content warnings
Mention of death, implied suicide
[1904 words]
How much would you charge for a tray of brownies baked from scratch? Consider the simple ingredients that you probably have in your pantry. Altogether, it costs five dollars—give or take. Add another twenty for the hour of your time spent measuring, whisking, baking, cleaning.
So, twenty-five dollars for a tray of brownies, sounds good? Gooey, fresh-baked brownies, stuffed and swirled with salted caramel. You can smell the richness of the chocolate, and the caramel oozes—warm and slow and sensuous—down the sides. Brownies so rich, it would be criminal to grab anything other than a glass of milk to help you swallow the snack.
Hell, knock the price down to twenty. Friends and family discount.
I wish I knew why I didn’t bake Kat those brownies. I only made them once, for the college party where we met—she was my closest friend since, and she would ask me at least once a year to make them again.
They weren’t anything special, but, oh, she raved about them. At first, I found her passion off-putting (even a little scary), but she won me over. Imagine a lifetime of feeling unappreciated and unheard. Now imagine being slathered in warm, delicious praise for something as basic as baking brownies.
Kat never was shy about showing pleasure in the little things. She said “yes” ten times for every “no,” and encouraged everyone around her to live according to her bacchanalian philosophy.
Have a drink, Kat would urge. Let’s share a blunt and get a new tattoo and not worry about tomorrow. What were our twenties for, if not to indulge in life’s vices?
She was either generous or bad with money, depending on who you asked. If she was shopping and something caught her eye that reminded her of a friend, she would buy it for them with pleasure. A handful of times, Kat showed up at my door with surprise cookies or a sweet-smelling candle because she knew I had a bad day.
It was easy to love Kat in those times, so I stuck around when the laughter faded and the bleak moods crept in, learning to measure her moods as carefully as a cup of flour. I waited out the spurts of anger that would erupt from her like chocolate from a lava cake. I waited out, too, the frighteningly giddy, gooey Kat who would reach for cigarettes (though she claimed she couldn’t stand their taste or smell) and not put them down for months. Those were the times she would drive too fast and gesture with excessive energy as she chain-smoked and chain-cursed while making big plans for us. Plans that would never come to fruition, like when she realized we should open a coffee-shop-slash-bakery.
“You don’t even drink coffee,” I pointed out.
Kat and I sat on the patio of her favorite bar, where she could smoke freely. It was summertime, and, underneath the smoke, the patio smelled like honeysuckle and beer.
“I don’t need to drink coffee to learn how to roast and brew it.” Kat waved her hand and, with a slight smile, eyed the cute server walking by.
“And what would I do?”
“Duh! You would bake things. You’re so good at it—like those brownies you made that one time.”
I rolled my eyes. “It’s impractical.”
“The best things always are.” She grinned and took a puff.
I grinned back. It was a silly idea, but fun to talk about. I was growing sick of my job at the printing shop.
“What would we call it?” I asked.
For weeks, we met at coffee shops around the city, doing our research. Kat took pages of notes and giggled every time she brainstormed a punny name, like Knead Coffee? or (the worst one) Brew-ti-ful Bakes.
“I still think Bake-a-Latte is prime,” she said one afternoon, tapping her pen on her notebook.
“It sounds like we bake our coffee.”
“Nobody’s going to think that. God, you always shoot down my ideas!”
I glanced up from my phone. Kat clenched her jaw and looked away. The weeks we just spent brainstorming together had been good, but when I saw that jaw clenching, I tensed. I could see the eggshells in the batter. It didn’t matter what I said, once she had gotten it in her head that I would disagree.
“Do I? Do I always shoot you down?”
She whipped her head back around to scowl at me. “You just did! Every name I’ve come up with, you’ve been like, ‘Ew, no.’”
“If you tried coming up with actual names instead of jokes, I might like one.”
“You don’t even think this will work. We’d have a name by now if you were really serious.”
I huffed a breath.“What? When did I say that? Can you even hear yourself right now?”
“Whatever. You know what I mean.”
If you mean that I have to talk you out of your underbaked ideas, then, yeah, I do.
I didn’t say anything else. We glared at each other.
After that, she stopped mentioning the shop. We never spoke of it again. Kat had new plans to whisk her away along the currents of fascination. She was going to go to law school. No, she was going to become a teacher. First, she was driving on a solo cross-country trip. After she signed up for singing lessons.
For weeks, she would tell me I was going places. She felt high on life, like a perfectly risen soufflé fresh out of the oven. But the soufflé would inevitably collapse, and those weeks would fold into other weeks of saying she didn’t know what she would do without me. Over and over she would insist that she couldn’t live without me.
She took so much, even as she gave. Maybe I didn’t bake her brownies, or drop gifts off at her door, but I was the first person she turned to when she needed someone to clean up one of her messes.
I guess I needed her sometimes, too. She was a constant presence, always in and out of my place. She was easy to call on when I needed a free pet sitter or a jumpstart for my car. There was the year when I locked myself out of my condo three times—Kat claimed it was at least five, but I’m sure it was only three.
“Get a smart lock,” she’d tell me after coming by with the spare key.
I always meant to, but it seemed a waste of money for something so trivial.
It’s not like she couldn’t bake those brownies for herself. Anyone can make brownies, even “fancy” ones. We’re talking basic kitchen ingredients.
They’re just brownies, for God’s sake.
Our entire friendship was on her timeline. We talked when she was in the mood to talk, but she could fall into strange funks and withdraw from me for weeks, leaving me to wonder if we had grown stale.
Did she ever consider how hard that was for me?
We fought when she wanted to fight, because nobody could avoid Kat’s fury once unleashed. She would rage and cry and apologize, and you better believe I had to accept those apologies on her schedule, too.
When we would go out drinking—when Kat, bouncing up and down, would proclaim she was jumping out of her skin—she would circle the bar and chat up strangers, looking for new entertainment, whether a drunken argument or an easy lay. Nights out with Kat meant a balancing act where I teetered between tipsy and attentive, in case she needed rescuing.
Kat often needed rescuing.
If I had rescued her less, would our friendship have been stronger? Or would it have crumbled into crumbs so much earlier? Could I have walked out of her life twelve years ago, and never looked back? Where would I be now? Where would she be?
When we parted ways, that was on her timeline, too. She had a breakdown—no big deal, she was always having breakdowns—but this time, she directed most of her rage toward me.
I should have seen it coming. She’d gone from months of hookups with anyone who swiped right to weeks of barely getting out of bed. She hardly ever texted me, and when she did, it was to disagree with whatever I said. I could have called the sky blue, and she would have gone on Google and found some way to argue that it wasn’t really blue, that was how we interpreted it.
Then, mid-morning one fall Sunday, I texted her some trivial celebrity gossip and she sent back a stream of consciousness and typos about how I thought I was better than her, better than everyone.
“You dont do anything for anyone else,” she wrote. In the next text, she contradicted herself, claiming instead that I could make time for everyone but her.
“I asked you to look over my resume and you couldn’t do that, but you went to Craig’s house party and you bought Sarah a fern. You’ve never even mad me those brownies, i pick up your dog from thevet for you, i bring you choclate when youre on your period, and you tell me that im a terrivle person but i constantly have tp unloc your door because you cant be bothered to remember a keya nd then you text me and ask why i dont get there fast enough!!11!”
I had thought we were friends; she had been keeping an abacus in her head, tallying up every good act against every bad.
I tried to call her; she didn’t answer. We didn’t speak for the rest of the day. I thought she would apologize after a week or two. But a day later, she blocked me, leaving me alone with my thoughts about brownies and house keys.
Twenty dollars for a tray of brownies. For an hour of my time. But I couldn’t find the time, so I never baked the brownies.
Until today.
I was up with the sun, baking. I was careful that no tears splashed into the batter, though I’m positive Kat would have thought them a morbidly appropriate addition. She would have made a weird joke about cannibalism. She would have pouted when I didn’t laugh, then denied she was pouting.
Maybe if I had laughed with her more, I wouldn’t have been left with the bittersweet aftertaste of our friendship.
Now, I grip the tray so hard, the metal digs into my palms as I walk up the front steps. Pause. Breathe. Balance the brownies in one hand. Knock with the other.
Kat’s mother opens the door and greets me with a brave smile that looks more like a skeletal grin.
The baked goods weigh me down. They feel as heavy as the ashes sitting in the urn that’s far too prominent in the living room.
Kat would have despised that urn. Too traditional.
I place the brownies in the kitchen. They are gooey and warm and chocolatey, with salted caramel liberally swirled on top. I cut myself a generous piece. Watch the caramel oozing down the sides.
They took an hour to bake. Yesterday, I looked up the date of that first party when we met. Roughly 109,950 hours ago. When I close my eyes tonight, I won’t sleep.
I’ll count the trays of brownies I could have baked, had I taken the time.
Jennifer Peaslee’s work has appeared in BarBar and on the Kaidankai Podcast. She lives in Atlanta with her mischievous cat, Trouble, and runs The Bleeding Typewriter, a creative writing advice blog and online community.
