Just clinically interested.
The way you might look at an X-ray of your own hand.
Nine years of a service door.
Three uninvitations.
One torn invoice.
One blue dress in a gravel lot in March.
And my hand still put them at the top of the page in the right birth order without being asked.
I didn’t cross anybody out.
I want to be clear about that too.
I didn’t scratch a single line.
I just closed the pad and went to bed.
In the morning, I ordered 93 invitations from a printer in Salem.
Which is 11 more than I ended up needing.
Dileia came into the shop on a Tuesday at two in the afternoon.
Our dead hour.
She had never been inside before.
Nine years.
Eighteen miles.
She stood just inside the door and looked around at the case and the shelves.
The way you look at a stranger’s house.
Then she came to the counter, put her purse down, and said she wanted to go over Rowan’s cake.
Not ask.
Go over.
She had it written out on a folded index card.
Three tiers.
180 guests.
Buttercream, not fondant, because Todd’s mother has opinions.
A dessert table with six varieties.
Coffee service through the reception with somebody pouring because at the Grange Hall the coffee is a disaster if nobody is watching it.
Delivery and setup at the church basement on the fourth.
Then transfer to the Grange on the fifth.
She read it off the card in order.
Like a work order.
Honestly, it was a good brief.
Clearer than most of my paying clients.
When she finished, I picked up my pen.
“What’s the budget?”
She looked up.
Then laughed.
The same small, friendly laugh from the gravel lot in March.
“Budget?”
“Maya, it’s Rowan.”
Behind me, Tessa, who is 19 and had been pretending to clean the same square foot of the espresso machine for four minutes, went very still.
Then Dileia added the last piece.
She said she had already told Todd’s mother that Rowan’s aunt was handling the cake.
So that was all squared away.
She had told the other family before she asked me.
Before she drove 18 miles to stand in my shop and read me a work order off an index card.
I heard my own voice say, “Let me send you a quote.”
She didn’t react right away.
She stood there with her hand on her purse.
Looked at me for three full seconds.
Then she laughed again.
But it came out wrong this time.
A beat too late.
Half a note too high.
“A quote?”
She said it like a word in a foreign language she was trying out.
She picked up her purse.
“Sure, Maya.”
“Send me a quote.”
She said the word again on the way to the door.
Then a third time from the sidewalk through the glass.
To nobody.
Shaking her head.
The bell over the door made its little noise.
Tessa waited until the truck pulled out of the space before she said anything.
“Was that a customer?”
I stood there with flour on my hands.
I could not answer her.
Not because it was a hard question.
Because there were two true answers.
And I had spent nine years making sure I never had to pick one.
I’d like to stop here for a second.
I stood in my own shop in the middle of my own workday feeling like I had done something wrong because I had offered to tell my sister what a job costs.
If you’ve ever gotten in trouble for asking what your own work is worth, you already know exactly what that feels like in the stomach.
Tell me about it in the comments.
And subscribe if you’re staying, because it gets a good deal worse before it gets better.
The invitations came from Salem that Friday.
Cream stock with a deckled edge.
Ninety-three of them.
They were more beautiful than I expected.
It embarrassed me a little how much I liked them.
I addressed them at the kitchen table over two nights with a bottle of wine and a good pen.
Eighty-two went into a shoebox by the door for the post office.
Eleven did not.
I want to describe exactly what I did with those 11 because it’s the thing I did most often that summer.
And I did it without ever once making a decision.
I took the 11 blank ones downstairs.
Put them in a small cardboard box.
The kind the vanilla comes in.
Then I set that box on the shelf beside the proof cabinet.
That shelf is the warmest spot in the building.
It sits exactly at eye level.
And it is 11 steps from the mixer and nine steps from the oven.
Which means I walk past it something like 30 times a shift.
I told myself I put them there so the corners wouldn’t curl in the damp by the door.
That is a real thing that happens to cardstock.
And it was also a lie.
I knew it was a lie while I was telling it to myself.
I put them there anyway.
For the next six weeks, every single working day of my life ran past that box.
Proofing the morning batards.
Past the box.
Pulling the sheet pans.
Past the box.
Four in the afternoon with my back gone and the last of the croissants laminated for tomorrow.
Past the box.
Not addressed.
Not thrown away.
Just there.
In the warmest part of the room.