How to Eat a Cupcake

by Meg Donohue

  Hi, Julia. It’s Annie, the voice mail message began. I’ve reconsidered. Let’s do it. Let’s open a cupcakery together. Call me.

  My mouth fell open and I slammed my fist down excitedly into the torn leather seat, and when neither action seemed to adequately express the surprising lightness that had suddenly swelled like helium in my chest, I found myself yelling, “YESSSSS!!!!!” into the cab, forgetting for a just a moment to care one bit what the cabdriver, or anyone else for that matter, might think of me.

  July

  Chapter 3

  Annie

  Later that week, once June had given way to July, I walked toward Valencia Street Bakery through dense morning fog, still questioning my decision to go into business with Julia. At that point, of course, I had no idea just how far—and how dangerously—the cupcakery would plunge us into the past. I suppose if I wanted to—and, believe me, I often did—I could blame everything that happened moving forward from that point on Becca’s expert needling. Becca and that too good bottle—okay, bottles—of Sonoma Cabernet.

  The day after the Save the Children benefit, after I’d received that annoying call from Julia and had walked my three canine charges back to their respective homes, I’d headed to Becca and Mike’s apartment on Capp Street for Craptastic Sunday. Having determined that the worst thing about moving in with her boyfriend Mike was that he refused to watch the steady stream of crappy reality television shows that she favored, Becca had invented Craptastic Sunday, a bimonthly event during which Mike vacated the apartment and Becca and I spent the better part of the afternoon emptying her DVR while simultaneously emptying a bottle or two—and on that one occasion, three, but we later agreed that had been a terrible mistake—of wine.

  “So how was it seeing Richie and Muffy McRicherson?” Becca had asked as she poured the first glasses of the afternoon.

  Becca and I had been freshman roommates at Cal. At first, she’d been standoffish. That fall, her first roommate, a Midwestern girl, had dropped out in a fit of homesickness and she’d been left with a coveted two-room single, so she wasn’t too pleased when I showed up at her door halfway through the year with a letter from student services clutched in my hand. Eventually, we’d bonded when, after making a pact to jog off the “freshman fifteen” we’d gained, we’d ended up, instead, sharing a joint behind the bathroom at the track and then an old-fashioned triple-scoop sundae at the ice cream parlor on College Avenue. After Devon Prep, Berkeley felt like a breath of fresh air; each year of high school had been more difficult than the year before, and by contrast, Cal, with its laid-back professors and the relative diversity of its student population, seemed like Utopia. Suddenly, I was surrounded by interesting, smart people who didn’t base their opinion of me on the label of my bag or the tightness of my ass or the birthplace and occupation of my great grandfather. I knew there were people like that everywhere, including Cal, but it was much easier to avoid that crew at college without becoming a social outcast. In Berkeley, there were options. San Francisco was just across the Bay Bridge, but I felt entire oceans away from Pacific Heights. Nonetheless, Becca, whose parents worked at a post office in Sacramento and who had a quartet of loud, overly muscled brothers who scuffled like puppies during the holidays I spent with them after my mother died, had an unfortunate fascination with the St. Clairs. She seemed to think of the family as an alien species worthy of endless dissection and analysis.

  “The party was exactly as I expected, with one glaring exception,” I’d told her as I sank back into the couch, still flabbergasted by the call I’d received that morning from Julia. “The Ice Princess was in attendance.”

  “What? No! How did that go?”

  “Weird. She’s engaged, but she was flirting with a guy I used to have a huge crush on—her ex-boyfriend, actually. And she was doing this whole sweet-as-apple-pie thing to me that was just disturbing. ‘Oh, Annie, your cupcakes are amazing.’ Blah blah blah. It was one of those conversations that seriously makes me question if all compliments aren’t inherently backhanded. I mean, isn’t a compliment just someone’s way of telling you they didn’t think you had it in you to look so good or be so successful or, I don’t know, pull off a sweater that shade of green?”

  Becca looked at me, her head cocked to the side. “So you’re telling me that bitch complimented you?”

  “I know, I know. I sound crazy. This is what one night with the St. Clairs does to me. A decade of normalcy becomes a blip on the radar and I regress to being a self-doubting, self-loathing teenager.” I sighed. “Never mind. Let’s just watch some craptastic TV before Mike gets home twitching for SportsCenter.”

  “First of all,” Becca said, “you forget that I knew you when you were a teenager, straight off the St. Clairs’ yacht and fresh upon the Berkeley shore, and you were never self-doubting, self-loathing, or self-anything that I remember.” She paused, her finger in the air. “Maybe self-deprecating. I’ll give you that, if you really feel you need to remember yourself as self-something.

  “And second,” she continued, “I’m as fired up as any red-blooded American woman to watch some ripped, shirtless dude make out with The Bachelorette in a hot tub, but you seem a little distracted. And unless you’re going to sit there and hurl clever peanut gallery comments at the TV, unless you can really put your game face on, I think we need to keep Craptastic Sunday on pause a little longer and just hash this whole St. Clair thing out.”

  I groaned. “C’mon, Becca. Do we have to? Julia has wasted enough of my time and energy today.”

  “Today?” Becca peered at me “What do you mean? I thought you saw her yesterday.”

  I looked down into my wineglass. I hadn’t planned on telling Becca about Julia’s call because I knew exactly what Becca would say. She would tell me I was crazy for saying no to Julia’s business proposal, just like she had told me I would be crazy to say no to Lolly’s catering request. But the thing about Becca, who taught math to tenth graders in one of the city’s toughest schools, was that she was in possession of the most highly attuned bullshit detector I’d ever encountered. I could practically see it, flashing and beeping and vibrating behind her eyes as it honed in on me. It was an exercise in futility, really, to attempt to keep anything from her. And I did loathe exercise.

  “Julia called earlier today,” I admitted. “She wants to open a cupcake shop with me and she said she’d put up the money to get us started. But before you say anything, I already told her no. It would be too uncomfortable. I couldn’t bear to work with her.”

  Becca’s mouth dropped open. “Okay, you are now officially off-your-rocker insane,” she said. She whipped her long, chestnut hair in front of her shoulder and began twisting it furiously until it coiled tight against her head. “I mean,” she said, looking like a crazed, lopsided Princess Leia, “I think it would suck to work with Madonna and have to look at her bizarro mutant biceps and hear her faux-British accent day in and day out, but if she were willing to, gee, I don’t know, make all of my dreams come true, I could probably learn to deal with her track suits and icy disposition.”

  “How is it that this is the first time I’m learning of your beef with Madonna?”

  “Nice try. We’re discussing you and Julia.”

  I shrugged. “What can I say? I feel like a second-class citizen when I’m with that family. Come on, Becca, you know what Julia did to me. If she’s funding my dream bakery, it’s not really my dream anymore because it means I’ve become a St. Clair employee, which is more like my nightmare.”

  “But your mom was a St. Clair employee. And she loved them, didn’t she?”

  “Look where it got her.”

  There was silence as Becca took this in.

  “It’s not like they killed her, Annie,” she said finally.

  “You say tomato . . .”

  “Annie!”

  “What? She basically died on their kitchen floor.”
>
  “That’s not the same thing,” Becca said. “You know that where she died and how she died are not necessarily related.”

  I poured myself another glass of wine, ignoring the slight shake in my hand as I did so. “Objectively speaking, yes, I know that. But it’s tough to be objective when you’re talking about your dearly departed mother.”

  “Fine, I get that. As long as you can admit that those feelings are irrational.”

  “Did I ever tell you what Julia said to me at my mother’s funeral? She said, ‘Well, at least now you’re totally free. You can be anyone you want to be.’ She presented this bit of wisdom like a gift, like I should thank her. I wanted to sock her.”

  “Okay,” Becca said slowly, quietly. “But still. It’s crazy talk in crazy town to let these feelings get in the way of your dreams. Unless, maybe, owning your own bakery isn’t your dream anymore?”

  My desire to own my own bakery was as strong on that day as it had been the day the seed was planted during my first pastry class at the San Francisco Culinary Institute five years earlier, and Becca knew it. The question was only whether or not the trade-off of linking my life with the St. Clairs in order to achieve my dream was worth it. The answer, I realized, was yes. Even if it meant allowing Julia back in my life. I took in the prodding smirk on Becca’s face. She loved winning. It was, perhaps, the only thing she and Julia St. Clair had in common. Me, on the other hand? Sometimes I wondered if I had a competitive bone in my body.

  “You know what, Becca?” I’d said then. “There are moments when I really, really hate you.” The victorious grin that had grown on her face was highly contagious, just as I’d suspected it would be.

  At five in the morning, the kitchen of the Valencia Street Bakery was a warm, dark, cavelike place: my private domain. I always found myself lingering in the doorway for a moment when I first entered the kitchen, savoring the silence and the way the edges of the appliances blurred with the still-gray air. Then I began my work. The two hulking ovens hummed and clacked and whooshed, the room swelled with warmth and the smell of butter and yeast, and the kitchen grew slowly brighter as though a veil were being lifted up and away from the dented steel counters and filling pastry racks.

  At six, Lorena, my assistant baker, and Carlos, the dishwasher, arrived bleary-eyed at the back door. I unlocked it, returned their mumbled hellos, and watched as they shuffled through their predictable morning rituals. Carlos, a skinny twenty-year-old who lived at home with his parents and five siblings, flipped on the radio and hoisted himself onto the counter next to the sink, blinking himself slowly into consciousness. Lorena, neat as a tack in a teal button-down stretched taut over her enormous bosom, her graying black hair pulled into a tight bun at the nape of her neck, immediately strode through the swinging door into the café and returned to hand out three steaming mugs of coffee. She stood, stout and serious, studying the prep list and taking admirably large gulps of the scalding hot coffee, before tackling the first duties of her day: mixing muffin batter and preparing pastry fillings. As Lorena switched on the stand mixer, Carlos dove into the Sisyphean task of scrubbing the mountain of crusted trays, tins, and bowls that had already stacked up in the sink. Lorena, Carlos, and I formed just the latest of a string of close-working kitchen teams I’d been a member of over the years, but we were more well-oiled than most, having been together long enough to iron out some of the kinks that come with working ungodly hours in tight quarters. But really, even the smallest, hottest, most adversarial kitchens in which I’d worked over the years—where Spanish bounced rapid-fire off the appliances—inevitably came to feel like some strange version of home. Eventually, though, someone always moved on—to a better gig, another kitchen, or a new city. This time, I realized with a pang, that someone would be me. I just hoped Ernesto, the owner of the bakery, would promote Lorena to head baker. She’d been working in kitchens for thirty years, and what she lacked in creativity she made up for in diligence and dependability. As tempted as I was to poach her for the cupcakery, I didn’t have the heart to leave Ernesto and take his best assistant baker, too.

  At six thirty I heard the jingle of keys in the café’s front door, and a moment later Ernesto himself popped his head into the kitchen.

  “Morning all,” he trilled. Ernesto was a triller, the kind of man who was as chipper at six thirty in the morning as he would be when he locked up at ten that night.

  “Banana-chocolate,” I said, passing him a tray of perfectly golden muffins.

  He faked a swoon against the door frame. “These are going on the top shelf. Ay, the aroma! The customers won’t stand a chance.”

  “As long as you save them some.” Ernesto’s habit of “sampling” the goods sometimes made me feel more like his personal chef than his head baker.

  “How can I serve something I haven’t tried myself?” Ernesto called from the front room. I could hear him sliding the display case open. “It would be . . . what’s the word? Unethical. And, you know, cruel. To me. Smelling these gorgeous little darlings all day long without being able to taste them. Cruel and unusual. Torture!”

  I rolled my eyes, but couldn’t help feeling pleased. I had to admit it was nice to have a boss who loved what I made. Over the years, I’d had every type of boss out there—the one who thought I used too much butter, the one who thought I used too little, the hairy one who was always trying to make out with me in the freezer, the one who never once in the two years I worked for her tasted a single one of my recipes, but fired me the day I asked for a raise. And now here I was, working for my dream boss, a boss who gave me free rein in the kitchen and had clearly formed an unhealthy, if flattering, addiction to the pastries I created, and I was going to quit? For the first time since college, I was in a place where I was one hundred percent sure that I would be able to pay my rent the next month—and even the month after that!—and I was about to throw all of that security away. I pressed my fingers into my temples to ward off the impending headache.

  Still, Becca’s words circled back through my thoughts, a not-so-gentle reprimand. Since when had I become such a slave to security? Since when had my dream to be my own boss morphed into merely working for my dream boss? Sure, the route I was headed down meant I was going to have to work with Julia, but wouldn’t the end result of owning my own bakery make the hassle of seeing Julia day in and day out for ten months be worth it? She’s only around until May when she’ll get married and move on to her next dilettantish distraction, I told myself. You just need to make it until May.

  Around noon, Ernesto popped his head back into the kitchen. “Oh, An-nie,” he called, singsong. “You have a vis-i-tor.” He wagged his thick black eyebrows up and down. Lorena and Carlos glanced at me and I shrugged.

  I wiped my hands against my apron—after all those years, I still could not manage to don an apron without feeling like my mother (a complicated feeling, to put it mildly)—and walked through the door of the kitchen into the shop. The five tables were all occupied and a few people lingered at the counter, awaiting their coffees and covertly tapping their feet to the Latin pop that Ernesto pumped through speakers from his iPod. It was the usual Wednesday Mission crowd: laptops, tattoos, and messenger bags. And there, leaning against the window in a Polo, jeans, and flip-flops, was Jake Logan. On cue, my silly little heart began to thwap around in my chest as though it were hoping to break out and bounce over into Jake’s arms. Traitor, I thought, giving my heart a few imaginary rat-tat-tat backhand-forehand slaps. I ran my hand over the top of my head and down the length of my ponytail. I’d later see that I’d imparted a fine film of flour like a skunk’s stripe down the center of my hair.

  “Hey,” I said, making my way around the counter to greet him. “What are you doing here?”

  Jake looked up and grinned. “I’m here to see you, of course.” He kissed my cheek, his hand resting on my shoulder. “Mmm, you smell good.”

  It felt odd to
have Jake kissing me as though we were really truly grown-ups and not just slightly more pulled together (Jake) and curvier (me) versions of our high school selves. I noticed Ernesto watching us and shot him my best go-about-your-business-or-suffer-my-unending-wrath glare.

  “Do you live nearby?” I asked. “I haven’t seen you in here before.”

  “Nope, I live in North Beach. Never heard of this place until you mentioned it the other night at the St. Clairs’. I thought I’d swing by and see what all the fuss is about.”

  “Not much fuss, I’m afraid. Some coffee, some sweets. This might in fact be the most fuss-free destination in the city. Sorry to disappoint you.”

  “Now that I think about it,” Jake said, shrugging and grinning simultaneously, “fuss is overrated. Want to grab a coffee? Catch up? Can you leave?”

  I laughed, gesturing at the enormous espresso machine behind the counter. “You just walked into what is, essentially, a coffee shop and asked if I want to grab coffee somewhere else. We’re clear on that, right?”

  “Well, I’d ask if you wanted to grab a drink, but I don’t know where you stand on the midday cocktail.”

  “Fair enough. I won’t be finished for another hour though. Can you come back?”

  “I’ll wait.”

  I looked at him. I was still having some trouble adding up the pieces. Jake Logan—yes, the guy’s first and last name seemed eternally bound in my head—had arrived unannounced at my place of work just to see me. If he were any other guy, I would have found his actions to be a bit too much, a bit stalkerish. But that would have been an Adult Annie reaction. Teenage Annie was internally screaming something along the lines of: Oh. My. God. Jake. Logan. Is. Waiting. For. Meeeeeeee!!!