by Meg Donohue
“Shouldn’t we get down to business?” she asked, as though reading my thoughts.
“Yes!” I said, straightening. “Of course. Let’s start with the contractual details. My thought is that I will make an equity investment of start-up capital and will own fifty percent of the business for one year. In the months that I’m actively involved leading up to my wedding in May, we’ll split ownership and cupcakery profits fifty-fifty; after May, you’ll become the sole proprietor by buying out my share of the business at a fifteen percent premium according to a payment schedule that will be linked to the cupcakery’s success.” I didn’t need this fifteen-percent return but feared that if I didn’t include it, Annie would balk. Better to keep things businesslike than to let on that the return on investment for me would be related to mental stability, not money.
“If the shop does well, which I’m sure it will,” I continued, “the schedule will be such that you’ll buy out my investment over the course of about three years. On the opposite end of the spectrum, if the cupcakery were to fail, you wouldn’t be required to repay me anything.”
“That seems generous,” Annie said, eyes narrowed. I could hear her foot anxiously tapping the floor below the table.
“Not really. This isn’t charity,” I said hurriedly. “Like any business investment, there’s risk and the possibility of reward. The risk is one I’m more than willing to take after tasting your cupcakes and doing a little market research.”
Still, Annie seemed skeptical. “And all of this is in the contract?”
What does she take me for? A criminal? “Yes, in explicit detail.” I handed her the document. “You should have a lawyer look it over so you feel completely comfortable proceeding.”
Under the table, Annie’s foot was still at last. “Sounds fine,” she said. “I’ll have a lawyer friend look it over.”
“Good. Let’s move on to lighter topics.” I swept my fingers along the laptop keyboard. “I’ve already scoped out a few retail spaces on Chestnut, Union, and Fillmore streets. The one on Fillmore was most recently a restaurant, so the kitchen is—”
“Wait,” she interrupted. “Fillmore Street? I don’t want the cupcakery to be in Pacific Heights.”
“Oh,” I said. I took a slow sip of latte, leaving a glossy peach rosebud on the glass. I’d envisioned the latest generation of Devon Prep girls strolling down the bustling shopping street, dropping into the shop on a daily basis to fritter their sizable allowances on cupcakes and coffee. Now I realized that that very clientele was probably Annie’s worst nightmare. Still, those girls had money, and Annie’s ample psychological baggage shouldn’t take priority over the cupcakery’s bottom line. “Where were you thinking?”
Without hesitating, Annie responded: “The Mission.”
I sighed.
“The Mission,” she repeated, jutting her chin into the air in a manner I remembered well from childhood. “It’s perfect.”
I took a bite of a macaroon, stalling as I worked to formulate a response. I was not one to pussyfoot when it came to matters of business, but I knew that Annie—who, stereotype or not, did seem to have a quintessentially Latin temper—required a certain deft approach. “It’s just,” I began carefully, swallowing a final bite of cookie, “we’re aiming for a very specific clientele. A three-dollars-and-fifty-cents-cupcake-eating clientele, to be precise.”
“Three dollars and fifty cents!”
“I ran the numbers. Three dollars and fifty cents per cupcake with a nice discount for a dozen. People spend forty dollars on a cake that feeds twelve, so why not forty dollars for a dozen cupcakes? These aren’t just any old cupcakes.”
Annie looked at me and shrugged. “Okay, fine. I’ll leave the pricing up to you. But the Mission is nonnegotiable.” She popped a macaroon into her mouth and chewed fiercely.
Now, I bristled. “Nonnegotiable? Annie, come on. We’re just getting started—everything is negotiable.”
Annie’s nostrils flared. I resisted the urge to reach out and brush away the crumbs that littered her large chest, thinking, as I clutched my hands in my lap, that a good tailor could have done wonders for the way that silly yellow jumper buckled and gaped around her curves.
“Have you ever even been to the Mission?” she asked, still chewing. “You haven’t lived in this city in ten years so I probably shouldn’t assume you know anything about the neighborhood. The Mission is filled with trendy new restaurants and shops. More so than some of the older neighborhood residents would like, in fact. The hipsters, the dot-commers, the overpriced-baked-goods eaters—that’s where they live. And if they don’t live there, then they go there for cutting-edge cuisine. It’s a culinary hotspot—the place to open a cupcakery.”
Her argument made some sense. I’d heard about the positive changes that had been happening for years in the Mission, though admittedly I wasn’t sure I’d ever been to the neighborhood. I reminded myself that this was Annie’s business; I would reenter my old, more conventional—and lucrative—life come May and she would be left running the cupcakery on her own. I held up my hands. “I’m not saying no. Let me just research the market a little more, and in the meantime we can check out what sort of spaces are available and see what the rent looks like. If it makes sense, we’ll move forward. Okay?”
Annie sat back against the upholstered bench, looking a little surprised that I was so easily swayed. “Okay.”
“Crisis number one averted.” That false chipper ring had edged its way back into my voice. “Next item on the agenda is nailing down a timeline. I know it’s tough to say without a space in mind, but if we start small, I think we can push ourselves to get this business up and running in three months.”
“Three months!” Annie said. “Really? But there’s so much to do.”
I shrugged. “You’d be surprised how fast money can make people move.”
Annie was biting into a second macaroon as I spoke and now slowly lowered the cookie to the table. Her eyes narrowed. “Did you really just say that?”
“What?” I asked, my mind racing back over what I’d said. The thing about money? It was a throwaway comment. Did she have to dissect everything?
“That I’d be surprised how fast money can make people move?” she said. “Please tell me you realize how that sounds.”
Oh, enough, already! This meeting was beginning to exhaust me. “I’m sorry if that statement makes you uncomfortable,” I said evenly. “Frankly, I thought it was only us WASPs who were supposed to be patently incapable of discussing money.”
“I can discuss money,” Annie spat. “It’s your sense of entitlement that turns my stomach.”
My mouth dropped. “Annie! Why must you act so mean?”
“Probably,” she said, “for the exact opposite of the reason that you act nice: it’s hard for me to be fake.”
“No! I act nice because, because,” I sputtered, “because I am nice! But you—you’re not a mean person. I know you’re not. So I’d really like to know why you act like you are.”
She shrugged. “I’m the kind of person who doesn’t sugarcoat anything but cake.” I got the distinct sense that she was enjoying seeing me riled up. “Anyway, I think the question of whether or not you’re a nice person is still very much up for debate.”
For the first time since Annie had walked in the door, I allowed silence to fill the room. It seemed clear that any attempt to move forward would have to come from me. I thought back to what had happened between us all those years ago, a series of events that I still had trouble remembering as anything more than one minor misunderstanding after another toppling against each other like dominoes. And, anyway, in the end, what harm had been done? Annie had graduated from Devon and eventually gone to Cal just as she’d wanted. Still, it was clear she needed some coddling.
“Annie,” I said at last, placing my hands on the table. My three-karat cushion-
cut diamond engagement ring shone brilliantly below the kitchen lights; my fingers, compared to Annie’s, were long and elegant—the hands of an adult. “In reflecting back on those years in high school, I realize I was not always . . . considerate of your feelings. I wasn’t a good friend to you. I see that now. I’m sorry.”
“You’re sorry for being inconsiderate? Julia, it’s not like you forgot to RSVP to my sweet sixteen party.” Annie released a sharp little laugh. “We were best friends and then you tried to ruin my life. Cal nearly revoked my acceptance!”
“That had nothing to do with me!” I refused to be steamrolled into taking responsibility for something that had been completely out of my control.
“Julia,” she said, enunciating my name as though she were speaking to a toddler. “Our senior year. Those rumors. You started them.”
I sighed. As much as I wanted to end the conversation then and there, I feared doing so would push Annie—and the cupcakery—out of my life forever. “Listen,” I began, trying again. “Senior year went by in a blur for me. I honestly hardly remember it—between working on my Stanford application and my valedictorian speech, I feel like I barely had time to breathe that whole year. But I am truly sorry for what happened and whatever part you think I played in it.”
Annie’s hair quivered. “Whatever part I think you played in it?” she repeated. “What does what I think have to do with anything? This isn’t some philosophical debate. In this instance, there is one truth, and what either of us thinks about that truth does not alter it from being the truth!”
Suddenly, as I watched her hands clench into fists and felt the icy charge in her voice, tears sprang to my eyes. I quickly blinked them away, but not before Annie looked down, alarmed. She knew me well enough to know that, unlike her, I wasn’t one to wear my heart on my sleeve. Annie had always, I remembered, cried nearly as easily as she laughed—her emotions had seemed irrepressible when we were kids, every thought and feeling scrolling across her face like sun and shadows across pavement. Now, it seemed almost like we had changed places; I couldn’t control my emotions, and Annie, who used to be so empathetic, eyed me coolly, as though from a distance. What role had I played in her transformation? I shuddered to think.
“I’m not that person,” I said quietly, deciding as I said it that I believed it was true, or at least that I planned to make it true. “Not anymore. I know you don’t believe me now, but I’m going to prove it to you.”
Annie shook her head and stood from the table. “I can’t do this,” she said flatly.
I rose with her. “Remember,” I said, wincing at the pleading note in my voice, “my involvement in the business would only be temporary. I just want to help you get it off the ground, and then I promise I’ll be out of your life. I’ll get married and I’ll find another job and you’ll be rid of me. It will all be detailed explicitly in the contract. The cupcakery will be one hundred percent yours after I get married.”
“But why?” she asked, staring at me. “Why do you want to do this?”
“I just—I think you’re a good investment. You’re so talented, Annie.”
I could tell she didn’t believe me. “Fine,” she said finally. “But let’s do ourselves a favor and keep our relationship about the cupcakery, okay? We don’t need to be friends—we’re starting a business, not a sorority. I’ll look into spaces in the Mission, you can do whatever research you feel is needed, and we can circle back to compare notes. I’ll see myself out.”
“Okay,” I said, surprised to hear the hurt in my voice. Business was exactly what I was looking for, wasn’t it? “If that’s what you want.”
August
Chapter 7
Annie
I had agreed to let Jake Logan teach me how to surf. Yes, me, a grown woman born and raised in foggy San Francisco with about as much of a chance of becoming a beach girl as I did of becoming a Bond girl. But there was something about Jake that made me want to expand my horizons. I placed the blame fully on his damn dimples.
On a rare sunny afternoon in August, we drove through Golden Gate Park with the top down on Jake’s yellow 1973 Mustang convertible (a vehicle I’d immediately christened “the Firm Banana”), two surfboards sticking up like antennae from the backseat. We pretended to be actors in some cheesy commercial promoting tourism in San Francisco, gesturing around wildly and throwing our heads back and fake-laughing with abandon as we cruised past the sparkling glass Conservatory of Flowers, the penitentiary-like observation tower of the de Young Museum, the Frisbee golf course frequented by Pabst Blue Ribbon–toting twenty-somethings, the middle-aged men racing toy boats across Spreckels Lake, the ever-fragrant bison paddock, and the Dutch Windmill at the far west end of the park. Nothing would have made me happier than if we’d just headed north at that point and pulled into the precariously perched Cliff House for an overpriced late lunch and cold beer overlooking the Pacific, but instead we crossed the Great Highway and pulled into the parking lot at Ocean Beach. I released a sigh of relief when I saw that the water was nearly lakelike that day; low, slow waves were like the doddering, geriatric version of the rough-and-tumble surf that usually pounded the shore.
Jake extracted the boards from the backseat and tossed me a wetsuit (an earlier mention of which was the only thing that finally prompted me to agree to this lesson; if I’d been forced to parade around in broad daylight in only a bikini, my own less appropriately placed dimples would have put Jake’s to shame). I pulled off my Hawaiian-print baby doll dress and squeezed my bikini-clad self into the wetsuit as quickly as possible, a feat made all the more difficult by the fact that the suit seemed more appropriately sized for some much smaller ex-girlfriend. Jake shot me a raffish grin as I struggled with the zipper.
“Who’d have thunk—black rubber suits you.”
“I figured that out years ago,” I said, raking my hair into a ponytail. “Halloween. College. Cat Woman.”
“Meow.”
After a brief and humiliating lesson involving jumping up and then belly flopping down on the surfboard while still on sand, Jake deemed me ready to hit the water. Even with the wetsuit, booties, and hood, the glacierlike water turned my limbs leaden with cold. I quickly learned that it took every ounce of my inconsiderable upper body strength to paddle up, over, and past those waves that had appeared so small and unassuming from the sand. When I finally caught up to where Jake sat bobbing nonchalantly on his board two hundred feet off the shore, I pulled the insulated hood off my head, gasping for breath.
“Well, that was fun,” I said. “When’s dinner?”
Jake laughed. “Don’t worry, you’re in the sweet spot now. The waiting game is just as good as catching a wave.” The spark in his blue-green eyes flared brighter than ever as he gazed back at the shore, but I could see how the rest of his body language had mellowed to a calmer state out on the water.
I maneuvered myself around until I sat up on my board beside him, facing back toward the coast. The feeling I had then was probably a bit like waking up with your head at the wrong side of the bed—the colors and shapes of the city where I’d grown up were utterly familiar, and at the same time almost eerily different from this new perspective. I bobbed beside Jake in silence, catching my breath.
“What do you think?” he asked finally.
“Not bad,” I replied, shooting him a sidelong smile. The lift and fall of the ocean had a numbing effect on my thoughts. My mind, which all afternoon had been frenetically running over the fairly preposterous idea of myself on another date—our third now—with Jake Logan, finally began to quiet itself. Out there on the ocean, with the city as a distant backdrop, he was just Jake: a cute, fun guy who didn’t serve as a constant reminder of a painful past I’d tried for so long to put behind me. I found myself liking this Jake, the one without the fancy surname, more and more.
Unfortunately, it turned out his thoughts were not running down quite suc
h a history-free path. “So you and Julia,” he said. “The dynamic duo reunited. How’s the cupcake business?”
I’d told him about the shop over oysters at Foreign Cinema during our last date and he’d made me promise to let him buy the first dozen cupcakes when we opened. “So far, so good,” I said. “We’re working on renovating a space in the Mission with the hope to open in October. It took some convincing to get Julia to that part of town, but I think we’re more or less on the same page now.”
“Julia St. Clair hard at work in the Mission,” Jake mused. “Now there’s a sight I’d like to see.”
Something in his tone made my mind shift a gear or two up from its short-lived relaxed state. Or maybe it was just the mere mention of Julia, who I still had some trouble believing had managed to convince me that going into business together was a good idea. When I didn’t immediately respond, I felt Jake’s gaze on the side of my face. He reached over and pulled my surfboard closer to him. I nearly toppled off it in the process, but one of his arms quickly encircled my waist, righting me, while the other turned my face toward his. In a moment, we were kissing, the water lapping gently at my thighs, the lowering sun working its way down my back.
Jake pulled away after several long minutes, but kept his steadying arm around my waist. “Lesson adjourned,” he murmured, his breath shallow. “I’ve taught you all I know. Let’s go home.”
It was the best news I’d heard all day.
By the time we reached the shore, the fog had rolled in. We couldn’t put the Firm Banana’s top up because of the surfboards and even swathed in the plush towels Jake had brought along I shivered the whole way back to his apartment in North Beach. I barely had time to register the fact that the building’s elevator opened right into his loftlike apartment, and that the view through the floor-to-ceiling windows stretched from Coit Tower all the way to the Golden Gate Bridge—now draped in ever-thickening fog—before Jake steered me toward a large freestanding fireplace that separated the living room and dining room. He flipped a switch on the wall and in an instant the golden light of the fire danced against the dark walls surrounding us. I stared into the flames, mesmerized, feeling a heady mixture of exhilaration and exhaustion, while Jake poured out two glasses of scotch. I don’t know if it was the bone chill or the booze, but I found myself in an unusually quiet, content mood. If I’d let myself, I would have admitted that it felt good to be pampered. That sort of tranquil luxury wasn’t something I wanted or needed every day, but after so many years struggling on my own to make ends meet, I was not above enjoying the easy comfort offered by Jake and his swanky digs. Soon enough, I’d be back safe and sound in my own apartment, but for the moment I was just tired enough to let my guard down and enjoy myself.
