The Cake Therapist

by Judith Fertig

  Here at the City Vue, where it was warm and dry, he could keep things safe. Like the letter from his daughter that the guy from Project Uplift, the nonprofit group that fed the homeless, had brought by. Jack kept the letter in his shirt pocket, which he patted from time to time to make sure it was still there.

  He sat back in the swivel chair that didn’t swivel anymore and looked around the room.

  A rack of Technicolor postcards of the Kansas City skyline was furry with dust. Fake paneling peeled off the walls. The dropped-down ceiling tiles were yellowed with nicotine, even though Marvin had stopped smoking years ago.

  Jack opened the desk drawer and drew out a sheet from a stack of stationery so old, there was no zip code. The paper smelled musty.

  But it was free.

  One of the perks of the job here, along with a room for him and the dog.

  In the back of the drawer, he found a ballpoint pen almost as old as the postcards. Amazingly, the darn pen still wrote.

  He opened with Dear Claire, then put the pen down, unsure what to say next. He had left when she was fifteen. He hadn’t spoken to her since, barely able to send a postcard from wherever he landed over the years.

  There was so much, he didn’t know where to start. Better keep it short this time, he told himself. When he finished, Jack put the letter in a City Vue envelope and wrote out the address he knew by heart in Millcreek Valley, Ohio.

  He leaned back in the chair, just to rest his eyes, and fell into that old dream again.

  He’s dangling by strings like a marionette, his arms and legs in a silky fabric, jerking at some invisible puppet master’s whim. Abruptly, the strings go limp and Jack collapses in a heap.

  He wakes up in the dark, in pain, a smell of woodsmoke in the air. And piss. A girl with blue hands reaches down to him. She’s trying to tell him something, but he can’t understand her. Her round face glows red.

  When Jack woke up, a blue light was seeping through the opening in the sagging draperies. Jack looked down at the floor and shook his head.

  More than forty years of this same goddamn dream. Wasn’t it time for it to make some sense?

  Or for Jack to quit searching for clues? Or to stop dreaming it?

  In the old days, this would have made him turn to the bottle.

  But he was learning to feel his feelings. And now he was goddamn hungry.

  Where the hell was Marvin?

  1

  APRIL

  Lime and Coconut

  This was not the way I wanted to start the week.

  Lydia, the twentysomething bride-to-be, sat stony-faced on the settee in my front parlor.

  Since I opened my bakery in Millcreek Valley’s bridal district in January, I had learned a lot about wooing, in the business sense. When I did wedding cake tastings, I took potential clients out of Rainbow Cake next door and into the more intimate setting of my home. Here, I hoped they would be charmed by the French gray walls, the glint of heavy hotel silver serving pieces, the fire in the Victorian hearth, and the little cakes, buttercream frostings, and mousses I had made for them.

  But this bride was unmoved.

  When we first opened, Lydia’s mother had put a substantial deposit down and reserved the date for her daughter’s July wedding, but trying to find a time when her wedding team could meet with her had been problematic. The bride had kept putting us off. And now this.

  As a new business owner, I could not afford to have high-profile, unhappy clients. Word of mouth was everything to wealthy mothers and brides. Who did your flowers? Where did you get those pashminas for the bridesmaids? Don’t use so-and-so. You never wanted to have your business name fill in the blank for so-and-so.

  I refilled Lydia’s teacup with a chamomile blend and poured more French press coffee for her mother and the other wedding team members, who must feel like I looked. My reflection in the silver teapot cast back my auburn hair tied up in a knot, wide green eyes, and a now-familiar Claire “Neely” O’Neil expression—a duck seeming to stay afloat effortlessly while paddling furiously underwater.

  Roshonda Taylor, wedding-planner-to-the-stars, was gorgeous as usual in her salmon sheath dress that showed off skin the color of her favorite caramel macchiato. Gavin Nichols, gifted interior designer and space planner, sipped his coffee, careful not to spill on his pristine starched shirt, navy blazer, and khaki pants. If someone had told us back in our blue-collar high school days that as thirtysomethings, we would be planning a high-style wedding together, we maybe would have moved our prom from the rickety but cheap Fraternal Order of Eagles hall to somewhere more expensive and glamorous. But probably not. We learned early: You have to work with what you’ve got.

  And what we had here was a crisis. Somehow we had to navigate the choppy waters between what the mother wanted and what the bride envisioned.

  They had sampled tiny browned-butter yellow, classic white, devil’s food, almond, and Grand Marnier cakes with a variety of pastel mousses and gossamer-textured buttercreams.

  Usually, by this part of a tasting, I’d be casting images of wedding cakes on the smooth plaster walls with my laptop, casually dropping a few celebrity client names from my New York days, and my current clients would be choosing a design.

  But we weren’t there yet. And I was beginning to fear that we wouldn’t get there. I looked over at Lydia again, who sat, stiff and silent.

  “Sweetheart, what do you think of the lemon with the lavender? For a hot summer night, that might be very refreshing,” Mrs. Stidham asked. Her expensively cut and streaked hair and the whiff of $350-a-bottle perfume from Jean Patou were at odds with her too-tight, too-short leather skirt and the animal-print top. Her French manicured nails were immaculate, if impractically long.

  The mother had remarried, I assumed, as Lydia’s last name was Ballou.

  Lydia crossed her arms in front of her chest. Where her mother was groomed and flashy, Lydia looked like a sixties folk singer. She wore no makeup and her long, curly, mouse-brown hair was parted in the middle. She had on a shapeless lace dress that hung on her thin frame, and a short-sleeved beige cardigan. Her beautiful, big gray eyes could probably look soulful when she wasn’t being obstinate.

  “Mother,” she finally said. “I told you I didn’t want cake. I want wedding pie.”

  Well, I can’t help you there, I wanted to say. My bakery was called Rainbow Cake for a reason.

  Roshonda jumped in.

  “I think what Lydia is trying to say is that although Claire’s cakes were delicious, maybe we’ve strayed too far from the Appalachian theme we talked about,” Roshonda said, giving me the eye.

  Appalachian. Hmmm.

  Bourbon and branch water. Dulcimer music. Wildflowers in jelly jars. Biscuits and country ham. That did have a certain charm.

  “I know you’ve talked this over with Roshonda and Gavin, but why don’t you tell me about the kind of wedding you want,” I said to Lydia with a smile. “What is your inspiration?”

  Lydia sat up straighter, unfolded her arms, and put her hands in her lap. “Some of my happiest memories growing up were the summers I spent with my grandmother in northern Kentucky,” she said.

  Her mother reached over and took her hand.

  “Mom worked two jobs to support us,” Lydia said, looking sideways at her mother and then back at me. “We lived in a crappy apartment. The neighborhood wasn’t safe, so I couldn’t go outside if she wasn’t at home. At my grandma’s in Augusta, it was like paradise. I would spend hours in the woods, by the creek, in her garden, in her skiff on the river. And that’s what I want for my wedding, that simple paradise,” Lydia said.

  I nodded and gave her those few moments of silence that always prompted more of the story.

  “I loved taking the little ferry near Point Pleasant. As it went across the river, getting closer to old buildings along the waterfront, yo
u felt the wind in your hair and the pull of the river under your feet. It was like stepping back in time and going home, if that makes any sense.”

  Simple paradise. Stepping back in time. Grandmother’s garden. Going home. So why was I suddenly getting the taste of Christmas? Of evergreen and spice together?

  Usually, if I focused on a client and then let myself open to her, I sensed a flavor that usually became the link to a meaningful, personal story. This is how I got to the heart of my client, flavor and story. With that signature flavor and the understanding I received from her story, I could craft a wedding cake that would fit her like a couture gown.

  As I liked to say, there was a flavor that explained you, even to yourself. There was a flavor to help you move on, mend your broken heart, help you start over, or begin a new life. Gavin once called me a cake therapist, but as any kind of therapist knows, you need information.

  I had a perplexing flavor. Christmas. But no story yet to help me interpret what it meant. Maybe I was pushing myself too much. Maybe if I just relaxed a little bit, the story would come.

  Spice usually indicated grief, a loss that lingered for a long time, just like the pungent flavor of the spice itself, whether it was nutmeg or allspice or star anise. The more pronounced the flavor, the more recent the loss and the stronger the emotion. But the puzzling thing was that evergreen, a taste that was new to me, came through just as strongly.

  Lydia was staring at me, and as I looked around the room, everyone else was, too.

  Somehow, I would have to figure out what to do with evergreen and spice. And pie.

  “So, it was just summers that you spent with your grandmother in Augusta? Did you ever go there for the holidays?” I asked. Maybe that was the link.

  “No. Grandma came to us then because Mom always worked at the restaurant on Christmas.”

  “And is there a special reason you’d like pie instead of cake for your wedding?” I asked her.

  “Grandma was the one who taught me how to make pie. She made the best pies.”

  I nodded. “Well, I don’t have pie today, but see what you think of this,” I said, and passed her a sugar cookie, which she—thankfully—took and began to nibble.

  I had to think fast.

  “Let’s start with the little things and then we can work up to wedding pie,” I suggested. “We can do these sugar cookies in virtually any shape and flavor you want for a bridesmaids’ luncheon and wedding guest favors or simply as part of the wedding dessert buffet. I have these wonderful edible transfer wafer papers that you can apply to a sugar cookie so it looks like a vintage postcard or a perfume bottle or a china pattern.”

  Lydia scowled.

  “But I don’t see those designs for you,” I quickly added. “I see botanical prints of Kentucky wildflowers or woodland plants like ferns on these cookies. We put the cookies in handwoven baskets so the guests can gather them for themselves.”

  “Yes!” Lydia said, suddenly animated.

  “And maybe the flavoring for the cookie could be a Kentucky flavor, something that could have come from your grandmother’s garden. We can figure that out later.”

  Lydia beamed and turned to her mother, who looked crestfallen.

  Uh-oh.

  “You have to understand, Claire, that this wedding is for Lydia and Brian, first, but it’s also a big social occasion for my husband,” said Mrs. Stidham. “He has been very good to Lydia and me, and I don’t want to disappoint him,” she said, twisting her hands together in her lap. “He has so many friends and business associates he wants to invite, but . . .” She trailed off, looking miserable.

  “Almost all of my weddings feature signature sugar cookies,” I explained. “It’s just a question of what you do with them.”

  But we were back to the classic standoff: Bride versus Mother.

  When Lydia got up to use the restroom, Mrs. Stidham whispered to us, “Isn’t it funny? I’ve spent most of my life trying to get as far away as I could from the backwoods, and now my daughter wants a hillbilly wedding.”

  Looking for more?

  Visit Penguin.com for more about this author and a complete list of their books.

  Discover your next great read!