The Sweetness of Forgetting (82)

I didn’t think I was a person who needed anyone. My mother was always very independent. And after my grandfather died when I was ten, Mamie was always busy with the bakery, too busy to tell me her fairy tales anymore, too busy to listen to my stories of school and friends and everything that was going on in my imagination. My mother had never been very interested in those stories anyhow, and gradually, I stopped telling them.

I don’t need anyone, I told myself as I got older. I didn’t talk to my mother or my grandmother about grades, or boys, or college decisions, or anything. They both seemed so absorbed in their own worlds, and I felt like an outsider with both of them. So I created my own world.

It wasn’t until I had Annie that I learned to let someone else in. And now that she’s right around the age I was when I had to learn to fend for myself, I’ve realized I’m holding on tighter, in a way. I don’t want her drifting out of my universe into one of her own making, like I did. And that, I realize, is what makes me different from my grandmother and my mother.

But as Mamie has regressed through time, turning almost into a child as the Alzheimer’s steals her lifetime, I’ve found her drifting back into my universe too. I realize that I’m not ready for it to just be me and Annie. I need Mamie here a little while longer.

“Come back, Mamie,” I whisper to my grandmother. “We’re going to try to find Jacob, okay? You just have to come back to us.”



Four days later, Mamie’s condition hasn’t changed, and I’ve just opened the bakery when Matt comes by with a big packet of papers in his hands. My heart sinks. With all the drama surrounding Mamie’s stroke, and the discovery of the existence of Alain and Jacob, I’ve nearly forgotten the trouble my business is in.

“I’m going to get right to the point,” Matt says after we exchange uneasy hellos. “The investors don’t like the numbers.”

I stare at him. “Okay . . .” I say.

“And I’m going to be honest: you leaving and going to Paris during the time they were considering this investment decision, well, let’s just say that was pretty foolish.”

I sigh. “Maybe from a business perspective.”

“What else is there right now?”

I look down at the tray of Star Pies I’ve been holding in my hands since Matt walked in. “Everything,” I say softly. I smile at the pies for a moment before sliding them into the display case.

Matt looks at me like I’ve lost my mind. “Hope, they’re pulling out. They’ve run the numbers, and you’re marginal, at best. They were on the fence, and I’ve been doing my best to try to persuade them on your behalf. But realizing you’d closed like that, at the drop of a hat . . . well, that was the final straw.”

I nod, my heart thudding. I realize what he’s saying to me: that I may have just lost the bakery. And I have a sensation coursing through me that feels a bit like panic. But I’m not nearly as upset as I would have thought, and this worries me a little. Shouldn’t I be more upset that my family’s business, my entire livelihood, is about to be ripped away from me? Instead, I just have the strange sense that things are going to work out the way they’re meant to, whatever that means.

“Are you listening to me, Hope?” Matt asks, and I realize he’s been talking while I was thinking.

“Sorry, what were you saying?” I ask.

“I was saying that there’s not that much more I can do. Do you know how out of my way I went to even get them here in the first place? But they’re not going to invest, Hope. I’m sorry.”

Matt doesn’t say anything as I quietly rearrange pastries in the display case. The door dings, and Lisa Wilkes, who works at the stationery shop on the corner, comes in with Melixa Carbonell, who works at the pet shop on Lietz Road. They were both a few years behind Matt and me in high school, and they come in together at least once a week.

Matt is silent while Lisa orders a coffee and Melixa orders a green tea, which takes me a few minutes to make, because I have to plug in the electric kettle. In the meantime, they argue over whether they’ll split a piece of baklava or a piece of cheesecake. In the end, I settle for charging them for a piece of baklava and throwing in a piece of cheesecake for free.

“That’s why you’re going out of business, you know,” Matt says after they’ve left.

“What?”

“You can’t just go giving people free pastries. They were totally playing you.”

“They weren’t playing me,” I respond indignantly.

“Sure they were. You’re too generous. They knew if they argued in front of you, you’d be nice and give them both pastries. And you did.”

I sigh. I don’t even bother explaining that there’s no way I’ll go through the remainder of the cheesecake today anyhow. “My grandmother always ran this bakery like it was her kitchen and the customers were her guests,” I say instead.

“That’s not a good business model,” Matt says.

I shrug. “I never said it was. But I’m proud of that tradition.”

The door dings again, and I look up to see Alain shuffling in. He’s taken to walking here himself in the mornings. I worry about him doing so at his age—the walk is more than a mile—but he seems to be perfectly healthy, and he swears that he walks far more than this each day in Paris.