The mother of Austin is named Colleen Fairbanks, a brisk, handsome woman who had spent thirty years as a buyer for a department store chain, and she was not a person to be fooled by a pretty label. She held the jar in one hand and the paper in the other, and her eyes went from the stamp on the bottom to the number on the page and back again. “Brittany,” she said, in a perfectly level voice, “this candle bears the lot number of another company.” Brittany, up on her chair with her glass of sparkling cider, said, “Mrs. Fairbanks, that is just a manufacturing code.” Colleen said, “It is a code that matches the schedule of a sale. Which this lady appears to have signed.”
The whole brewery had stopped. A man with a pint glass paused halfway to his mouth. Somebody turned down the music. I looked up at my daughter on her chair, a pretty, restless woman in a linen dress, with the same dark eyes her father had, and I felt the old ache of every mother who has ever had to correct a grown child in public. “Brittany,” I said, “come down, honey.” She did not move. “I sold Blue Ridge Candle in September to a fragrance company in Atlanta. Ten million seven hundred thousand dollars. The formulas, the inventory, the factory. I did not tell you, because I wanted to see who my daughter would be.”
Austin, the boyfriend, put down the pitcher he was holding. He is a tall, soft spoken young man, a brewer, with the careful hands of a person who measures things for a living. “Brittany,” he said, “you told me your mother gave you the scents.” Brittany said, “She did, in a way.” Austin said, “In what way?” His voice was gentle, but there was a question in it that would not go away. Brittany climbed down from the chair. She stood very straight in the middle of the room, and for a moment I thought she would deny everything. Then something in her shoulders gave out.
A lot number stamped on a candle jar brought a department store buyer into a brewery and gave one candle maker the night to bring her daughter back to the stove.
“Mom,” she said, “I did take the jars. And the binder.” She was crying, but quietly, with her chin up. “Nobody would invest in a new candle company without a product. I thought if I could prove the brand, I could pay for the jars later. I thought you would never find out. Doris said you did not even visit the warehouse anymore.” I said, “Doris called me the same afternoon.” She laughed, a short wet laugh. “Of course she did.” She turned to the guests. “I am sorry, everyone. I lied. The scents are not mine. They belong to my mother. All thirty eight of them.”
I will tell you a hard thing, dear reader. I had expected to feel triumph. Instead I felt only a deep, bone tired sadness, the kind that comes at the end of a long harvest. I walked to the display table and picked up Blue Ridge Morning, the scent that I had made in 1984, at my kitchen stove, with a pound of beeswax and a bottle of balsam oil. I held it to my nose. It smelled of the mountains at dawn, of wet laurel and woodsmoke. “Brittany,” I said, “it is a beautiful candle. You poured it well.” She looked at me in astonishment.
“I do not want to take your launch from you,” I said. “I want to give you a better one.” I explained it then, right there, with Colleen Fairbanks and Austin and forty guests listening. I would call the buyer in Atlanta the next morning. I would ask them to license three of the scents to Brittany for a modest fee, under a contract that said, plainly, that the formulas were mine. And I would teach her to develop three new scents of her own, from scratch, in my kitchen, on Saturdays. “Not the old ones,” I said. “Your own.” Brittany pressed the back of her hand to her mouth. “Mom, I do not know how.” I said, “Nobody does, the first time.”
The buyer agreed. A woman named Pilar in the legal office laughed on the telephone when I told her the story, and said her own mother had once borrowed her prom dress without asking. The license cost Brittany one dollar per jar. She wrote the check herself, at my kitchen table, with a pen she had borrowed from my drawer. Then she sat back and looked at the old formula binder, which I had slid across the table to her, open to the page for rain on rhododendron. “Mom,” she said, “your handwriting is beautiful.” I said, “Thank you.” She said, “I never noticed.”
We worked through the winter. It was clumsy at first. Her first attempt, a sharp, green thing called Mountain Cedar, smelled like a pine cleaner. Her second was too sweet. Her third, a smoky blend of black tea and maple, made me stop with the wick in my fingers and say, “Oh.” Brittany looked up from the stove. “Is that good or bad?” I said, “It is yours.” She grinned at me, a broad, startled grin I had not seen since she was nine. We poured twelve jars that afternoon. She labeled them herself, in her own tidy script, at the bottom: Lot BM 001. Brittany Mills, maker.
The first Saturday in April, she held a second launch. Smaller this time, in my yard, among the tulips, with folding chairs and lemonade. Colleen Fairbanks came, and Austin poured the cider, and a handful of neighbors came to light candles. I sat in the front row. My daughter stood on no chair at all. She said, “These three are mine. These three are my mothers. I will tell you honestly which are which.” And she did, one by one, holding each jar to the sun. The crowd listened without a sound. When she was done, they applauded, long and warm, the way people applaud for truth.
That night, after everyone left, we sat on the porch with a single candle burning between us. Mountain Cedar, the second attempt, now much improved. Brittany tucked her feet under her. “Mom,” she said, “were you ever going to tell me about the sale?” I thought about it. “I was going to tell you on the day you needed it,” I said. “And I think the day was Saturday.” She laughed, softly, and leaned her head on my shoulder. The candle flickered. In the dark, beyond the porch, the mountains had gone blue and silent, as they do every night, as they did for my mother, and her mother before.
