Chapter One
At a certain point on South High Street in Columbus, Ohio, the drab city scenery of sidewalk-fronted buildings takes a colorful turn toward scarlet and grey as one nears the main entrance to the Ohio State University campus. The OSU logo and the word “Buckeye” begin meeting one’s gaze wherever it falls: on the shirts, hats, jackets, and scarves of people passing by; scrawled across windows in large, hand-painted lettering; fluttering on flags hung from buildings and posts; chiseled into concrete and adorning half of the cars in the street through paint, magnets, and decals. Brutus Buckeye is the OSU mascot, the team is the Buckeyes, and when football season arrives two million city residents and University students are all Buckeyes, too. Taken together they are proudly referred to as the “Buckeye Nation.”
Accordingly, the small bakery just at the edge of the University entrance is named the Buckeye Bakery and adorned year-round in scarlet and grey. On this early September day, with the first home football game of the season only hours away, Ashley O’Reilly, the bakery’s owner, hides in its employee bathroom sitting on the toilet, her gaze fixed on the floor between her legs where rests the positive pregnancy test that has just slipped through the weary, nearly useless fingers of her right hand.
With tears wetting her cheeks, Ashley shifts her gaze from the floor to the annoying, malfunctioning appendage that has been causing her so much trouble for the past few months. Using her somewhat less disabled left hand, she reaches over to touch the right, feeling the webbed area between its thumb and index finger, then holds both hands parallel before her eyes to once again examine them side-by-side. There is a dent, a definite concavity to that area of her right hand that is not as evident on the left. Twenty years of squeezing icing through pastry bags is apparently interfering with her physiology, trying to render her hands useless just when she is going to need them the most.
A baby, she thinks, once again looking down to the stick on the floor. Timothy would be ecstatic when she told him. She and Tim were both thirty-six, had been married at nineteen, and Timothy had been asking her to get pregnant since they were twenty-five.
“No.” She had been explicit, her feelings unambiguous for all these years. She wanted her business, her bakery, her personal success and fulfillment before becoming the endless and constant care keeper of another human being. He and his Irish-Catholic longing for a litter of little ones would have to, and did, wait.
The shushing, clacking sound of a dog pawing at the door drew her attention.
“Stop Buckeye!” she called out to her chocolate and tan Lab, whose coloring duplicated that of the hard, round Buckeye nut, making him the perfect mascot for the shop.
Buckeye emitted a whine and the pawing ceased but was replaced immediately by a soft knock.
“Ashley?” The voice of Lori, her manager, apprentice and invaluable assistant, called in to her. “Are you OK in there?”
Ashley silently rolled off a few sheets of toilet paper to wipe her face while replying, “I’m fine. My hand’s hurting again, that’s all.”
Lori turned from the bathroom door, glancing apprehensively into the kitchen behind her where five employees hustled and chattered as they rapidly swiped icing, piped shell borders, and transferred edible OSU decals to the tops of the final dozen cakes waiting to be picked up for game-day parties. Two others dipped creamy, tan, peanut butter balls into vats of melted chocolate and paraffin in a final push to complete the scores of orders for a confection unique to Ohio and called, of course, the Buckeye. The three-tiered OSU-themed wedding cake Ashley had been finishing sat incomplete on a table, the young man responsible for its delivery leaning against an opposite counter, scowling.
“Ashley, will you be able to finish the wedding cake?” Lori asked. “It has to be there in thirty minutes.”
“No,” Ashley responded firmly. There was just no way she could continue using her hand. “You finish it,” she said. “It just needs some piping on the top layer; the schematic is there and the topper is in the blue box next to it.”
Lori cringed; she had six dozen cupcakes to ice and get out on the floor where she knew they were running short.
“OK,” she replied hastily before darting back into the kitchen, deciding on the fly whom she could delegate the cupcakes to while she finished the wedding cake.
So quickly did Lori depart that when Ashley called out a further command to remove Buckeye from the kitchen, Lori didn’t even hear her. Of course this may have been attributed to the fact that Ashley’s voice at times, recently, seemed to fail her. She’d call to someone across the kitchen and instead of hearing her normal, strong voice charging through the commotion, she’d hear only a whisper and have to try again. It concerned her a bit, but seemed to happen only after she’d been working for many hours; and since she was no longer a youngster, she’d ascribed it to age. She was aging and she guessed her voice was aging, too; and so were her uterus and her eggs, which is why she had finally made the decision to go ahead and make a baby with Tim.
Her bakery was flourishing and Tim was well established in his high paying job as a design supervisor with the building renovation company he’d worked at for years. They were financially secure, or at least as secure as anyone could be now-a-days; were well-covered with double medical and life insurance; and though she dreaded the idea of giving up her daily micro-management of the bakery to stay home with an infant, she’d had to admit that Lori demonstrated the ambition and capability to successfully replace her.
Ashley leaned over and picked up the test stick from the floor, holding it before her eyes and staring at it hard. So it was here. Inside of her right now: the tiniest group of cells that, if they were doing what they should be and if she left them within her and cared for them, would eventually grow into a baby.
Standing up, she slid the stick into the back pocket of her jeans, undid her long, auburn hair from its ponytail and brushed through it before re-wrapping it in a black, elastic band. Then, turning sideways before the full length mirror on the back of the door, she gazed at her reflection.
Scrutinizing her five-foot seven-inch frame, her eyes drifted over shapes and contours as familiar to her as the sun in the sky: slight waist, curvy hips, firm and muscled thighs, excellently rounded butt. Her breasts were perfect for her frame, nicely shaped full C cups that, in her youth, had been firm enough to allow her to go days without even thinking of putting on a bra. Of course, those days were behind her, but overall she felt she’d been very lucky with her body; it was strong, healthy and beautiful and she knew it. And she’d done nothing to earn it, really. She’d simply been born this way. Oh, over the years she’d exercised and done some running to maintain her fitness, but for the most part her body was what it was and it seemed to stay that way. She had not gone flabby as she aged, nor had she ever been seriously ill.
Her face had served her well, too, even though she had a mouth that she thought too wide, a nose she felt too thin and almond-shaped, hazel eyes that were not even or identical in size. Somehow, these imperfections hadn’t mattered. She was beautiful and every day of her life there had been some confirmation of that fact for her.
Her beauty had actually been the base upon which she’d built her personal strength. When she was young and miserable living in poverty with her single mother and her whiny, not- so-pretty little sister Joan, she had traded on her appearance to get things she wanted but could not otherwise obtain. A free necklace at a thrift shop when her mother couldn’t afford its measly three dollar cost: “Oh, you’re such a pretty little thing I’ll just give it to you,” the female proprietor had said. Free popsicles from the ice cream truck, where the male, teenaged driver had always said, “And here’s one for the prettiest girl on the block.” Affirmation from whomever she could when she simply needed ego boosting. The flash of a sweet smile would usually prompt compliments, which made her feel special and better than the norm. The ability to use her beauty to achieve what she wanted had given her the first of many useful life tools.
She wouldn’t lose her beauty, of course, simply by being pregnant, but there would be changes. Placing her left hand on her still flat stomach, Ashley rubbed softly. Try as she might, she could not realistically envision how her skin and muscles would stretch and enlarge over the coming months. And her boobs! How large would her C cups grow? And would their pale, soft skin crack and break as they enlarged and engorged themselves in preparation for the new life that would depend upon them for nourishment? And would she use them to nourish the baby? Would she get stretch marks and would they last? Did cocoa butter really help to prevent them?
For the moment, it was all too much. Shaking these swirling thoughts from her head and still using her left hand, she opened the door and left the bathroom.
“Let’s go,” she said to Buckeye, who stood from his sentry position just outside the door the instant he saw her, wagging his tail and displaying his big canine teeth and floppy pink tongue in a happy dog expression. Ashley patted his head and headed to the bakery’s main room and customer service area, looking down at Buckeye as he paced beside her. He, too, was getting old. He’d developed hip dysplasia, a common condition in many larger-breed dogs that leads to arthritis, so she always watched his movements closely to gauge if his condition was worsening. He would be twelve years old in January and Labs normally lived between ten and thirteen years. He was the second Lab named Buckeye that had served as mascot for her shop and his predecessor’s picture hung out here in the front room. Ashley did not cherish the idea of hanging a second picture beside it.
As expected, the counter hummed with activity as customers crowded the few feet of tiled area before it. Quickly, Ashley scrutinized their faces to see if anyone’s expression registered impatience or upset; but most of them were texting on their phones or laughing and chattering with one another, sharing the excitement of the imminent gridiron battle.
“Who’s here to pick up an order?” she called out and three people raised their hands and scurried up to her. Cake for Turner; cake and four dozen Buckeyes for Green; two cakes and three dozen football-shaped cookies for Bottomsley. They’d pre-baked over a thousand cookies for this day and Ashley was glad they had as she raced back into the kitchen to pull the orders from an organizing board. Matching order slips to the waiting items, she delivered them one at a time to the front counter, asking the cashier to ring them up. If her right hand had been working properly, she’d have been able to carry everything at once.
Back she went into the kitchen, Buckeye close on her heels and this time she did not shoo him away, as she intended to leave shortly. She simply could not stay with her hand in such a state. Business was hectic, and Lori would be upset; but Ashley knew she could handle it. She needed to go home and take care of her hands and decide how and when to tell Tim the good news.
Moving from counter to counter she checked on the work progress at each station before ensuring the wedding cake had been finished satisfactorily. Lori was boxing up the tiers with John’s help, but Ashley was able to take a final look before deciding that everything was well under control, and as the game started in two hours she knew business would be dropping off soon.
“Lori,” she said. “I’m going to leave now. Do you feel you can handle things without me?”
There was a flash of panic in Lori’s eyes, followed by a forced smile of confidence as she replied, “Yea, I got it. You go ahead.”
“John,” she said, turning to him. “You clear on directions to the venue?”
“Of course,” he replied. “Take me ten minutes at the most.”
“Great, she said. “ I’m going to go take care of this hand so I’m not completely out of commission tomorrow. I’ll be at home if you need anything.”
“Will do,” Lori replied, careful not to reveal her concern that Ashley was leaving the bakery before the work was done on this of all days.
“John, don’t forget the topper,” she reminded. The topper for this cake was the OSU logo with the bride and groom’s initials superimposed behind it: true fans, indeed.
“Got it,” he said, grabbing and sliding it nearer to him; a gesture of reassurance.
“OK then,” she said, beckoning to Buckeye who wobbled to her side as she collected her purse and keys from the office and called “See you later,” as the two of them went out the door, into the still warm, pre-autumn, Ohio afternoon.
