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Plum Kitaki is not a good baker.
She just isn’t. There’s no two ways around it, really, and a quiet, secret part of her is ashamed over it. It’s not that she thinks being able to bake is an integral component of being a good mother; she’d like to believe she’s a good mother without the homemade cookies and banana bread and sweets on the weekends.
In any case, Winfred has all that covered and more. Plum is inclined to believe that her husband’s baked goods are the best in the world, so Wocky really isn’t missing out at all.
Plum just wishes, sometimes, that she could bake like her mother. Her mother was incredible in the kitchen. She’d make mouth-watering cookies with browned butter and cinnamon, and Plum would help her roll the dough into balls to place on cookie sheets exactly two inches apart. When she was especially small Plum would sit impatiently in front of the oven and watch through the glass door as the cookies baked, and her mother would chuckle under her breath while polishing one of her guns.
“They won’t bake any faster that way, sweet thing,” her mother would say, but Plum was not only impatient but also stubborn, and she’d cross her arms and stare down the cookies even harder. Her mother was particular about her baked goods, too, and never allowed Plum to touch one of those cookies until they were completely cooled on the rack. Plum often tried to sneak a still-hot cookie anyway, and was almost always caught. Being caught meant shooting practice with the sawed-off until her arms turned to jello and her ears rang and her shoulder turned black and blue (because she wasn’t nearly as good at taking the recoil as her mother, who never bruised her shoulder, ever, and could load a Tommy gun in five seconds flat), all while her mother corrected her on her form and aim. Though she’s always preferred the quiet grace of a sword over guns and rifles, Plum is certain that with all the shooting practice she went through as the headstrong, disobedient daughter of a yakuza kingpin, she could load any given firearm in her sleep with one hand tied behind her back, despite not having held a gun in years.
And Plum does miss her mother terribly for it. Even if she didn’t inherit her baking skills.
It’s not as if she hasn’t tried, but it seems each and every time the yeast won’t rise (because the water she bloomed it in was too hot, according to Winfred), her cookies turn out flat (because she didn’t chill the dough long enough, according to Winfred) and her cakes taste like she might’ve swapped the sugar for salt (which she did, according to Winfred).
(And sometimes she wants to give Winfred a good thwack over the head with her broom.)
(Sword sheathed, of course, because she loves him dearly.)
Her husband and son know perfectly well her lackluster skills in the kitchen, which is why they handle all the baking and Plum handles, well, everything else. The bakery’s register books are impeccable and she has an entire binder dedicated to the price of every different kind of ingredient Winfred might ask for per pound and per gram, a binder which contains no less than thirty-seven different types of flour because she never knows when Winfred might decide he wants to try coconut flour, or chickpea, or corn or cassava or chestnut or even cricket flour and that’s just the C’s of it. It’s an exhausting job, sometimes, but it’s one she gets to share with her family. She wouldn’t trade that for anything.
Plum smiles to herself, leaning back in her chair, away from the register books she’s been scrutinizing all day. The bakery smells like fresh-baked bread, as it tends to do, and it wafts to the back room adjoining the kitchen where she sits. Winfred wanted to bake challah today, and judging by the sounds from the kitchen Wocky had a beast of a time trying to figure out how to braid the dough correctly, or, at least, close enough to correct where they could actually sell it. Eventually Winfred decided it might be best if Wocky kneaded the dough and Winfred braided it if they wanted to have any nice-looking loaves to put on the shelves at all.
Wocky’s never had the patience for these kinds of things. He gets his impatience from Plum and she knows it; she thinks Winfred, on the other hand, might be the most patient man alive. A skill that’s greatly needed when it comes to handling their son, sometimes. Even now, when he’s twenty, nearly full-grown. Though Plum does struggle seeing Wocky as an adult, as anything other than her darling little boy, really: that same little boy who terrorized his auntie Viola when she came to babysit him when he was really young, who tried to lock pick the gun cabinet when he was ten and smashed the glass with a paperweight when he couldn’t figure it out (and then Winfred had to chase Wocky around the house for fifteen minutes to try and get the thankfully unloaded ruger bearcat revolver out of his hands so Plum could give him a stern talking-to about gun safety), who punched a high schooler when he was just in middle school so hard it knocked his teeth out because he was talking poorly about his family, who pierced his own ears when he was fifteen and passed out at the sight of blood and nearly knocked his brains out on the bathroom counter.
Perhaps darling isn’t quite the right word for him, Plum muses. He really was a terror as a child, but she loved him then and she loves him now, more than anything in the entire world.
“Ma?”
Speaking of. “Yes, dear?” Plum says, without turning. She’s working on a budget for the next month; Plum prides herself on the fact that the Kitaki bakery is always perfectly on budget thanks to her excellent money managing, which is a feat considering Winfred seems insistent on buying all the most expensive spices and sugars and untouched, pure, organic vanilla beans and it honestly makes Plum wish they kept just a little bit of their more…ambiguously acquired money simply to fund her husband’s incredibly high vanilla bean standards.
Wocky clears his throat awkwardly behind her. “Uh…could you…come help with the bread?”
And that gives Plum pause. Because Plum is not a good baker, not even a bit, and Wocky knows this. They all know this. “Perhaps you should ask your father, dear,” she says gently, turning a page. “I’m afraid I won’t be of much help.”
“I…” Wocky starts, and then hesitates. “Dad’s on a walk.”
“Well, he’ll be back in an hour or so, won’t he?”
Wocky is silent for a moment. So silent, in fact, that Plum thought he left the room. “Yeah, s’pose so, I just…” he mutters, and there’s something in his voice that snags in Plum’s ears, a nervous little waver that causes her to lift her head from the books, pen stilling in her hand. “I just wanted your help. Specifically.”
Plum turns in her chair, then, to face her son standing there in the doorway stubbornly looking everywhere but at her, his hands shoved under his armpits and flour drowning the freckles at the bridge of his nose but not enough to hide the flush staining his cheeks.
Oh, Plum thinks, then. Because this isn’t about bread at all.
And that’s how Plum ends up in the kitchen of their little bakery, a familiar and yet unfamiliar place for her, in her husband’s apron staring down at a hunk of challah on the floured counter, a dough divider in her hand. The proofing rack with Winfred’s completed loaves is just to her right, rows of neatly braided dough and they all look terribly complicated and Plum cannot for the life of her figure out how Winfred did it. She’s no stranger to braiding, of course, what with her long, thick hair, but these don’t look like any simple three-stranded braids she’s dealt with before.
Wocky, standing beside her and measuring out cups of flour, glances at her. He’s a nervous ball of energy and has been ever since Plum stepped foot in the kitchen, his anxiety about as subtle as a brick to the head, even to someone who hasn’t known him his entire life. But if she asks him outright if something’s bothering him he’ll deny it instantly, so Plum remains quiet. Her son is a complicated little puzzle sometimes; he couldn’t hold back his feelings and emotions if he tried, but when he’s nervous he’ll clam right up despite clearly wanting to talk. Winfred is much more patient with Wocky about this than Plum, but Wocky wanted to talk to her, not Winfred, so Plum is determined to let her son find his words on his own time.
Even if that means trying to braid bread dough.
Wocky bravely attempts to explain to her how to braid them the way Winfred did it, but he doesn’t have a firm understanding of it, either, so his instructions aren’t very helpful.
“You gotta cut it into four chunks, then roll ‘em out so they get all long and noodley,” Wocky tells her, wrestling a wooden spoon through the half-formed dough he’s working with.
“Four?” Plum repeats.
“Yeah, then you’re gonna cut the four in half so you got eight and then braid ‘em all together so it looks all fancy and sh-stuff,” Wocky explains, catching the curse right before it slips out. “Or somethin’. I dunno, that’s what Dad does.”
“…I see,” Plum says slowly, glancing at the proofing rack nearby with all its rows of neatly braided dough. Why can’t she just braid with three strands? Surely that’d be so much easier.
“Dad wrote it down.” Wocky points to a post it note stuck to the shelf, which has some kind of nonsense scribbled all over it that reads:
8U7O1/2U3O8/1O5/7U6O1/8O5
Plum frowns at the note. She has no earthly idea what this could possibly mean, and she’s beginning to understand why Wocky was put on dough-making duty rather than dough-braiding. She looks back down at the blob of dough before her, and resolutely divvies it up into three equal(ish) pieces. She’s not here for intricately braided bread, she’s here for her son and Winfred is just going to have to deal with it. If he has an issue with her simple loaves, then he’ll have to take it up with her.
As she braids the dough as neatly as she can, Plum glances at Wocky out of the corner of her eye. His hair is getting longer, she thinks. Long enough where he’s taken to wearing it half up, little wisps escaping to curl at his forehead. She thinks it suits him. He looks over at her, catching her gaze before quickly away, suddenly a lot more forceful with his kneading. Her smile widens as she sets another loaf on a tray. He’s quiet, but she imagines she can hear all the thoughts bouncing around in his head right now. He wants to talk to her about something, that much is clear. Why else would he ask her to help? The last time Plum stepped foot in the kitchen with intent to help he threatened to hit her with a broom if she dared step foot near his pastry dough (and then immediately apologized for threatening his mother, of course, because her Wocky is a good boy and she won’t have anyone thinking otherwise).
It was a very proud moment for her.
Plum smiles at the memory until she realizes she made a mistake in her braid. Frowning, she undoes her progress to fix it. She thought she was getting the hang of this, but dough is a bit different than hair. She doesn’t get flour under her fingernails when braiding hair, for example. And hair certainly doesn’t stick to your fingers while you work.
It’s like this for a while, silent in the kitchen as Plum braids and Wocky kneads. Once he’s done with the dough, he covers it to rise, and then proceeds to putter about the kitchen, clearly stalling talking to her by pretending to do things like wipe down the counter three separate times and shift flour bags around and open one of the cabinets to just look at the spices. Plum bites her tongue throughout all of this, reminding herself to be patient, until he finally clear his throat to speak to her.
“Ma?”
“Yes?” Plum strategically does not turn to look at him.
“Can I…can I tell you somethin’?” Wocky says slowly, nervously.
Plum nods, continuing to braid. “Of course, dear. What is it?”
“It’s…um…it’s kinda an important somethin’.”
“Oh?” Plum stops, then, and faces her son. He looks up at his mother with those big brown eyes of his and he looks, for a moment, panicked, like he regrets drawing her attention. He swallows, his shoulders drawing up to his ears as he abruptly looks away, his cheeks flushing red and brows drawing in and oh, Plum knows that look. It’s a look she hasn’t seen in a long time, and she suddenly knows exactly what Wocky is about to tell her.
She does an excellent job of pretending that she doesn’t, though. She smiles at him (not too widely), waiting for him to find the right words and trying to hide how secretly delighted she is. He fidgets with his rings, shifting his weight in his pink high-tops. One of them is untied, Plum notes, but she doesn’t interrupt to tell him so.
Her patience quickly dwindles, however, as Wocky repeatedly begins his sentence and then backtracks, stuttering over his words. “We don’t have all day, dear,” Plum says, not unkindly.
“R-right. Yeah. Clock’s tickin’, ain’t it,” Wocky says, and then laughs, too loud and forceful to possibly be real. Plum fights back an amused smile. “I…uh…you remember when I got shot?”
Plum blinks at him. “Yes, I certainly do,” she replies, like she hadn’t nearly throttled Wocky herself over it. “Did you manage to get shot a second time?”
He frowns at her, the same, petulant frown he always wore as a little kid when she told him he wasn’t allowed to play with her swords. “No, Ma. I’m actually kinda tryin’ to avoid a round two with that.”
“Excellent plan, dear.”
“Okay, um…” Wocky fiddles with his rings, hesitating like he’s gathering his courage. “Do you…uh…you remember Vera, right?”
Plum almost rolls her eyes at the question. Does she remember Vera. How could she not? After Wocky came home from the hospital he wouldn’t stop talking about her, even if he didn’t realize why. She’s only met the girl a few times but she likes her tremendously. She’s a stark change from Alita, a good change. Plum certainly never liked her. She didn’t even like her before she nearly got her son killed.
“Vera, yes. The artist, right?” Plum asks, even though she knows.
Wocky nods nervously, and Plum resists the urge to smile. Oh, she knew it, she thinks, wiping dough and flour off on her husband’s apron. And it’s been so long.
When Wocky was younger, he’d find a new love of his life every week or so. He’d come to Plum, eight, ten, twelve, fourteen years old, gushing about someone’s eyes, their smile, their hair, the way they laughed at Wocky’s joke even though it really wasn’t that funny. Any little thing that sparked a fire in his heart, he would come and tell her, always excited, always smiling. Sometimes a boy, sometimes a girl, or sometimes not a boy or a girl but someone that’s neither, both, or in-between. It doesn’t really matter to Wocky, it never did - if they’re pretty, and they smile at him, he’s a goner. Simple as that.
And then there was Alita. And after her, he changed. That’s the truth of it.
Plum remembers so clearly a few nights after he came home. Plum had come down from the bedroom to the kitchen for a glass of water, and Wocky had been sitting there at the kitchen table. His hair was a mess and there were circles under his eyes, his fingers curled around a mug of the kind of hot chocolate that comes in a packet, the kind that Winfred frowns at because he could make the real thing so much better, but Plum keeps in the back of the cupboard because she knows Wocky likes it. The LED display on the oven had just clicked over to a little past four in the morning, and there were tear stains on Wocky’s cheeks.
“Do you think she ever actually loved me?”
His voice had broken when he said it, just a bit. He was just a boy. He was only nineteen, sitting there at the kitchen table, wearing one of his dad’s old shirts that was too big for him, that made him look so small. He looked small then, too, at the hospital. Winfred had carried him there, staining his shirt with blood. There had been so much blood. Plum didn’t see him until after the surgery - the surgery that was supposed to take out that godforsaken bullet - because Winfred hadn’t let her, holding her back in the waiting room but she’d seen the blood on Winfred’s clothes and the looks on the nurses’ faces and she would’ve fought like hell just to see her son at that moment, to see the rise and fall of his chest but Winfred took her hand and shook his head and hugged her until it was over.
He was just a boy. Her boy.
And seeing her son there crying at the kitchen table over a woman who used him, lied to him, manipulated him, who likely never loved him at all, Plum hoped Alita considered herself lucky she landed herself in jail at all. She was safe in jail.
Relatively. The Kitakis might not be gangsters any longer, but they still had their connections.
Plum hadn’t said any of that, though. She just knelt in front of her son on the hard kitchen floor and wrapped her arms around him and let him cry into the crook of her neck so hard his body shook.
After that, after her, after everything she did, Wocky stopped falling in love so much. It was almost like he’d made a conscious effort to swear it off, as if it were an addiction he needed to quit. She broke his heart so badly that getting shot in the chest wasn’t even the worst part of the ordeal, and Plum isn’t entirely sure that Wocky’s fully recovered from it. In truth, she doesn’t think he ever will be, not really. It isn’t something so simple as removing a bullet. The scar on his chest goes deeper than just the skin. There was something in him, that trusting, sweet, naive boy who wore his heart on his sleeve, that broke right along with his heart.
If Plum’s being honest, she didn’t think Vera Misham was going to be the one to change that.
He met her in the hospital, while he was recovering from his second surgery. He talked about her a lot but always acted as if he didn’t want to, like it would start tearing down walls he’d carefully constructed around his battered heart. All Plum knew about her for a while was that she was an artist, she was quiet, and she’d been in the hospital recovering from something serious. Whenever she was brought up, he talked about her so carefully and vaguely that it felt purposeful, even after Vera came to the bakery for the first time and he got so excited to see her again that he hugged her, getting flour all over her shirt.
It was like he knew that he could like her, that maybe he did, but was refusing to allow himself to. For once in his life, he was holding himself back.
But it seems that things have changed, Plum thinks now, looking down at her son while he tries to get the words out.
“What about Vera, dear?” Plum prompts gently.
Wocky sucks in a breath. “We’re…kinda…you know,” he stammers, making a vague gesture with his hands.
Plum blinks innocently at him, her smile growing on her face. She does know, but she wants to hear him say it. Mostly because she wants to hear him say those words out loud, but also because she enjoys teasing him, just a bit. “You’re what?”
Wocky makes a frustrated sound. His cheeks are bright red, and he looks, acutely, like he regrets every single one of his life choices. “Me and Vera, we’re…goin’ out,” he says finally, in one great, frantic rush of air. “S-seriously. And have been, for, like, a month. Twenty-eight days, specifically, so maybe not - no, wait, that’s counts as a month. February’s got twenty-eight days. We’ve been goin’ out for a month but specifically the month of February, but in, like, January, cause it ain’t February right now, so-“
“Wocky,” Plum says softly, interrupting his rant.
He flinches, and his mouth snaps shut. Plum bends down, taking her son’s face in her hands, something she hasn’t done since he was much younger, and though he’s almost twenty-one now he doesn’t move, just meets her gaze with his big, anxious brown eyes.
“Wocky,” she repeats.
“Y-yeah?”
“Do you like her?”
Wocky swallows. His eyes flicker to the side, then back at Plum, and his cheeks grow warm under her hands. “I like her a lot,” he says weakly, and there’s a tremor in his voice like he’s terrified of that.
Plum smiles. “Does she like you?”
After a moment’s hesitation, like he’s fighting with himself over it, Wocky nods, and there’s the tug of an unbidden smile at the edge of his mouth. “S-she told me so, um, once or t-twice.”
Plum doesn’t say anything for a moment, and Wocky glances at her questioningly, likely anxious over her silence. But Plum throws her arms around him, and pulls him into the tightest bearhug she’s capable of.
“Ma,” Wocky says petulantly (and a bit strangled), even though Plum knows for a fact that he likes her hugs and he’s just acting embarrassed because he still has the silly notion in his head that that’s what tough guys do.
“Oh, darling, I’m so happy for you,” Plum says delightedly.
“…Really?”
“Yes,” she says, pulling back so she can smile at him. She places her hand back on his cheek. “You two are good for each other. You better treat her right, Wocky.”
“I do,” he says defensively, then flushes again. “I…I’m tryin’ to.”
Plum laughs before straightening, turning back to the half-finished loaf she left on the counter. She supposes she should finish this before Winfred gets back from his walk. As she starts to braid the strands of dough together again, she looks at Wocky out of the corner of her eye. “Oh, and Wocky, dear?”
“Yeah, Ma?”
“I already knew.”
She’s not looking anymore, but she can picture the look on his face solely by the strangled noise he makes. “Wh-you-huh?” Wocky sputters. “Then why’d you - why didn’t -“
“And, you know, I think you should invite her over for dinner sometime,” Plum says smoothly, over her son’s stammering.
“Fuck - shit, sorry, Ma, I mean-” Wocky coughs, his face flushing red in his panic. Poor boy. He’s going to combust. “Wh-why?”
Plum smiles at him. “Well, she’s your girlfriend, isn’t she?” She asks, trying not to smile harder as the word girlfriend causes Wocky’s face to burn even brighter. “And she’s such a lovely girl, too.”
“Wh…uh…I mean, she’s…she’s a girl,” Wocky stammers.
“I do hope you compliment her a little better than that, Wocky.”
“Ma!”
Plum laughs so loud it echoes through the kitchen as Wocky buries his red face in his hands. Oh, how she missed this side of him. She’ll have to make sure Wocky brings Vera over for dinner sometime soon; she’ll have to pester him on what Vera’s favorite foods are so Winfred can make them for her.
Plum is still laughing as Winfred returns to the kitchen from his walk, his hair mussed from the wind. He looks surprised to see Wocky with his face on fire furiously kneading dough like it’s done something to personally wrong him despite the faint, happy little smile on his face, and even more surprised to see Plum there as well, her hands coated in flour. She smiles at Winfred, the crow’s feet at the corners of her eyes crinkling.
“Hello, dear. How was your walk?”
He nods gruffly in response, glancing between her and Wocky. “Did I…miss something?”
“Oh, yes. In fact, Winfred, dear, you owe me twenty dollars.”
“MA!”