The Bakery My Sister Never Saved

The reopening

The grand reopening of Merrow’s Bakery was loud and bright and completely, painfully false.

The whole of Delia, Missouri had turned out for it. Two hundred people, maybe more, packed into the little brick storefront on Main Street where my grandmother had sold pie and bread for forty years. Somebody had strung white lights across the front windows. Somebody had hired a fiddle player. The old glass display cases were full again, apple hand pies and cinnamon rolls the size of a fist and the lemon chess pie that used to sell out by nine in the morning, and the smell of butter and yeast was so strong it made my chest ache.

My sister Bethany stood in the middle of it all like a woman accepting a crown.

She had on a cream-colored suit that cost more than the bakery took in on a good week, and she was letting the whole town press in around her and tell her she was a hero. Cousins I had not seen in years. Ladies from the Methodist church. Men from the co-op who used to buy their morning coffee off my grandmother’s counter and call her by her first name. They came up one by one and took Bethany’s hand and told her the same thing.

“You saved this place, honey. You saved Ruth’s bakery.”

Bethany smiled and pressed their hands and said, “I couldn’t let Nana’s legacy just die. I couldn’t let the bank win.”

I stood near the back by the coffee urns, in my flour-dusted apron, carrying a tray of samples, and I let every single one of them believe it.

The useless sister. That was me. The quiet one. The one who moved back to town with a kid and no husband and no money and never amounted to much. Bethany loved that version of me. It made her shine brighter to stand next to it. It always had.

But I knew something none of them knew.

I knew who had actually paid the bank.

What they thought they knew about me

Let me back up, because you cannot understand what happened that night without understanding the shape of my family.

My name is Diane. I am the older sister by four years. Growing up, Bethany was the pretty one and the loud one and the one who could talk her way into or out of anything, and I was the one who stayed in the kitchen with Nana Merrow, learning to laminate dough and blind-bake a crust and tell by the smell alone when the bread was two minutes from done.

Our mother, Loretta, decided early that Bethany was going places and I was not. She was not shy about it. When Bethany got into cosmetology school in Springfield, my mother cried and told everyone at church her baby was going to be a success. When I told her I was staying in Delia to help Nana run the bakery, she looked at me like I had told her I was joining the circus. “You’ll never make anything of yourself standing over an oven,” she said. “That’s your grandmother’s life, not yours.”