Chapter 3: On The Market

That night all hell broke loose.

Well, not exactly.

When I came downstairs for dinner, June was home. Mom and Dad must’ve picked her up on the way home from the bank.

“June!” I said. She turned and smiled at me and gave me a big hug.

“Nunie!”

“I didn’t know you were gonna be home,” I said, stroking a piece of her reddish brown hair.

“I didn’t either,” June half-laughed. “Mom and Dad wanted me home for dinner tonight.”

I felt my stomach plummet but held my facial expression together. “Oh,” I said.

Small talk about her visit at her friend Emma’s house commenced as we made our way through the side door to where the bakery kitchen and our family dining area was. We had always eaten dinner in the kitchen, which had a metallic echoey sound to it. But this was the only area where we could fit a table for all of us to eat at without disturbing the “customers.” This wasn’t much of an issue now of course, but moving the dining table into somewhere more public would have been a sign of defeat.

We sat around the table in our usual seats; Dad, then Gram, then me, then Mom, then June, then Dad. Dad prayed for the meal which was Gram’s delicious cranberry chicken.

There wasn’t much conversation at first, which was an ominous sign. Gram’s mouth was pursed and pouty, as if she knew something bad was coming but already knew she had no control over it. Dad would try to exchange a look with mom every so often, but Mom kept her eyes averted as if not giving in would keep me and June from suspecting something was going on. This had the opposite affect of what she intended and made me and June even more tense and miserable, already knowing exactly what everyone was thinking but having zero authority to address it. We just had to wait for someone to actually say what everyone was thinking.

Finally Dad donned his dad-grin, which meant he was about to present bad news in the most positive light imaginable. “So, Mom and I wanted you all to be here tonight because as you know we were at the bank today—“ Gram already had tears streaming down her pink cheeks “—and you know, we talked about a lot of options, and we have been for while now. As you guys know. But we ultimately realized that… we need to sell the bakery.” He looked up at us, eyebrows uplifted in sympathy.

No one responded. I had already been weeping and raging in my soul so there was no need to do so outwardly now.

Silence. Dad, who didn’t exactly understand how grief and a lack of words went hand in hand, plowed forward.

“I know that this bakery means so much to all of us, and reminds us of Poppy, and he’s kind of in it in a sense— but it’s also been a business and business-wise it hasn’t been successful for a while.”

Tears were stabbing at the back of my eyes but I wouldn’t let them fall. That would just result in more words that would do nothing to comfort me.

“And with my studio finally being ready for me to move in, and Mom and June going to school in Wells— and Nunie, you’ll be moving on soon too with college and everything— it just seems like Wells makes more sense as our permanent home.”

June kept looking over at me. Although she loved the bakery and living here, this was good news for her. But I knew she was aware of how much it would crush me and was trying to offer as much moral support from across the table as possible.

Suddenly I couldn’t hold it back anymore and my face collapsed into tears.

Of course Dad kept talking, telling me he knew it was hard. I had opened the flood-gates to Gram’s tears and now she was bawling too, which didn’t help at all. June looked sickened by the state of her family. Mom reached out a hand and put it on my shoulder. I knew she understood and was mourning in her own silently strong way. I wished I could be more like her.

Of course I interjected with the only thing I could manage to put into words, “Why are you just assuming I am leaving for college?” This was the least of my worries, but for some reason the only tangible thing I could grasp onto. What I meant was, “I care about this bakery more than any of the rest of you, so why would you assume I have a reason to leave it like the rest of you?” But since I had no way of proving this fact I somehow couldn’t get it out.

Dad took the attack in full stride and told me that of course I didn’t have to go to college if I didn’t want to but that was what we had been discussing and thats why he mentioned it. It was true, we had had a few overwhelming discussions about college but none of them had given me any more clarity on whether I wanted to go or not. I guess I would have to go now.

Mom finally spoke. “We haven’t put the bakery on the market yet. We wanted to tell you first and we still need to have a few more meetings about how much we can sell it for. But it should be up for sale by the end of this week… After that we’ll still have some time before we get an offer and then a month before escrow closes and we have to move out.” Thank goodness for some hard facts I could actually grapple with.

“However, Dad and I have already been looking for a place in Wells, and we actually found one we’d like to make an offer on. Tomorrow we’ll go as a family to take a look at it. If they accept our offer, then Dad an I are thinking we’ll start moving in there in the next couple weeks after we get back from the family reunion. It will give us a chance to get settled before the school year starts and Dad’s studio opens—“

The next couple weeks?! I was about to protest but Mom was already there.

“Nunie, I know it’s important to you to have your last summer here at the bakery. And I know you haven’t decided what to do for the fall yet. So you are more than welcome to stay here for as long as you’d need and we’ll totally understand if you want to stay here instead of come to the reunion. You could have Jenny come live with you even? Savor your last few weeks living here and… say goodbye.”

I usually would never skip out on a family reunion and I didn’t like any of what my mom had said, but there was no way I was leaving the bakery in a matter of weeks. I nodded and eeked out, “Okay,” in a way that demonstrated my intention to stay.

Something in me grabbed hold in that moment to the idea that none of what my parents had announced was going to happen. It couldn’t happen. It wasn’t what anyone wanted. Mom had grown up here and loved living in the little apartment as much as I did if not more. And Gram’s heart would be crushed to leave the home she had spent her whole married life building. Dad was just in denial. I knew deep down he had never fully grieved the loss of Poppy, his best friend. He couldn’t bring himself too— I think he thought if he ever let himself just cry it out he would never recover. So he was just trying to get out of Dodge as soon as possible. And June, well, June knew this place was a family legacy as much as I did, and even if it wasn’t her favorite place in the world, I think it scared her to know we were losing it. And Poppy— what would Poppy say? Would he be giving up on the bakery just because business was slow?

There were too many memories in this place to let it slip away. There had to be another solution. My brain was already spinning. It was the only way I could console myself. Somehow I knew we weren’t going to lose the bakery. Even if the rest of them left, I would stay and fight it out.

This resolution brought a calm over my expression. I think everyone thought it was because I was beginning to accept the way things were. In fact it was just the opposite. I was donning my emotional armor and weaponry to fight reality to the death.

The next day we went and looked at “the new house.” I felt sick to my stomach the whole time but managed to hold it together. Everyone else in my family looked pretty green too, except for Dad who was pushing through on sheer avoidance of his true feelings.

When we came home, I called Jenny and told her the sitch.

“Oh my gosh,” she said softly. “Nunie, I’m so sorry… I know that’s like… the last thing you wanted to happen.”

“Well,” I said, “It’s not going to happen, so…”

“What do you mean?”

“I’m just not gonna let it happen. I’m gonna figure out a way to get the bakery back in business before mom and dad get home.”

“How?!”

Jenny’s lack of faith in my aspirations crushed me inwardly but made me outwardly defensive. “I already have some ideas, are you gonna help me?”

Silence. “Well yeah, of course, but I just wanna know what you’re planning to do. Do your parents know?”

“…No.”

“Dang Nunie.”

“It’s not like I’m going to do anything bad,” I exclaimed, “I’m just gonna try and fix the place up, market it better, make it more trendy—stiffen up competition with Izby’s.” In the past 24 hours my feelings about Izby’s had gone from slight annoyance to outright hatred.

“Isn’t that gonna cost a lot of money?”

I hadn’t really thought about it. “Well, yeah, but…” Now my brain was chewing on that problem. “We’ll figure it out.”

Jenny’s silence was deafening. I felt myself choking up again. “Anyway, I was just wondering if you’d want to come stay with me over the bakery while my family is on vacation?”

“Ooh! Of course,” said Jenny, perking up again. She was always down for a sleep-over and some midnight gossip. And I knew she was onboard with helping me. She’d just need for me to have more of a “plan” before she got enthusiastic. In elementary school I had wanted to draw a chalk mural on the side of the school building in honor of our teacher’s birthday. Jenny had been skeptical until I showed up to school with a box of chalk and a mockup of what it would look like. We had the mural completed in 10 minutes after that and despite being scolded for drawing on the building we were the teacher’s pets for the rest of the year.

Within a few days Mom and Dad had made an offer on the house. By the end of the week there was a big, ugly “For Sale” sign in the window of the bakery and Mom, Dad, Gram and June had left for New Hampshire to stay in cabins with Mom’s brothers and their families.

Me and Jenny were left in the bakery with instructions to bake just enough goods for two customers a day. First thing we did as soon as they left was to take that ugly sign out of the window and hide it behind the counter. Then we made box mac-n-cheese, put on ninety-nine-cent face-masks and watched Free Willy upstairs, which was what we had done for every sleepover since we were kids. Afterward, we began to plot.

We sat on the floor on beanbags facing each other. “Okay, I’ve been thinking about this, and I know what the first thing to do is.” Jenny reached into her denim tote and took out a heap of magazines. She dumped them on the floor. “Mood board!”

I smiled a little. I knew she would come through for me. Plus, making mood-boards was fun and would comfort me in my hour of trial. “Good idea,” I said.

My mom always had a bunch of old poster-boards jammed behind her desk because she used them to teach her English class diagrams about how story plots work. We stole one and brought it back to the living room.

“Okay, so, what exactly is your plan. What are your goals?”

“Well, obviously my main goal is to save the bakery. But I think it’s going to come down to making it trendy. A certain type of person would choose a trendy bakery over a streamlined vintage ice-cream parlor, right?”

“Yeah, I get what you’re saying.”

“We need to make the bakery a contrast to the ice-cream parlor. The ice-cream parlor is loud, hot and pink. I think our shop needs to be peaceful—but still aesthetic.”

“Right,” said Jenny. She started thumbing through a home-improvement magazine. “I feel kind of weird doing this without Bill, does he know about it?”

“No,” I said, realizing I hadn’t told him anything about the bakery being officially on the market.

“He doesn’t even know about the bakery being for sale?!”

I shrugged.

“Nunie!”

“Well I’m gonna tell him eventually, obviously.”

“We should have him come over here and help us. He’s really good at this kind of thing, marketing and crap. Better than me.” She laughed self-depreciatingly. “Call him.”

I was quiet. Jenny lifted her eyes up to me. “Oh… are you going through one of your weird stages again?”

“I don’t know,” I groaned. “I just don’t want to be leading him on and I feel like I already am—“

“Nu-nie…”

“Plus I think he’d judge me for doing this.”

Yes. You guessed it. Bill liked me, or at least he had two summers ago. Honestly I think he had liked me for our whole lives, before he was even old enough to know he did. Heck, when we were kids, even I thought we were gonna get married. Obviously I had no idea what that meant because there was no way we were actually going to end up together now. Over middle school I had built up a small—okay, pretty decent— crush on him, but I was fixated on Michael coming during the summers enough to avoid doing anything serious about Bill. Then, sophomore year of high school he finally confessed his love which sent me into a severe panic. I let him flirt around with me and be my half-boyfriend for about a month out of desperate fear of losing his friendship, then let him down slowly one day over a turkey sandwich at lunch. Fortunately he was Bill, and his worst fear was to lose our friendship as much as it was mine. It took a few miserable months for him to recover from the blow and for me to do penance every day for breaking my best friends heart, but finally we got back to normal. But only as close to normal as we could ever be. Now I had to live in constant dread of making him hope I had changed my mind and he had to live in constant restraint from feeling the way he really felt.

Most of the time this all affected nothing because we were the best kind of best friends anyone can be, the kind who are deeply loyal, can make each other fall on the floor laughing, the kind who have common interests and a common soul.

But every few months I’d get this rock in my stomach and revert into one of my “stages” as Jenny called them, in which I became distrustful of Bill and miserable with the whole situation.

See, when a guy has been both deeply in love with you and broken hearted by you you never know whether in his deepest heart he adores you or hates you. You hope the love has managed to hold on in some sort of platonic way, and yet the pain of letting them down constantly leaves the question of whether their image of you has been permanently tainted. And if there was anyone in the world who’s image of me I would not want to be tainted, it would be Bill.

“He’s not going to judge you Nunie… he cares about this bakery as much as we do if not more. I think any of us would do anything we could do to save it.”

I felt my heart warm at this. I was lucky to have such loyal friends who had been there forever. “I guess you’re right,” I said.

“Yeah. I really think he’s totally over you, you don’t have to be so on edge anymore.”

“You think so?” I asked. I thought Bill was over me too, but sometimes I still wondered.

“Yes, I think so,” said Jenny. She reached into her bag and took out a pair of steel scissors. She cut a bohemian looking rug out of the magazine, then pasted it to the board, right in the middle.

I had been thumbing through a magazine and found some nice hanging plants that I cut out and added. Seeing our vision begin to come together we both went quiet for a few minutes, pasting items to the board. I cut out the words, peaceful, comfort, and spice. We added couple of stuffy looking leather chairs, and some bare-wood furniture. Some more colorful rugs. Bits of color including rusty brown, forest green, pops of yellow and red, and a soft oceany blue.

“Alright, well that’s a vibe,” I said, sitting back on my knees and looking proudly at the board.

“It’s a vibe,” Jenny said, “but I still think we need Bill’s advise. Just decorating the inside isn’t going to get people to come inside.”

“You’re right,” I said. “Fine, I’ll call him.”

A few minutes later Bill was in the living room. Jenny held the mood-board up so he couldn’t see the front.

“What’s going on?” He sat down crosslegged between us on the floor.

“Okay,” I said, taking in a deep breath. “Mom and Dad are selling the bakery.”

Bill was quiet. “Oh no…”

“I know,” I said, maintaining my poise. “It’s on the market, but we still have time.”

“Time for what?”

“My family is out of town— in New Hampshire. For two weeks. That’s two weeks for us to spruce this place up, set up tough competition with Izby’s, attract some of these billions of tourists and save the bakery. By the time they get back this place is going to be so hopping they’ll have to take it off the market!”

Bill laughed. “It’s crazy,” he said. “But it’s worth a shot I guess.”

I let out my breath in satisfaction. “It’s what we have to do.”

“No, you’re right,” Bill said. “So what’s the plan?”

Jenny flipped the mood-board dramatically. “Behold,” she said, “the new and improved Main Street Bakery!”

Bill looked unconvinced. “You’re gonna make hippie-ify it?”

“It’s not hippie,” I said, “its bohemian. There’s a difference.”

“Okay,” Bill said. “I mean I guess it is a contrast from Izby’s.”

“That’s exactly what we were going for.”

“Yeah, I still think you’re gonna need something that Izby’s doesn’t have…”

“We have baked goods?”

“No, I know, but it’s not the 1950s anymore. People don’t clamber for baked goods anymore. We need to think of something else that people clamber for… Coffee! Like coffee.”

Bill picked up a sharpie that was lying on the floor and scrawled, “espresso maker” onto our perfect mood-board.

“BILL!” we both screamed, a second too late.

“What?!”

“You don’t write on a mood-board you nut!” I said, snatching the sharpie.

“Sorry,” Bill whined. “But am I right?”

“Yes,” I said, “its a super good idea. We can offer espresso drinks as well as bakery items. Bribe them in with coffee, then get them to buy a pastry while they’re at it.”

Jenny flipped rapidly through a magazine and found an espresso maker. She cut it out and pasted it over Bill’s defacement.

“What about dishes?” Bill asked.

“What about them?”

“I don’t think you should keep using those weird plasticky cheap ones.”

“Yeah, you’re probably right.”

“Do you have a budget?”

“No…”

“You need a budget,” Bill demanded. “How do you plan to pay for this?”

“With my nannying money,” I answered, finally facing the fact that this was going to come straight out of my own pocket.

“Nunie,” Jenny said, “that’s your college savings…”

“Yeah, well, someone’s got to pay for it.”

My friends were silent. They were taking in how much this truly meant to me, even more than they had realized before. Experiencing the pain of having your home taken from you.

“Well, we can help,” Bill said, speaking for both of them but I knew Jenny agreed.

I didn’t even try to argue their help away. It was soothing the wound deep inside that no-one cared about the bakery.

“How much can you contribute?” Bill asked.

I gulped. “$2000.”

“Nunie, that’s a lot of money!”

“Are you sure?” Bill asked, remaining calm.

“Yes.”

“Alright. I can probably manage $800.”

“You guys know I don’t save money,” Jenny said. “So I don’t have a lot. But I can give $200.”

“Good,” Bill said, “that will put us at a $3000 budget. $3000, two weeks.”

“I promise I’ll pay you guys back once the bakery get’s back in business—“

“It’s okay,” Bill said. “This bakery has already given us so much we owe it something.”

I looked at Jenny. She nodded kindly.

“Thanks,” I said.