The Sweetness of Forgetting Read Free Page A

vacated a few minutes earlier and put my head in my hands. I’m failing at everything, but most of all at connecting with the people I love.
    I don’t realize Gavin Keyes is standing above me until I feel his hand on my shoulder. I jerk my head up, startled, and find myself staring directly at a small hole in the thigh of his faded jeans. For an instant, I have the strangest urge to offer to mend it, but that’s ridiculous; I’m no better at using a needle and thread than I am at being a mother or staying married. I shake my head and pull myeyes upward, over his blue plaid flannel shirt to his face, which is marked by a thick shadow of dark stubble across his strong jaw. His thick shock of dark hair looks like it hasn’t been combed in days, but instead of making him look unkempt, it makes him look really good in a way that makes me uneasy. His dimples, as he smiles gently at me, remind me just how young he is. Twenty-eight, I think, or maybe twenty-nine. I feel suddenly ancient, although I’m only seven or eight years older. What would it be like to be that young, with no real responsibilities, no preteen daughter who hates you, no failing business to save?
    “Don’t beat yourself up,” he says. He pats me on the back and clears his throat. “She loves you, Hope. You’re a good mom.”
    “Yeah, uh, thanks,” I say, avoiding his eye. Sure, we’d seen each other nearly every day during the months he was working on my house, and when I returned home from work in the afternoons, I often fixed us lemonade and sat on the porch with him, doing my best to avoid looking at the tanned swell of his biceps. But he doesn’t know me. Not really. Certainly not well enough to judge me as a mother. If he knew me that well, he’d know what a failure I am.
    He pats me awkwardly again. “I mean it,” he says.
    Then he too is gone, leaving me all alone in my giant pink cupcake, which suddenly feels very bitter.

Chapter Two

    I close the bakery early that day to run a few errands. Although the sun hasn’t set yet when I get home at six fifteen, it feels dark and depressing inside the cottage I’m trying hard to think of as my own.
    The silence inside is deafening. Up until last year, when Rob surprised me just before Christmas by announcing he wanted a divorce, I’d looked forward to coming home. I was proud of the life we’d made together in the solid, whitewashed Victorian overlooking Cape Cod Bay, just east of the public beach. I’d painted the interior myself, retiled the kitchen and hall, installed hardwood floors upstairs and in the living room, and planted a garden dominated by blue hydrangeas and pink salt spray roses that looked crisp and beautiful against the sail-white clapboard.
    And then, just as I was finally done with everything, finally ready to relax in the dream home, Rob sat me down and announced in a soft voice, without meeting my eyes, that he too was done. Done with our marriage, done with me.
    In the space of three months, while still reeling from my mother’s death from breast cancer and the decision to put Mamie in a memory care home, I found myself moving back tomy mother’s place, which I hadn’t been able to sell anyhow. A few months later, exhausted and discouraged, I’d signed all the divorce papers, eager only to have it all over and done with.
    The truth was, I felt numb, and for the first time, I understood something I’d wondered about my entire life: how my mother had always been able to stay so cold about the men in her life. I’d never known my father; she’d never even told me his name. As she once crisply explained to me, “He left. A long time ago. Never knew you existed. He made his choice.” And when I was growing up, she always had boyfriends whom she would spend all her time with, but she never let them get close. Not really. That way, when they’d ultimately leave her, she’d just shrug and say, “We’re better off without him, Hope. You know that.”
    I always used