Maybe because I know he gets how this feels, I’m grateful enough to leave it in the background and fill up the foreground with things like breakfast tacos and Esther’s Follies and how easily we can embarrass the Walgreens cashier by buying condoms and KitKats.
He’s my first serious boyfriend, but he’s two years older than me, so I know he’s had serious girlfriends, though I don’t need to complicate what’s uncomplicated between us. Which is why I reassured him that I didn’t need any details.
I’m here, I write. I’m OK. Sorry so quiet, stuff with Mom.
My finger hovers over the send arrow as I try to remember why I didn’t respond to his texts last night. I hear Mom’s voice over Ezra’s, hear my sister’s name said aloud. I need uncomplicated. I need Chris. I send it.
And then another: I want to see you tonight.
Cool. Gotta get back to work. Be strong.
I smile at the phone. As if he can see me.
I’m downstairs washing the dishes, stacking them in the broken dishwasher to dry, when a shriek sounds from upstairs. Mom. A soapy mug slips out of my hands. It falls into the sink and cracks neatly in two. There’s another yell, this time a more sustained keening wail. And then a loud thud.
I’m taking the stairs two at a time, blotting my wet hands on my shirt. Ezra’s coming out of Harper’s room when I get there, closing the door softly.
“What happened? She okay?”
“I think she will be. She just … uh … well …” His forehead, usually smooth and serene, is creased.
“What was that noise?”
“She knocked over the piano.”
“Jesus!”
“She didn’t get hurt though,” he says. He holds several books of matches.
“Where’re those from?”
“Apparently she’s been collecting these. She flipped out when I found them.”
“What was she—” I cut myself off. I can’t go there. I can’t.
As Ezra stuffs the matches in his pockets his angle shifts and I see something I’d missed.
“Oh my God,” I say. There’s redness on his cheekbone near his eye. I lift a hand to touch his face, but his hand finds mine. He grips it, then lets it go. “Did she hit you?”
He shrugs. “She didn’t mean it.”
“Oh, Ezra.” I want to cry.
My phone is heavy in my pocket. I know I have to call her doctor. Adults can only be institutionalized against their will if they are a demonstrable danger to themselves or others. Check and check.
If you’d told me a year ago that I’d be on a first-name basis with my mom’s psychiatrist I would’ve told you you’re the crazy one. She didn’t even have a psychiatrist back then. The Tretheways are sane.
Yeah, well, a year’s a long time for a heart to break.
9
LINNEA
“Fucking freezer,” Nicola says when I walk into the restaurant kitchen.
It’s hard to know when she wants a response. “I thought the guy was supposed to fix it today,” I say, as if I really care about a broken door latch.
“He was, the moron.” She pauses to plate a thick piece of sea bass. “Needs to wait for ‘a part to come in.’” She spins the plate around, wipes the edge clean of the drizzled-out-of-bounds blackberry sauce, and glares at the hovering waitress to take it to the table. “Incompetence, everywhere.”
Nicola owns Basement Tapes, a pretty swanky place, especially when you consider how unswanky she is. She’s somewhere between thirty-five and fifty-five (she said this during an interview on KXAN-TV, wearing her usual uniform: unflatteringly tight T-shirt, mullet hairdo, enormous spacers in her earlobes). Kitchen rumors have her bouncing between prison time, rehab, and homelessness. And yet here she is with her own restaurant. She always says that: a) people can change, and b) customers don’t give a shit about your past if you’re filling their stomachs with something good and helping them forget about how hard life is for a while.
I like her, and like that she doesn’t micromanage me. This apprenticeship could get me into the Institute of Art. I have an interview with them next month. Not one where you and the dean sit on opposite sides of the desk and blab about global issues and service projects, but instead, one where a panel of pastry chefs watch me work and then eat what I’ve made while I die a little inside.
An hour later, I’m in the tiny bakery, my own enclave of the former auto body shop. This space used to be the office. Bright and airy and sweet smelling, it didn’t carry any of that dreary garage feng shui into its reincarnation. I’m cutting strips of dough for the top of a fruit pie. After three failed attempts at making straight, symmetrical strips, my hands ache. When the bell on the door jingles, I get a break. Maybe I can cut myself some slack considering I was getting kamikazed by bees twenty-four hours ago.
It’s Leo. Ex-employee, likely drug addict, and all-around jerk. He saunters in, chains on the belt loops of his baggy black jeans jangling like enough change to choke a parking meter. The last time I saw him his short spiky hair was neon green. Now it’s safety-vest orange. I feel a headache coming on.
“Ooh,” Leo says in his usual smarmy way as he leans against the customer side of the pastry display. “Cherry. My favorite.” Leering at me, he anchors a skinny elbow—the one with the tattooed spiderweb rippling out from it—on the counter where I’m working. “Well, if it’s your cherry, that is.” He smells like mouthwash.
“Wow, so original.” My neck flushes. “Prick,” I say under my breath, which is not the type of thing I say at work, even under my breath.
“That’s it,” he says, playing air drums. The motion makes the spider on his forearm look like its creeping. “Let go of the squeaky-clean thing. I like ’em dirty.”
“Pathetic.” I suddenly crave a shower.
“By the way …” He raises a heavily studded eyebrow toward my dough strips. “That’s not lookin’ like your best work, cupcake.”
What do you know about pastry, twerp? “You’d better get lost before Nicola catches you in here.”
The sinews in his neck popping like wire, he throws his head back and laughs. His ravaged teeth don’t look like they belong in the mouth of a twenty-something. “She’d better catch me. She called me.”
“What?”
He seems to roll around in my surprise.
“Once you get a taste of Leo’s mad skills, yo …” He threads his fingers together and cracks all of his knuckles at once. “You don’t forget it.”
Maybe Leo is the second most talented chef in Austin (savory, not pastry), but he’s a mess. In and out of prison for God knows what. Despite her soft spot for second chances, Nicola let him go months ago when he showed up for work high.
Nicola strides into the bakery and claps her hands together when she sees Leo. Not like applause, more like a drill sergeant impatient to get the grunts marching.
She’s at least six inches shorter than Leo, but she grabs his chin, yanks him down to her level, and peers into his eyes. Probably checking his pupils. She sniffs. I’m not sure whether she’s checking for booze or filth. Whatever the case, apparently Leo passes the sniff/stare test.
Or maybe not.
“Airplane arms,” she commands.
“What?”
“Time for a pat-down.”
“I’m clean, Nic.” There’s a little whine in his voice that makes me smile inside.
She glares, taps her foot. He grumbles but raises his arms.
I hope Nicola finds a felony-size rock in those oversized jeans. She pats. He jangles. She pats. He sighs.
“You think I’d bring drogas in here?” he says.
“No, I think you’d bring durian fruit you got off the back of someone’s truck, or mushrooms you picked up camping, or ghost peppers hot enough to send a line cook to the ER. That was all you, remember?”
“The blank plate is my canvas. Can’t blame a guy for gettin’ creative.”
“Tell that the Department of Public Health.”
Another thing that pisses me off about Leo is that even though he looks like a derelict in his random chains and ridiculous T-shirt with the sleeves cut off—You lookin’ at ME?, bloodshot cartoon eyes peering out from behind the E—once he’s in chef’s whites, he’ll command a convincing chef presence.
“Okay, first we need to go over the specials,” Nicola says to him. “The carne spesh: pork belly with black pudding mash and grain mustard sauce. The veg: roasted creminis with sherried shallots—”
“Uh, Nicola?” I say. “What’s going on?”
“What does it look like?” she snaps. Leo grins at me over her shoulder in his pervy way, complete with darting tongue and ogling eyes. She gestures for me to hurry up and talk. Apparently her question was not the rhetorical kind.
“It looks like you’re putting Leo on the line again?”
“Not quite, princess,” Leo says. “I’m running the kitchen tonight.”
“Hey!” Nicola barks and stomps on his toes with her waffle-soled boot. He yelps, which gives me way too much satisfaction. “Cut the cockiness, Leo. And don’t make me regret calling you. I don’t care how much talent you have—if you fuck up this time, I swear to God you’ll never work in this town again.”
Nicola catches me smirking.
“And you don’t need to deal with him directly,” she says. “You’re bakery, he’s restaurant. Beef cheeks have no business with cupcakes.”
“Ha, beef cheeks,” Leo repeats. “Cupcakes.”
“Are you gonna be around though?” I ask Nicola. I kick myself; she hates neediness.
“I didn’t think I had to get my personal time okayed by my payroll.” She points at my dough. “Redo that. Looks like shit.”
Leo smiles triumphantly.
The restaurant and bakery are too busy tonight for Leo to bother me, and for that I’m grateful. I’ve made a Texas sheet cake, three dozen profiteroles, and chocolate mousse in handmade chocolate cups.
Forty-five minutes left to closing. I’m looking forward to a quiet space where I can get the kinks out of the phyllo dough and make baklava.
The bell over the door announces another customer. I smell the woman’s perfume before she makes it up to the counter.
“I need a cake.”
“You’re in the right place,” I say. “Our cakes have won Best of ATX for four consec—”
“A birthday cake.”
“Okay, do you have a flavor preference?” I ask.
“Not chocolate.”
I slide open the door to the pastry case. “We have a lemon left, this one will serve eight to ten. Or a coconut-almond, which would serve twelve.”
“Which would you choose?”
I used to hate coconut, thought it tasted like pencil shavings and had a less appealing texture. But tonight, with the tropical smell wafting out of the case, I want to press my face into the cake and gobble.
“Coconut,” I say.
“Fine.” The woman clicks open her purse. “Is it extra to write on it?”
“Not at all. What would you like it to say?”
“Happy Birthday, obviously.”
“Obviously.” I’ve had enough of her attitude. “Happy Birthday to who?”
“Sandra.”
“Color preference?” Now I’m all business.
“Just not chocolate.”
“Chocolate’s not a color.”
She snorts.
I choose green gel and start to write. But it’s coming out all wrong, as if this is my first cake. Lopsided, uneven. Huh?
The woman leans over to watch me. “Now I know why it’s included.”
“Sorry.” I grab a clean frosting scraper and wipe away the botch. I try again. This time, if at all possible, is even worse.
“Don’t you work here?” she says.
“Of course I do.” I hate that my voice squeaks.
“Did you just start?”
“No, ma’am.”
The woman glances at her watch way too many times through my next two attempts, which end up looking like a middle schooler’s home ec project. I wipe the top clean again and stare down at the blank white circle like I can psych it out. The bell rings to signal another customer. I can’t deal with anyone else right now.
I look up but can’t see through my bangs, which are now glued to my forehead with nervous sweat. I use my forearm to swipe them aside.
It’s Daniel.
“Hey you,” he says.
“W-what are you doing here?”
“Had a craving for something sweet.”
My mind fills with buzzing, flying thoughts. Baking soda. Pizza. Kisses.
The customer huffs.
Oh great, now Daniel can witness my spectacular failure. My left arm tingles weirdly, not in an uncomfortable way, not like pins and needles, more like droplets of warm water beading up on the inside. Wasp venom? The sensation travels from my upper arm all the way down to my wrist, finally intensifying and ending in my palm and fingers.
I pick up the pastry bag with my left hand even though I’m right-handed.
In the time it takes for my heart to beat six times, I write Happy Birthday, Sandra in a beautiful, flowy script that is definitely not mine. I’ve tried writing with my left hand plenty of times and it always comes out looking like someone with a brain injury did it.
“Why didn’t you do that in the first place?” the woman asks, pulling her wallet out of her purse.
I laugh uncomfortably. “Just messing with you.” And messing with myself, apparently. My hands, the secret keepers. Playing piano, writing with the wrong hand. What’s next?
I ring her up, and once she leaves, Daniel leans against the counter.
“What can I get you?” I ask.
“For starters,” he says, “I wouldn’t turn down a cupcake.”
I’m supposed to launch into a description of today’s varieties now, right? Instead, the way he looks at me shoves words out of reach. A car pulls up to the curb outside, its hazards on, the pulsing lights like cartoon heartbeats in my eyes.
“How’re you feeling?” he asks.
“Good.”
“You look good,” he says, but with none of Leo’s creep factor.
“Thanks.” I expect to flush from the neck up, but I stay cool. Something in me makes me want to take off my apron and, and, and … My God, who am I? Suddenly I’m Leo.
“Is this you?” He points to the pastry case. There’s not much left at this time of night, but what is there is pretty good-looking. The lattice-work on the cherry pie never came out the way I wanted, but it’s passable. Just more on the “rustic” side.
“Mostly.”
“Hey,” he says, “I found my phone.”
“Oh. That’s good.” It feels like we’re looking for a way to break the ice all over again. Like last night was part dream. “Was it in my yard?”
“Yep.”
“Do you really want a cupcake?” I ask.
“Absolutely.” He taps the glass of the pastry case. “If you made it.”
I nod. “That’s devil’s food cake, toasted marshmallow frosting, peanut butter filling.”
He takes out his wallet. “I was sold on marshmallow.”
“It’s on me,” I say.
“Really?”
“A cupcake for every person who saves me from a swarm of killer bees. It’s, like, a policy. Besides, I forgot to send you home with dessert last night.” I grab a small white paper bag to nestle the cupcake into.
“Actually,” he says, “I think I’ll eat it now. If that’s okay with you.”
“Sure.” I’ll just die on the spot if you hate it.
I place the cupcake on a small plate and hand it to him. He undresses it, peeling away the yellow paper liner. Did I taste that batch? I can’t remember. Oh, God. He takes a huge bite that wipes out half the cupcake. He closes his eyes and chews. There’s a bit of frosting at the corner of his mouth.
/> “Holy shit, Linnea … you made this?”
“Yeah.” Why does his opinion matter so much?
“It’s amazing.”
I put down the tongs and come out from behind the counter. Something is waking up inside of me. Waking up in a new space and stretching and drawing in big pulls of air. I take the plate from him and set it down. Who am I?
“You have a little frosting,” I whisper, “right there.” I point to the corner of his mouth.
He lifts his hand to swipe it, but I intercept. Gripping his hand, I lean toward him until my face is inches from his. I dart my tongue out and lick the marshmallow off his lips. It’s the sweetest bit of frosting I’ve ever sampled, and I’ve sampled a lot.
His hands are on my shoulders, then they’re cupping the back of my head, then they’re gently touching my face. For a second I lose track of my mind-of-their-own hands. Oh, here they are … tucked under his shirt, into the waist of his jeans, at the small of his back. His skin is oven warm beneath my palms.
A whole new recipe is revealed to me: Daniel + marshmallow = perfection.
The bell over the door dings. Damn.
I’m sure this flagrant PDA will earn a complaint to Nicola, but my fears are erased when I see the customers. A youngish couple holding hands and smirking our way.
I wait on them while Daniel drifts outside. I catch him peeking through the plate-glass window a few times.
Within a few minutes, the couple is gone (with a playful “We’ll leave you two alone” tossed over their shoulders). And within two beats, Daniel’s back inside.
“So you’re closing soon,” Daniel says, gesturing toward the wall clock with his chin.
“Half hour.”
“You might be sick of sugar …”
“Impossible.” Although I have been craving salty stuff today, and, come to think of it, I haven’t taste-tested anything I’ve made my whole shift. (With the exception of what was on Daniel’s lips.)
“I heard there’s this all-night trailer that sells giant doughnuts.”
“Gourdough’s,” I fill in. “They’re fantastic. You can’t be a true Austinite ’til you have one.”
“Can I hang around and wait for you?”
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