The Strange and Beautiful Sorrows of Ava Lavender(26)

The cherry tree along the side of the house had bloomed a season earlier than any other on the block. Throughout January, Viviane had watched the pink blooms scatter across the snow-covered lawn. Now the tree was bursting with cherries so red they were purple, and so large and ripe their skins were cracked, the juice leaking down the tree’s branches and soaking into the ground. All the jars of cherry jam Emilienne made, all the cherry pie they sold at the bakery, barely made a dent in the amount of fruit falling from the tree. Fortunately, cherries were the only food Viviane could manage to keep down, although the doctor — a man who only a few years before had been her pediatrician — claimed that she should no longer be experiencing nausea.

Viviane stretched her swollen feet out in front of her; the bottoms had been perpetually lined with dirt since February, when her shoes no longer fit. Not that there’d been any reason to wear shoes. No one in the neighborhood had seen Viviane since she quit her job at the soda fountain when she could no longer pretend that her clothes still fit.

Emilienne inserted triangles of mismatched fabrics into Viviane’s skirts and dresses. It was a fruitless attempt to get Viviane to change out of the white lace dress she’d worn for seven months straight, a dress that had turned brown and whose zipper could no longer be closed.

Viviane could barely look at herself in the hallway mirror, let alone dress herself. Or bathe. Grimy rings collected underneath her heavy breasts and around the areolas, which had grown strangely dark and foreign. Her hair hung in sullied sticks down her back, and her hands were constantly sticky with cherry juice.

She bathed only when her mother and Wilhelmina forced her to, when Emilienne added the day’s milk delivery to warm water in the tub and pulled Viviane into the bathroom by her dirty feet. Wilhelmina doused Viviane’s head with olive oil and lemon juice, scrubbed the grime from underneath those breasts with the strange nipples, and made sure she soaked long enough for the sticky gloss of cherry juice to come loose from the skin between her fingers.

Viviane watched a tribe of carpenter ants surround a glob of boric acid and honey, a toxic concoction Emilienne had put out underneath the porch swing. The ants resembled black petals around a golden circle. The ants drank their fill, then made their way back to their nest in the wall. There they unknowingly poisoned their babies before dying themselves. Viviane imagined the nests as tombs, the bodies piling up.

By this point Viviane Lavender had loved Jack Griffith for twelve years, which was far more than half of her life. If she thought of her love as a commodity and were to, say, eat it, it would fill 4,745 cherry pies. If she were to preserve it, she would need 23,725 glass jars and labels and a basement spanning the length of Pinnacle Lane.

If she were to drink it, she’d drown.

In the kitchen Emilienne feigned interest in the dish towel in her hand as Viviane slowly made her way back into the house, her steps awkward under her tremendous belly.

“Is it getting warm out there?” Emilienne asked, her tone more gruff than she intended. Did she always sound so cold? she wondered. So stern? So heartless?

“Hmm. A bit,” Viviane replied.

The sound of hammer against nail could be heard coming from upstairs, where Gabe was converting one of the bedrooms into a nursery. The noise made Viviane wince.

“Viviane —” Emilienne started.

Viviane raised her head, and in that moment, when mother and daughter locked eyes, Emilienne felt a rush of cold fill her lungs. As her head flooded with images of last midsummer’s night — a night of broken dahlias and broken promises — Emilienne recalled a time when love, and not longing, filled her, too, with its icy breath.

Before Emilienne could say what was on her mind, Viviane turned and walked out of the kitchen. “I’m going to take a nap.”

“On your way, go take a look at the damn nursery!” Emilienne shouted after her. Emilienne threw the dish towel on the counter and ran her hands miserably over her face. “I’m going to the bakery,” she murmured to no one.

Emilienne used the bakery to hide from the horrible mess that was her daughter’s life. Pregnant, she thought disbelievingly, and with Jack Griffith’s child, no less. That talent for avoidance was something that Wilhelmina never failed to mention when Emilienne came in on her days off.

The bakery’s success had now lasted eighteen years thanks to Emilienne’s skills as a French patissier and Wilhelmina Dovewolf’s clever nose for business. It was her now-partner Wilhelmina’s idea to hire local high-school boys to walk door to door through the neighborhood carrying baskets of fragrant loaves and morning buns. As business thrived, the routes became longer, and these boys — eventually known as Emilienne’s Bakery Boys — began using bicycles to make deliveries, balancing their breadbaskets on either side of the back tire. Their shiny red bikes became a familiar sight not only on Pinnacle Lane, but also well into the Ballard neighborhood and up past Phinney Ridge.

The bakery survived the Depression by selling jams, jellies, cured meats, and eggs whenever Emilienne could get them. She kept her customers loyal by offering them store credit. Some attributed the very survival of the neighborhood to Emilienne during those tough times — if someone was hungry, they could always get bread from the bakery.

They added wedding cakes to their pastry repertoire after beloved high-school teacher Ignatius Lux married Estelle Margolis in a small ceremony at the Lutheran church. The celebration ended with a four-tiered cake baked by Emilienne just for the occasion. Happy smiles were shared between the bride and groom, but it was the cake their guests remembered — the vanilla custard filling, the buttercream finish, the slight taste of raspberries that had surely been added to the batter. No one brought home any slices of leftover cake to place under their pillow, hoping to dream of their future mate; instead, the guests of Ignatius Lux and Estelle Margolis ate the whole cake and then had dreams of eating it again. After this wedding unmarried women woke in the night with tears in their eyes, not because they were alone, but because there wasn’t any cake left. Needless to say, the cake later became one of the bakery’s most popular items, requested for every event, large or small.