Chapter 6
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The candid was up on the Mercer Bay Reporter’s website by ten that morning.
Ada was teaching her ten o’clock when it went live, which meant her phone went off in the staff hall and she did not see it for forty-five minutes.
By the time she got to it she had nine missed texts and two missed calls.
Two of the texts were from Joanna (photo is fine, photo is great, breathe).
One was from her brother Conor (lol). One was from Bridget Halligan (you owe me oat milk for the rest of your natural life xx).
The remaining five were from Eilis Halloran, in increasing intensity, the last one of which simply read: come to the bakery.
Ada went to the bakery.
It was eleven-fifteen. The mid-morning rush had thinned to a single woman drinking a coffee at the window. Eilis was at the counter, her hands flour-white to the wrist, kneading. She did not stop kneading when Ada came in. She did not look up.
“Salt & Sugar,” Eilis said, by way of greeting.
“Don’t,” Ada said.
“Coffee on the house. Sit.”
“Mom.”
“Sit, Ada.”
Ada sat. Marisol, the front manager, appeared with a tea and a piece of brioche and said, “Don’t shoot the messenger,” and disappeared back into the kitchen. The kitchen door swung. The kitchen door fell still. The bakery smelled like cardamom and butter.
Eilis kept kneading.
“Mom.”
“I am thinking.”
“Please don’t think.”
“I am thinking very calmly, and I would like you to drink your tea.”
Ada drank her tea. The brioche, today, was studded with golden raisins, which her mother only did on Thursdays for reasons Ada had never been brave enough to ask about. Possibly because Eilis had told Ada the answer once when Ada was eight and Ada had forgotten and was now too embarrassed.
Eilis turned the dough. Folded. Pressed.
“All right,” she said. “I have a question.”
“Yes.”
“Is Wes Berglund a person.”
“What.”
“Is he,” Eilis said, “a person. Does he eat a sandwich. Does he sleep. Does he own a couch.”
“He is — yes, he is a person. He owns a couch. I would assume he owns a couch. I have not been to his apartment.”
“That is not the question.”
“It sounded a lot like the question.”
“It was,” Eilis said, “a check, Ada. I was checking whether you were going to be very precious about this man in front of me, and the answer is no, which is excellent. The question now is what kind of person is he.”
Ada considered. She had, in her pocket, a contract handshake from a man she had known of for two years and known for two days.
She had, in her body, a small, deep, completely uninvited memory of his hand in hers in front of Cass the photographer, which she had been refusing to examine for an hour and a half.
“He is a quiet person,” she said. “He is the kind of person who fixes things in a building without expecting anyone to notice. He is dry. He listens. He volunteered for this campaign without making me ask. He has — he has been the most polite version of a coworker I could ask for, for two years.”
“That is what he is on the outside,” Eilis said.
“That is what I know.”
“That is not nothing.”
“It is not nothing,” Ada agreed.
Eilis turned the dough one more time. She covered it. She washed her hands. She came around the counter, sat down across from Ada at the small marble table by the window, and waited until Ada looked up at her.
“I am not your handler,” Eilis said. “I am not going to ask whether you can do this for six weeks. You said yes. I trust your yes. I want to ask you something different.”
“Okay.”
“You said yes to Pete, on this thing, this morning. Yesterday afternoon. Whenever it was. You said yes very fast.”
“It wasn’t fast. It was a day. I slept on it.”
“You said yes very fast for the woman I raised,” Eilis said. “Which is not a criticism. I am only making an observation. Why.”
Ada thought.
She did not lie to her mother in the bakery.
She had a number of small daily evasions with Eilis, and they had a number of long-standing avoidances they did not discuss, but she did not tell direct lies in the bakery.
Lying in the bakery was a thing Ada had given up at fifteen, when Eilis had stood with her in front of a bowl of failed pate à choux and made her, very calmly, tell the truth about why she had not been eating lunch at school.
The bowl had been the lever. The lever still worked.
She told the truth.
“Because Joanna would have lost a year of her life trying to find a different solution,” Ada said, “and because I cannot stand by while the rink that has been keeping me alive for two years goes under. And because Pete needed an answer. And because — because I knew, the second Pete walked into Joanna’s office, that I was going to have to do something I did not want to do, and at least this version had the rule of not Theo attached to it. ”
“Hmm,” Eilis said.
“And because Wes is — he is —”
She stopped. She did not have the next word.
Eilis waited.
“He is not the wrong person,” Ada said at last. “He’s just not — I don’t know him. We’re going to have to figure each other out as we go. But he’s not the wrong person.”
“Hmm,” Eilis said again.
Ada ate the brioche.
After a long moment Eilis reached across the table and put her flour-cool hand over Ada’s wrist.
“Ada,” she said. “I’m going to ask you one thing, and then I am going to stop.
The town is going to take this campaign and run with it.
The town does not have a not Theo clause.
The town has a romance now. Eight people have come into this bakery in the last hour and one of them was Donna Acquaviva, who I love, and Donna told me — Donna told me, Ada — that the photo of you two outside the rink was the sweetest thing she has seen all winter. ”
“Oh no.”
“Oh yes. So my one question is: do you have a face for this. Do you have a face for the version of this where, by Monday, half of Mercer Bay believes you have been falling in love with a backup goalie since November. Because that is a face you have not made before.”
“I know.”
“And it is not a face I want you to make if it costs you any more than the campaign is paying for.”
Ada looked at her mother.
She had not, when she was fifteen, been able to look at her mother across the failed pate à choux. She could look at her mother now. That was a piece of grown-up math she had earned.
“I’ll figure it out, Mom.”
“Good answer. Wrong question.”
“I’ll figure it out.”
“Good,” Eilis said. “Eat your brioche. Take a second one for Wes. Marisol — Marisol! Put a second brioche in a bag for Ada to take to Wes.”
“Mom.”
“Politeness is politeness, Ada. He brought you coffee. You bring him bread.”
There was no arguing with that. There had never been any arguing with that. Marisol came out with a small paper bag and pressed it into Ada’s hand. The bag was warm. The bag was already faintly translucent with butter at the bottom.
Ada took the bag.
She kissed her mother’s cheek.
She walked out of the bakery into the cold bright light, and she did not, all the way back to the rink, allow herself to think about the small, soft thought that had risen in her chest at her mother’s word politeness, which was that the rule of not making a habit of it was going to be an interesting rule to hold up if she was now expected to deliver pastries.
The Tidemark candid was the lead photo on the Reporter’s home page until two-thirty p.m., at which point a fishing boat ran aground at Tidewater Island and they had to push the rink story down to second.
Ada did not click on the photo. She did not need to.
She could feel it the way you could feel weather.
By the time her two o’clock private lesson ended, the woman she’d been teaching — Iris, sixty-one years old, beginner skates, daughter of Mercer Bay’s late, beloved postmaster — had said honey, that photograph this morning, you and that big man, he looks like a person who would shovel your driveway.
Iris had said this in the tone of a woman who had decided that this was, at her age, the highest possible compliment that could be paid to any man, and had then, with no transition, asked Ada to please show her the right way to do a slide stop.
By three o’clock the Reporter photo had been forwarded to Ada by an aunt in New Hampshire, a cousin in Halifax, two former skating coaches, and her old training partner in Sweden, who was the one who had finished sixth, who had appended only an emoji that was a small, mischievous, single eye.
By three-thirty Ada had locked herself in the staff kitchenette, turned off her phone, and sat on the counter eating the second brioche, which she had not, in the end, delivered to Wes, because she was not going to deliver a brioche to a man on day one of a six-week campaign, no matter what her mother said.
The brioche, she would deliver tomorrow.
Or possibly never. The brioche was a hostage now.
The kitchenette door opened.
Joanna Mendez walked in. Joanna closed the door behind her. Joanna sat down on the only chair, took the kettle off the counter, refilled it from the tap, set it back on the base, and turned to look at Ada.
“Tell me you’re fine,” Joanna said.
“I’m fine.”
“Tell me you’re not fine.”
“I’m fine.”
“Ada Halloran.”
“Joanna Mendez.”
Joanna sighed. She rubbed her face once with both hands. She looked, in the harsh kitchenette light, like a woman who had been doing the math for a long time.
“Two things,” she said. “The campaign is performing very well. The campaign is performing well enough, in the first eight hours, that Marin Pell texted me at one to say her boss had seen the candid and her boss is enthused.”
“That’s good.”
“That is excellent. That is the first piece of unambiguous good news this rink has had since November.”
“And the second thing.”
Joanna looked at her.