The Sweetness of Forgetting by Kristin Harmel Read Free Book Online

of the morning preparations. Check the timer for the chocolate chip meringues in oven 1. Roll out the dough for the almond rose tarts Matt Hines likes so much. Layer the baklava and slide it into oven 2. Put the softened cream cheese for the lemon-grape cheesecake into my second bowl mixer. Fold the layers of croissant around little squares of dark French chocolate for the pains au chocolat . Braid the long ropes of whole wheat challah, sprinkle it with raisins, and set it aside to rise again.
    There is nothing wrong with you, dear, Mamie had said, but what does she know? Her memory is all but gone, her senses completely off. Yet there are times when her eyes look as clear as ever, and when I’m sure she’s looking directly into my soul. Although I never doubted that she and my grandfather loved each other, theirs always seemed to be a relationship of function more than romance. Had I had that with Rob and thrown it away because I believed there was more out there? Perhaps I’d been a fool. Life isn’t a fairy tale.
    The timer on oven 1 goes off, and I move the meringues to a baking rack. I turn the oven on and prepare to slide the pains au chocolat in. I’ve started making a double batch of those in the mornings; they go more quickly now that it’s autumn and the air has turned cool. Our fruit tarts and pastries are more popular in the spring and summer months, but the denser, sweeter confections seem to bring people comfort as winter approaches.
    I started helping Mamie in the bakery, the way Annie helps me now, when I was eight. Every morning, just before the sun came up, Mamie would stop what she was doing and lead me to the side window that looked due east, over the winding ribbonof Main Street. We’d watch the horizon in silence until dawn broke, and then we’d go back to our baking.
    “What are you always looking at, Mamie?” I’d asked her one morning.
    “I am looking at the sky, my dear,” she’d said.
    “I know. But why?”
    She’d pulled me close, hugging me against her faded pink apron, the one she’d been wearing for as long as I could remember. I was a little scared by how tightly she was holding on.
    “ Chérie, I am watching the stars disappear,” she said after a minute.
    “Why?” I asked.
    “Because even though you cannot see them, they are always there,” she said. “They are just hiding, behind the sun.”
    “So?” I asked timidly.
    She released me from the hug and bent down to look me in the eye. “Because, my dear, it is good to remember that you do not always have to see something to know that it is there.”
    Mamie’s words from almost three decades earlier are still echoing in my head when I hear Annie’s voice in the doorway to the kitchen, startling me out of my fog.
    “Why are you crying?” she asks.
    I look up, surprised to realize that she’s right; there are tears rolling down my cheeks. I swat them away with the back of my hand, streaking wet, sticky dough across my face in the process, and force a smile.
    “I’m not,” I say.
    “You don’t have to, like, lie.”
    I sigh. “I was just thinking about Mamie.”
    Annie rolls her eyes and makes a face at me. “Great, now you decide to show some emotion.” She throws her backpack down in the corner, where it lands with a decisive thud.
    “What’s that supposed to mean?” I ask.
    “ You know,” she says. She rolls up the sleeves of her pinklong-sleeved shirt and grabs an apron from a hook on the wall, just to the left of the racks where I store the trays.
    “No, I don’t know,” I tell her. I stop what I’m doing and watch as she gets a carton of eggs and four sticks of butter out of the stainless steel refrigerator and grabs a measuring cup. She moves as fluidly through the kitchen as Mamie once did.
    Annie doesn’t answer until after she has creamed the butter in the stand mixer, added four cups of sugar, and cracked the eggs in, one at a time. “Maybe if you’d been, like, capable of feeling