by Sophie Stern
“I’ve done my best to keep up with things since Hannah fell ill,” my Uncle Ray said. “But it’s been rough.” His voice held pain, and he sounded close to tears.
“You’ve done a good job,” I told him, turning around. It wasn’t a lie. He’d been doing everything he could to take care of the bakery since my aunt was diagnosed with cancer, but her treatments had been rough on both of them. Chemo didn’t just take it out of you physically. It also took it out of you emotionally, spiritually, and even mentally. My uncle was a carpenter. He wasn’t a baker. Savored was my aunt’s passion project: not his.
Still, he’d done everything he could to keep the place running. He had been doing his very best trying to keep it all under control, but it finally hadn’t been enough. That’s why he’d called me last week. He’d asked me if there was any chance I’d be interested in coming to help with the bakery. The truth was that my aunt couldn’t handle things with the business anymore, and neither could my uncle. Neither one of them wanted to see Savored close, though. That’s where I came in.
I didn’t tell him at first, but the timing of their offer couldn’t have been better. I was more than ready for a fresh start, and working at Savored was the perfect way to forget my troubles. I needed something new in my life, and running a bakery was something I’d dreamed about once upon a time.
“I really appreciate you coming,” he told me, wringing his hands together. He didn’t need to worry. I wasn’t going to let anything happened to Savored.
“It’s not a problem,” I said. “You know I’d do anything for you and Aunt Hannah.” I owed them so very much.
“I know,” he said. “But she feels bad taking you away from your life in the city and asking you to come here.”
Leaving Kansas City to move back to rural Ashton was probably the best decision I could have possibly made. Working at a digital marketing firm had been fun for a few years, with lots of intensity and passion and chaos. Then Jake and I had broken up, my boss had been replaced with someone young and new who wanted to prove their worth, and the entire firm had gone downhill seemingly overnight.
I had turned in my two week’s notice last week, but the firm had been happy to let me go early. I knew that I wasn’t going to miss my life there. Kansas City had been a lot of fun, but I had also experienced a lot of pain and a lot of loss. After the breakup, I didn’t really know what I wanted to do next. Coming back to Ashton hadn’t been in my plans like, at all, but I was going to make the most of it.
Besides, my family needed me, and I was going to do whatever it took to help them. Aunt Hannah and Uncle Ray would have done anything for me. I could do the same for them.
“How long has it been closed for?” I asked him.
“Two weeks,” he said.
My aunt was diagnosed with breast cancer a month ago. So my uncle, in addition to helping his wife with her double mastectomy and chemotherapy treatments, had managed to run the bakery for two weeks on his own before shutting it all down. I didn’t know how the hell he did it. Running a bakery was a huge endeavor for someone who wanted to do it. Uncle Ray was just an ordinary guy. How had he kept everything going while helping my aunt? He was a hero in every way.
“She had stuff in the freezer,” he explained. “She didn’t want me to do any baking. I just thawed it and one of her friends came in and frosted everything.”
“That was nice of them to help out,” I said. It was good to have people you could count on. I felt a pang of regret as I realized that I really didn’t have anyone special I had left behind when I’d walked away from the city. I had spent the better part of the last decade with Jake and...well, that had been a wash.
“She’s got good friends,” he agreed. “They would do anything for her.”
“I believe it.”
“So,” he looked around. “You think you can work your magic?”
“I think so,” I said. While my career had been in digital marketing, my undergraduate degree was in bakery science. I’d planned on opening my own bakery one day, but then life got in the way, and I just hadn’t done it. Jake and I had started dating, and things had kind of gone south from there.
What had my biggest mistake been?
I couldn’t blame everything on other people. I couldn’t blame Jake, and I couldn’t blame my boss. I couldn’t blame anybody except for myself for the way things had turned out. There was one major problem with how I’d handled my life.
I’d settled, I realized. I had made the classic mistake of thinking that somehow, holding out for what I really wanted was a waste of time, and I’d taken the path that was easy. Well, I was paying for it now. I was 31, and I was now living in the apartment over my aunt and uncle’s garage, and I was...
Well, I didn’t know.
Lost might have been a good word to describe myself.
Confused could have been another option.
“Thank you,” my uncle said again. “You don’t know what this means to us.”
“I think I have a pretty good idea,” I said. “Why don’t you head home? I’ll take a look and figure out what I need to do in order to get everything open and running again.”
“Okay,” he said, nodding. My uncle left the keys with me and took off. I started walking around the bakery, looking at everything. It was a small little place. The front space was tiny. There was a glass display case, of course, and two round little tables that each had two seats. There was a larger patio table outside, and sometimes people would sit there to eat their treats.
The bakery was designed to be a place where you came and then you went, though. It wasn’t like a coffee shop. It wasn’t designed for hanging out and loitering, which was too bad, because in my opinion, there was nothing quite like sitting down and enjoying a wonderful croissant or cupcake with someone you loved.
Maybe I’d change things around, I thought. My aunt would still be the one with the final say, but she was essentially making me acting manager, and I’d do the best that I could to not only keep her business up and running, but to improve it, as well. Savored was cute, but the menu was limited. I bet that with a bit of careful planning, I could make it flourish.
The walls of the bakery were filled with family photos. It was a cute design. She wanted her bakery to look like someone’s living room, so there were pictures of my parents, and pictures of me, and pictures of my aunt and uncle. There were photos of my grandparents. There were other pictures, too. There were snapshots from high school swim teams and special events that had happened in Ashton. If you could imagine it, it was on the wall, and the walls were definitely filled to the brim with photos.
My aunt was a memory type of person. She loved nostalgia, and she loved dreaming up different ideas to help people remember who they were and where they came from. Sometimes, that was a good thing. Sometimes, like when I saw the picture of Cooper Clark standing in front of the Ferris wheel during a particularly hot high school September, it wasn’t so great.
I took that picture down. There was no chance I’d be staring at that while baking cookies for Aunt Hannah. No chance in hell. I stared at the space where the picture had hung. The nail was still there, and the paint on the wall was a little darker than the rest of the room. The picture had blocked the sun from fading the paint.
“I’ll find something else to hang there,” I said out loud, and then I headed to the back of the bakery to figure out what I needed to buy to get Savored back up and running.
ASHTON WAS A BEAUTIFUL place to visit, but not a wonderful place to live. There was nothing particularly wrong with the town: not that I could pinpoint, anyway. It was more that the town was just...well, it was a reminder of everything I’d wanted to leave behind when I’d moved.
I couldn’t look around Ashton and forget about what had happened to me. Every corner seemed to be a reminder. Every shop held a memory. Unfortunately for me, most of those memories were things I wanted to forget. For a long time, I thought that I had. Moving away, going to college, a
nd starting my job had all been steps I’d taken to forget the boy who had gotten away and the girl who had broken my heart.
That was what had really soiled me on Ashton: losing everyone, including my very best friend. Larissa and I had done everything together. We’d been the best of friends all throughout middle school and those first three years of high school. I hadn’t been able to bear knowing that she’d betrayed me and gone behind my back to start dating Cooper. My senior year had been hellish. Maybe I was being overdramatic, and I often thought back about those years and wondered where it had all gone wrong, but the pain still stuck with me.
It was incredible how someone totally screwing you over could mess with your head.
For a long time, I worried that I wasn’t worthy of anyone’s love. After all, the person I’d been crazy about had chosen my best friend over me. How messed up was that?
When I finished working in the shop for the day, I locked up and headed back to my aunt and uncle’s place. They were letting me stay in their apartment for free, which was nice. It was located just over their freestanding garage, and it afforded me the privacy that I needed to nurse my wounds and get over my recent job loss, as well as the fact that I’d ended my relationship with Jake.
Not that there was much to get over.
My relationship with Jake had soured a long time ago, and by the end, we were basically roommates who didn’t really speak. It was easy to point fingers at couples who stayed in loveless relationships and to think about how stupid and foolish they were, but the reality is that sometimes, staying with someone just becomes easier than breaking up.
At one point, all of our stuff was mixed together. I couldn’t pinpoint who had purchased which DVD or who owned which sweatshirt or whether the mixing bowls in the kitchen were mine or his. Breaking up meant that we had to face the reality we’d created. We had to divide our shit and move on.
I had a car that I had purchased a few years ago, but I’d left it at Aunt Hannah’s place and had chosen, instead, to walk to the bakery to meet Ray. He’d come over after work to meet me and to show me around. I’d been pleased with the space. Savored was in a good location and it was in decent shape.
Walking home meant I could unwind and think about those things. I could picture the colors I wanted to use and the menu I wanted to create. I could feel the gentle breeze of the evening air on my face. It was autumn, but it was still warm most days. It was at night, really, that you could tell cooler weather was on the horizon.
Besides, if I was being honest with myself, I could afford to do some walking. I’d gained a little bit of weight while dating Jake and even though I didn’t really have a problem with the way that I looked, exercising was going to be a good way to make myself feel more...what was the word?
Energetic?
Was that it?
Maybe that was what I needed: energy. I needed something. I didn’t know how I was going to get what I needed, but walking was a first step. That was all life was, really: a series of steps. You could go forward or backward, but everything you wanted from life started with taking a single step in the correct direction. You just had to know what that right direction really was.
I walked down the bustling downtown street in Ashton, lost in my own thoughts. Everyone seemed to be going around looking for places to eat dinner. People were parking and scurrying into stores before they closed, and a couple of people were on walks and holding hands.
It was nice, I thought suddenly. It was kind of quaint, and it was...
Slow.
It wasn’t as fast and busy as the life I was used to back in KC. This was okay, though. Not everything in life had to be a rush, right? This was a change, and I deserved to have change in my life. That’s what I kept telling myself, anyway. I had to believe in something, even if it was just myself. If I could believe that a slower lifestyle was okay, then I’d be able to get through today, and tomorrow, and then the next day. I was just going to take everything one day at a time, because if I didn’t, I was going to spend too much time thinking about everything I’d lost, and I was going to go crazy.
The walk took less than half an hour and soon I was back in my apartment over the detached garage, taking a hot shower, falling onto bed, and passing out before I could worry about anything else in the world.
THE NEXT MORNING, I headed over to the main house and knocked on the door.
“Come in,” my uncle yelled out. “You don’t have to knock, honey.”
“How’d you know it was me?” I asked, stepping inside directly into the living room. “I could have been a burglar.”
My aunt and uncle were quiet, small-town people. They didn’t have a lot of tech and they didn’t even like knowing about it. They didn’t have a doorbell camera or anything like that. They just knew that nobody else would be coming over quite so early except for me.
“Of course it was you,” Uncle Ray said, peeking into the living room from the kitchen, which was located just behind it. “Your coffee’s almost done. Have a seat. Hannah’s at the table.”
I walked through the living room to the kitchen and dining room area. Sure enough, my aunt was seated at a table with her blanket wrapped carefully around her shoulders. She looked pale, and she looked thinner than she had in the past. Her chemotherapy treatments were hard on her in many ways. The drugs made her feel nauseous, and they made her feel like she wasn’t as strong as she was supposed to be. I knew that bothered her more than she would admit. Hannah didn’t like to depend on other people to help her out. She was wildly independent, and she liked her freedom. She liked being able to do things when she wanted to and not when a doctor gave the okay.
“How are you feeling today?” I asked her. The answer was obvious, but it was a song and dance that we would do. Besides, I still couldn’t shake the idea that asking someone how they were was polite. Even though she looked terrible, I still had to ask.
“Not too bad,” she said, sipping a glass of ice water.
“Liar,” I whispered, smiling at her.
She shrugged, and smiled back at me. Her eyes lit up, and I grinned. She reminded me of my mom so much. The two of them were twins, and until my mom passed away when I was in college, they’d been the best of friends. My entire life, it had felt like I’d actually been lucky enough to have two moms. I’d had double the people looking after me, and I’d had double the people loving me.
“It’ll get better,” I told her.
“I hope so.”
“The doctors say you’re going to be just fine,” I pointed out.
She nodded carefully.
“Sometimes chemo doesn’t work, sweetie.”
“Sometimes it does,” I said.
“Stage four, love,” she whispered, pressing her hand on top of mine. “I love you, sweetie, but I’ve had a good life.” Her words were soft, and I knew they were for my benefit, not her own. I knew that she meant what she was saying, but I didn’t like it.
“Don’t talk like that,” I whispered. I couldn’t bear the idea of her talking like that, like something was going to happen where I’d have to say goodbye to her.
“It’ll be fine,” she said. “I’m a fighter, but we all have to die sometime.”
My aunt was only 61, but I understood what she wasn’t saying. My mom had died of breast cancer, too, and my aunt had already outlived her. That had been tough on her. She’d lost her twin sister. She’d lost her very best friend.
Now she was dealing with the same disease that had stolen away her sister. I would bet anything that Hannah was missing my mom more than ever these days.
Aunt Hannah’s life had been hard, messy, and tricky. She’d been infertile for years and when she’d finally gotten pregnant, she’d had a stillborn. After that, she and Uncle Ray hadn’t tried for kids anymore, and instead, they’d turned to spoiling me. My dad died in a car wreck when I was two, and his family had never been interested in maintaining a relationship with me, so pretty much forever, it had been Uncle Ray, A
unt Hannah, my mom, and me. We’d been our own little weird, wonderful family.
“I love you,” I said, pressing a kiss to her forehead.
Uncle Ray, who had quietly been working over at the counter, came over to the table and sat down with a tray of breakfast food. Of course, it held the promised coffee, too. I lifted the mug and sipped it, sighing with contentment.
“Good?” He asked.
“Only you know how to make coffee this good,” I told him.
“I learned from the best,” he commented, smiling over at Aunt Hannah.
“Who, my mom?” I winked at Hannah as she feigned offense, and then we all laughed for a minute. It felt good to laugh. It was a comfortable sort of feeling, and I didn’t want it to end even though I knew it probably was going to sooner than we wanted it to. Sure enough, the phone rang, and Uncle Ray scurried to answer. They didn’t have a landline anymore, but he’d left his cell in the living room. We heard him answer and start talking, and I turned back to Aunt Hannah, not wanting to eavesdrop on my uncle’s conversation.
“About the bakery,” I said.
“About that,” she set her drink down and looked at me. “Cordelia, I’ve been thinking.”
That sounded ominous.
“Okay,” I said slowly, carefully. “What have you been thinking about?”
“The future of the bakery,” she said. “And I’d like you to have it.”
Her words were simple and concise, but they didn’t quite register at first. She couldn’t be saying what I thought she was saying. Savored was her pride and joy.
“You...what?” I asked, not quite understanding what it was she was trying to tell me.
“I want you to have the bakery. It’s yours. All of it. Consider it your inheritance.”
