The Sweetness of Forgetting (13)

I started helping Mamie in the bakery, the way Annie helps me now, when I was eight. Every morning, just before the sun came up, Mamie would stop what she was doing and lead me to the side window that looked due east, over the winding ribbon of Main Street. We’d watch the horizon in silence until dawn broke, and then we’d go back to our baking.

“What are you always looking at, Mamie?” I’d asked her one morning.

“I am looking at the sky, my dear,” she’d said.

“I know. But why?”

She’d pulled me close, hugging me against her faded pink apron, the one she’d been wearing for as long as I could remember. I was a little scared by how tightly she was holding on.

“Chérie, I am watching the stars disappear,” she said after a minute.

“Why?” I asked.

“Because even though you cannot see them, they are always there,” she said. “They are just hiding, behind the sun.”

“So?” I asked timidly.

She released me from the hug and bent down to look me in the eye. “Because, my dear, it is good to remember that you do not always have to see something to know that it is there.”

Mamie’s words from almost three decades earlier are still echoing in my head when I hear Annie’s voice in the doorway to the kitchen, startling me out of my fog.

“Why are you crying?” she asks.

I look up, surprised to realize that she’s right; there are tears rolling down my cheeks. I swat them away with the back of my hand, streaking wet, sticky dough across my face in the process, and force a smile.

“I’m not,” I say.

“You don’t have to, like, lie.”

I sigh. “I was just thinking about Mamie.”

Annie rolls her eyes and makes a face at me. “Great, now you decide to show some emotion.” She throws her backpack down in the corner, where it lands with a decisive thud.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” I ask.

“You know,” she says. She rolls up the sleeves of her pink long-sleeved shirt and grabs an apron from a hook on the wall, just to the left of the racks where I store the trays.

“No, I don’t know,” I tell her. I stop what I’m doing and watch as she gets a carton of eggs and four sticks of butter out of the stainless steel refrigerator and grabs a measuring cup. She moves as fluidly through the kitchen as Mamie once did.

Annie doesn’t answer until after she has creamed the butter in the stand mixer, added four cups of sugar, and cracked the eggs in, one at a time. “Maybe if you’d been, like, capable of feeling anything when you were married to Dad, you wouldn’t be divorced right now,” she says finally, over the whir of the mixer.

My breath catches in my throat and I stare at her. “What are you talking about? I showed emotion.”

She turns the mixer off. “Whatever,” she mutters. “Only to, like, send me to my room and stuff. When did you ever act like you were happy to be with Dad?”

“I was happy!”

“Whatever,” she says. “You couldn’t even tell Dad you loved him.”

I blink at her. “Did he say that to you?”

“What, like I’m not old enough to figure things out on my own?” she asks, but from the way she avoids my gaze, I know I’ve hit the nail on the head.

“Annie, it’s not appropriate for your father to be saying bad things about me to you,” I say. “There are a lot of things about our relationship that you don’t understand.”

“Like what?” It’s a challenge, and she gazes at me coolly.

I weigh my options, but in the end, I know it’s not appropriate to drag our daughter into an adult battle that isn’t hers to fight. “That’s between me and your dad.”

She laughs at that and rolls her eyes. “He trusts me enough to talk to me,” she says. “And you know what? You ruin everything, Mom.”

Before I can reply, the front door to the bakery chimes. I glance at my watch. It’s a few minutes before six, our official opening time, but Annie must not have locked the door behind her when she came in.

“We’ll continue this later, young lady,” I say sternly.

“Whatever,” she mutters under her breath. She turns back to the batter she’s mixing, and I watch for a second as she adds some flour and then some milk, then a dash of vanilla.

“Hey, Hope, you back there?” It’s Matt’s voice, from the front of the store, and I snap out of it.

I hear Annie say “Of course it’s him” under her breath, but I pretend not to as I make my way up front.



Mrs. Koontz and Mrs. Sullivan come in at 7:00 a.m. as usual, and for once, Annie rushes out to wait on them. Usually, she’s happier to be in the kitchen, baking cupcakes and miniature pies with her iPod on, effortlessly ignoring me until she has to go to school. But today, she’s sunshine and smiles, whisking into the main room and pouring their coffee before they even have a chance to order.

“Here, let me help you to your seats,” she says, juggling two coffee mugs and a little pitcher of cream as they trail behind her, exchanging glances.

“Why, thank you, Annie,” Mrs. Sullivan says as Annie puts the coffees and cream down and pulls out her chair for her.