Baked with Love

by Erin Wright

  “I’m assuming it’s faster to just walk?” she asked, shielding her eyes from the sun as she peered down the street towards the waving statue.

  “Absolutely, and again, you’re publicly supporting a local business – walking there means that everyone can see you going there to eat. That sort of thing is insanely important around here.”

  “Right.” They took off down the street, Cady clutching her purse as they walked. Not that she thought anyone was going to jump out and try to nab it from her – even if there was a rash of purse thievery in Sawyer, no one would be stupid enough to try it with Gage by her side – but rather because she was clutching the purse to her side, she then had something to do with her hands.

  Something that didn’t involve reaching over and threading her fingers through Gage’s.

  You are being an idiot. Like, a world-class dumbass. You know you can’t date someone. You know what happens when a guy tries to kiss you.

  One date. She’d gone on one date since the near-rape, and only because her mom had been moaning and groaning about how her daughter never got out anymore, and how was she going to have any grandkids to love on at this rate?

  You never did get your grandkids, Mom. Just one more way that I failed you.

  But that one date was enough for Cady. When Tom had leaned forward to plant what was probably a perfectly innocent, close-mouthed goodnight kiss on her lips, she’d slapped him across the face, kneed him in the balls, and then had run into the house, dead-bolting the door behind her.

  Needless to say, Tom hadn’t called to ask for a second date.

  The painfully quiet walk finally reached its conclusion when they got to the front door of Betty’s, the giant statue casting a shadow over them as they walked inside.

  Cady immediately felt at home. There was the same homey, warm vibe here as there was at the Muffin Man, and Cady knew that more than shopping in a public sort of way, she needed to recreate this feeling in the Smoothie Queen if she was going to make it in this town.

  “Hey, Gage!” A lady with short cropped platinum blonde hair waved across the restaurant at them. “Pick a booth – I’ll be right over.”

  Cady looked Gage straight in the face – the first time since she’d stupidly done it back in the bathroom at the store – as she grinned up at him. “Eat here much?” she asked dryly as he led the way to one of the booths lining the front of the diner.

  He shrugged, unrepentant. “This is Sawyer,” he reminded her. “Whether I ate here daily or only once a month, I’d still know everyone. Chloe is a transplant to the area, but she’s been here long enough, most of us have forgiven her for being a big city girl.”

  “How long will it take for people to forget that I’m a transplant here, too?” Cady asked, gnawing on her bottom lip with worry. She hadn’t thought about that nearly as much as she probably should have; an oversight she was only realizing she’d made because she was finally starting to get to know this town.

  And outsiders were definitely not the norm.

  “Fifteen years?” Gage guessed. Cady gasped in horror. “If you’re lucky,” he added.

  She glared at him. “You’re teasing me, aren’t you.” It was a statement, not a question, but before he could affirm or deny, the waitress came bustling over.

  “Hey, Gage!” she said, pushing her hand through her short blonde hair, the shiny straight hair falling back into a perfect line to her shoulder, even after she ran her fingers through it.

  Cady tried not to drool with envy. She had naturally curly hair that simply wasn’t something she could run her fingers through – at least not without using a pick and a whole bottle of detangler beforehand – and so naturally, she was green with envy over every woman who had straight hair.

  I bet her hair never creates a halo of frizz around her head when it rains.

  She heaved a sigh.

  “I haven’t met you yet,” Chloe said, turning to Cady with a large, friendly smile. “I’m Chloe, and you are…”

  Cady held out her hand and they shook. “Cady Walcott. I bought the store next door to the Muffin Man.”

  “Oh!” Chloe’s face lit up. “I’ve been watching the progress on that old place. I can’t believe everything you’ve managed to do to it so far. Just fixing that broken awning was a huge step forward. It looks a thousand times better now that you’ve scrubbed the smoke damage off the walls, too.”

  Cady smiled, trying to hide her surprise. Was Chloe pressing her face up against the window and inspecting the interior? She knew small town residents tended to stick their noses in wherever they wanted, but surely peering inside of an unopened building was odd, right?

  Before Cady could ask any questions – before she could think of any question to ask – Gage broke out with, “Now lookie here – who’s an expecting mama!”

  Chloe’s face broke out in a huge grin. “You sure are observant,” she said, turning sideways and running her hand over the small bump with pride. Cady gulped. Gage was damn brave to mention it. Sure, Chloe was fairly petite and it looked like a pregnancy bump to the untrained eye, but it could’ve been an eating-too-many-donuts bump too. “Dawson is over the moon. He’s already counted out how many days until we can go in and find out if it’s a girl or a boy. He says he’d be fine with either, but honestly, I think he wants a little girl he can spoil rotten. Of course, Tommy wants a younger brother. I’ve tried to tell him that we don’t have a choice in the matter, but he’s started adding it to his prayers every night, sure that he can talk God into giving him a brother instead of an icky sister.”

  Gage rumbled with laughter. “You two have your hands full with that one. Well, I don’t know if you were at Jennifer and Stetson’s baby reveal party, but I baked the cake for it, making the inside blue. I’d be happy to do something similar for you two. No charge. I’m just excited to see you two getting around to adding to the family.”

  Chloe smiled then, a contented smile filled with warmth and precious memories that made Cady feel almost like an interloper, eavesdropping on an inner conversation that only Chloe could hear. “Me, too,” she murmured. “So!” She straightened up, putting her back-to-work face on. “Are you two ready to order?”

  Chapter 16

  Gage

  They headed back up Main Street, Gage gallantly carrying the to-go bag from Betty’s. It was Cady’s leftovers and she’d tried to argue that she should thus be responsible for carrying it, but he’d pointed out that his manly man pride had already taken a beating when he’d let her pay for lunch, so she surely couldn’t expect him to have her carry a bag while he was empty-handed.

  He’d cheerfully ignored her not-so-quietly muttered comments about male chauvinistic pigs. He’d come to the firm conclusion in the last few weeks that teasing Cady was one of the highlights of his life, and he wasn’t about to give up that pleasure now.

  “So, how long have you known Chloe and Dawson?” Cady asked as they walked.

  “Only since I moved back to Sawyer myself,” he said, scratching again at the stubble on his jaw. At this point, he wasn’t sure if he was more excited about going back to work tomorrow so he could get back to baking, or so he could shave and not feel like he was giving in.

  He hated shaving. He wasn’t going to do it on his days off, dammit.

  But he was quickly starting to realize that he might hate stubble even more.

  “I didn’t know the story for a long time,” he continued, “and I probably still don’t know most of it, but somehow, Chloe ended up here, pregnant with Tommy, and totally alone.” They paused to look both ways, and then darted across the street back towards their stores. Gage glanced up at the Muffin Man Bakery storefront, automatically noting the smudges in the corner of the far-left window and making a mental note to tell Sugar to clean it up, and then his brain was off to the races and he was wondering how sales were going that day and if the latest teenage hire was actually going to show up or not this afternoon and…

  Today is my day off, da
mmit. I will not worry about the bakery. Sugar has everything under control. The smudge will still be there tomorrow. I can clean it then. If there are any problems, she’ll come find me.

  “So anyway,” he said, forcing himself to keep going, “our town vet, Adam Whitaker, helped her give birth on the side of the road in the middle of a blizzard – that’s a story you should hear her tell sometime – and she’s been here ever since. Years later, Tommy’s dad, Dawson, showed up and they patched things up. Dawson started a horse breeding ranch outside of town out at the old Miller place, and they seem plenty happy now.”

  Cady nodded thoughtfully as they stopped in front of the smoothie store. Just as she was digging into her purse to pull her keys out, though, she froze, one hand inside of her purse, jerking her head up to stare into the sky, a look of sheer panic on her face.

  “What? What?” Gage asked, twisting to look upwards, instinctively readying himself to defend her from whatever would cause her to look like that. But all he could see was a little two-seater plane flying overhead – probably a crop duster on his way to a new field.

  Totally confused, he looked back down at Cady, searching for an answer from her on what the hell was going on, but she was shaking, her purse falling off her shoulder, spilling everything out onto the ground but she didn’t notice. She was drawing in on herself, wrapping her arms around herself and rocking, moaning with pain.

  Shit, shit, shit.

  Without a moment’s hesitation, Gage scooped up the keys off the sidewalk and after only two false tries, he got the right key in the lock and shoved Cady inside. Whatever the hell was going on with her, the last thing she needed was for the whole town to witness it.

  She was already the big city girl with more money than sense, who was stupid enough to buy the most beat-up, piece-of-shit real estate in town.

  She was already the big city girl who killed the electricity to the whole town by hiring the worst electrician in living memory.

  She didn’t also need to be the big city girl who had full-blown panic attacks over nothing at all.

  He grabbed her purse, still laying on the ground, and haphazardly shoved the items back in that’d fallen out, and then slipped inside the smoothie store, shutting and flipping the deadbolt behind him before dropping the leftovers from Betty’s, Cady’s purse, and her keys on the floor. He could put them nicely up on the counter later. Right now, he had someone falling to pieces in front of him, and absolutely no idea why.

  “Cady?” he said hesitantly. She was shaking harder than ever, her teeth chattering, and she was rubbing her arms incessantly, up and down, up and down, trying to soothe herself, backing towards the wall until her back touched it and then she began sinking, sliding down the wall.

  “Hold on there,” Gage said, and pulled her up again, snuggling her against his chest. He didn’t want to see Cady curled up on the floor – it seemed like it was too close to her giving up on the world. He wouldn’t allow her. If she had to borrow some of his strength to make it through…whatever this was, then he had plenty to lend to her.

  He stroked his hand down her back, rubbing up and down, just like she had been doing with her own arms, but he added what he hoped were sympathetic noises in concert to his movements. For what would probably be the only time in his life, Gage silently thanked God for “blessing” him with a younger sister who gave into hysterics often as a child, and who only got worse as a teenager. Emma’s tears were usually caused by someone teasing her at school; over a boy who didn’t like her as much as she liked him; or getting into trouble because Chris had done something awful and mean – again – and Emma had exacted revenge – again – and only Emma had gotten in trouble for it – again.

  In other words, things that in that moment felt pretty inconsequential, at least compared to whatever the hell it was that Cady was going through.

  Eventually, the shaking slowed down to mere shivers and Gage could feel the change wash over Cady as soon as she realized what had happened.

  “So sorry,” she muttered, pulling away, wiping at her eyes with the back of her hand. “I don’t know what came over me.”

  Gage just stood there, watching her, his hands helplessly dangling at his sides. He wanted to pull her back into his arms and soothe her again, but the time for that had passed. If he did it now, Cady would fight him tooth and nail.

  “You wanna tell me what’s going on?” he asked quietly.

  “No.” But she quirked just a bit of a smile as she said it – the tiniest lifting of the corner of her mouth – and Gage breathed a silent sigh of relief. Whatever had just happened, she wasn’t blaming him for it.

  Cady looked around the torn-apart store, clearly wanting something, and then spotted her purse on the floor. Digging a small package of tissues out, she blew her nose loudly. She sounded rather like a goose honking on its way up north in that moment, and Gage couldn’t help the laughing smile that crossed his face. She really was too damn adorable for words.

  “My parents are in Boise,” she said so quietly, he had to lean forward to hear her. “That wasn’t a lie.”

  She stopped, and Gage just held his breath, waiting for her to continue. His mind bounced around from possibility to possibility, trying to figure out where in the hell she could be going with this, but none of his half-formed guesses turned out to be even vaguely correct.

  “More specifically, their cremated ashes are in the Boise River. Their spirits are…well, wherever spirits go after death.” She waved her used tissue through the air dismissively, trying to act casual, as if she was just fine.

  “Oh,” he breathed, saying nothing else, waiting as he watched Cady struggle to tell him the story without breaking down again.

  “It was their 35th anniversary, and my parents decided to celebrate by doing something they’d always wanted to do – a big trip up to Alaska. They were supposed to spend 10 days up there – bear watching, whale watching, hiking, kayaking, and…and taking an aerial tour of the glaciers.”

  “Ohhhh…” he said again.

  He could put it together then – he didn’t need to know the gory details of how and why.

  But he kept his mouth shut anyway and just listened, because he knew this was a story that Cady needed to tell and if he was the only one she could talk to, well then, by God, he’d listen.

  She stared at the far wall behind him as she spoke, though, like she was reciting facts about the 19th President of the United States.

  “My parents aren’t – weren’t – rich, so they did the same thing that I did when looking for an electrician: They searched for the cheapest charter plane available. If they didn’t get a bare-bones price, they wouldn’t be able to afford to go, and my mom had always wanted to see the glaciers of Alaska.

  “But the company they chose was the cheapest for a reason – the FAA found in their investigation afterwards that the company had been falsifying a lot of their maintenance and training records. My parents were going up in a plane that was being held together by bubblegum and string, and being flown by a guy who shouldn’t have been allowed to pilot a hang glider, let alone a charter plane.

  “Weather is unpredictable in Alaska, and partway through their tour, a strong wind came up, gusts blowing them around, and the pilot freaked out – didn’t know how to handle it. Investigators told me that they listened to the black box, and they heard my father trying to tell the pilot to stay calm and think through it, but…I couldn’t listen to the recording myself. They asked me if I wanted to, you know. I could never listen to the last moments of my parent’s lives. Never, never, never.”

  She drew in a ragged breath, still staring at the wall, but there was a crack in her façade now – just a tiny one, but there. This was now more than just a recitation of facts that happened to someone else. It had become a little more personal.

  “They…well, they hit the side of a mountain, basically. Using GPS, the first responders were able to locate the plane but it was several days before they could pull
everyone out. They all died on impact, so at least my parents didn’t lay there for days, slowly freezing to death, right?”

  She drew in an unsteady breath, held it for a moment, and then blew it out. “Between the Mayday calls, the black box, the weather satellites, and falsified records, the FAA investigators were able to piece it all together. I…my parents worried about me as an only child, so they’d paid for a large insurance policy on themselves for years, just in case something happened to them. I took some of that payout and I sued the charter company into oblivion, quite literally. My parents’ flight was the last one that charter company ever did. They’re no longer able to save a buck here and fifty cents there, and put the lives of their pilots and customers on the line in the process. Shutting that company down is the one good thing I think I’ve ever done in my life.”

  She lifted her chin and looked Gage straight in the eye for the first time since her meltdown began outside the store. “I don’t do planes,” she said bluntly. “Not ever, not for any reason. Just listening to them fly overhead…well, you saw what just happened. It’s ironic – my parents owned a charming, small Craftsman home in Boise – nothing that anyone would take notice of, but for me, it was home. It was the only home I’d ever had until I started at Boise State. I could’ve just stayed living with my parents while going to college – I would’ve been perfectly happy there – but my mom knew me better than I knew myself, and she knew I needed to be out on my own, learning how to navigate the world. I ended up with Hannah as my roommate, but my parents were only twenty minutes away, so I ended up at home quite often, especially when my laundry hamper got full.”

  She sent him a grimacing smile, and he smiled in return, trying to mold his features into understanding and kindness, when all he really wanted to do was punch the penny-pinching owner of the charter company into oblivion.

  “But the ironic part of it all was that my parents’ home is close to the Boise Airport. I grew up with planes flying overhead. When I was really young, I dreamt of being a pilot, although that dream disappeared as soon as I realized that I got major motion sickness when I was up in the air.” She chuckled humorlessly. “After my parents died, all I wanted to do was sleep – well, sleep and get revenge on the chartering company. But mostly sleep. I retreated to my parents’ house and I probably never would’ve left again – I have enough money that if I lived frugally, I never would’ve had to work again – except day and night, there were planes, flying overhead. It slowly drove me insane. I never knew when they were coming. I didn’t know if they’d fly safely over and keep going or if they’d drop out of the sky and take out the house and me in it. It was horrible – it was my sanctuary and a torture chamber.”