by Maggie Wells
Darla’s cheeks flamed as she stared straight at the glowing papier-mâché sun. She closed her eyes and allowed the wave of pure mortification to wash over her. He’d done nothing more than take a few minutes out of his evening to talk to a little girl who’d spent almost two weeks getting the rings of Saturn right, and she’d stopped just shy of calling the man a pedophile.
This wasn’t the first time she’d fucked up royally. And given the poor impulse control she’d displayed, this screw up probably wouldn’t be the last. Still, she hated that she’d not only done so in front of Jake, but to him.
God, she hated working these things. Over the past dozen years, she’d grown accustomed to serving her former friends and classmates at The Pit, but these nights... This kind of work was totally different. At The Pit she’d learned to brazen out the stares and whispers by wearing her regulation T-shirts tight to fit her reputation and keeping conversation as short as her shorts. But she couldn’t wear her ‘‘Our sauce is the boss!” shirt to Mobile’s society galas. No. On nights like this, she was nothing more than another server in anonymous black and white. Even when offering her own father a tray of canapés.
Drawing a deep breath, she kept her focus glued on the tableau Grace had created. No sense in looking at the crowd. The festivities were winding down. Her parents were probably long gone. Not that she had any expectations as far as they were concerned. They hadn’t acknowledged her in almost fourteen years. She’d long-since given up hoping this shindig would be different.
She’d accepted this job so she’d have a little extra money to put in the dream jar they’d started when Grace was six and they’d set their sights on a week at Walt Disney World. They might as well have picked the moon.
Or Venus.
The thought tugged her lips into a rueful smile as she reached out to touch the planet some kid had painted neon pink and coated in a liberal dusting of glitter. She couldn’t help wondering if the student who’d decorated the planet had been a girl, or a budding good ol’ boy making an artistic statement about where girls belonged.
Seven years had passed since they’d glitter-painted an old pickle jar and seeded their dreams with a few crumpled ones from her tips. In all those years, they hadn’t traveled farther than her friend Harley’s Orange Beach condo. Gnawing her lip, Darla blinked back the sting of frustrated tears.
Space Camp was all Grace had talked about for the past two years. She’d saved every bit of birthday and allowance money she could. There was no way she could cover the cost of a week at Space Camp herself, and apparently her little girl had figured that much out. Usually, when Darla had to work an evening shift, Grace opted to hang out with her self-proclaimed grandmother, Connie Cade. But not tonight. Tonight, her daughter had begged to come with her and Darla had relented. For weeks, Grace had talked about little else than the It IS Rocket Science program. She’d considered and discarded at least a dozen project plans, collected all the data she could find on previous winners, and done her due diligence on the members of the Gulf Coast Young Scientists Foundation. Of course Grace knew who Jake Dalton was. Dr. Dalton. The man was everything her daughter hoped to be one day. Well, if she couldn’t be an actual astronaut, that is.
And Darla might have blown any chance Grace might have had of winning the scholarship she wanted so badly.
Trailing her fingertips lightly over the cloth, she snagged the tiny replica of Pluto from the edge of the table before heading toward the kitchen door.
She used only the very tips of her fingers to push on the swinging door, knowing Grace was most likely hovering on the other side. A startled gasp and the clatter of trays told her some of her instincts were still on key.
“All clear?” she asked before opening the door wider.
“I’ve got them.” Grace sounded breathless.
Darla peeked in to see her daughter crab-walking along the floor gathering round serving platters into a stack.
“Stupid place to put those,” she muttered as she shoved the stack onto the end of a butcher block worktable and scrambled to her feet. Color rose high in Grace’s cheeks. Those serious hazel eyes sparked with gold. “Jeez, Mom—”
Darla saw her daughter’s ire and raised her the mom hand. “Don’t start.”
“That was Dr. Dal—”
“I know who he was.”
“You embarrassed me!”
Those three little words took the starch out of any defense Darla might have presented. Like any woman who’d survived adolescence, she felt her daughter’s discomfiture keenly. “I’m sorry, sweets.”
“We were talking. He liked my Saturn!”
Desperation edged Grace’s voice. Every fiber in Darla’s body tensed. “Honey, I—”
“It was gross, Mom.”
Darla blinked. “Gross?”
“I’m not a little kid. I know what you were thinking.” Grace’s lip curled and her nose wrinkled. To drive home the extent of her disgust, she gave an exaggerated shudder. “Gross. I bet he’s even older than you.”
“Two years,” Darla murmured. Her mind reeled, but facts were facts. “Jake was two years ahead of me in school.”
“See? Old.”
A breathy laugh escaped her as she took a cautious step closer. Gracie was a pretty easy kid, but when she was riled she made a wet hen look zen.
Nodding her defeat, Darla murmured, “Ancient.”
Their gazes met and held, then, right in front of her eyes, Grace deflated. Leading with her heart, Darla closed the gap between them. She had her daughter in her arms before her feet caught up, sending them both hurtling into a worktable. The trays Grace had so carefully stacked sailed over the edge. The platters crashed to the floor again and the Kennet girls clung to one another, bursting into giggles as they scrambled to regain their footing.
“Get out of my kitchen!” Marcel, the chef, shouted from the other end of the kitchen.
“Sorry!” Darla and Grace called in unison.
Grinning, Darla pulled back to look at Gracie, but her daughter’s laughter had already faded. Her little girl could almost look her straight in the eye. Luckily, Grace was still more child than teenager. She ducked her head and pressed her face into the crook of Darla’s neck, seeking comfort in the same place she’d found it since the day she came into the world. Darla brushed the heavy dark curls away from her daughter’s face and sighed. “I’m sorry, baby.”
“So embarrassing,” Grace mumbled, but to Darla’s relief, her daughter relaxed into the caress.
“I’m your mom. Embarrassing you is in the job description.”
“You excel at embarrassing me.”
Resting her cheek atop Gracie’s head, Darla smiled. “I’ve always been an overachiever. No one can screw up as big as your mama, kiddo.” Her daughter huffed with exasperation, and Darla had to fight to keep her smile in place. The truth hurt, but she wasn’t one to run from it. Pressing a kiss into Grace’s wild hair, she whispered, “I’ll fix things with Jake.”
“How?”
The catch in Grace’s voice made Darla’s heart thud against her breastbone. Smoothing the cursed curls she’d passed along to her offspring, she blew out a breath. “Don’t you worry about that. I have my ways.”
* * * *
The Pit barbecue shack stood on the same quarter-acre of undesirable land near the Alabama and Gulf Coast railroad tracks for over fifty years. Natives claimed the worn clapboard building was as much a part of Mobile as the bay itself. Everyone ate at The Pit. Governors, garbage collectors, movie stars, and construction workers rubbed elbows over racks of dry-rubbed ribs and succulent pulled pork topped with slaw. Darla had never met the original pit master, Beauregard Lavelle Pickett, but Beau Jr. had appointed himself her unofficial granddad the moment she first showed up at his counter asking for a job.
Pregnant, alone, and without any appreciable skill set.
He’d long-since turned the tending of the smokehouse over to his
own son, Beauregard Lavelle Pickett III—a.k.a. Bubba—but Mr. Beau still held court each noontime at a small Formica-topped table in the back. And every day, Darla served him and his cronies quantities of sweet tea sufficient to float the USS Alabama.
Wearing squeeze bottles of Bubba’s famous sauce tucked into her apron pockets like six shooters, she cocked a hip and stared down at the septuagenarians, a sassy smile curving her lips. “If you loved me, you’d make an honest woman out of me and take me away from all this.”
“Darlin’, I’ve already made you the queen of my kingdom,” Mr. Beau protested. Brilliant blue eyes twinkled, but the hand pressed over his heart was twisted by arthritis and the skin covering the mapwork of veins was so thin it shone under the florescent lights. “If only I hadn’t let that hellcat snare me into marryin’ her. Why, that woman ruined me for all others. I’m not good enough for you, Sugar, and that’s the truth of it. Plain and simple.”
The old man heaved a gusty sigh, and his companions groaned good-naturedly. The ‘hellcat’ he referred to was none other than Miss Alee-Ann Sommers Pickett, Sunday school teacher, St. Augustine’s soup kitchen field marshal, and Mr. Beau’s wife of over fifty years.
Darla curled her lip into a playful sneer. “I can take her.”
Mr. Beau grinned so big Darla was tempted to shield her eyes from the blinding glare bouncing off his spanking new set of dentures. “Now, wouldn’t that be a sight worth seein’, boys? Say, you think you might wear one of those string bikinis when you do?”
“You’re a dirty old man.”
“Not dirty so much as still breathing.”
She planted a hand on her hip. “You know I could sue you for sexual harassment? Take you for all you’re worth?”
“Puh-leeze.” He coughed softly, then waved her threat away with his work-worn hand. “You came onto me, and I have witnesses. Right, fellas?” Right on cue, his companions nodded. Leaning back in his chair, he gave her the soft, affectionate smile she knew so well. “Tell you what, Sweetie Pie. You bring your pretty little girl around to see Miss Alee-Ann this weekend and we’ll forget all this ugliness ever happened. Deal?”
“Deal,” she replied with a brisk nod. “Now you boys behave. I don’t want to have to get the manager out here to keep y’all in line.”
Turning on her heel, she let their guffaws carry her through the dining room. They’d opened the doors at eleven on the dot. Barely thirty minutes had passed and already they had only two tables open. By the time she made it to the kitchen to check on her orders, she’d drained the pitcher of tea she’d been carrying.
“Order’s up, Boopsie.”
Darla chose to ignore the nickname as she ignored Zelda Jo’s thousands of other foibles. Life was easier that way. The other waitress had seniority by about six months and she never let Darla forget it. She was also Bubba’s perma-fiancée.
If Darla’s mama had ever had the pleasure of encountering Zelda Jo, she would have proclaimed her to be brass with no polish. She colored her hair a nearly blinding white blond. Looking at the super-teased cloud of fluff actually hurt when the harsh fluorescents caught it at right angle. The glare was almost enough to distract a person from the feathered hairdo popular in the early nineteen-eighties. She also wore her tops cut low to show off her gravity-defying cleavage, and heels that made nosebleeds a credible threat. Every day, Zelda Jo chewed a bright pink wad of bubble gum, and she smacked it when she talked.
She also had nicknames for almost every person to ever cross the threshold of The Pit.
Celebrity nicknames, in most cases, because Zelda Jo had a serious jones for everything and everyone famous. Didn’t matter much to her how they were known—politics, movies, television, and even cartoons. There was no one and nothing off-limits. And, Zelda Jo wasn’t happy until she assigned each person a famous name to go with their face.
Darla’s changed in accordance with her hairstyle. When she gave in to the urge to grow her unruly curls out a bit, Zelda Jo called her Snow White. The unfortunate wedge cut she’d attempted when Grace was a baby led to a brief stint of being called Demi. Then, she made the mistake of falling in love with a slightly modified pixie cut, and the die was cast. For the past five years, Zelda Jo refused to refer to her by any name other than Betty Boop. Or one of the thousands of variations she cooked up.
Though more than a little annoying, Zelda Jo’s name game was harmless. Everyone got one. Well, everyone except Jake’s little brother, Brian Dalton. He’d actually gone off to Hollywood and become a star of sorts, so Brian simply got to be Brian.
Most of the time, the names she picked for people were pretty flattering. Hell, she called Bubba ‘Clooney’. The only resemblance Darla could find between the Hollywood heartthrob and Mobile’s premiere purveyor of heart failure were a full head of hair with a dash more salt than pepper. True, the men were about the same age. But George was fit, handsome, and breathtakingly urbane while Bubba… Well, Bubba looked a lot like you’d expect a man called Bubba to look. Soft. Scruffy. And, more often than not, covered in the rich red barbecue sauce.
At first, the two of them grated like cheap cutlery on bone china. But little by little, Darla had fit together bits and pieces of a past that wasn’t pretty. The more she learned, the easier it became to see how Bubba might look like George to someone who’d been through some of the things Zelda Jo had survived.
The man himself smiled as he tossed slices of thick, spongy white bread into the baskets arrayed on the butcher block counter like he was dealing cards for a hand of poker. “There you go, D.”
“Thanks, B,” she said. She checked the tickets and slid the tray from the end of the counter. “Your daddy said he wants brisket.”
“There’s a shocker,” Bubba muttered. Without missing a beat, he pulled down four more paper-lined baskets and began scooping up sides of potato salad, slaw, and baked beans. “Tell him mama said chicken or starve.”
“You tell him. I can’t go over there. He threatened to sue me for sexual harassment,” she called over her shoulder as she paused to add a handful of individually packaged wet-wipes to her tray.
“One of these days, he’ll take you for all you’re worth.”
Darla laughed at the notion. “Seems like a lot of trouble for a buck-seventy-five.”
“Don’t you worry, Betty baby,” Zelda crooned as she sashayed back into the kitchen with her empty tray. “John-John is here and he asked for one of your tables. You’ll be rollin’ in the dough pretty soon. But don’t forget who gave him up for you.”
Ignoring the ridiculous nickname, Darla rolled her eyes as she hoisted the heavy tray to her shoulder. “As if you’d let me.”
The second she spotted Jake Dalton sitting alone in her last empty booth, her heart leaped into her throat and swelled like a bullfrog. Regret and nerves did a tango in her tummy. Ducking her head, she busied herself with delivering her orders. She managed to kill another three minutes refilling water glasses and depositing hastily scrawled tickets on several table tops before she forced herself to fill a cup with sweet tea, drop two wedges of lemon on top, and make her way to him.
He had new glasses. This pair was rimless and the lenses cast a faint greenish tint at certain angles. His hair wasn’t as neat as it had been at the gala. The dark waves had runners. Like he’d spent the better part of the morning raking his fingers through them. She liked that hint of messiness. He wasn’t perfect and didn’t bother pretending he was. He didn’t seem to think he was God’s gift to womankind because some putzes down at Upwardly Mobile magazine named him the bay area’s catch of the year.
Jake was Jake. The same nice guy he’d always been. Even in high school, when being genuine seemed to be against some unwritten rule. She had to go over there. She’d still owed him an apology even if Gracie weren’t insisting on one. As much as she hated saying she was sorry to anyone for anything, spewing mea culpas to a St. Pat’s grad was particularly galling.
From t
he moment she left her parents’ house, she did her level best to have little to do with the life she’d lived before Gracie came along. Severing ties hadn’t been terribly hard. Most of her so-called friends had stopped talking to her the second she began showing. The rest fell victim to natural attrition. While they were going through sorority rush, she’d been learning how to early-bird rush yard sales in order to get the pick of the baby clothes. The majority of her classmates had moved on to bigger and better things, but they all came home for the holidays, graduations, births, and deaths. And even the most far-flung alums made a point of visiting The Pit.
Over the years, she’d become adept at sidestepping, or outright ignoring, their nosy questions. She looked past the speculative stares and pretended not to notice the whispers stopped whenever she came near. At least, for the most part. There were still a few jerks who could get to her, but she didn’t waste much time worrying about them. They’d been jerks before she’d become a St. Patrick’s pariah.
“Hey.”
Darla flinched as she snapped out of her reverie. Sugar-sticky tea sloshed over the side of the glass and onto her hand. Big brown eyes stared up at her.
“You okay?”
The combination of warmth in his dark eyes and genuine concern evident in his simple question ripped through her pride like a torpedo. “I’m sorry.” The apology burst from her with shocking ease. Plopping the glass down on the table, she slid into the seat across from him without even stopping to blink. “I’m so sorry. I was a complete bitch last night and you didn’t deserve it.”
A tiny furrow appeared between his brows. “I don’t know if I’d say you were a bitch—”
“Oh, I was,” she insisted.
He paused for a split second, then gave his head a business-like shake. “No, you overreacted, but I guess I can understand why—”
