Somewhere Out There(6)

Natalie


Natalie Clark was running late.

She sat inside her car in the pickup line at Pine Wood Elementary on a Tuesday, waiting for Hailey to emerge from her second-grade classroom. Natalie drummed her fingers against the steering wheel, staring at the sign over the entrance that proclaimed in bright red letters: 2015 IS GOING TO BE OUR BEST YEAR YET! as she mentally tallied the number of red velvet cupcakes she had in the back of her car. The order had been for six dozen, but as always, on the off chance some of them didn’t turn out flawless, she’d baked extra, and now was worried she’d spent so much time obsessing over getting the swirls of cream cheese frosting just so before filling the boxes, she might have set one on the counter at home.

“Damn it,” she muttered as she unbuckled her seat belt, opened her car door, and jogged around to open the trunk. It was a gray and drizzly late-September afternoon, but instead of thinking about the damage the rain would do to her recent blowout, she counted the signature pale lavender boxes in which she delivered all of her company’s, Just Desserts, products, and confirmed that yes, the entire order was there. Thank god. Natalie had wanted to pick up Hailey after she’d delivered the cupcakes to her client’s house, then grab Henry from preschool on their way home, but now she would have to take her daughter along to drop off the order. It wouldn’t be the first time her best-laid organizational plans were a victim of her culinary perfectionism.

The car behind her gave a quick honk, snapping her out of her thoughts, and Natalie looked up to see that all of the vehicles in front of her had already loaded their children and pulled away. Causing a backup was a major offense for parents who picked up their kids at the school; some people had been known to purposely rear-end a person not paying attention to the flow of the line.

“Unbelievable,” her husband, Kyle, had said when Natalie told him about the deliberate fender bender she’d witnessed a couple of weeks ago. “The victim should threaten to sue for vehicular assault.” Kyle was a defense attorney, and tended to notice potential legal threats the same way an electrician might point out bad wiring in another person’s house.

Natalie was a lawyer, too, but after passing the bar and an unhappy three years at her father’s firm, Bender & Beck, telling him that she wasn’t going to return to work when Hailey was born had been one of the hardest conversations she’d ever had. But the truth was she wasn’t passionate about the law—she’d only studied it to make her father happy—and something about becoming a mother had prioritized things for Natalie. It made her realize the days were too short, too precious, to waste spending them in a career that required insanely long hours and in general made her miserable. She and Kyle agreed that she would stay home until Hailey started school, and Natalie could use that time to figure out exactly what kind of work she wanted to do. Their son, Henry, came along two years after his big sister, and it wasn’t until he started preschool that Natalie’s favorite hobby began to morph into a job. She’d loved baking since she was seven years old, when a family friend gave her a hardcover cookbook filled with glossy, colorful pictures of perfectly round chocolate chip cookies and smoothly frosted cakes. She used to sit on the couch for hours, turning the book’s pages, reading through each recipe as though it were a story, the ingredients its characters, dreaming of the bakery she might one day own.

She lost sight of that dream somewhere along the way and instead, ended up doing what her parents expected of her. She went to law school. Which in some ways was good for Natalie, who at her core was a little shy. It forced her to push through her insecurities and interact—to argue case law with her classmates and become, at least on the surface, a well-spoken professional. But it wasn’t until she worked up the courage to leave her father’s firm that Natalie started to follow her true passion. She became known among the other mothers in her mommy and me classes as the baker of the best cookies and other sweet treats, and was often called upon to provide the dessert for any group function. For Natalie, baking offered a way to connect. She lived for the looks on people’s faces when they bit into one of her lemon drop cupcakes or caramel honey-pot pecan bars. Expressing their love of a sugary treat was a language everyone knew how to speak.

Soon, she started receiving offers to be paid for her talent. Encouraged by her customers’ overwhelming positive response, she took several classes at the local community college to hone her skills and started Just Desserts catering company last year, when Hailey began first grade and Henry started a full-day preschool program, which, because of his later birthday and the fact that he didn’t seem quite ready to make the transition into kindergarten, Natalie and Kyle had decided to keep him in for one more year. She relied mostly on word of mouth to gather new clientele, and wasn’t making a fortune, but she loved the flexibility running her own business allowed. “You went from torts to tarts,” Kyle liked to say, which always made Natalie roll her eyes.

Now, Natalie waved and smiled at the man in the blue Honda Accord behind her, hoping he wasn’t about to ram her for her lapse in attention, which would undoubtedly ruin the cupcakes. “Sorry!” she said as she shut the trunk and rushed back behind the wheel. Throwing the car into gear, she pulled forward as far as she could, then glanced at the clock. Two forty-five, and she had to have the order delivered by three. “Where are you, munchkin?” she murmured, and then, as though Hailey had somehow heard her question, Natalie heard her daughter’s voice.