Sweet Forty-Two(71)

“I have to be honest with you, Georgia. I was afraid that after a few days of this, I would get bored, or something. I was thinking, Okay what’s the big deal? There are muffins, breads, cupcakes, just different flavors. How exciting can that be?” Regan rambled as he flipped through my recipe book.

“That’s ... honest of you.” I was trying to search his face for further information, to see if there was a but coming.

“But,” there it was, “what I realized is ... it’s just like music. There are only twelve notes on a musical scale. Period. That’s it. Sure there are octaves and other minutely measurable frequencies. But, the point is ... all the music you’ve ever heard is based on twelve notes. Twelve!” His eyes lit up as he held out his hands, like he was presenting me with this gift of twelve.

“Right ... twelve...” I smirked as he slid the book back to me. I thumbed through the pages to find my chocolate chip cookie recipe.

“People search for variety everywhere. With everything. In music and in here, in your bakery, we make variety. We are the masters of variety.” He seemed quite pleased with himself, leaning back against the painted cinderblock wall and folding his arms across this chest.

“It’s like colors,” he continued. Dear God, he continued. “Primary colors. Red. Blue. Yellow. Boom.”

“You’ve gone mad. And that’s not a title I dole out to just anyone.” I laughed and pointed to the recipe on the page. He dutifully began gathering flours as I pulled out the wet ingredients.

“I just mean, Georgia,” he teased, “people generally take the few basic and bare things afforded to us in this world and make them as complicated as possible. Us, though? We complicate it in beautiful ways. We have fun with it. Basically, we’re awesome.”

He grinned. To call it a grin wouldn’t do it justice, really. It was like one side of his face was sneaking up on the other side. Waiting to jump out and say Surprise! Both of his eyes lit up. He really was quite ... I have to say it ... beautiful. He was rugged and elegant. Traits that I’d been hard pressed to find on the men in my life anywhere. The way Regan carried himself made you think he could just as easily fall over as he could sweep you into a ballroom dance. Long, lanky limbs that moved in tempo with the earth on a frequency shared between him and Mother Nature alone.

Still, it was sexy. There, I said that, too. Regan was sexy and beautiful and he was helping me bake and I listened to him play his violin and we just spent time with each other. Few questions and fewer answers. I still didn’t even have an idea what Rae said to him in that letter he carried around with him in his back pocket every day.

“How’s your mom doing?” Regan asked so nonchalantly you’d think he was looking at me as I read the thermometer on the window, waiting for news on the weather.

We hadn’t set rules on what we would and would not talk about with each other, but this was the first time he’d mentioned her. I panicked a little, thinking maybe he’d found out about the shock therapy and was preparing for a grand sprint out of my life.

“She’s fine. Why?”

He shrugged. “I care about the people in your life. I haven’t seen her around since the first time I, uh, met her. I feel bad about the way I hand—”

“Don’t apologize.” I held up my hand. “She and I talked that day. She knows you didn’t mean any harm.”

“Was she mad about me thinking she was dead?” He winced like a child trying out a swear word for the first time.

I smiled. “No. She wasn’t even mad at me for making you think that. She’s very forgiving.”

“Is she excited about you opening the bakery?”

No, because she doesn’t know.

“She’s wanted me to open it for a long time. That whole binder there is filled with family recipes. Most of them I modify on the fly for this bakery, but they’re all hers and my grandmother’s.”

She had wanted me to open it for a long time. I was trying really hard not to lie to Regan, as had become customary for me in nearly every close relationship over the last decade. Still, the full truth was too new, too infantile in its resilience to the rejection I knew would chase after it.

“Well, let me know when she’s coming in again. I’d like to meet her, like, for real.”

“Will do.” I nodded. The fatigue of the last week and my mother pressed on me like a brick between my shoulder blades.

Tomorrow was another treatment. Another lie I’d have to tell Regan. Another reminder why I couldn’t feel about him the way I was feeling. Because the last thing I wanted was to watch his smile fade as he drove me to my own ECT appointments.

To watch the brassy sheen in his hair turn white with the stress of watching his girlfriend, or wife, or whatever I could possibly become, have her brain rewired over and over. His wife, because that’s what Regan would want, being the all-the-way romantic he is. His wife would forget little things at first. What she had for breakfast that morning, what movie they saw a few days ago. But, how long until she forgot about the way they met? The reasons they fell in love. How long before he looked for my eyes and found two empty wells? The deep kind. Not the wishing well kind.

There aren’t enough pennies in the world to cover the cost of that wish ... the wish that things would go differently for me.