Chapter 2 - The Price of Vanilla and Sugar
We lived in a three-room apartment above an auto repair shop in Bridgeport, seven miles and thirty light-years away from Greenwich.
The stairs were steep, narrow, and smelled of rust, damp wool, and the sulfurous bite of gear oil from the bays below. I carried June all the way up, her shoes dangling against my thighs, her head heavy against my shoulder. She didn't speak during the drive in my twenty-year-old Ford truck, and she didn't speak while I carried her up the wood steps.
Inside, the apartment was warm. I had rebuilt the small gas heater myself two winters ago, replacing the cracked heat exchanger with a reconditioned copper core I'd pulled from a demo site in Danbury. It hummed with a low, steady thrum that usually put her to sleep within ten minutes.
I set her down on the counter in the tiny kitchen.
"Hold still, honey," I said, reaching for the first-aid box behind the tea tins.
I wetted a clean cotton cloth with warm water and began working on her face. The vanilla buttercream had hardened in her blond hair, turning into stiff, fragrant clumps that took five minutes of gentle rubbing to loosen. The cut beneath her left eye was shallow—less than half an inch long—but the skin around it was swollen and blue.
"Does it need stitches?" she asked, her voice dry.
"No," I said, pressing a clean piece of gauze against the skin until the bleeding stopped completely. "Just a little butterfly bandage. It'll leave a mark for a week, and then it'll be gone."
"Uncle Blake broke the windows," she said softly.
My fingers twitched against the bandage, but I kept my hands steady. "Yeah. He did."
"Why did he do that?"
I looked at her face—at the wide, clear hazel eyes that were so much like Rebecca's that sometimes, when the light hit the kitchen at sunset, I had to look away toward the sink just to clear my chest.
"Because some people don't know how to build things, June," I said, applying a thin strip of clear medical tape over the cut. "And when people can't build things, sometimes they get angry at the people who can."
"Like the cake?"
"Like the cake."
She was quiet for a moment, watching my hands as I put the iodine away and closed the plastic box. "Grandpa said you had to say sorry."
"I know what he said."
"Are we going back there for Christmas?"
I stopped with my hand on the cupboard door.
For five years, since Rebecca died on that slick stretch of Interstate 95 near Norwalk, my parents’ house had been our only anchor to something larger than this three-room flat over the garage. Every Christmas, every Thanksgiving, every easter afternoon, we had driven up the long gravel driveway at Hawthorne House. I had sat in the corner of the living room, listening to Harold explain the bond market to Blake while my mother made pointed remarks about the grease under my fingernails or the fact that June's dresses came from target instead of the boutique shops on Elm Street.
I had swallowed every word. I had swallowed the slights, the cold shoulder at dinner, the way my father handed Blake a ten-thousand-dollar check for his birthday while giving me a boxed pen set with the company logo on the cap. I had swallowed it all because I believed June needed a family. I thought that even a cold grandfather was better than no grandfather at all for a girl who didn't have a mother.
I closed the cupboard door. The latch caught with a sharp, clean snap.
"No, June," I said, looking her straight in the eyes. "We aren't going back there for Christmas. We aren't going back there ever."
She looked down at her small denim sneakers, her thumbs tracing the seam of her jeans. "Because of me?"
"No," I said, taking her face in both of my hands—my rough, calloused hands that were stained with iron dust and pipe joint compound—and lifting her chin until she had to look at me. "Never because of you. Because your dad took ten years too long to figure out where he belonged."
After she went to bed, I sat at the small formica table in the kitchen with a mug of black coffee that had gone cold an hour earlier.
On the counter sat the small wooden box where I kept our important papers: the truck title, June's birth certificate, Rebecca's death certificate, and my union card. Next to the box was a small velvet bag that had been empty since Tuesday morning.
I reached out and touched the velvet.
It had contained Rebecca's engagement ring—not a diamond, because I couldn't afford one when we were twenty-three, but a small, emerald-cut aquamarine set in vintage silver that her grandmother had brought from Maine. It was worth maybe seven hundred dollars at a pawn shop on State Street, but to me, it had been the last physical thing that smelled of her perfume and the cold wind off the Sound.
I had sold it on Tuesday to buy forty pounds of specialized king arthur flour, six Madagascar vanilla beans, imported belgian cocoa, three sheets of edible gold leaf, and the heavy plastic cake board that was currently sitting, smashed and covered in gray mud, in the trash bin outside Hawthorne House.
Seven hundred dollars. Three nights of sitting at this table until three in the morning with a tiny pastry brush and a pair of magnifying glasses, shaping individual sugar panes for windows that Blake had ruined in three seconds while my father watched.
I opened my notebook—the thick, leather-bound ledger where I kept track of every service job, every furnace replacement, every hour of overtime I worked for Miller & Sons Mechanical.
On the last page, under a heading titled Independent, I wrote three numbers:
Checking: $1,420.00
Savings: $4,100.00
Debt: $0.00
It wasn't much. In Greenwich, four thousand dollars was what Harold spent on a weekend golf retreat in South Carolina. But it was clean. There wasn't a cent of Cole money in it. There wasn't a single dime that required me to bow my head, hold my tongue, or watch my daughter get pushed around by a coward in a navy coat.
I picked up my pen and drew a heavy black line beneath the figures.
May you like
Then I turned the page and started drawing a circuit diagram for an industrial boiler system I had seen in a commercial building on Fairfield Avenue three weeks ago. The owner had mentioned he was unhappy with his current contractor—a massive, expensive firm that charged three hundred dollars an hour and sent junior techs who didn't know how to balance a six-zone hydronic loop.
My hands were steady. The coffee was cold, but the line I drew across the clean white paper was straight, sharp, and absolute.
