Bliss

by Hilary Fields

  Sera grimaced. “No, there isn’t anyone special in my life, and there hasn’t been for a long time. Kind of got my buns burned, if you know what I mean.”

  Aruni nodded sympathetically.

  “Right now, I’m really more focused on getting my bakery up and running than on getting laid,” Sera continued. “But please,” she hastened, “don’t tell that to Pauline. She’d have a spazz if she knew I wasn’t keen on finding someone to hop in the sack with.” Serafina flushed, lowering her voice to an agonized whisper. “You can’t know what it was like, growing up with Aunt Pauline always pushing me to be more ‘out there,’ as if getting some would solve all my problems…”

  “I hear ya, sister. I love Pauline like she was my own aunt, but seriously, I can’t keep up with that dame. Tell you what. You keep me in sweet stuff, and I’ll keep your sex life—or lack thereof—our little secret.”

  The two women high-fived across the Formica table. “Deal.”

  Chapter Seven

  I’m so glad you’re not giving up on the orgasms, dear.”

  Serafina started, face instantly flaming. She glanced around to see if anyone had heard Pauline’s overly loud comment, but the aisles of the Whole Heart supermarket were free from tittering eavesdroppers. Could Pauline actually know? Sera thought with a spurt of panic. Visions of what Pauline would say—and do—if she knew the truth about her niece sent tendrils of dread down Sera’s spine. Then she relaxed a bit as realization dawned. Her aunt was talking about tonight’s meeting of the Back Room Babes, and Sera’s agreement to allow the club to continue despite the shop’s changing hands.

  I’m just groggy from the flight, she reassured herself. She’d only returned late last night, and the supermarket was their first stop this morning, since Sera needed some basics for the house. More than that, she’d wanted to scope out the grocery situation and get a feel for what everyday life would really be like in Santa Fe. The answer, she’d already decided, was A-okay. Sure, Whole Heart was wildly pretentious. Pauline liked to call it “Whole Paycheck” and mutter about how much better the place had been—how much more authentic—when it was still just a local grocery called Wild Oats. It seemed pretty authentic to Sera—at least, as authentic as earnest, sustainable supermarkets could get. It smelled like a health food shop, the dry air carrying a whiff of the musty, tangy scent that always reminded her of the inside of a vitamin bottle, commingled with the odors of homemade soaps, bulk cereals that tasted like hamster feed, and always, always, the faint hint of patchouli that emanated from no evident source. She figured it must be the echoes of generations of hippies who had settled into middle-aged complacency but couldn’t quite leave behind their bohemian youth, wandering the aisles in search of enlightenment and lower cholesterol.

  While you could get any kind of spelt flour, seventeen varieties of organic low-foaming shampoo, or a free-range bison steak complete with birth certificate and pictures of said buffalo frolicking on the prairie as a calf, nowhere in evidence were such simple pleasures as Oreos and Diet Coke. For that, Pauline had assured her, her needs could be amply supplied at the local Albertsons. But for the kind of yogurt Pauline preferred—goat’s milk with locally gathered honey (great for vaginal balance, if Serafina knew what she meant)—and granola that would convince Sera that granola actually tasted good, nowhere but this supermarket, with its cool sea foam décor and wide, well-stocked aisles, would do. Sera had to admit, compared to the cramped, tiny-carted, uptight grocery stores she’d frequented in Manhattan, this was a pretty sweet deal, Oreos or no Oreos.

  Pauline was wheeling their cart through the deli section, passing displays of farmer’s cheese and sourdough bread that made Sera’s empty stomach rumble longingly as she followed her aunt toward the dairy case at the back. Today Pauline had braided her rough-and-tumble hair into a long rope, just a few frizzy strands escaping to frame her lined but lively face. Her T-shirt invited readers to “Ask me how I DO IT,” and Sera was grateful the accompanying diagram was covered by the gray cashmere cardigan she was sporting—a gift from Sera last Christmas that already looked like it had seen nearly as much love as its owner. Her skirt was a cheerful red broomstick affair, threaded with silver tinsel and chiming with the little Tibetan bells Pauline loved so much.

  “You’re still serious about keeping the back room the way it is, right, kiddo?” Pauline persisted as she scanned the yogurt selection. “I mean, I’d hate to have to tell the gals that tonight’s their last get-together. Their climactic moment, if you get what I’m saying.” She gave a burlesque-worthy pelvic thrust that set her skirt bells chiming.

  Man, she is really attached to those rubber weenies, Sera thought. She’s, like, totally fixated. Maybe it’s her way of coping with her loss?

  “Well, we’ll see how it goes, I guess.” Sera shrugged, dubiously eyeing a shelf of flavored soy products that promised to revolutionize her coffee experience. “I’m mainly going to be concentrating on the front of the store, to tell you the truth, and leave the back room to its own devices.”

  “Devices.” Heh, heh.

  Oh, good lord, was she going to have Beavis and Butthead chuckling moronically in her mind for the rest of her life? No, silly, said the little voice in her head. Just for as long as you run a “pleasure enhancement” establishment that’s chock full of instruments you can’t even look at without giving yourself a case of rosacea.

  “There’s so much to work out before I can open Bliss, I haven’t had much of a chance to think about how we’ll feature the P-HOP leftovers,” Sera continued. “I still have to interview contractors after I check out those secondhand ovens Asher was telling me about at the auction today. And change over my driver’s license, apply for my small business license, meet with the accountant… and I’ve just barely gotten things settled in New York.” She sighed, overwhelmed by the scope of her to-do list, still processing the magnitude of what she’d just done in severing ties with her past. In her head, Maggie’s voice chimed in. One day at a time, Sera. Sufficient unto the day are the troubles thereof.

  “How’d that go, kid?” Pauline wanted to know. “You feelin’ okay, now that you’ve taken the plunge and said sayonara to the Big Apple?”

  Sera slung her arm across her aunt’s shoulders and gave her a squeeze as they piloted the cart leisurely through the refrigerated section, feeling a wave of affection for the woman who had raised her. “I’m fine, Aunt Paulie. Excited actually. And I got a lot accomplished. I’m really looking forward to getting set up here.”

  It was true. Sure, she’d still have some logistics to work out back East, but she’d been lucky—her assistant Carrie had offered to take over the lease on her loft, and wanted to carry on the catering business on her own. In fact, Carrie had been quite keen to grab Sera’s rent-stabilized apartment, claiming that since the majority of the baking had been done on the premises, it just made sense to move in. It might have been a little Single White Female for Sera if she hadn’t been so comfortable with Carrie—and if she’d cared more about what she was leaving behind. Since Sera had stopped taking commissions for her signature cakes and confections, and had been subsisting on selling more standard dessert fare to local eateries, it hadn’t been too much of a hardship handing over the reins.

  Indeed, she’d found herself eager to box up her belongings and get out of Dodge while the getting was good. The minute she’d arrived back at her Tribeca apartment, everything from the heaping trash bags piled outside the building oozing noxious sludge to the jackhammering of the condo complex racing upward to blot out her last iota of natural light had assaulted her senses in a way they never used to. Or perhaps she’d just never realized her nerves were slowly but constantly being gnawed at by New York’s frenetic pace, like rats nesting in her neural wiring. She’d immediately started looking forward to her next whiff of dry desert air. The only hard part had been saying her good-byes to Margaret and the rest of her fellowship friends. Sera wasn’t too broken up over it, though—these we
re friends she knew she’d keep for life, and distance, while it would bring the pang of separation, could do no lasting damage to the affection they had for one another.

  As for the rest, she didn’t think she’d start missing life back East anytime soon.

  Not when there was Santa Fe waiting for her. The spaciousness here was doing something unexpected to her consciousness. Sera could feel an opening, a widening crack in her defenses, as if her chest were expanding and warm sunlight was pouring in. After a year of slow, painful recovery, clawing her way back from the brink and getting to the point where she did a fair imitation of a human most days, it felt like she was finally ready to blossom into something more. “A bridge back to life,” was what AA had promised, and Serafina Wilde was ready to start living.

  Smiling, Sera realized she was happier than she’d been in a long time. Still, she found it strange that Pauline seemed nearly as chipper, especially after spending a lonely week packing up her life partner’s personal items to make room for Sera’s stuff. The two older women hadn’t, to Sera’s astonishment, actually been living together despite their three-year relationship, but Hortencia had had plenty of stuff over at Pauline’s. Despite Sera’s offers to be there to help and support her, Pauline had resolved to do the work alone, which Sera found odd given her desperate plea for Sera to fly out here only a week earlier. Before she’d left, she’d squeezed a promise out of a reluctant Pauline to think about what she wanted to do to commemorate her life with Hortencia. But if she’d been entertaining any such serious thoughts over the past week, it wasn’t evident from either her demeanor or her conversation. Her aunt seemed nearly as jaunty and animated as she’d ever been. Sera took a deep breath. It was time to collect on that promise and make her aunt face the music.

  “Um, Pauline, I don’t want to press, but I have to ask. Have you given any more thought yet to how you’d like to memorialize Hortencia?”

  Pauline looked chagrined. At first Sera thought it was either distress over her question or the price of the $4 yogurt she held in her hand. However, Pauline was transfixed neither by the sticker on the container nor Sera’s query, but by something over Sera’s shoulder.

  “Yes, Pauline,” an acerbic voice said. “How exactly were you planning to memorialize me?”

  Sera spun around.

  A fluffy, plump little grandmother type wearing a beige canvas fisherman’s cap, sensible trousers, and a cozy crocheted vest over her Coldwater Creek blouse was leaning with her elbows braced on the bar of her shopping cart, not ten feet away. A pair of shearling-lined Merrell demi-clogs graced her tidy feet, and her hair was an appealingly short halo of white cotton candy under her hat. The only jarring element was the total lack of twinkle in Grandma’s chocolate brown eyes.

  “Serafina Wilde, I presume?” the woman asked when Pauline just stood there, stock-still and uncharacteristically speechless.

  Sera suddenly knew who she was. Pauline’s discomfited expression, her odd behavior since Sera had come out to Santa Fe, her difficulty speaking of her life partner in the past tense…

  “Hortencia?” she asked incredulously. “Are you Hortencia Alvarez?” Her gaze whipped back and forth between the two older ladies.

  “In the flesh, if Pauline hasn’t got me dead and buried already,” said Hortencia, shooting a pointed glance at Pauline.

  And Pauline Wilde actually blushed. Sera could hardly credit it, having never witnessed her aunt embarrassed in the nearly three decades she’d known her, but yes, her weathered cheeks went distinctly ruddy, even as her jaw worked nervously and her eyes darted around for escape.

  “Pauline…” she asked. “What’s going on here? You said…”

  The indomitable feminist within resurfaced. “Well, she’s dead to me, and that’s what counts.” Pauline sniffed, crossing her arms under her braless breasts. She refused to look Hortencia in the eye. For that matter, she wasn’t exactly meeting her niece’s gaze either.

  “But you said… you asked me to come out here because…,” Sera sputtered. “I mean, you said you were devastated and you needed my help…”

  “I did need your help, kiddo,” Pauline muttered. “And I was pretty broken up after Horsey and I split up. I didn’t lie—not about that part anyway.”

  Sera didn’t know how to respond to that kind of logic. But Hortencia did.

  Hortencia straightened, placing her fists on her comfortable hips. It might have been Sera’s imagination, but she thought the woman’s eyes had softened just a teensy bit at Pauline’s confession of distress. “You, Pauline Wilde, are una mujer loca,” she scolded. “I can’t believe you told your niece I was dead! For heaven’s sake, my yarn store’s just two streets up from yours. We were sure to run into each other sooner or later. What were you thinking? Just because I wouldn’t marry you…” She trailed off, shaking her head and pursing her withered lips. But Sera thought there was a hint of a smile there.

  Her mind reeled. Pauline, married? Her independent, free love–espousing aunt had never shown the slightest inclination to be tied down—at least in a non-S&M sense. Committing to just one person—sexually or emotionally—had never been her style, despite how she’d seemed to mellow since she’d met Hortencia. Moreover, the actual institution of marriage, she’d argued, was an antiquated tradition that no liberated woman needed in this day and age. In fact, she’d hectored Sera against its perils repeatedly over the years—not that Sera had been in any danger of being asked. Watching Pauline’s expression as she tried to deflect her erstwhile lover’s ire, it was obvious to Serafina that her aunt had finally encountered The One. Politics and belief systems be damned. Pauline Wilde was a woman head over heels in love.

  “It wasn’t ‘just because’ you refused my proposal—a proposal I worked on very hard, by the way,” Pauline flared, tossing her yogurt into her cart with such force that Sera winced, fearing it would splatter. “That hot air balloon cost money, damn it. And do you know how fast a diamond ring travels falling—or should I say being tossed—from that altitude? You could have caved in somebody’s head if we hadn’t been hovering over the goddamn Rio Grande Gorge at the time. As it is, you probably choked a fish. But I’m not angry that you refused, you nitwit. It was why you refused. And if you can’t ’fess up to it…”

  “God damn it, Pauline,” Hortencia shouted back, her own apple cheeks ripening to red, “will you stop with that nonsense about me wanting to sleep with men?!” She no longer seemed the least bit tickled. “I told you I’m done with all that, and I meant it!”

  Sera was abruptly aware they were causing quite a scene in the refrigerated section. The tittering onlookers she’d earlier feared had materialized with a vengeance upon hearing the commotion, peeping out from behind cereal boxes and gawking across butcher counters. Suddenly she had the desire to be very, very far away. Above all things in this life, she wanted to stay the ever-loving hell out of her aunt’s sex life.

  “I’m gonna let you two duke it out,” she said, backing away slowly into an aisle that advertised teas for every complaint from “feminine distress” to “involuntary astral projection.” Good thing I followed Aunt Paulie out here in the rental car, or I’d be marooned at the organic O.K. Corral. “I’ll be late for the auction if I don’t get a move-on, so I’ll just be going, and catch up with you back home later, okay?”

  Pauline spared a nod, but didn’t look away from her standoff with her beloved.

  “Hortencia, it was, er, nice to meet you. I’m, ah, very glad to hear you’re alive, and, um…” Sera stuttered to a halt, stymied for a socially correct exit.

  “Thank you, dear,” said Hortencia. Her gaze remained locked with Pauline’s. “I’ll see you again soon. Tonight, in fact, since I’ll be attending the Back Room Babes’ get-together as usual.”

  “You wouldn’t dare!” cried Pauline. She looked ready to swipe the contents of the dairy case clean to the floor. “The BRBs are my club, and I say who the members are. And you… you lying, man-loving hussy, are
officially disinvited!”

  “You just try and stop me from showing up, you hypocritical old harpy,” Hortencia flashed back at her.

  She had more to say—a lot more. But Sera had already fled to the safety of a row of esoteric canned goods, and was making a beeline for the door as the argument raged behind her.

  Was I the only one Pauline lied to about this? I must have been—she’d never have gotten away with such a whopper in a town this small. Now Aruni’s nonchalance at the diner made so much more sense. So did Pauline’s hinky behavior this past week.

  Well, hell.

  Sera had a great deal to think about. The very reason she’d come out here—to comfort her grieving aunt—had just been called into question. But there was no going back now. Santa Fe, it seemed, still had a few surprises to lob her way. She’d known it was a magical place, but a full-on resurrection?

  Nice one, she complimented her new home as she stepped out into the sunlight and headed for her car. I truly did not see that coming.

  Chapter Eight

  Apparently I’m destined to live in the land of grumpy people today, Sera thought as she tiptoed around the edges of the pie whisperer’s going-out-of-business-sale. So much for “enchantment,” I guess.

  Still stunned at seeing Hortencia rise from the dead, she’d found her way to the little hole-in-the-wall bake shop run by Malcolm McLeod with some difficulty. (Santa Fe, she’d discovered, justly deserved its reputation as a town laid out by a drunken monk riding backward on a mule.) Tucked away at the edge of what had once been a dusty office park on Cerrillos Road, but now hosted an ersatz Chinese restaurant and a dog-grooming parlor as well as the bakery, his place was unimposing from the outside, barely deigning to advertise beyond a small sign that read “Best Pies.” The windows were unwashed, as though to shield the interior from customers’ too-curious gazes, and the token awning was faded and fraying. Inside, there was little charm, just a display case that doubled as a take-out counter and a cash register up front, no seats for waiting customers or even pictures on the walls. In the back, where the sale was about to start, the environment was all stainless steel business. The atmosphere, however, was borderline toxic.