Living My Own Dramatic Opera Cake—
an almond sponge soaked in coffee syrup with coffee buttercream, arranged in far too many daunting layers
Mom leaves the house after our fight without a goodbye. I text her when it nears dinnertime to ask if she wants me to make her something, but all she says is that we should eat without her. And that’s the end of our communication, which of course worries Spence, and we wind up spending the whole meal talking about her. I assure him that everything is going to be fine, even though I’m not entirely sure.
When she finally does return home in the evening, she’s weighed down with shopping bags. The hurt on her face is no longer visible, but she also does a good job of not looking directly at me. Shortly after, she goes up to her bedroom and closes the door. Spence takes his computer to the living room to video chat with his friends and I proceed to stare at my bedroom ceiling, feeling like a failure of a parent and a failure of a daughter. How did this all get so screwed up so quickly, and just when I thought I was getting a handle on things?
My phone buzzes and I snatch it up, hoping it’ll magically provide an answer to my many messes.
The hope I was holding onto with my desperate clutchy little fingers vanishes in an instant and all I’m left with is a hollow feeling.
I sit up, texting Liv a quick thanks, and before I close out of my messages, I spot Wilder’s name. I don’t know why, but I open the thread, reading through his texts from last night. My mind replays everything that’s happened recently—how emotional it was to see the booth after all these years, how hard it must have been for Wilder to pull off on such short notice, and how moved I was before Kate showed up. And then there was the apology ice-skating that spiraled into awkwardness. I try to sort my way through it, how much of it was my fault, how much of it was his, why it went south so fast, but it’s one of those balled-up necklaces you find at the bottom of your purse that you consider just throwing out as opposed to untangling.
The longer I stare at Wilder’s texts the antsier I become. And worse still, a wisp of an idea starts to creep in, one born out of the futile need to control something. I actually start to think maybe I should get in touch with him, just clear the air the way I wasn’t able to this morning. That if I solve one relationship that maybe the others will follow.
I purse my lips, my shoulders lifting with the tension of having to decide. I go so far as to type out a message just as an experiment.
I stare at it, my thumb hovering over the send button.
Stop. Are you just trying to make things more complicated? I ask myself, throwing my phone on the bed with a huff. But before I even realize I’m doing it, I’m getting up and moving toward my vanity, pulling out the journal I promised myself I had divorced from meaning. The worst part is I know exactly what I’m looking for—the picture I tried to throw out on multiple occasions and failed, eventually stashing it so I wouldn’t have to look at it in the frame on my vanity. Even as I lift it out of the drawer, I tell myself to put it down.
But no. I open the journal, my fingers pulling the photograph free from the pages, and a thrill zings through me hinged somewhere between excitement and the need to close my eyes and scream for my life.
I stare down at a younger version of me and Wilder on the beach, arms thrown around each other, skin tanned from hours in the sun and hair dripping from the wave that had crashed over us a minute prior, wearing the type of joy in our expressions that is so pure you can’t help but smile in return.
I turn it over, running my thumb over the inscription on the back. There in Wilder’s neat cursive are the words: Promise me, Mads, that you’ll recognize me in our next life, even if you’re a cat and I’m a dog. Even if I can’t hold you like I am in this picture, I just want to be near you.
For one bright flash of a second, I consider if that’s what he’s doing now with the booth and the ice-skating—trying to be near me. But as soon as I think it, embarrassment envelops me like too-hot bath water, burning my most vulnerable areas. Of course not; he’s simply trying to make this situation livable, nothing more. And even if he was, say making a bigger move than just civility, look at how it turned out last time. Broken trust, friendship in the gutter, an inordinate amount of pain. And this time the bakery hangs in the balance. Plus, it’s not only my heart in the equation now, but Spence’s, too. So, good, it’s decided then. Clean. Easy. Business only. Nothing to see here, folks.
Just two old lover-enemies learning to coexist.
Exactly.
While also baking passionately in the den of their childhood memories.
Um? NO.
And one of them smells like pastry and fire and is a tasty British-Argentinian snack.
SERIOUSLY brain, we’re back here?