“Better let me do that,” Luke said. “I don’t want my dad to show me up.” As he washed his hands he looked at the cakes on the counters. They really were beautiful and quite professional-looking.
“I’m waiting,” Joce said.
“Sorry. I keep looking at everything.”
“No, I mean I’m waiting for you to tell me where you’ve been.”
“Well, Mom…,” he said, trying to make it sound as though Joce was his mother. But she didn’t smile. “Show me how to do this.”
Joce showed him how to use the bowl and a spatula to fill the liners, then how to put the pan into the oven and set the timer. “We have to get all these into the boxes your father ordered and you can talk while we work.”
“Why do you think Miss Edi never told you about Edilean?”
“I don’t know,” Joce said, and she could hear the hurt in her own voice. “She told me so much about the rest of her life. I could write a book about her years with Dr. Brenner, but she left out everything about the town where she grew up.”
“She said nothing about her childhood?”
“She told me she grew up in a little town in the South but that was all. She said her life didn’t begin until she met David. And until I came here, I thought David was killed in World War II, but Sara said he jilted her. Miss Edi returned from the war with her legs a mass of scars and the man she loved had married some floozy he’d impregnated.”
“That’s one way of looking at it,” Luke said as he filled a bakery box with a dozen cupcakes.
“What does that mean? You sound as though I’ve said something horrible. I’m just repeating what I was told.”
“Good ol’ Edilean gossip. Where do I put this?” He held up a box filled with cupcakes.
“I thought we’d stack them in the hallway. I need a place to put the big mortar so I can start grinding.”
“You know that there are machines that can do that,” Luke said.
“Sure, but who wants one? Not me.”
She could see that Luke liked that answer as he took the box into the hallway and returned with the big mortar and pestle, then got the baskets of lavender.
“I think you have something to tell me, but you’re hesitating,” Joce said, “so out with it.”
“If you could have any job in the world, what would it be?”
“Writing biographies,” she said instantly.
Luke looked
at her in surprise.
“When I was a junior in college, Miss Edi said that a friend of hers wanted to write a biography on her great-aunt who’d been a suffragette, but she didn’t have any idea how to do the research. She didn’t know a primary source from an encyclopedia.”
“Primary source,” Luke said as he packed more cakes in boxes. “Letters, unpublished documents, that sort of thing?”
“Exactly. I spent spring break with the woman, and we had a wonderful week going through old trunks and rummaging through the attics of some of her relatives.”
“Did she write her book?”
“Yes and no,” Joce said as the timer went off and she took the cupcakes out of the oven. “She wrote it, but she couldn’t find a publisher, so it just made the rounds of her relatives, but that was beside the point. It was great to search and dig and find out about the life of a person. In her case she found out that her great-aunt had done nothing more than invite the suffragettes to tea at her house, but when her husband heard what she’d done, that was the end of that. But still, I loved doing it.
“Afterward, Miss Edi encouraged me to write letters to some editors, and I got a few jobs helping research some other books. It didn’t pay much but I enjoyed it greatly.”
“So who would you like to write about?”
“I…” Jocelyn hesitated, as though she was trying to get her courage up to tell him. “I thought about writing about Miss Edi’s work with Dr. Brenner. He died a few years ago, but his wife has all the letters he wrote to her, and she said she’d be glad to lend them to me. But she thinks I want to write about her husband, not his assistant. That could cause problems.”