I cruised past the building on the corner of the old town district and pulled out of traffic to park across the street. The storefront had that 1930s dust bowl look about it, with lots of dirty glass in the front and paint down to the primer. Its ripped awning dipped down like a fedora over one jaundiced eye.
I’d never really noticed the building before, even though I passed it every morning on the way to the elementary school, but it was perfect—on a main street with a neglected parking lot on the side, not really in a great part of town, but not so bad as to have break-ins every night. What if? What if one day I opened my own bakery there?
A fresh coat of paint in a pale shade of 1950s T-bird turquoise. Giant squares of black and white linoleum on the floor. A coffee bar along the wall with chrome and retro prints. A glass case filled with pastries, cookies, and decadent desserts, and the scent of bread rising. Round tables with chairs for two or three and a poodle-skirt pink awning with a crescent moon sign over it—Blue Moon Bakery.
Well, maybe I had thought about it more than I realized. I was made to bake, wasn’t I? We didn’t even have a bakery at Shop’n Save. Every bit of bread and pastry we sold was trucked in already packaged. What a travesty.
What did it take to open a bakery, I dared to wonder as I waded at the edge of dangerous waters. Licenses, start-up money for equipment, supplies, staff, and utilities. Money and desire and more money. I’d never really done any research. It had seemed like a waste of time and an invitation for discouragement. I wasn’t even sure I’d be good at the business side of it.
I eased the car back into traffic and headed to work. No need to start off the day this way, and arriving late to boot.
A weight lifted from my shoulders the night the Dodge pulled into the driveway and Dad unfolded himself from many hours in the driver’s seat. Now I could cut back to my regular work hours. No more midnight baking to keep my sanity. No more going it alone with the girls. We had so much extra time now, with the opening of the farmers market still a month away, that we found ourselves sitting around watching reruns at night. One day I stopped by Walgreens on the way home and picked up a pack of Uno cards and the game of Clue.
It wasn’t hard to interest the younger girls in the game, but Deja was a harder sell. We had some rowdy Uno sessions, and Win and I played partners with Clue until she caught on. Dad and Andie had an intense rivalry going on each night. It was apparent that Andie fancied herself a Clue expert. Dad finally beat her.
The laughter generated by our time together made me vaguely uncomfortable at first, and I couldn’t put my finger on just why. It surfaced every time the girls lunged forward, yelling “Uno!” and slapping their cards on the table.
I remembered feeling that same way the time Dad tickled the girls at the dinner table, the first time I really heard Andie laugh. Late one night it came to me. Visions of Ginger in a seizure. In cataplexy, or struggling with suffocating congestion brought on by the excitement. We had to keep Ginger calm and avoid just such situations in order to manage it all. Fear was a learned response.
It wasn’t easy, since she was a little jokester herself. Her favorite joke was about her feeding tube. The top flipped up on the feeding tube so the connector could be inserted, and she’d say “Fill … her … up … Mommy.” That is, until she could no longer speak. The first time she said it, we laughed until she was choking.
On top of it, Ginger refused to wear headgear because she knew it set her apart from the other kids at school. She said it gave her “headgear hair.” So the order of the day was to keep her life as uneventful as possible. I’m not sure it was best for Ginger, after all. Maybe it was just easier on us not to deal with the aftermath of distress.
But now we were laughing again. Full-on, tear-streaked, loudmouthed laughter. Here we were, trying it on, and it fit fine. We’d been living with fear sitting in the darkened corner long after we’d needed to, daring us to let go and laugh. Andie had drawn swords with it without even knowing, and freed us, hesitant and gun-shy as we were. She brought laughter back to our home.
It made me want to hold her, to gather her up and feel her arms around my neck and her cheek against mine.
Would that time ever come?
Jo looked slimmer. The way she bent over refilling a Valentine candy display exposed angles in her hips where padding used to be. I told her so at lunch.
“Go figure—it’d take my husband’s diabetes to make me slim down. Hey, I could be on Oprah. ‘How my own weight loss saved my husband’s life.’” She nibbled her rice cake thoughtfully, and said, “I should send that in.”
“Dad’s back.”
“All safe and sound, is he?”
I nodded. “You know,” I said as I paused to take a sip of my diet soda, “it really wasn’t as bad as I expected.” When I looked back over the weeks, I realized that God had helped us get through it unscathed and took care of Dad too.
“I’d like to see what he’s got new to sell. Maybe I’ll buy a painting for Walter’s birthday. One of those Grand Canyon scenes.”
“He hasn’t shown us his new stuff from the trip. He’s funny about his paintings. Probably has some touching up to do.” I took another sip. “I heard from Andie’s grandparents’ attorney. They asked for an extension until June. I guess they’re having trouble selling. I suspect their health is declining, too.”
“That’s good news for you. I mean … well, you know what I mean.”
“Yeah, but it could be bad news for Andie. If it doesn’t work out with us, the judge will probably send her to live with her uncle in Canada.”
“How bad is that? Could be a great place to raise a kid.”
“He has DUIs in two states.”
“Holy moly.” Jo picked at the shell on her hard-boiled egg. “Did Andie find her chain?”
“Not yet. If Deja took her rings, she’s done a good job of hiding them. Or she’s gotten rid of them, which is worse.”
I smoothed out the foil from my sandwich and folded it over and over into a small square. How could a daughter of mine do such a thing? My Disneyland pin was missing too, the one from our last trip to Disneyland with Ginger. Could Deja have taken that too?
As I’d gotten dressed for work that morning, I’d dug into my change cup where I always kept the pin, and found it gone. I distinctly remembered pushing the back firmly onto it the night before because Andie had warned me that the old backs were faulty. And then I dropped it into the cup.
“You sure it was Deja who took the rings?” Jo asked.
“Well, who else? She had plenty of motive and opportunity.”
Deja was so angry. She seemed genuinely hurt, the way she jealously watched Andie when we were together. Almost like she was looking for something. Favoritism, maybe? Betrayal? Maybe she was trying to even the score by taking things that were important to us.
“Could be she was set up.”
I studied Jo. “Set up? By who, Andie?”
“Does she have any other enemies?”
“Deja pretty much alienates everyone.”
Jo tipped her head down confidentially and hooked her eyebrows. “Well, if I were Andie and I wanted to get even with Deja for something, that would work. It got her in trouble and got you on Andie’s side, didn’t it?”
I grunted something to end the conversation and chewed on the possibility all afternoon. It left a sour taste in my mouth. If Andie was the sneaky one, it was possible that she could have taken my pin too. I never thought to go through her things. I wasn’t sure it was even worth attempting. What if she noticed they’d been disturbed? She would just blame Deja, and the situation between them would worsen.
Visions of Andie in Walgreens squeezing that candy bar in her fist came to mind. And she liked pins. She’d noticed mine and even said she wouldn’t trade any of hers. And there was that matter of money missing from the register at the drive-in. It had to be someone.
Was it worth the risk of making her suspicious to go through her things, and did I really want to find out that Jo was right? As a mother, I would prefer to remain ignorant if clearing the name of one child meant convicting another. In truth, though, I owed it to both girls to find out.
The next day, I took a long lunch while Andie was at school and went home to look through her boxes and suitcase. I felt like a sneak thief, but I didn’t find the rings or the pin. I felt part relief, part disappointment.
I did find a Bible under her bed. I picked it up and looked over my shoulder to make sure Dad hadn’t come in before I opened the cover. Words of endearment were written there. From Gary to Noelle. Words of love and commitment that I’d not heard in years. Her parents were obviously Christians, judging by the verse inscribed there. I flipped randomly through the Bible and found it well worn and colorful with marker.
So this was Andie’s heritage. She was no stranger to church or to a Christian home. Her questions and doubts didn’t come from a lack of knowledge. They must have come from a feeling of betrayal. “My heart-shape is plugged,” she’d said. At least I knew she believed in God—why be angry with Someone she didn’t believe in?
I went through Deja’s stuff as well, with no luck, and carefully covered my tracks. I hurriedly ate a sandwich and went back to work, puzzling over the whole mystery, and dreading to know the outcome.
Report cards came in the mail that day, along with an envelope addressed to me in shaky handwriting and postmarked Pine Run. The girls were distracted by their grades and didn’t notice when I slipped the envelope into my pocket. Something told me I should read it in private.
Winnie and Andie both had B averages, which told me that Winnie was trying her best and Andie probably wasn’t. I praised them both equally and kept my observations to myself. Deja had “no credit” in two classes, two Ds, and two Cs. Three of her teachers requested conferences. Her only comment was, “Hey, I passed PE.”
She tried to get me to budge on her driver’s ed, since I hadn’t heard from her principal in several weeks, but I refused.
“This is your future we’re talking about, Deja. Granted, we haven’t heard from Mr. McNulty, and that’s progress. But if your grades are this bad now, they’ll only get worse if you’re never around to do any homework. When your attitude improves we’ll see a difference in your grades.”
I went to my room and closed the door to read the letter. It was a good thing I’d waited. After a few pleasantries, her grandmother wrote that they would like one of Ginger’s baby pictures, just to keep. I was stunned. They were finally accepting the fact that they’d had a granddaughter they never knew.
Jealousy churned within me. They could not have Ginger. I didn’t have to share her. She was gone, and she’d always be mine alone. They didn’t suffer her horrible illness. They didn’t deal with unanswered questions, they didn’t …
But hadn’t they? Death can be a horrible illness in itself. They had plenty of unanswered questions—of course they did. Why were their children taken while they were young, with so much to give? Why were they left alone in their declining years with a precious burden instead of adult children to care for their needs?
In the end, I got out Ginger’s baby book and selected a picture. I knew that if they had to share their beautiful child with me, I had no choice but to share mine with them. It was the right and proper thing to do, no matter how much it hurt to hand her over to strangers.
Winnie had picked up a permission slip for the church snow trip. As I was filling it out, I dug through my top drawer for her immunization records, and something sharp stuck my finger. I looked in to find a tiny drop of blood and my Mickey pin. His happy little face smirked at me. It must have fallen into the opened drawer when I was getting ready for bed the night before, and, yes, the back had come off. So it was there all the time. I felt very low, having had doubts about Andie and Deja all day. I carried it out to the kitchen, sucking on my finger. The girls were doing their homework at the table.
“Andie,” I asked, showing her my pin. “Could I have one of your extra pin backs?”
“Sure.” She brightened and took off for her room. She returned with a red lanyard full of pins and a Mickey-shaped rubber pin back. She slipped the back onto my pin while Winnie ogled her lanyard.
“You’ve got quite a few pins there,” I said.
She spread the lanyard out carefully over her homework, pressing each pin back tightly on. The words Walt Disney Travel Co. danced around the lanyard in white.
“This Sorcerer’s Apprentice is my favorite. I picked out all the pieces at a pin store, and they glue it all together for you.”
“Wow, it’s big,” Winnie said, reaching for the next colorful pin. “Oh, this one’s cool. It’s Alice in Wonderland.”
“And look at this Winnie the Pooh,” Andie said, wiggling Tigger’s tail. “It moves. And look—this is the Haunted Mansion, and you can open the … uh … box …”
“Casket,” I said, reaching over to toggle the piece. The casket lid lifted to reveal Goofy trapped inside.
Winnie said, “You have a Mickey like Mom’s.”
“My Mickey’s at the beach too, but it’s different.”
Mickey balanced himself on a surfboard with a giant wave about to break over him. The weight of my suspicions curled over me, threatening to drench me in guilt. How could I have suspected this kid of anything? Watching her animated face, and with her so close that I felt the heat of her and smelled the soap from her shower, made me feel foolish and ashamed.
I instinctively went over to the cookie jar, loaded up a plate of peanut butter blossoms and chocolate chips, and placed it in front of the girls.
“We need milk,” I said, reaching for cups and the milk jug.
After we were settled with cookies on napkins and mugs of milk as my private peace offering, I said, “Tell me about all your pins. Start with Jiminy Cricket.”
Andie not only told us about her pins, and which ones were unusual or collectible, but she knew things about the park only a seasoned traveler would know. It was as though we’d wound her key.
I’m not sure I could tell you what she said, because I was listening to the timbre of her voice and watching her eyes light with fire. It was more words than I’d heard her say in the whole sum of the time she’d been with us. She enchanted me.
Winnie slid onto my lap, even though she was getting too big for it, and I realized it was a habit that had begun back when Ginger was so needy. Winnie wanted reassurance, even as I focused on Andie, that she wasn’t forgotten or replaced. I made room for her and smoothed her hair back behind her ears while I listened, my hands moving to braid out of habit. The feel of her cornsilk hair in my fingers couldn’t have been more satisfying if I’d been weaving gold.
The thought occurred to me that the three of us together was a start. We were a beginning. I saw a glimpse of God’s promise fulfilled—of our family reconciled—and I felt an unexpected ache. Could I risk loving this child of the snow?