Sweet Expectations (10 page)

Guilt deflated some of her steam. “You sleeping? It's eight fifteen.”

“Resting my eyes.” She sniffed. “Was that the Holder Brothers' truck I heard? Jeb can't shift gears without grinding them.”

“Yeah. Jeb wanted to make a delivery.”

“I sent an e-mail.”

“He said you didn't.”

Irritation widened her tired eyes. “I'll deal with him.”

And Rachel knew she would. The problem was she should be able to deal with Jeb. Instead of digging into what she couldn't do she shifted to what she thought was safe. “I slept a lot when I was pregnant.”

Daisy winced. “Don't say the P-word. I'm not there yet.”

“Doesn't matter what you want. It's all about the . . .” She hesitated and found a smile. “It's all about the B now.”

Daisy rubbed her eyes. “Why are you here?”

“I want to look at the recipe box.”

Daisy yawned and rubbed her eyes. “You're kidding.”

“I'd like to read through it. Maybe bake.” She dealt with nervous energy by baking.

Daisy yawned again. “You have ten days off and you want to bake?”

“It's an addiction. What can I say?” She snapped her fingers. “The box.”

Daisy raised a brow, surprised by Rachel's crisp tone. “Right.”

Daisy vanished and reappeared seconds later. She handed the box to Rachel.

Rachel thumbed through the yellowed cards. “We should try and find Jenna. Dad's old bakery records are in his attic.”

Daisy shook her head and rolled her head around as if working kinks from her neck. “My window of non-nausea doesn't open until later this evening.”

She smiled. “I didn't have much nausea.”

“Lucky you.”

“Want to bake with me?”

Daisy's bloodshot gaze narrowed. “I'll drink a ginger ale, eat crackers, and talk to you while you do.”

“Deal.”

“She wrote lots of notes in the margins.” Daisy nibbled a saltine and followed Rachel down the flight of stairs to her apartment. “You've scribbled notes on every cookbook you've owned.”

While Daisy dug a soda from the back of the refrigerator, Rachel thumbed through the cards in the box. “There are times when the recipe comes out right and other times when it won't and doesn't gel no matter what. It's my way of keeping track. And then sometimes I try different flavor combinations.” Rachel squinted as she studied one card. “This is a recipe for simple cake.”

“Yum.”

Rachel pulled bowls out of the cabinet and banged them hard on the stainless workspace. She grabbed ingredients, slamming all on the counter.

“So what's eating you?” Daisy said.

“I'm fine.”

Daisy sipped her ginger ale. “It sounded like you were dragging dead bodies out of your apartment earlier. Thump. Thump. Thump. What was it?”

For a moment Rachel didn't answer as she unwrapped a pound square of butter. “I cleaned out Mike's closet.”

Daisy sat silent, as if knowing there wasn't much she could say.

“I was fine until I saw his shoes.” A half smile quirked the edge of her lips as sadness simmered like a pot of sugar water reaching the hard-ball stage.

“All those crazy tennis shoes?”

Doubt amplified her sadness. “I saved one pair.” She frowned. “I chucked all his belongings into garbage bags.”

Daisy offered no signs of judgment. “I love garbage bags. It's the suitcase for the girl on the go.”

Her easy words softened the sadness. “I hauled them all downstairs and into the van. Made it as far as the Goodwill and watched the guy load them all on the truck.”

Daisy winced. “And then . . .”

Worry drew her mouth tight. “I kind of freaked out. I made the guy pull all the bags off the truck.”

Daisy winced. “You didn't bring all Mike's stuff back, did you?”

“No. Not that bad. But I dug through every bag.”

“Looking for?”

“The shoes he wore when the girls were born.”

“The ones stained with chocolate?”

She dumped the butter into the stainless bowl. “Yeah. I wanted to hold on to one memento.”

“Reasonable.”

She pulled a hand mixer from a drawer, popped two beaters into the sockets, plugged it in and switched it on low. The mixer strained against the hard butter, chewing at the edges of the brick. Rachel revved the speed of the beaters, shoving and pushing the butter until it lost its hard angles and dissolved into a creamy mixture. She shut off the mixer. “Mike never would have wished death so young. And he'd never have left us. I know.”

Daisy glanced toward her can of ginger ale. “But you still feel abandoned.”

Rachel nodded. “Yeah. In the days and weeks after he died I was so busy running around trying to keep it all together. I didn't have a lot of time to feel much. I mean I read about the stages of grief and kept thinking, ‘Well, I'm at Acceptance. I must have skipped the Anger stage.”

Daisy flicked her thumb against the can's tab. “Anger can be very tricky. It's good at hiding and lurking. But it always rears its head. In fact, I've seen it enough times that I think I can draw a picture of it.”

Rachel smiled as she shoved a measuring cup into a white canister filled with sugar and scooped out two cups, which she dumped onto the creamed butter. “It was a complete stranger to me until the last couple of months.”

“About time it arrived. Shows you are alive.”

Rachel shrugged a shoulder. “When you came in the spring, I thought the cavalry had arrived. For the first time since Mike died the panic in my chest eased and I could breathe.”

“Panic actually has its plusses. No time for much else when you are a little panicked. Definitely keeps you in the moment.”

She frowned. “I thought I'd feel better without fear always chasing me, but the extra time gives me a chance to really miss Mike. And then in the last couple of weeks I've somehow stumbled from sadness to anger. I've been so pissed lately.”

“Welcome to my world.”

“I never could understand why you were always so angry. I thought, ‘Yeah, her birth mother left, but she has Mom and Dad and we all love her. She should be fine.' Now I realize all the love in the world doesn't soften a terrible loss.”

Daisy swallowed. “It's also easy to be angry, Rachel. It's easy to shake your fist and search for the next person to blame. But since I arrived here, I realized I'd gotten a little tired of being angry. It's kind of like carrying a big heavy rock. You're so focused on the rock you miss the scenery.”

Rachel nodded. “It's all about the rock for me now.”

“Sooner rather than later you need to put it down.”

“And you have?”

“Most days. And then I send an e-mail to Terry and she doesn't respond right away and I find myself picking it up again. But at least now I know when I'm carrying it.”

Rachel mixed a splash of vanilla into the batter and blended it in. “Have you talked to Gordon?”

“Oh, yeah.”

“How did it go?”

Daisy shook her head. “Not well. I did a number on him.”

“You didn't ask for this. If you could have chosen a different outcome you would have chosen it.”

“Terry said the same to me when I asked her about leaving me. Woulda, shoulda, coulda doesn't really count.” She sighed. “At least this time I was honest with Gordon. I didn't try to hide my feelings.”

“He needs time to cool off.”

“You didn't see the look in his eyes.”

Rachel came around the counter and wrapped her arms around Daisy. “For the record, I'm excited about the baby.”

Daisy's questioning gaze met Rachel's. “Really?”

“Yeah, really. And if it's a girl, she will be dressed to the nines. I've all the girls' clothes, in two sets.”

She traced her finger around the rim of her soda can. “Given my luck, it'll be a boy.”

“Dad will be thrilled with the first male McCrae in the house. I know he loves us, but he'd kill for another guy on the premises.”

“Mom and Dad.” Daisy groaned. “That's going to be an interesting conversation.”

“They'll be a little surprised, but they'll adapt.”

Daisy squeezed Rachel's arm. “Thanks.”

Rachel returned to her mixing bowl. “We make a fine pair.”

“Call us knocked up and hacked off.”

Rachel laughed. Using the recipe card, Rachel finished mixing the cake. Soon she had the batter arranged in two parchment-lined cake pans. She popped them in the oven. The apartment filled with the sweet smells of vanilla and cinnamon.

As they inhaled scents of the baking cake, the room chilled, making them both shiver. Rachel rubbed her hands over her arms and moved toward the stove.

Daisy set her soda down. “I think I finally feel human.”

Rachel held her chilled fingers toward the oven. “No nausea? Aren't you a little ahead of schedule today? Shouldn't it be two or three more hours before the non-nausea time?”

“I'm not looking a gift horse in the mouth. The kid is giving me a reprieve, and I'm taking it. When are those cakes going to be ready? I'm starving.”

At that moment the buzzer dinged. “Ask, and you shall receive.” Slipping a red oven mitt on her hand, she opened the oven door and pulled out the cakes.

“God, they smell great.” Daisy inhaled deeply. “And they don't make me sick to my stomach.”

Smiling, Rachel dumped a cake on a white plate. Steam rose and normally she would have waited for it to cool before she cut it. Tonight, she cut it immediately and plated a piece for Daisy. “Here ya go.”

Daisy blew on the hot cake and then bit into it. She closed her eyes, chewing slowing. “I have died and gone to heaven.”

Rachel picked up a hot cake wedge and bit into it. “Not bad.”

“Looks like Jenna knew how to bake.”

“I'll say. And no eggs. No small feat.” She shuddered as a cool blast of air blew. “I think the AC kicked into overdrive.”

“What do you mean?” Daisy finished the first piece of cake.

“I'm freezing.”

“Really? I'm kinda warm. It must be ninety outside.”

“It's twelve in here.”

Daisy bit into the cake. “Maybe you're getting sick.”

“I feel fine. But it turned cold in here.”

Daisy shook her head. “This cake is amazing. It feels like I haven't eaten in weeks.”

The chill settled deeper in her bones and suddenly all the loneliness of the last eighteen months rose up. Tears threatened, but she swallowed forcing them back. “Times like this I really miss Mike. He'd have loved discovering a new recipe like this.”

Daisy reached for a second piece of cake and as if she hadn't heard Rachel, said, “I really hope I don't screw this kid up. I don't have a clue how I'm going to pull motherhood off.”

Rachel swiped away a tear. “Mike's birthday is next week. He'd have been thirty-five. It's not fair he died.”

“What if I'm like Terry, and I try but I fail?” As she nibbled the cake, her frown deepened. “I don't want to fail my child.”

The two sisters, each lost in a web of fear and worry, stood in the kitchen for several minutes. And then outside a car backfired.

Both sisters blinked at the intrusion and then stared at each other as if they'd forgotten the other was there.

Rachel shoved a shaking hand through her hair and stepped away from the cake. She cleared her throat and shook her head. “My emotions were amped up one thousand percent.”

“Me, too. And I do not like it.”

Rachel glanced at the half-eaten cake and the counter now littered with crumbs. “It's like the cake cast a spell.”

Daisy's gaze trailed hers. “It wasn't the cake.”

“How do you know?”

“It was hormonal.”

“You maybe, but I went through my cycle last week.”

Daisy pushed her cake plate away. “It was the cake, Rachel. How could it make us feel so much?”

“I don't know. But we were fine until we bit into the first piece.”

“It wasn't the cake.” She reached for her ginger ale and sipped slowly. “We are both just on edge.”

Rachel stretched her arms over her head. “Do you feel pretty good? Because I feel like a million bucks.”

Daisy rose. “My feel-good window has passed. I think I might go rest. You okay here?”

Rachel nodded. “Yeah. I'm good. Real good. Thanks.”

“Good,” Daisy said. “I still feel like I've been hit by a truck.”

“What can I do?”

“This time I don't think I'll be able to muscle my way through the problem. I'm not in charge anymore.”

Chapter Eight

Tuesday, 7:00
A.M.

11 days until grand reopening

Income Lost: $600

F
rom my attic desk, the sound of Jean Paul's drill grinding through wood rose up through the floors and snaked right up my spine. Normally noise and chaos didn't bother me, but lately it drove me mad. At my desk I buried my face in my hands wishing I could call Gordon. “I am going insane.”

I'd worked with an older woman years ago. She'd been a secretary, and I'd been an analyst on the rise. When life got tough and I thought I'd go crazy, she'd always smile and say, “This too shall pass.”

I'm not sure what had made me think of her. But I repeated the words, “This too shall pass.”

I breathed in and out, hoping it passed before I grabbed the hammer from Jean Paul's toolbox and hit him with it.

Instead of using a hammer on Jean Paul, I picked up the phone and dialed the Holder Brothers. Three rings and I got their receptionist's perky, “Holder Brothers.”

“Sandy, this is Daisy McCrae. How you doing today?” I'd start with nice.

“Ms. McCrae. How are the renovations going?”

“Well, thanks. Look, I've got a problem. Your man Jeb showed up here yesterday with a delivery. You and I agreed, no deliveries this week.”

“We sure did.”

“I don't mind the mistake as much as Jeb. He was rude to my sister.”

A heavy silence followed. “I'll let the boss know. I'd put you through but he's in the warehouse now.”

“No worries, Sandy. But if Jeb gives us trouble, especially Rachel, I'm firing Holder Brothers.” The bakery wasn't a huge client but in this economy every penny counted.

“It won't happen again, Ms. McCrae.”

“Thanks, Sandy.”

I hung up and, sighing as I stood, my gaze settled on Jenna's recipe box. Hadn't I left that with Rachel? She must have brought it back up last night. Lately I slept like the dead, so I could easily have missed her.

Picking up the box, I thumbed through the cards. Rachel had mentioned Dad had old bakery records. As much as I didn't want to think about Jenna, she kept creeping back into my thoughts.

“So much work to be done, and I want to play history detective.” But then what could it hurt to carve out a half hour. I'd take a peek at the records and return to work.

Downstairs, I checked in with Jean Paul, waved my cell as a signal I could be reached by phone. He held up his finger as he drove the drill deeper into a stud, halting when he'd punched through the wood.

He removed his finger from the trigger and the drill went silent. “My friend Gus has wine.”

“Wine?”

Jean Paul pushed back a thick lock of dark hair with his typical must-I-explain-again glance. “Gus. He owns a restaurant that is not to be. He has lots of wine. We can buy it from him, and we can sell the wine at the bakery.”

Right. Gus. “I don't have much cash.”

“He will sell the wine to us for three dollars a bottle. We can sell it for fifteen dollars a bottle.”

“Nice profit margin. How many bottles does he have?”

“One thousand.”

“Three thousand dollars.” A sum once insignificant was now a fortune.

“He will take half now and half in a month.”

“He is that desperate?”

Jean Paul reached in his back pocket and removed a cigarette pack.
“Oui
.
”

“And the basement could be a wine cellar?”

“
Oui
.”

“I'll need shelves.” My mind played with the possibilities as it added and rearranged numbers.

He shrugged. “Of course. Wine must be stored on its side.”

If I bought the shelves, I could do them on the cheap. And a wine cellar would set us apart. Bread, wine, and maybe cheese. It was a risk, but a risk with a high payout. “I'll do it. But it will have to be half now and half in sixty days. It will take me time to get a liquor license.”

He nodded. “I will tell him.”

“And he delivers?”

“I will ask.”

“Okay.” A little deeper in debt, I headed out the front door to my parents' house. “Have you seen Rachel?”

“She went for a walk.”

“Where?”

“I am not in charge of her.”

No doubt she needed a break, a day to breathe and regain her footing. Fair enough.

My folk's town house was next door to the bakery. Real estate in Old Town Alexandria had remained high despite the economy, but my folks had been in the neighborhood over forty years and thirty years in this house. When Dad pitched the idea of buying the house it had been cheap, but it had been a real reach for my folks. Dad had had to do some fast talking to get Mom to agree to the purchase. Because of his risk, they were sitting on some very pricey real estate.

Let's hope Gus's wine would do the same for me.

I climbed the front steps of their narrow brick townhome outfitted with wrought iron window baskets filled with red geraniums. The house had been built in the 1820s by a sea captain who'd made his money trading spices and slaves. The windows, original to the house, had a beveled wavy look that added a misty, watery quality. I dug my keys out of my pocket and opened the front door. Quickly, I moved to the alarm and punched in the year of Margaret's birth—my parents' universal security code. I'd tried to get them to vary the code, but the times we'd tried they'd forgotten the code and had to call me to help them reset it. I'd given up and reset them all back to Margaret's birthday.

The entryway was long and narrow and cut through the center of the house. Immediately in front of the door a slender, tall staircase climbed to the second and third floors. The walls, trimmed with waist-high wainscoting, were painted a creamy white and extended a good twelve feet. Pocket doors separated the hall from the first parlor. With an eye always on resale, Dad and Mom had chosen simple classic colors and finishes. However, when it came to furniture they chose what they liked. So the fireplace had been restored with a sleek marble and the floors were a light pine but the furniture was a couple of decades-old La-Z-Boys, end tables piled high with magazines, and a very wide-screened television.

I climbed the stairs to the second floor and glanced in my parents' room. Mom and Dad slept in a four-poster bed that had belonged to my dad's parents. Mom rarely made her bed, the exception being when they had company or she was on vacation. Mom had a fear of dying on the road, and the idea of everyone tromping through her house and seeing an unmade bed was too much for her. She wanted her last impression to be a good one.

I moved to the end of the hallway and opened the door leading to the attic. Thankfully it was a walk-up attic, so no pull-down rickety stairs. I switched on the light and climbed the roughly hewn stairs.

Dad had relocated the old bakery files to his attic about twenty years ago so that he had more room in his bakery office, which I was now having removed so we could add freezer space.

Halloween and Christmas decorations crowded the right side of the attic. My mother's favorite holiday adornments included a light-up snowman (with a bad right arm), a dozen careworn wreaths with red bows, assorted lights, and electric white candles for each of the town house's windows.

Dad had commandeered the left side of the attic, arranging his bakery files neatly in metal file cabinets. Dad had always been a good record keeper/historian of the Union Street Bakery, and as he'd gotten older the past drew him more and more. He'd talked about writing a book about the bakery's history but so far had not been able to sit still long enough to write the first page.

This early in the day, the attic temperatures were bearable, but by noon, the heat would be unmanageable. And if I'd waited until late July, heat plus the kid would have made this outing impossible.

Head bowed so I didn't bump into the rafters, I moved past the file cabinets designated for the 2000s, past the nineties, eighties, and then skipped quickly to the forties. The deeper I traveled back in time, the less space was dedicated to files. I knew if Dad had been alive one hundred years ago, he'd have saved every scrap of paper connected to the bakery. He grumbled often enough that his ancestors hadn't been the best archivists.

Like me, Dad favored organization because it gave him a sense of control. My birth mother had abandoned me at age three, and his father had died suddenly when he was fourteen. Both of us suffered a loss that ran so deep, we'd convinced ourselves if we were organized and orderly we could control the universe. Of course, neither of us had been widely successful. Dad had a heart that wouldn't tick much longer, and I was underemployed and pregnant.

I found the drawer marked
1940s
in the very back row. My grandfather would have kept these records. After this file cabinet there were only two more. The first one hundred years of the bakery garnered three cabinets, whereas the subsequent fifty had twelve. I glanced back toward the front to the five empty cabinets Dad had delivered weeks ago. These were going to be my cabinets. He'd anticipated I would be as dedicated a recorder as he. And honestly, he was right. I'd amassed more files in the last two months than Rachel and Mike did in their seven years of running the bakery.

With a hard tug, I pulled open the top file drawer. The marker read January–December 1940. I wasn't sure when Jenna came to work at the bakery, but her last recipe card was dated 1944.

These files, kept by my grandfather, were dusty and brittle. The handwriting on the tabs was bold, thick, and impatient. I understand impatient. Seems a baker is always stealing time. Time at the desk keeping records is time away from production, and no production means no money.

I pulled the first dozen files and moved back to the attic steps where the light was better and the air a touch cooler.

Smoothing my hand over the first file, I opened it. I was expecting to see the files and forms my dad used. Taxes, business license. But the first page contained a bill of sale for flour: forty pounds at twenty-five cents per five-pound bag. There were more receipts, and I marveled at the cost of butter, eggs, and sugar. There were ration books that my grandmother, like the wartime women, used to buy precious items such as sugar and butter. As a baker's wife, she'd have enjoyed extra rations through the business. By the end of file one all I'd gained was a lesson in inflation. Digging through the next three or four more files I found letters from my grandfather, a bank loan agreement to pay for the oven we used today, and information about local shopkeepers and merchants. But there was no mention of employees.

I neatly stacked and returned the files to the cabinet before grabbing more files to be searched page by page. As I went through the pages I imagined the grandfather I never knew. The bread, his customers, and the seasons ruled his life as they now directed mine. My father said his father had had a beautiful singing voice and customers marveled at his talent. Grandfather McCrae had dreamed of singing in New York on a grand stage. My father had a tin ear and his dreams were of joining the army and flying planes. Both had surrendered dreams for the bakery.

My dreams had changed over the years. First it had been college and then a master's. Then a top job. Then to make big bucks. And then, well . . . since my return to Alexandria, my dreams had ceased to matter. Maybe one day I'd make new ones.

Maybe.

Or was I going to be like my father and sacrifice the rest of my life for the bakery? And what about the kid? Was he going to grow up here with a mom frazzled by lack of sleep, shaky finances, and long hours behind the retail counter? I didn't exactly yearn for a return to finance. The money was good but lately the idea of getting on a plane in a suit didn't thrill me so much. But the bakery wasn't enough.

“Damn.”

I opened the last set of files dated 1943 and discovered the first set of employee files. My grandfather notes he's advertising for new employees, a clerk to run the front counter:
Clean, reliable, good with people
.

There were no applications, only names with notes on a blank page.
Christopher is too brash. Rosa is too short. Willa—my wife doesn't like her. And finally Jenna. A pleasant girl, nice smile, can bake.
There is a check beside her name. This was my first bit of information on Jenna.

Pleasant, nice smile, and can bake
.

I kept digging through the papers and found a black-and-white picture of six women and my grandfather. My grandfather's hair is dark and his body lean and fit. He's holding a plate of cookies and grinning at the camera. All smiling, young and slim, each girl wears a skirt dipping below the knees, a sweater, socks, and dark shoes. The girls have their arms linked together. A USO banner hangs in the Union Street Bakery window and snow on the ground suggests it's winter. I leaned in and studied the smiling faces. It wasn't hard to spot Jenna. She is the third from the left.