How to Eat a Cupcake

by Meg Donohue

  “Annie! It is you, isn’t it?”

  That voice. I spun around. Before me stood Julia St. Clair. Tall and willowy, she had cut her shiny curtain of blond hair so that it fell razor-straight and ended bluntly at her shoulders, making her look sophisticated and vaguely Parisian. Her face, under the stylish hairdo, was as placidly beautiful as ever.

  “Julia!” I said, feeling my calves tense. It was something that happened to me when I was anxious, as though my body, of which I only required running when I was late for a bus, nevertheless managed to tap into a biological instinct for flight. Just being near this woman, my legs seemed to be warning, decreases your chance of survival!

  Julia hugged me, enveloping me in her rose-petal scent. “You look surprised. My mom didn’t tell you I’d be here?”

  “No,” I said coolly. “She didn’t.”

  Julia either didn’t notice or chose to ignore my tone. “Funny. Well, I’m living at home now. For now, I should clarify.” She smiled, glancing down at the sparkler on her left hand. “I’m engaged. Couldn’t bear the thought of planning a California wedding all the way from New York City, so here I am. We’re getting married up at the vineyard in the spring.”

  Actually, Lolly had mentioned that Julia was engaged. Her fiancé’s name was Wesley something-or-other, a Silicon Valley whiz kid. What Lolly hadn’t mentioned was that Julia was back in San Francisco. Sneaky lady! I thought. Hell, downright Machiavellian. I had to give credit where credit was due.

  “Congratulations,” I said, keeping my voice neutral even as my tongue went dry in my mouth. Seeing Julia brought me back to a time when rumors had buzzed around me as dark and thick as a cloud of flies. “That’s great news.”

  “I know, thanks. God, Annie, how long has it been? Ten years? Not since, I guess . . .” Julia faltered and I didn’t jump in to save her, enjoying the rare crack in her confidence. But then she shook her hair back and plowed forward. “Not since your mother’s funeral.”

  “That’s right.”

  We were both silent for a long moment, looking out at the bay.

  “I miss her,” Julia said.

  I looked over sharply. There was something plaintive in her voice, a quiet desperation I couldn’t help feeling was about more than my mother’s death. Julia St. Clair had always had the type of serene, classic beauty that practically begged to be studied, and I tried to view my onetime friend through the eyes of a stranger. Her features were understated, less dramatic than her mother’s, more pretty than glamorous; she had the look of someone who had never known less than eight hours of sleep per night, who opened her eyes each morning to the smell of lilacs and lattes, who wrapped herself in a cashmere blanket when she flew first class to Rome, which was often. Her nose was patrician, long and thin, but not too long or too thin, her skin a flawless shade of cream that had never been blemished by a pimple. At twenty-eight, there were no traces of burgeoning laugh lines around her rosy lips or true-blue eyes, but I knew that I myself had made Julia laugh countless times when we were children—a loud, infectious belly laugh that broke her composed face into an unexpectedly cockeyed, cat-got-the-bird grin.

  Of course, that was back when I still cared about making Julia happy, before I realized that the person releasing that peal of laughter was a manipulative, lying, cruel young woman who was trying her damnedest to ruin my life.

  “Anyway,” Julia said, turning to face me. “It’s really good to see you again.” The way Julia said these words—with equal parts earnestness and surprise, as though she could hardly believe them herself—set my teeth on edge. She hesitated, a shadow passing over her face, and seemed on the verge of saying more. But then, just as a heaping tablespoon of curiosity was being mixed into the complicated and fairly toxic concoction of feelings I had for Julia, we were interrupted by the voice of the very man who, once upon a time, had put one of the first nails in the coffin of our friendship.

  “Well, look at the two of you!” I heard from behind me. “If someone had told me this shindig was going to be a reunion of the prettiest girls from Devon Prep, I would have gotten here a lot sooner.”

  Coming from anyone else, this line would have sounded smarmy. But coming from Jake Logan—Jake Logan of the blue-green eyes, the puckish smile revealing that ever-so-slight gap between his front teeth, and the impossibly adorable dimples—the line produced in me a feeling I could only, and not without embarrassment, describe as puppylike in its unchecked delight. I know, I know: how cliché to fawn over a grown man with dimples. But! He called me pretty! I might as well have wagged my tail and rolled over.

  How was it that ten years after graduating from high school, I still had a crush on Jake Logan? He’d been one of those kids who’d probably avoided an attention deficit disorder diagnosis by a year or two, always bouncing from one activity to the next, quick-witted and effortlessly talented at ostensibly everything and acutely, though somehow not obnoxiously, aware of his charm. Standing before me now, he didn’t seem much changed from his teenage self—perhaps a bit broader through the chest and shoulders, a little more poise in his easy stance, a steadier hold to his gaze. But men nearly always age annoyingly well, don’t they?

  My stomach did a not-so-little flip. Why the hell had I decided to wear that stupid purple tunic? Julia, of course, had on a strapless navy miniskirted dress that might as well have been a field hockey uniform for all of the casual confidence she emitted. Round two: Julia, I thought. Jake Logan, after all, was Julia’s ex-boyfriend. The whole surreal scenario called desperately for more wine. I grabbed another glass from a passing waiter and was surprised to see Julia do the same. Julia had never been much of a drinker in high school, though of course we were underage at the time. Not that that had ever stopped me.

  “I can’t believe my mother still has you on her invite list after that de Young Museum gala when you got so drunk you knocked over the champagne fountain!” Julia said to Jake, laughing as she touched his sleeve.

  “Please,” Jake stage-whispered. “You’re blowing my cover in front of Annie! She hasn’t seen me in ages. There’s a sliver of hope that she might think I’m all grown up and responsible now.”

  “Not a chance, Jake Logan. I’ve got your number,” I said. I looked down pointedly at his feet. “No one who wears flip-flops with a suit is grown-up and responsible. A peddler of surfboards to i-bankers? Perhaps. Responsible? ’Fraid not.”

  Jake laughed. Now I saw that the skin around his blue-green eyes crinkled in a new way. His dimples shone through a light brown scruff he could never have grown in high school. If anything, the changes made him more attractive.

  “Touché. Note to self: Lose the suit.” He clinked his wineglass lightly against mine. “So, Ms. Quintana, other than cutting overconfident men down to size, what have you been up to these last ten years?”

  Wait. Was it possible that Jake Logan was actually flirting with me? Before I had a chance to answer him, Julia jumped in.

  “Annie’s a pastry chef.” She turned to me. “A fabulous one. I tried one of your cupcakes already. That lemon one—it’s pure summertime. Remember when you were seven and the thing you truly wanted most in the world was a cupcake? You weren’t thinking about world peace, or the economy, or, I don’t know, life . . . you just wanted something delicious and special and homemade. Remember?”

  And there goes Julia’s third sheet, I thought as wind swept the patio.

  “I’m pretty sure all I ever truly wanted was a snake, but maybe that’s a boy thing,” Jake said. His amused gaze lingered for a moment on Julia, making me wonder just how many of his old feelings for her remained. Then he looked at me, and for a brief moment I benefited from all the warmth that had built in his eyes as he’d gazed at Julia. “So these cupcakes,” he asked, “are they . . . Ecuadorean?”

  I couldn’t believe he remembered where my mom was from. When I tried to recall the few interactions I’d had with
Jake during high school, what immediately surfaced was the memory of being stung by his look of contempt during my humiliating walk to the principal’s office near the end of that devastating final year at Devon Prep. Prior to that, I suppose he had occasionally taken a benign interest in me, but nothing strong enough to risk breaking rank with Devon’s dominant crowd. I only made a couple of friends in high school: Jody, the poet who had terrible acne and a tendency to mutter, “This is definitely going in my collection” whenever classmates snickered at her dorky, overeager comments; and Penelope, the painfully shy pianist whose face turned a remarkable shade of ground chuck each and every time a teacher called on her. Yup, it was the artsy-fartsy girls and me getting by together as best we could all those years. After the rumors about me started, though, even Jody and Penelope couldn’t risk association, and I didn’t really blame them. That was the year loneliness gave my sense of humor a run for its money.

  “Not exactly,” I told Jake now. “There isn’t a long Ecuadorean cupcake tradition for me to draw on. I guess it’s in the genes though. My mom was a wonderful baker.”

  “So it runs in the family. And now you’re a pastry chef.”

  “I actually work very hard to eschew labels,” I said. “I am quite literally the most accomplished eschewer of labels you’ll ever meet. But if you called me a baker, the pretension police might look the other way. I make desserts and breakfast treats for the Valencia Street Bakery in the Mission. It’s a hole-in-the-wall. And I walk people’s dogs. We must not forget the dogs.”

  “Never,” Jake said solemnly.

  “You’re being too modest,” Julia jumped in. “Those cupcakes . . . really, they’re delicious. I’m so impressed.”

  I looked at her and allowed a beat of silence to pass before saying, reluctantly, “Thanks.”

  I was having trouble knowing what to make of Julia’s apparent kindness. If she realized how bizarre it was for three of us to be chatting away like merrily reunited old friends, she certainly wasn’t letting on. Did she really not remember what she’d done to me? How she’d turned on me in the years leading up to my mother’s death? How her actions had changed the course of my life and caused irreparable damage to my relationship with my mother? What she’d said at the funeral? I shook my head, irritated to find myself rehashing the events of that year after I’d spent so much time working to put it all securely in the past, and excused myself as tactfully as a short woman with two large glasses of wine snaking through her veins was capable of doing. I had nearly reached the living room when I heard Julia’s laughter, a loud, flirty, artificial sound that hung in the warm night air. I glanced back. Her hand was touching Jake’s arm, their foreheads mere inches apart. Awfully close for a happily engaged woman, I thought as I turned and made my way out of that house, determined, yet again, that it would be the last time I allowed myself to be pulled into the duplicitous world of the St. Clair family.

  The St. Clairs’ squat, stucco carriage house sat flush against the city sidewalk at the front of their property and served as the final line of defense between the public and the mansion. A garage and gated porte cochere formed the lower half of the carriage house; the top floor contained the two-bedroom apartment my mother and I had lived in for so many years. Leaving the mansion and its still-crowded party behind me, feeling the courtyard’s uneven cobblestones below my feet, and walking up those familiar steps to the carriage house apartment prompted a dizzying wave of déjà vu to wash over me. I found the key in its usual spot underneath a stone duck beside the door and slid it into the lock. Stepping inside, I flipped on the lights and sucked in my breath.

  The sight of my old living room was like a punch to the gut. Here, too, as in the mansion, Lolly and Tad had not changed a thing. I picked up a framed photograph from the table beside the couch. There was my mother, her dark brown eyes molten with joy as she crouched down to hug an elfin version of me and a coltish version of Julia tight in each arm. I could almost smell my mother then, all warm sugar and vanilla and a hint of something citrusy and tart, like lime. I set the photograph down carefully in the same spot and tried hard to keep myself firmly planted in the present.

  Now where the hell could that recipe book be? The last time I looked for it was the day of my mother’s funeral, and over the years I’d come to wonder if perhaps the blinding fog of sorrow had prevented me from finding it. Maybe, I thought, just maybe, I’d simply overlooked the book in my hurry to finally be out of that house for good. Each time Lolly had contacted me over the previous decade, a part of me had hoped she was calling because she had found the book. But Lolly had never mentioned it.

  My mother’s book was more than just a place she stored her favorite recipes, though since she was an accomplished baker and chef, her book would have been precious to me even if that’s all it were. But I knew that my mom had used the recipe book as a journal as well, a place to write down her thoughts on the day, her daughter, and the family of which she took such heartfelt care. The image of my mother bent over the book each evening, her pen marking the pages with careful, flowing script, her dark hair falling around her face like a privacy curtain, was ingrained in my memory. I suppose in some small way it had been a relief to not find the book ten years earlier—I hadn’t really felt ready to read my mom’s private thoughts so soon after her death. Wouldn’t it have been breaking her trust to do so? But those recipes! The meringues, the empanadas dulces, the coconut flans of my youth! I had tried to re-create them, but without the book the resulting desserts were pale imitations of the confections my mother had made with such precision, patience, and love.

  And so I had long ago given up on re-creating and started reinventing. I began baking in college in the years after my mother’s death, and, no, I didn’t need a therapist to tell me it was a coping mechanism, a way to feel closer to her. Once I realized I would never be able re-create my mother’s specialties exactly, at least not without her recipes, I had taken to interpreting my memory of those desserts with a modern twist. The pastries I created made me feel both closer to my mother and further away than ever. I had no family—I’d never known my father, had no siblings, and even the cousin my mom had once lived with in South San Francisco had long since moved back to Ecuador. To taste my mother’s passion fruit meringue one more time would have made me feel a little less alone, if only for one or two bites’ worth of time.

  The shelf beside the carriage house’s stove still held a few cookbooks—The Joy of Cooking, Mastering the Art of French Cooking—but there was no sign of my mother’s recipe book. I opened every last drawer and cupboard in the kitchen and even checked the refrigerator. I sighed, leaning against the narrow, tiled countertop before working up the nerve to walk down the hall to my mother’s old room.

  Her bed was made up with crisp white linens, as though at any moment she might return and need a clean place to rest her weary body after a hard day’s work. The closet was empty. After the funeral, I had kept a few of my mother’s clothes and told Lolly she could donate the rest to her favorite cause of the moment. The bedside tables, too, were empty. I was peering under the bed when I heard the sound of a faucet running in the kitchen.

  “Hello?” I called, making my way back down the hall.

  There, filling a glass with water from the sink, stood Curtis, the St. Clairs’ longtime driver, handyman, jack-of-all-trades—whatever anyone needed, big, dependable Curtis was your strong and silent man. He looked so much older than when I had seen him last. Now in his fifties, his ruddy forehead was lined with age, his eyes darker and more sunken than I remembered, his brown hair nearly overtaken by coarse gray. Mom, too, would surely have had a few gray hairs if she’d lived past the ripe old age of thirty-four. Before I knew what I was doing, I had thrown my arms around Curtis and buried my face in his broad chest.

  “Annie.” He sighed, patting my back awkwardly. “I thought I spotted someone walking up here, but then I figured I was just seeing th
ings. You scared the bejesus out of me.”

  I pulled away. “It’s just little old me, Curtis,” I said, swiping at my eyes. “Not the Ghost of Empanadas Past.”

  Curtis shrugged sheepishly. “What are you doing back at the St. Clairs’? It’s been a long time.”

  “Oh, you know, getting Lolly and the crew hopped up on sugar for old time’s sake. I thought I’d try to find my mom’s recipe book while I’m here. You haven’t seen it, have you? Black, leather-bound, remarkably skilled in the art of camouflage?”

  Curtis shook his head. “Sorry.”

  “It’s okay. I’ll live.” Even as I said the words, I realized how disappointed I was. I hadn’t understood until that very moment just how much my decision to cater the St. Clairs’ party had been tied to the hope, the expectation, even, of finding that book.

  Curtis walked me out to Becca’s car. It cheered me somewhat to pass through the St. Clairs’ gate with him by my side. I felt buffered for a moment from the pounding emotions of the previous few hours. Out of all of the people I’d seen that night from my old life, I was happiest to see him. After all, he was one of us—or maybe it’s more accurate to say that I always thought of myself as one of them: the help. There were the St. Clairs—Lolly and Tad and Julia. There was the help—my mom and Curtis and a small army of other household employees. And then there was me, stuck somewhere in the middle, attending fancy private schools with Julia and living out in the carriage house with my mother. When it came down to choosing a side, I decided pretty early on that I would always have more in common with the Lucias and Curtises of the world than the St. Clairs.