The Summer of Good Intentions (40 page)

The challenges in tackling the various health issues here was to reveal them over time, as the characters' stories played out, and to resist the impulse to infuse the book with research and statistics. I'd done a fair amount of research on MS and hoarding, and at points the book veered into textbook territory—thankfully, those sections were cut! As for the more everyday issues, I really just trusted my own emotional instincts to guide me through the characters' thoughts and reactions. With luck, they ring true in the book.

As a former book editor, how does writing your own book compare to editing someone else's? What's the biggest challenge for you in the writing process?

Oh, my goodness, writing is much, much harder than editing! And I'd had no idea. You think when you're an editor that you have a fairly good understanding of how a book should be written. But when it's
you
staring at the blank page, you realize just how impossible and insurmountable the whole writing thing is. Given that, it's amazing to me how many great books get written. The biggest challenge in my writing is turning off my editor's ear so that I can focus on getting the characters and story down on the page. Otherwise, I'd be tempted to revise every sentence as soon as it's written, and it would take me about ten years to finish a single chapter.

If your readers were to take away only one message from this story, what would it be?

Wow, that's a tall order. Basically, the epigraph at the beginning of the book by Dani Shapiro sums it up: “The mess is holy. . . . There is beauty in what is.” She was referring to the writing process in her wonderful meditation
Still Writing: The Perils and Pleasures of a Creative Life
(which, incidentally, every writer should read). When I read those words, they resonated with me on so many levels. My whole life felt like a big mess at the time: my mom was battling leukemia; I was flying back and forth between Wisconsin and Massachusetts, trying to help her and still be a good mom back at home. For me, those words were a potent reminder to live in the moment. Yes, our lives may be messy, and every last good intention we have may get foiled. But remember: there is beauty in our lives
right now,
as cluttered and out of control and crazy as it might seem. That's the conclusion I think Maggie comes to by the book's end and the one that I hope readers will take away from this novel.

Can you share with us any news of upcoming writing projects? What can we expect from you next?

All I'll say is that my new novel involves plenty of family drama once again—and a boat. Stay tuned!

Turn the page for an excerpt from

Three Good Things

“[The] very process of mixing, rolling, and folding layer upon layer for each
kringle
makes for a yoga of its own kind.”

—
The Book of Kringle

Ellen McClarety was thinking about serendipity, more particularly about serendipitous encounters, on her way into the shop this morning. The snow fell in heavy, leafy flakes, their distinct edges outlined against the car's windshield before evaporating on the glass. A blanket of black stretched on either side of her. It was a darkness she'd grown accustomed to with her three a.m. risings for work, but this morning, the dark had a softness to it. No wind cutting through her parka to her clavicle, just enormous flakes drifting down from the sky. The weatherman had predicted up to a foot of snow, all of this in April, but that was Wisconsin weather. Just when a person thought she was well on her way to spring, the gods of winter doled out a blizzard.

She was looking forward to a day's swift business. More people dropped by the bakery during a storm, the plowers who'd been out all night and those hoping for early news on the cagey weather.
Plenty of serendipitous encounters to be had,
a thought that made her smile as she drove along slowly, wiping condensation from the windshield with the back of her hand. She would need to make extra coffee this morning, extra dark.

As she turned down Curtis Road, she could see that a thin topcoat already skimmed the fields, like a wide expanse of flour. A light shone from the Curtis barn, where they were well into the early-morning milking, and she could just glimpse a handful of black-and-white Holsteins gathered outside, looking bewildered by the snow. Cows were dense animals; she knew that much from her grandfather, a farmer. They would stand in a snowstorm and freeze to death if you didn't move them to shelter. God's saddest creatures, her grandfather had called them.

“Look into their eyes,” he once said. “Have you ever seen a more mournful face than that?”

And Ellen, only twelve at the time, had to admit they did look pretty depressed. But who could blame them? They were destined for the milk machine or the butcher block. No wonder they never demonstrated much enthusiasm.

But her granddad also helped her appreciate their beauty. He bought only Black Angus cows, the stocky, sturdy bovines that typically sold for meat, and whose dark, silky coats she loved to run her hands over. It was her first lesson that in nature, as in so many things in life, there was both inexplicable beauty and sadness.

• • • •

She turned down the main street into town, the pavement growing slick beneath the wheels. At the third light, she turned right and pulled into the back lot. White funnels spiraled in the air as she exhaled, braced herself for the freeze beyond the door. Gingerly she let herself out and walked around the corner to the storefront, where bright green stems poking up from her window boxes greeted her. Daffodils under snow in April! It didn't seem right. Inside she stomped the snow from her boots, flicked on the lights—and inhaled: the scent of yesterday's kringle, raspberry and pecan, lingered blissfully in the air.

“Good morning, store,” she called out. Such words were her mantra before beginning each day. She believed the greeting, like a yogic blessing, whisked away any demons that might be lurking in the shop's corners. She found an old broom in the closet and used it to sweep off the front steps, then tried her best to brush the snow from the budding daffodils with her hand. She was tempted to wrap her scarf around their stems but thought better of it: She needed to get started on the kringle if she was going to be ready for the hungry masses today.

In the back room, she removed her snowy parka, her hat, her boots and shoved them all into the closet. She tied on a fresh apron, slid on her clogs, and smoothed her hair into a ponytail. After washing her hands, she went to pull out the dough that had been chilling overnight. Before leaving yesterday afternoon, she'd rolled out the dough, shaped it into squares, and then smoothed a sheet of pure Wisconsin butter over the middle of each. After that, it was a matter of folding up the sides of each square to cover the butter, then turning the dough a quarter of the way around, and rolling and folding it again. Rolling and folding, rolling and folding, it was a delicious process, her own personal meditation as she felt her arm muscles working. She could work through any worries of the day—Had she ordered enough supplies for the week? Did her sister seem overtired yesterday? Did she pay the electricity bill?—and feel refreshed, her world righted again. By the time she was finished, each square was larded with twenty to thirty layers of scrumptious butter, while her mind was emptied, momentarily free of any burdens.

Now, when she released the doughy cakes from their cool confines, she smiled to see that yesterday's hard work had paid off. They had puffed up pleasingly, each a work of art. She set the oven and began the process of feeding the chilled dough through the sheeter, an industrial, steel contraption that stretched it even further, yielding a large paper-thin swath. She knew that the dough's thinness determined whether she got a heavenly puff confection or, like a batch last week, a heavy, chewy disaster. From there, it was a rhythmic routine that she fell into easily each morning; stretch the dough across the long wooden table to yield four rows of eight narrow rectangles; add the day's filling—today it was apple and blueberry—fold the sides over, and seal with egg, until the table was lined with thirty-two loaves, each resembling a jelly roll.

Then, with a quick flick of the wrist, she knitted together the ends of each to create an oval-shaped kringle, which got tossed onto the baking board—and
voilà
! The morning's work was nearly complete. She still had a ways to go before she was as skilled as Erik, the pastry chef under whom she'd apprenticed for three summers in Racine when she was a teenager. When Erik worked, it was as if each kringle got shaped in midair, the ends magically adhering in the short trip from the table to the baking board, the finished pastry delectably flaky and light.

She set the timer for seventeen minutes and checked her watch. Five thirty. Soon her customers would be arriving.

Out front she gave the counters a fresh wipe and started brewing the coffee. She pulled the bright-blue chairs off the tables, setting them right-side-up. On the board behind the register under
Today's Drips & Tips
she wrote:

Drips:
Hazelnut; Vanilla; Almond Decaf
Tips:
Contrary to popular opinion,
IRREGARDLESS
is not a word. However, you might say: “Regardless of this weather, we still have plenty of delicious kringle to eat.”

She didn't even need to consult her edition of Fowler's
Modern English Usage
, the well-thumbed paperback crammed between the cash register and her cookbooks. The news guy on the radio had said
irregardless
this morning, and it made her skin prickle as it did anytime she heard someone abuse the English language with such abandon. She was proud that her customers had come to expect a grammar tip from her each day, even though her sister, Lanie, chided her that it was condescending. The way Ellen saw it, she was linking the gustatory to the literary; her daily tip was her one small contribution to making the world a better place. So what if she put off a new customer every now and then?

At the front of the counter near the register, she kept a glass candy bowl that was currently filled with bits of paper. The sign on its front read:
GIVE US YOUR WORST GRAMMAR; WE'LL GIVE YOU OUR BEST!
She encouraged customers to contribute their sightings of egregious usage, and once every few weeks she'd sift through the folded-over papers, like tiny fortunes, and pick one for the board.

She had come a long way from the day she'd rediscovered her mother's battered copy of
The Book of Kringle
, buried in a box of her things in the attic. For some reason she'd held on to it all these years, even though her mom had passed away when Ellen was just sixteen. What she had been searching for originally in those dusty old boxes she couldn't recall, but when she thumbed through the book of Danish recipes and folk wisdom, the scent of her mother's baking came wafting off the pages. And there, at that very moment, shortly after her husband had left, the first kernel of an idea for a kringle shop was planted.

When the abandoned old pizza place went up for sale downtown shortly thereafter, Ellen knew it was a sign.
Serendipity inviting her in
. She could almost feel her mother brush up against her shoulder, giving her a little shove. “Go for it,” Ellen imagined her saying. “You've always wanted to create something of your own. This, my love, could be it.”

And so, without further thought, Ellen McClarety, recent divorcèe, former university secretary, bought the store. She revamped the entire space, scrubbing the grease off the walls with bleach, giving the place, not to mention her soul, a full cleanse. Each swish of the sponge wiped away years of caked-on dirt and grime.
How easy
! she thought to herself at the time, to rid herself of a husband and most of her savings in one fell swoop. She installed new ovens in the back and transformed the storefront from a high glimmer, red-and-white pizza motif into a cozy cafè, the fake sheen of her marriage tidily tossed off for more humble beginnings.

Perhaps the divorce would be the catalyst she needed to begin the life she was meant to live. Ten long years ago, she'd been drawn to Max like wind to a hurricane, the attraction so intense, but eventually the hurricane had hit land. She'd assumed marriage was about two people caring for each other, but Max never seemed to fully reciprocate. Whenever she'd needed him, he would perpetually come up short—or disappear. And then there had been the baby: After years of trying they'd lost their only child, just two months along, in a miscarriage. Ellen didn't know if she'd ever recover, but Max had moved on so easily, as if it were no big deal. Maybe it was part of his happy-go-lucky nature, though Ellen had come to see it as selfishness. Max, a dreamer, could always see the forest for the trees, imagining what
could be
; it just seemed that after ten years of marriage, he kept running into trees.