“That’s right.”
“I believe Margaret has told me all there is to know about your family tree.”
Certainly not all. I moved toward the display case now filled with a dozen different cookies and pies. “She’s a very enthusiastic woman when it comes to history.”
She extended her hand over the case and took mine in a very firm grip. “I’m Daisy.”
“I guessed. Your sister has also told me a lot about you.”
Her laugh was warm and sincere. “Has Margaret totally spilled the beans about the entire McCrae family yet?”
“She doesn’t share as much as you might think.”
Daisy hitched her hands on her hips. “Good to know. Margaret keeps us all guessing.”
“She seems to enjoy her work so much.”
“These days, she’s consumed by the McDonald papers.”
“I haven’t heard from her in a few days,” I said.
“She and Addie drove out to the Eastern Shore to look at the potential salvage of a lightkeeper’s house. I’m not sure. Could be a big job. And they’ve had several smaller jobs that have kept them busy.”
“Sounds encouraging. I’m glad to see the business growing.”
“I thought Alexandria would lose the salvage yard a few months ago, but Addie brought it back from the brink,” Daisy said.
“That’s what Rachel said you did for the bakery.”
She hitched her hands on her hips. “I’m the numbers gal. And that’s important, but it’s Rachel’s baking that brings in the customers.”
“She said you were out looking at warehouse space.”
“I was. It’s a very nice place out in Loudoun County, about an hour commute if there’s no traffic.”
Loudoun County. “It’s a very nice area.”
A wisp of hair slipped free and brushed over her eyes before she quickly tucked it back in place. “Has a lot to offer location-wise.”
“Does that mean you might be moving?” I asked.
“Prices are still a little high, so I need to keep searching. But my husband and I are considering a move. A place in the country means more space for his bike business—he does excursions, so it’s easier to launch a tour from Loudoun or Prince William County rather than from Alexandria city roads. We could also afford a bigger facility where he can store bikes. Less traffic. I don’t know. Still processing.”
“That sounds promising.”
She clasped her hands together. “What can I get for you? Rachel has been testing recipes for days. Though I’m afraid nothing is too savory. Margaret says you don’t have much of a sweet tooth.”
“I’m thinking about expanding my horizons and thought I’d try your sugar cookies,” I said. “Rachel gave me some the other day when I visited but they were gobbled up before I had a chance to eat one bite.”
“Must have been the lemon polenta. We don’t have those today, but I can hook you up with plain sugar cookies.”
“That sounds perfect.”
She tugged a piece of wax paper from a dispenser and grabbed a pink box. She inspected the cookies a moment before she chose a perfectly round one. “So, you’re enjoying working with Margaret?”
“Yes, I appreciate her directness and humor.”
“When it comes to all things history, she’s unstoppable. She really does know her stuff.”
I remembered what Margaret had said about Daisy. She was adopted at age three and reached out to her birth mother last year. The reunion had not gone smoothly.
As I watched Daisy arrange the cookies so carefully in the box, she reminded me of myself. Control was important. She did not have Rachel’s artful knack for making the haphazard look beautiful.
Questions about her birth mother jabbed at me. She was a year into this process, and I wanted to ask about her relationship. What had her birth mother done wrong? What could I do to reach out to the boy without pushing him away?
Instead of opening my heart and sharing, I opened my wallet and pulled out a ten-dollar bill. As I creased the bill lengthwise and stretched out any wrinkles, the questions shoved against the ice. Just ask her.
All I could manage was, “How much do I owe you?”
She closed up the box and sealed it with a gold Union Street Bakery label. “Seven dollars.”
I pushed the bill toward her and accepted the box, almost wishing she could reach into my mind and see the questions clanging around.
She, of course, didn’t and I was reminded of my advice to my clients. No one can read your mind. If you have a question, then simply ask it. What harm can come from asking?
Daisy looked up at me from the register and arranged three bills face side up. “Three dollars change.”
“Thank you.”
“So are you buying the cookies for a special occasion?”
I tucked the bills away. Ask her! For a moment, I imagined Jennifer prodding me as she did when we were kids. “Nothing special.”
“You’re eating them all?” She held up her hand. “And if you are, I’m not judging. I’ve crushed a few boxes of cookies in my time. Raises the endorphin levels through the roof. Good for the soul.”
“I think you mean serotonin levels.”
She chuckled. “Definitely, the feel-good levels.”
“Yes.” Ask her! “Have a nice day.”
“You do the same, Rae. Don’t be a stranger.”
A baby cried from the back room and I hesitated. “Who’s that?”
“My son, Walter. He’s up from his nap. Would you like to meet him?”
Something primal and feminine clenched inside me. “I would.”
“Be right back.”
I waited as she vanished through the swinging doors and then reappeared seconds later with a boy that appeared to be about ten months old. His hair was as dark as his mother’s, but instead of being smoothed and controlled, it stuck straight up. He popped his thumb in his mouth and though his eyelids were heavy with sleep, he grinned when he saw me.
I pictured Michael at that age. His face was round though the hair was thinner and more red. Grinning, drooling, and sucking his thumb all at the same time. “He’s very cute.”
She rubbed his tummy and kissed him on the cheek. “Walter Sinclair is the best thing that ever happened to me.”
Sadness gathered at my feet like a mist. “I can see that.”
Daisy studied me, picking up something in the tone under my words. “Would you like to hold him?”
Shifting, I struggled with the powerful and surprising urge to hold the baby. “I don’t have much practice holding babies.”
“He’s pretty easy. A very laid-back child.”
The ice cracked and broke, and disconcerting warmth emerged. “I would like to hold him.”
She came around the counter as I set down the cookies and my purse on the display case. I extended my hands to him and he leaned gently forward until I had the full weight of him in my embrace. So much heavier and sturdier than I remembered when I held Michael, though he had only just been born when I’d cradled him.
“His name is Walter?”
“Yes. Walter Gordon Sinclair.”
“He looks like you.”
“Good. He should after the stretch marks and twenty hours of labor. I’m still trying to get my shape back.”
That was one of the perks of having a baby so young. The body forgave quickly.
Walter looked at me, thumb firmly in mouth, and studied me as closely as I studied him. This close, I could see the cracker crumbs in his hair, the bits of sleep in the corner of his eyes, and the way his earlobe gently rounded. “He’s very sturdy.”
Daisy retied her apron strings, securing them with a tight bow. “He’s a tank. You should hear him when he’s crawling or when he’s working his way through the lower pantry,
pulling pots and pans from the cabinets. I tried to keep him out of the cabinets at first, then just decided to move the dangerous stuff up high and leave the fun stuff within his reach. He won’t be this age forever, and I enjoy watching him wreck the kitchen.”
I tugged down his blue T-shirt, which had inched up over his round belly. The ice splintered more, and this time, I didn’t even try to shore it up. This was a moment of pure joy, and it had been so long since I’d felt anything like this that I couldn’t shut it out.
“You’re a natural with him,” Daisy said. “Do you have children?”
And there was the opening. Just tell her!
“Only a few people know this. But . . .” Emotion clenched my throat and threatened to cut off the words. “I had a baby when I was sixteen. His name is Michael.” Tears stung the corner of my eyes. God, I’d said it out loud. “I gave him up for adoption.”
Daisy stilled, staring at me and searching for answers to questions she’d so carefully walled away. “Oh, Rae.”
I smiled, keeping my focus on the baby’s face, unable to speak with a steady voice.
“Have you seen him since?” she asked.
Walter pulled his thumb from his mouth and grabbed my lower lip as if he were waiting for my answer. Grinning, I gently pulled his tiny hand away. “For the first time last week.”
She straightened her shoulders and shifted. “How did it go?”
I looked up at Daisy. “I think it went well. But we were both so nervous.”
“Did you reach out to him or did he contact you about the meeting?”
I wasn’t even sure if she was talking to me or her own birth mother. I studied Walter’s sweet face, drawing the warmth my heart needed to speak. “He e-mailed me a couple of weeks ago. It took me a little time to get the courage to respond, but I did.”
She cleared her throat. “Why were you afraid?”
Daisy’s expression was almost childlike. It reminded me of Amelia when she spoke about her birth mother. “I didn’t want him to hate me.”
“Why would he hate you?”
I kissed Walter on the cheek and handed him back to Daisy. “Because I gave him away.”
She held her son tightly. Most in this situation would have said, What you did was the best for you both. Giving him away was an act of love. You should be proud.
Though all true, those words described only one side of the coin. The other, the one few discussed, was the loss, the unnatural separation, and the sadness that always lingered in the shadows.
With Walter gone from my arms, so went the warmth in my chest. A chill snaked up my back, circling over my shoulders, and crept toward my heart. “That’s a hard thing to forgive, even under the best of circumstances.”
A wrinkle furrowed her brow. She no longer saw her birth mother now, but me. “It sounds like you did it out of love,” she said.
“I’d like to believe so. I was sixteen and scared. I just didn’t think I was brave enough to raise us both without my mother’s support. And my mother was very clear she wouldn’t help.” The anger that had stirred in the last couple of years glowed. “Michael is with a great family.”
Daisy chewed her bottom lip. “How is your son doing?”
I reached for my purse and the box of cookies. “Very, very well.” Susan’s pale, drawn features and the wispy strands of hair peeking from her headscarf troubled me.
“Does he look like you?”
A sigh shuddered over my lips and I said with no small measure of pride, “He does.”
“I’m glad for you, Rae.” She kissed Walter. “No guarantees in life, Rae, but here’s hoping you and your son can become good friends.”
Never a mother. I’d signed that right away. But a friend . . . “That would be nice.” I raised the box of cookies. “Thank you for these. Please tell Rachel I said hello.”
“Sure, any time.” She shifted Walter to her other hip. “Come back soon, Rae. I like talking to you.”
I raised the box of cookies. “I enjoyed meeting you, Daisy.”
Twenty minutes later, when I arrived home and saw the Shire Architectural Salvage truck in front of the house, I didn’t tense up or resent the intrusion. I was actually grateful for it.
As I parked, Margaret swung open the driver’s-side door and hopped out. “Rae! My wo-man! I have news from the past!”
Always excited. Always ready to grab life by the hand and run with it as fast as she could.
“Margaret. You must be psychic. I just bought cookies.”
She stretched and rolled her head from side to side. “USB cookies, I hope!”
I held up the pink box. “Is there any other kind?”
Nodding, she grinned. “I’ll trade you a data dump for coffee and cookies.”
“Sounds like a fair swap.” The sky now was a deep blue and so blissfully cloudless. No rain in sight for now. “Let’s eat on the back porch. I could use a little sunshine.”
“Done!”
And so I made coffee, and within ten minutes, the two of us were sitting on black wrought-iron chairs on the brick patio.
“At one time,” Margaret said, “this spot would have offered us a panoramic view of the river.”
For as long as I can remember, houses crowded the land between my current property line and the banks of the Potomac. “The family began selling off the property a hundred and fifty years ago.”
“That would have been right after the Civil War,” Lisa said. “The family’s finances were decimated. Your great-great-grandfather was one of Mosby’s Gray Ghosts. Basically, the special forces of the Confederacy. They did a lot of damage and made the Union very unhappy. Union soldiers burned all the McDonald’s crops. That generation of McDonalds lost three sons in the war. One for the Union and two for the Confederacy.”
“I didn’t realize.”
“One son survived. He ended up being your great-great-grandfather,” Margaret said.
“We seem to barely survive each generation. No more sons in this generation to carry on the name.”
“Then you keep the name. You pass it on to your children.”
I reached for a cookie but did not bite into it. I’d never considered that I could have more children. It was almost as if fate gave me my chance, and I blew it. Now, especially after holding Walter, at least a door to the possibilities had cracked open. “Maybe.”
Margaret tucked her feet up under her as she bit into a cookie. She pointed to the square patch of dirt. “So, what’ll be on that spot anyway?”
“I asked for a garage with an office. But now, maybe an apartment.”
“Sounds a little indecisive, Rae. First you buy cookies and now you can’t decide on a construction project. What’s next? No high heels and pearls?”
A smirk tugged at the corners of my mouth. “I’m never indecisive. But for whatever reason, I can’t make up my mind on this.”
“That hearth was there for almost three hundred years. It must be hard to imagine something else in its place.”
“I was told by my mother never to remove the stones. The stones were supposed to bring us good luck.”
“Then why’d you tear it down?” Margaret asked.
“I wasn’t feeling like the McDonald family had seen much luck.”
“Why?”
“I decided to remove these stones because the hearth felt like a monument to the past, and for me to move forward, the hearth would need to go.”
Margaret reached for a cookie. “I can see that.”
“I just didn’t realize that once it was gone, choosing what is to come next would be harder than I ever imagined.”
Margaret inspected her cookie as if it held all the answers. “Too many people assume the past, present, and future are separate. When will we learn?”
“So what do you have for me, Margare
t? Something about your witch bottles? Or maybe Fiona McDonald?”
Margaret glanced up. “As you have already guessed, the McDonald women have had a very rough time of it over the last few hundred years.”
Needing a distraction, I bit into the cookie. The taste caught me by surprise. It was the perfect blend of butter and sugar, with a hint of lemon.
“Pretty good, right?” Margaret asked grinning with a wink.
One bite created a longing for more . . . “Very good.”
“Dare you to eat just one.”
As much as I wanted to prove her wrong and set the cookie aside, I couldn’t. Not only would it be a waste to toss away what was clearly made with such love and care, but I also didn’t want to deny myself the pleasure.
It was only a moment before I could say, “Rachel is a genius.”
“I know. She’s the cookie master.” She gobbled the last of her cookie and reached for another. “You can taste all her emotions she puts into her food.”
“After her husband, Mike, died,” Margaret said, “she went through a phase where everything was too salty. Then there were the months she dated that French baker. Too sweet. She’s still trying to find the perfect balance.”
“I remembered reading the obituary notice for her husband in the paper,” I said. “The young ones always remind me of Jennifer. I’m sure that was a very difficult time for her.”
Margaret shook her head. “It was a tough time, but Rachel is stronger than she gives herself credit for, and we were all lucky when Daisy came to the rescue. It always seems to work out for us.”
“Really?” I reached for a second cookie.
“They say my great-great-grandfather had the luck of the devil. He won the Union Street Bakery in a card game and found the love of his life when he was in his late forties. He and his wife Sally had seven children, and all survived to adulthood.”
“All? That’s something.”
“We also have a wanderlust in us. Most of the McCraes are now scattered, but from what I’ve been able to piece together, that thread of luck hasn’t abandoned us.”
“Very fortunate.”
She dug her beat-up spiral notebook from her backpack. “But the McDonald women have struggled with some bad breaks.”
The View from Prince Street Page 23
