She never could control her sweet tooth. When she was young, she would always give her mother’s sleeve an extra hard tug as they passed the patisseries of Paris. It’s not that she was especially weak when it came to baked goods, but the way the gateaus looked like a forest out of Candy Land always mesmerized Joanna. Even after her family moved back to the states, Joanna loved walking by bakeries, and smelling whatever had just been pulled out of the oven. As she grew up, she tried her own hand at baking, but was a complete failure. She followed recipes to the letter, yet for some reason her cookies burned, her soufflés fell, and her pudding curdled. By the time she finished school, Joanna had managed to ruin every recipe in her mother’s cookbook. Somewhere along the way, though, she found her true calling: event planning.
If she couldn’t bake, she would spend her life finding people who could, and do it well. After years of networking, hosting small gatherings, and planning parties as favours for relatives and friends, Joanna started to make a name for herself. Coincidentally, it was the placement of her planning service’s ad in the local newspaper next to real estate agent Leroy Marlow that led to their eventual meeting. Joanna didn’t find Leroy particularly interesting, or even incredibly attractive, but he turned out to be charming, ambitious, and head over heels crazy for her. So, when he proposed to her on their two year anniversary, Joanna took the ring box home, had a slice of leftover cake from the retirement party she had just planned, and texted him “sure, why not? ;)”.
The night before her wedding, Joanna ran into her bridesmaids’ suite in the hotel and screamed, “what am I doing? I don’t even love him!”
“But you guys have such great chemistry, and you go so great together!” her sister and maid of honour, Cynthia, was the first to jump up to the rescue. As Joanna’s other best friends and cousins cooed her into submission and reapplied her mascara, Joanna settled a bit, but still felt the smoldering burn of regret.
“Sure we go great together, but are we any good for each other?” She asked through three highballs and a tequila shot. As logical as the question seemed to her, her bridal party seemed thrown off by the question.
“Of course you’re good for each other! He’s the number 12 ranked realtor in the state, and you’re planning weddings for people across the country! Together, you help people get married, find homes, retire, and celebrate every occasion in between! You’ve got us covered from bridal veil to grave!” Roberta, Joanna’s older cousin, laughed back. Out of the entire set of bridesmaids, Joanna was most certain that Roberta would never be a bride herself. But instead of pitying her, Joanna decided it was a conscious decision she must have made years ago, after she left the only man she’d ever dated because he sat on her kitten. Joanna sighed, realized her friends were right, and finished off the bottle of wine sitting in front of her.
Two years after her wedding, Joanna was offered a job in a town quite a ways away from her home. She could do most of the ordering and planning from home, but for the week leading up to the birthday party, she would have to temporarily relocate to make sure her crew wasn’t slacking off and delivering everything to the wrong address like her last out-of-town function. For the most part, things had been running relatively smoothly, except for an issue with the cake. The plan was to have a blown-up version of the birthday boy’s face imprinted on the cake, but the bakers accidentally cropped out the wrong part of the picture, and all that showed up was a picture of him from the belly button down. This was only a problem because the picture had been taken during one of his diaper changes, and the cake was chocolate. Joanna couldn’t decide whether to laugh, cry, or say nothing and bring out the cake as it was, but after she got her bearings, and finally tore her eyes away from the incredibly dirty diaper, she chose a bakery near the house of the family, and elected them as the best candidate for making the cake.
Joanna strolled into the bakery in a smart pantsuit with sunglasses that implied business, because she had one goal in this shop: she wanted to find a cake that could be served to a two year old child without giving her a reputation for getting generic cakes when she was outside of her specialty. Joanna wanted to prove she could do more than weddings and funerals, and this would be the event to make her respected among young families. Without giving a second glance to the danishes, croissants, and éclairs, Joanna bee-lined towards the counter. The baker’s nametag said Doug, and while her first memory of a man named Doug conjured up images of a particularly foul-smelling uncle, when she met his eyes, Joanna suddenly experienced the bakery.
In a dramatic gesture, Joanna swept off her sunglasses, and took a breath. Each loaf of bread’s individual smell became so obvious, and she swore she could hear the fire in the ovens delicately lapping at the loaves on display’s future brothers and sisters. Cream was being whipped behind the counter, and it wasn’t until Doug said a third “hey!” that she realized there was more than just stainless steel machinery behind the counter. And as she breathed out a “hey” in response, Joanna had to fight to keep her eyes level with Doug’s. With a body and a smile unlike any of the bakers Joanna remembered from France, Doug could have sold her an oatmeal raisin cookie and she wouldn’t have noticed anything was wrong until the baby started crying.
“So what can I get for you?” Doug didn’t sound impatient, but Joanna couldn’t quite place the tone that was in his voice.
“I… need a cake. A birthday… cake for a birthday…” Joanna was stumbling over her words, and started panicking. She was here for a job, so why did she suddenly feel like a fourteen-year old again?
Doug smiled back at her, and Joanna started to guess that maybe this guy felt a bit like a fourteen-year old as well, “well, you’ve come to the right place to get a cake, but unfortunately we don’t have a lot available right now. How soon do you need it?” As if on cue, Joanna switched back into business mode to answer the question.
“Not till this Thursday, but I need something that’s going to wow the parents. It’s for a boy’s second birthday, he wants chocolate, and my name is Joanna.” She stuck her hand out awkwardly for a handshake, at which Doug smiled again, reached out, and shook it more slowly than Joanna anticipated. Thoughts started flowing, “what am I doing? I sound like I’m reading off a script! Why does the cute baker have to be shaking my hand so softly? Oh god, I really need to stop staring at him.” Joanna finally retracted her hand, smiled, and asked, “So what can you do by then?”
“Well, do you want to see some of our templates? I have a binder in the back with a bunch of generic designs, but it gives you a lot of room to customize and make it really personal.” Doug kept smiling at Joanna, and at the mention of a back room, Joanna shifted. She had been in back rooms with plenty of contacts before, but never before had she been this undecided.
“…Of course. I’d love to see what you have!” Joanna said. She almost slapped herself for not making sure the word “cake” was in there somewhere, but she felt it was too late to correct herself, and followed the sexy baker to an office in the back of the store. Doug pulled a binder seemingly randomly from a bookshelf of nearly identical binders, but instantly opened to a page of the most beautiful pieces Joanna had come across.
“Well, we have tiered cakes if you want to get really fancy, but I think some of our simpler desi-“ Doug didn’t finish his sentence because Joanna had shoved the binder off the desk, and pressed her face against his. He immediately responded by grabbing her upper thigh more forcefully than Leroy ever had, and by the time the next batch of bread was ready to be taken out, Joanna was walking out of the bakery, readjusting her blazer and making sure her shirt was tucked in. The cake ended up being a three-tier chocolate cake with a hand-frosted picture of the boy, and Joanna met fourteen young couples that were looking for a planner for their children’s next birthday.
That weekend, Joanna returned to an empty house. Leroy was at his office late, trying to push a couple from buying a foreclosed house that would cut his commission to a fraction of what he had hoped. So, Joanna called her sister, and before Cynthia could say “hello,” Joanna blurted it out:
“I just cheated on Leroy.” She found the words pretty easy to say, but was even more shocked at her sister’s response.
“…And? I’ve been sleeping with the kids’ Spanish tutor for years! I think Geoff knows, and doesn’t even care! Our marriage is better without the sex, and the kids have taken quite a liking to Ricardo, so I see everyone as winning.”
Joanna was flabbergasted. “Can we have this discussion in person?”
“I don’t see any reason why we have to go to all the trouble! So tell me… was the guy any good? How’d you meet him?” Cynthia’s casual attitude worried Joanna even more than the fact that she had slept with a man that wasn’t her husband. Unable to think of anything else to say, she hung up the phone, ate a box of Oreo’s, and went to bed. She was asleep by the time Leroy climbed into bed next to her.
Joanna woke up the next morning after Leroy had left for work. She went to her desk, and wrote down everything she was thinking – her regular reaction to personal dilemmas. After she had considered everything she had done, and weighed the pros and cons of telling her husband, she thought about what her sister had asked. “Well,” Joanna reasoned, “the sex was a lot better than what Leroy usually tries to bring to the table… But that doesn’t justify what I did!” And then she remembered the smell of the bakery. She hadn’t smelled anything that heavenly since she was a girl, and she realized, “the baked goods. I did it for the bread.” She threw down her pen, and grabbed her car keys. If she couldn’t have an affair, then she could at least eat her feelings. And maybe see if Doug was working again.
The drive back to the bakery took an hour and a half, but the entire time Joanna could only think about having a slice of bread. Smeared with butter. Then covered in raspberry jam. And dark chocolate shavings on top. Joanna felt flushed thinking about food as she parked her car, but she stopped at the shop’s front window. A customer walked out looking particularly embarrassed, and as the door opened, Joanna smelled every taste she would soon taste. But then she heard a yell, and snapped out of her trance to see someone yelling at Doug. She couldn’t hear what the man was saying, but he was obviously Doug’s boss, and Doug had done something to deserve the lecture. From outside the shop window, Doug didn’t look nearly as fit, and Joanna noticed he had a growing bald spot on the back of his head. Images of the well-fed bakers from her childhood rushed back into Joanna’s memory, and she knew that no loaf of bread or slice of pie from this bakery would ever be appetizing to her.
The drive home was much less eventful than her trip out, but Joanna felt relieved. She made it home before Leroy again, but this time she decided to bake cookies. She hadn’t tried in a few years, and had a foolproof recipe she found online a few weeks earlier, so she felt like this was the day. The cookies burned to the baking sheet, but the tops tasted alright, and Leroy thought they looked pretty, so long as they didn’t turn them over. They made love that night, but instead of falling asleep right after like he usually did, Leroy asked if she wanted a second round in a few minutes. They did it two more times that night, and Joanna woke up the next morning exhausted for the first time in her marriage.
Word count: 2,156
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