Courtship of the Cake

by Jessica Topper

  “Sindy told me about how she raised you like her own. And took care of Nash, too.”

  Mick pinched a thin chocolate snake and dropped it on the deck of the boat. Then he shot me a pointed look. “Did she tell you what he did in return? How she and my uncle took out a second mortgage on the bakery to help get him to California, to help set him up for his so-called sure thing? He blew through their money out there faster than you can say Ponzi scheme. Girls, clothes, drugs . . . oh yeah, and his ‘Jumpstart My Heart’ demo. Don’t even get me started on that. Everything Nash has in this life was begged, borrowed, or stolen.”

  He didn’t add it, but I knew what he was thinking. Even you.

  I gulped a mouthful of the sweet bakery air. “I . . . I had no idea.”

  “My aunt is too much of a class act to talk about it. The day my uncle crashed through the window? He wasn’t coming to work that day. The bakery had been foreclosed on. Shuttered. Waiting for a short sale. But we bakers . . .” He took the snake’s mate and slung it through the slats on the boat’s railing. “We are creatures of habit. And we’re ever hopeful that things are going to work out in the end. He was doing his daily drive-by. Hoping for some miracle.”

  “Well, in a way, he got it.” I touched his gloved hand lightly. “You came home, right?”

  Mick

  BUSTED

  It was hard to see Dani’s eyes when she used that waterfall of hair to hide behind, those sun-drenched kinks veiling her delicate features. But I heard all the warmth and understanding in her voice that I had been longing for, since having had to leave New Orleans before I could find her. I gently placed my other hand over hers, and we stood there for a long moment, amid the industrial baking racks and under the bright fluorescent lighting as my workers buzzed by us. Even through the annoying barrier of my stupid poly gloves, it felt intimate and exciting.

  “You know so much about me. Isn’t it time you let a little slip about you?” I asked.

  Dani smiled and gave a modest little shrug. “I’m used to being everyone’s rock. Sometimes it’s hard to let others chip away at the stone. Maybe someday, Mick.”

  Despite all the ordinary chaos going on around us, it felt like we had climbed up a steep incline, just the two of us, and had been transported to somewhere wholly new.

  “Thanks again for coming to the rescue with my sister’s cake. She said they loved it.”

  “Thank you,” I said. And her smile confirmed what I had suspected; asking me to “re-bake” Posy’s cake was her way of saying that all misunderstandings down in New Orleans were behind us.

  “I’d better get back,” she finally said, and moved away, a wave of regret in her breezy tone.

  “I’ll walk you up,” I said, peeling off the gloves. I wished my hands could touch hers now, and I felt an undercurrent of lust surge as we made our way to the front of the shop.

  “Uh-oh, don’t look now!” Tom hissed a warning. “I told you she would catch on to you.”

  I caught a glimpse of the customer clanging past the bells on the door, and ducked behind the big glass counter like a soldier jumping into a foxhole, dragging Dani with me.

  “I demand to see Mick Spencer!”

  “Is that your mother of the bride?” Dani whispered, peeping between the desserts on doilies in the case, taking in what I was seeing: the marshmallow orthopedic shoes, the knee-high stockings that didn’t quite make it up to her knees, and the clutch on a cheap pocketbook that would no doubt come to bop me on the head, if given the chance.

  “Please. Give me a little credit, will you?” I replied. “That’s Mrs. Vega. Angie’s mother.” She had to have a good ten years on Mandy Davis, and her no-nonsense, old-world ways made her seem even older.

  “If he is not here,” she trilled to Tom in the South of the Border–meets–Southern belle accent she had cultivated after moving here from Mexico in her teens, “I will wait. I’ve got all day.”

  I squeezed my eyes shut, took a deep breath, and slid open the case on the pretense of grabbing a cheesecake. “Oh, hey, Mrs. Vega. What can I—”

  “The jig is up, Mick Spencer.” She slapped her hands on the top of the glass to show she meant business. “You think I don’t know what you and my Angie are doing?”

  I heard Dani’s sharp intake of breath. Great. I know how that must’ve sounded to her. Rolling my eyes heavenward, I said a silent prayer. If I kept my mouth shut, Mrs. Vega would absolve me all by herself. Sure enough . . .

  “How dare you let my baby girl fool that boy into thinking your polvorones are Palomar’s polvorones? I see her sneaking your white boxes”—she wagged a finger at a stack on the counter, all with the telltale Night Kitchen label—“into the Dumpster at our restaurant after she empties them into one of our takeout boxes. And then off she goes”—Mrs. Vega arced her arm through the air as if she were conducting an angry orchestra—“to Jenkins Auto Body, sweet as pie. Six months now, Mick!”

  “People do crazy things when they’re in love, Mrs. Vega.” I couldn’t stop the smile from spreading over my face. Dani was watching with interested amusement.

  “That’s the problem! That boy is going to fall in love with her, and what’s going to happen when he realizes his bride cannot bake a decent Mexican wedding cookie to save her life, eh? This is a crazy scheme!”

  Other customers in the shop, who had paused with guarded looks, began to ease back into their shopping, some laughing quietly behind their hands.

  “You need to do right by my niña, young man! Promise me, that? You need to bring her in here, and you need to teach her how to make a polvoron she can be proud of.” She hung her head, shaking it sadly. “Because the Lord knows, I cannot. The day I can make mine taste like yours will be the day I die happy.”

  “Okay, Mrs. Vega,” I laughed. “I promise. Only problem is, Bear’s already in love with her.”

  “Then you’d better hurry up.” She clicked her tongue. “En nombre del amor, Mick. And give me a half dozen to go, please. In a bag.”

  “For you? They’re on the house.”

  Dani shook her head slowly as I bagged the cookies and sent Angie’s mom on her way.

  “What?” I asked innocently.

  “You never told Bear?”

  “What would I say? ‘It’s my cookies that have been giving you a hard-on every week for the last six months’? I’m just the baker. Angie’s gotta be the lovemaker. And the risk taker.”

  Angie had broken his heart back in the day. Now it was her job to jumpstart it again.

  “She’s courting him with Mexican wedding cakes.” Dani sighed happily. “That is so sweet!”

  “Oh? But not when I do it?” I asked, palms out.

  Dani slid a fresh pair of poly gloves onto my hands and dropped a kiss on my cheek. “Get back to your baking, baker.”

  “Maybe you should come back when Angie does,” I called after her. “You might learn a thing or two!”

  Mick

  SI NOS DEJAN

  Bear bounded down the stairs in a huge, wide-brimmed sombrero and high, tight black embroidered pants.

  “Oh, hell no.” Quinn did a double take.

  “Hell to the yes.” Bear tugged on the short jacket. “The guy who usually plays guitarrón has shingles. The gig, she is mine!” He raised a fist triumphantly. I’m pretty sure that was code language for the fact that he was finally going to score with Angie, who got out of waiting tables on the nights when she played violin in the mariachi band. “Who’s coming down to Palomar for dinner tonight?”

  Quinn looked at Nash, and Nash looked at Quinn. Something had broken open over the last week, and I couldn’t quite put my finger on it. Maybe it had something to do with guests in the house. Nash’s celebrity status kept the reservation book full, which, in turn, kept Quinn busy. Warmth and energy reverberated through the Half Acre. Proprietor and star attraction
were on their best behavior, but it wasn’t their usual wary circling: sizing each other up like caged animals. They seemed to be looking at each other in a new light. The vacant look had left Nash’s eyes, especially when he gazed at his son.

  “Logan is cooking for us at home,” Quinn said.

  “Breakfast for dinner,” Nash supplied. “I taught him how to cook an egg in the nest. Remember those?”

  “Do I ever.” I could practically smell the butter in the pan, browning before Nash’s dad could get the bagel in fast enough. Why use bread when the bagel has the hole already built in? His dad would shrug over his logic, tilting back a beer and supervising us as we cracked eggs into the center. Stand back, you little fuckers, he’d say, when it was time to do the flipping. I’ve never broken a yolk yet. This is Scott’s Special. He’d serve them up on paper plates and we’d sit on the floor of the trailer, dipping pieces of the bagel into the delicate center. The crispy, fried whites were never runny, and the yolk was always liquid-gold perfection. Every damn time. Nash’s dad was a sad drunk, and unpredictable when sober, but when he cooked those Scott’s Specials for us, we ate like kings.

  “Logan’s Special.” Nash smiled at the renaming, and I was glad he had been able to pass a good memory down to his son. “I still can’t get him to eat one, though.”

  “I’m free. How ’bout it, Dani?” I asked. “Mariachi Monday?”

  She laughed. “This I gotta see.”

  “Well, it’s about frickin’ time!” Bear drawled. “I’ve been trying to get you out to see one of my tributes for weeks.”

  Logan bounded into the room, his eyes lighting up at the sight of Bear’s Charro costume. He made the taco sign and gave us all an angelic grin.

  “Why, you little schemer!” It was good to see Quinn laughing. “You’re going to cook us dinner and then cut out on us?”

  Logan threw out the name sign he’d given his uncle, two swipes of his hands like bear claws, followed by the universal I love you sign, which he zoomed up into the air.

  Dani laughed. “I believe he just said he’s Bear’s wingman.”

  “I guess we’ve got ourselves a chaperone,” I murmured to Dani.

  • • •

  Palomar wasn’t kitschy Mexican. It was a cozy refuge, with amber lights that hinted at subtropical warmth and subdued terra-cotta walls. But it came alive with Mariachi Monday, and when the band stopped at your table, you were on the spot to sing along with your requested song.

  We settled in with sangria and ordered a root beer for Logan, which he held exactly like his father, encircling the top of the bottle with his thumb and index finger before turning it up to his lips, cocky and confident. Hangman was the name of the game using the paper placemats on the top of the table, but underneath was a different story. Her knee had brushed mine the minute we slid into the booth, and I did my damnedest to keep it there, anchoring my foot firmly along the side of her sandal.

  “Camelburp?” I protested, as Logan gleefully hung me from his crayon-hewn noose and filled in all the letters I had missed before my time, and available limbs, ran low. “Should’ve been two words, buddy.” I flashed him the number two with my hand. “I totally would’ve had that, otherwise,” I said to Dani, whose pretty lips were pressed into a smile behind her fruity sangria glass. “How do you sign ‘cheater’?” I asked her.

  “I don’t know the sign for it, but you can finger spell it,” she said, demonstrating. Logan put his hands on his hips, and Dani mock-discreetly gestured that it was really me who was the cheater, not him.

  “Nuh-uh.” I shook my head, and worked my fingers through the letters, aiming them at him.

  Logan just laughed, shook his head, and began to draw another gallows pole.

  “Picking on a ten-year-old,” Dani ribbed me. “Nice. Although maybe he turned eleven, given the time it took you to sign that word.”

  “Har har. So I’m a slow learner. You up for schoolin’ me?” I nudged her bare ankle, and she in turn tipped her toe and dragged it across the top of my laces.

  Tilting her head, she regarded me. “All that time growing up near the Half Acre, and you didn’t learn any signs?” To Logan, she signed the letter P and earned a nice round head in the noose for her trouble.

  My libido tensed and took a nosedive at her question. “I grew up in the shadow of the Half Acre,” I said slowly. “My mom worked there, cleaning rooms. Under the table. But I wasn’t really allowed inside.”

  Our food arrived, and we dug into the homemade, spicy fare. Logan was wholly immersed in a burrito, bigger than the size of his head, and between bites, I felt it safe to confide in Dani. “When Mr. and Mrs. Bradley weren’t around, she would bring me to work with her. I’d sit in that turreted nook, you know, the one in the front room? And she’d read me books, and we’d pretend we lived there.”

  Dani touched my hand that was fidgeting with the stem of my sangria glass.

  “She got fired. And then . . . well, Sindy told you. But there’s one detail you won’t find in the papers . . . I went and confronted Bill Bradley. Demanded to know if he was my father. He denied it. That was . . . the day of the fire.”

  “Oh, Mick.” Dani’s brow creased with concern.

  “I carried that guilt with me for long after, telling myself I must’ve been the reason Bear and Quinn lost their parents.” I shook my head. “Silly, right? He obviously had a lot of other problems, and I would’ve been the least of them.”

  “Did you ever tell Bear or Quinn?” Dani wanted to know. “I mean, there are ways—”

  I shook my head and managed a smile. “It doesn’t matter. I’ve . . . made peace with it all.”

  But had I, really? I had split town soon after. First, in pursuit of my mother, who I last heard was in Florida. Then up the coast, raising hell till Sindy and Walt threw me into culinary school. Then down to New Orleans, a good a place to get lost in as any.

  The exuberant blare of a trumpet cut my words to a clip. The mariachi band had made it to our table, consisting of a beaming Angie serenading us with a careen of her violin bow, Bear grinning at us behind the big-ass wooden Mexican guitar, her mustachioed grandfather on a regular acoustic, and Angie’s stern-looking father, red in the face as he blew his trumpet and placed himself between the two lovebirds, who kept making eyes at each other as they sang.

  “Any requests?” Bear bellowed to us. He quickly signed something to Logan.

  “What did you tell him?” I asked.

  “I told him nobody better request ‘La Bamba’ or I’d kick their ass,” Bear said.

  “Bear!” Dani admonished the shaggy-haired guitarrón player. “We should wash your hands off with soap for swearing.”

  “How about that song you were singing in the shower today?” I joked.

  “You heard that?” Bear asked.

  “Dude, the whole B and B heard it.”

  “‘Si Nos Dejan,’ everyone.” Bear grinned at Angie’s extended family and began to count off. Angie’s wide brown eyes grew even larger and sparkled with tears, but she grinned and busied herself with positioning the violin under her chin. Meanwhile, Mr. Vega looked like he was going to bust a vein as he glared at Bear and began to play.

  Bear sang along easily, meeting Angie’s grandfather’s baritone with a mellow harmony that could only come from having melded his voice for a myriad of tributes over the years. Whatever the words were that were spilling from his mouth, he seemed to be nailing them to a T. Angie’s mother bustled out from behind the hostess station, happily shaking maracas and trying to catch her husband’s eye, but he just squeezed them shut and continued to play. As the song dwindled down, she handed the maracas to Logan, who gladly set down his executioner’s crayon and joined the band as they began to drift to the next table.

  “Gracias,” Bear said, as I slid a twenty into the hole of his instrument where he collected tips.
With a wink at Dani, he strolled off in those tight pants and that ridiculous hat to join the rest of the Vega family, and Logan, who was shaking his moneymaker with glee.

  Dani leaned across the table, eyes wide and shining. “What do you think that was all about?” she asked, her smile wanting in on the joke.

  “I haven’t a clue,” I said truthfully. “But whatever that song was that he dished out, had Angie and Mrs. Vega eating it up with a spoon.”

  Dani laughed. “Wow. I can’t believe he can play and sing like that.”

  “Yeah,” I said, pouring more sangria for the two of us. “Bear can play circles around Nash.”

  Dani grew quiet at the mention of his name. I wondered if she had noticed the closeness growing between him and Quinn, and how she felt about it. Careful what you wish for, Mickey, I could hear my mother say. Logan returned, and we ate the rest of our meal in silence.

  Driving past the Night Kitchen on the way home, I glimpsed Nash’s Porsche out front. It looked like he and Quinn had decided to have dessert out. Whether Dani noticed or not, she didn’t say anything.

  “Bedtime, buddy.” I made a sleeping motion with my hands under my tilted head. He held out his hand and made a motion with his fingers for our shared notepad.

  Can I play you my song first?

  I showed Dani what he had written. “How can we deny that?” she asked, amused.

  Logan raced upstairs and returned with his guitar, and a journal.

  He propped the book up, pulled a sheet of lined paper from it, and arranged the guitar carefully on his knees. With a bit of fanfare, he stroked the pick slowly down the strings before carefully forming his first bar chord.

  I could see Nash’s diagrams and lettering littered over the notepaper, but the lyrics were written separately, in the journal.

  Without warning

  Dawn slices through the night

  I said I’d stay

  Till the morning

  You know I tried with all my might