Chapter 3 #2
"I made you something," she said, sliding the binder across the counter.
"It's a basic profit-and-loss template, a cash flow projection for the first six months, and a list of every business expense I could think of that you'll want to be tracking from day one.
I filled in the ones I could guess at from our setup last week. The rest you can fill in as you go."
I opened the binder.
The binder was beautiful. It had tab dividers. It had color-coded columns. It had, on the inside of the front cover, in her neat slanting hand-writing, written for Harper — you are going to make this work. xo E.
I put the binder down on the counter very carefully.
I went around the counter and I hugged her, and she hugged me back with the slight surprised stiffness of a person who is not naturally a hugger, and then she relaxed into it, and she said, against my shoulder, "I had nobody when I came here.
They did this for me. So I'm doing it for you. That's just how it works."
I pulled back. I wiped my face. "You all keep making me cry."
"Yeah," she said. "We will keep doing that. You should expect it. Now, before I go — your cardamom snickerdoodle is good but the cardamom is too shy. Bump it up by half. And put the lavender shortbread out front on Saturday. Nadia's right about that. And — Harper."
"Yes."
"You should put a tip jar on the counter that says for the renovation . People in this town will tip into it because they want this shop to succeed. Don't be proud about it. Just put it out there. I'll bring you one."
She left at four.
I sat on a stool behind my counter at four-thirty p.m. with the sun coming in low through the front windows and a binder open in front of me and a clipboard from Nadia balanced on the binder and a phone full of new contacts and a kitchen full of food I had made with my own hands, and I want to put something down on the record.
I want to put down that for the first time in eight months — for the first time since the morning in February when I had walked into the Nashville bakery and found Joelle's office cleaned out and her keys on the desk and her phone disconnected — for the first time since that morning, I felt like a person who lived inside her own life again.
I felt like a person whose body was the right shape and whose hands belonged on her own counter and whose name was on her own door.
I felt good.
I want to mark that down because what happened next is hard, and I think the order matters. I felt good. I felt good for about an hour and a half. From four-thirty to six on the Monday before my grand opening, I felt better than I had felt at any point in the last calendar year.
Then the email came.
I should explain about the email. I had set up a business email for Kneaded before I left Nashville — a Gmail account, [email protected] , a free one, because I was too broke for anything fancier.
I had given the email out to suppliers and the sign painter and Connie the realtor and a couple of people in town who'd asked about ordering catering, and otherwise nobody had it.
I checked it maybe twice a day. I'd checked it that morning at eight and it had been empty.
I checked it at six because I was killing time before I went home to my parents' house for supper, and I opened the inbox, and at the top of the inbox was an email with no subject line from an address I did not recognize, and the preview text was —
Harper, I am the attorney for Joelle Bryant. Please find attached the formal—
I closed my laptop.
I closed my laptop very calmly, like a person closing a laptop.
I sat at my counter. I looked at the front window.
I watched a man walk a small white dog past the window.
I watched the dog stop and lift its leg on the planter Briar had sent me, and I watched the man tug the dog away and apologize to the planter on the dog's behalf, and I watched the two of them disappear down the sidewalk, and I sat there a long minute with my hands flat on the counter on either side of my closed laptop.
Then I opened it back up. I opened the email. I read the email.
The email was a formal notice of a civil claim.
Joelle Bryant, doing business as Half-Moon Pastry LLC, had filed in the state of Tennessee against me, Harper Kincaid, formerly doing business as the same LLC, for the sum of forty-three thousand five hundred dollars.
The claim alleged that I had withdrawn that sum from the company's operating account in February without authorization, that I had then absconded with that sum to my home state, and that she was seeking restitution plus damages plus attorney's fees.
The email attached an eleven-page PDF of the actual filing.
I scrolled through it. I read maybe four pages. I closed the laptop again.
She had stolen forty-three thousand dollars from me in February.
She had stolen forty-three thousand dollars and she had vanished, and I had spent three weeks looking for her, and then I had spent two months trying to keep the bakery afloat with my own savings, and then I had spent two months untangling the mess of bills and suppliers and unpaid leases that had piled up around her disappearance, and then I had given up.
I had given up because I had been alone, and I had been broke, and I had been twenty-nine years old and tired down to my bones.
I had taken what was left of my own savings and I had come home.
And she had filed against me. She had filed against me alleging that I was the one who had taken the money.
She had filed against me from wherever she was hiding, and she had set up a paper version of events in which she was the wronged party, and she had done it through an attorney with a Nashville address, and the language of the filing was the calm icy language of a woman who believed, or wanted somebody to believe, that I had ruined her life.
I sat at my counter at six-ten p.m. on the Monday before my grand opening and I tried to figure out what this meant.
It meant my bank accounts could be frozen pending discovery.
That was the first thing it meant. It meant my brand-new business checking account, with the seventeen thousand dollars in startup capital I had scraped together from selling my Nashville furniture and emptying my Roth IRA early at a forty percent penalty, could be frozen if she pushed for an emergency motion.
It meant I could not pay my suppliers on Friday.
It meant I could not pay the sign painter on Tuesday.
It meant I had eight hundred dollars of cash on me, in this town, and a U-Haul rental I had not yet returned, and a grand opening on Saturday, and a former business partner who was apparently willing to spend money to keep ruining me from across state lines.
It meant Joelle had found me.
That was the part I sat with longest. Joelle had not just gone away.
Joelle had not just stolen the money and moved on.
Joelle had, somewhere in the last three months, hired a Nashville attorney and learned where I lived and built a paper case for war, and the war was here, on a Monday afternoon, in my brand-new bakery, sixty feet from the Iron Thorn clubhouse, in the same room where four good women had spent the day eating my pastries and telling me I was going to make it.
I did not call my brother.
I sat at the counter and I thought about calling my brother and I did not.
I thought about calling my parents and I did not.
I thought about calling Elara — Elara knew how to read the language of this filing better than anyone I knew in this town — and I did not, because Elara was somebody's wife and not my lawyer, and I did not want to make her tell her husband about my mess at supper.
I thought about calling Briar, and Nadia, and Wren, and I did not.
I thought about Boone.
I want to put that down because it scared me.
I want to put down that for one full minute, I sat at my counter at six-fifteen p.m. on a Monday, and I thought about calling Boone Dalton.
I thought about hearing his voice on the phone — that low slow voice — saying hey Harp, what's up.
I thought about telling him. I thought about him pulling up on his bike in fifteen minutes and walking into my bakery and standing on the customer side of the counter with his hands on the wood and his blue eyes on my face, and I thought about how he would listen, the way he listened, all the way down to the bottom of what you were saying, and how he would not panic, and how he would, calmly and quietly, the way he did everything, start to figure out what to do.
I almost called him.
I did not call him.
I did not call him because we were not that to each other yet, and because on Friday at the counter when he had had his hand on my wrist and his eyes on my face he had said you've got flour on your nose and stepped back, and because I had made myself a promise in a U-Haul about not running at him, and because I was thirty years old and I was building my own life, and this was my mess, and I was going to handle it on my own.
I closed the laptop. I locked the front door.
I cleaned the kitchen, which took me about forty minutes, because cleaning a kitchen is the thing my hands knew how to do when nothing else made sense.
I scrubbed the prep table. I wiped down the inside of the oven.
I rinsed and put away every bowl. I folded every dish towel.
I swept the floor and mopped the floor and turned off the lights one at a time as I worked my way back to the front of the shop.
Then I sat down on the floor behind the counter, in the dark, with my back against the lower cabinets and the smell of fresh bread still in the air, and I cried.
I cried hard. I cried the kind of cry that bends you in half.
I cried for the bakery I had lost in Nashville, and for the trust I had given Joelle that she had taken, and for the year I had spent learning that some women you love will burn you down to feel warmer themselves, and for the bank account that could be frozen on a Wednesday, and for my parents who didn't know any of this and who I had not told because I had wanted to come home a success, and for the sign painter who I owed a check on Tuesday, and for the four women who had spent today telling me I was going to make it, and for Boone Dalton's face on a Friday afternoon, and for the porch six years ago, and for the U-Haul I had not returned, and for myself, who was very tired and very small in the dark of her own kitchen on the floor.
I cried for maybe twenty minutes.
Then I wiped my face with the bottom of my shirt and I stood up, because that is what you do, and I let myself out the back door, and I drove out to my parents' farm where my mother had made meatloaf, and I sat at the supper table and ate two helpings, and when my daddy asked me how the bakery was coming I smiled at him and said better every day , and I lied to my whole family at the supper table on a Monday in June, and nobody noticed, and the meatloaf was good, and I went to bed at nine-thirty and lay there with my eyes open until two in the morning.
I told myself, in the dark, that I was going to handle it.
I told myself I was going to call a lawyer in the morning.
I told myself I was going to find the receipts from the bakery's operating account that proved what Joelle had done, and I told myself I had them, somewhere, in a box of paperwork in my parents' garage, and I told myself I was going to win this thing, alone, on my own, before Saturday.
I told myself I did not need Boone Dalton.
I told myself that for two and a half hours.
I told myself that until the cicadas outside my window stopped, and then I gave up telling myself anything, and I let the silence have me, and I went to sleep.