The Sweetness of Forgetting (109)

I hang my head. “But how do I know what I’m supposed to do?” I don’t know how to explain that my heart has never led me into anything more than trouble.

“You will know,” Jacob says. “Just listen. The answers lie inside you.”



The next morning, as I’m getting ready to leave for the bakery, I come into the living room to find Jacob staring out the window, just where I’d left him the night before. I wonder whether he’s looking at the stars, the way Mamie always did.

“Hey, Jacob,” I say as I grab my keys from the kitchen table. “I’m headed out. If you feel like it, come by the bakery later. I’ll bake you a Star Pie.”

When he doesn’t respond, I go over to the chair and kneel beside him. “Jacob?”

His eyes are closed, and there’s a small, peaceful smile on his face, as if he’s in the midst of a dream he doesn’t wish to leave. I wonder whether he’s thinking about my grandmother.

“Jacob?” I say again. I touch his arm lightly, and that’s when I know. “Jacob,” I murmur softly, tears beginning to run down my face. His arm is cold, and so too is his cheek, when I reach up to touch it gently. He’s gone. And somehow, I’m not surprised at all. He has spent a lifetime trying to find Mamie. And now he has eternity to make up for all those lost years.

I don’t disturb him. I don’t wake Annie or Alain. I don’t leave for the bakery. I just sit beside him, this man whose courage gave me life so many years ago, long before I was ever born, and I cry. I cry for everything lost and everything found. I cry for my grandmother, and for my mother, who never knew the story of her birth. I cry for Annie, because she’s had to endure far more loss than one should have to at such a young age. And I cry for myself, for I don’t know the way. I don’t know how to find the answers Jacob seems to believe I carry in my heart.



After much careful thought, Alain and I decide to bury Jacob beside my grandmother. After all, he has no family left elsewhere, and we can’t imagine anywhere in the world he’d rather be than beside the love of his life. I have found her, he told me on his last night. I am at peace.

Elida White and her grandmother drive down from Pembroke for the funeral, and we all stand together—Muslims, Christians, and Jews—and listen to the words of the rabbi at the grave site. I look east, in the direction Jacob’s tombstone will face, once it’s delivered. Mamie’s will face that way too. In a few hours, the first stars of evening will begin to poke through the sky, just like they always have, just like they always will. For as long as there are stars in the sky, I realize, Jacob’s promise to love Mamie will live on. The stars she once looked for will keep watch silently over her, and over the love of her life, who has, at long last, returned to her side.





Chapter Thirty-one



Winter on Cape Cod is long and lonely, and this year, it feels as if time has frozen in place, as I wait to lose the bakery. There are no prospective buyers, for who would want such a place in the dead of winter? But the bank intends to take it from me all the same. Matt does nothing to stop it, and I do not ask him to. Every morning, as my breath hangs in the air like puffs of frozen smoke, I wonder whether today will be the day that the last of Mamie’s legacy will disappear. Until then, I will keep running the bakery, because it is all I know how to do.

One might think that this season would be my least favorite time of year, because of the slow desolation and the lack of business. But I’ve always found peace in the winter months. The evenings are so still, just before the sun sets, that when the caw of a single seagull sounds over the sea, I can hear it from inside the walls of my cottage. When I walk on the beach, frozen ice sometimes crunches beneath my worn boots. And Main Street feels like a ghost town before the holidays; on the mornings when I arrive at the bakery, sometimes I believe I’m the only person in this wintry wonderland, and I imagine what I’d do if no one else could see me.

The third week of November, Gavin asks me to go to dinner and a movie with him, and although I say no, he comes by a few days later and invites Annie, Alain, and me to his family’s house near Boston for Thanksgiving. I’m missing Mamie more than usual that day, and I’m on edge about the bakery, so I explode at him without meaning to.

“Look, I appreciate everything you’ve done for me and my family,” I tell him, as my stomach tightens into a knot. “But I can’t do this to Annie.”

He looks baffled and wounded. “Do what?”

“Take a chance on someone like you.”

He stares at me. “Someone like me?”

I feel terrible, but just like Mamie had put her child’s life first, neglecting her own needs, I know I need to do the same. I owe it to my daughter. “You’re wonderful, Gavin,” I try to explain. “But Annie has lost so much lately. She needs stability now. Not someone else who might disappear from her life.”

“Hope, I’m not planning on disappearing.”

I look down. “But you can’t promise me today that you’ll be here forever, can you?” I ask. He doesn’t answer, so I go on. “Of course you can’t. And I would never ask you to. But I can’t let anyone into my life if there’s even a chance they’ll hurt my daughter.”

“I would never . . .” he begins.