by Stacey Keith
Jake thumbed through the photos he’d taken, already calculating how to push through the environmental impact studies, the traffic overviews, the permits. Hold up there, buddy, he told himself. Never let yourself build things in your mind until you have the papers in your hand. “Where’s this other place you wanted to show me?” he asked Richard.
“It’s in town,” Richard replied. “Do we mind walking?”
They headed out, crossing the field and then following the road into Cuervo. Richard talked nonstop about the project. Carmen was clearly busy with her own thoughts. The sky was a pale blue shell dotted with puffy clouds. The air smelled of sunbaked dirt and road tar. A soft spring wind feathered through the wild grass. In the distance, Jake heard someone cranking the gears on a tractor.
“Are you going to try and see that woman you met here a few weeks ago?” Richard asked him. “What’s her name? Madeleine, Margery—”
“Maggie,” Jake said. He wasn’t ashamed of it. Why should he be?
Carmen gave him an eye roll. “So it’s farmer’s daughters now? Does she wear bib overalls and walk around with a piece of straw hanging out of her mouth?”
Richard laughed. “She runs a bakery.”
“Who can keep up?” she said. “One day it’s yoga instructors. Now it’s raspberry scones.”
“I’d eat the hell out of a scone right now,” Richard muttered. He gave Jake a quick look of apology. “I don’t mean that way, of course.”
When they turned onto Main Street, Jake took a look around. There was something charming and unpretentious about Cuervo that strongly appealed to him. The sidewalks were swept and the fire hydrants freshly painted. Some storefronts had striped awnings over their doors. Others were crammed with flowerboxes full of daisies and purple coneflowers. Two old men played checkers in front of a place called Fred’s Hardware.
The street ended at an intersection. One of those old hooded traffic lights hung suspended from wire. Just past it was a water tower with the word Cuervo painted on it. Maggie’s bakery was around that corner. He found himself a little impatient to see her.
Richard gestured toward a building across the street. “Well, what do you think? You said you wanted someplace big enough to turn into residential lofts.”
Jake looked up and went a little lightheaded.
It was an old Art Deco movie theater, probably built in the early thirties, but boarded up now, a grande dame past her prime and sadly neglected. The Regal, it said in broken, unlit neon.
For most of his thirty-one years, Jake had dreamed about renovating an Art Deco building.
Uncle Marty had taken him to see The Adventures of Robin Hood in a lushly romantic Art Deco theater when he was a kid. The city bulldozed it ten years later and built a parking garage. But ever since, Jake had vacuumed up every scrap of knowledge, lore, history and hearsay he could find about the period. Something about its extravagance and naïveté strongly appealed to him.
Now here he was standing in front of what could be a lifelong dream come true. He could easily imagine there were cartoon Valentine hearts floating out of his eyeballs.
“Nice to meet you,” a slightly pudgy man with horn-rim glasses said to them. “I’m Chuck, the owner of this old popcorn palace.” He pushed open an old-fashioned grate and then unlocked the front doors. “It’s going to be dusty in there. No one’s set foot in the place in ages. My dad—he’s in assisted living now—says the last regular weekday movie they showed at the Regal before going to weekends was Hooper in—”
“Nineteen seventy-eight,” Jake said.
Chuck looked surprised. “You’re a movie buff.”
Jake followed Chuck inside a lobby every bit as dusty as promised. His heart couldn’t have been beating any harder if he’d run a marathon. It was like finding Ali Baba’s cave or Atlantis or the lost library of Alexandria.
Once his eyes adjusted to the dim light, he had to keep himself from spinning in circles and trying to see everything at once. The vaulted ceilings were high and heavily embellished in the sleek, angular Art Deco style—Hollywood starlets in cloche hats and drop-waist dresses smoking cigarettes in elegant filters. Men in spats and tux tails. The light fixtures may have been from an even earlier part of the last century.
Chuck went on about the theater’s history, but Jake had trouble keeping up. He still couldn’t believe he’d discovered something that he’d pretty much given up trying to find. The theater was built in 1928, Chuck told him. Registered as a historic landmark, but vacant all these years because no one wanted to stake the money for a proper restoration. There was a photo upstairs of what the Regal looked like in its heyday with the soaring neon marquee and mosaic archways.
Jake drifted into the vast auditorium and just stood there, basking. He looked at the dirty wall sconces, the ruined red velvet theater seats, the cratered floor.
All he saw was beauty.
Richard came up beside him, followed by Carmen with her clipboard.
“What an absolute nightmare,” she muttered. “A money pit if ever I saw one.”
“Buy it,” Jake said. “Whatever it takes. I won’t accept no for an answer.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
The best substitute for sex, Maggie decided, was pie.
And since she couldn’t eat enough pie to make those bad feelings go away—whipping up pastries all morning, every morning, kind of ruined a person’s enjoyment of baked goods—she kept her ovens working overtime.
Now her display case was packed with pies. There was caramel delight pie filled with soft-piped caramel and drizzled with chocolate. There was butter pie bursting with butter, sugar, eggs, raisins and walnuts covered in a crisp pastry shell. And there were crumbly apple tarts bubbling over with oats, cinnamon and brown sugar.
She assembled the ingredients for lemon meringue. Between customers, she returned to the kitchen to add her grandmother’s special lemon curd filling to the bottom of a short crust and then she layered in the fluffy meringue. After she slid the pie in the oven, Maggie washed the pastry board and set it to dry.
It was ten a.m. two weeks after her sister’s wedding. Cuervo had returned to being the drowsy little hamlet it had been and she was bored out of her skull. And restless. And so not thinking about Jake Sutton.
Okay, so she might have looked him up online a few nights ago. Big deal. Well, he actually was a big deal if all those photos of him glad-handing the president meant anything. There were lots of pictures of blond women standing beside him, all white teeth and artfully tossed hair, and a photo essay of Jake hang gliding with some celebrity athlete she’d never heard of. Jake was shirtless in a few photos. Seeing what she’d walked away from, all ripped and lean and tan, not only made her grumpy, it filled her with an ache that closely resembled regret.
But that wasn’t true, she told herself, picking up a bottle and spritzing blue glass cleaner on the display case. How could you regret not doing something really damn stupid? And sleeping with Jake would have been the worst kind of stupid. He would have been one of those lovers who left their brand on you, who ruined you for regular mortal men you should actually want to settle down with and start a family.
The bell above the door chimed, startling her. She looked up and saw April and her mother walk in.
“What are you doing here?” she asked. Her sister was usually at work at this hour.
“Living the jet-set life of a social worker.” April sighed. “My boss is making everyone take a ‘mental health’ day and now I don’t know what to do with myself.”
Priscilla’s gaze roamed over the pie rack. “Hand to God, Maggie, I get fatter every time I come in here. Just from breathing. Why couldn’t you open a frozen yogurt place instead? I hate frozen yogurt.”
“Ah, but I made a lemon meringue today,” Maggie said. “Dad’s favorite. You should take one home with you.”
Pris
cilla heaved one hip up on the lipstick-red, soda-shop stool behind her. “No, because I already know how it will end. I bring home a pie, your father gets one slice, and I eat the rest. Last time, I actually hid it from him.” Priscilla gave her a tragic smile. “I’d better just get a coffee.”
While Maggie made her a cup, April wandered behind the counter. She grabbed a white chocolate chip cookie without the wax paper, earning herself a swat on the hand.
“So,” April said, studying the cookie as she chewed. “Did you find any more boys to kiss that you said you didn’t want to kiss but then went ahead and kissed anyway?”
Not this again. Maggie set a cup of coffee in front of her mother and then went into the kitchen to do the dishes. April followed.
“Everyone is still talking about how smokin’ hot he was,” April said. “And that was before they found out he was worth four billion.”
“Billion? With a b?” Maggie had to stop scrubbing a pie plate just to absorb this. “Nobody with four billion dollars comes by it honestly.”
April shrugged. She broke off another piece of cookie and popped it into her mouth. “Apparently, you can see his helipad from the breakfast room window of his penthouse.”
“How do you even know these things?” Maggie tried not to remember him mentioning the plane or how sexy and disheveled he looked in the gazebo. Her insides gave a little hiccough, which she ignored by scrubbing harder.
“Mom’s gossip magazines,” April said.
Maggie glanced at Priscilla, who had a gossip magazine open on the counter. A former hairdresser, Priscilla inhaled just as much gossip as she had peroxide fumes. Sometimes when Mason and Cassidy appeared together inside those magazines, Priscilla gloated for days.
“Well, don’t get any ideas,” Maggie told April. “Jake isn’t coming back to Cuervo any time soon. And even if he did, why would I care? It was just a kiss. I’m not fifteen, you know.”
“Just a kiss, eh?” April went to the refrigerator. She opened a milk carton, sniffed it, and then poured herself a glass. “I guess that’s why you two couldn’t keep your eyes off each other all night.”
“You’ve got a wild imagination.” Maggie heard the doorbell ding. She set the pie on a pie rack to cool, untied her apron, and headed toward the front. “If you’re waiting for me to do something naughty, you’ll die of boredom.”
“That’s not quite how I remember it,” came a familiar voice.
And it wasn’t the one she’d secretly been waiting for.
It was Todd, her ex-husband. He was standing right in front of her. In her bakery. Wearing the same black suede cowboy hat he’d had on the night she met him.
Maggie felt the blood drain from her face. Everything went fuzzy except for weird, random details. Black T-shirt. Scuffed cowboy boots. Jeans. Him.
She hadn’t heard from Todd in three years. Seeing him now brought it all back, the whole painful carousel of knives.
There was a crater-sized hole inside her that had rumbled open again. That hole had swallowed her dreams, her youth, her heart. She was stronger now, a thousand times stronger, but it still seemed as though she might have lost something along the way. She’d become another divorce statistic, another “failed marriage.” The world was full of them. Try as she might to fight it, she still felt like damaged goods.
She’d loved. Trusted. And she’d been punished for being such a fool.
Now the man who’d fooled her swept his hat off as though suddenly remembering his manners. The eyes that had once made her feel beautiful, desirable, special were gazing at her with the same keen interest. Was that why her heart kept booming? Or was it because every cell in her body was screaming at her to run like hell?
“Hey, Maggie,” he said in his rumbling drawl.
Priscilla’s mouth was open, but no sound came out. Maggie couldn’t think straight, and April wouldn’t dare say a word, so all they did was stare at him in the thundering silence.
“It’s real good to see you,” he said with his signature country-boy politeness. “You look…well, you look beautiful as always.”
Priscilla seemed as though so many unsaid things were bottled up inside her, she might fly apart like a piñata at a children’s party. With visible effort to modulate her voice, she said, “What’s it been, Todd, about three years since you came to Cuervo?”
“Yes, ma’am, I’d say about three.” Strange to hear him ma’am the woman he once affectionately called “Miss Priss.” But then this whole thing was strange, including the fact that some part of her was happy to see him, even though any sensible woman would want to stab him through the heart. Just like he’d stabbed hers.
He’d slept with her best friend, Avery. Slept with her, knocked her up and then married Maggie anyway.
Avery was already pregnant when Todd was saying his vows in church and Miss Priss was dabbing her eyes in the front row. Maggie’s heart was still whole back then—not this scarred, war-torn, patched-together thing that wanted much but didn’t buy it anymore. Not that she let anyone in far enough to see.
“What are you doing here?” she heard herself say. It was another Maggie who asked it. Maybe the same Maggie who used to take people at their word.
“I’m taking a break from the rodeo circuit,” Todd said, his fingers inching around the brim of his hat. “Blew my shoulder out in Abilene.”
She remembered the risks he took when she’d sat watching him from the stands. She remembered the churned-up dirt and the horse smells and the rodeo announcer’s patter echoing across the arena. She’d been so proud of him then, her sexy cowboy husband, that she’d forgotten to watch for other women who thought he was sexy, too.
“Where’s Avery?” Priscilla asked in the crisp tone that betrayed how much more she wanted to say on that subject.
Todd looked a little stricken. His hands kept traveling around the circumference of his hat, restless like he himself was restless, always searching for the next woman or bronc to bust. “She took up with another fella, to tell you the truth. Left me and the kids high and dry about two weeks ago.”
Kids, Maggie thought with a pang. Plural. When she and Todd hadn’t managed to have even one kid.
A ribbon of envy snaked through her belly. The past was clawing at her again—the night of her wedding, how she’d found Avery, her Maid-of-Honor and best friend since kindergarten, throwing up in a bathroom stall. How she’d gathered big armfuls of her wedding gown and knelt down to help because that’s what friends did. Because friends stuck together no matter what, through breakups, weddings, or even what your best friend swore was a stomach virus but turned out to be the early stages of morning sickness.
Of course, what friends didn’t do was sleep with your fiancé since pretty much the beginning of your relationship with him.
And now Avery was on to the next guy.
Maggie had difficulty swallowing because of the pain in the back of her throat, which was where all her tears lived. They simmered there like lumps of burning coal.
But right now, what was important was acting like she didn’t care. She was good at that. Always a sharp answer, a scornful side-eye, a subtle drifting away. It seemed to her that when you couldn’t have love, you settled for power.
“You got a fine bakery here, Mags,” Todd said. “Annetta Woburn at the grocery told me where to find you. She and I agreed you’re the best cook in Raymond County.”
“A lot has changed since you left,” Maggie murmured.
Behind Todd, a small face appeared in the window. She recognized it at once—Todd and Avery’s six-year-old son, Sawyer. He struggled manfully to carry a baby wearing a pink bonnet.
Sawyer had Todd’s eyes. They were busy taking in the pies and the cookies and the café tables with the spring daisies on them. Maggie’s heart gave a sharp jab to her ribs. She felt as though she were being dragged toward the children by
invisible strings. All she saw were little beings who might need her, little beings she could protect.
“Why didn’t you bring your kids in with you?” she asked Todd sharply before lifting up the hinged door in the counter. “You can’t just leave them outside like that.”
Todd looked sheepish. “I didn’t want to show you any disrespect, Mags. Sawyer’s a good boy. I knew I could depend on him to take care of his sister.”
Maggie grabbed two cookies out of the display case. “April, will you watch the store for a minute, you and Mom?”
April nodded. Priscilla seemed less shocked now and more worried. But Maggie knew she wouldn’t say anything. Priscilla might have thought about giving Todd a piece of her mind, but she’d figured out long ago that it was best to let your grown daughters handle their own business.
Maggie went outside and Todd followed. Spring sunshine gleamed on the leaves of the live oak that grew in front of her store and the oxblood lilies nodding gently in their half-barrel planter. Next to the planter was a sandwich board displaying the day’s specials.
When she set eyes on Sawyer and his baby sister, yearning moved through her. The only thing worse than wanting kids was knowing that she could never have them. She’d tried so hard with Todd. And nothing.
Sawyer wore a collared shirt the same color blue as his eyes. She could see the comb marks in his hair. He seemed very serious for a six-year-old, which only increased her yearning to protect.
“Would you like a cookie?” Maggie asked.
Sawyer looked up at his father for permission and then nodded.
Todd said, “Mind you thank Miss Maggie.”
“Thank you, ma’am,” Sawyer answered in a boy’s shy voice.
Maggie put her arms out for the baby. “Here, let me.”
With touching maturity, Sawyer adjusted his sister’s lace-covered bonnet before handing her over. Maggie accepted the baby with a kind of melting. It felt as though some deep yearning inside her had been appeased, something that had lain in mute hunger for the chance to hold a child.
