Chapter 5 Micah, the Beautiful One
Micah, the Beautiful One
September, a month before the reunion
“Hi, Logan, it’s Mom,” Micah said after the beep, her voice low and a little shaky as she stood in the kitchen of Lola’s. “Please, let’s talk. Okay? I get that you’re mad, but, honey . . .” What should she say? What could she say? “Please call me. I love you.”
She clicked off, swallowed hard, and pressed the heels of her hands against her eyes. This was torture.
The bells over the door to Lola’s Bakery jangled. Micah fixed her face and went out front. There was Marjorie Fielding, the self-appointed gentility queen of Stafford, staring at the display case as if it were full of rats rather than pastries. Micah’s toes clenched instinctively.
“Hello, Mrs. Fielding,” she said, her voice on auto-pleasant.
“Micah,” Marjorie said. “How are you?” Her tone seemed to indicate that Micah was a stage IV cancer patient.
“Wonderful. How are you?” Micah said.
“I’m well. How’s that boy of yours?”
“That boy” was twenty-four. “He’s doing great. Very happy in Boston. Loves his job, has a gorgeous apartment.”
Marjorie deigned to look at her finally.
“Has he found a special someone yet?” she asked.
“Settling down, one hopes? Not living the life of an irresponsible . . . oh, what do they like to call themselves? Millennial? The human race will die out unless they start acting like adults. Please tell me he’s not whoring around on one of those sex sites. Is marriage unheard of these days?”
For one, Logan was Gen Z. For two, Micah didn’t know whether Logan was whoring around.
Three, she didn’t know how his job was going, and four, she didn’t know anything because it had been four weeks and two days since they last talked.
“No marriage on the horizon just yet,” she said. “He’s still a little young.”
Marjorie clucked. “Mr. Fielding and I were married at twenty-one. Today’s youth. All they care about is watching their phones and sleeping around. They’ll be lucky not to be riddled with disease or get pregnant out of wedlock.”
Micah’s smile turned to cement. “I got pregnant out of wedlock, Marjorie. Things turned out just fine for me.”
“Of course, of course. Lucky for you, you have that nice James. I imagine he’s a good provider, being in the trades.”
Marjorie had lipstick on her teeth, and Micah was not going to tell her. Let her run her errands looking slightly demented.
“What can I get you today?” Micah asked.
“Nothing catches my fancy at the moment,” she said. “Just thought I’d check in to see if you needed any help with the reunion.”
Micah tilted her head. “Why would you want to help on a reunion for my class?” To collect gossip, Micah well knew, so she could be the first to announce who’d gotten divorced, who was unemployed, who had failed to live up to their potential (Micah, for example).
“Wasn’t your own reunion a few years ago?
Your fiftieth, if I remember correctly.” After all, Micah made all the cakes and goodies for every event in town.
“Gosh, was that ten years ago already? Eleven?”
Marjorie swelled like a poisonous blowfish. “I’m just offering help, Micah. I’m well aware of the work required for an event like this.”
“Luckily, we have a great committee. But thank you so much, Marjorie. Here. Have a cupcake on the house for your thoughtfulness.” Micah picked out a red velvet cupcake topped with a hefty swirl of cream cheese frosting and popped it into a box. It was the old hag’s favorite.
Marjorie wavered, then caved. “Fine. Thank you.”
The second she was out the door, Micah’s fake smile dropped.
Marjorie Fielding was small-town Stafford at its worst. No matter what Micah did, a healthy portion of the population would always think of her as that wild girl who made bad choices and tormented her poor mother.
Who was responsible, at least partially, for The Accident.
No amount of free cupcakes would ever erase that.
Marjorie was right about one thing: Being chair of the reunion was exhausting.
The committee was made up of people who’d said they wanted to be involved but were now too busy.
Micah would end up doing 75 percent of the work herself, along with James.
He always had her back, and it was his reunion, too, after all. But God, she was tired.
Every day, Micah got up at 4:30 a.m. so she could shower and have a cup of coffee at home before heading to the bakery four blocks away.
The machinists at the clean energy plant started their shift at 6:30, and Lola’s needed their business.
It wasn’t just the hours and being on her feet all day, though.
Her mother was a spewing volcano of self-pity and complaints about everything—except Eve, Micah’s egotistical sister, now the golden child due to her glamorous job.
And there was Stafford itself. As a small business owner—and someone who’d spent her teenage years loudly declaring her intention to leave town—Micah had to pretend that baking for Stafford was her choice, her calling, her joy.
That even though this was exactly the opposite of where she’d thought she’d end up, this was the dream.
She had to atone for The Accident, atone for being a teenage mother, atone for not marrying James right away.
(How many people had told her she was lucky he had stood by her?
Had anyone ever told him he was lucky, too?)
She had to be the proud scion of Lola’s, the bakery her great-grandmother had founded seventy-five years ago.
Micah was a registered independent, so she could pretend to be politically neutral.
She brought cupcakes to all the school celebrations—Homecoming, Fall Festival, Thanksgiving Celebration, Holiday Festival, Spring Fling, May Day, Awards Night and all the graduations, from kindergarten through high school.
She made goodies for the teachers and librarians, stopped by town hall with two dozen scones, had free tastings on winter weekends when the wealthy flat-landers came up to ski.
She brought goodies to the Garden Club, the Friends of the Library, the Downtown Stafford Business Owners, of which she was president this year.
She donated dessert to the spaghetti supper for Miles Wilkes, the ten-year-old who’d been hit by a car and needed extensive physical therapy not covered by insurance.
She organized meal trains for anyone who needed one .
. . the mom of the triplets; the teacher with ALS; sweet old Mr. Stone, who’d lost his wife.
She was a pillar of the community. She had to be.
She owed Lola’s a lot. It had supported her mom after Dad left when Micah and Eve were teenagers.
It had given her a job when she’d been pregnant and unmarried.
The first seven years of Logan’s life, they had lived in the apartment above the shop with her mom.
And it did have its upsides. Micah loved baking (thank God), and Lola’s was a legend in Vermont, one of the few businesses that had been woman-owned for four generations.
The vintage signs were meticulously maintained, the painted window lettering spelling out Coffee Parlor on one side, Baked Goods on the other.
The scuffed wooden floors were original, the embossed bronze engraved cash register a work of art.
It always smelled of cake and coffee and happiness.
And Logan loved the bakery. What if he never came back here? What if the days of him demolishing cupcakes out front or helping her in the back were over? The thought caused actual pain in her chest. Heartache, the kind only a mother knew.
“Hey, Mrs. Paulson,” called Mathilda Joyce, walking in the door.
Micah straightened up. “Hi, Kylo! How are you?” So many teenagers changed their names these days, and Micah tried to remember them and use the pronouns they preferred. Making a teenager feel accepted in this world was worth the effort.
Mathilda was Audrey Porter’s—well, Audrey Joyce’s—stepdaughter, and she came in at least twice a week.
Like a lot of kids at that age, she was figuring out who she was, as demonstrated by the occasional green streaks in her hair and the odd choice in name.
She was usually with Everest Snow (original name, so it was the parents’ fault in that case).
Everest was cheery, smart and expressive, the nicest girl in town—or kid, Micah silently corrected herself.
They/them. The same helpful, smiling type of teenager Logan had been.
“Your usual, Kylo?” Micah asked, knowing the kids loved to feel like regulars.
“That’d be great,” Kylo said. “Thanks, Mrs. Paulson.”
“Is Everest joining you?”
“Yeah.” Kylo glanced at her phone. “Any minute now.”
“Then I’ll get theirs, too.”
She turned to the coffee station and started on the vanilla soy chai for Kylo, a plain old cappuccino for Everest. She wondered how Audrey was handling her kid’s teenage years.
Logan had been easy, affectionate and open with her and James—especially James—his rebellion consisting of nothing more than a few eye rolls and a messy room rife with the smell of sweaty sneakers.
He’d never been angry with her before. Not like this. But she couldn’t say she didn’t deserve it. Micah swallowed hard.
“Hey, Mrs. Paulson!” Everest banged through the front door, resplendent in black, with three nose piercings and a chain going from their ear to somewhere down their shirt. “How’s the best baker in the world?”
Micah smiled. “I’m good, honey. Kylo’s already ordered you a cappuccino.”
“But what about sugar and carbs? I can’t, like, get through the rest of the day without a serious infusion of deliciousness, Mrs. P.”
“Pick your poison,” Micah said.
“I’ll take that bad boy there, if you don’t mind.” They pointed to a whoopie pie—two round chocolate cake disks with marshmallow filling in between, a New England classic.
Micah handed it over. “On the house,” she said. “Because of your deep appreciation of my life’s work.”
Everest laughed, thanked her and went to sit with Kylo.
Micah had made the pink-and-white cake for Everest’s baptism.
The purple mermaid cake when they were six.
The cupcakes when they had earned their black belt.
Last year, a goth castle cake for their fifteenth.
Being the town baker meant being involved in almost every family’s life, a privilege as warm and lovely as cranberry-orange muffins fresh from the oven.
But she’d never made anything for the Joyce family.
Another person came through the door. Kirsty Talcott, one of the reunion committee members. “We just lost the DJ,” she announced. “Do you know anyone else?”
“I probably do, but can’t we just do a Spotify playlist? It would save money,” Micah said.
“DJs make it so much more fun.”
“Okay then.” She scrolled through her phone. Since she made a lot of wedding cakes, she knew plenty of people who worked in the business. “Here. Jeff Stein. I’ll text you his number.”
Kirsty looked at her watch. “Can you call him, Micah? I have to get home and pack. Jack and I are going to New York City for the weekend.”
“Sure thing.” And so it went, at least in Micah’s life.
She made the call, then emailed her three part-timers to ask them to cover reunion weekend, hoping no one would flake at the last minute.
James, like her, would be taking the weekend off, picking up the slack, doing stuff she forgot, making sure she knew he was right there.
He understood how high school had ended for her, how hard it had been when most of their class had left.
He was such a good guy. An incredible dad.
Fear jolted through her veins like a double shot of espresso injected into her heart. Call me, Logan. Please, please call me.
“Bye, Mrs. Paulson,” Kylo and Everest called.
“Thanks for coming in, you two,” Micah said.
She glanced at the clock. Forty-five minutes till closing.
She went to the tiny office and checked her email.
Ten or twelve messages about the reunion from vendors and committee members and former classmates asking if they could bring a guest, where to stay and, in one case, the best car services from the airport.
It felt cruel to be in charge of this, though she had no one to blame but herself. She’d volunteered. Her penance, maybe. The Core Four, her part in its ruination, the immensity of it all, the snarl of emotions it conjured—fear, shame, love, anger—was a rope wrapped around her throat.
Her computer made the little burping sound that indicated another message.
The subject line read Reunion weekend. But this one was from Audrey.
Audrey, who’d barely acknowledged Micah since she’d moved back with her husband and stepdaughter.
Micah’s eyes flew across the screen. She read the email three times.
An invitation to stay at Bitter Creek Farm? With Jasmine and Beck?
Could she avoid it? Would the other two actually come back to Stafford? God, it would be awful. If they did come, though, she’d have to go. Of all of them, Micah really couldn’t say no.
Though Lola’s was supposed to stay open till four, Micah went to the door, locked it, flipped the Open sign to Closed, pulled the shade and went back to her desk.
There, in the bottom drawer, was her emergency Irish whiskey.
She poured herself a finger or two (definitely two) and swallowed it in one gulp.