Chapter 5
Harper
I cried in my car for ten minutes before I went home that Friday night.
I cried in the driveway of my parents' farmhouse with the engine off and the cicadas going and my own face in my hands, and I cried because I had been mad at Everett Dalton and because I had not been mad at him for the reason I'd said.
I had told him you don't get to rescue me , and I had meant it, and it had been a true thing, but it had also been a convenient thing.
The convenient thing about being mad at him for rescuing me was that I did not, in being mad about that, have to be mad about the bigger thing.
The bigger thing was: he had spent forty-eight hours quietly building a paper fortress around my life.
He had called the club president. He had called the club lawyer.
He had filed motions and worked phones and gotten a Tennessee judge to dismiss a case before I had even finished crying about it.
He had done all of that — every single hour of it — in the same week he had been in my kitchen pretending he could not feel me when I came past him to reach for the salt.
He had done it because he loved me. He had done it without saying he loved me.
He had done it the way he did everything, which was quietly and thoroughly and without taking credit, and he had stood in his own kitchen at six p.m. on a Friday in June and let me ask him Cade.
That's why. Isn't it. and he had not answered, and the not-answering had been the answer, and I had walked out of his kitchen because if I had stayed in his kitchen one more minute I would have done something neither of us was ready for.
I wiped my face. I went inside. My mama had made fried chicken. I ate two pieces. I went to bed.
I woke up Saturday morning at three forty-five.
The alarm was set for four. I didn't need it.
I had slept maybe two hours, total, in the way that brides sleep the night before their wedding, which is to say, with my eyes mostly open and my heart already running.
I sat up in my childhood twin bed in my parents' guest room and I sat there a long quiet minute in the dark with my feet flat on the floorboards, and I made a promise to myself.
The promise was: today is for Kneaded. Today is not for Everett Dalton.
Today is for this thing I am building, and for the four women who showed up to help me build it, and for the brother of mine who is going to bring his big stupid heart to my front door at eight a.m. with a thermos of coffee.
Today is for all of those people. Whatever Everett and I are going to be to each other gets dealt with tomorrow, or next week, or never.
Today, I am a baker, and my doors open at nine.
I made that promise sitting on the edge of my bed. I held that promise from four a.m. all the way through.
Cade picked me up at four-thirty. He didn't ask me why I had circles under my eyes.
He had thoughtfully brought a thermos of coffee with too much sugar in it, the way our daddy made coffee, and a paper bag from Pearl's with a breakfast biscuit in it, and he drove me to my own bakery and he unlocked the back door for me with the spare key I'd given him, and he carried in my bag and turned the lights on and stood there in the middle of my kitchen with his hands on his hips and said, "Sis. Look at this place."
I looked at it. I had been looking at it for two weeks.
I had not, until that minute at four forty-five in the morning, with my brother standing in the middle of it lit up under the kitchen lights and a paper bag from the diner on the counter, seen it.
I saw it then. I saw the prep table running clean down the middle.
I saw the eight-foot oak counter behind the front register, planed and stained and sealed and waiting.
I saw the chalkboard menu Wren had lettered for me in her perfect art-teacher script.
I saw the pastry case Nadia had positioned exactly four inches off the back wall for the visual lines, Harper, trust me .
I saw Briar's fairy lights along the pass-through and the dried flowers in the front window.
I saw the little jar by the register with for the bakery on it in Elara's calm handwriting, already with six dollars in it from somebody who had come by yesterday to wish me luck and slip cash in.
I saw a bakery. Mine.
"Cade," I said.
"Yeah."
"I'm gonna be okay."
"I know you are, sis."
"I really am. I'm — I'm gonna be okay. Whatever happens today. Whatever happens. I just want to put that down. I'm gonna be okay."
He looked at me a long second. He did the eye thing.
He nodded, and then he came over and hugged me from the side around the shoulders the way he had hugged me at the supper table the night Mama'd told us Grandpa Kincaid had died when I was ten, and he said, "Get to work, baker. You got a town to feed."
I got to work.
I baked from five to eight-thirty. I baked four hundred and twelve individual pastries in those three and a half hours, alone in my kitchen, with the radio on low — country station, the old one out of Asheville — and the oven going steady.
I baked sixteen dozen of the lavender shortbread.
I baked twelve dozen of the brown sugar scones.
I baked the cinnamon rolls in two big sheet pans, eighteen per pan, and I frosted them at eight-fifteen with the warm cream cheese frosting that had been my grandmother's recipe and that Wren had told me was the best cinnamon roll she had ever had in her life.
I made eight dozen of the cardamom snickerdoodles with Elara's adjustment, half a teaspoon more.
I made six dozen of the honey-thyme biscuits, Briar's marriage proposal.
I made four dozen of the ham-and-cheddar biscuits with chive butter, Nadia's lunch item.
I made three coffee cakes the size of small hubcaps.
I made a single tray of pain au chocolat because they are the hardest thing I know how to make and I wanted there to be one hard thing in the case to remind me, when I looked at it at the end of the day, what my hands were still capable of.
I did all of it alone. I did all of it with the radio on. I did all of it without crying once, which I want to put down as an achievement.
The line started forming outside at eight-twenty.
Cade saw it first. He had been at the front counter eating his second breakfast biscuit, and he came back to the kitchen looking a little pale and said, "Harp. Come look."
I went to the front. I pushed the kitchen door open and stepped through into the front-of-house, still in my apron, flour on the front of it, and I looked out the window.
The line went down the block.
I am not exaggerating. The line went past Briar's flower shop and around the corner onto Magnolia, and at the front of the line was Mrs. Hatcher the lavender lady from the farm outside town, holding a basket she had brought me as a welcome gift, and behind her was the deacon from the Methodist church on the corner, and behind him were two of the older ladies from the quilting circle at the senior center, and behind them was a young couple with a stroller I did not recognize, and behind them was Roman, Nadia's husband, in his cut, holding her hand, and behind them was Silas, Briar's husband, also in his cut, with the baby Lark on his shoulders eating something pink off her own fist. Behind Silas was Maverick, Wren's husband, and behind him was Axel, Elara's husband.
Behind them was Knox, the Iron Thorn president, the man who had taken a phone call from Boone Dalton at six forty-five on a Thursday morning and started a paper war on my behalf without telling me, standing in line for my cinnamon rolls in the early summer sun with his hands in his pockets.
I did not see Boone in the line.
I scanned twice. I scanned with the very deliberate eyes of a woman who had made a promise to herself at three forty-five a.m. and was already, at eight thirty-five a.m., one block past breaking it. He wasn't there.
"Sis," Cade said. "You ready."
"I'm ready."
"Open the door."
I opened the door at nine on the dot.
The next four hours are not entirely in focus.
I remember pieces. I remember Mrs. Hatcher handing me a paper twist of dried lavender stems tied with twine and saying for the front window, sugar, when you have a free minute .
I remember the deacon ordering one of everything and paying with a one-hundred-dollar bill and telling me to keep the change as a welcome gift from the church .
I remember the quilting ladies arguing about which scone was best and finally settling the argument by buying eight of them and splitting the haul four ways.
I remember Lark on the front counter eating a frosting flower off the top of a cinnamon roll while her uncle Silas laughed and her mama Briar took fourteen pictures of her in a row.
I remember, sometime around ten-thirty, Cade behind the register helping me bag, because the line had not stopped, and the third hour of grand opening was running into the fourth, and we were going to run out of cinnamon rolls.
I remember at twelve-fifteen — I remember this very clearly, because I had not eaten since the breakfast biscuit at five a.m., and I had been moving for seven hours, and I was running on coffee and adrenaline and pure stubbornness — I remember pulling the last sheet of cinnamon rolls out of the oven for the second bake and turning around to set it on the cooling rack and looking across the front of the shop and there was Boone.