Chapter 6
Story: She Called My Bakery a Rented Place, Then I Set the Contract's Second Page on the Counter
Ken sat down.
He did not sit in a chair. He put his hand on the counter, lowered himself onto it like the weight had gone out of his legs, and sat there, half on the Formica, facing the paper.
The shopper's phone was still up.
I watched him read page two. I watched him trace the line with his finger, the way you read a thing when you don't want to believe it.
"Mom," he said. "Why?"
She did not answer.
"Mom. Why did you do this?"
"I did it for you," Barb said, and her voice came back sharp, carrying, the way she pitched it when she wanted to make something true. "Everything I've done, I did for you. You were too soft to fight her. You let her walk away with the bakery. I was not going to let her walk away with everything."
"Thi didn't walk away with anything," Ken said. "She bought the storefront. You told me to give her the storefront."
"I told you to give her the storefront so she would stop fighting the divorce. So we could keep the catering company."
"And I sold the catering company," Ken said. "To Greg. Two years ago. You told me that was a good idea. You said —"
"I know what I said."
"You said you had looked at the numbers. You said it was the smart move. I sold it because you told me to."
Barb did not look at him. She was looking at the contract on the counter, at her own signature in blue ink, and her hand had gone white around her purse strap.
"I was trying to keep you from losing everything," she said.
"Everything," Ken said. "Thi is standing in the building she owns, reading me the contract you signed to take it away from her. And you did it because — because —"
He stopped.
"I sold the catering company," he said. "That was the only piece of the divorce I kept. I sold it because you told me the bakery was a dead end and the catering company was the way forward. And you told me that because you were planning to take the bakery."
Barb's jaw worked.
"From her," Ken said, and I could hear him working it out, the pieces sliding together. "You were planning to take the bakery from her, so you told me to sell the catering company — your fallback plan — so you could have everything together. You —"
"Ken," Barb said.
"You told me to sell the one thing I had left," he said. "So you could take the one thing she had."
The room was very quiet. I could hear the hum of the pastry case, the click of the oven cooling, a car on the lot. I could hear the phone, steady in the shopper's hand, recording everything.
I looked at Barb. Standing there, tall and straight-backed in her quilted navy coat, her silver-white bob hard with spray, her mouth a thin plum line, her eyes fixed on the floor.
And I thought about the contract under the register, folded once, page two facing down, waiting for two weeks for her to say the words that would trigger it. And I thought about the fact that she had not read page two. That she had not needed to, because she had already read it at the planning meeting with Dana Whitfield, in February, eleven years ago.
She had planned this.
She had not planned on the witness.
"Read the clause out loud," I said.
Barb looked up. The color had come back, high on her cheeks, and I saw her gather herself, straighten her back, lift her chin. The soprano came back into her voice.
"I don't think —"
"Read it," I said, and my voice was quieter than hers, and the whole room heard it. "You signed it. You planned it. Read it out loud."
"Mrs. Halvorsen," the shopper said, and I had almost forgotten she was there, "I'll post this entire thing if you don't. Not the cupcake. The whole thing. Before you've done damage control."
Barb looked at the shopper. Looked at the phone. Looked at me.
The silence stretched — and broke.
Barb picked up the contract, held it in front of her face like a menu she had quoted from a hundred times, and read in a flat, dead voice:
"Should the buyer publicly claim, in the presence of a witness or witnesses, that the vendor has no permanent premises — the buyer's deposit shall forthwith convert into an option to purchase the buyer's share of the catering company identified in Section 3 — the option to be exercised at the vendor's sole discretion —" she stopped.
"From not." I said.
"I was getting there."
"The option shall cover the buyer's catering company share, including the value realized in any subsequent sale, in whole or in part, by the buyer or her assigns," she ended. She looked up. "The last line is: 'This clause is intended to be given full effect under law.'"
Ken was looking at her.
"Mom," he said.
"What?"
"That's a purchase option on share that I sold," he said. "You're giving Thi the right to take the value of the share — the cash Greg paid me — back."
"It's just a piece of paper."
"It's a piece of paper you signed," Dana said.
She was standing by the door, holding her folder, rain jacket unzipped. She had not moved. She had simply been standing there, waiting for the moment to speak.
"You wanted to take the bakery," she said. "You asked me to witness the contract so we could tie Thi up in a claim. And you didn't read page two until tonight." A pause. "You told me about this. In February. But you never got to the part where you actually read the whole document, because you were so busy planning what you'd do when it worked."
Barb's hands were shaking. I could see the paper trembling in her grasp, the blue ink of her signature blurring under the fluorescent light.
"It's just a piece of paper," she said again, but her voice was quieter now. The soprano was gone.
I didn't say anything. I just watched.
I had done enough.
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