Thrown Out in Front of His New Woman… A Year Later He Came to Her Office Asking for Work.
The doctor’s office smelled of antiseptic and fresh paper, and Nora Mercer sat on the edge of the examination chair with her hands folded in her lap, still wearing the apron she had forgotten to take off before leaving the kitchen.
Dr. Patel closed the folder on her desk and smiled the way doctors smile when they are about to give good news.
“Your fertility tests came back, Mrs. Mercer. Everything is normal.”
Nora blinked.
“Normal? All of it?”
“All of it. Has your husband been tested?”
Nora’s fingers tightened on the edge of her apron.
“His mother says it’s me.”
“His mother isn’t a doctor. Bring him in.”
Nora walked out into the parking lot of the medical plaza on Route 9, past the pharmacy and the dry cleaner’s, and sat in her car for ten minutes without turning the key, because six years of Sunday dinners and pointed silences and Diane Mercer’s little comments had just been handed back to her as somebody else’s fault.
That night she wrapped the test results in a folder and put them in her purse and told herself she would show Grant after his birthday party, and she baked him a three-layer chocolate cake with buttercream because that was what she did when she was nervous.
The party was at the Mercer house on Orchard Lane, and there were forty people in the backyard and a bar under a white tent and wives in dresses that cost more than Nora’s oven.
Diane Mercer stood by the champagne with her pearls and her perfect posture and said, “Poor Nora. Six years married and still no children,” and the other wives made the faces that wives make.
Grant was across the lawn in a navy blazer, laughing at something, and beside him stood a woman in a burgundy dress with dark hair and an easy smile, and Diane followed Nora’s eyes and said, “And who’s that at the bar? That’s Brooke, Grant’s new partner. Pretty girl.”
Nora set the cake on the table and went inside to get a knife and came back to find that the cake had been moved to the far end of the buffet, half-hidden behind a platter of shrimp.
She poured herself a glass of wine.
“This party just got better,” somebody said, and Nora did not know who, and did not want to.
“Happy birthday, Grant,” she said, when she found him alone for a moment by the bar.
He looked at the cake on the table and then at her and said, “Three days of work. You should have asked me first.”
Diane appeared at his shoulder and said, “Throw that in the trash. It’s my son’s birthday, not a bake sale.”
Nora looked at Grant.
“Grant, say something.”
Grant said, “You embarrassed me, Nora.”
In the car on the way home, with the streetlights passing over the windshield, she said, “Do you know who was at that party tonight? My partners and their wives. I baked you a cake, Grant. That’s all I did.”
He did not turn his head.
“When we met, I had one truck. You had nothing. We were the same. Now I have forty trucks and this house, and my wife is still a baker.”
She looked at him.
“You’re ashamed of me.”
“I’m ashamed of where you come from. And tonight you showed it to everyone.”
She reached into her purse and took out the folder and held it on her lap.
“Grant, wait. My tests came back today. The doctor—”
He opened the car door.
“Not tonight, Nora. I’ve heard enough from you today.”
The next morning Diane came into the kitchen while Nora was washing the pans.
She picked up the crust of a hand pie from the counter and tasted it and said, “Too much salt.”
“I made it your way, Diane.”
“Then you heard me wrong. Six years, no child. My son needs a family, not a baker.”
Nora dried her hands on the towel and said, “Diane, my tests are normal. Yesterday, the doctor said the Hollis girl has twins.”
Diane set the crust down.
“Grant,” she called, “not now, Nora.”
But it was not Diane who answered; it was Grant’s voice from the hallway saying, “Not now, Nora,” and then the front door closing.
That evening Grant came home with Brooke, and he said they had business to discuss away from the office, and Brooke was wearing a dress that made the word business feel like a very elastic word.
Diane opened the door before Nora could.
“Brooke, darling, come in. I’m so glad you made it.”
“Mrs. Mercer, thank you for having me. Your home is beautiful.”
Diane said, “Rosa, please show Brooke to the guest room,” and Nora stood in the hall and understood that she had not been consulted about the guest room or the guest.
She followed Grant into the kitchen.
“You invited her, not Grant.”
“She has what you don’t. Money, a name, and nobody will ever blame her for an empty nursery.”
Nora took the folder out of her purse again.
“This morning, you didn’t let me finish. Read it. The doctor says I’m fine.”
Grant looked at the folder and did not take it.
“Grant has a guest tonight. Go upstairs.”
Upstairs, Nora sat on the edge of the bed for a long time and then came down and said, “Your mother put your business partner in our guest room.”
Grant sighed.
“She’s here for work. Don’t start.”
“In that dress at nine at night.”
“Listen to yourself. You’re jealous of my partner.”
“I’m not jealous. I saw how she looks at you.”
“You see things that aren’t there. You always have.”
“Don’t do that. Don’t make me crazy.”
Diane appeared in the hallway in her robe, saying, “What is all this shouting? We have a guest.”
Grant said, “She thinks Brooke is after me.”
Diane smiled the way she smiled at parties.
“Oh, Nora. Again. First the waiter, then the neighbor, now Brooke. She’s been like this for months, Grant.”
Nora’s voice was shaking.
“My tests are normal, Grant. Maybe it was never me.”
Diane said, “I saw her paper. She’s lying.”
And Grant said, “Enough. You want to accuse me? Do it somewhere else. Get out tonight.”
Nora stood in the driveway with her suitcase because Grant had thrown it down the stairs and it had landed open by the front door, and Diane had stood in the doorway with her arms folded, and Brooke had watched from the top of the staircase with an expression that Nora could not read.
At the gate, she called her sister.
“Julie, can you come get me? I’m at the gate.”
She was still holding the bag of hand pies she had baked that morning, because she had picked them up on the way out without thinking.
When Julie’s car pulled up, Nora got in with the suitcase and the pies and said, “You baked these this morning. Take them.”
Julie looked at the pies in the back seat and then at her sister’s face.
“He threw you out over a cake. Over six years.”
Nora looked out the window.
“The cake was just the last day.”
“Did he hit you?”
“No. He threw my suitcase down the stairs. And Diane, she read my test, Julie. Then she told him I was lying.”
Julie drove for a while without saying anything and then said, “So it’s not you.”
Nora let out a breath that was almost a laugh.
“It was never me.”
“Start over.”
“With what? I have a suitcase and a bag of pies.”
Julie turned into her own driveway.
“You have me and my couch. That’s a start. Cry tonight. Tomorrow we start over.”
Nora carried the suitcase up the walk and stopped in the doorway.
“Which room is mine?”
Julie said, “The guest room until there’s a ring.”
At the house on Orchard Lane, Diane moved into the master bedroom and said, “All this flower,” and then, “She lived in this kitchen. Leave her jars.”
Brooke was at the table with her phone.
“Rosa uses them.”
Diane said, “Rosa can buy new ones with Grant’s money.”
Brooke looked up.
“It’s not your money, Brooke.”
Diane sat down across from her.
“In this house, we don’t sit with phones at dinner.”
Grant said, without looking up, “Mom, let it go. She’s my partner.”
Diane said, “I heard crying through the wall last night.”
Nora slept on her sister’s couch for three weeks and woke at four every morning because her body did not know how to do anything else.
Julie’s apartment was on the third floor of a brick building on the east side of town, and across the street lived an old woman named Ruth who came out every morning at seven and walked to the corner store and came back with a newspaper and a carton of eggs.
On the fourth morning, Ruth knocked on Julie’s door and said, “This is my sister, Nora,” and Ruth looked at Nora’s face and said, “Soup first, then you tell me who made you cry.”
Nora told her about the husband and the mother-in-law, and Ruth stirred her tea and said, “Then they don’t deserve your tears.”
She nodded at the bag of hand pies on the counter.
“Who made these?”
Julie said, “She did. Every morning for six years.”
Ruth picked one up and took a bite and chewed and looked at the ceiling.
“You bake like this and you sit here crying. Who would buy them from me?”
Nora said, “Who would buy them from you?”
Ruth said, “The men on 34th. The construction site. Seven a.m. They’re starving. Bake. Sell to people who work for a living.”
The first morning, Nora stood at the construction site gate with a cardboard box and a hand-lettered sign that said HAND PIES, $2, STILL WARM.
A man in a hard hat walked by and said, “No time, lady,” and then stopped and turned around.
“Smells good. Lemon?”
She nodded.
“Thank you. Lemon and apple baked at four this morning.”
He ate it standing up and said, “Three.”
She sold three in the first hour.
At seven thirty she looked into the box and counted seventeen left, and a man in a clean jacket with a clipboard walked up and said, “How many left?”
She said, “Seventeen.”
He said, “I’ll take them all. If they’re good, I want forty tomorrow.”
She said, “Forty? You haven’t even tried one.”
He held out his hand.
“Then let me try.”
He bit into it and chewed and looked at her.
“Real butter. Forty. Seven a.m. right here.”
She said, “I’ll be here.”
He said, “I’m Sam,” and she said, “Nora,” and he said, “See you tomorrow, Nora.”
That was $34, and she went home and did the arithmetic on the back of Julie’s electric bill and said, “We have flour for twenty.”
Julie said, “Then I buy flour tonight. And butter. I’m off tomorrow. I’ll roll. You fill.”
They baked in Julie’s kitchen from eight at night until one in the morning, and Nora’s wrist began to ache, and Julie took the rolling pin out of her hand and said, “Let me see.”
Nora said, “It’s fine. Put the next tray in.”
At dawn they had forty pies and Nora’s right hand was wrapped in a dish towel.
Ruth met them at the door with a cup of coffee and said, “Is this the pie lady?” and the man in the hard hat said, “Two lady,” and Ruth said, “Lemon. Told you. Line up, guys. No cutting.”
Sam came out of the trailer and said, “You burned yourself for my guys.”
Nora said, “It’s nothing. The oven door.”
Sam said, “My guys finished seventeen by nine. At lunch I called three other foremen. They want you every morning.”
Nora said, “Every morning. I have one oven in my sister’s kitchen.”
Sam said, “Then get two. I’m Sam, by the way.”
Six months later, Nora stood behind the counter of a rented storefront on Steinway Street with a cash register and a chalkboard menu and a line to the corner.
Sam came in every morning and bought two lemon and one apple and said, “Six months ago, she sold pies at your fence. Now I have a line to the corner.”
Ruth said, “Then open up, boss.”
Julie said, “My savings are in that oven. Don’t burn it. The bank’s money, too.”
Nora said, “I won’t.”
It was a Tuesday in March when the door opened and a woman in a gray coat came in and stood at the counter and looked at the menu and said, “Finally. Two lemon, lady, like always.”
Nora looked up from the register and said, “Next, please. What can I get you?”
The woman said, “Nora. Nora Mercer from Westchester.”
Nora set the tongs down.
“It’s Hayes now. Lemon or apple?”
The woman said, “Lemon. I’m sorry about the cake.”
That afternoon Grant came home to the house on Orchard Lane and found his mother at the kitchen table with the mail sorted into piles and Brooke in the study on the phone.
He said, “Six new trucks, Mom. We can’t fill the old ones. Brooke says a big company needs a big fleet.”
Diane said, “Brooke has never been to this yard.”
Grant said, “Hill Farms pulled their contract this morning. Hill Farms is half our money. You missed three meetings with them. You were in Miami. And the drivers haven’t been paid in two weeks.”
Diane said, “Brooke does the payroll now.”
Grant said, “Then ask Brooke where the money went.”
The second time Nora saw Brooke was at the bakery, three weeks later, when Brooke came in on a Wednesday afternoon and stood at the end of the counter until the line was gone.
She was wearing a coat that had been expensive once and was now simply a coat.
She said, “I need to tell you something.”
Nora said, “You can tell me while I close out the register.”
Brooke said, “He doesn’t know I’m here. He’d kill me.”
Nora said, “How’s your father?”
Brooke said, “He’s not my father.”
Nora looked at her.
Brooke said, “He’s my partner. Was. He never—” She stopped and started again. “There was never anything between us. I want you to know that. He was a business partner and a fool and I took advantage of the fool part, but not the way you thought. I saw the way he treated you and I decided that a man like that was a man I could manage.”
Nora said, “You emptied the company account.”
Brooke said, “I did. The payroll account, the operating account, the second card. I put it into a company that doesn’t exist anymore.”
Nora said, “Why are you telling me this?”
Brooke said, “Because my mother is sick and the hospital won’t take promises, and because I have watched him look at that phone every night for a year, and because I should have opened the door wider. That night. I stood at the top of the stairs and I watched him throw your suitcase down and I didn’t say a word.”
Nora was quiet for a moment.
She took a lemon pie out of the case and set it on the counter.
Brooke said, “What’s this?”
Nora said, “It’s a pie. Eat it. You look like you haven’t eaten in a week.”
At the house on Orchard Lane, Diane sat in the kitchen with the final notice from the bank in her hand and said, “Grant, it’s Mom. Call me back, please.”
Grant came in from the yard with his phone against his ear and said, “Diane. They need to operate on her hip tomorrow.”
Diane said, “She’s your mother, not mine. Handle it.”
Grant said, “Brooke, I need you here.”
Brooke’s voice on the phone said, “I need a life, Grant.”
The bank officer on the other line said, “What do you mean, zero? The account was emptied on Friday, Mr. Mercer. Brooke had the second card.”
Grant sat down on the porch step.
The hospital was the last bill he could pay.
The house was sold.
He moved his mother into two rooms in Jamaica, Queens, above a laundromat, and he took the subway to job interviews and did not get called back.
His mother’s pills cost $340 a month and the rent was $1,400 and the money ran out in the spring.
One morning he stood in line at a bakery on Steinway Street because the woman ahead of him said the lemon pies were the best in the borough, and he got to the counter and looked up and saw his wife’s name on the chalkboard in her handwriting, and he turned around and walked out without saying anything.
The next Monday, a hiring notice went up in the window of the bakery on Steinway Street: DRIVER WANTED. EARLY HOURS. CLEAN LICENSE.
The next morning, a man in a clean but faded shirt came in at 6:45 and stood at the counter and said, “Good morning. I’m here about the driver job.”
Nora looked up from the register and said, “Nobody hires a man who lost his own company.”
Grant said, “We rent two rooms in Jamaica now. And I owed you an apology to your face.”
Nora said, “You start Monday at five. Bakers start early.”
Grant said, “After everything I did, you’re the one giving me a chance.”
He put a folder on the counter.
“Here are the papers for the insurance. Mom’s pills. Every month I’ll manage somehow.”
Nora looked at the folder and did not open it.
“I’ll pay for your mother’s medicine. She shouldn’t suffer because you lost everything.”
Grant said, “Nora, I can’t take that.”
Nora said, “You’re not taking it. She is.”
Ruth came out of the back with a tray of rolls and looked at Grant and said, “You’re the new driver. I know who you are. She gave you a job. Don’t make her sorry.”
Grant said, “I already made her sorry once.”
Ruth said, “Then drive careful.”
On his first route, Grant pulled up to the construction site on 34th and a foreman in a hard hat said, “Where’s the pie lady? She sent me forty lemon and apple.”
Grant said, “Forty lemon and apple.”
The foreman said, “Tell her the guys say thank you.”
That fall, Diane sat in the kitchen of the two rooms in Jamaica with a cup of tea in a chipped mug and said, “Diane, don’t.”
Grant said, “It was never you.”
Diane set the mug down.
“The doctor warned me when Grant had mumps at sixteen. At twenty-five, I had him tested and never told him. I let you carry it for five years.”
Nora had come to the apartment that afternoon to drop off the first month’s medicine, and she stood in the doorway with the bag in her hand and listened.
Diane said, “Get up. You made me believe something was wrong with me.”
Nora said, “I forgive you. But you’ll tell him yourself.”
Grant came in from the bedroom.
“Tell me what, Mom.”
Diane said, “Grant. Mumps.”
Grant said, “At sixteen, you knew.”
Diane said, “Five years. You let me think it.”
Grant looked at his mother for a long time and then at Nora and said, “Why didn’t you leave sooner?”
Nora said, “Because I loved you. That part is over.”
Sam was at the bakery when Nora got back, and he said, “Sam’s a lucky man.”
Nora said, “Be at five, Grant. The pies won’t wait.”
At the end of the year, the bakery on Steinway Street pushed two tables together for a staff dinner, and Ruth said, “Who pushed the tables together? Nobody asked me.”
Julie said, “You’d have bossed us all, Ruth.”
Ruth said, “She still will.”
Sam stood by the door with his coat over his arm and said, “Should I ask him in?”
Nora looked through the window at Grant standing on the sidewalk with his hands in his pockets and said, “Not today. Maybe one day.”
She turned back to the table where the cake sat in the center, a three-layer chocolate cake with buttercream, and she said, “It’s the same cake.”
Julie said, “Yes.”
Nora picked up the knife and said, “This time somebody’s going to eat it. Cut it, Nora. People are hungry and I want the top tier.”
The next morning, Nora stood behind the counter at five o’clock sharp with her apron tied and her hair pulled back and the ovens already warm, and Sam came in first and said, “Morning, you two.”
Grant came in behind him in a clean shirt with his license in his pocket, and Rosa, who had worked eleven years in the Mercer house and had been hired at the bakery the same week Grant was, came out of the kitchen with a tray and said, “Say hi to Daddy,” and the whole shop turned to look, and Nora laughed and said, “Not yet. Lemon or apple?”
