Chapter 2
C HAPTER 2
The First Wedding
Joshua Tree
Five Years Ago
I had never been so nervous in my life as I was driving the disparate layers for what would be a three-foot-high cake, nearly nine hours southeast to Joshua Tree for Sarah and Derek’s wedding.
Poppy, I saw this gravity-defying inverse wedding cake online and if you could actually do that instead of what we discussed a few months ago . . .
Of course!
I’d said that with great confidence, and I had absolutely no evidence I could pull it off. But it was what Sarah wanted! And the whole point of a wedding was giving the bride everything she wanted, right?
It’s impossible.
That was Quinn’s verdict when she saw my first practice attempt in my kitchen.
Nothing is impossible with God and fondant, Quinn.
That better be holy fondant then, Poppy, because anything short of divine power isn’t going to hold that monstrosity together.
She was wrong, I’d made it work. But I was more than a little worried about it all working out upon assembly in a totally different environment and with an audience.
A watched cake was a much more finicky beast than one that would be seen by no one but the baker, in my experience.
But I had to manage my anxiety around that because this was supposed to be my shift.
I worked in my grandmother’s bakery from the time I was a sophomore in high school, until she’d died just six months earlier. It had been the most terrible dark time of my life. I still felt the ache, sharp and hard every time I took a breath.
At first I tried to run the bakery just like she had. But I came to the conclusion pretty quickly that what worked for her wasn’t working quite as well for me. So I took a leap.
I was still falling.
I wasn’t quite sure if I was going to land in a decent spot. I hired extra people to help cover shifts at the bakery, so that I could invest in wedding cakes. Because I liked the fussy, decorating part of working in a bakery.
I liked the mass production and early mornings a lot less.
You don’t have to keep the bakery open. You used to want to be a wedding planner, why are you limiting yourself?
Quinn was my ally in all things, and she’d been concerned about my ambitions getting lost.
Limiting myself would be just doing the bakery. I’m expanding.
Halfway.
I felt like it was a reasonable compromise. Yes, I’d gone to school for business management with the hope of starting my own event planning company, but life changed. And I was changing with it.
It felt like a gamble, spending all that money to try to keep the bakery going while I tried to invest in this new business. But so far it was . . . well, I was surviving, anyway.
And working my very first wedding after building a portfolio of cakes for birthday parties, baby showers and bridal showers.
I wanted to be sure I was ready for the main event before I attempted to make a wedding cake.
Last month I’d gone to a convention in LA to get ideas and to talk to experts in the wedding industry. I’d met up with my mom, who’d I’d seen just six months prior at the funeral. If it could be called a funeral.
Gran had been a complicated woman. The people who’d loved her had done so mostly in spite of her. I’d just loved her. But I think she was softer with me than anyone else. Out of guilt, I sometimes thought.
My mom had come and stood by me, large sunglasses on her face to disguise her identity, even though everyone knew who she was.
In Pineville, they just didn’t care.
I’d always wondered if that was the real reason she hated it.
Either way it had been a lot of loss and a lot of my mom in the past few months and I still felt raw with it.
This felt like the first step to something new. Something healing.
When I pulled up to the wedding venue, I was astonished by the natural beauty. The trees looked like something from an alien planet. Like palm trees that had grown twisted and bent trying to avoid the harsh sunlight. The sky was a gloriously bleached blue over the round sand-colored rocks and boulders, broad expanses of dirt punctuated by scrubby green plants. It was entirely different to the scenery I was used to.
The lush green and towering pines of Oregon. I would’ve said that I didn’t like the desert.
But this felt magical. Even more so as I took the cake layers out of the back of my car and brought them into the white stucco building that had been allocated as a staging area for the different wedding cast members.
Privately, I thought of us as cast members. All preparing for this big show.
Bits and pieces of it were of course Derek and Sarah. But so much of it was how Derek and Sarah wanted everybody else to see them. A production.
One that was going to be beautiful.
I loved the whole scope of weddings. If I really dreamed big, I would want to help plan the whole wedding, from beginning to end. But baking was my special skill, so it had made the most sense to handle cakes, rather than trying to get into planning.
It connected to the bakery. And I needed to keep the bakery going.
The cake was going to be glorious with this scenery as a backdrop. I had seen pictures, and I had listened as Sarah had described her vision, but until I actually got there, I didn’t fully appreciate how spectacular the design was.
The feeling of satisfaction that I got as I looked at the flowers I had selected to go on the cake, the rust colors in context with the desert surroundings, told me that I was in the right place.
That I had made the right decision.
I was so settled in that, that when I turned around and nearly ran smack into the broad, unwelcome chest of Ryan Clark, I couldn’t formulate a sentence for a full fifteen seconds. Which doesn’t sound like that long, but when you’re standing there, looking up at a man who hates you in utter, shocked silence, believe me when I tell you it’s an eternity.
“I didn’t know that you would be here.”
That wasn’t what I meant to say. I had no idea what I actually meant to say, but there was no way that it was that. Because that was stupid.
“Why would you?”
He didn’t smile. I studied his face for a hint of welcome.
No. And honestly, why would I expect a welcome from him? He didn’t like me. He never had. And maybe it was because we had a long history of unfortunate incidents, but in my opinion most of it was petty kid stuff.
Things that a person should have gotten over by now.
Things he definitely had not gotten over.
Which might be less of a problem if he wasn’t friends with my boyfriend Josh. They were a package deal. They’d hooked up in high school. Josh and I hadn’t hooked up until after college.
That meant that whether I wanted to or not, I occasionally found myself in Ryan’s surly company.
Though this was the first time I had ever encountered him . . . in the wild .
Sure, sometimes I saw him walking down the street in town, but that was different.
He was in context.
This was . . . bizarre.
He had only been around town intermittently for the past few years. His work as a photographer took him around the world. He was a beloved credit to the town of Pineville. A success story. You kind of had to be made of stone to not be somewhat impressed by him, and I was not in any way stony. But that didn’t mean that I . . . liked him.
He had done an exhibition of the faces of Pineville, a portrait of the small-town Main St. in America, a stirring collection that showed it wasn’t a myth, or a bygone era, but demonstrated the change and diversity that had come to those spaces. The old colliding with the new, the occasional tensions, the acceptance of new ideas and new people – even if it was sometimes met with resistance.
It had been brilliant. And honest. Nothing glossed over or painted with romanticized brushstrokes. Portraits of people and their businesses, captioned by their own words. Comments about the changes that had come to town. Stirring speeches about how wonderful it was that there was a new bookstore, and pride displays in the window. And also laments about the very same.
That display had traveled around exhibitions and galleries for two years before ultimately being installed in the Chamber of Commerce in town. Pineville, warts and all. And while certainly some people were unhappy about it – apparently not everybody liked to see their own bigotry reflected back at them in black-and-white – for the most part, it was roundly praised by the populace.
Too bad he was such a jerk.
It isn’t like I meant to break his solar system five minutes before our sixth-grade science fair.
I was carrying a bowling ball.
My project was on inertia.
So it was successful at least.
It had also made me an enemy for life.
It was just that things always seemed to happen with him. And maybe it wasn’t even that he held a grudge against me for all of that. Maybe it was just that . . . every time we were near each other it was difficult.
That was what made me so wary about him. And it definitely put a dampener on my joy regarding my very first wedding.
“Why exactly are you here?” I did not recall his name being in the credits. Or, the wedding program, whatever you wanted to call it.
“Last-minute replacement. The photographer they originally hired couldn’t make it.”
Ryan Clark photographing a wedding. That seemed . . . unexpected.
If asked, I would have said that he would find photographing the wedding a bit too pedestrian for his lofty photography aims.
After all, he’d had a major global exhibition.
“Oh,” I said. “I . . . I paid Melissa extra money.”
“Okay,” he said, looking at me like I was an intrusive jackrabbit that had wandered in from the outdoors, rather than as a human being.
“Melissa, the original photographer.”
“I do know who Melissa is. Thank you. I’m unclear as to why you paid her extra money?”
“To photograph the cake. Once I’m done with it. I have to assemble it. But, she was supposed to take some extra pictures for my website.”
“Right. Well, I will do that. Everything got forwarded to me. Except for instructions. So.”
“Great,” I chirped.
It was not great. Really not, that somehow Ryan Clark was going to end up photographing my first wedding cake for my website. It just felt portentous. And I hadn’t really been in the market for important.
One thing I’ve learned is that life doesn’t exactly ask you about these things.
So, I determinedly went into the kitchen area and began working to assemble my cake layers. It was a huge cake, enough to feed the three hundred guests they had coming all the way out here to their magnificent venue. I had never served that many people before, but I was pretty confident that everything would go fine. I told myself that, repeatedly, as I assembled the vanilla and spice cake layers, in alternating order and with the largest layer on top and the smallest on the bottom.
Each cake layer sat on its own platform that hung suspended from a special stand designed to let the cake hang in space like a frosted chandelier. Cascading coral and cream-colored roses helped hide the structural elements and support the magic of the illusion.
The hours flew by, and when I was finished, my heart was pounding.
Because it was beautiful . It was exactly what I had promised that it would be. And I just had to get it down to the table at the venue.
The only problem was, as I began to lift the whole cake platform from the counter, I realized it was heavier than I thought, and each layer swung with more force than I wanted. I wasn’t an idiot, I had brought a cart to wheel out to my car, which I was going to pull up to the door, but what I hadn’t realized was that lifting it off the counter was going to be a physical impossibility for me. And then, of course, that followed that it was going to be impossible to get it into the car.
Great. It was blazing hot outside, so there was no way that I could have decorated it out there. I was finished just in time. I had everything planned down to the minute. Except this. I didn’t realize that I was going to have to pump iron too . . .
The door opened again, and in walked Ryan.
“Are you ready for pictures?”
“I don’t want you to take pictures on this random counter. I want to take pictures down at the reception venue before the ceremony finishes.” That seemed obvious to me. And he was supposed to be an artist. He should know that.
I didn’t say that to him though. Which felt like a feat.
“The ceremony doesn’t start for twenty minutes. I just finished all the before photography.”
“Well, I need to get the cake down there.”
“Okay. I probably won’t be able to take a picture until just before you cut it.”
“That’s fine. But I need . . . I need your muscles.” I grimaced. He lifted a dark brow. And I hated him right then for being as handsome as he was irritating.
“I told you,” he said slowly, his blue eyes never leaving mine. “I only have twenty minutes.”
I couldn’t explain what those words did to me. It was like the dry desert air suddenly flooded my nose and mouth and left them indescribably dry. While dryness wasn’t exactly the effect anywhere else.
And I suddenly wished that the floor would open up and swallow me whole. Not even just so I wasn’t standing in front of him, but so I didn’t have to unpack the implications of that.
“No,” I said, rather than putting my head in the oven, “I need help getting the cake off the counter. It’s a lot heavier than I anticipated.”
“Right,” he said.
“Will you help me?”
“Sure.”
He crossed the space and I moved back, maybe a little bit further than necessary. And suddenly, I remembered the bowling ball. The science fair.
“Please don’t . . . hurt my cake?”
“I’m not going to hurt your cake,” he said.
And I realize that the comment had been a miscalculation on my part, because where he had been neutral before, he was irritated now.
And about to touch my cake.
“This is my first wedding,” I said.
“Congratulations.”
“I just mean, this is what I want to do, because my grandmother died. You know. And I want to expand the business. And I want this to be my focus. And it’s really important to me. The cake was . . . well you can see this is an elaborate cake and it was a last-minute change from the bride and I’ve never done it before but it needs to be perfect.” I was breathing hard when I finished my speech.
He looked at me, his expression dispassionate.
“You’ll get over it, trust me.”
“What does that mean?” I asked.
“It means, that eventually, you will see that weddings are a farcical exercise that do nothing but waste people’s time and money.”
“Excuse me. You’re here photographing it.”
“Yes. For money. I wouldn’t be here for any other reason.”
“Well, I’m here because I like it. I like decorating wedding cakes. I like finding out what somebody wants and helping make their dreams come true.”
“That’s what I don’t get. How your dreams can revolve around a day. It’s unrealistic. As is demanding your baker do a cake that defies the laws of gravity, by the way.”
“You are . . . wow .”
He ignored me, and slid the cake off of the counter, holding it firmly, his large hands curled around the edges of the big tray. And my heart stopped. He was lifting it effortlessly, no strain whatsoever, but still, I was more than a little bit nervous, watching him hold that cake. I might as well have been watching him hold my baby.
At least, I assumed, that’s what it would feel like.
He set the cake on the cart, and my breath exited my body.
Then I gripped the cart. “Thank you.” Then I began to wheel it toward the door. “I’m going to need help again, getting it into the car.”
“You can’t roll it down there?” he asked.
“No. I have to drive it. But there’s a paved road to the edge of the venue, and then there’s another sidewalk.”
“This feels unnecessarily extreme.”
“Well. This is what you do when you make people’s dreams come true. For love.”
“Great.”
I led the way with the cart, and he followed me. I rolled the cart carefully down the sidewalk, and right to the edge, where I had parked my car with the hatchback facing toward where I rolled the cake.
I opened the hatchback, the seats were all laid flat, there was a vast field of space, and I had done some testing on birthday parties and the like with driving large cakes short distances. It could be done.
He picked the cake up again. “Okay,” I said. “Just follow my instructions. Because you have to kind of lower it to get it underneath the tailgate but you don’t want it to swing.”
“I’ve got it,” he said.
“No!” I said, as he listed a little bit too close to the edge of the car. And my exclamation may or may not have startled him slightly. Which made his movement a little too big, and made the cake swing, as I’d been afraid it would, and caused the widest layer to hit the side of the car. Leaving a big gouge in the side.
He set it down on the back of the car.
“Oh no,” I said.
“You can fix that,” he said.
“Oh. Great. I can fix that. Just that simple, right?”
“It’s just frosting.”
“Maybe you should give me your camera and see if I can make a little disaster that you can fix.”
“Should I give you a bowling ball?”
“I knew it. I knew you were going to ruin my cake because I ruined your solar system. That is so petty. And it is childish. You are a small,” I said, looking up at him, “petty man.”
He wasn’t small. I was small. He was six and a half feet tall, built like a brick house and far too imposing and masculine to ever be called anything like childish. But I said it anyway. Because I was furious. An accident would’ve been one thing. I knew that he had been hanging onto that. I just did.
“You honestly think that I decided to get revenge on you for a sixth-grade science project by scarring your cake?”
“You’re the one that mentioned it.”
The corner of his mouth lifted upward. “I guess I did.”
“So it seems plausible.”
“To you ,” he said. “Not to a rational person.”
“Well. Well. I . . . You don’t even like weddings. You don’t care. That’s the thing. At the very least, you just don’t care about love. And now you have gone and destroyed this symbol of Derek and Sarah’s love.”
“Get some extra frosting and slap it on the side once you get down there.”
“Are you physically incapable of apologizing?”
“You created the situation, Poppy. I don’t know that an apology is warranted.”
I was incandescent. I knew that my rage didn’t exactly match the drama of the moment. Because the fact was, he was right. It was repairable.
I could fix it. No structural damage had been done.
But for some reason everything felt like it had come to a head. Maybe it was standing there in the hot sun. That I had been in for five minutes. But still.
“You know, you’ve just always been a dick.”
He nodded slowly. “You’ve always thought so.”
I stormed back into the venue building and grabbed different things for serving, and for emergency repairs. And when I went back outside he was gone. Belatedly, I realized my mistake of completely alienating him, since I was going to need help getting the cake out of the car.
I wasn’t sure why I had combusted like that. Why the whole thing had combusted like that.
I didn’t have the kind of grandmother who would have told me to be nice, or that everybody was fighting a secret battle that we didn’t know about. She would have said that Ryan was a Clark, even though he had been adopted into the family late, and wasn’t genetically related, he was tainted by association.
She would have said that we were cursed to be at odds, and I had to honor said curse.
My grandma hadn’t been a sweet old lady. I loved that about her.
Because if she was nice to you, then you knew that she really cared about you.
She had really cared about me.
My grandma would’ve hexed Ryan Clark.
She’d have told him to fuck off into the sea.
And I really wished that she was here to do it.
I tried to muster up an incantation.
To wish that his hair would fall out, or that his muscles would atrophy. Except as much as I disliked him, it felt like it would be such a waste that I couldn’t bring myself to seriously hope such a thing happened.
So instead, I drove as carefully as possible down the road and toward the isolated spot where the wedding reception was being held. There was a large metal frame with lights strung up and over it, that I knew would look stunning once darkness fell. Tables and chairs were set up beneath a canopy, and that was where the cake table was.
Thankfully, the catering team was down there, and I was able to get help moving it from the car to the table, though it took two men, whereas Ryan had done it by himself.
But that was only because it was a longer walk. I wasn’t going to exalt Ryan and his muscles to quite that degree.
I got the cake repaired just in time. Guests began to filter over the rise and down toward the reception area, coming from a trail that was nowhere near the highway.
It took an additional twenty-five minutes for the bride, groom and bridal party to arrive, since they had been getting their pictures taken.
And that was when Ryan appeared. Wordlessly, without speaking to me or making eye contact, he took pictures of the cake.
“Stand beside it,” he said, addressing me for the first time.
“What?”
“The cake looks great. You should stand beside it and be in the picture.”
“Oh I don’t need that.”
“Trust me. That’s what you should have on your website.”
Normally, I would’ve argued, but there were people watching. So instead, I did what he asked.
I stood behind the cake and smiled, he snapped the picture, and lowered his camera, and that was how I found myself smiling at Ryan Clark. He didn’t smile back.