How to Eat a Cupcake

by Meg Donohue

  But I’ve gotten ahead of myself. Back to that very first bite of hidden cupcake in the pantry: a soft cap of vanilla buttercream giving way to light, creamy mocha cake. I kept eating, turning the cupcake slowly in my hand. This was not rich, one-bite-and-you-couldn’t-possibly-have-more chocolate. This was refined, complex chocolate cut with a hint of coffee and what else . . . Currant? Salt? A grown-up, masterful cupcake. It was perfect. I leaned back against the shelves in the cool, dark pantry and felt myself relax.

  Annie could make a fortune on these things.

  I straightened, licked each of my fingers clean, and snuck one last nibble out of the bottom of the delicate white cupcake wrapper before balling it in my fist and shooting it into the pantry trash can. Swish. There I was, out of cupcakes—but with a very good idea in their place.

  Of course! I kicked myself for not thinking of this the moment I tasted my first bite of lemon cupcake the night before. Wasn’t I known for spotting a sure bet from a mile away? And here I was, taking more than twelve hours to realize the business opportunity that was staring me right in the face! Talk about going soft. One week off the job and already I was losing my edge.

  I practically ran to my mother’s study to find Annie’s phone number. This is exactly what I need, I thought, pressing the number into my cell phone. Something to distract me, something to pour myself into while I get through this . . . this year. I walked out on the patio again and pulled the door shut behind me, listening as the phone rang in my ear.

  “Hello?”

  “Annie, hi! It’s Julia.”

  Silence.

  I cleared my throat, then clarified, “Julia St. Clair.”

  “Yes, I know. Hi.”

  The chill in Annie’s voice was impossible to miss. Was she really still stuck on a series of events that took place a hundred years ago? I wondered. Of course, this had been fairly apparent the night before when she’d stared at me coldly all through our conversation and then left abruptly when Jake Logan appeared. I decided to ignore her rudeness and press on.

  “Do you have a minute to talk?” I asked.

  “Well, I just left the bakery and now I’m headed to the park with a few dogs, so . . .”

  “This will just take a minute. Really. I have an idea I’d love to run by you.”

  More silence. But I was nothing if not persistent.

  “It was great to see you last night, Annie,” I said sweetly, trying a new tack.

  I heard her sigh. “Is this urgent, Julia? Talking on the phone while walking three dogs with bulging bladders down an incredibly steep street toward a park is like trying to race the Iditarod with one hand tied behind your back. It would be much easier if we had this little chat another time.”

  I had the distinct sense that if I agreed to this, the next time I phoned Annie, my call would go straight to voice mail. It was time, I realized, for my business voice.

  “Then I’ll make it quick,” I said, and immediately began pacing the patio. “Your cupcakes are the best I’ve ever tasted, and I’ve eaten more cupcakes than I care to admit. That’s a compliment, but more importantly, it’s a fact. I’m confident that with your skill and my operations experience, together we could open a cupcakery that would have a line out the door from the time we open in the morning until the moment we close at night. I can provide the capital to get us started. This is what I do, Annie, and I do it well: I invest in businesses and I drive them to be successful. I’ll be in San Francisco for nearly a year—plenty of time to get you off the ground and seeing returns, at which point I’ll bow out and you can take full ownership of the shop.”

  When she didn’t answer right away, I continued hurriedly. “I know what you’re thinking: a cupcakery? Does the world need another? The post-9/11 comfort-food era and Carrie and Miranda’s little trip to Magnolia Bakery for cupcakes on Sex and the City definitely sparked a surge of interest—but let me tell you, I’ve tasted Magnolia’s cupcakes and the cake is dry and the icing is practically grainy with sugar. Those cupcakes couldn’t hold a candle to yours! Besides,” I stammered, feeling the hollow rush of her silence in my ear, “anyone who knows anything knows to order the banana pudding at Magnolia, not the cupcakes.” I was rambling, something I never did, or at least never used to do. Why was I trying to impress her? It’s just Annie, I told myself. Calm down.

  “My point is, people clearly want cupcakes—that desire won’t wane anytime soon, I promise—and yours are the best. So let me do this for you.” I paused, readying the final line of the pitch that I realized I’d already crafted in my head: “Your talent is utterly wasted working for anyone but yourself.”

  I swallowed. There was a beat of silence. And then:

  “Well, gee, Julia, thanks so much for swooping into town and picking up the pieces of my wasted life. Whatever would I have done without you?”

  “What? No, that’s not at all what—” I sputtered.

  “I’m going to decline your generous proposal. And I really have to go. Good-bye.”

  I pulled the phone from my ear and stared at it, shocked. What just happened? Leaning against the patio railing, I searched the still-green hills of the Marin Headlands across the bay to the north, trying to make sense of the conversation I’d just had.

  Annie’s voice had been so hard, so remote, and so angry. If it hadn’t quite contained the cold ring of hatred, it bared at least the chilly tone of strong dislike. I was sure that she had never sounded like that when we were growing up. I remembered her as brave and independent, clever and warm in a way I’d always envied. Now she sounded hardened, more sarcastic than funny; her words were clipped and designed to sting.

  Of course, I had some idea of what Annie was so pissed off about. Our senior year at Devon Prep had been especially hard for her, and I knew I hadn’t made it any easier. As I thought about that time, I felt myself descending swiftly through a series of emotions—defensiveness, regret, and finally, with a heavy, sandbag thud: sadness. I crossed the patio and sank back down onto the lounge chair. Sadness! All my life I’d been proactive in my pursuit of happiness, and now suddenly I felt dogged, cloaked even, by sadness. I couldn’t seem to shake it. The whole point of the cupcakery venture was to get my mind off of the past—distant and recent—and move forward. Put one foot in front of the other and just keep walking until I was out of this funk. And here I was, being dragged back into the thick of it by Annie Quintana.

  It was selfish of her, really. And ungrateful. I hated feeling like I needed her, but there I was practically begging her to take my money and my expertise so that she could finally embark on her dream career—or at least, I assumed it was her dream career. And she’d said no all because of some silly misunderstanding that had taken place a decade ago! I quickly flipped through the series of events that had corroded our friendship. By the time we’d each left for college, I remembered, we were barely speaking. And then Lucia had died; after that, complete silence.

  Oh! I thought with a start. Is Annie’s anger somehow related to her mother’s death? In the fall, after I had left for Stanford and Annie for Cal—or, no, I suppose that wasn’t right, Annie’s acceptance to Cal was still suspended at that point and she was living in the carriage house, waitressing, and taking classes at City College—my mother had walked into the kitchen one morning and found Lucia collapsed on the floor. She’d called an ambulance straightaway, ridden with her to the hospital, tracked down the very best doctors, and later paid for all of her medical bills. Still, despite my mother’s best efforts, Lucia slipped into a coma before either Annie or I reached the hospital. She died several days later without ever waking. Her death had gutted me—I’d taken weeks off school and then slogged through finals in a stunned haze. Really, Annie should have counted herself lucky she wasn’t at Cal yet and could deal with her grief at home, in private.

  At the funeral, Annie and I had mostly kept our distance from one anot
her but I do remember sharing a tearful hug at some point during the service. And then, nothing. A few weeks later, she left for Cal and basically fell off the face of the planet. Does she blame our family for Lucia’s death? My mother in particular was hurt by Annie’s chilly behavior over the last ten years. After all, Annie had lived with our family for most of her life—she was like a second daughter to my mother. A niece, at the very least.

  My phone rang in my lap, startling me out of these thoughts, and I picked it up without checking the caller ID, hoping against odds that it was Annie calling with a change of heart.

  “Hello?”

  “Crap. I must have dialed the wrong number. You’re no saint.”

  It was Jake Logan, with an old joke. In spite of my mood, I laughed. “That’s Ms. Julia, to you,” I said airily. “What on earth do you want?” Jake and I hadn’t spoken much on the phone since our mutual breakup during our freshman year in college, but we’d seen each other at various parties thrown by the Devon Prep crowd over the years and had maintained an easy, drama-free friendship.

  “Ah, yes. It is you, isn’t it?” he said. I could practically hear his mischievous smile through the phone. “Good! I just woke up and was afraid I dialed the wrong number.”

  “You just woke up? It’s ten o’clock!”

  “Please, no judgment. I’m calling with a very attractive offer. It appears the sun is out, which as you know is simply inappropriate for a June day in San Francisco.”

  “True,” I said, matching his mock-businesslike tone. “Do go on.”

  “To spite this defiant sun, in defense of our poor burned-up fog, and in celebration of the return of San Francisco’s prodigal daughter—that’s you, Saintie!—I propose we sit inside all day and drink. Balboa Café, for old time’s sake. You in?”

  I squinted out at the bay, considering. A drink at ten in the morning with an ex-boyfriend was not exactly my style. And yet. Wes was halfway around the world. Annie clearly wasn’t speaking to me. When I spent time alone I thought only of hospital beds and a suddenly, heartbreakingly unknowable future. So where, exactly, had “my style” gotten me after all these years? And, really, what harm could there be in having one drink with Jake? I was supposed to meet my mother at the florist’s in an hour, but she could handle that appointment in her sleep, couldn’t she?

  “I’ll be there in thirty,” I said, feeling the flutter of—what, exactly? Relief? Trepidation?—well, something other than sadness in my chest.

  I walked down the long, steep slope from our house in Pacific Heights toward the flat stretch of the Marina neighborhood that housed the Balboa Café and many of the other bars that I had frequented on my trips to the city during college at Stanford. I’d never been much of a drinker and usually nursed one vodka-soda over the course of a night, taking tiny sips until I was left with only melted ice and a vaguely metallic lime taste. Lately, though, I’d started to enjoy drinking more and more. The first couple of drinks tended to make me feel morose and self-pitying, but the third? The third made me feel suddenly lighter, as though nothing that had happened over the previous couple of months was really worth worrying about at all.

  Even with the panoramic view of city carved into steeped slopes and shining bay and green expanse of hills to the north, the walk made me miss Manhattan. When I first moved to New York, I’d been surprised to find that despite what everyone said, the city was cleaner and had fewer scary homeless people than my hometown. In San Francisco, sidewalks and streets appeared messy and leaf-blown all year long and buildings needed to be painted annually to combat the damage of salty winds and months of dust. There were entire neighborhoods that seemed in perpetual need of a hose-down. Still, there was something undeniably magical about this city by the bay. It was, and always would be, my home. Annie and I had that much in common, at the very least: we were San Francisco girls, born and raised.

  Jake was sitting at the dark wood bar with his back to me when I entered Balboa Café. A girl a few stools down leaned toward him, her blond ponytail dangling over her shoulder as she laughed at something he said. Her friends exchanged knowing glances at the sound of her flirtatious laughter, and soon the whole group had burst into a fit of giggles. I paused in the doorway, watching them. Why do women with muffin tops insist on wearing low-slung jeans? I wondered, irritated. Is it really too much to ask for a couple extra inches of fabric to protect the innocent public’s eyes from their unsightly bulges? I sighed, reminding myself I didn’t care one bit if Jake flirted with a girl who couldn’t have been older than twenty-one and whose pale pink Hanky Panky thong was pulled above the layer of fat on her lower back. And yet, gazing at the two of them, I felt a territorial buzz start up behind my eyes. It was a feeling I’d had before.

  By the time I entered my senior year at Devon, I had long established myself as the school’s queen bee in every respect. Of course, I didn’t think of myself that way at the time, but looking back, it’s easy to see that’s who I was. I had the best grades, led a pack of pretty, popular friends, and had a closetful of clothes any girl would have killed for. When I noticed Jake Logan of the shipping Logans, captain of the football, swim, and baseball teams, and most certainly headed to Dartmouth in the fall, flirting with Annie in the hall—Annie, whose social circle at that point consisted of two pimply, tweezers- and sunshine-adverse girls whose names I always confused—I know I should have been happy for her. Instead, almost without thinking, I turned on the charm. Okay, maybe it wasn’t entirely without thinking. In any event, Jake and I were officially dating by the end of the week.

  “Julia!” Jake called from the bar, stirring me from these unproductive musings.

  I crossed the room, enjoying the disappointed flush that crept up the back of Hanky Panky Girl’s neck as I did so, and perched myself on the stool beside Jake. He leaned over to kiss me on the cheek.

  “Glad you made it. Vodka tonic?”

  “Please.”

  He ordered me the cocktail and watched with an amused twinkle in his aquamarine eyes as I took a long drink.

  “You okay?” he asked.

  “Sure,” I said. “Fabulous.”

  He held his beer up to his lips and shook his head. “I don’t know,” he said, gulping. “Something’s different.”

  I shrugged. “I’m engaged.”

  Jake laughed. “Well, I know that, Jules. It’s not the rock—it’s you. You seem . . . I don’t know. Different.”

  “No, I don’t,” I said sharply. I drained my drink and Jake ordered me another. We’d moved on to other, lighter topics of conversation—Caroline Sistenberg’s recent stint in rehab for a Vicodin addiction that developed after she blew out her knee skiing in Aspen that winter, the new Peter Carraway restaurant opening in Jake’s building in North Beach, whether I should switch to a martini for my third drink—when I suddenly found myself asking, yelling, actually, truth be told, “And anyway, would it be so bad?”

  “Would what be so bad?” Jake asked, surprised.

  “If I were different! If I’d changed. People change, Jake. Sometimes for the better.” I had no idea why I was saying this. I wasn’t even sure I believed it. And anyway, I hadn’t changed—I was exactly who I’d always been. Except, really, I was different now, wasn’t I? I suddenly envisioned that the only thing left of the old me was a painted, external shell. This, I thought angrily, trying to rein in my wayward thoughts, is why I shouldn’t drink.

  Jake shook his head. “I never said change was bad, Jules. I was just checking in on you. I didn’t mean to upset you.”

  “I’m not upset!” I said, but my face burned. I looked down at the martini that had appeared on the bar in front of me. “Maybe I should go.”

  “Oh, c’mon, stay,” Jake said. He gave my shoulder a playful little push. “Let’s talk about something fun.” He squinted at me. “I know! Have you met Linus Tarrington’s new girlfriend yet? She’s one of those a
wful girls who are always wearing sequins and preening for photographers at events. And do you know where she grew up? Fresno.”

  “Oh God, really?” I asked weakly.

  “The worst part is I think she really has her eye on me. I have this theory that she’s planning on leapfrogging her way through our crowd and right into Gavin Newsom’s bed.”

  “Jake, no!” I said, feeling the beginnings of a smile work its way onto my lips.

  He leaned in conspiratorially and held out his hand. “I’ll bet you a hundred dollars she dumps Tarrington right after opening night at the opera.”

  “Poor Linus!” I said, shaking Jake’s hand and laughing. At last, the martini spread its warmth through my veins.

  And so I stayed. Over the course of the next several hours, we got very, very drunk. I remember wondering, when Jake finally walked me out to find a cab, whether I would tell Wes about this little sojourn down memory lane. Why would I? I decided. Really, there was nothing to tell. Just old friends catching up over drinks.

  I recited my parents’ address to the cabdriver, hoping I wasn’t slurring my words. In the harsh light of day—and it was, uncomfortably, still quite sunny out—I was acutely embarrassed by the impropriety of being drunk on a Sunday afternoon. As I settled in the seat and pulled out my cell phone, I was surprised to see that I had just missed a call. I put the phone to my ear and tried to ignore the taste of bile that crept into the back of my throat as the cab raced, seemingly, straight up into the sky, peeling through every stop sign along the way.