The Irresistible Blueberry Bakeshop & Cafe

by Mary Simses

  “Of course,” I said. “I promise. I’ll do anything you—”

  Her fingers fell from my arm and a wisp of air came from her mouth. Then she was still.

  That night I searched for the letter, starting with the table next to my grandmother’s bed. In the drawer I found three pens and a pad of paper with blank sheets, two pairs of glasses, a pack of Life Saver candies, and a copy of One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez.

  I searched her desk—an antique cherry writing table from Paris. Wednesday’s Pine Point Review, the local weekly paper, was on the top. Opening the one drawer in the center of the desk, I found an address book. I thumbed through the pages, feeling alternately comforted and saddened by the familiar up-and-down pen strokes of my grandmother’s handwriting. There was no letter.

  Her walk-in closet greeted me with the smell of lavender. Hanging rods held Chanel suits and sale-rack department store dresses side by side. Shelves displayed sweaters of every color from peach to cranberry. I brushed my hand over a pink sweater. The cashmere was soft as a cloud.

  On the top of a built-in dresser stood a collection of photographs in silver frames. One showed my grandparents on the day of my grandfather’s graduation from the University of Chicago medical school. He had his arm around Gran. They stood in front of a stone building with a massive Gothic arch. Her chin was tilted upward slightly as she looked at the camera, her long, swanlike neck encircled by a strand of pearls. My grandfather gazed at her, a smile spread over his whole face.

  An oval frame held a photo of my grandmother and me at Alamo Square, a park across the street from my grandparents’ house in San Francisco. I was ten, so Gran would have been fifty-five. Looking at the photo, I was struck by the similarity in our looks. We had the same green eyes and long auburn hair, although Gran had always worn hers up. I remembered the day the picture was taken. I had a camera slung over my shoulder and some tourists, who thought we were also tourists, offered to take our picture together. We stood in front of a huge bed of red flowers, both of us smiling, my grandmother’s yellow house visible in the background.

  I put the photo back and gingerly began opening her dresser drawers, telling myself I was doing what she’d asked me to do. I sifted through a drawer where she had stashed clothing receipts, owner’s manuals for long-departed appliances, paper-clipped stacks of foreign currency saved from trips abroad, years of birthday and Christmas cards she had received, and a copy of the announcement from Winston Reid when I became a partner. There was no letter.

  I went back into the bedroom and sat down on the edge of her bed. Whatever she had written wasn’t there. Maybe she hadn’t written anything at all, I thought. Maybe she was delirious at the end.

  My grandmother’s bookshelves were laden with novels and biographies and family photographs, and I glanced across the room at them, wondering what to do next. I gazed at the paintings on the walls—seascapes and landscapes. She had even framed a couple of photographs I had taken as a young girl—driftwood on the beach and an old pair of sneakers.

  I opened the bedside table drawer again and saw the book—One Hundred Years of Solitude. As I picked it up, a sheet of pale blue paper fluttered out from between the pages. Gran’s initials were embossed in script at the top of the paper—RGR. Ruth Goddard Ray. I recognized the tall, upright letters of her handwriting as I looked at the name of the person to whom the letter was addressed: Chet Cummings. Under the name was the address, 55 Dorset Lane, Beacon, Maine. It looked like a draft; the page was full of scratch-outs and changes, but I knew I’d found the letter.

  I took a deep breath and began to read.

  Dear Chet,

  I’ve thought about writing to you so many times but I’ve always been afraid to do it. I guess I imagined you would send my letter back, unopened, and I would find it in a stack of mail, the canceled stamp staring up at me, your handwriting scrawled on the side—“return to sender.” Or perhaps you would simply ignore it, tossing it into the trash with the orange rinds and coffee grounds and the day-old newspaper, and I would never know what happened. Poetic justice either way. Still, I didn’t want to face that disappointment.

  Perhaps there is something about turning eighty that has created this urgency to finally write to you after sixty-two years and has given me the strength to deal with the outcome, whatever that may be. Having survived eight decades, I feel it’s time to resolve matters I’ve neglected and, more important, to make amends.

  In truth, I couldn’t have written sooner because it wasn’t until recently that I knew where you were. The last thing I heard was that you were in South Carolina. That was about fifteen years ago. Then one day this past March, I discovered you had moved back to Beacon. I was using the computer, looking up the address for a breeder of roses in New Hampshire. With no particular thought in mind, I typed your name into the search box and then added, “Beacon, Maine.” And, suddenly, there you were! On Dorset Lane. You can’t imagine my surprise. With that one little click of a key I had found you. I must have sat in front of that computer holding my breath for a full thirty seconds after I saw your name.

  It took me another three months after that to decide to actually write to you. But here I am, finally putting pen to paper, and what I want to say is that I’m very sorry about what happened between us and I am writing to ask you to forgive me. I did love you, Chet. I loved you so much and I loved what we had together—our dreams for the future, our dreams of a life together in Beacon. When you came to Chicago and I told you I didn’t love you anymore I was lying. I think I was trying to convince myself because it was easier that way—easier to make a clean break. At least that’s what I believed at the time. And everything I did from that point on I did with that in mind—a clean break.

  I know what my leaving cost you in the end and I can never forgive myself for that. If I hadn’t left you the way I did, you wouldn’t have left Beacon and you wouldn’t have lost the thing that meant so much to you. I’ve always felt responsible for that loss and I’m sorry. I hope you can forgive me.

  I have many wonderful memories of those days we had together. It would make me happy to know that at least a few of your memories of me are good ones. I wonder if you ever think about sitting under that oak tree, with the cicadas buzzing, and, at night, the crickets. Or how the ice used to cover the blueberry bushes in the winter, giving them that dreamy look. Or how we used to sell the pies for your mother at the roadside stand.

  I still think of you whenever I see blueberries.

  Fondly, Ruth

  I stood in my grandmother’s bedroom, holding the letter, thinking about her writing to a man she hadn’t spoken to in over sixty years. What was this love affair they had? She would have been eighteen, just a young girl. After all these years she was writing to apologize for leaving him. I sat on my grandmother’s bed, holding the blue paper in my hand, wondering about Chet Cummings and what he would think when I handed that piece of paper to him. Was he really her true love? Was theirs a secret romance she never dared to speak of?

  Draped in my wet towel in the bathroom of the Victory Inn, still holding the cell phone to my ear, I wondered what my grandmother’s life would have been like if she had married Chet Cummings. She wouldn’t have had the English Tudor house with its six bedrooms or the rose garden or the fountains or the acres of grass that were so green in the summer and smelled so heavenly when cut. She would have lived in Beacon. She would have given birth to my mother in Beacon and my mother might have stayed and married and given birth to me in Beacon. And I would have grown up a country girl, living in a small town, isolated and far from all the things I love. I couldn’t imagine life without my favorite museums, the jazz clubs, coffee shops on every corner, Broadway, the Brooklyn Bridge. Life without all of that seemed so bleak.

  “Are you still there?” Hayden asked.

  I switched the phone to my other ear. “Yes, sorry. I was just thinking about Gran. I was wondering what it would have been like if she had
stayed in Beacon.”

  “Well, luckily, she didn’t,” Hayden said. “Or I might never have met you.”

  A drop of water fell from my hair and landed on my lip. I could taste the salt. “Yeah,” I said. “Luckily.”

  I glanced down at the compass rug. Maybe I needed to find out about this part of my grandmother’s life for her. It was like helping her put the final letters into her crossword puzzle.

  “I guess you’re right, Hayden,” I said. “I should stay and deliver the letter. She asked me to do this and I promised her I would.” I pulled my knees up to my chest and wrapped my arms around them, cradling the cell phone to my ear. “But I miss you.”

  “I miss you, too.”

  “I’ll be back tomorrow night,” I said. “Thursday at the latest.”

  “Perfect, because the dinner is Friday night and there’s only one person I want by my side.”

  I couldn’t miss the dinner. Hayden was being honored by an organization called New York Men of Note for all of the pro bono projects he had been involved in over the years, from chairing the Literacy Coalition to spearheading the capital campaign for the Guggenheim.

  “Don’t worry,” I said. “I’ll be back long before then. I wouldn’t miss it for the world.” I closed my eyes and pictured Hayden being handed his award by the mayor. I was so happy he was being recognized that way. And it could only help him in his run for city council next year. Not that he needed the help, of course.

  His father, H. C. Croft, was the senior senator from Pennsylvania and head of the Senate Finance Committee. His uncle Ron Croft had been governor of Maryland for two terms, and his cousin Cheryl Higgins was a congressional representative in the Rhode Island legislature. On top of that, his late great-aunt Celia had been a suffragette. Besides steel, where they had made their fortune, politics was the Croft family business, and they were naturals at it. I knew Hayden’s father and uncle pretty well, and they were both charming, charismatic men who could draw a crowd while attending a charity ball or popping into a hardware store. The media were already buzzing over Hayden’s decision to run.

  “I’m so proud of you,” I said. Then I sent him a kiss through the phone.

  When I hung up I saw that I’d missed a call from my mother. My heart started flipping like a fish out of water. I couldn’t talk to her. Not yet, anyway. She had a sixth sense when it came to knowing that something was wrong with me and I wasn’t about to upset her by telling her I’d fallen into the ocean and almost drowned. And I certainly wasn’t going to tell her that I’d kissed a perfect stranger. She’d be so worried she’d probably drive right up to Beacon. So I decided to send her a text message. All well, lovely inn, talk 2 you soon. XOX. All right, I felt guilty about it, yes. It was a bit of a stretch. A big stretch, since none of it was true. But tomorrow I’d figure out what to tell her.

  I turned on the shower to let the water heat up. Tomorrow would be a much better day all around. I had a ten o’clock conference call, but that would only last about an hour, and right after that I’d swing by Mr. Cummings’s house, have a nice chat, give him the letter, and then head back to Manhattan. I’d get home just in time for a vodka and tonic and dinner on the terrace if it wasn’t too hot outside. Lovely.

  Testing the shower with my hand, I found the water tepid. Paula had warned me about that when she showed me the room. “The hot water takes a little while to get all the way up here from the heater in the basement,” she said, stretching her arms out as if to demonstrate the distance.

  I waited another minute and finally the bathroom was filled with a delicious steam. Standing on the compass rug, I watched the N, S, E, and W letters disappear as the fog enveloped me.

  I stepped into the shower and let the hot water cascade over my head and down my back. Running my hands through my hair, I let the water chase away the sticky salt. It was heaven. Then I emptied a tiny bottle of shampoo on my head and worked up a good lather, inhaling the clean, floral scent. Just as I was about to rinse out the shampoo, the water temperature plummeted. The water came out in an icy stream and I stood under the spray, shivering, cursing the Victory Inn, cursing Beacon, cursing the entire state of Maine. And then the tears came.

  Chapter 3

  Media Frenzy

  When I first awoke in the semidarkness of the room, I thought I was back in our apartment in New York and for a split second I was happy. But then my eyes began to make out foreign shapes and I remembered, with a dull, lonely ache in my chest, that I was in Beacon. I remembered the dock, the ocean, the ice-cold water, the man diving in, and…

  Oh, my God, the kiss. What had I been thinking? I replayed the scene in my mind. I hadn’t been thinking, that was the problem. One second I was standing there looking at him and the next second I had basically lost my mind. Was I trying to jinx my own wedding? Did I not want to get married? None of that made sense. Of course I wanted to get married. I loved Hayden and I wanted to be his wife. I was sure of that.

  I rolled onto my back and rubbed my eyes. I wasn’t going to think about it anymore. Today was a new day, a fresh start, and it was going to be a good day because I was delivering my grandmother’s letter. I tried to picture Chet Cummings. Would he have a cane? Would he live alone or have a caretaker? Would he be sweet or would he be a cranky old man? Would he remember Gran?

  It was only seven fifteen, according to the clock on the bedside table—too early to go visiting an eighty-year-old man. My plan was to head over to Chet Cummings’s house right after my ten o’clock conference call.

  Glancing around the room, I couldn’t believe I’d ended up here. My secretary, Brandy, said she had booked me into the Ocean View Suite, but whoever named this a suite needed to go back to hotel school. It was a small room, with a hardwood floor, a braided rug, and a mahogany dresser on which stood a large white pitcher in a white bowl (an antique, Paula had proudly pointed out). A white coverlet lay on top of the mahogany bed. There was no desk or table and only the one uncomfortable ladder-back chair in the corner. And there was no minibar. (Mini what? Paula asked when I inquired.)

  Worst of all, there was no ocean view. The two windows looked out onto the front lawn, the street, and other houses. I got out of bed and rummaged through my briefcase until I found the confirmation Brandy had given me.

  The Victory Inn

  37 Prescott Lane, Beacon, Maine

  Deluxe suite, with ocean view

  Two nights

  Deluxe suite, with ocean view. There it was.

  I freshened up and put on a pair of pants and a sweater. Then I went to look for Paula so I could tell her about the mistake and have her switch me into the right room. I checked the front desk and the lounge and the dining room and finally found her on the second-floor landing, talking to a chambermaid. I could barely take my eyes off Paula’s pants—yellow with brown dachshunds all over them.

  “Paula,” I said. “I think there’s been a little mistake. My secretary booked me into a deluxe ocean-view suite.” I handed her the paper. “But the room I’m in is…well, there’s no view of the ocean.”

  Paula’s lower lip stuck out a little as she peered at the paper. “What room are you in?”

  “Room ten.”

  “Does it say ten on the door?” she asked, taking a pencil from behind her ear and scratching her head with the eraser end.

  I nodded. “Yes.”

  “Well, then, it’s room eight.”

  How, I wondered, could it be room 8? Was this some strange kind of Maine hotelier counting system I didn’t know about? “But the door says ten.”

  Paula put the pencil back behind her ear and handed me the confirmation. “It’s room eight,” she said cheerfully. “It’s our deluxe suite, best room in the house, and there is an ocean view.”

  “But I’ve looked and I can’t see the ocean anywhere,” I said, wondering if I’d stepped into a reality show in which the producers and crew would suddenly appear, laughing about how funny all this was.

  “Oh,
the view isn’t from the room,” Paula said. “You have to go up to the roof.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “The roof,” she repeated, in a tone that indicated the answer should be obvious. “There’s a door by your closet. Go up the stairs and you’ll get to the roof. We put some nice lawn chairs up there.”

  Lawn chairs. On the roof.

  “All right, let’s put the ocean view aside for a moment,” I said, figuring I could find better accommodations, maybe right in town. “I have another issue. I need to use your business center to print something for a ten o’clock conference call.”

  Paula pursed her lips as she and the chambermaid looked at one another. Neither one spoke.

  “A printer?” I said. “I have a document I’d like to have printed for…”

  Paula was giving me a blank stare.

  “The printer’s a little broken,” she said finally. “Sometimes the paper gets jammed.” She made a twisting motion with her hands. “Probably the salt air.” She pronounced it salt eh-ah. “But you can try it.”

  A little broken. I turned away and looked through the round window on the stairway landing. A man and woman were wheeling their suitcases around to the parking lot in the back. Lucky people, I thought. They were going home.

  “But you have a business center,” I said, turning back to Paula. “My secretary specifically asked about that. Are you sure you don’t have a working printer?” I couldn’t believe I was actually having this conversation. I probably could have stayed at a Ritz-Carlton, in a city, with real hot water and wireless in the rooms, but Brandy insisted this would be more convenient.

  The chambermaid arched her eyebrows and shifted the stack of towels in her arms. I could see the edge of a tattoo on the side of her neck. It looked like a parrot.

  Paula motioned for her to move along. “Well, we have…let’s see, a printer, a fax machine, and a computer. I’ll show you,” she said as she led me to the first floor and into the lobby.