“How long has it been closed for?” I asked him.
“Two weeks,” he said.
My aunt was diagnosed with breast cancer a month ago. So my uncle, in addition to helping his wife with her double mastectomy and chemotherapy treatments, had managed to run the bakery for two weeks on his own before shutting it all down. I didn’t know how the hell he did it. Running a bakery was a huge endeavor for someone who wanted to do it. Uncle Ray was just an ordinary guy. How had he kept everything going while helping my aunt? He was a hero in every way.
“She had stuff in the freezer,” he explained. “She didn’t want me to do any baking. I just thawed it and one of her friends came in and frosted everything.”
“That was nice of them to help out,” I said. It was good to have people you could count on. I felt a pang of regret as I realized that I really didn’t have anyone special I had left behind when I’d walked away from the city. I had spent the better part of the last decade with Jake and...well, that had been a wash.
“She’s got good friends,” he agreed. “They would do anything for her.”
“I believe it.”
“So,” he looked around. “You think you can work your magic?”
“I think so,” I said. While my career had been in digital marketing, my undergraduate degree was in bakery science. I’d planned on opening my own bakery one day, but then life got in the way, and I just hadn’t done it. Jake and I had started dating, and things had kind of gone south from there.
What had my biggest mistake been?
I couldn’t blame everything on other people. I couldn’t blame Jake, and I couldn’t blame my boss. I couldn’t blame anybody except for myself for the way things had turned out. There was one major problem with how I’d handled my life.
I’d settled, I realized. I had made the classic mistake of thinking that somehow, holding out for what I really wanted was a waste of time, and I’d taken the path that was easy. Well, I was paying for it now. I was 31, and I was now living in the apartment over my aunt and uncle’s garage, and I was...
Well, I didn’t know.
Lost might have been a good word to describe myself.
Confused could have been another option.
“Thank you,” my uncle said again. “You don’t know what this means to us.”
“I think I have a pretty good idea,” I said. “Why don’t you head home? I’ll take a look and figure out what I need to do in order to get everything open and running again.”
“Okay,” he said, nodding. My uncle left the keys with me and took off. I started walking around the bakery, looking at everything. It was a small little place. The front space was tiny. There was a glass display case, of course, and two round little tables that each had two seats. There was a larger patio table outside, and sometimes people would sit there to eat their treats.
The bakery was designed to be a place where you came and then you went, though. It wasn’t like a coffee shop. It wasn’t designed for hanging out and loitering, which was too bad, because in my opinion, there was nothing quite like sitting down and enjoying a wonderful croissant or cupcake with someone you loved.
Maybe I’d change things around, I thought. My aunt would still be the one with the final say, but she was essentially making me acting manager, and I’d do the best that I could to not only keep her business up and running, but to improve it, as well. Savored was cute, but the menu was limited. I bet that with a bit of careful planning, I could make it flourish.
The walls of the bakery were filled with family photos. It was a cute design. She wanted her bakery to look like someone’s living room, so there were pictures of my parents, and pictures of me, and pictures of my aunt and uncle. There were photos of my grandparents. There were other pictures, too. There were snapshots from high school swim teams and special events that had happened in Ashton. If you could imagine it, it was on the wall, and the walls were definitely filled to the brim with photos.
My aunt was a memory type of person. She loved nostalgia, and she loved dreaming up different ideas to help people remember who they were and where they came from. Sometimes, that was a good thing. Sometimes, like when I saw the picture of Cooper Clark standing in front of the Ferris wheel during a particularly hot high school September, it wasn’t so great.
I took that picture down. There was no chance I’d be staring at that while baking cookies for Aunt Hannah. No chance in hell. I stared at the space where the picture had hung. The nail was still there, and the paint on the wall was a little darker than the rest of the room. The picture had blocked the sun from fading the paint.
“I’ll find something else to hang there,” I said out loud, and then I headed to the back of the bakery to figure out what I needed to buy to get Savored back up and running.
ASHTON WAS A BEAUTIFUL place to visit, but not a wonderful place to live. There was nothing particularly wrong with the town: not that I could pinpoint, anyway. It was more that the town was just...well, it was a reminder of everything I’d wanted to leave behind when I’d moved.
I couldn’t look around Ashton and forget about what had happened to me. Every corner seemed to be a reminder. Every shop held a memory. Unfortunately for me, most of those memories were things I wanted to forget. For a long time, I thought that I had. Moving away, going to college, and starting my job had all been steps I’d taken to forget the boy who had gotten away and the girl who had broken my heart.
That was what had really soiled me on Ashton: losing everyone, including my very best friend. Larissa and I had done everything together. We’d been the best of friends all throughout middle school and those first three years of high school. I hadn’t been able to bear knowing that she’d betrayed me and gone behind my back to start dating Cooper. My senior year had been hellish. Maybe I was being overdramatic, and I often thought back about those years and wondered where it had all gone wrong, but the pain still stuck with me.
It was incredible how someone totally screwing you over could mess with your head.
For a long time, I worried that I wasn’t worthy of anyone’s love. After all, the person I’d been crazy about had chosen my best friend over me. How messed up was that?
When I finished working in the shop for the day, I locked up and headed back to my aunt and uncle’s place. They were letting me stay in their apartment for free, which was nice. It was located just over their freestanding garage, and it afforded me the privacy that I needed to nurse my wounds and get over my recent job loss, as well as the fact that I’d ended my relationship with Jake.
Not that there was much to get over.
My relationship with Jake had soured a long time ago, and by the end, we were basically roommates who didn’t really speak. It was easy to point fingers at couples who stayed in loveless relationships and to think about how stupid and foolish they were, but the reality is that sometimes, staying with someone just becomes easier than breaking up.
At one point, all of our stuff was mixed together. I couldn’t pinpoint who had purchased which DVD or who owned which sweatshirt or whether the mixing bowls in the kitchen were mine or his. Breaking up meant that we had to face the reality we’d created. We had to divide our shit and move on.