Chapter 3: Rosa’s
I laughed. I’m not proud of it, but I sat in my van and laughed until I had to wipe my eyes.
Then I thought about the display case as long as Mom’s dining room, and I stopped laughing.
Ruth Adler’s office is above a dry cleaner on Brown Street. She’s sixty-one, with gray curls and black glasses, and she helped me register my farmers market name two years ago, back when I thought trademarks were something only soda companies needed.
She listened to the whole thing without interrupting. Then she took her glasses off.
“I have to tell you something you’re not going to like,” she said. “A recipe is basically a list of ingredients and steps. In this country, you can’t copyright that. If your sister had stolen the real recipes, there’d be very little I could do about it.”
“She didn’t steal the real recipes.”
“So I gathered.” Ruth almost smiled. “Let me make sure I have this right. Your grandmother, on her deathbed, had you forge her own handwriting so that anyone who stole her book would bake bricks.”
“Forty pages.”
“I would have liked your grandmother very much.” She tapped her pen against the legal pad. “But understand me. Sabotage isn’t a legal theory. Nobody’s going to jail because her bread didn’t rise. If this goes the way you think it will, the only judges are going to be her customers.”
“I don’t want her in jail. I want her to stop using Grandma’s name.”
“Good. Because here’s what you do own.” She turned her monitor toward me. “You filed for Rosa’s eighteen months ago. Bakery goods and retail bakery services. It registered in August.”
I’d forgotten. It had felt silly at the time. A little legal paperwork for a folding tent.
“Grandma Rosa’s Bakehouse,” Ruth said, “is a bakery. Selling bread. Twenty minutes from where you sell bread under a registered name. That’s a likelihood of confusion, and it’s a strong one.” She put her glasses back on. “We can send a cease-and-desist letter this week. She’d have to change the sign, the bags, the cups, the website. Everything with that name on it.”
“My parents put money into it.”
“Then that’s your parents’ risk,” Ruth said. “Not your fault.”
I wanted to believe her.
I called Vanessa from the parking lot. Voicemail. I texted: We need to talk about the book. Before Saturday.
Her answer came eleven minutes later. Not today. Big week. 😘
I called Mom. “Mom, the pages she copied are wrong. Grandma made me write them wrong. If Vanessa bakes from them, it’s going to be a disaster.”
There was a long pause.
“Oh, Nora,” Mom said. “Listen to yourself. Your sister finally has something of her own, and suddenly Grandma’s book is booby-trapped?” She sighed. “I didn’t raise you to be jealous.”
She hung up.
On Wednesday I was setting up my tent at the market when Dad walked up in his green and navy flannel shirt, the one he’s worn every fall since I was a kid. He picked up a sourdough boule, turned it over, and thumped the bottom like Grandma taught all of us.
“Your mother doesn’t know I’m here,” he said.
“Okay.”
He paid for the loaf. Full price. He wouldn’t let me give it to him. Then he just stood there holding it in both hands, looking at the bread instead of at me.
“Dad. What is it?”
“Your mother told you we invested.”
“She did.”
“We didn’t give your sister our savings, Nora.” His voice was very quiet. “We co-signed her loan. Two hundred and forty thousand dollars.”
He thumped the bottom of the loaf again, softly, as if he was listening for something.
“The house is the collateral.”
