How to Eat a Cupcake

by Meg Donohue

  At twenty-eight, I felt damaged beyond love. Am I going to feel this way, raw and exposed, for the rest of my life? I desperately missed the old me. I sank down on the bench in the dressing room, wishing I could tear the dress off, wishing I hadn’t drunk so much champagne.

  The door clicked open and shut before I could say anything, and then Annie was looking down at me with her hands on her hips.

  “Oh, Julia!” she said, her eyes widening. “What’s wrong?”

  I stood quickly and brushed my hands briskly down the gown, a move that made me feel exactly like my mother. “Nothing’s wrong,” I said. “I’m just so happy.”

  Annie cocked her head, a droll half smile playing on her face. “Tears of joy don’t usually come with so much snot.”

  I laughed despite myself. It was better, I realized, not to be alone. Snatching a tissue from a dupioni-covered box on the table, I looked in the mirror and dabbed expertly at the mascara that had trailed below my eyes. Watching my appearance improve made my spirits improve, too. “Well,” I said, glancing at Annie in the mirror. “Are you going to stand there all day gaping or are you going to tell me I look gorgeous?”

  “You look gorgeous,” Annie said without any hesitation. I heard the warmth in her voice, the utter absence of envy or bitterness or anger. It was the voice of my old friend Annie, the voice of the best friend I’d had before I managed to ruin everything so many years ago. I breathed out, smiling at her through the mirror, and sniffling just a little, tried to be happy.

  Annie plucked the price tag from where it dangled along the side of my dress and raised her eyebrows, laughing a little. “Remember that game we used to play with your mom’s magazines?”

  I shook my head and did a half spin before the mirror, letting the gown’s lush silk skirt swish and fall back into place.

  “We’d pretend that we could have one thing from every page,” Annie said. “But we couldn’t look at the price or the brand or anything, we just had to do a quick pick of what caught our eye first. I was like a bird. I always picked the sparkliest, most colorful thing on the page.”

  “Just what you needed.” I laughed. “Another lime-green vest with bedazzled pockets.”

  “Hey! I loved that vest.”

  I shrugged, smiling wryly.

  “Anyway,” she continued, “the point is you always managed to pick out the most expensive thing on the page, even though you swore you weren’t cheating. I never knew how you did it! Even then, you had expensive taste.”

  The game rang a distant bell, but I couldn’t in all honesty say I actually remembered playing it. It was strange to consider the things that Annie remembered from our shared childhood that I didn’t. This is what it would be like to have a sister. It felt good. I was glad I’d invited her on this outing. Even though I knew champagne was making my thoughts sepia-toned, I vowed then and there to never do anything to risk losing Annie’s friendship again.

  I turned back to look at myself in the mirror again, a feeling of confidence blooming in my chest. “This is the one,” I said, cupping my hands around my cinched waist.

  “That’s the dress?” Annie asked, surprised. “I mean, it’s amazing, but isn’t it the first one you’ve tried on?”

  “Sometimes you just know,” I said.

  “Wow, okay. I guess all that practice making quick decisions with those magazine pages is coming in handy. Should we bring in The Lolly?”

  “Yes.” I laughed, turning in front of the mirror. “Bring in The Lolly!”

  Later, with Curtis silently guiding the Bentley through the Mission’s chaotic streets, and my mother, Annie, and I all sharing the ample backseat despite Annie’s attempt to sit up front, the car buzzed with the excitement of a successful shopping trip. My mother peppered us with questions about the bakery, though rarely allowed either of us a chance to answer.

  “Your mother’s passion fruit meringue is on the menu, I hope,” she said to Annie. “Isn’t it? It would really be a shame if it weren’t. I don’t think I’ve ever tasted anything so sinfully perfect in my life. I know you probably enjoy creating your own recipes—and I’ve certainly tasted for myself that you’re very talented at it—but sometimes there is nothing quite like a recipe from an older generation. Every bite is a taste of history! You don’t get a lot of history in experimental pastry, do you?”

  “Mother,” I broke in, “we’d love to include some of Lucia’s recipes, but as I’ve told you a million times, we haven’t been able to find her recipe book.”

  “Oh.” She turned from me to Annie as if to confirm this bit of news. Annie nodded glumly. “Well, that won’t do! I’ll get Jacqueline and the girls on it immediately,” she said, referring to her housekeeping staff. “Operation Lucia’s Recipe Book. Those ladies could find a hay-shaped pin in a haystack, though I must say they don’t seem to have much luck locating my husband’s jewelry.” She sighed. “Then again, I’m not sure I would turn in a very expensive missing watch if I were in their position. Would you?” she asked Annie pointedly.

  I felt my mouth drop. Annie and I locked eyes and pulled nearly identical faces.

  “Here’s my apartment,” Annie called out without answering, tapping on the window as we stopped in front of her building. “You’d love it,” she said teasingly to my mother. “It’s very quaint. Very charming. Surprisingly few rodents. Can I give you a tour?”

  My mother sat up, buttoning her blazer, and cleared her throat. “That would be lovely, darling. Another time.”

  Annie shrugged, grinned at me, waved good-bye to Curtis, and hopped out onto the sidewalk, where several passersby made subtle efforts to peer in at whoever was driving through the Mission behind the tinted windows of a Bentley.

  A few blocks later, Curtis dropped me off at my car. Alone once more, doors locked, with the key in the ignition but the engine off, the dense fog of a champagne-fueled headache set in and clouded my good spirits. I leaned my head back against the car seat. These relentless mood swings were exhausting. Enough is enough. Tomorrow at dinner, I’ll tell Wes everything. The thought produced a taut feeling in the pit of my stomach, like a rope that was being pulled to the point of vibration, the point of fraying. If tomorrow was the day I would tell Wes everything, tonight I needed a drink. I removed the key from the car’s ignition, stepped back out into the crisp evening air, and headed toward the closest bar I knew.

  From my seat at the back of the 500 Club, I watched Jake step through the front door and felt a wave of gratitude. I hated being there by myself. No one should suffer the indignity of drinking alone—and certainly not in a place like that. Although the seedy bar did offer a shield of anonymity that was appreciated. Anyway, I reminded myself, if I’m just meeting an old friend for a cocktail, nothing sordid is going on.

  Jake slid in beside me in the booth and took a long slug of the scotch I’d ordered for him. His biggest strength, I thought, was the apparent flexibility of his schedule. If he had a schedule at all. I knew Jake talked up this surf foundation he was supposedly starting for city youth, but I’d heard from mutual friends that he spent more time surfing than actually building anything of lasting value. Unlike Wes, who was actually doing something with his life, Jake had always had big ideas and little follow-through. But that was Jake, and you could either appreciate him for who he was or not. Anyway, I realized with a pang, who was I to judge anyone for anything? Jake and I had been getting together in dive bars across the city every few weeks, and even though my subsequent hangovers were increasingly tinged with guilt, I still enjoyed the comfortable, no-strings-attached banter that these meetings offered. I’ve gone through so much this year, I told myself. I’m allowed to indulge in a little fun. Who’s it hurting?

  “So I realize I never apologized to you about tattling to Annie about your marriage,” I said once we were comfortably a few drinks into the evening. “I’ve been meaning to. I’m sorry it came
out the way it did. I just didn’t want to see her get hurt.”

  Jake shrugged, grinning. His dimples were truly unfair. How did any unsuspecting girl stand a chance?

  “It’s okay,” he said. “We’ve moved past it.”

  I set my drink down on the sticky table and stared at him. “Wait, what? She didn’t break up with you?” Strong, spitfire Annie hadn’t kicked him to the curb the moment she learned he’d been lying to her? I hadn’t wanted to risk another fight by asking Annie what had happened when she confronted Jake, but I’d always assumed they’d broken up. She hadn’t mentioned one word about him since that morning in October when I had told her he was married.

  “Nope,” Jake said. “She was very forgiving.”

  His nonchalant attitude made me want to slap him. I sat back against the hard booth, furious, wishing I weren’t trapped in the seat beside him. “But what are you doing here with me if you’re still seeing Annie?” I asked. “If I’d known, I wouldn’t have called—”

  “Julia, I think the better question is what are you doing here with me?” he interrupted. He sounded more amused than defensive. “Annie and I have never talked about being exclusive, but aren’t you engaged to be married? I’m just a single guy hanging out with an ex-girlfriend, but what are you?”

  I stared down at my drink. He was right. I was every bit as guilty as he was. Or more. Suddenly, I couldn’t wait to get out of there. I was supposed to be safe in my bed in my childhood home, calling my fiancé to see how his meeting in Palm Springs had gone, not sitting in some dive bar with my ex-boyfriend. What was I trying to prove by being there with Jake Logan? What had I hoped to gain? Being with him no longer felt like an uncomplicated sojourn to happier times—instead, I realized, it was making me more anxious. The rose-colored glasses were officially off.

  Jake threw his arm around me and gave me a chummy little rattle. But when I looked up, his face was close and the look in his eyes wasn’t chummy at all. In an instant, he was kissing me. Stunned, I pressed my hands hard into his chest and pushed him away. And that was the moment I saw Annie, standing in the open doorway of the bar, staring at us, the color drained from her face.

  Chapter 21

  Annie

  Do you know how every once in a while you have one of those almost out-of-body experiences where you’re both living through some experience and simultaneously watching the whole thing unfold from a distance? Seeing Jake and Julia together was one of those moments. I stepped into the bar, did a quick scan for Becca, and found myself instead staring at Jake and Julia kissing. Physically, the pain was as shocking and visceral as grabbing a hot pan from the oven with my bare hands—though more accurately akin to laying that three-hundred-degree pan straight across my bare chest. At the same time, I felt like I’d been sucked out of my body and was hovering somewhere above the whole scene, watching everything unfold with the interest of a primatologist studying the mating rituals of monkeys. This moment is now a critical part of my life history, I remember thinking. The image of the two of them kissing will never go away.

  I stood in the doorway of the 500 Club, unable to move. Part of me wanted to stride across the room, picking up drinks from the bar and tables along the way to hurl at them, screaming like a banshee at the top of my lungs. Another part of me felt immediately deflated and humiliated and wanted to hightail it home for a good cry and a couple dozen cookies. As I stood frozen in the doorway, trying to decide between the two options, Julia shoved Jake out of the booth and came running toward me.

  “Annie!” she cried, her blue eyes huge. “I . . . I don’t know why he just kissed me. We’re not . . . we’re not doing anything.” Her shoulders began to shake. “This must look awful, but I swear, we’re not—”

  “Just shut up,” I said.

  When I saw Jake striding up behind her, I finally worked up the wherewithal to turn on my heel and walk outside. Out on the sidewalk, I heard him calling after me.

  I spun around. “What were you thinking?” I hissed, ignoring the fact that Julia was just a step behind him. “Is this fun for you? Are you having a great time with the two of us?”

  He reached out and held my arms, his brow furrowed. Sniveling drunkenly behind him, Julia had a kicked-in, crumpled look. I fought the urge to take a picture with my phone and e-mail it to her mother.

  “I’m sorry,” Jake said. “This shouldn’t have happened, even if it was . . . nothing. And it wasn’t calculated—I hope you don’t think that. We’re just”—he glanced back at Julia and sighed—“drunk.”

  Looking up at him out there on the street, I suddenly found myself staring at the man behind the contrite, concerned look. It was like seeing a face behind a veil. This is all an act, I realized. Practically everything about him was an act. He didn’t care. About me, about Julia, about those kids he professed to want to help, about anyone but himself and his easy, no-consequences life. How had it taken me this long to discover the real Jake Logan? Seeing the man behind the veil—the man who, I saw now, looked at me distantly, as though I were a mildly amusing stranger—somehow came as a relief. The spark in his eyes that I’d always interpreted as mischievous but inherently kind I now saw signified insouciance, plain and simple. He wasn’t at all the man who I’d thought he was—or had wanted him to be. It crushed me to think that I’d opened up to him, that I’d shared parts of myself I could never take back. I probably should have been used to the humiliation of breaking up, of losing pieces of myself to the wrong guy, but the act never lost its sting.

  I shook my head, at a loss for words.

  “Why don’t I call you in the morning,” Jake said softly. I realized he was still holding my arms. “We can talk about this with clear heads.”

  Without hesitation I stepped back, out of his grasp. “I think it’s better to just end things now. There’s really nothing to say, is there? Where could we possibly go from here? Whatever it was that was happening between us is over now.”

  Jake blinked. “Why don’t I just call you—”

  “Please don’t,” I said, and turned around before the tears could start. I heard Julia calling after me, but I ignored her, as I should have done months earlier.

  It was impossible to completely avoid Julia at Treat, but each time she approached me, I shot her a warning look that must have been pretty fierce because she managed to basically keep her distance. I could tell she was dying to speak to me, but what could she say that I would want to hear? What could possibly make up for what she had done? I still couldn’t understand why, out of all the bars in the city, Julia and Jake had picked the 500 Club for their little rendezvous. The bar was in my neighborhood. Had they wanted me to find them there?

  Sadly, like some masochistic idiot, the person I really blamed was myself. After all, I knew Julia St. Clair. I knew exactly what she was capable of, and still I had found a way to trust her again. Her betrayal really shouldn’t have come as such a big surprise. You know how the saying goes: Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice. . .

  So I found myself in the exact position I’d feared from the start—professionally bound to a person I loathed. The words It’s just until May, It’s just until May, echoed through my head like a mantra keeping me sane. Come May, Julia would be married and, as contractually bound, would leave Treat and my life for good.

  Meanwhile, the customers continued to line up at Treat’s counter on a daily basis, so I poured myself into work and simply turned up the radio when Julia’s bright, phony voice oozed into the kitchen from the shop. It was times like these that I felt my mother’s absence acutely, like the unrelenting throb of burned skin long after the initial injury. I wished I could feel her arms around me one more time, or see her warm brown eyes searching my face with maternal concern. A distant second would have been to gorge myself on the ginger cookies she used to make when I’d had a bad day, but even those were out of reach. I’d tried for years to figure out th
e recipe to those cookies but never came close to getting it right. I seemed to be missing something completely obvious, and it drove me nuts.

  I started waking up earlier and earlier, eager for those hours of time in Treat’s kitchen before the day officially began, when it was just me and my old friends, the appliances. One morning in mid December I stood hunched over the counter, practically basking in the silence of the kitchen and scribbling out some ideas for new cupcake flavors that had come to me in the fog of half sleep the night before, when I was startled by a loud knock at the front door of the shop. I glanced at the clock. Five. Who the hell was knocking at five a.m.? I heard my heart pounding in my ears as an image of the man in the hooded sweatshirt flashed across my mind.

  The moment I stepped through the door of the kitchen into the shop, I breathed a sigh of relief. It was only that blowhard Ogden Gertzwell; I could see through the door’s window that he was holding a large crate of fruit.

  I unlocked the door and resolved to not be immediately exasperated with the guy. It was going to be tough, though; he seemed to have a tendency to show up and subject me to a lengthy description of his latest crop during those moments when my enjoyment of the shop’s morning silence was at its peak.

  “Hi, Ogden,” I said, working to keep my tone polite but brisk. “This is an early stop on your route, isn’t it? I didn’t expect you for a couple more hours.”

  “I was driving by on my way to another delivery and saw the light was on. Figured I might as well drop off the fruit now, while I’m in the neighborhood. Do you mind?”

  “It’s fine,” I said. “Need help?”

  “No, I’ve got it,” he said. “Just hold the door for me.”

  I stood at the front door as he made several trips from his truck to the kitchen. When he’d brought the last crate in I clicked the deadbolt in place and followed him back into the kitchen. Already, he was at the sink, washing a large persimmon that glowed as orange as the Technicolor sunset on one of the vaguely penitent postcards Jake had been mailing me from Costa Rica. Jake hadn’t made it easy for me to stop thinking about him, sending one gorgeously lush bouquet after another to the shop. I sensed he had them delivered to Treat instead of my apartment to show that he was not trying to keep anything from Julia. The action seemed insincere to me, reeking of obstinance and strategy. I didn’t respond.