“Leona?” I search my memory but come up empty. “I don’t know. Why? Where’d you hear that name?”
“Mamie,” she says. “She keeps, like, calling me that. And it seems to, like, make her real sad.”
I’m startled. “You’ve been going to see Mamie?” After my mother died two years ago, we’d had to move my grandmother into a memory care home; her dementia had rapidly taken a turn for the worse.
“Yeah,” Annie says. “So?”
“I . . . I just didn’t know you were doing that.”
“Someone has to,” she spits back.
I’m sure the guilt plays across my face, because Annie looks triumphant.
“I’m busy with the bakery, Annie,” I say.
“Yeah, well, I find the time,” she says. “Maybe if you were spending less time with Matt Hines, you could spend more time with Mamie.”
“Nothing is going on with Matt.” I’m suddenly acutely conscious of Gavin sitting a few feet away, and I can feel my cheeks turning warm. The last thing I need is the whole town knowing my business. Or lack of business, as the case may be.
“Whatever,” Annie says, rolling her eyes. “Anyway, at least Mamie loves me. She tells me all the time.”
She smirks at me, and I know that I’m supposed to say Honey, I love you too, or Your dad and I love you very much, or something along those lines. Isn’t that what a good mother would do? Instead, because I’m a horrible mother, what comes out of my mouth is “Yeah? Well, it sounds to me like she’s saying ‘I love you’ to someone named Leona.”
Annie’s jaw drops, and she stares at me for a minute. I want to reach out, pull her into a hug and say I’m sorry, I didn’t mean it. But before I have a chance, she whirls on her heel and strides out of the store, but not before I see the tears glistening at the corners of her eyes. She doesn’t look back.
My heart aches as I stare in the direction she disappeared. I sink into one of the chairs the twins vacated a few minutes earlier and put my head in my hands. I’m failing at everything, but most of all at connecting with the people I love.
I don’t realize Gavin Keyes is standing above me until I feel his hand on my shoulder. I jerk my head up, startled, and find myself staring directly at a small hole in the thigh of his faded jeans. For an instant, I have the strangest urge to offer to mend it, but that’s ridiculous; I’m no better at using a needle and thread than I am at being a mother or staying married. I shake my head and pull my eyes upward, over his blue plaid flannel shirt to his face, which is marked by a thick shadow of dark stubble across his strong jaw. His thick shock of dark hair looks like it hasn’t been combed in days, but instead of making him look unkempt, it makes him look really good in a way that makes me uneasy. His dimples, as he smiles gently at me, remind me just how young he is. Twenty-eight, I think, or maybe twenty-nine. I feel suddenly ancient, although I’m only seven or eight years older. What would it be like to be that young, with no real responsibilities, no preteen daughter who hates you, no failing business to save?
“Don’t beat yourself up,” he says. He pats me on the back and clears his throat. “She loves you, Hope. You’re a good mom.”
“Yeah, uh, thanks,” I say, avoiding his eye. Sure, we’d seen each other nearly every day during the months he was working on my house, and when I returned home from work in the afternoons, I often fixed us lemonade and sat on the porch with him, doing my best to avoid looking at the tanned swell of his biceps. But he doesn’t know me. Not really. Certainly not well enough to judge me as a mother. If he knew me that well, he’d know what a failure I am.
He pats me awkwardly again. “I mean it,” he says.
Then he too is gone, leaving me all alone in my giant pink cupcake, which suddenly feels very bitter.
Chapter Two
I close the bakery early that day to run a few errands. Although the sun hasn’t set yet when I get home at six fifteen, it feels dark and depressing inside the cottage I’m trying hard to think of as my own.
The silence inside is deafening. Up until last year, when Rob surprised me just before Christmas by announcing he wanted a divorce, I’d looked forward to coming home. I was proud of the life we’d made together in the solid, whitewashed Victorian overlooking Cape Cod Bay, just east of the public beach. I’d painted the interior myself, retiled the kitchen and hall, installed hardwood floors upstairs and in the living room, and planted a garden dominated by blue hydrangeas and pink salt spray roses that looked crisp and beautiful against the sail-white clapboard.