Finding Fate

by Ariel Ellens

  “Yeah, there’s tons of work to be done here,” Colt remarks.

  Now I’m annoyed.

  Seriously.

  “What do you know about a bakery or café?”

  Colt spins around. “I own a few.”

  “A few... what?”

  “Cafés,” Colt said. “And we bake there too.”

  “A few?”

  “Okay, fine, I own four.”

  I’m in shock. Colt looks...

  “...so young,” I whisper.

  “Me?” He laughs. “Look at yourself. You have a bakery.”

  “I don’t own it,” I say.

  Colt’s eyebrows raise. “Oh. Okay. Who does?”

  “Family,” I say. Which is true. I’m not really sure who owns the place fully. It was my Grammie’s, but since she...

  “Family business is hard,” Colt says. “Been there, done that. Sometimes cut throat. You should open your own place.”

  Hearing it sounds good but the reality of it all is that I’m behind the counter of the family bakery, the neon sign outside buzzing GG’s Bakery. It’s my life, for now, until things sort themselves out.

  “Did you hear me, Bella?”

  I hate shortened versions of my name, but when Colt says Bella... well... wow... what a feeling. My rules instantly change. Colt can call me anything he wants.

  “I heard you,” I say. “It’s complicated.”

  “Why?”

  I raise an eyebrow. “Who are you?” I ask. “I’m not going to tell you about my personal life.”

  “So it’s a matter of getting to know each other better?”

  He’s so smooth and calm. He seems the type that lets nothing get to him.

  Damn, he’s sexy and smart...

  I’m screwed, big time, if he doesn’t leave.

  He puts his elbows back on the glass counter.

  He’s not leaving.

  “Let’s get to know each other.”

  “Why? I’m busy.”

  “I’m busy too. Everyone is busy.”

  “Then you understand my position.”

  “I’d love to know about your position,” Colt says. “Then I can share mine. We can share positions together...”

  I grumble under my breath, trying to make it seem like he’s lame. But he’s not lame, I am.

  “What’s your favorite position?”

  My cheeks start to turn red and I will it not to happen. I turn and walk towards the register, touching my cell phone, pretending that I have a text or email or something. But there’s nothing, just my main screen showing a picture of a droplet of water hitting the ground.

  “Must be important,” Colt calls out.

  “What? Oh. My phone. Of course. Business.”

  Colt smiles. “Business. I understand. Is that what this is? Business?”

  “Me in the bakery is business,” I say. “Why you’re here... I don’t really know.”

  Colt looks up at the neon clock behind me and smiles. “Right on time.”

  “Right on time?” I ask.

  “Yep. You’re now open. I’ll take a slice of the chocolate chip bread, to go.”

  He adds the words to go as though I should suddenly be upset that he’s not going to spending more time bothering me.

  I tell myself it’s good he’s going to be leaving but as I reach for his order, I kind of wonder what else he has to say to me. He seems so calm and casual, like we know each other.

  I ring him up just as a few people begin to work their way in. I recognize all of them as regulars. The people who knew my grandparents and think the world of my family. They’ll ask how my mother is doing with her illness and I’ll have to nod and explain she’s taking it one day at a time. They’re the ones who have the potential to linger and mingle with the other patrons. If the subject is anything but my family, I’m fine, but when they start about my mother and her...

  “Can I be honest for a second?” Colt asks with a mouthful of chocolate chip bread.

  “Sure,” I say.

  “This bread...” Colt points to the bread. He swallows his bite. He smiles. “This bread sucks.”

  My mouth falls open.

  Colt winks and then takes another bite.

  By the time he reaches the door, someone is at the counter but I’m not paying attention to them. Not at all. My eyes are locked on Colt, watching him walk up the sidewalk.

  I hear someone saying my name but I ignore.

  I could care less about the people in the bakery.

  How dare Colt try and say the bread sucks? And then he leaves without giving me a chance to ask why... or explain... or...

  I hear a heavy rumbling outside kick up. It takes me all of a second I know it’s a motorcycle.

  You’ve got to be kidding me.

  Sure enough, a couple seconds later, a black motorcycle goes down the street. The driver thankfully is wearing a helmet, but he’s not wearing a jacket.

  And I see tattoos.

  Really sexy tattoos...

  Shit.

  If Colt comes back, I’m in big trouble.

  -Chapter 2-

  When the bakery finally closes, my body is sore. The first thing I do after locking the door is just stare out the door. The large glass panes are more of prison bars but I have to keep it to myself. I can’t let anyone down, except myself. That I’ve done many times and will probably continue to do so.

  It’s my nature.

  Go, Isabella, go.

  I stand there and stare out the glass, wondering what life is like out there. A normal life. A life after college. A life with an internship, a job, anything but this mess. The days I want to quit I hear my Grammie talking in my head. I know going into the back means I’ll have to look at the orders I took throughout the day. It’s a small bakery, but for one person, it feels like an empire.

  An empire that’s on one leg as the bone slowly begins to crack.

  I change my routine for a second and refuse to look at the orders. I go straight through to the back and just leave. My cars starts on the first try and when I look in the mirror at myself, I’m surprised to find I don’t look like hell too much.

  That’s a good day in my book.

  The ride home is silent, by choice. I soak in the air and find my mind traveling back to Colt.

  What exactly was that all about?

  Why did he really come into the bakery?

  More important, who was he?

  I try to convince myself that it’s been a long time since I’ve been out of the bakery and that maybe he was new in town or something.

  But it didn’t feel that way.

  Not at all.

  As I drive, I don’t pay attention. Call me a bad driver, whatever, but we all do it. Sometimes life becomes this constant motion, creating its own routine that we follow. And here I am, looking at twenty-two in four months, feeling like I’m a hundred and twenty-two, ready to cash it all in.

  I hate this feeling.

  My mind thinks about Colt but my driving skills take me to the small yellow house in Cranberry Avenue. I stop and look at the house. The shades of age I ignore, seeing it for all the beauty it once was. The yellow house has blue shutters and a brick red chimney. If I think about it hard enough I can see the wisps of smoke coming from the chimney, like Grandpa used to during winter when he’d build fires.

  Now he can’t.

  Now my mother has the house, to my disgust.

  It’s the place she houses her personal hell and here I am, sitting in my car, ready to go inside and check on her.

  Why do I have to check on her?

  Better yet... why do I want to check on her?

  Part of me wants to open the door and smell food. To smell something Grammie is working on - maybe for us, maybe for the bakery. To smell a warm Sunday dinner where we could share laughs and food, like a real family. It all feels so distant and I hate it.

  I walk to the front door and notice all the the imperfections of the house. The blue shudders ne
eding attention. One of the front windows cracked. The shrubbery all dead, uncared for. The railing loose and tilted. The doorbell, not working.

  And I find the door unlocked.

  Yeah, like that’s safe.

  The door is surprisingly closed and when I turn the knob I try to tell myself that it’ll all be the way it once was. Everything now, in this present reality, is just a bad dream. A long nightmare that feels like years but is only minutes. The only piece of this reality I’d like to keep when I wake up is Colt.

  Ugh. Did I just think that? Did I really just think that about a complete and total stranger?

  Yes.

  But, in my defense, Colt is complete and total hot stranger, so that makes it okay.

  Okay?

  I step into the house, the house that once housed my family, but now houses my pain, and I catch the faint smell of smoke and ash. Two more steps and the odor penetrates me with disgust. I hate that smell. To my left is an olive green chair. It’s a recliner that has been used so much that my Grandpa’s legs and butt print has left a worn white spot where he sat all the time. There’s a small table next to the chair, where he placed his newspaper and TV remote, but now it had a bottle of whiskey and an overflowing ashtray. The whiskey has no label because that’s how my mother drinks. She peels the labels off, thinking that if she doesn’t see the words ‘whiskey’ or ‘alcohol’ then it’s not either.

  Also in the living room is three more tables, including a coffee table, all complete with ashtrays and bottles. Not to mention food containers, the occasional fly, and it all mixes together creating a stench that eats away at the memories of the living room. Where the Christmas tree stood in the corner. Where everyone would sit and talk, and laugh, and love.

  “Isabella? Is that you?”

  Her voice sounds terrible. Like she swallowed three frogs on fire and kept their deep bellowing voices.

  I want to ignore her, so bad, but I can’t.

  I hear Grammie’s voice in my head... she needs you...

  As I walk into the kitchen, I catch sight of my mother flicking a silver square lighter. She thumbs it, letting the spark turn into flame and then blows it out. At first I think maybe it’s just a bad day instead of a normal. Trust me, bad days are better than normal days. Then I notice her head starting to rock as though there’s music playing.

  There’s no music.

  My mother thinks her head weighs a metric ton, thanks to drinking.

  I scan the kitchen for the bottle but find nothing.

  “Mom, what are you doing?”

  “Setting myself on fire,” she says and smiles.

  Two of her teeth on her left side are missing. They weren’t from violence but from her gums and body giving up on her. It pains me each time I see that because I vaguely remember a time when my mother used to call people names for missing teeth. Now she had become a self destructive opposite image of all she believed she hated.

  “How was business?” she asks. What she wants to really know is how much money is in the register. She takes it all and lives this lavish life of full ashtrays, a faint hint of mildew, and the whiskey that counts down her life like a liquid pendulum sloshing through her veins.

  “Good,” I say, trying to stay upbeat. I used to believe that if you were upbeat, the rest of the world would be too.

  For some reason, it makes me think of Colt again.

  “Sell lots of bread?”

  “Well, it is a bakery.”

  “Well, it is a bakery,” my mother mimics. “I fucking know that, okay? Christ Isabella, what do you think I do all day here?”

  I feel a twitch on my nerves. And since I can’t find the bottle she’s been drinking, it just makes me angrier. “What do you do?” I ask with instant regret.

  “You know what...”

  But my mother stops. She looks at me and I can almost see her eyes spinning round and round. She’s loaded. Wasted. Fried.

  Fuck.

  Then she smiles. I used to love when my mother smiled. Not anymore.

  She reaches to her right and grabs the bottom of the window, sliding it open. Hidden between the screen and the glass are an almost flattened pack of cigarettes. She opens the pack, her eyes never leaving mine. Three cigarettes fall to the floor, one broken in half. She doesn’t notice. When she finds one, she sticks it to her lips. There’s a tear in the thin paper of the cigarette and tobacco sprinkles to the table. Again, she doesn’t notice. She lights the cigarette and inhales deep, closing her eyes.

  I feel the tears well up in my eyes.

  Is it wrong to hate your parents?

  Sorry, maybe I should admit that out loud.

  She leans back and exhales, the smoke rising and thankfully attacking the open window. Even still, the tang smell hits my nose and I want to vomit. When she leans back to laugh, that’s when I see the bottle. She has it between her legs, hiding it.

  I opt to take the high, which I’ve done my entire life. In fact, I’ve taken the high road so much it’s not longer called the high road. It’s tentatively titled Isabella Drive. I walk to the sink, in defeat, and find a single glass in a strainer stained with white calcium deposits. I turn the water on and it spits and coughs for a few seconds then comes water. I fill the glass and walk it back to my mother.

  She has half her cigarette gone and the bottle of booze is on the table.

  Not a secret now.

  “You should drink this,” I say.

  I put the glass on the table and before I could take my hand away, she swats at it, acting like a child that doesn’t want to eat their peas. The glass hits the floor and shatters, water going everywhere. The saddest part of the sight is that where the water touches, it begins to collect dirt. That’s how long its been since the house has been taken care of.

  “Fuck that,” my mother says.

  I look at her and Colt pops back into my mind. The sight of his tattoos. His muscles. His eyes. How freely he talked, with confidence. Riding a motorcycle. Owning his own business.

  He was free.

  Truly free.

  I want to be that. To be free. Not to run a bakery left into my hands because my mother couldn’t live up to her promise to Grammie to take it over. That was the deal. Rehab, AA, whatever, and then take the bakery.

  My body starts to shake.

  Outside a car door slams and a little girl laughs. My ears pick up on that and I don’t know why. Before I know what I’m doing, I grab the bottle of whiskey. It’s in my hand. My mother drops her cigarette, the glowing tip dancing to the table with potential threat.

  “Fuck this,” I say and slam the bottle to the floor.

  Hearing it shatter makes me happy.

  I’m done here.

  I make it four steps and my mother starts to scream.

  “You bitch!” she cries out, something she loves to call me.

  I turn just in time to see her try to stand, only to fall to the floor. She’s too drunk to stand. That’s when she begins to weep. She cries with a pain that shots straight into my heart.

  I can’t take it anymore.

  Not today.

  “Have a good night, Mom,” I whisper.

  Someday, I swear, I’ll pay to have this house torn down. I’d rather have past memories than a living nightmare.

  -Chapter 3-

  I go home, to my real home, a small studio apartment that has a faint smell of my favorite honeysuckle body spray and cooking grease. The cooking has nothing to do with me but my neighbors. The Hendersons are a sweet older couple, in their sixties, who do nothing but cook all day. And everything is fried and used to be deep fried. I say used to be because they once had a small grease fire that got the building evacuated and the fire department called. Since then they stuck to cooking in pans, although I'm not really sure that's much safer.

  I don't have much to lose if there was a fire, but I would miss the coziness of my apartment. My mother knows the address but in her normal state of life she can't find me. That's good.
Sometimes it's nice to be alone. Then again, Colt is on my mind. My gosh, one hot guy comes in the bakery and I'm like this?

  My head is in the freezer, literally. I'm not trying to 'cool off' or anything but I'm looking for food. Just because I can bake and love to bake doesn't make I love to cook. Sadly, my microwave is my most used appliance.

  I opt for a not quite so delicious dinner that sees a cardboard box caked in frost and only takes four in a half minutes to cook. My microwave takes seven minutes. I hit the couch, I eat, and I reach for my laptop. I swear to myself I won't do what I'm about to do... but I'm alone. Nobody will know.

  I'm going to research Colt.

  I know it’s probably pathetic and a total cop out, but hey, the technology is there, so why not use it? I’m not an expert on searching for people, but I start with the basics. Colt’s name and the word ‘café’. It brings up instant results. I’m in shock of what it brings up. There’s article after article about Colt and his business endeavors, not to mention pictures. Oh my, the pictures. Some just pop up as I run the pointer along the links but when I click the images button, it’s like a hundred ways of Colt. Most are him caught off guard in casual clothing, t-shirts, jeans, some smiling, some pictures of hi caught of guard, but each and every one of them making Colt look hotter by the second.

  The pictures become so overwhelming that I switch back to the page with links to articles. From what I can discover by clicking just the first few links, Colt wasn’t lying to me. Why would he though?

  Colt has a lot of business going on his life.

  Cafés.

  Small music venues.

  He’s even partner in a small Italian restaurant.

  The cafés are all shapes and colors, so basic that it makes me want to laugh until I think about Colt and his muscles. And his tattoos.

  Blue Circle.

  Yellow Square.

  Red Triangle.

  They’re so... goofy... but the logos are all beautiful. The web sites are sleek and inviting. And the pictures of the places are so intense, everything perfect and in place.