“Thanks for taking me into custody, Officer Diaz.” I trot briskly to catch up to Dani as we spill out the door onto Front Street. Away from the shop, my guilt at leaving and my lingering anxiety about my birthday start to ease, replaced by a sense of enjoyment. It’s a beautiful day and I turn my face to the sun, enjoying the rarity of being out and about on a lovely summer morning.
“I knew you could spare a few minutes on your birthday to get a raisin bun,” Dani says, walking at a fast clip. Even though she tops out at barely over five feet, meaning she’s a good two inches shorter than me, Dani somehow manages to always outpace me by a decent margin. Speed walking must be something she perfected at the police academy.
“You mean a raspberry Danish?” I remind her. “Which is absolutely the best pastry in the world.”
“Blasphemy.” Dani sticks her tongue out at me as we continue the argument we’ve been having since kindergarten.
We’ve been best friends since the first day of school when the teacher seated Dani next to me. A tiny, quiet new girl with huge, dark eyes, Dani was still learning English and had been in the States only a few months after her parents and grandmother emigrated from Mexico. Feeling sorry for her, Mrs. Thomas paired her with me. She thought my friendliness and helpfulness would be good for Dani, whom she labeled as painfully shy. How very wrong she’d been about that! It took Dani about a month to warm up, but by the end of the year, Mrs. Thomas had come to rue the day she’d seated us next to each other. We simply could not stop talking and laughing once we got going. Twenty-eight years later, it’s still true.
For most of our twenties we went our separate ways. Dani spent several years in New York, and I moved to France. But then we both found ourselves unexpectedly back home and picked up our friendship as though the years apart never happened. Dani is my polar opposite—brash to my gentle, loud to my soft-spoken, a little wild to my levelheaded. She is the most loyal, exasperating live wire of a best friend a girl could wish for. I absolutely adore her and could not have made it through these past few hard years without her.
“We’re headed to Sluys, right?” I ask, turning in the direction of the most iconic Scandinavian bakery in town. She grabs my hand and drags me in the opposite direction.
“No, Kristensen’s. I have to show you something. You’re not going to want to miss this, I promise.”
Curious, I follow her. Our candy shop is located in the heart of downtown Poulsbo on Front Street, the main street in the historic district. Downtown is just a few blocks long, with rows of brightly painted wooden buildings, some decorated with fanciful gingerbread and pointed eaves, others with a retro chalet vibe.Combined, they give the town a charmingly European feel. Poulsbo is tiny and postcard perfect, with local shops and bakeries and several Viking- and Norwegian-themed murals by local artists.
“Got any hot birthday plans yet?” Dani asks as we walk down Front Street toward Kristensen’s Bakery.
“Just the usual—birthday dinner at the Longboat, which you know about since you’re coming to it. And then probably home to try to put Gus to bed on time for once. If I’m lucky, I’ll get through at least one episode ofSavorbefore I fall asleep.” I wince at how lame that sounds. I can’t recall how many episodes of my favorite show I’ve drifted off halfway through. It’s a lot.
I don’t mention what’s eating at me today, the question that swirls around every birthday for me. Dani knows about it, but there’s nothing she can do. There’s nothing any of us can do. I feel a flutter of anxiety again at the thought of the birthday cake, of blowing out the candle once more and making a wish and…I’ll have to just wait and see what happens. Maybe this will finally be the year my wish comes true.
“That is a super-boring birthday plan,” Dani announces, pulling a face. “We need to get you a hot date with a real man, not a hot date with your couch, drinking wine in your pajamas and drooling over your celebrity TV crush.”
“I don’t drool over Henry Summers,” I protest. This is a lie and Dani knows it. She throws me a disbelieving look.
“What?” I lift my hands. “IadmireHenry Summers. His whole goal is to celebrate inspiring stories of food and family across the globe. I love to see all the unique places he finds in out-of-the-way corners of the world. That episode he did on the pub in the Yorkshire Dales that’s been in the same family for two hundred years? Amazing. Mom thinks he should come here anddo a show about the fudge shop.” It doesn’t hurt that Henry has the plummiest English accent and rocks a sweater blazer—“swazer,” as they’re called—better than any man on the planet.
“Mm-hmm, well, you need to ‘admire’ someone who isn’t on the other side of a TV screen,” Dani says, looking skeptical. “Henry Summers is dreamy, no argument there. That English accent—yes, please! But is he going to keep your bed warm at night? You need a real man, Emmie. A big, hairy man…in the flesh.”
She confidently steps off the curb and jaywalks across the street. I trot behind her.
“I’m not the biggest fan of hairy men. I like my men a little…smoother,” I tell her. “You can have the hairy lumberjack types.” But she’s right about one thing. Henry Summers might be my dream man, but he is also completely unattainable. It would be nice to have a crush on someone real, not someone I see only through a TV screen.
Golly, that makes my life sound sad. It’s not. It’s really not. I adore my mom and my son. I have a lot to be thankful for. But yes, there are a few things I wish I could have. Like a chance to make a life somewhere other than the tiny town where I grew up. Or a real boyfriend. Heck, I’d even settle for a nice dinner with a man who didn’t text me beforehand asking for pictures of my earlobes. That happened, by the way, and it wasn’t even the strangest text I’ve gotten before a first date.
“Besides, I don’t have time to date right now,” I counter when we reach the far curb. “And I feel like I know every available bachelor in Poulsbo. It’s pretty slim pickings.” I roll my eyes.
I’ve tried dating off and on over the past couple of years, mostly because I give in to Dani’s badgering and try online dating for a few weeks or a month or two. The whole dating appsituation has been quite disappointing. Dani rocks the apps, chatting with like ten guys at once, going out to Bremerton or Tacoma every weekend with someone new. She doesn’t want a serious relationship, just some companionship and fun. For me, it’s been really underwhelming. One guy canceled our coffee date an hour before we were to meet for the first time because he decided I looked too short in my photo. Another asked me to text him a picture of my boobs after we had lunch once. It’s a weird world, online dating. I don’t think it’s for me. Which leaves my chances for romance in real life at about a zero. Unless a guy wanders into the fudge shop or works at the elementary school, I’m not likely to cross paths with him.
“You need to keep getting out there,” Dani encourages me. “Any guy would be lucky to have you. You just haven’t met the right one yet.” She heads toward the red Kristensen’s Bakery storefront.
“I think I scare guys off,” I tell her, breaking into a weird little hybrid hop/walk to keep up with her pace. “Let’s be honest. I’m not a great catch. I’m a tired single mom. I live with my disabled mother and a six-year-old who likes to wear sweater-vests and is obsessed with space disasters, and I’m tied to a family business that’s slowly failing. That’s a little bit of a hard sell.”
Dani halts in the middle of the sidewalk and holds up her hand. Her tone is stern. “Stop right there. Emmaline Gwendoline Wynne. You are a young, hot single mother. You look like Reese Witherspoon in herLegally Blondeera, and you are a small-business owner, an excellent mother, and selflessly devoted to your family. You are the kindest, most generous person I know. You make casseroles for anyone who’s sick, and cards for the nursing home on Valentine’s Day. You are a pillar of your community, and you always smell like candy. What’s not to love?” Shewags her finger in my face. “Stop selling yourself short, reinita.” She loves to call me that, her pet nickname for me, her little queen.
Dani stops lecturing me as we halt in front of the big plate glass front window of Kristensen’s Bakery, which has been in the Kristensen family since the 1930s. I can’t remember the last time I visited this bakery. We always go to Sluys down the street. Warm light spills from inside, and the windows are crowded with trays holding a wide assortment of Danishes and sweet buns, cream buns, donuts, cardamom braids, butter cookies, gingerbread men, spicy pepparkakor cookies, and piles of freshly baked loaves of bread. My stomach rumbles. It’s been a while since my three cups of coffee. I scan the trays in the window, trying to decide what I want to splurge on today.
“Emmie,” Dani hisses out of the corner of her mouth. “Look. Up.”
I glance up and my heart misses a beat and lands with a thud in the bottom of my stomach. There behind the counter, wearing an apron and dusted in flour, stands a Norse demigod of a man. Tall and broad-shouldered and built like an inverted triangle, he has blond hair pulled back in a stubby ponytail and is wielding a rolling pin like he means business. The sleeves of his tight T-shirt are rolled up, revealing tattoos snaking around each bulging bicep. I swallow hard. Why is my mouth suddenly so dry?
“Is it my imagination or did hot Thor just show up in our town and start baking cookies?” Dani asks in a hushed, reverent tone. The man seems unaware of our hungry eyes on him. He’s concentrating on rolling out the dough, his back mostly toward us. I can’t see his face, but there’s something strangely familiar about him.
“Where’s Gunnar?” I whisper. Why am I whispering? Gunnar Kristensen, the patriarch of the Kristensen clan, has beenbaking pastries in this shop in taciturn silence for almost forty years. To find someone new in his place is jarring. Especially if that someone does indeed look like a lost Hemsworth brother.
“Gunnar says he’s retiring now that Jakob’s back,” Dani replies, her tone nonchalant as the man expertly shapes the dough into a long roll.
