A Measure of Happiness

by Lorrie Thomson

  Was Zach warm and dry and somewhere safe? Had he found a place to stay for the night? She’d given Zach a few suggestions, including Ledgewood, where Celeste had ended up renting, but low-rent apartments were few and far between in this neck of the woods. And with a job description that included wielding a toilet brush, Katherine couldn’t exactly pay him top dollar without arousing—or confirming—his suspicions about her.

  Her strong suspicions she couldn’t confirm, either.

  She wondered how long he’d remain at Lamontagne’s if she didn’t fess up and give him what he seemed to be looking for. She agonized over him leaving. She knew if Zach left, that would be it. Life sometimes gave you second chances, but third chances were as unlikely as a pregnancy had been after she and Barry had decided to halt the fertility treatments and go it alone. The decision to do nothing was a decision nonetheless.

  Along those lines, last night Katherine had worried about whether Celeste might’ve skipped dinner. As soon as Celeste walked through the door this morning, Katherine had reminded her about the importance of eating breakfast.

  Katherine didn’t pretend to understand Celeste’s eating disorder. When Katherine was hungry, she ate. When she was full, she stopped . . . usually. But Katherine had been married to a shrink long enough to understand the way thoughts—insidious thoughts—could grow inside you. These wrong opinions, Barry had told her, festered and became your truth. The story you told yourself. She understood how these damning thoughts might have originated in your childhood. How even the smallest of acts—from the way you took your time washing a Pyrex dish, turned the pages of your dog-eared copy of That Was Then, This Is Now, even peeled open a bag of Lay’s potato chips—could inspire a barrage of insults, questions with no right answers.

  But a whole impenetrable universe wedged between understanding and soul-deep believing.

  Most likely the negative thoughts were wrong, but what if they weren’t?

  A rap sounded through the rain racket and turned her toward the door. A face peered through the glass.

  Katherine stared at the face. The face stared back. Katherine’s brain scrambled to unite the features with a name. Then the puzzle pieces clicked.

  “Oh, my gosh!” Katherine fumbled with the lock and opened the door.

  Look what the rain dragged in, Katherine thought but wouldn’t dare utter.

  Mrs. Jenkins stepped into the café, wearing her usual beige trench coat but, on this day of days, sans the telling plastic bonnet. Courtesy of the rain, her gray hair hung straight to her shoulders, not a pin curl in sight. Soaked through, her hair appeared more brunette than gray. Even her face looked different. The snap of cold water tightened the pores and pinked cheeks, a trick Katherine’s older sister had taught her.

  Dare Katherine even think it? Mrs. Jenkins looked younger.

  Celeste came out of the kitchen and refilled her coffee cup. Then she did a double take. Bemusement washed across her features before she hid her smile behind her coffee cup, her wide gaze peeking above the lid.

  “Good morning, Mrs. Jenkins,” Katherine said. “What can I help you with today? Can I—may I take your coat?” Katherine didn’t usually take customers’ coats, but the woman was dripping on the floor, standing in one place, making a puddle. Katherine had the urge to grab a hand towel from the back room and dry the woman’s hair, squeeze out the sodden ends.

  “There is something you can help me with.” Mrs. Jenkins strode toward the bakery cases, as though she usually visited the shop half an hour before Lamontagne’s opened for business. As though today weren’t even Thursday.

  Mrs. Jenkins groomed her shih tzu, Annabella, on Sunday after church, delivered Meals on Wheels on Mondays, visited her widowed sister, Mrs. Something or Other, in Bath on Thursdays. She picked up her muffin order on Wednesdays and Fridays. Never on a Thursday.

  Celeste scooted behind the counter and set her coffee beside the register.

  In the last twenty years, Mrs. Jenkins had deviated from neither her schedule nor her muffin order.

  Mrs. Jenkins turned to Katherine. “Those blueberry muffins I purchased yesterday—”

  Merde.

  The woman’s eyes went half-mast, her hand stroked the length of her sleeve, her shoulders rose, her head canted to the side, and her lips curled into a sleepy grin reminiscent of Meg Ryan in When Harry Met Sally. The famous faked orgasm deli scene.

  Only Mrs. Jenkins looked as though she were about to hit a high note for real.

  Then she righted her head, opened her eyes, and straightened her shoulders. “Luscious,” she said, and her eyes blinked twice, as though she was as surprised by her word choice as Katherine.

  “I—I’m so pleased,” Katherine said.

  Celeste slid a white bakery box out from under the counter, assuming the sale, the way Katherine had taught her. To the untrained eye, Celeste’s expression didn’t change. But Katherine read I told you so in the way she straightened her spine, lifted her chin, and sniffed the air.

  “Whatever did you put in those muffins?” Mrs. Jenkins asked Katherine.

  “Oh, I’ve no idea,” Katherine said. “They’re Celeste’s recipe.”

  “Celeste?”

  “It’s a secret.” Celeste swiped a sheet of bakery tissue. “Your usual order, Mrs. Jenkins? Two blueberry, two corn, and two lemon poppy seed?”

  Mrs. Jenkins shook her head. “Actually, if you don’t mind, I’d like something different. How about”—she bit her lip, narrowed her gaze—“four blueberry muffins, one corn, and one lemon poppy seed?”

  “Four blueberry muffins it is.” Celeste scooped muffins into the box. Then she lifted the lid to close—

  “Wait.” Mrs. Jenkins bit her bottom lip. She leaned over the muffins and inhaled deeply, audibly.

  When Mrs. Jenkins stepped back, Celeste tied up the box and set the muffins in Mrs. Jenkins’s outstretched hands. Her gaze slid from Celeste to the bakery box, as though she’d woken from a sultry dream to find herself in a room full of strangers. “Well, you two have a nice day.” She swung her head. Water droplets flung from the ends of her hair and splattered the bakery case.

  The door jingled, and Zach stepped into the café, as wet as Mrs. Jenkins but none too pleased about it. He held the door for Mrs. Jenkins. “Why, thank you.” Then—if Katherine could trust her eyes—she could’ve sworn she saw her most conservative customer check out the back of Zach’s jeans before exiting Lamontagne’s.

  Merde.

  “Morning, Kath-ther-ine,” Zach said, using the same three-syllable pronunciation as yesterday. “Celeste,” he said, pausing on his way into the kitchen. Nothing unusual about the way he pronounced her name. If anything, the word tumbled from his lips, either an afterthought or trying to resemble one. But it was the way he held her gaze a second too long, the way he pressed his lips into a quarter grin, the way Celeste mirrored his expression. Infused with meaning.

  Katherine had been around long enough to recognize the day after a hookup’s wordless lingo. And, heaven help her, but if she wasn’t mistaken, she’d both given and received that same laden look from Adam.

  The skin beneath Celeste’s eyes glowed faintly mauve. Not as raw looking as yesterday, but she still moved slower than usual, and she was working on her third cup of coffee.

  Zach dashed into the kitchen. The door to the employee bathroom closed with a telling whine, and water ran through the pipes.

  “Sleep okay last night at your new place?” Katherine asked.

  “Decent,” Celeste said. Zach came out of the kitchen with his shirtsleeves rolled to his elbows, tying an apron around his waist and somehow looking fresher than when he’d entered. “What’s up first, boss?” he asked Katherine.

  Again that look between Celeste and Zach, thick as the bread aroma filling Katherine’s lungs and just as evocative of shared warmth. Celeste picked something from Zach’s collar, held up a bit of yellow fluff. “Don’t let this drop into the pastry. We’d have to charge extr
a.”

  Zach grinned, snatched the lint from Celeste’s fingers, and tucked the fluff into the pocket of his jeans. “Your blanket was warmer than it looked.”

  Celeste’s blanket?

  Katherine knew none of the rumors from years ago about Celeste were true. She’d seen firsthand the price Celeste had paid, in pounds, at the hands of her high school boyfriend’s false claims she was promiscuous. In the past four years, Celeste had dated. Of course she’d dated, but on that subject Celeste rivaled Katherine’s ability to keep her mouth shut.

  The oven timer dinged three steady beeps. “Rye, sourdough, and baguettes,” Katherine said. “Ready to rack and roll?”

  “Yes, ma’am.” Zach touched two fingers to his forehead and ducked back into the kitchen. Half a dozen racks of bread would keep Zach busy for a while. Had he kept Celeste busy last night?

  “I suggested Ledgewood to Zach. Did you happen to see him there after work?”

  “He was there,” Celeste said, too offhand to be meaningless. “So . . . Mrs. Jenkins . . .”—Celeste perfectly replicated the tilt of the woman’s head, her muffin happy dance—“seems to have enjoyed my blueberry muffins. She kind of scared me. For a second there, I thought she was going to launch into a striptease. I mean, what do you suppose she’s wearing beneath that trench coat? Maybe she’s a stripper over at The Gentleman’s Club? A throwback to the olden days, heavy on the tease, light on the strip? Can you imagine?”

  “I’d rather not.” Katherine barked out the laugh she’d been holding back since the original Mrs. Jenkins performance.

  Celeste only grinned. “What did you think of the muffins?”

  “Oh, Celeste, I apologize.” After Katherine had offered the job to Zach, she’d suggested he have something to eat, if he was hungry and while he had the chance. That something had ended up being the muffin intended for Katherine. “I haven’t tried one yet.”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  “Of course it matters.”

  “Apparently, not to you.”

  How could Katherine argue with such an assertion? She could tell Celeste she mattered to her, that she was more important than a recipe, good or bad. Katherine could offer the truth of having been distracted yesterday by Celeste’s surprise return and hiring Zach. She could admit that Celeste’s recipes were often good, sometimes amazing. At the most, she could admit defeat and tell Celeste she’d been right to change up a recipe, Katherine’s mentor Hazel May’s recipe. The recipe that had served the town since before Celeste was born.

  Whatever Katherine said would be wrong.

  If you’re so smart, why are you still living here?

  All these years later, Katherine could still hear her father’s words. The tone scraped across her nerves and sucked the spit from her throat.

  In the end, it hadn’t mattered that she’d shielded her mother from the worst of her father’s drunken tirades. That she’d given half of her salary to her father. That despite the saying about sticks and stone and words not hurting you, she knew differently. The sharp point of a carefully selected insult sliced beneath your skin and stripped you bare.

  The best defense? Keeping your damn mouth shut.

  Katherine had long ago given up wondering what had been going on in her father’s head, but with Celeste she came closer to understanding. Words were cheap. Celeste wanted proof.

  Katherine swiped a blueberry muffin from the bakery case and, before Celeste could say another word, Katherine took a bite. Then, like a sommelier, she focused on the notes of flavor—sweet butter and tart blueberries and a surprising, enlivening zest of lemon. The texture was at once richly satisfying yet light enough to gobble. No wonder Zach had eaten two. No wonder Mrs. Jenkins had adapted. No wonder Celeste had taken offense.

  Celeste stared at Katherine, her face impassive. Too impassive. Celeste’s need for approval was louder than words.

  Katherine set the remaining muffin on the counter. She unfolded the orange stool and stepped onto its lower rung, raising herself to the blackboard. She erased Blueberry Muffins and wrote Celeste’s Wild Blues in her tidiest print. Then she stepped down and brushed the chalk dust from her hands. “Better?”

  “It’s a start.” Once again, Celeste attempted to conceal her grin behind her coffee cup, but her smiling eyes gave her away.

  Katherine made fast work of the rest of the blueberry muffin. She arched her back until her spine gave way with a satisfying crack. “They’re wonderful.”

  “I know.”

  “Eaten one today?” Katherine asked, a veiled reminder about her earlier breakfast lecture.

  “Later, when I’m hungry,” Celeste said, letting Katherine know her reminder hadn’t been all that veiled.

  An odd vibrating sound came from the kitchen—the thread of a tune Zach was humming that Katherine couldn’t identify.

  Celeste held a cupped hand to her ear. Her gaze slid toward the kitchen, her brow creased.

  “ ‘Slide’! Goo Goo Dolls!” Celeste called into the kitchen.

  “Yes!” Zach appeared in the doorway, holding a loaf of sourdough between food prep gloves. “You got that from hmm, hmm? Nobody has ever been able to guess a tune I was humming. You a fan?”

  Celeste held up the two fingers—pinkie and pointer, thumb holding down middle and ring. “Rock on, baby.”

  Zach laughed, tossed up his own two-horn salute, and ducked back into the kitchen. The humming resumed.

  Celeste licked her bottom lip, her gaze trained on the spot Zach had vacated.

  “He seems like a nice guy,” Katherine said, her words conjuring Adam and their instant, easy camaraderie. He’d seemed like a nice guy, too. “Hey, pretty girl,” he’d said by way of introduction. “What time do you get off work?”

  If he’d been entirely honest, he should’ve asked, What time do you want to get off?

  Within an hour she’d followed him back to his hotel room, where they’d smoked a joint. Heads fuzzy, they’d made love to “Free Bird,” slow and sultry giving way to fast and frenzied.

  Love, she supposed, had been too strong of a word. Weeks later, she’d changed her thoughts on that front. Back then she’d loved everyone. But loving everyone was a lot like loving no one at all.

  “Did you and Zach spend time together last night?”

  “What do you mean, spend time?”

  Who Celeste dated, spent time with, made love to, was none of Katherine’s business. But the memory of Celeste’s full-blown illness—that Katherine couldn’t forget. “I mean, you’ve just gotten back from school,” Katherine said. “It’s a big adjustment, coming back to work here, and you don’t do well with . . .”

  “Transitions,” Celeste filled in.

  “Yes. Sort of. No.”

  “What in the world are you trying to say?”

  Katherine glanced into the kitchen, where Zach slid loaves of bread into the rolling rack and hummed a wordless tune.

  “With you and Zach working together, and you said he moved into Ledgewood—”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “I couldn’t help but notice you struggling with food yesterday.”

  “Yesterday, I’d just quit school. Yesterday, I’d just driven all night on five hours of sleep.”

  You’d think after ten years married to a shrink, Katherine would be better at framing her questions. “My point, exactly. So this is probably not the best time for you to start something—”

  “Wait, what? What exactly do you think I’ve started?”

  Katherine tossed a glance back toward the kitchen. Clearly, Celeste had gone through something in New York, something that had spooked her all the way back to Hidden Harbor. But in Katherine’s experience, sex didn’t shield you from loss. Sometimes sex—specifically sex with a stranger—only added to your long life list of regrets.

  “Zach?” Celeste whispered. “Me and Zach? You think I’ve started something with Zach? Wh-why would you—? H-how could you—?” Celeste stammered, not with
embarrassment but with rage. Katherine could feel Celeste’s anger spiking hot in her own throat.

  “Okay, clearly I’ve misunderstood,” Katherine said.

  “I don’t get it. Am I wearing some kind of sign that says whore?”

  “That’s an ugly word, Celeste. I’d never say that.”

  “No? You thought it, though. What kind of woman sleeps with a guy she’s just met?”

  A good woman, a woman who enjoyed sex. A woman who, with all her heart, believed the adage “make love, not war.”

  “Zach mentioned a blanket—”

  Celeste threw a look into the kitchen. “And you assumed—I didn’t sleep with Zach, if that’s what you’re implying. And I didn’t screw him either.”

  Another awful word. A screw was something that held you down and pierced your flesh. To screw someone implied coercion, treachery, manipulation.

  Celeste’s glare seemed to say, Screw you.

  Katherine touched Celeste’s arm and watched her eyes turn liquid. Then the muscles around her mouth tightened, shades of the resolve she’d shown Katherine months ago, and moments before storming from the bakery. All righteous anger. All I’ll show you. Celeste shook off Katherine’s touch and went into the kitchen.

  The humming stopped.

  “‘Iris’ ?” Celeste asked.

  “Two for two,” Zach said. “Two for two.”

  On a rain-soaked night, right before Katherine had left home for good, she’d gone out to The Watering Hole, a local joint that served pizza so greasy you had to sop up the oil with a handful of napkins, and watered-down melon balls for cheap. She’d needed to get out, to shake off the constant negative vibe that clung to the household. She’d needed to get laid. Two hours later, she’d tiptoed through the darkened house, dragging a lanky guy by the hand. Wallace or Warren, some W name. Three drinks had worked their magic to blind her to the negativity humming from the walls, and her father sleeping on the sofa.