The Woman My Grandmother Loved.

Chapter Five

"Maybe I really don't want to know what's going on. Maybe I couldn't bear to know. The Fall was a fall from innocence to knowledge."

Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale.

There sat a small bakery down the road from St. Anne's. It was a fading enterprise that had seen better business days. A year from the chilly January of 1970, it would shut down for good. But that winter, while business didn't bloom within it, something else did. And if the owner of the bakery were half as romantic as poets and writers, he would've placed his chin on his palm, his feet resting against the counter, and sighed with the delight that one feels when somebody else's story makes the tender bud of nostalgia blossom within you. But the owner was not romantic and it served him well, for it does not do well to romanticize things like a business that moves about in numbers and figures.

But for now, we will take our focus from the bakery which sat shrouded in withering ivy, and to the two women who sat in there. For love is a beautiful thing and to be able to witness it growing is gratifying.

The girls had been stuck in what could be defined as an 'awkward friendship limbo' whereupon you aren't very certain if all that she is to you is a friend or if you would want to take it further. And because such things aren't looked upon as normal there is always the shadow of a doubt that sits across your mind, a gloomy reminder and a haunting warning.

"What is so special about this place?" Anita asks, turning her nose up at the bakery, secretly hoping that it would lead to a finer establishment inside. They had been spending quite a lit of time together, with Anita waiting for Becky when she returned home from her work, their evenings mostly about idling away. Becky would paint, her ink splattering across the canvas in concentrated strokes and Anita would read the letters sent from home, some of which would make her burst out laughing. Tolstoy sat in a corner, forgotten for when the reality is unmissable; you wouldn't yearn to dwindle your days navigating the seas of fiction.

"Nothing really," Becky admits, looking around at the fading paint and the tiny stools from which the metal underneath the paint peeked out.

"Then, why would you want to waste our Saturday here, of all places?" Anita asks, a little haughtily.

"Does it really matter?" Becky asks her distractedly, still looking around the bakery and Anita shrugs in response. "I'm just saying if all you want is cakes why not get it from someplace better?"

"Hello. I would like two pieces of your honey cake, please." Becky says to the disinterested owner whom she finally spots.

They take a seat near the window, the glass not very clean making both the girls feel a bit icky.

"Tell me something about yourself. Something that I don't already know." Becky says, looking at Anita who sat across her.

"There's a lot that you know. And there's a lot that you don't know." Anita muses. "But I suppose it would surprise you if I said that I've never been in love."

"The analytical journalist who only looks at proof with editorials inked in her blood, never in love, who would've guessed." Becky scoffs which causes Anita to look at her curiously.

"You sound very sure of yourself. Really aren't you surprised?" Anita asks her, a bit offended that Becky had read her so easily.

"Well, it's not very difficult to deduce that. You're very realistic, not very idealistic." Becky offers an explanation.

"So then now that we've established that I'm a cynical woman, what about you? Tell me if I'm right, art is pretty romantic for a subject and I would say you've had your fair share of love. Fallen in and out of it several times, I would say." Anita says, narrowing her eyes as if trying to laser in onto Becky's secrets.