On Any Given Sundae

by Marilyn Brant

  “I’ve been pretty self-absorbed with my own bizarre life, and I’m sorry,” she told him. “I know something’s bothering you. Do you want to talk about it?”

  He took a deep breath then a big bite of muffin. “Mmm,” he said without enthusiasm.

  She smiled slightly. “Are they that bad?”

  His brow wrinkled. “Well, chéri, let’s just say they aren’t your best effort.”

  “I was mad when I made them. And sad. And…well, I don’t know.”

  “Just as it was in that film Like Water for Chocolate. How the family’s reactions to the foods the heroine served depended on her emotions when she cooked them.” He sighed. Jacques was a longtime fan of foreign flicks that played at independent artsy theaters.

  Of course, in this case, he was probably drawing an accurate comparison.

  She snatched the muffin plate away. “Better not eat these then. I don’t want you suffering through my reactions from last night.”

  “Rob—he’s a short-term thing, yes?” He looked up at her with big worried eyes.

  She hated to admit it, but she couldn’t lie to her good friend. “I suppose so.”

  He reached passed the plates and papers and gave her a long hug and then a soft kiss on her cheek. “You know, my marriage proposal—it still stands. We could be very, very happy together. Good friends, comfortable. Not this constant and unpleasant churning of emotion.” He smiled at her. “Why don’t you marry me, Elizabeth?”

  She glanced at him sharply before being distracted by a noise. “Did you hear something?” she said.

  He shook his head then grinned a little wickedly. “Just my beating heart.”

  “Nice try.” She thought about his words. What he’d described as a “constant and unpleasant churning of emotion.” He wasn’t just talking about her feelings for Rob. Something was definitely up with him. Then it suddenly hit her. “Jacques, are you in love with someone?”

  He gave her a stricken look. “It doesn’t matter. I don’t like this. I don’t want this.”

  “You are in love with someone.” And she knew, with certainty, that this someone wasn’t her. For a moment she felt a sting of hurt, but she and Jacques had always worked best together as friends. She knew that even before Rob Gabinarri returned to put a big crimp in her life.

  Jacques still wasn’t talking.

  “Why won’t you tell me?” she asked him. “You know you can trust me.”

  “Oh, I know. It’s just—I’m just—” He paused and she saw actual tears in his eyes. Tears she knew he wouldn’t let fall. “She’s a good friend, too, but there was always something…more to it. A spark of something beyond friendship, which made everything more frightening.”

  Elizabeth covered her mouth as the connections in her brain began to zig and zag and reach an amazing—but not really so unbelievable—conclusion. “Gretchen?” she whispered.

  Jacques nodded. “For maybe two years now,” he admitted. “She’s like the smell of bread dough rising. Like thick chocolate icing on a fresh pastry. Like powdered sugar on Mexican wedding cakes.” He gave her a small smile. “Like all the things I love best.”

  “Does she know how you feel?”

  A single tear escaped his eye, but he brushed it away before it rolled down his cheek. “I was going to try to tell her yesterday. Then I saw her with Rob. And I realized that, even if there’s nothing between them, she has higher standards than just me.” He looked utterly, inconsolably miserable.

  “Jacques, don’t say things like. It’s so, so not true. You’re a wonderful man who’s incredibly caring. Gretchen, or any woman, would be delighted to know you were interested in her. Even when I knew you were just playing around with the marriage proposals, I was still flattered that you’d thought enough of me to pretend.” She took his hands in her. “Please, d-don’t sell yourself short.”

  “Guys like Rob are tall. They have a head full of hair, muscles and no flab. They don’t have a silly accent and they know how to play all sports. There’s no comparison between him and me.”

  “But Jacques, you and Gretchen can literally see eye-to-eye. She laughs when she’s with you and has told me a trillion times that she loves your French accent and wishes it were even thicker.”

  This made him grin. “Really?”

  “Oh, yes. And you know darned well that appearances aren’t everything. Hair and flab don’t matter where there’s true affection.”

  He tilted his head to one side and regarded her strangely. “You believe this?”

  She paused for a moment of personal honesty. “Well—” she began.

  “You’re saying you believe, although your hair was so frizzy and you were a little chubby in high school, that these things didn’t matter? That a boy who cared about you wouldn’t have cared about those features? What you always considered to be your flaws?” He shook his head. “Mais non, il n’est-ce pas vrai. It’s not true that you believe this.”

  “But that was high school, Jacques, not now. That same kind of shallowness doesn’t hold up anymore. We’re all smarter and wiser. At least most of us are.” She grinned at him and tried to make herself project total belief in this position despite all of her evidence opposing it.

  If only Rob would have ever said that he thought she was beautiful to him. He must’ve said a thousand times he thought she was brilliant. But, to her, that was decades-old praise. And, perhaps her grand wish was just an expression of human nature. Everybody craved the one compliment they never got.

  Jacques still looked sad as he stood up and tossed the rest of his blueberry muffin in the trash. “Ah, mon amie, thank you for the advice. I will consider every thought. Although—” He grinned. “I’ll wait for the next batch of muffins you bake, if you don’t mind. Those were dreadful, you know.”

  “I know,” she said, pitching the remaining ones into the trash bin one at a time as Jacques left. Without Rob, most everything was dreadful.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Rob found himself on US-41 driving a good twenty miles per hour above the speed limit. He didn’t care. He was headed southbound to Chicago and, by God, he couldn’t get there soon enough.

  There were times in a man’s life when standing and fighting were the best options. There were also times to head for the hills. Or, in his case, a high-rise condo overlooking the Windy City’s Lake Shore Drive. Go Bears.

  Even now, an hour later, he still couldn’t believe what he’d overheard. Monsieur Jacques saying so breezily to his secret love interest, “Rob—he’s a short-term thing, yes?”

  And Elizabeth—damn her!—saying, “I suppose so.”

  And then the two of them mumbled some stuff he couldn’t hear because he was too busy picking his heart up off the floor. Oh, except for the last, extra-special bit: “Why don’t you marry me, Elizabeth?”

  Why? He could sure give good ole Jacques a few hundred reasons why not…in English or in français, for that matter. He’d taken two whole years of French in high school. He could put a few fairly graphic sentences together if he ever found his battered old dictionary.

  He stepped a little harder on the gas pedal.

  Huh. So that’s how it was, then. Elizabeth…and Jacques. He knew there’d been something simmering between them, even if she hadn’t fully opened her eyes to it. Why had he ever overlooked, overruled, overridden his first impression? The casual friendship those two shared. All that time spent baking and talking about recipes together. They had mutual interests. And what could he add to the conversation? “I used to play football a lot. Cool, eh?”

  Rob saw the police siren before he heard it but, no doubt about it, the black-and-white car was headed toward him.

  “Oh, hell.”

  He pulled over and the officer got out and sidled up to his Porsche.

  “Nice car,” she said.

  And he thought, Nice body, nice lips, nice skin… But he said, “Thanks.”

  She asked for his driver’s license. “You realize you were go
ing close to thirty miles above the speed limit, Mr. Gabinarri, don’t you?”

  He nodded then managed to shoot a warm smile at her.

  She grinned back. Attractive lady, no doubt. But, dammit, not his particular type of attractive these days.

  “No way are you getting out of this speeding ticket,” she told him. “And it’s going to be an expensive one.”

  He sighed and squeezed his eyes shut while she did all of her police officer stuff back in the squad car. A few minutes later she came back, notepad in hand.

  “Here you go,” she said, scribbling down the rest of his ticket information. One that probably would have his insurance company tossing him in driving school.

  “Um, thanks,” he said, when she handed the paper to him. He noticed an address scrawled on the top and glanced up at her in question.

  She winked. “If you’re free after five, I’ll be a little place called the Silver Stallion, a bar about a mile and a half east of here.” She pointed to the street address she’d written on the page. “It’s easy to find. Any chance you might be able to swing by?”

  He struggled with his answer. Not because he didn’t want to tell the truth, but because he desperately wanted his lie to be the truth. “I don’t think so, ma’am. There’s a woman at home who’s waiting for me.”

  She shrugged and gave a good-natured laugh. “Oh, well. Lucky lady.” She waved him off but, before she walked back to her squad car, she added, “Drive back to her safely.”

  Rob thought about that comment (as he headed south and still further away from Elizabeth) for another ten miles before pulling off into a gas station along the side of the highway.

  “Hi, Miguel,” he said into his cell phone. “How’s it going down there?” I’m only about seventy minutes away. Tell me you need me back right now. I need a good excuse to leave Wilmington Bay for twenty-four hours and you’re my only chance, buddy.

  “Awesome, Boss Man.”

  So much for that idea.

  “Hey, have you got any more of that winning Fourth-of-July topping?” Miguel asked. “That Hawaiian Mix? The Playbook’s dinner crowd is going crazy for it.”

  “Sure, I could get some to you, though it’s pretty easy to make,” Rob said.

  He explained to Miguel that the winner of the Topping Taste Test had brought a combo of macadamia nuts, dark chocolate chips and coconut shavings. The runner-up was the person with the candied pineapple bits. Put them all together and you get what they’d been calling the Hawaiian Mix for the past two weeks. It’d been Tutti-Frutti’s biggest hit since the contest, and he’d shipped some down for Miguel to experiment with at the restaurant.

  “Why don’t I bring you down a tub of it?” Rob suggested hopefully.

  “Nah, no need. I’ll get the dessert guys on the case now that I’m sure of the ingredients. You just deal with whatever you need to deal with up there. All’s well here.” His friend paused. “Unless you want to come back, Rob. I mean, I’m not trying to keep you away. It’s your place, after all.”

  He thought about it, going purely on gut instinct. Did he want to go back to Chicago, or was he just trying to escape Wilmington Bay? Two different things, weren’t they? And, oh, the answer was obvious.

  “Guess I’ll stay here a little longer then,” he told Miguel. “I promised Uncle Pauly, after all. But call me if anything comes up.”

  “Likewise. And we’ll see you for sure in a few weeks.”

  “Right,” Rob said. But, for the first time, there was no thrill, no satisfaction associated with this thought. For the first time in a long time he was rearranging his definition of the word “home.”

  He got back on the Interstate, taking the northbound ramp, and began driving back to his hometown…at a very responsible speed.

  ***

  Elizabeth called Gretchen.

  “Hey, Gretch, any chance we could talk?”

  “Sure, what’s up? Everyone’s been acting so moody lately. Must be something they slipped into that Lake Michigan water.” She laughed at her own joke then sobered up. “Is there something serious happening, Elizabeth? Something I don’t know about?”

  Gretchen’s voice was so concerned, so very caring, that Elizabeth almost burst out with an apology for entertaining, even for a second, the idiotic notion that her best friend might try to sneak around with her boyfriend behind her back. If Rob even was her boyfriend anymore.

  One thing was certain, though. She owed Rob an apology for what she’d said to him.

  “No,” Elizabeth told her. “I—I just wanted to thank you for being such a true and loyal friend. And—and if you ever need someone to listen to you about relationship things, then I hope you’ll come to me.”

  Elizabeth thought she heard Gretchen sniff on the other end of the line.

  “Thanks,” Gretchen said. “But I think it’ll be a good long time before anyone’s interested in me. I’m glad Rob’s smart enough to see in you all the wonderful qualities that we’ve always known about. He’s a great guy. Gorgeous, too.” She paused. “But I don’t know if anyone is out there who’ll look at me that way. The men I’m attracted to…well, they have a tendency to think of me as their buddy. I’m too tall, too strong, too big-boned. Not one of those cute feminine women like you.”

  “What? Gretch, you’re totally beautiful! And not all men want a woman whom they can easily overpower. Trust me on this. You should hear Camden talk about Annabelle, Karate Queen Extraordinaire. He loves how strong she is.”

  “Camden isn’t the man I’m attracted to, though. I’m telling you, this guy thinks of me as a friend and that’s all. I mean it. Every time I start to wonder if there might be something more there, he backs away. He’s trying to protect me from myself, I just know it. He doesn’t want to break my heart.”

  Elizabeth’s eyes pricked with tears—tears of joy for two of her best friends who were about to realized they were meant for each other.

  “Uh, Gretch? Is there any chance that I know this guy-friend of yours?”

  There was a long pause.

  “Gretchen?”

  Then came a very small voice from the other side of the line. “Mais oui.”

  Elizabeth grinned and let the tears stream down her face.

  ***

  Inspired by the new love blooming between Jacques and Gretchen, and by their heartfelt declarations (albeit not yet to each other), Elizabeth decided she should try to make amends with Rob. So she called his mother.

  Alessandra Gabinarri greeted her suggestion with a whoop of delight and told her to come over immediately.

  She also called Tutti-Frutti and spoke with Nick, who’d switched with Jacques and was working an earlier shift today.

  “Nick, could you please tell Rob not to pick me up for dinner tonight? I’ll meet him at his mom’s.”

  “Sure,” he said. “I’ll tell the man just about anything you want once he comes in.”

  She looked at her watch. It was one o’clock. “What do you mean? He was supposed to be there three hours ago.”

  “Yep. But Gretch said he never showed for the first shift, and he’s still not here. He left a way weird message on my voicemail, though. Said he’d be ‘back when he was back.’”

  Her throat tightened. “Did he sound hurt or in trouble or anything?”

  “Nope. Just kind of pissed.” Nick paused. “But, hey, if you wanna contact him so bad, why don’t you call his cell? Speak to him in person or leave a message?”

  “Um, that’s okay.”

  “Why?”

  How about: Because she was scared. Because she didn’t know if Rob would ever want to talk with her again after her little tantrum. Because sometimes love just wasn’t enough to overcome every obstacle.

  “B-Because I’m running late,” she said instead. “So, uh, thanks for your help. Please just tell him what I said if he comes in.” And if he doesn’t come in, then what? Will it be because he’s taken off for good?

  “Okey-dokey.”

&nb
sp; Then, thinking worst-case scenario thoughts, Elizabeth drove to the Gabinarri house.

  ***

  Rob meandered back toward Wilmington Bay, stopping at just about every roadside antique shop or cheese-n-sausage store in southeastern Wisconsin, and reacquainting himself with the native experience. Decided it was high time he bought himself a new “Badger” t-shirt and he’d been fresh out of salami cheese for probably eight years. He’d forgotten until today how much he’d liked them both.

  As he tossed his Abercrombie and Fitch shirt in the back seat and pulled on his new Badger one, he wondered about that. Wondered why people let certain things go, even when they loved them. Sometimes, maybe most times, it was because they wanted to move on to other things. Finer, maybe more preferable things.

  But sometimes that wasn’t the case at all. Every once in a while it was just because they’d gotten caught up in something that was different, but not necessarily better. Sometimes the original stuff was still the best.

  Feeling unbearably philosophical for someone who was neither drunk nor wearing a white clerical collar, he sat on the curb in the gift store’s parking lot, bit off a hunk of salami cheese and tried to figure out what to do with the rest of his life.

  His cell phone rang.

  “Hi, Mama,” he said, swallowing.

  “Don’t spoil your appetite, Roberto. We’re having a nice dinner tonight.”

  He looked around his Porsche for a hidden camera. How did she always know when he was doing something wrong? Not that eating between meals was a crime but—

  “Roberto?”

  “Yeah?”

  “I don’t know where you are right now, but I want you come home early tonight.”

  “Um, well…”

  “And you need to pick up some wine, too, capiche?”

  He groaned. “Yes, Mama, I understand.”

  “Good,” she said, sounding fairly satisfied. “Red wine, please. And don’t worry about getting Elizabeth.”