The Sweetness of Forgetting (12)

Rose puzzled this over, trying hard to remember. There was a flash of something, glinting in the background of her memory, but then it was gone. She was certain that she’d watched the sunset alone, as she did every night. “No, dear,” Rose told her.

“Are you sure, Rose?” the nurse prodded. She handed Rose her pills in a Dixie cup and watched as Rose swallowed and washed them down. “Amy at the desk downstairs said your granddaughter was here. Hope.”

Rose smiled, for she loved Hope, who must be thirteen or fourteen by now. How quickly time flies, she thought. Before I know it, she will be all grown up. “No,” she told the nurse. “There was no one here. But you must meet her one day. She is a very nice girl. Maybe she will come visit with her mother.”

The nurse squeezed Rose’s arm gently and smiled. “All right, Rose,” she said. “All right.”





Chapter Four



I never intended to come back here, to the bakery, to the Cape, to any of this.

At thirty-six, I wasn’t supposed to be the mother of a teenager, the owner of a bakery. When I was in school, I dreamed of moving somewhere far away, traveling the world, becoming a successful attorney.

Then I met Rob, who was in his last year of law school just as I’d started my JD. If I thought the magnetic pull of the Cape was strong, it didn’t compare to being pulled into his orbit. When something went wrong with my birth control midway through my first year of law school, and I had to tell him I was pregnant, he’d proposed the next week. It was, he said, the right thing to do.

We’d decided together that I’d take a year off to have the baby before returning to school. Annie was born that August; Rob got a job with a firm in Boston and suggested I stay home with our daughter for a while longer now that he was making more money. At first, it seemed like a good idea. But after the first year, the gulf between us had opened so wide that I no longer knew how to cross it. My days, filled with diapers, breast-feeding, and Sesame Street, held little interest for him, and I was admittedly jealous of him going out into the world each day and doing all the things I’d once dreamed of. Not that I regretted having Annie; I’d never felt that way for a second. I just regretted that I’d never had a chance to live the life I’d thought I was supposed to.

When my mother was diagnosed with breast cancer for the first time, nine years ago, Rob agreed, after many nights of arguments, to relocate to the Cape, where he’d realized he could set up shop and be one of the only personal injury lawyers in the area. Mamie watched Annie at the bakery during the day while I worked as Rob’s legal assistant, which wasn’t exactly what I’d dreamed of, but it was close enough. By the time Annie was in first grade, she was frosting cupcakes and fluting piecrusts like a pro. For a few years, the whole arrangement was almost perfect.

Then my mother’s cancer returned, Mamie’s memory began to ebb at the edges, and there was no one to save the bakery but me. Before I knew what had happened, I had become the keeper of a dream that wasn’t mine, and in the meantime, I’d lost my hold on everything I’d ever dreamed of.



It’s nearly five in the morning, and dawn is still two hours away. When I was in grade school, Mamie used to tell me that each new morning was like unwrapping a gift from God. This used to confuse me, because she wasn’t a big churchgoer. But in the evenings, when my mother and I would visit for dinner, we’d sometimes find her on her knees at the back window, praying softly as the light fell from the sky. “I prefer to have my own relationship with God,” she told me once when I’d asked her why she prayed at home instead of at Our Lady of the Cape.

This morning, the smells of flour, yeast, butter, chocolate, and vanilla dance through the kitchen, and I breathe in deeply, relaxing into the familiarity of it all. From the time I was a little girl, these scents have always reminded me of my grandmother, for even when the bakery was closed, even after she’d showered and dressed at home, her hair and her skin still carried the perfume of the kitchen.

As I roll out piecrusts and add more flour to the industrial mixer, my mind isn’t on the tasks at hand. I’m thinking about Mamie’s words last night as I methodically go through the motions of the morning preparations. Check the timer for the chocolate chip meringues in oven 1. Roll out the dough for the almond rose tarts Matt Hines likes so much. Layer the baklava and slide it into oven 2. Put the softened cream cheese for the lemon-grape cheesecake into my second bowl mixer. Fold the layers of croissant around little squares of dark French chocolate for the pains au chocolat. Braid the long ropes of whole wheat challah, sprinkle it with raisins, and set it aside to rise again.

There is nothing wrong with you, dear, Mamie had said, but what does she know? Her memory is all but gone, her senses completely off. Yet there are times when her eyes look as clear as ever, and when I’m sure she’s looking directly into my soul. Although I never doubted that she and my grandfather loved each other, theirs always seemed to be a relationship of function more than romance. Had I had that with Rob and thrown it away because I believed there was more out there? Perhaps I’d been a fool. Life isn’t a fairy tale.

The timer on oven 1 goes off, and I move the meringues to a baking rack. I turn the oven on and prepare to slide the pains au chocolat in. I’ve started making a double batch of those in the mornings; they go more quickly now that it’s autumn and the air has turned cool. Our fruit tarts and pastries are more popular in the spring and summer months, but the denser, sweeter confections seem to bring people comfort as winter approaches.