Just Desserts

by Barbara Bretton

  A great kid, a great job, and now a great chance at hitting the big time.

  Now if she could just shake the feeling that there was a giant shoe suspended overhead, waiting to drop.

  Welcome, Liz. You have 1 NEW message.

  TO: rainbowgirl@goldysbakery.biz

  FROM: mkg329302@stealthmail.biz

  SUBJECT: asap

  IM as soon as you get home.

  RAINBOWGIRL: I’m here. Where r u?

  MKG329302: u were out late. Everything ok?

  RAINBOWGIRL: I delivered a cake w my mom then had pasta at olive garden

  MKG329302: listen I hate to do this but I’ve got a real problem. Need ur help

  RAINBOWGIRL: what?

  MKG329302: need some $ asap.

  MKG329302: r u still there?

  RAINBOWGIRL: sorry. How much?

  MKG329302: same as last time

  RAINBOWGIRL: I can’t do that.

  MKG329302: this is serious. I’m in real trouble.

  RAINBOWGIRL: it’s almost the end of the month

  MKG329302: that’s too long. I need it now

  RAINBOWGIRL: I can’t. I shouldn’t have done it last time. It was wrong.

  MKG329302: you were helping me. That’s a good thing

  RAINBOWGIRL: why don’t you ask your mother?

  MKG329302: she’s tapped out. So’s everyone else

  RAINBOWGIRL: I can’t take from the store again. I got it paid back but it was really hard. I had to go into my college $

  MKG329302: you’re a smart girl. You won’t need that college $. You’ll get a scholarship

  MKG329302: ur quiet tonight.

  RAINBOWGIRL: don’t know what to say

  MKG329302: say you’ll help me, lizzie.

  RAINBOWGIRL: you have to pay me back by may 15

  MKG329302: ur a good kid lizzie. Ur the only one I can count on.

  RAINBOWGIRL: gotta go…goodnight dad

  The session has ended

  Time: 12:03 a.m.

  Duration: 4 mins 37 secs

  East Hampton—After Midnight

  Tommy was waiting for them on the front porch. Three empty glasses balanced on the railing and a cloud of cigarette smoke hovered over his head in the dark.

  “I thought you quit,” Finn said as he climbed the steps.

  “I started again.”

  “That stuff’ll kill you.” Anton, a reformed smoker, waved his arms in the air between them.

  “I want to hear everything,” Tommy said as he led them through the sleeping house and into his office.

  Taking the bar exam had been easier than answering the man’s questions. He wanted to know everything about Hayley. Was she happy? Was she smart? Did she like music? Was she talented? Was she a good mother?

  “This is the Hamptons, not Gitmo,” Anton said at one point. “Give us a break, will ya?”

  If Finn hadn’t been so tired, he would have laughed. “We’ve been at it almost three hours. There’s nothing left to tell you.”

  “Is she pretty?”

  “Tall and skinny,” Anton said. “One of those big smiles that make you feel good.”

  “Long, light brown hair with blond lights,” Finn said. “She wears it in a ponytail.” She’s beautiful, Tommy. Not magazine-cover beautiful like Willow. The kind that lasts.

  “There’s gotta be more,” Tommy said, drumming the tabletop with his long, bony fingers. “Think harder.”

  “We were there ninety minutes, Tom. We didn’t exactly exchange life stories.” Finn leaned back in his chair and stifled a yawn. “That’s all we got.”

  Tommy turned toward Anton, who was nursing his second Red Bull. “Anything he forgot?”

  Anton shot a look in Finn’s direction. “Did you get her shoe size?”

  Finn slapped his forehead with the heel of his right hand. “Damn! Totally forgot.”

  “You find a daughter I didn’t know I had and you’re surprised I have questions?”

  Finn downed his third espresso and prayed for a reprieve from the governor. “Think how many questions she’ll have when she finds out.” Not exactly what he’d meant to say but he was tired and his internal censor fell asleep over an hour ago.

  “I’ve been thinking about that.” Tommy leaned forward, his blue-green eyes alive with excitement. “Why wait? If we leave now we can get a jump on rush hour and be down in South Jersey before nine.”

  “Not going to happen,” Finn said. “Seriously bad idea.”

  “Count me out too,” Anton said, pushing away from the table. “I’m going to crash.”

  “Come on,” Tommy urged. “We’ll split the driving. We’re all Jersey boys, right? I haven’t had a good diner breakfast in years.”

  “Later,” Anton said. “I’m wasted.”

  “Don’t look at me,” Finn said after Anton closed the back door behind him. “The only place I’m driving is home.”

  “So I’ll drive,” Tommy said. “You can sleep in the backseat.”

  “Not if you’re driving, I won’t. You haven’t driven on a highway since nineteen eighty-seven. Let it go for now, Tom. You have a week. Let’s see what we can find out between now and then.”

  “You saw her. You talked to her. I know you. You think this is the real thing. What more proof do I need that she’s mine?”

  “Blood tests, for starters. Corroboration from the mother.”

  “There’s plenty of time for that. I want to see her with my own eyes.”

  “Next week.” He stifled another yawn. “And I’m not exactly crazy about that idea either.”

  “Why the hell not?”

  “Where do I start?” Finn shot back. “There are legal precedents for handling this type of thing.”

  “Is this the friend or the lawyer talking?”

  “Both. She doesn’t have a clue what’s going on. The woman has a kid, a business to run. You’re going to blow her the hell out of the water when you drop this bomb on her.”

  He was making progress. He could see it in Tommy’s eyes.

  “And what about Willow? What about your other kids? Their mothers? Hell, your mother down in Boca is going to jump out of her Lilly Pulitzer when she finds out. Think it through, Tom. Hayley’s been out there for thirty-eight years. You can wait another week to meet her.”

  Tommy said nothing but Finn could feel his friend’s resistance softening.

  “I’m asking you to think about the repercussions before you do anything. This isn’t just about you, Tom. It’s about that woman and her daughter too, and they deserve better.”

  The silence was long and it wasn’t friendly. Tommy was a genuinely good man but superstardom had conditioned him to expect easy acquiescence whenever he exerted his will.

  Finn stood up. “I’m heading home. We can talk later.”

  Or not.

  It was up to Tommy.

  He drove back to his house in Montauk on autopilot. Great washes of early morning light spilled across the empty roadway. This was the best part of living out on the East End. Not the celebrity sightings or the four-star restaurants with Manhattan menus. The sun-bleached road. Gulls wheeling overhead. The briny, life-giving sea air.

  Nothing else came close.

  “Damn.” The word filled the car. He hadn’t handled it right back there. His focus was supposed to be the care and feeding of Tommy Stiles, but the second he laid eyes on Hayley Maitland Goldstein and her daughter, something inside him had shifted. An allegiance he hadn’t realized was his to give away had taken a sharp turn toward two total strangers.

  Maybe he should bail out on the whole thing. How long had it been since he’d scheduled a vacation that didn’t include Tommy and the extended Stiles clan? He had enough frequent flyer miles to take him to Mars and back. Why not spin a globe, pick a spot, and take off for a few weeks?

  Or at least until this mess straightened itself out.

  He shouldn’t have agreed to the whole ridiculous scheme in the first place. He should have trie
d harder to talk Tommy out of hiring her to supply cakes for the after-party and pushed for proceeding through legal channels. You could say what you wanted about the law and the way it was practiced, but sometimes you needed the cold-blooded distance it provided.

  She had known something was going on. That look of cynical hope in her eyes had made him feel like a shit.

  This was the age of celebrity journalism. Paparazzi haunted Main Street in East Hampton like it was the lobby of the Chateau Marmont the day Belushi died. At the first hint of news, they would jump into their SUVs and descend on Lakeside, New Jersey, like a horde of hungry vultures. The Goldstein girls wouldn’t stand a chance.

  Tommy’s kids knew the drill. They had grown up in and around the chaos that came with fame. Their lives were an ongoing reality show that they had been starring in since birth.

  For that matter, so had he. His earliest childhood memories were of arenas packed with crazed After Life fans waving light sticks overhead while Tommy and his father made magic onstage. Onstage was where it all happened. Onstage was their reality. The rest was filler.

  He remembered the long bus trips before they could afford to lease a jet to take them from city to city. The endless rumble of the road beneath the wheels, the engine’s growl, laughter, the faint chords of a guitar rising above the clamor. Everyone he loved all safe and together in the big green bus.

  Sometimes he dozed with his head in his mother’s lap, listening while she stroked his hair and chatted softly with his father who sat across from them, tuning his guitar while he listened to her dreams for the future.

  One day we’ll get off the road and—

  The sentence remained as unfinished as their lives.

  Would they have pulled away one day and settled down somewhere far from the spotlight? Not many people turned away while the spotlight was still shining down on them. Leaving the band would have been like abandoning family. His father and Tommy had been best buds, closer than brothers. Creative, mercurial, deeply decent men whose genius sometimes made them seem scattered and distracted when it came to the stuff of real life.

  Real life was the kitchen of Goldy’s Bakery where a fourteen-year-old kid negotiated contracts while her mom iced a cake for a group of overweight real estate agents. Real life was a van with a bad transmission, an aging Buick, the look of wariness and hope in her eyes when he signed his name on the dotted line.

  He wasn’t sure if any of the people in Tommy’s extended family, including himself, would handle real life with as much grace and competence as Hayley Maitland Goldstein and her daughter, Lizzie.

  7

  Goldy’s—Around seven a.m.

  “You look awful!” Michie announced from the doorway between the shop and the kitchen. She worked the seven-to-noon shift two days a week. “Don’t tell me you’ve been up all night.”

  “I’ve been up all night,” Hayley said, hiding a yawn with the back of her hand, “and I have nothing but garbage to show for it.”

  Frank and Maureen, the married couple who had been coming in at four to bake bread for Goldy’s for more than thirty years, waved good morning to Michie from across the room.

  “She was here when we came in,” Frank called out. “We thought maybe she had a hot date last night and just got home.”

  Maureen elbowed him in his well-padded ribs. “Less gossip, more bread,” she ordered and drew him back to the task at hand.

  “Let me see what you’ve got,” Michie said.

  Hayley pushed the rough sketch toward her former sister-in-law. “Tell me this isn’t as awful as I think it is.”

  Michie glanced at the sheet of paper then met Hayley’s eyes. “It’s worse.”

  “Oh God!” Hayley buried her face in her hands. “I knew it! I never should have taken on this project. I can’t make a bass drum out of cake. There isn’t a pan big enough on the planet.”

  “Calm down. You’ve seen that guy on Food Network. If he doesn’t have a big enough pan, he builds one.”

  “He knows how to weld, Michie! He practically has a machine shop attached to his bakery.” Hayley felt herself move another giant step closer to total meltdown. “What am I going to do? I promised I’d fax an idea to them today and I’ve got nothing!”

  “It’s only seven in the morning,” Michie reminded her. “You have time.”

  “I have the dentist at nine, my annual at the gyno at ten thirty, and a retirement cake I need to finish this afternoon for Mrs. Ostrowsky at the bank. Not to mention the fact that the van broke down last night and needs a new transmission.”

  “Don’t forget Lois is taking over for me at noon today.”

  She groaned. “Which means I’d better make sure her prune Danish is our featured pastry.”

  “I can’t believe anyone still eats prune Danish.”

  “Goldy’s tradition,” Hayley said. “Prune Danish on Thursdays, baklava on Fridays, and blackout cake on Saturdays. Some things never change.”

  “Better you than me,” Michie muttered. “I don’t know how you stand it.”

  “Right now my biggest problem is the fact that I need a cake pan the size of a VW.”

  “I’ve seen you think your way out of worse messes than this one. Remember the swans? Nobody makes a pan in the shape of a giant swan. You—”

  Hayley leaped to her feet and swept Michie into a hug. “That’s it!”

  The idea was so simple, so perfect, she wondered why it took her so long to see it. She grabbed a fresh sheet of paper and her marking pens and laughed out loud as the design sprang to life on the page as if by magic.

  Monster-sized decorated cookies mounted on padded wire frames, then covered with tinted rolled fondant would serve as the set of drums while ten perfectly matched triple-layer cakes gilded with gold and silver leaf would represent some of the gold and platinum records Tommy Stiles and the After Life had amassed during their long career.

  “I’ll get there extra early,” Hayley said, her mind racing. “I’ll need to talk to the hotel’s union rep and see if I can get the waitstaff to work up a flashy presentation for the cakes.” A darkened ballroom. Some After Life blaring from the speakers. The waitstaff entering from the back, cakes held high, sparklers shooting gold and silver in every direction.

  First there would be a long, awestruck silence that would be followed by cheers and stomping of feet and cries of “Baker! Baker!”

  Okay, maybe that was going a tad too far, but they would know her name before the evening was out. That much she was sure of.

  Michie, however, seemed uncertain. “The contract specifies a cake in the shape of a bass drum. They didn’t ask for a giant cookie.”

  “Michie, come on! They’re getting their cakes. The cookies are a bonus.”

  “But they didn’t ask for cookies,” Michelle persisted. “They’re not expecting cookies. You can’t just whip out surprise cookies and expect them to be happy about it.”

  “Aren’t you listening to me? They’ll get their cake and cookies too.”

  “Maybe you’d better fax them the new design and have them sign off on it.”

  “You’re starting to sound like Lizzie.”

  Michie laughed out loud. “I wish! If I sounded like Lizzie, I’d be running my own company, not working part time in the family bakery for bingo money.”

  “Okay,” Hayley relented. “You might be right. I’ll scribble a quick note explaining the changes and fax over the plan. I think they’ll be okay with it, don’t you? I mean, they must like my work or they wouldn’t have driven all the way down to Lakeside.”

  “I guess.” Michie didn’t sound quite as positive of that as Hayley would have liked.

  “Oh God,” she groaned. “You think it’s weird too, don’t you? I mean, that Tommy Stiles wants me to do his after-party.”

  “Hey, what do I know? I think you’re a freaking genius with cake but I don’t think I’d drive here from the Hamptons for it.” Michie shrugged her shoulders. “Maybe the guy’s cheap and
he figured he’d get a better deal down here.”

  “He’s a rock star, Michie. A millionaire!”

  “You read InStyle. The richer you are, the less you pay for everything. We save three years to go to Disney World while movie stars vacation every two minutes,” Michie said. “You wanna know why? Because somebody else is footing the bill! It’s like a law of nature or something.”

  “I don’t think that’s what’s going on with Tommy Stiles,” Hayley said. “He’s actually paying me for the cake.” Paying her a lot, in point of fact.

  Michelle was undeterred. “Okay, then maybe it’s some weird kind of money-laundering scheme.”

  “That involves cake?”

  They locked eyes and broke into raucous laughter.

  “I didn’t say it had to make sense,” Michie protested, a tad defensively.

  The truth was it didn’t make sense and it probably never would. Maybe this really was one of those random acts of good fortune that defied rhyme or reason but showed up in your life just the same.

  If only she could believe that.

  “Trish is alone up front,” Hayley said when they finally stopped laughing about money-laundering baked goods. “You go out there and spell her and I’ll fax over the revised plans.”

  “His lawyer’s office opens this early?”

  “Probably not but this way it’ll be waiting for him when he gets there.”

  With a little more luck, when the other shoe finally dropped, she wouldn’t be there to hear it.

  Montauk

  Who the hell would be faxing him at seven thirty in the morning?

  Finn, fully clothed, had just dropped off into a deep sleep on his living room sofa when the high-pitched whine of the fax machine down the hall erupted. He slammed the sofa pillow over his head and buried his face deeper into the seat cushion but he couldn’t block out the sound.

  Every time he thought the damn thing was finished it started over again, that ear-piercing shriek arrowing straight into his tired brain.

  He could either lie there trying to ignore it or he could get his lazy ass up, stumble down the hall, and rip the phone cord out of the wall.