The Irresistible Blueberry Bakeshop & Cafe

by Mary Simses

  “Roast chicken,” he mumbled, scribbling again.

  “What’s for dessert?” I said, throwing all caution to the wind and promising myself I’d make it up back in Manhattan. Maybe I’d even try to get in shape for that 10K race Winston Reid was sponsoring in the fall.

  The waiter took a piece of paper from his pocket and read off the selections—cheesecake, brownie sundae, blueberry pie, and ice cream.

  “The blueberry pie,” I said, without even thinking. “Oh, and a glass of white wine, please. Can you tell me what you have by the glass?”

  He scratched his chin. “Ah, by the glass. We have a house wine and some others. Let me find you the list and—”

  I waved my hand. “Never mind, I’ll just take the house wine.” I’d be reviving Hayden with smelling salts if he heard me say that. The house wine, Ellen? And you don’t even know what it is?

  “Sí sí, we send it up.” The waiter nodded several times.

  I trudged upstairs and unlocked the door, letting my purse drop to the floor. Then I stretched out on the bed with my arms around the pillow. The long drive up to Kittuck and back had knocked me out. Or maybe it was Lila. Either way, I just needed five minutes to relax. To lay my head on the pillow.

  I yawned and thought about the love triangle—Gran and Chet Cummings and my grandfather. I thought about Lila Falk and her daughter, Sugar, and what she might have of Gran’s, and I thought about the pillow that felt so lovely under my head.

  A half hour later someone was knocking at the door and I came to with a start, trying to figure out where I was.

  “Miss, it’s Rodolfo from downstairs.” Another knock. “Miss, I have you dinner.”

  My dinner?

  “Yes, I’m coming.” I sat up, brushed some hair away from my face, and tried to smooth out the wrinkles in my clothes. Then I opened the door. Rodolfo stood in the hallway, shifting from one foot to the other. He was holding a blue tray with seashells painted on it. On the tray was a vintage wineglass of etched crystal, which had been filled with white wine, a salad of colorful greens and cranberries, a large white plate covered by a gleaming silver dome, a slice of blueberry pie, and a pink rose in a bud vase.

  For a moment, I just stared. It looked so beautiful. Then I caught myself. “Come in. Please.” I waved my hand.

  Rodolfo looked around the room. “Where would you like?”

  I thought he was joking. There was nowhere to put the tray except on the bed. “Right there, I guess.” I pointed.

  “Sí sí.” He put down the tray.

  I rifled through my purse for some loose bills. “Thank you,” I said, handing him a tip.

  “Thank you,” he replied, making a little bow before he left.

  I sat on the bed and tried the salad. The greens were crisp and fresh, and there were lots of big chunks of tangy goat cheese. The caramelized walnuts crunched in my mouth. Then I lifted the silver dome from the dinner plate. A puff of herb-scented steam rose into the air as I stared at the chicken. It was roasted to a golden glow and sprinkled with fresh sprigs of tarragon and some other herbs I couldn’t identify. The mashed potatoes looked creamy and buttery, and the carrots were coated with a rich, dark glaze. I ate everything within minutes, right down to the pie, with its flaky crust and still-warm blueberries. I wondered if Paula would ever part with the recipes. I had underestimated her. That was certain.

  Too full to move now, I pushed the tray aside and lay down again, staring at a crack in the ceiling that looked like the state of New Hampshire. Gradually, my whole body began to relax. Don’t fall asleep, I told myself. You need to call Hayden and Mom and Sugar.…

  We are walking through a huge, overgrown field bounded on all sides by stone walls. Some of the boulders have fallen by the side and Hayden is picking them up and setting them back into the wall, finding the proper place for each one, turning them and repositioning them until he is satisfied with the way it looks. Every so often he stands back and assesses his work and sometimes he takes a boulder off and tries it in another spot. I begin to pick up the smaller stones and to look for crevices in the wall where I might fit them.

  “This happens after every winter,” he says. “It’s expansion and contraction that causes it.”

  “Same as potholes,” I reply. “The roads do that and it makes potholes.”

  “You’re such a city girl,” he says, wrapping his arm around my neck and pulling me toward him. Then we sit on the wall and gaze across the field as a breeze ruffles the weeds.

  He jumps off the wall and pushes away some brambles. “Blueberries,” he says. In the space where he has cleared the weeds, green shoots poke through the ground.

  “How did you know they were there?” I ask.

  “They’ll always be here,” he says. And then he kisses me with a passion that leaves me unable to speak.

  Someone was knocking at the door. I tried to pull myself from sleep, from the field with the stone walls and weeds and blueberries.

  The knocking came again, a little louder. Rodolfo. He had come to collect the tray. I could smell the vinegar from the dressing and it didn’t smell that appetizing anymore. I sat up and rubbed my eyes.

  Rodolfo kept knocking.

  I tried to remember what was going on in the dream, but it was already vanishing, fog into sunlight. And then I remembered standing in a field with Hayden, fixing a wall. There were boulders and weeds and it was overgrown. We were lifting stones and putting them back in the wall.

  The knocking continued. Rodolfo was being so insistent. Almost rude.

  “Just a minute,” I mumbled, moving clumsily from the bed. “I’m coming.”

  All right, take the stupid tray, I thought as I slid off the bed. And in that second, as my feet touched the floor, I realized the man in the dream wasn’t Hayden at all. It was Roy Cummings. Roy. Oh, my God, Roy had kissed me. And it was an amazing kiss, even more amazing than the one on the beach. I could still feel his arms around my neck. I could feel his lips on my lips. I could taste him. He tasted like salt spray, like the end of a long summer day.

  I took the tray in my hands and moved toward the door. Balancing the tray with one hand, I turned the doorknob with the other. The weeds and the blueberries and the kiss. I wanted the dream. I wanted the kiss. I wanted Roy. Something inside me began to ache.

  I opened the door to hand the tray to Rodolfo, and there, in a custom-made tan raincoat of Italian gabardine, holding a briefcase in one hand and a Louis Vuitton overnight bag in the other, stood Hayden.

  Chapter 12

  Battle of the Roosters

  Hayden!” I dropped the tray, sending plates and flatware crashing around us. A woman opened a door down the hall, peeked out, and then closed it. “What are you doing here?”

  Hayden stood before me, his tousled hair golden against a gray Savile Row suit. The yellow Italian silk tie I’d given him last Christmas was knotted under the collar of a crisp white shirt. He looked very handsome.

  “Are you all right?” He smiled, eyeing the scattered china.

  I threw my arms around him, banishing all residual thoughts of Roy and inhaling the scent of leather and courtrooms and boardrooms with thick mahogany paneling and centuries-old Aubusson carpets. “I’m fine,” I said. “Just surprised, that’s all.”

  He pressed his lips to mine, giving me a long, soulful kiss, and for a moment I was back in New York, taking cab rides and making conference calls, riding in limousines and going to opera fund-raisers and museum galas. I could see myself in our apartment, lounging on the sofa on a Sunday morning, sipping coffee, newspapers spread out on the table, sunlight streaming in through the windows. It felt good to be there.

  We picked up the scattered dishes, and Hayden followed me into the room. “Why didn’t you tell me you were coming?” I asked.

  “I didn’t know I was coming until this afternoon.”

  I turned to take his coat and saw him looking around.

  “This is where you’ve been staying?” His
eyes darted from the earthenware bowl and cracked pitcher to the uncomfortable ladder-back chair to the tiny bathroom with my drinking glass of pens and pencils on top of the toilet tank.

  I slipped his coat over the back of the chair. “It’s not so bad.”

  He gave me a skeptical look. “Ellen Branford, queen of the five-star hotel circuit, telling me this isn’t so bad. I’m impressed.”

  “Really,” I said, taking his jacket. “I think it’s kind of cute.”

  He raised his chin and peered at me. “You look a little…I don’t know…” He paused. “Something’s different.” He studied my face for a moment. “Oh, you’re not wearing any makeup. Maybe that’s it.”

  “I’m not?” I touched my cheek.

  “Don’t look so alarmed.” He laughed. “You don’t need it.”

  I wondered how I could have forgotten to put on makeup. “I guess I was in such a rush this morning,” I said. “I went to see an old friend of my grandmother’s in a nursing home.”

  “A friend of hers up here?” Hayden asked, brushing my hair away from my face and studying my eyes.

  “Yes. You wouldn’t believe what I found out today.” I told him about the man at the camera store and the painting at the historical society and the article at the library. “There are things about my grandmother we never knew.”

  He gave me a curious look. “Almost as though she had a secret life.”

  “Well, not a secret life, at least I don’t think so. I mean, I hope not. But there are definitely things she never talked about.”

  “It’s kind of like solving a mystery,” he said as we sat down on the bed. “I’d love to see the paintings. You’ll have to show me.”

  “I will. I want you to see them. But before we talk about any more of that, you have to tell me how you ended up here. I thought you were going to be in a settlement conference all day on that Dobson case.”

  Hayden’s smile spread across his face.

  “What’s going on? Tell me,” I said.

  “We settled it this morning.”

  “You did? Oh, Hayden, that’s great!” I threw my arms around him again. “You said you didn’t think it would ever settle.”

  “Twenty-nine five,” he said, shaking his head as though he couldn’t believe it. “I didn’t think it would ever settle that high.”

  I knew he was speaking about millions, not thousands, of dollars. Our client was getting the money, but our firm was getting a huge fee out of it. It was another feather in Hayden’s cap.

  “Wow, that’s fantastic,” I said.

  He nodded. “I’m happy. Dobson’s board is ecstatic. It’s a good settlement for them. I’m just glad it worked out. They ended up getting a pretty fair deal. Sometimes things go the right way, and this was one of those times.”

  “Congratulations,” I said, feeling proud of him. “You must have been extremely persuasive.”

  “Oh, I can be pretty persuasive when I want to be,” he said, his smile turning mischievous now. “I recall using my persuasive powers on you a few times.”

  “Maybe,” I said, feigning indifference, “but you’ll never get twenty-nine five out of me.”

  He took my hand. “All kidding aside. You know what the best part about the settlement is?”

  I shook my head.

  “That I got to come up here and be with you. I was in a cab, on my way back to the apartment, and then I thought, Why don’t I just go to Maine? So I grabbed a few things and got on a plane.”

  “Oh, Hayden.” He had a way of making me feel like I could melt.

  “I missed you,” he said, drawing me close. “I don’t like being in our apartment without you.”

  I put my head against his chest. “I missed you, too.”

  “I kept thinking about you up here by yourself,” he said. “I thought this way you’d have some company and we could go back to New York together.” He stood up. “And speaking of New York…I brought you something.” He winked at me as he took a package from his briefcase.

  “What’s this?”

  “Open it,” he said, sitting down next to me again.

  I tore off the wrapping paper and saw that it was a book. The World of Henri Cartier-Bresson.

  “Hayden, he’s my favorite.”

  “I know. And it’s a first edition.”

  “It’s beautiful.” I began flipping through the pages of black-and-white photographs. “The father of modern photojournalism.”

  “Yes, he definitely was.”

  I paused at a photo of a man riding a bicycle through a narrow street in France. The picture was taken from a stairway. “I love this one. Look at the curve of the steps and the iron railing, how beautiful the shapes are. And the man whizzing by on the bike, almost a blur. He had a half second to take that picture. Incredible. ‘F-eleven and be there.’”

  “Hmm?”

  “It’s that old saying photographers use,” I said. “You know—it means the technical aspects aren’t as important as being in the right place at the right time.” I pulled Hayden toward me and kissed him. “What an amazing gift. I can’t wait to go through every single photo.”

  “I’m glad you like it,” he said.

  I closed the book and held it against my chest. “I love it.”

  He smiled. “So tell me what’s been going on. Did you finally get to meet the famous Mr. Cummings?”

  I looked down and shook my head. “No. I’m not going to meet him.”

  “Why not? What happened?”

  I pulled at a loose thread in the coverlet. “Chet Cummings is…well, he died.”

  Hayden took my hand. “Oh, honey, I’m so sorry.”

  I nodded. “Yeah. Me, too.”

  “When did it happen?”

  “Three months ago.”

  “Oh, no. What bad timing. You came all the way up here and…well, I’m sorry.”

  A cool breeze blew through the window. Feeling a chill, I closed the sash, walked to the thermostat, and turned on the heat. Something groaned and clanked, and then a fan whirred. A metallic smell rose from the radiator vent on the floor, and a gust of lukewarm air shot out.

  Hayden put the pillows against the headboard, kicked off his shoes, and lay down on the bed. He loosened his tie and motioned for me to join him. I settled into the crook of his arm.

  “So tell me what happened,” he said. “You couldn’t deliver the letter and—”

  “No, I did deliver it,” I said. “I gave it to his nephew.”

  Hayden looked at me. “His nephew? Who’s his nephew?”

  “A guy named Roy Cummings. Chet was living in his house.”

  “Oh.” He paused and then said, “What’s he going to do with it?”

  “I don’t know, but I thought he should have it. Don’t you think?”

  Hayden gave me a quizzical look. “I don’t know, Ellen. I’m surprised you did that. The letter wasn’t addressed to him. I would have given it to the executor of the guy’s estate or the court-appointed administrator if he…is this guy the executor?”

  I tried to remember what Roy said to me in the front yard. Any business of my uncle’s is business of mine. Something like that. He hadn’t actually said he was his uncle’s executor, but that was the feeling I’d gotten. That he was taking care of his affairs. I hoped I hadn’t jumped to conclusions. What if I did the wrong thing? Was I losing my edge?

  I nodded. “Yes, I think so.”

  “You think so?”

  “No, I mean he is. He’s the executor.”

  “Well, then, I don’t see a problem with that.”

  Hayden stretched and let out a loud sigh. I helped him take off his gold cufflinks, the ones with the family crest on them, and he placed them on the bedside table. Then he began to kiss my neck. I closed my eyes and felt his breath, warm and familiar, his hair soft against my skin. His hair smelled like citrus, like the shampoo in our apartment.

  He unbuttoned my blouse, his fingers moving gently along the fabric. I pulled o
ff his tie and undid the buttons of his shirt. Then he leaned in and kissed me. The crack on the ceiling that looked like New Hampshire became soft and fuzzy and, as crickets hummed outside the window, we undressed and made love.

  Hayden was already up when I awoke on Sunday morning. Sitting next to me in bed, in his boxers and a blue T-shirt, he clicked away at his laptop.

  “Good morning,” I said, yawning and rubbing my eyes. “What time is it?”

  He looked at his watch. “A little after nine.”

  I could see a strip of light beneath the window shade. “Does it look like it’s a nice day?”

  He continued to type away. “I don’t know. I haven’t checked yet.”

  “You haven’t looked?”

  He shook his head. “I’ve been working.” He gave me a kiss on the cheek.

  “Listen, Hayden,” I said. “I really want you to see Gran’s paintings. I doubt the historical society is open today, but maybe we can go over to the Porters’ and see the one in their attic.”

  “Sounds good,” he said. “I’d love to see it.”

  “I’ll call Susan in a little while.” My stomach rumbled and I realized I was famished. Something was happening to my appetite. I felt hungry all the time now, and the food I wanted to eat wasn’t the superhealthy variety I was used to. It was comfort food. Meat loaf and mashed potatoes, chicken and dumplings, macaroni and cheese, pot roast. I turned to Hayden. “Do you want to get some breakfast?”

  “Yeah, just give me a minute,” he said. “I need to finish one thing.” He grabbed my arm as I walked toward the bureau, his hand sliding down my bicep. “Mmm, still got great muscle tone.” He smiled. “You’ve been working out up here.”

  “Not really.” I wondered if there even was a place to work out. I took a pair of shorts and a top from the drawer. “Oh, wait,” I said. “I forgot—I did some swimming.”

  “Swimming?” He gave me a quick glance. “Oh, yeah, you used to be on a team. Exeter, wasn’t it?” He took the cap off of a pen and began scribbling on a pad.