How to Eat a Cupcake (7 page)

Downstairs, I could see right away that Jake loved dogs as much as I did. I had to warn him not to try too hard with Gus; too much attention from a stranger would only make Gus more nervous out there in the big loud world. Jake managed to restrain himself for half a block, but soon was cooing down to Gus, running his hand down the length of his silky black-and-tan coat, and passing him a little piece of chorizo from a napkin that he'd somehow slipped into his pocket at El Farolito without me noticing. Gus pressed himself against Jake's leg and looked adoringly up at him as he gobbled the meat, his tail for a moment wagging as freely as it did at home.

“So, can I see you again soon?” Jake asked, looking up from Gus to me, his eyes crinkling against the sunlight.

YES!
Teenage Annie screamed.

“I suppose that could be arranged,” said Adult Annie, finally, if barely, staking her claim.

Chapter 4

Julia

W
hen I heard Jacqueline, the maid, opening the door for Wes, I hurried out of my bedroom, but it was too late: my mother's throaty voice carried up the stairs to me as clearly as if she were speaking directly into my ear.

“Wesley darling, how wonderful to see you! Julia didn't even let us know you were back in town. She must be trying to keep you all to herself.”

Wes's response was too low to make out, but I could hear the warmth in his voice, the drawl of South Carolina hanging in there after all those years. I loved his voice. I loved thinking about him in business meetings all over the world, his honeyed, down-home vernacular and his gracious manner unexpected from a successful American businessman. I loved introducing him to people and watching their reactions when this big, sweet, slow-moving guy began talking about wireless Internet boosters and the socioeconomic complexities of third world countries. He had a pull, a magnetism, that people seemed unable to resist, least of all me. He was not really the sort of man I thought I would end up with, but I suspected I loved him for that reason, too.

“Well, surprise or not, I'm very glad you're here,” my mother was saying as I descended the stairs. Her hand, I could see now, rested conspiratorially on Wes's arm. “Julia's been moping around this house night and day for weeks. Your visit couldn't be better timed.”

“Mother, you're exaggerating,” I said as I crossed the foyer to join them. “Wes knows I don't mope.” I kissed him on the lips. “Hi.”

“Hey there,” he said, hugging me tightly so the side of my face pressed into his crisp linen shirt. He was one of those men who managed to make even off-the-rack clothing look perfectly tailored to his broad frame; the combination of that stylish, yet unfussy wardrobe and his debonair good looks created an overall impression of confidence without cockiness. There was something so unquestionably
manly
about him, and seeing him still gave me butterflies even after all our time together. I wasn't so head-over-heels to not realize that some of the spark between us was undoubtedly flamed by the fact that we had yet to actually live in the same city as each other, and had in fact only seen each other, at most, once every couple of weeks for the entirety of our relationship. Even now that we were finally living on the same coast, we were unlikely to see each other with much more frequency in the year leading up to our wedding. Wes owned a condo in San Francisco, but spent most nights at a hotel near his company headquarters in Silicon Valley and probably caught the majority of his sleep on airplanes, living out of a suitcase as he traveled nationally and internationally to raise funds and establish manufacturing operations. He'd already warned me that the months ahead would be no different; he'd be away from the Bay Area more often than he was there, determined to get his business ducks in a row so he could properly enjoy our wedding and subsequent honeymoon in Fiji.

When he released me, he looked over at my mother and said, “With all due respect, Mrs. St. Clair, Julia's right—I don't think moping is in her DNA. She must have her mother's dynamite genes to thank for that.”

It was just like Wes to find a way to take my side and still manage to charm my mother. I could see the tiniest hint of a flush make its way across her smooth cheeks, her lips working to not break into too pleased a smile. “Wesley darling,” she rasped, “it's
Lolly
. If that doesn't quite roll off the tongue just yet, I'll be forced to make matters worse by insisting you call me Mother. I don't think either of us want that, do we?”

“No, ma'am,” Wes drawled, laughing. “Lolly it is.”

“So, tell me, what do you make of this whole cupcake scheme?” she asked. “Here I thought my daughter and I were going to spend the year planning a fabulous wedding, and instead she's starting a business with her old friend Annie.”

“Mother!” I cried. Wes looked at me with quizzical amusement, his brows raised high above his square-framed glasses. “I haven't had a chance to tell Wes about the shop yet. He just walked in the door!”

“For heaven's sake, haven't you two heard of telephones? What's with the secrecy?”

“I wanted to give him the news in person.” I glanced at Wes. “I'll tell you all about it at lunch.”

Wes's dark eyes twinkled. “You know me—if there's one thing I like better than surprises, it's talking new business ventures over a heaping plate of food.”

“Where are you going?” my mother asked, pulling a tiny, wayward thread from the cuff of her white blouse.

“Rose's.” I glanced at my watch. “We should get going. Our reservation is in ten minutes.”

“Union Street was a zoo this morning. Curtis will drive you so you don't have to deal with parking,” my mother pronounced. She shook a finger at Wes. “The chopped salad followed by the roasted turkey on brioche. Don't let anyone talk you into ordering anything else.”

“W
hat's all this about a cupcake shop? You're taking up the domestic arts? Business school to baked goods . . . you're liable to give me whiplash!” Wes joked as Curtis eased the Bentley out of the courtyard, through the front gate, and into the street.

I tried not to bristle at Wes's teasing tone, but now that we were alone I felt on edge. There was so much unsaid between us, so many half truths that had built up so quickly. I leaned my head back against the cool leather seat and took a deep breath. If I could have foreseen the repercussions the conversation that followed would have over the course of that year, I would have avoided it all together. Instead, I plowed blithely forward, hoping that full disclosure in the seemingly innocuous area of cupcakes would act as a smokescreen for the nondisclosures in other, darker areas of my life.

“I'll be on the business end of things,” I explained. “Annie will do the baking. You know the Save the Children benefit my mother threw? Annie made the cupcakes for it and they blew me away. It's crazy she doesn't already have her own bakery. Those cupcakes are going to take this city captive.”

“If anyone can tap into the pulse of a city, it's you, baby,” Wes said. “Sounds exciting.” When he leaned over and kissed me, I felt myself relax a little. He seemed to notice this change and smiled. “You look good. I think being a small-business owner will agree with you.”

“Well, nothing's official yet. We still have a lot of details to hammer out. And, about that ‘small' part . . .” I shot him a good-natured warning look.

He laughed. “Oh, with you at the helm, there's no chance this business will be small for long. You could out-strategize Mrs. Fields, Auntie Anne, and Little Debbie combined any day of the week and twice on Sundays.”

“Those old broads?” I scoffed. “They'll never see us coming.”

We both looked ahead at the bay view as Curtis nosed the car down the steep slope toward Union Street.

“Still,” Wes said. “I have to admit I'm a little surprised. I knew you and Annie grew up together, but I didn't realize you two were still close.”

I'd told Wes about my childhood with Annie and Lucia, and he knew that Annie and I hadn't been in touch in years. I'd always implied this was due to a general drifting apart over time, and had avoided going into specifics. “Oh, we're not close anymore, but we're still friends,” I said breezily.
Where's the harm in one more white lie?
“We've had our differences over the years, but I think if I can avoid bringing up some of the sore spots, we'll make excellent business partners.”

I felt grateful when Wes didn't press me for details. His inherent patience, not at all indicative of a lack of curiosity or empathy, both heartened and baffled me.
If I took things one day at a time the way he does
, I admonished myself,
maybe the unknowns in life wouldn't drive me so crazy.

As we turned onto Union Street, a sharply dressed couple with a toddler daughter in tow exited an ice cream shop that Annie and I used to frequent when we were kids. The father swung the little girl onto his shoulders, and a long chocolate drip from her ice cream cone immediately fell down his forehead.

Wes tapped on the car window. “That's us, baby, give or take a few years. Except I'm willing to bet there will be cupcake crumbs on my forehead instead of ice cream.” He looked at me with an expression so heartbreakingly eager and kind that it was all I could do to quickly smile and look away before my true emotions overcame me.

I kept my gaze pinned to the window until we reached the restaurant and I felt confident that I'd regained my composure, if only temporarily.

Chapter 5

Annie

S
till feeling a tingle of electricity from my afternoon with Jake earlier in the week, I hopped off the 22 bus at Broadway and Steiner and began walking toward the St. Clair mansion. Julia and I were meeting to discuss the first steps we needed to take to get the cupcake business off the ground, but in all honesty, I didn't have a clue where to begin. The process seemed overwhelming—there was retail space to be found, equipment to be purchased, permits to obtain, employees to hire and manage. It was enough to make my head throb. But I figured Julia's experience with those logistical things was the singular bright spot of having her involved. No, not singular. There was, after all, the not-so-small matter of money.

I squinted down the street. It was one of those gray summer days for which San Francisco is famous and the fog gave the sky an oddly bright, bleached-out look. When a damp breeze swept up the hill from the bay, I pulled the belt of my crimson coat a bit tighter, unconsciously slowing my pace as I neared the St. Clairs'.

Each house I passed seemed bigger than the one before it, an architectural hodgepodge of the finicky tastes of the rich over the past century—there were the dark, shingled Craftsmen, the Queen Anne Victorian wedding-cake houses with intricate, pastel-painted curlicue details, the elegant Italianate homes with tall windows of thick, antique glass, and the sleek, contemporary ones where you'd be hard-pressed to locate a front door. I'd walked by this particular row of Pacific Heights homes hundreds of times before my eighteenth birthday. The Lorensteins, with their three boys, Irish setter, and Portuguese au pair, had lived in the towering glass, concrete, and steel structure with the dramatic waterfall-like fountain running down its side. The Chens, an older couple who lived alone in a squat brick mansion with white shutters, had had the pristine landscaping in their side yard tended to weekly by a muscular young gardener named Raul who, if Julia and I timed our walk-by ogling just right, would toss us ice-cold Cokes from his cooler. At a certain point in time, my mother and I had probably known more people on that block than anyone else—we knew the parents, the kids who went to the neighborhood playground and later Devon Prep, the housekeepers and nannies and drivers who were my mother's friends and confidants.

Mom had loved living on this block. The views, the magnificent homes, the well-dressed neighbors, the suburb-within-a-city feel never lost their luster for her. Everything remained new and sparkly and surreal for her, but as I grew older, I began to realize just how much was lost in translation. Where Mom saw glamour and beauty, goodwill and gaiety, I saw bulimic fourteen-year-olds and a perilous social ladder littered with casualties and boys who already behaved as if they owned, had somehow
earned
, the world. I'd known I was different from the other kids at the small, private elementary and middle schools Julia and I had attended, but it was only once I entered the halls of Devon Prep—to which the St. Clairs had shepherded my acceptance and paid my tuition—that I understood just how differently I was viewed. I don't think it was so much that I was of Ecuadorean descent as that I was the daughter of the St. Clairs' hired help. For example, I was pretty certain that if I'd been the first-generation American daughter of some Ecuadorean mining magnate, or even just the daughter of an exiled Ecuadorean politician, I would have received many of the same glittery party invitations I saw pinned to Julia's bulletin board. But my family didn't own a vineyard in Napa, a second home in Pebble Beach, or even a chalet in Tahoe. We didn't have season tickets to the opera; I didn't ride horses in Marin; there wasn't a wing named after us at SFMOMA. I lived with those people, but I wasn't a member of their club. We didn't speak the same language.

There were only two occasions on which I tried to explain the truth about Devon Prep to my mom. Both were during our senior year, and the first was right before the annual all-school spring dance that Julia had been obsessing over for months. As class president, she needed one hundred signatures for her petition to hold the dance at the Palace Hotel's opulent Garden Court and she enlisted her top minion, Caroline Rydell, to strong-arm the underclassmen into signing. And by strong-arm, I mean boobnotize. Julia, whose own chest fit into classy B-cups, knew that Caroline's D-cups were the way to freshman boys' hearts. I heard Caroline had gathered one hundred signatures by first period. I didn't go to the dance, but I'm sure the Garden Court was a fantastically over-the-top venue, with its domed glass ceiling and sparkly chandeliers. I'd made the mistake of watching
Carrie
in the weeks leading up to the dance, and let me tell you, there is no quicker way to get a social outcast to decide not to attend a school dance than the sight of Sissy Spacek covered in pig's blood. I'd tried to explain to my mother how I felt about my classmates, but when I saw her wounded face, I dropped it and just told her I didn't want to go because I had a stomachache. I decided I needed to buck up and let her believe in my happy, golden childhood and my lifelong friendship with Julia. She had worked so hard to give me that life.

Later that spring, I was compelled to try again. This time was more serious: I needed to tell my mom my side of all the rumors that had been spread about me. But almost as soon as I began, I saw a flicker of something dark in her eyes that was all too easy to interpret as a sliver of doubt.

“How will anyone believe me if my own mother doesn't?” I shouted, hurt to the point of anger.

“Annie, I'm just listening.” My mother's face was pained. She reached out to me and I pushed her away.

“You're not listening, you're
deciding
!” Suddenly, all of the anger I felt toward Julia and my classmates and teachers at Devon Prep funneled down into one hot point of fury that I directed at my mother. “You're deciding, just like you've always decided everything!
You
decided to run away from home.
You
decided we were going to live at the St. Clairs'.
You
decided I needed to be friends with Julia and go to Devon Prep. And look where your decisions have gotten me! You think you know what's best for me, but you don't! All you know is how to kiss Lolly's ass and keep your head down so you don't get in trouble! You don't know what it's like to grow up here! You don't know anything about my life! You don't know anything about me!” I'd ignored her little gasp and the tears that sprang to her eyes, swatted her hands from me, and stormed out of the carriage house.

Almost immediately, I felt remorse. The worst part was that I didn't even believe half of what I'd said. My mother hadn't run away from home—she'd been kicked out. She didn't spend her days kissing Lolly's ass—in fact, over the years, Lolly had become as close a friend to my mother as any in her life. And
of course
my mom knew me—she knew me better than anyone in the world. Which was why, I suppose, the look I'd seen for just an instant in her eyes stung me so badly. Each time over the next few months that I found myself walking to her room to apologize, the memory of that look I'd seen on her face surfaced and reignited my anger. It was a long, lonely summer without my mother's company and with all of the unknowns about my future hanging over my head.

On the August day that my diploma from Devon Prep finally arrived in the mail—I had not been allowed to attend graduation that spring—I decided it was time to cut through the impasse. Crossing the courtyard from the carriage house to the mansion, diploma in hand, I felt that odd anxiety-induced tension straining at the muscles in my legs. I hoped that the diploma would be an olive branch of sorts and planned to invite my mother for milk shakes down on Union Street, an end-of-school-year tradition that she had instated when Julia and I were kids. That June—suspended from Devon Prep, my acceptance to Cal still under review with no hope of news anytime soon—the end of school had come and gone without my mother mentioning the tradition. Already, the summer was drawing to a close and we'd barely spoken to one another for months, and it was all the fault of my temper and pride.

When I walked into the St. Clairs' kitchen and showed the diploma to my mother, she fingered its edges with her small brown hands and sighed. It was a hard sigh to interpret, but before I let its ambiguity stoke my anger I quickly asked her if she wanted to walk down to Union Street for milk shakes.

She lifted her gaze from the diploma to me, her face softening. “That sounds wonderful, Annie,” she'd said.

Even as the words came out of her mouth, Julia strode into the kitchen, her long blond hair freshly straightened and impossibly shiny. She shot me a saccharine smile. At school she was cool, dismissive, and curt; but at home all summer she'd been acting demure, nearly deferential. The juxtaposition tired me; in her presence, I felt almost physically ill. But I had no desire to fight with her. The events of that spring, the rumors and accusations, had deflated me, knocking the wind out of my proverbial sails. I held my breath, hoping, against odds, that my mother would wave good-bye to her so that we could be on our way. I knew my mother well enough to know that this would never happen. Out of respect for her job or actual love for the girl she'd had a significant hand in raising or some complicated combination of both, she was perpetually vigilant—
overly
vigilant, I thought—to include Julia in every activity.

“Annie and I are going to get milk shakes!” she said. “Will you join us?”

And Julia had looked at me carefully, almost calculatingly, and said yes. My heart sank. With Julia accompanying us, I would never have the chance to apologize to my mother. The next week, with no reason to hold out hope for word from Cal, I accepted a waitressing job and began taking classes at City College. The distance between my mother and me hardened into something rigid and sharp and crackling, like the torched top layer of crème brûlée. Our stilted interactions began to seem more and more like the norm. Still, I knew with all of my heart that at any moment I would conquer my pride, crack the wall between us, and make things right with her. And I kept on believing that up until the day, weeks later, that she died.