullivan corrects. “I remember it exactly. It was my twentieth birthday.”

  “Oh yes, of course. You cried into your birthday cake.” Mrs. Koontz winks at Annie. “She had a silly schoolgirl crush on your great-grandfather. But your great-grandmother stole him away.”

  Mrs. Sullivan makes a face. “She was two years younger than us, and she had that exotic French accent. Boys are very easily swayed by accents, you know.”

  Annie nods again, solemnly, as if this is something she knows instinctively. I hide a smile as I pretend to concentrate on a particularly tough spot to wipe up. I’ve never heard my grandmother talk about how she and my grandfather met. She rarely talks about the past at all, so I’m interested to hear what the women know.

  “Ted got some sort of job in New York, at a secondary school, after he received his doctoral degree,” Mrs. Koontz says. “And then he and your grandmother moved back to the Cape. That’s when he took the job at the Sea Oats.”

  My grandfather, whose PhD was in education, had been the first headmaster of the Sea Oats School, a prestigious private school one town over. It used to serve grades K through twelve, but now it’s only a high school. It’s where Annie will go from ninth grade on, on a legacy scholarship.

  “And, um, my grandma was there too?” Annie asks. “When Mamie and my great-grandpa moved here?”

  “Yes, your grandmother Josephine must have been what, five years old? Six years old when they moved?” Mrs. Sullivan says. “They moved back to the Cape in 1950. I remember clearly, because it’s the year I got married.”

  Mrs. Koontz nods. “Yes, Josephine started first grade when they moved here, if I remember right.”

  “And Mamie founded the bakery then?” Annie asks.

  “I think it was a few years later,” Mrs. Koontz says. “But your mother would probably know.” She calls to me. “Hope, dear?”

  I pretend I haven’t been listening to their whole conversation. “What’s that?” I ask, looking up.

  “Annie here was wondering when your grandmother founded the bakery.”

  “In 1952,” I say. I glance at Annie, who’s staring at me. “Her parents had owned a bakery in France, I think.” I’ve never heard any more about Mamie’s past than this. She never talked about her life before she met my grandfather.

  Annie ignores me and turns back to the two women. “But you don’t know anyone named Leona?” she asks.

  “No,” Mrs. Sullivan says. “Maybe she was a friend of your great-grandmother’s from France.”

  “She never really had any friends here,” Mrs. Koontz says. Then she shoots me a guilty look and amends hurriedly, “Of course, she’s very nice. She just kept to herself, that’s all.”

  I nod, but I wonder whether that was all Mamie’s fault after all. She’s quiet and reserved, certainly, but it doesn’t seem as if Mrs. Koontz, Mrs. Sullivan, and the other women of the town exactly welcomed her with open arms. I feel a pang of sadness for her.

  I look at my watch again. “Annie, you’d better get going. You’re going to be late for school.”

  Her eyes narrow, and the brief glimpse of the old Annie is gone; she’s back to hating me.

  “You’re not the boss of me,” she mutters.

  “Actually, young lady,” Mrs. Koontz says, shooting me a look, “she is. She’s your mother, which makes her the boss of you until you turn eighteen, at the very least.”

  “Whatever,” Annie says under her breath.

  She gets up from the table and stomps into the kitchen. She emerges a moment later with her backpack.

  “Thank you,” she says to Mrs. Koontz and Mrs. Sullivan on the way out the door. “I mean, thanks for telling me about my great-grandma.” She doesn’t even look at me as she strides through the front door, onto Main Street.

  Gavin comes by as I’m closing to drop off the spare keys I’d given him two days earlier. He has on the same pair of jeans with the hole in the thigh, which seems to have gotten marginally bigger since I last saw him.

  “Your pipe’s fixed,” he tells me as I pour him the last of the afternoon’s coffee. “Dishwasher’s running good as new.”

  “I don’t even know how to thank you.”

  Gavin smiles. “Sure you do. You know my weaknesses. Star Pie. Cinnamon strudel. Hours-old coffee.” He looks into his coffee cup and arches an eyebrow, but he takes a sip anyhow.

  I laugh, despite my embarrassment. “I know I should be paying you in something other than baked goods, Gavin. I’m sorry.”

  He looks up. “You have nothing to be sorry for,” he says. “You’re obviously underestimating my addiction to your baking.”

  I give him a look, and he laughs. “Seriously, Hope, it’s fine. You’re doing your best.”

  I sigh as I place the last of the day’s remaining almond rose tarts into a flat Tupperware container that I’ll store overnight in the freezer. “Turns out my best isn’t good enough,” I mutter. Matt had brought me a bunch of paperwork that morning, and I haven’t begun to read it yet, although I know I need to. I’m dreading it.

  “You’re not giving yourself enough credit,” Gavin says. Before I can reply, he adds, “So Matt Hines has been around a lot.” He takes another sip of his coffee.

  I look up from packing away the pastries. “It’s just business,” I tell him, although I’m not sure why I feel like I have to explain myself.

  “Hmm,” is all Gavin replies.

  “We dated in high school,” I add. Gavin grew up on the North Shore of Boston—he’d told me all about his high school in Peabody one afternoon on the porch—so I assume he doesn’t know about my past with Matt.

  I’m surprised when he says, “I know. But that was a long time ago.”

  I nod. “That was a long time ago,” I repeat.

  “How’s Annie holding up?” Gavin changes the subject again. “With the stuff between you and your ex and everything?”

  I look up at him. No one has asked me this recently, and I’m surprised by how much I appreciate it. “She’s okay,” I tell him. I pause and correct myself. “Actually, I don’t know why I said that. She’s not okay. She seems so angry lately, and I don’t know what to do about it. It’s like I know the real Annie’s in there somewhere, but right now, she just wants to hurt me.”

  I don’t know why I’m confiding in him, but as Gavin nods slowly, there’s not a bit of judgment on his face, and for that I’m grateful. I begin to wipe down the counter with a wet rag.

  “It’s rough when you’re that age,” he says. “I was just a few years older than her when my parents got a divorce. She’s just confused, Hope. She’ll come out of it.”

  “You think so?” I ask in a small voice.

  “I know so,” Gavin says. He stands and crosses to the counter, where he puts his hand on mine. I stop wiping and look up at him. “She’s a good kid, Hope. I saw that this summer with all that time I spent at your house.”

  I can feel tears in my eyes, which embarrasses me. I blink them away. “Thanks.” I pause and pull my hand away.

  “If there’s ever anything I can do . . .” Gavin says. Instead of completing the sentence, he looks at me so intensely that I look away, my face burning.

  “You’re really nice to offer, Gavin,” I say. “But I’m sure you’ve got better things to do than worry about the old lady who runs the bakery.”

  Gavin arches an eyebrow. “I don’t see any old ladies around here.”

  “That’s nice of you to say,” I murmur. “But you’re young, you’re single . . .” I pause. “Wait, you’re single, right?”

  “Last time I checked.”

  I ignore the unexpected feeling of relief that sweeps through
me. “Yeah, well, I’m thirty-six going on seventy-five; I’m divorced; I’m sinking financially; I’ve got a kid who hates me.” I pause and look down. “You’ve got better things to do than worry about me. Shouldn’t you be out doing something . . . I don’t know, something young, single people do?”

  “Something young, single people do?” he repeats. “Like what, exactly?”

  “I don’t know,” I say. I feel foolish. I haven’t felt young in ages. “Clubbing?” I venture in a small voice.

  He bursts out laughing. “Yeah, I moved to the Cape because of the wild club scene. In fact, I’m just on my way back from a rave now.”

  I smile, but my heart’s not in it. “I know I’m being dumb,” I say. “But you don’t have to worry about me. I have a lot on my plate. But I’ve always handled everything before. I’ll figure things out.”

  “Letting someone in once in a while wouldn’t kill you, you know,” Gavin says softly.

  I look at him sharply and open my mouth to respond, but he speaks first.

  “Like I said the other day, you’re a good mom,” Gavin goes on. “You’ve got to stop doubting yourself.”

  I look down. “It’s just that I seem to screw everything up,” I say. I feel the color rise to my cheeks and I mumble, “I don’t know why I’m telling you this.”

  I hear Gavin take a deep breath, and a moment later, he has come around the counter and wrapped his arms around me. My heart thuds as I hug him back. I try not to notice how solid his chest is as he pulls me close, and instead focus on how nice it feels to be held. There’s no one left to comfort me this way anymore, and I hadn’t realized until this moment how much I’ve missed it.

  “You don’t screw everything up, Hope,” Gavin murmurs into my hair. “You’ve got to cut yourself a break. You’re the toughest person I know.” He pauses and adds, “I know things have been hard on you lately. But you never know what will happen tomorrow, or the next day. One day, one week, one month can change everything.”

  I look up sharply and take a step away. “My mother used to say that. Those exact words.”

  “Yeah?” Gavin asks.