Deep, fluting emotions were a form of weakness. She'd seen the softening in her work over the years, she'd started making the lazy, homey treats like apple crumble, chocolate muffins, butterscotch pudding, and lemon bars. They were fast and cheap and they pleased her children. But she'd trained at one of the best pastry programs in the country. Her teachers were French. She'd learned the classical method of making fondant, of making real buttercream with its spun-candy base and beating the precise fraction off egg into the pate a choux. She knew how to blow sugar into glassine nests and birds and fountains, how to construct seven-tiered wedding cakes draped with sugar curtains copied from the tapestries at Versailles. When the other students interned at the Four Seasons, the French Laundry, and Dean & Deluca, Avis had apprenticed with a botanical illustrator in the department of horticulture at Cornell, learning to steady her hand and eye, to work with the tip of the brush, to dissect and replicate in tinted royal icing and multihued glazes the tiniest pieces of stamen, pistil, and rhizome. She studied Audubon and Redoute. At the end of her apprenticeship, her mentor, who pronounced the work "extraordinary and heartbreaking," arranged an exhibition of Avis's pastries at the school. "Remembering the Lost Country" was a series of cakes decorated in perfectly rendered sugar olive branches, cross sections of figs, and frosting replicas of lemon leaves. Her mother attended and pronounced the effect 'amusant.

Propped on a small easel she uses for orders and ingredient lists is a request for a 'gateau Saint-Honore' bearing the legend "Together, Toujours" in scrolling Edwardian script. She attempts to calm herself with her work. It's a nicely time-consuming cake, though Avis finds it distasteful to deface her pastries with these slogans- even "Happy Birthday"- using fine creations as billboards. Today's order, from a Cutler Road matriarch, is an anniversary commandment- "till death do us..." Avis embarks on the journey of the cake which will require both the work of 'pate feuilletee,' and the 'pate a choux,' a carefully timed caramel, a 'creme patisserie,' as well as a 'creme Chantilly.

Avis named her business Paradise Pastry because she imagined cathedrals. She thought about the stonemasons, glassblowers, sculptors- who gave lifetimes to the creation of beauty. Every sugar crust she rolled, every simple 'tarte Tatin' was a bit of a church. She consecrated herself to it: later, it became her tribute to her daughter and the unknown into which she'd disappeared. She had her cathedral to enter, to console her. Her friend Jean-Francoise, chef at La Petit Choux, said that her pastries would be transcendent, if only she wasn't American.

She collects a tray from the kitchen: arranges almond and mango cream puffs, brown sugar lace cookies, and miniature napoleons of vanilla and guava: fleeting breaths of pate a choux and buttercreams that dissolve in single bites.

The first time Avis knelt on a chair and stirred eggs into flour to make a vanilla cake, she had an inkling of how higher orders of meaning encircle the chaos of life. Where philosophy, she already intuited, created only thought- no beds made, no children fed- in other rooms there were good things like measuring spoons, thermometers, and recipes, with their lovely, interwoven systems and codes. Avis labored over her pastries: her ingredient base grew, combining worlds: preserved lemons from Morocco in a Provencal tart; Syrian olive oil in Neapolitan cantuccini; salt combed from English marshes and filaments of Kashmiri saffron secreted within a Swedish cream. By the time Avis was in college, her baking had evolved to a level of exquisite accomplishment: each pastry as unique as a snowflake, just as fleeting on the tongue: pellucid jams colored cobalt and lavender, biscuits light as eiderdown.

But Stanley persisted in the kitchen, performing the small yet demanding apprentice's tasks she set for him- removing the skin from piles of almonds, grating snowy hills of lemon zest, the nightly sweeping of the kitchen floor and sponging of metal shelves. He didn't seem to mind: every day after school, he'd lean over the counter, watching her experiment with combinations- shifting flavors like the beads in a kaleidoscope- burnt sugar, hibiscus, rum, espresso, pear: dessert as a metaphor for something unresolvable. It was nothing like the slapdashery of cooking. Baking, to Avis, was no less precise than chemistry: an exquisite transfiguration. Every night, she lingered in the kitchen, analyzing her work, jotting notes, describing the way ingredients nestled: a slim layer of black chocolate hidden at the bottom of a praline tart, the essence of lavender stirred into a bowl of preserved wild blueberries. Stanley listened to his mother think out loud: he asked her questions and made suggestions- like mounding lemon meringue between layers of crisp pecan wafers- such a success that her corporate customers ordered it for banquets and company retreats.
On the day Avis is thinking of, she sat in the den where they watched TV, letting her hand swim over the silk of her daughter's hair, imagining a dessert pistou of blackberry, creme fraiche, and nutmeg, in which floated tiny vanilla croutons. Felice was her audience, Avis's picky eater- difficult to please. Her "favorites" changed capriciously and at times, it seemed, deliberately, so that after Avis set out what once had been, in Felice's words, "the best ever"- say, a miniature roulade Pavlova with billows of cream and fresh kumquat- Felice would announce that she was now "tired" of kumquats.