29. Millie
CHAPTER 29
Millie
The sweet smell of apple and cinnamon hits me as soon as we pull up in the parking lot outside Stella’s. The bakery has a different look to it this morning, the usual backlit cake displays are nowhere to be seen in the shopfront. Instead, lace curtains are drawn across the windows and a handmade cardboard sign is affixed to the front door. I squint to read the message.
Closed until noon - Private Baking Lesson - come back soon! Stella.
As if Stella has closed the entire bakery just for this.
I push open the door, glass beads jingling as I go.
“Millie!” Stella places down the tray of breakfast rolls in her hands and bustles around the front counter towards me. “Happy Birthday, sweetheart.” She pulls me into a warm hug, leaving me coated in flour and doughy handprints.
I’m starting to regret my choice of double layers of black for clothing, but there was no way I was leaving my dorm room in anything close to white after Caden’s earlier comments. I made sure to find my thickest vest top and follow it up with a long-sleeved cardigan, buttoned right up to the neck.
“Thanks, Stella.” I try to dust off what I can from my midriff, but I seem to make more of a mess of myself in the process. “You really didn’t have to do all this,” I note, gesturing to the closed curtains.
“It’s nothing,” she replies, shooing away my comment with her hands. “Teaching you to bake is my pleasure. Plus, I get to spend some time with my bonus nephew. It’s not often that happens these days.”
Caden bends, leaning into a hug. “Thanks, Aunt Stell,” he gives her a squeeze, “but don’t be acting like I don’t come around here to see you. You know I’m at that door every time there’s a new pie to try.”
Stella tuts, rolling her eyes as she signals for us to follow her into the back of the bakery. I hadn’t really given much thought to what it’d look like back here, too preoccupied with the sugar laden treats out front, but I’m taken aback by how big this space is. Two large industrial steel counters line the back wall, with another forming an island in the middle of the room. Pantry shelves are stacked high with baking sheets and plastic containers, and there seems to be at least two of each appliance – stoves, walk-in fridges, stand mixers. I can’t believe all of this is kept by one woman in her sixties and a few high school part-timers.
Stella squeezes in between Caden and I, throwing down a recipe book on the counter with a thunk, a plume of icing sugar swirling in the air.
“Now.” She licks her index finger as she flicks open the first page. “I’ve already made you some pastries and a peach crumble to take back to the lodge later, so it’s up to you what you’d like to bake this morning. Have a flick through and decide on a recipe.”
This recipe book is a tome – it seems to originally have been some sort of Filofax, but is now twice the size, with newspaper clippings, photographs, and recipe cards stapled inside. Some of the entries are handwritten, and look to be older than Stella herself, while the more recent ones are printed on fresh white paper. I thumb through the recipes, lingering on each page for a second as I drool a little at all of the options. It’s impossible to decide, there’s cakes and cookies, pies and pastries, and I want all of them.
“Take your time, Adams.” Caden sighs, leaning over the counter, anxiously tapping his thumb against the steel.
“Patience is a virtue,” I remind him.
“Well, consider me short on virtues, then. I just want to get to the tasting part.”
I pull out a recipe card for a two-tier lemon sponge, separated by a layer of tangy curd and covered in sweet butter icing. Nothing goes harder than a lemon dessert, and the recipe is significantly shorter than some of the others in the book, which seems like a smart choice given my inexperience.
“I’ll be baking my own recipe,” Caden states.
“You can bake?” I ask, embarrassed that this man can bake, and I’ve never so much as cracked an egg into a mixing bowl.
“I can do lots of things, Adams,” he boasts, selecting an array of utensils from a drawer beneath the island.
I busy myself, grabbing the ingredients we need to get started from the pantry, while Stella sets up a baking station on the opposite side of the island. It’s a simple list, but I still find myself lost between the shelves trying to source everything we need. Sugar, butter, flour, eggs … It’s no secret that my wide hips don’t need any of these things, but birthdays were made for cake.
I watch intently as Stella talks me through each stage, showing me the techniques and then giving me the chance to try it out myself – measuring, mixing, whisking. Her hands move with ease through the steps. I try to follow, but my wrists are too rigid, my measures too clumsy.
By the time the cake pans are in the oven, I’m exhausted.
I slump down in the wooden chair by the back window and rest my forehead on my fingers.
“Baking is no joke, huh?” Stella pulls up a chair next to me.
I lift my head, dragging my forearm across my brow to wipe away the residual sweat from my whisking. Caden is still clattering around in the thick of it, pans and bowls and baking paper strewn over the counter. I’m not sure how much of the flour made it into his batter, but there’s at least half a bag on the floor.
“I love to see Caden like this,” Stella muses.
“Hmm?”
“He seems to be coming back to himself.” She pours hot tea into a mug, sliding it across the table towards me. “For a while, I thought we had lost him again.”
“Lost him? What do you mean?” I ask.
“He’s been through a lot, that boy. He grew up here after his parents passed, and we all got to recognize when he was withdrawing into himself. I started seeing that again this year, he stopped doing the things he loved. No ice fishing, no trips back to BC, less of the back country stuff. None of us wanted to see him back in that dark place. But he seems to be living again, there’s a spark back in him that’s been missing for a while.”
I read between the words, hearing everything she doesn’t say.
I watch him as he clangs around the kitchen, haphazardly piling up dishes in the deep sink, belting out some country song or another. I’ve not known him for long, but even in this short time he does seem different from the first day I met him, like he’s rolled his shoulders back and let himself breathe in life a little.
“I brought these with me this morning.” Stella places a shoe box filled with old photographs on the table between us. “I thought you might like to see some older pictures from the Valley – it’s changed a lot in recent years.”
“I’d love that.”
Time seems to fall away as we sift through the pictures, it’s like a walk down memory lane. The mountains in the background look the same, but the town itself has changed so much.
“Here’s the day we opened the bakery.” Stella’s hair is darker, a coiffed bob resting on her shoulders as she snips a ribbon in front of the store.
“Oh, and here’s the day Frank asked me to be his wife.” She passes the photograph to me with careful hands. “It was simple as it could be – no fanfare back then, no elaborate declarations for the masses. We were just two people agreeing to keep falling in love, over and over again.”
I run my thumb across the weathered photograph, the two of them sat on a park bench with ice creams in hand. Stella beaming at the camera, Frank’s head tilted down, his eyes locked on her.
“How did you know?” I don’t know where the question comes from. “That you loved Frank, I mean?”
“Oh, well…” she laughs, “I didn’t know. Not for some time. Frank played the long game, asked me to court him more times than I can remember. I always said no, had my sights on some cowboy over in Aspen Ridge who I hardly remember now. I thought he was the man I’d marry.”
“And then?”
“And then it crept up on me… loving Frank. We didn’t have that love at first sight sort of beginning. We were childhood friends, and that was all I wanted from him. Until I realized that nobody cared for me the way Frank did. I thought love was supposed to be explosive, filled with lust and wanting, arguing and breakups – that’s what I’d seen in my kid years. But what we had was soft, what we had felt so natural that I didn’t recognize it for what it was. It was love, and when I finally realized that, I knew I couldn’t give my heart to anyone else. So I gave it to Frank.”
I swirl a teaspoon around in my tea, scared to speak for fear of letting out the raw emotion sitting in my throat.
“There are all kinds of love in this world, Millie. When you find it, your heart will know, but it might take a while for your head to catch up.” Stella pats my back as she pushes up from the table, hobbling towards the oven on seized hips to silence the shrill beeping.
I continue looking through the photographs, pausing on a more recent photo, printed in colour and stamped with a date in the late nineties. I recognize it. It matches the photo from Caden’s key chain, the one he was looking at when we hiked to Lake Ingrid.
There’s a woman on the left, roaring red curls falling over her shoulders as she points towards the camera, trying to redirect the attention of the toddler secured to her chest, granola bar in hand, eyes fixed on her mother.
On their right is a man who looks to be in his late thirties, tall and built, his strong features a perfect match for the adult son he never got to meet. His head is thrown back in laughter, hands on his hips as he lets the little boy in front of them take center stage.
Caden.
He’s dressed in knee-length shorts, with stripy socks that rise to mid-calf and chunky white trainers covered in a thick layer of dirt. A gummy smile stretches across his face from ear to ear. His legs are spread wide, arms outstretched, fingers forming peace signs in the open air. He looks like the happiest kid in the world.
A kid who had no idea just how much he was set to lose.
My heart aches for every version of that little boy, the one who didn’t know what was coming, and the man in front of me now, who’s had to live through every moment since.