Out of the Ashes

by Cynthia Reese

  Too many times when Kari had dated before, guys would get pushy and impatient and try to rush things. All it did was turn Kari off.

  To try to explain that meant trying to explain her record...which wasn’t something she felt comfortable trotting out by even the second or third date.

  But Rob knew. He knew, and he still wanted to touch her that way.

  The timer beeped. She sighed, glanced at the clock to see it was ten minutes after midnight, and laid the pastry bag on the table. Time to check on the cake.

  The door behind her rattled as Kari peered in the oven window. Jumping at the sudden sound in the otherwise silent kitchen, she felt her heart settle when she realized it was Jake at the door.

  She swung it open. “Hey. Pretty late for you to come wandering by for a visit.”

  He pushed by her, a waft of beer and something that didn’t smell altogether legal in his wake. “Yeah, well, me and the guys, we were at this club, got a little wasted, y’know? And so I didn’t think it would be a real good idea for me to drive.”

  “That was...smart, at least the not driving part. But you know if Mom sees you like this, she’s going to worry—”

  “Oh, shut up, Saint Karina,” he snapped, invoking his childhood nickname for her. “Not everybody can be so freaking awesome like you all the time. Give me a break. I can’t stand my job—stupid boss thinks he’s smarter than me, and it’s all because he’s got some piece of paper from a two-bit community college. I just want to, you know, blow off some steam.”

  He slumped into the kitchen chair and popped one of Kari’s piped roses into his mouth. He spat it out in his hand. “God, that’s too sweet! I thought it would be good like your usual stuff.”

  “Well, no, not those. The buttercream recipe that I use for flowers is pretty sweet. But I’m glad you didn’t like it—each one of those takes a good two minutes to make, and I’ve got a lot more to do,” she said. Just to be on the safe side, she moved the flexible cutting board of piped roses to the counter, away from Jake and his appetite. “I got the oven working, by the way.”

  He slapped his palm to his forehead. “I was supposed to help you! Crap. No wonder you’re miffed, huh?”

  “I’m not miffed, Jake.” She used oven mitts to pull the cake layers out of the oven and move them to the stovetop. She slid the next two pans in and shut the door. “But I have to admit, it would have been nice for you to have—for once, anyway—actually shown up when you said you would.”

  “I’m here now?” he hazarded. “No, wait, I came too late. Okay, so what can I do to get out of Saint Karina’s doghouse?”

  “Not wake Mom up, for one thing. I didn’t tell her.”

  “Tell her what?” He was instantly alert, the spaced out expression evaporating and wariness taking its place.

  “That you didn’t show up. I didn’t want to worry her.”

  “That’s like telling the Statue of Liberty to put her arm down,” Jake joked. “Mom always worries.”

  “I guess we’ve given her good reason to. Don’t you think?”

  “I require hazardous duty pay for thinking at this time of night, the way I feel. I’m gonna crash in my room—you know if the bed’s made up?”

  Kari bent back over the roses, feeling her hand ache as she squeezed out another petal. “You know it is. I wish you wouldn’t mooch off Mom so—half the time she pays your rent, and you wind up staying here anyway—”

  “Me? Hey, I’m not the one who borrowed thousands of Mom’s retirement money and then, after it all went up in smoke, moved back here rent-free, all the while raking in big bucks for all this frou-frou cake stuff.” Jake sneered as he pointed a finger at things around the kitchen. “Yeah, we all have got to be sooo nice to Saint Karina, you know? Because she went to jail for you, Jakey! She took the rap for you, Jakey! I can’t tell you how many times she’s shoved that down my throat. I am so sick of it.”

  “Yeah, well, I was pretty sick of actually doing the time for you,” Kari shot back.

  Her anger surprised her. For so long, she’d literally been afraid of what she might do or say to him if she had laid eyes on him. Kari’s reaction now must have surprised Jake, too, for the sneer melted. He had the grace to give her a sheepish grin. “You’re a good egg, Kar. I know how much I owe you. I do. It’s just—well, nobody wants it shoved down their throat. All. The. Freakin’. Time.”

  “I know. And I tell Mom that. It’s not like I intended to go to jail for four years for you. Honestly, if I’d known that going in...” Kari trailed off.

  “Yeah, well, who could blame you, right? Besides, it was Mom’s not-so-brainy idea, not mine.”

  “And she feels horrible about it. That’s why—” Kari shrugged. Her mom’s guilt explained a lot of her motivation. “Please don’t worry her anymore. She just wants both of us to be...”

  “Tax-paying productive citizens,” Jake finished with his mom’s usual line. “Though why anybody who makes as little as I do has to pay taxes...” he groused.

  “Speaking of work, you must be off tomorrow—since you stayed out so late,” she said.

  “Nah, I gotta drag my butt in. We’ve got inventory. Man, I hate that. So boring. Count this container of widgets. Now count that bin of whatchamacallits. Why? You need me to do something? I can blow work.”

  “You cannot ‘blow work,’ as you so elegantly put it.” She paused in midpiping to gape at him. “Besides, it was nothing really.”

  “No, what is it? If it’s any better than counting washers and bolts, I’m in,” Jake told her. He stretched out his long legs and planted his flip-flopped feet on the opposite chair. He yawned, not bothering to cover his mouth.

  “Really, it’s nothing. I just thought you might go downtown with me and help some of the merchants. A few of them have got their insurance checks, but you know how it is—they’re trying to do a lot of the demolition work themselves to save some money. I thought we could help.”

  “Help? Dang, Kari, I thought it would be something fun, you know, like ride down to Savannah and pick up something from that cooking supply store.” He wiggled his toes in his flipflops and yawned again, running his hand through hair that Kari itched to take a pair of scissors to.

  “They’re like me, Jake. They’re all having to pay rent to keep their space. Charlie’s threatening to yank our leases if we don’t.”

  “That old jerk. Hates spending his money so much. Shoot, the night that block went up in flames, I’m surprised he coughed up the gas to come back early from his vacay—I hope he couldn’t get his money refunded for his hotel room.” Jake threw his head back and dissolved into gales of laughter.

  A cold tingle drifted down Kari’s spine. “What do you mean, Charlie came back early, Jake?”

  “Yeah, you know. He told us, right? That he was going to be gone.”

  She laid the pastry bag down. “No. He didn’t tell me that.”

  Jake became as still as she was. “Sure, he did. The day before the fire. He came in, and you started nagging him about the repairs, and then y’all screamed at each other...” A flicker of awareness crossed Jake’s face. “Maybe that was after.”

  “You talked with him after that, Jake?” Kari’s mouth went dry. She clutched the edge of the countertop.

  “Maybe. Or maybe it was some other time,” Jake said vaguely. “I get mixed up when I’m this wasted.”

  “I went in the back...” She didn’t say, to wash the tears off my face. “I heard the bell on the front door, and I thought he went out. And when I came back, you were gone, too.”

  “Maybe that’s when he told me he was going to be on Jekyll Island.” Contempt flooded Jake’s face. “He acted like it was Hilton Head or the Cloisters on Sea Island, the way he talked so big about going ‘down to Jekyll.’ Bet he stayed at a roach motel with sand in the sheets, as c
heap as he is.”

  “But you told...you told me that you told Rob you didn’t know that Charlie was going to be out of town.”

  Jake stood up, stretched so long and leisurely that Kari could hear his shoulder joints pop. “Yeah, so. No biggie. What? You think I torched the place? Like I keep telling you and Mom—it gets old, this business of you two thinking I’m responsible for every fire that gets started around here.”

  Then he wandered off, but not before he reached around Kari and helped himself to another of her painstakingly piped roses. “Night, sis. Don’t stay up too late, huh. You need your beauty sleep.”

  But sleep was the furthest thing from Kari’s mind. She was awake—achingly awake, with every nerve ending screaming. Jake had bought a propane tank. And he knew when Charlie was going to be out of town.

  Had he impulsively decided to wreak revenge on her behalf?

  * * *

  EVEN AN EXTRA-LONG hot shower did not make up for having just three hours of sleep. Kari stumbled into the kitchen the next morning to see her mom pouring coffee in a mug.

  Mom took one look at her and handed over the cup. “Here. You look like you sorely need this. I’ll get me another.”

  Kari slurped the heavenly brew down. “Thank you. I’m so tired I need toothpicks to keep my eyelids open.”

  “What time did you finally go to bed?” Her mom began pulling out eggs and milk.

  Kari groaned. “About three. I got the layers baked and in the freezer, and all the roses done. Now I just have to make the rest of the flowers. Hey, I made egg cups and blueberry muffins for our breakfast. I wasn’t sure I would be up to cooking this morning, and I figured if our breakfast was ready, it would help.”

  “Great. We’ll just have those, then. So where’d you put the other roses?”

  Kari took another welcome sip of her coffee. “What do you mean, the other roses? They’re all laid out to dry on the cutting board over there. All one hundred of them. Mattie wanted a waterfall of flowers cascading down the side of the tiers, and I needed to get a head start on the roses.”

  “Oh, honey...” Her mother wheeled around, her eyes wide, her mouth open. “There’s not nearly a hundred here.”

  Kari lurched to the counter and peered down at the cutting board. Sure enough, just as her mom had said, only about half of the roses were still there. Telltale crumbs of buttercream icing littered the flexible cutting board where the other roses had been.

  “Jake,” she snarled. “Jake ate my roses. And he didn’t even like the way they tasted.”

  It all flooded back to her, the alarm she’d felt the night before when he’d revealed he had known Charlie Kirkman was going to be out of town, now mingled with fury that he’d sabotaged her hours of hard work.

  “Jake? Kari, Jake wasn’t even here—” her mom protested.

  “He was. He came stumbling in the door last night at midnight, half-wasted.”

  “Oh, I didn’t hear him—has he left already?”

  Kari flicked the buttercream icing crumbs. “If he hasn’t, he’d better start running for the door,” she said grimly. “I told him these roses were for a cake—”

  She marched to his bedroom, or what had been his bedroom when he’d lived here. At least her mom had not left it in its teenage glory of martial arts posters and video consoles and piles of dirty clothes—now it had been turned into a gender-neutral spare bedroom.

  No sign of Jake, save the rumpled bedclothes, remained. She felt her mom brush up against her as she peered into the bedroom.

  “He’s gone? He could have at least waited and had breakfast with us.”

  “He had breakfast—my roses. I hope they give him a mouthful of cavities,” Kari muttered.

  Her mother’s hands fluttered and her bracelets clattered against each other as she put her fingers to her temples. Kari shook her head. “Don’t even think about trying to defend him.”

  Back in the kitchen, Kari grabbed the plastic bin of muffins—obviously Jake hadn’t dug around enough in the kitchen to find them—and got the egg cups out of the freezer. She nuked the egg cups in the microwave, trying to get a grip on her temper.

  The microwave beeped. She pulled out the steaming mini-omelets, not even cheered by the scent of eggs, onions, bacon and oozing cheese. “Mom...has Jake said anything to you about where he was the night of the fire?”

  “You mean, the downtown fire? Why, he told us. Remember? He said he crashed on somebody’s couch. You can’t think he did that. There’s a big difference between your brother thoughtlessly helping himself to your roses and burning down your bakery.” Her mom reached for a muffin and an egg cup. “These are really good.”

  “Thanks,” Kari said absently. She crumbled the muffin in her hand for a moment before popping a bite into her mouth. “It’s just something he said last night...he lied to Rob, Mom. Did you know that? He told him that he didn’t know Charlie was going to be out of town, and last night he let slip that he did know.”

  Her mom frowned, clearly wanting to drop the unpleasant topic. “I wish we weren’t so ready to blame Jake. He tells me all the time how I jump to conclusions because of that first fire.”

  “Well, your past does define you. It sure defines me. One choice. It’s funny how you can trace your life back to one solitary decision.”

  “I was the one who—”

  But Kari ignored her mom’s protest. “I’m not talking about the confession, Mom. Neither of us could have known that the judge would throw the book at me. No, if I just hadn’t asked Jake to take us by that dumb store that day.”

  Her mom stared out the window at the bright morning sunlight filtering through her kitchen curtains. Kari followed her gaze and spied a mockingbird dive-bombing a gathering of sparrows. “You never talk about it,” her mom said.

  “You never wanted to,” Kari replied.

  “All Jake said was the guy was mean to you.”

  “He was. It was...awful, Mom. About the worst humiliation I’d experienced ever—well, at least until I went to juvie.” Kari pushed aside her own egg, and rose to drop her plate into the dishwasher. “Funny thing was, Jake didn’t want to stop at the convenience store. But it was me and Chelsea Boynton and Kai Williford, and we all begged him to. You’d asked him to pick us up from cheer practice, you remember?”

  Suddenly an awful pang of regret flooded through Kari—she was fourteen again, pumped up and excited that she had made the cheer squad and that her freshman year was going to be full of adventure. There’d been weeks of hard work and practice—she’d been a flyer, or she would have been.

  “And the owner accused you of shoplifting,” her mom tagged on. “That’s what Jake said. The guy practically strip-searched you there in the store.”

  “I swear, Mom, I hadn’t so much as thought about shoplifting. I don’t know what he saw. Maybe it was because we were a group of young girls and he’d seen things go missing—that’s a common age for shoplifting, and the girls I knew in juvie talked a lot about how they stole in packs.” Kari glanced down at the half-filled cutting board of roses and sighed. No help for it. She had to mix up more icing and start re-making those roses.

  She began beating the pasteurized egg whites, the mixer thrumming along at low speed as she sifted her pricey organic powdered sugar. It lumped like nobody’s business, and she dared not push the big rocklike clumps through the sieve—she’d learned the hard way that one little sugar crystal could stop up a piping tip.

  Over the sound of the sifter and the mixer, she heard the glug of her mom’s second cup of coffee. Her mom came to stand beside her.

  “Careful of your jacket, Mom—this powdered sugar is going everywhere, and it will get all over that black blazer,” Kari warned.

  “Jake said that man was a pervert—that he seemed to genuinely like patting you down.”


  Kari shuddered at the memory. “Compared to other searches I went through after that...no. But it was still mortifying. I wanted to melt into the floor—there I was in front of my friends, and that guy going ballistic over a dollar candy bar that I had not even taken to begin with.” It had been the first time that anyone but a family member or a medical professional had touched her in such an invasive way. “Jake snatched me out of there and told him to keep his hands to himself. He even threw a dollar down on the floor, said if the man was so greedy for a dollar, there it was.”

  “He was just trying to look out for you, Kari. He said the guy deserved what was coming to him.”

  Kari shook her head. “Nobody deserves his business burned down, Mom. If I didn’t know that then, well, I know it now. But... I believe Jake when he said he got carried away with his buddies, defending my honor. I wish he hadn’t.”

  “He...he cares, honey. He doesn’t always show it the right way, but he cares. And—and if he did start the downtown fire—I’m not saying he did, mind you, but if—well, he was probably just getting back at Charlie. It was the same thing, right? He saw two men putting their greediness ahead of his little sister’s best interests?”

  Leave it to her mother to try to put the best spin possible on criminal activity. Kari stopped the mixer to check the progress of the batch. The icing was whipping up into a fluffy off-white froth that would have to beat slowly for another ten minutes to become the pure white she needed it to be. She ran a finger through a fluffy peak and tested it: sweet, but not quite light enough yet. Kari slid the switch back on. She met her mother’s gaze.

  “Mom...he can’t keep doing this. He’s within spitting distance of thirty. He needs help—professional help.”

  Her mother recoiled in horror. “Kari! You know—you of all people know what happens when you confess to a crime. The authorities aren’t in the business of getting people help—not to say Jake needs that kind of help. He only needs to, you know, grow into his own, settle a little. If you go to Rob Monroe and tell him—” She put her hand to her mouth and set the coffee mug down with a thud. “The stories you’ve told me about being...in that place. And that wasn’t even a real prison, not where they’d send Jake if they convicted him of the downtown fire—oh, honey, please, please don’t do this! Not to me, not to Jake.”