Chapter 5
C HAPTER 5
The Second Wedding
Yellowstone
Four Years Ago
I stepped outside the cabin that had been rented out for me as part of my compensation for this wedding.
It was beautiful.
I hadn’t realized just how many women in my hometown liked to have destination weddings until I started specializing in wedding cakes.
It stood to reason. If you got married in Pineville, there were only so many venues. I had done several of those since the wedding in Joshua Tree last year, but when Lydia, a vague acquaintance from high school, had asked me to do the cake for her wedding near Yellowstone, I was thrilled.
She didn’t have the budget for a cake really, not when she had to rent a whole block of cabins, but I’d agreed to do the cake just for the cabin, with no compensation because she’d really wanted one of my cakes and I’d felt flattered, and also driven to not disappoint her.
I had never been to Wyoming before, and it was a great chance to visit a state I hadn’t seen.
I had come a couple of days early, with the cake already baked and the icing made, and I was really enjoying being out in nature like this. My porch overlooked woods and mountains, towering pine trees and lush greenery. I inhaled the scent of the forest. And went back inside to look at my cake which was sitting in the middle of the counter, disassembled, because I had learned a few things from last time. It really was better to try and get it all together on site. But everything was as frosted and decorated as it could be, and ready to be shifted into the back of the car.
The only issue . . . and really, it wasn’t an issue. Because I didn’t need to be like that, was my neighbor, in the cabin next door.
The photographer.
Yes. Because of course Ryan Clark had been hired to be the photographer at this wedding. Apparently, I was becoming the go-to baker, and he was the premier photographer. Which he hated. It didn’t really seem fair. If he hated weddings, why was he involved with them at all?
And definitely, why was he in the cabin next to mine?
I grumbled as I took my cake layers out to the back of the car.
At least he hadn’t come out to the porch this morning at the same time I had to drink coffee. That had been a little gift from yesterday. We had both opened our doors at the same time, and stepped out onto the deck. He had been wearing plaid, of the very red and lumberjack variety that made me wonder if he chopped his own wood. Which had given me that same dry-as-a-desert feeling in my mouth I had experienced during the wedding in Joshua Tree last year.
It was this . This seeing him out of context. Seeing him without any buffers.
He didn’t like me, that was the thing. And it bothered me.
It really did. Because everybody liked me. I worked so hard to make sure that was the case.
I knew it came from unhealthy coping strategies. But I also knew my fear of flying wasn’t logical. It didn’t make it go away.
Because my mother left me when I was a child and abandoned me to be raised by my grandmother, so consequently I’d always behaved in ways designed to keep people with me so that I wouldn’t experience that level of abandonment again. I knew that. But it was a pattern. Ingrained and well-worn. And knowing that the man was wandering around on the streets just disliking me for no real credible reason was extremely irritating.
That was all.
But I did my best to ignore him, diligently. Because he ignored me. Like I wasn’t even there. Sipping his coffee and taking in the scene like I wasn’t fifty feet from him on my deck.
I whistled. Because I knew it would bother him. And that if it did, I could pretend I didn’t know he was there.
I hadn’t seen him yet today, though. I did wonder sometimes if I took a little bit of pleasure in disliking him because there were so few people that I openly disliked. And who openly disliked me. It was a paradox. I hated it, but there was also some freedom in it. I was always working so hard to get people to see me in the most positive light. I was relentlessly cheerful in the bakery, relentlessly giving and understanding with all of my clients, I was always doing extra work that I didn’t quite bid on, and doing people favors around town.
I knew that if Gran were alive to see it, she would scoff and tell me to grow some spite.
That was why my grandma had always been such a gift. Because she didn’t perform for people. Of course, her husband had left her, and her daughter had abandoned her, so it wasn’t like it had gone great for her. But she had been exactly what I needed. Whatever her issues had been when she was younger, they had toned down enough by the time I came to live with her. She was a crotchety old lady. But again, I was a people pleaser. So we had gotten along fine.
She had been salt and steel to my sugar and everything nice.
The sweetest thing about my grandmother was her baked goods. We’d bonded over them. For my grandma, cake had been more than a treat, it had been a way for her to survive when she’d ended up a single mom looking for a way to survive.
And baking had been a way for me to connect with her.
To feel secure.
It had been survival for me too.
I packed my cake up into the back of the car and closed the hatch back. I didn’t need any insects flying in there and getting stuck in the butter cream.
Then I went back into the house to make sure that I had all the necessary accoutrements that I would need. Knives, serving utensils, extra frosting; everything that I would need to assemble the cakes.
I had it all, and I began to put them in tote bags. Then I decided to make myself an extra coffee for the road because it was going to be a long day; delightful, but long.
The wedding was in three hours. And it would probably be an hour until cake service after that. I really had plenty of time. Getting up here early had made it so easy and delightful.
I slung the tote bags over my arm and grabbed my travel coffee mug. Which was incidentally lumberjack plaid.
I chose to ignore that.
I went outside and stopped when I saw a flurry of movement. I froze. There was a dark black shape rumbling up next to my car and for a moment I couldn’t believe what I was seeing.
When I entered the park I was given a handout with information on wildlife. What species you could find in the park and how to be safe around them.
But when I’d thought about seeing wildlife, I’d thought . . . maybe a bison.
Perhaps a pika.
I was ready to be charmed by a pika.
I was not prepared for a bear.
A black bear and not a grizzly bear, which I knew to be a crucial difference in terms of my odds of being eaten alive. So there was that.
There were black bears in Oregon. One time, in fifth grade, we’d been barred from recess for a day because one had been seen in the woods around the school. But I had never personally seen one alive. Stuffed and fashioned into rugs, and once hit by a car, yes.
But never living, powerful and this close to me.
Still, I stood frozen, unable to access any of the information given about what a person was supposed to do when there was a goddamned bear in front of them.
If I ran from it, it would probably just come after me. And I wasn’t faster than a bear.
I loved a good Animal Planet marathon. I knew a lot about wildlife.
I knew enough to know bears were fast. But not enough to know what the hell I was supposed to do to come out of this un-gnawed on.
The door to Ryan’s cabin opened, and he stepped out onto the porch. For one moment I debated running straight to him.
But that would take me past the bear.
That was a big no.
“ Bear ,” I whispered, because my throat was tight and my voice refused to go any higher. Maybe yelling would make the bear mad anyway. “ B-bear .”
It was no louder or clearer the second time I said it.
“What?” He looked across the expanse, and his eyes collided with mine. The first time we had made eye contact since he’d checked into the cabin.
“Bear.” I gestured wildly toward my car. But realized that he couldn’t see what was happening on the driver’s side of it.
“ Bear? ” he repeated.
“ Yes ,” I said, in that same strangled whisper.
I couldn’t take my eyes off the bear, who was shuffling and snuffling by my car and in general acting like we weren’t there. Maybe I could just back away.
Then it stopped, and raised its head, its eyes connecting with mine.
My mouth went totally dry, my whole body drawing tight like a bowstring.
I was prey.
I had never been more aware of that in my life.
Humans had front facing eyes. Which was nature’s way of lying to us and convincing us that we were the predators. Right then, I knew what a lie that was.
Without a gun, a bow and arrow, a knife, something , I was nothing but soft, pink dinner to a bear. An antelope without the ability to outrun my quarry.
But I refused to simply lay down on the ground like a picnic.
In the back of my mind, I remembered seeing something on an outdoor survival show. People yelling something like . . . hey bear ?
I decided to give it a try.
“ Hey bear ,” I shouted. “ Hey bear! ”
The bear did not respond in kind. I’m not sure what I expected. A wave and a good old: Hey, Poppy!
Certainly not.
“Why are you saying that?” Ryan asked, moving to the edge of the porch like he was ready to race down the stairs and . . .
What was he going to do? Fight the bear?
My heart was pounding so hard I thought I was going to pass out.
“You’re supposed to,” I said.
The bear turned its focus back to the car, sniffing at the door. Relief crowded my chest, making my heart slow down just a little.
I took a step back and the bear didn’t look at me. “I’m going to try to get back inside,” I said, taking another step backward.
Then the bear stood up. On its hind legs. And that was when I got a real sense for the size of it. That was also when Ryan saw it.
His eyes went wide and I was very nearly satisfied by the shock I saw there.
“See!?” I hissed. “It’s a whole ass bear!”
“I didn’t doubt you,” he said, his voice more of a hushed shout now that he’d seen it. “Well, don’t just stand there . . . keep backing up!”
The bear sniffed the air and then went back down on all fours, snuffling at the tire on the front driver’s side.
I stepped back and then the bear partly launched himself upward again, his paw on my door handle. I heard the claws scrape the paint and winced.
“My car . . .”
But then he moved his paw over the handle. Scrape. Scrape. Scrape.
“No no,” I said.
“What’s it doing?”
“It’s . . . it is trying to get in my car.”
“Is it locked?”
“ No . I was loading it and it isn’t like a bear can open—” But then it did. It full on opened my car door. “ Holy shit .”
“What—”
And then the bear slipped into the car, and the door snapped closed behind it.
And I was momentarily gratified to see Ryan Clark’s eyes go wide. “Holy fuck.”
He could clearly see the bear now, just as I could, perched in my driver’s seat.
But my satisfaction was very, very momentary because the issue of there being a bear in my car was not a small one.
“ Holy fuck, ” I repeated.
“You have a bear in your car,” he said.
The one good thing was that now I had a vehicle separating me from the bear. But there was also one very, very bad thing.
“Yes. I have a bear in the front seat of my car. And I have a wedding cake in the backseat.”
Normally, before a trip, I had a lot of anxiety and my end conclusion – every time – had been that I’d panicked too much beforehand.
Not this time.
I hadn’t panicked enough.
“Well, that’s why the bear got in your car,” he said.
I wanted to kill him. As if that was some normal thing any old person would have thought of.
“I wasn’t storing it in there, I just went inside to get some supplies. And some coffee.”
The bear was now rummaging around my car. Bumping about like a furry bumblebee, without a care in the world.
It was so damned cute. And so horrifying.
And then, the cute little bear turned in my seat, and its claws dug into the headrest, and it knocked it off. Beheaded it. Like it was nothing.
The bear’s claws sheared off pieces of the car like it was made of butter and I was jolted by the realization that it could have been me.
My hands were shaking and I still couldn’t move as I watched it dismantle the whole dash.
Then the bear rambled toward the back of the car, right to the cake.
The cake .
The representation of love that I had created for this couple in exchange for staying here. The very place that was now responsible for the death of the cake.
It was devouring it, moving its devastating paws through the soft sponge, its gaping maw powering through my perfectly frosted layers like they were nothing.
Ryan took his phone out of his pocket. “I’m going to call . . . animal control or something.”
I didn’t answer. I didn’t have an answer. I was mesmerized by the power of this predator unleashing its fury on . . . my cake.
Anyway, it hadn’t really occurred to me to do anything other than let the bear do what it was going to do, because what was the point? The bear was in the car. Could anybody even get a bear out of the car?
I blinked, like I was coming out of a haze and I realized what he’d just said.
Animal control.
“I don’t want them to kill it,” I said.
I was surprised that I meant that, considering what the bear had done to my car and cake, but I was staying in a cabin plopped in the middle of his woods, so it really didn’t feel like he should suffer the consequences for that.
“They’re not going to kill it,” he said.
But then I saw a piece of the cake that I had made fly up and hit one of the interior windows.
My benevolence wilted.
“Maybe they could kill it a little bit,” I said.
I had no idea what I was going to do. I was going to have to drive down to a grocery store and try to find a sheet cake.
Honestly. What the hell were you supposed to do with the bear who had got into your car and consumed your wedding cake? He wasn’t even eating it, actually. He was just flinging it around. It was the flagrant disregard for the cake really. And . . . my car.
He made the interior of that car look like it was made of soft butter. His claws cut through everything, door panels pulled off like they were nothing.
And I had worried that if I left the back of the car open some insects might fly in. Much like an insect, the bear seemed to know only how to get into the car. And not back out.
And all I could do was stand there on the deck and stare.
The utility vehicle that pulled up ten minutes later, courtesy of Ryan, had two park rangers inside. They had tranquilizer guns, and a couple of real guns.
“What are the real guns for?” I asked.
“In case the tranqs don’t work,” said the female ranger, nodding.
“Is that . . . a genuine risk?”
But she didn’t answer me.
She was busy, understandably.
The man lunged forward and opened up the back passenger door. Then stepped back, his gun aimed at the bear. But the bear tumbled out and started to run. Up the street, past Ryan’s cabin, and away.
No shooting required.
The interior panel on that open door slid off and landed on the ground; the sound loud in the silent, still forest.
“You gotta leave your cars locked,” the man said.
“Thanks,” I said. “I didn’t realize that there was a break-in risk around here.”
I realized that I didn’t feel like pleasing this man at all.
So that was kind of nice.
“Bears are attracted to food.” He leaned into the car. “The cake back here is toast.”
Great .
My cake.
My cake.
After giving me a couple of unhelpful tips like I should report the damage to my insurance, the rangers left. And I simply stood there and looked at my rack of a vehicle, and my wreck of a cake.
At my wreck of a car.
I wanted . . . to curl up on the ground – in the house not outside, because there were bears out there apparently – and cry. I wanted to fall apart and scream and freak out.
But people were counting on me. I couldn’t fall apart.
“My cake is dead.”
“But you aren’t,” Ryan said. “And I’m pretty sure no one can get mad at you for a bear destroying your cake.”
“Maybe not, but they still won’t have a cake. They were so excited and I . . . I needed two ovens and four hours for that cake, plus time to cool and I . . . I don’t even know what the ovens are like here or if I’m at an altitude that will make this difficult and . . . but if I don’t do something they just won’t have a cake on their wedding day.”
The idea of letting them down like that . . . it killed me.
And if that wasn’t enough impetus to hold my shit together, then Ryan standing there was certainly added fuel.
I took a breath and I tried to imagine what Gran would do.
Spite and steel.
I needed some steel.
“Okay,” I said. “I have two hours and thirty minutes to make a new cake. In a cabin without any of my specialty equipment.”
“We better get started.”
I looked up at Ryan. There was no way that he was offering to help me.
“Are you serious?”
“The carnage that I just saw . . . I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy.”
Why did I have a feeling he actually meant me? And that while he wouldn’t wish it on me, he had enjoyed it a little bit. But he was also offering to help me.
So. So .
“Are you going to sneeze into my cake batter?” I asked.
“You’ve had enough for one day. Let’s go inside and bake. I’ll have to leave a little bit before you, but you can use my oven. I’ll even run the stuff over there. And babysit it. Whatever you need.”
I was stunned. Not only did he rarely say this many words to me, he was never, ever nice.
But then, I supposed being mean to me right now would be the equivalent of kicking the Little Match Girl into a snowdrift. And Ryan wasn’t cruel. That was the thing. We didn’t mesh. But it wasn’t like he was a bully.
Still, where I grabbed an apron and put it on, and tossed him the other, which he took wordlessly, and then stood there, awaiting orders, I was shocked.
I looked up at his stern face. It wasn’t like there was a hint of softening or kindness there, nothing quite so extravagant.
But maybe . . . maybe after this he wouldn’t hate me so much. Maybe what he needed to do was pity me.
“Okay,” I said. “I need to start getting ingredients out. I also need cake pans. I brought a bunch of specialty items in those bins. So, if you can get out every square cake pan that you see, that’s what I need. And I’ve got enough ingredients to basically feed a village. So.”
I knew my recipe by heart, and it was easy to get everything out and start measuring.
We had to get baking as quickly as possible, and he ran over to preheat his oven, as I preheated the one in the cabin we were working in.
We didn’t make conversation. But it surprised me how easy I found it to work in tandem with him.
Soon, I had new, freshly baked cake layers. I stuck them in the freezer immediately, doing my best to get them cooled down so that I could start decorating and frosting.
While that was happening, I mixed up new batches of buttercream, and cut new lengths of ribbon, rolled new fondant pine trees. And I had to give credit where credit was due, because if Ryan hadn’t been there assisting, it never would have gotten done.
As he helped me with the frosting, I watched him. His hands were so sure and certain, like he’d done this before.
“You aren’t a novice at this,” I said.
“I’ve made cakes before.”
I laughed. “Why?”
“Why not?”
“Because men usually . . . don’t.”
“I didn’t realize you were so married to traditional gender roles.”
I huffed. “I’m not, Ryan, the world is.”
He slowly moved his knife over the buttercream and I stared a little bit. Because watching him in my environment like this, watching him be so comfortable with it, was doing things to me I couldn’t explain.
And I didn’t want to explain them.
“My mom made me my very first birthday cake when I was thirteen.”
“What?” I asked, my heart going still.
“Yeah, I . . . you know I moved from home to home a lot when I was younger and I never really had a birthday or anything. She made me a birthday cake and it was the nicest thing anyone ever did for me. I asked her who made her birthday cakes and she told me she always did.” He smiled just slightly. “I told her fuck that. She told me to watch my language. But I make a cake for her every year.”
I was stunned by that revelation. Both that he hadn’t had a birthday cake prior to being thirteen and that he’d made it his mission to ensure his mom never had to make her own cake again.
It was a level of care and thoughtfulness I’d never ascribed to the boy who’d been so mean to me when I’d accidentally damaged his solar system. The boy who’d scowled at me all the time after.
“I . . .”
He checked his watch.
“I have to go.” He tossed me the keys to his truck, and I just stood, staring at them and him.
“What’s this for?” I asked.
“You can’t drive your car. So, you can take mine.”
“Oh. Thank you.”
I stood there for a second and looked at him, and I had to wonder if I had been wrong about him. From every angle. All this time. I had to wonder if maybe some of what had gone wrong really was me, and I hadn’t fully appreciated it until now. Because this was just nice. He was being nice. And I would’ve said that Ryan Clark was incapable of being nice.
“Did you need a ride down . . . ?”
“No,” he said. “I’ll walk.”
“But . . . there are bears out there.”
I might not like him, but I didn’t dis like him enough to let a bear eat him.
Chew on him for a minute maybe. But not eat him.
“Just one. A small one. And I think he’s full.”
I huffed a laugh. “If you got eaten I wouldn’t be able to forgive myself.”
“Nice of you.”
I looked at my cake, which still needed to be assembled, and quickly.
“How about I do all of this down at the venue.” I tossed the keys back at him.
“If you insist.”
We loaded everything up as quickly as possible, and I climbed into the passenger seat of his truck. “You know, this kind of vehicle really isn’t convenient when you have short legs.”
“I wouldn’t know,” he said.
I looked at him, and he was smiling.
Reluctantly, I felt my mouth twitch.
We drove down winding roads, until we arrived at the venue. A gorgeous cedar gazebo next to the creek, the brilliant mountains as a backdrop. He went to go and take pictures, and I unloaded the truck.
Whenever I looked over at him, it was like I was staring at someone entirely new. Like I had never really known him until today, even though I’d known him since the sixth grade.
The legend of the bear eating the cake traveled like wildfire through the wedding and since I had a cake to present in the end, the story was funny and not tragic at all.
“What happened exactly?” the groom asked Ryan, his eyes wide.
Ryan recounted the story, smiling. Laughing. I wanted to memorize the way his face looked when he did that because I saw it so rarely.
It felt almost like my car had died for a good cause.
I finally cut the cake and I looked up, right at Ryan.
I smiled, and he took a picture. I knew that was going on my website.