The Sweetness of Forgetting Read online

“Who didn’t have problems then?”

  “A lot of people did,” Matt agrees. “Unfortunately, you were among them. And with your credit score . . .”

  I close my eyes for a moment. I don’t even want to think about my credit score. It wasn’t exactly helped by my divorce, taking over my mother’s mortgage payment after her death, or juggling a large revolving balance between several credit cards just to keep the bakery stocked.

  “What can I do to fix this?” I finally ask.

  “Not a lot, I’m afraid,” Matt says. “You can try other lenders, of course, but the market’s tough right now. I can guarantee that you won’t get anywhere with another bank. And with your payment history and the fact that a Bingham’s just opened down the street . . .”

  “Bingham’s,” I mutter. “Of course.” They’ve been the bane of my existence for the past year. A small New England doughnut chain based in Rhode Island, they’ve been steadily expanding across the region in an attempt to go head-to-head with Dunkin’ Donuts. They opened their sixteenth regional location a half mile from my bakery nine months ago, just when I was climbing out of the financial hole I’d found myself in after the recession.

  It was a storm I could have weathered if not for the financial impact of the divorce. But now I’m hanging on for dear life, and Matt knows it; all my loans are with his bank.

  “Listen, there’s one option I can think of for you,” Matt says. He takes a long sip of his wine and leans forward. “There are a few investors I work with in New York. They’re always looking for small businesses to . . . help out. I can call in a favor.”

  “Okay,” I say slowly. I’m not sure I like the idea of having strangers invest in what has always been a family business. Nor do I like the thought of Matt calling in favors on my behalf. But I’m also aware that the alternative may be losing the bakery altogether. “How would that work, exactly?”

  “They’d basically buy you out,” he says. “So they’d assume the loan with the bank. You’d get a cash payout, enough to pay off some of the bills you’re facing right now. And you’d stay on to manage the bakery and run the day-to-day operations. If they go for it.”

  I stare at him. “You’re telling me that my only option is to entirely sell my family’s bakery to some stranger?”

  Matt shrugs. “I know it’s not ideal. But it would solve your financial problems in the short term. And with some luck, I could persuade them to let you stay on as the bakery’s manager.”

  “But it’s my family’s bakery,” I say in a small voice, aware that I’m repeating myself.

  Matt looks away. “Hope, I don’t know what else to tell you. This is pretty much your last option unless you have a half million dollars lying around. And with the debt you’re in, it’s not like you can just pick up and start over in another location.”

  I can’t formulate words. After a moment, Matt jumps back in and adds, “Look, these are good people. I’ve known them for a while. They’ll do right by you. At least you won’t wind up closed.”

  I feel like Matt has just dropped a grenade in my lap, pulled the pin, and then offered to clean up the carnage, all with a smile on his face. “I need to think about this,” I say dully.

  “Hope,” Matt says. He pushes his wineglass aside and reaches across the table. He folds his hands around my much smaller ones in a gesture I know is supposed to tell me I’m safe. “We’ll figure it out, okay? I’ll help you.”

  “I don’t need your help,” I mumble. He looks wounded, and I feel terrible, so I don’t pull my hands away. I know he’s just trying to be a nice guy. The thing is, it feels like charity. And I don’t need charity. I may sink or I may swim, but I’d at least like to do it on my own.

  Before either of us can say anything else, I hear my phone ringing from inside my purse. Embarrassed, I pull my hands away and grab for it. I hadn’t meant to leave the ringer on. I can see the maître d’ glaring at me from across the restaurant as I answer.

  “Mom?” It’s Annie, and she sounds upset.

  “What’s wrong, sweetie?” I ask, already half standing up, ready to go to her rescue, wherever she is.

  “Where are you?”

  “I’m out at dinner, Annie,” I say. I avoid mentioning Matt, lest she think it’s a date. “Where are you? Aren’t you at your dad’s?”

  “Dad had to go meet a client,” she mumbles. “So he dropped me back at your house. And the dishwasher is, like, totally broken.”

  I close my eyes. I’d filled it with detergent and turned it on a half hour before Matt got there, assuming that the cycle would be nearly over by the time I left. “What happened?”

  “I didn’t do it,” Annie says quickly. “But there’s, like, water all over the floor. I mean like lots of inches. Like a flood or something.”

  My heart drops. A pipe must have burst. I can’t even imagine how much it will cost to fix, or how much damage has been done to my old hardwood floors. “Okay,” I say in an even tone. “Thanks for letting me know, honey. I’ll be right home.”

  “But how can I stop the water?” she asks. “It’s, like, still totally flowing. The whole house is going to be flooded.”

  I realize I have no idea how to shut off the water to the kitchen. “Let me try to figure it out, okay? I’ll call you back. I’m on my way home.”

  “Whatever,” Annie says, and hangs up on me.

  I tell Matt what happened, and he sighs and summons the waiter to ask for our meals to be boxed up.

  “I’m sorry,” I say as we hurry outside to the car five minutes later. “My life is one disaster after another lately.”

  Matt just shakes his head. “Things happen,” he says tightly. It’s not until we’re driving back toward my house that he speaks again. “You can’t put this business thing off, Hope,” he says. “Or it’s all going to go away. Everything your family’s worked for.”

  I don’t reply, both because I know he’s right and because I can’t deal with it right now. Instead, I ask him whether he knows how to turn off the water supply to the kitchen, but he says he doesn’t, so we ride in silence the remainder of the way home.

  “Whose Jeep is that?” Matt asks as he pulls up in front of my house. “There’s no room for me to park in your driveway.”

  “Gavin’s,” I say softly. His familiar dusty-blue Wrangler is parked beside my old Corolla. My heart sinks.

  “Gavin Keyes?” Matt says. “The handyman? What’s he doing here?”

  “Annie must have called him,” I say through gritted teeth. My daughter doesn’t know that I still haven’t paid Gavin in full for the work he did around my house over the summer. Not even close. She doesn’t know that one July afternoon on the porch with him, after getting a statement from the bank, I’d broken down in embarrassing tears, and that a month later, when he’d finished his repairs around my house, he’d insisted on letting me pay him in free pastries and coffee from the bakery for the time being. Annie doesn’t know that he’s the only person in town other than Matt who knows what a mess my life is, or that because of that, he’s the last person in the world I want to see right now.

  I walk inside, with Matt a few steps behind, carrying my meal from Fratanelli’s. In the kitchen, I find Annie with a stack of towels and Gavin bent over with his head under my sink. I blink when I realize my eyes have gone directly to the thigh of his jeans, to see whether the hole I’d noticed this morning is still there. It is, of course.

  “Gavin,” I say, and he starts, pushes back from the sink, and stands up. His eyes dart back and forth between Matt and me, and he scratches his head as Matt moves past him to put my food in the refrigerator.

  “Hey,” Gavin says. He glances at Matt again and then back at me. “I came right over when Annie called. I got your water turned off for now. Looks like the pipe that burst is in the wall, behind the dishwasher. I’ll come over and fix it for you the day after tomorrow, if you don’t mind waiting.”

  “You don’t have to do that,” I say softly. I make eye c
ontact with him, hoping that he knows what I’m trying to say: that I still can’t pay him.

  But he just smiles and goes on as if he hasn’t heard me. “Tomorrow’s packed, but the next day, I’m wide open,” he says. “I just have a small job over at the Foley place in the morning. Besides, this shouldn’t take too long to fix. It’s just a pipe repair, and you should be good as new.” His eyes dart to Matt again and then back to me. “Listen, I’ve got a wet-vac in the Jeep. Let me go grab it, and I’ll help you get some of this water up. We can see if it did any damage once the floors are dry.”

  I glance at Annie, who’s still standing there with a huge pile of towels in her hand. “We can clean all this up ourselves,” I tell Gavin. “You don’t have to stay. Right?” I add, looking at Annie and then at Matt.

  “I guess,” Annie says with a shrug.

  Matt looks away. “Actually, Hope, I’ve got an early morning tomorrow. I’m going to have to head home.”

  Gavin snorts and walks outside without saying another word. I ignore him. “Oh,” I say to Matt. “Of course. Thanks for dinner.”

  By the time I walk Matt to the door, Gavin’s reentering with his wet-vac.

  “I said you didn’t have to do that,” I mumble.

  “I know what you said,” Gavin says, without slowing down to look at me. A moment later, as I watch Matt’s shiny Lexus pull away from the curb, I hear Gavin’s vacuum turn on in the kitchen. I close my eyes for a minute, and then I turn and begin walking back toward the one mess in my life that can actually be fixed.

  The next evening, Annie’s at Rob’s house again, and as I mop up the remainder of the mess in the kitchen after work, I find myself thinking of Mamie, who always used to know how to fix disasters. It’s been two weeks since I last visited her, I realize. I should be a better granddaughter, I think with a swell of guilt. I should be a better person. Yet one more area in which I seem to be eternally falling short.

  With a lump in my throat, I finish mopping, put some lipstick on in the hall mirror, and grab my keys. Annie’s right; I need to go see my grandmother. Visiting Mamie always makes me want to cry, because although the home she’s in is cheerful and friendly, it’s terrible to see her slipping away. It’s like standing on the deck of a boat, watching the waves suck someone under, and knowing that there’s no life preserver to throw in.

  Fifteen minutes later, I’m walking through the doors of Mamie’s assisted living facility, a huge home that’s painted buttercream yellow and filled with pictures of flowers and woodland creatures. The top floor is the memory care unit, where visitors are required to enter a pass code on a digital pad at the door.

  I walk down the hallway toward Mamie’s room, which sits at the far end of the west wing. The residents’ rooms are all private and apartment-style, although they eat all their meals in the dining room, and staff members all have master keys so that they can check on residents and give them their daily medications. Mamie’s on an antidepressant, two heart medications, and an experimental drug for Alzheimer’s that doesn’t seem to be helping; I meet with the staff doctor once a month to get a status report. He said at our last meeting that her mental faculties have been going sharply downhill in the last few months.

  “The worst part is,” he’d said, looking over his glasses at me, “she’s lucid enough to know it. This is one of the hardest stages to watch; she knows her memory will be all but gone soon, which is very unsettling and sad for patients in this state.”

  I swallow back a lump as I ring the doorbell beside her name: Rose McKenna. I can hear her shuffling around inside, probably getting up from her recliner with some effort, moving toward the door with the cane she’s been using since she fell and broke her hip two years ago.

  The door opens, and I resist the urge to throw myself into her arms for a hug, the way I used to do when I was a little girl. Up until this moment, I’d thought I’d come here for her, but now I realize it’s for me. I need this. I need to see someone who loves me, even if it’s an imperfect love.

  “Hello,” Mamie says, smiling at me. Her hair looks whiter than the last time I saw her, the lines in her face deeper. But as always, she’s wearing her burgundy lipstick, and her eyes are rimmed in kohl and mascara. “What a surprise, dear.”

  Her words are tinged with the hint of a French accent that has all but disappeared. She’s been in the United States since the early 1940s, but the traces of her long-ago past still shroud her words like one of the feather-light French scarves she almost always has wrapped around her neck.

  I reach forward to hug her. When I was younger, she was solid and strong. Now, as she leans into the embrace, I can feel the bones of her spine, the sharpness of her shoulders.

  “Hi, Mamie,” I say softly, blinking back tears as I pull away.

  She stares at me through gray eyes that are clouded over. “You will have to forgive me,” she says. “I get a little forgetful sometimes. Which one are you, dear? I know I should remember.”

  I swallow hard. “I’m Hope, Mamie. Your granddaughter.”

  “Of course.” She smiles at me, but her gray eyes are foggy. “I knew that. I just need a reminder sometimes. Please, come in.”

  I follow her inside her dimly lit apartment, where she leads me to the living room window.

  “I was just watching the sunset, my dear,” she says. “In a moment, we’ll be able to see the evening star.”

  Chapter Three

  North Star Vanilla Cupcakes

  CUPCAKES

  INGREDIENTS

  1 cup unsalted butter, room temperature

  1 1/2 cups granulated sugar

  4 large eggs

  1 tsp. pure vanilla extract

  3 cups flour

  3 tsp. baking powder

  1/2 tsp. salt

  1/2 cup milk

  DIRECTIONS

  1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Line 24 muffin cups with paper liners.

  2. In a large bowl, cream together butter and sugar using electric mixer. Beat until light and fluffy, then beat in eggs one at a time. Beat in vanilla extract and mix well.

  3. Sift together flour, baking powder and salt, and add to the butter mixture, about a cup at a time, alternating with milk.

  4. Fill muffin cups about halfway. Bake for 15–20 minutes, or just until a knife inserted through the top of a cupcake comes out clean. Cool for 10 minutes in pan, then move to wire rack to cool completely.

  5. Wait until they’ve cooled completely, then frost with pink icing (recipe below).

  PINK ICING

  INGREDIENTS

  1 cup unsalted butter, slightly softened

  4 cups confectioners’ sugar

  1/2 tsp. vanilla extract

  1 tsp. milk

  1–3 drops red food coloring

  DIRECTIONS

  1. Beat the butter in a medium bowl with an electric mixer until light and fluffy.

  2. Gradually add the sugar and beat until well blended.

  3. Add the vanilla and milk and continue to beat until well blended.

  4. Add one drop of red food coloring and beat well to incorporate. If you’d like the icing to be a deeper pink, add one or two drops more, and beat after each drop to incorporate. Spread on cupcakes, as directed above.

  Rose

  Rose gazed out the window, searching, as she always did, for the first star on the horizon. She knew it would appear, as twinkling and brilliant as an eternal flame, just after the setting sun painted the sky in ribbons of fire and light. When she was a girl, they’d called this twilight l’heure bleue, the blue hour, the time when the earth was neither completely light nor completely dark. Rose had always found comfort in this middle ground.

  The evening star, which appeared each night during the deep velvet twilight, had always been her favorite, although it wasn’t a star at all; it was the planet Venus, the planet named after the goddess of love. She had learned that long ago, but it hadn’t changed anything, not really; here on earth, it was hard to tell what w
as a star and what wasn’t. For years, she had counted all the stars she could see in the night sky. She was always searching for something, but she hadn’t found it yet. She didn’t deserve to, she knew, and that made her sad. A lot of things made her sad these days. But sometimes, from one day to the next, she couldn’t remember what she was crying for.

  Alzheimer’s. She knew she had it. She heard the whispers in the halls. She had watched her neighbors in the home come and go, their memories slipping further with each passing day. She knew that the same thing was happening to her, and it scared her for reasons no one would understand. She dared not speak them aloud. It was too late.

  Rose knew that the girl with the glistening brown hair, the familiar features, and the beautifully sad eyes had just told her who she was, but she had already forgotten. A familiar panic rose in her throat. She wished she could grab the memories like lifelines and hold on before she went under. But she found them slippery, impossible to grasp. So she cleared her throat, forced a smile, and hazarded her best guess.

  “Josephine, dear, look for the star on the horizon,” she said. She pointed to the empty space where she knew the evening star would make its appearance, any second now. She hoped she had guessed right. She hadn’t seen Josephine in a long time. Or maybe she had. It was impossible to know.

  The girl with the sad eyes cleared her throat. “No, Mamie, I’m Hope,” she said. “Josephine isn’t here.”

  “Yes, of course, I know that,” Rose said quickly. “I must have misspoken.” She couldn’t let them know, any of them, that she was losing her memory. It was shameful, wasn’t it? It was as if she didn’t care enough to hold on, and that embarrassed her, because nothing could be further from the truth. Perhaps if she pretended a little longer, the clouds would go away, and her memories would return from wherever they’d been hiding.

  “It’s okay, Mamie,” said the girl, who looked far too old to be Hope, her only granddaughter, who couldn’t be more than thirteen or fourteen. Yet Rose could see the lines of worry etched around this girl’s eyes, far too many lines for a girl that age. She wondered what was weighing on her. Maybe Hope’s mother would know what was wrong. Maybe then, Rose would be able to help her. She wanted to help Hope. She just didn’t know how.