by Meg Muldoon
A little voice that had become ever noisier with the growing crowds gathering at my pie shop door every morning. A little voice that was telling me to keep my head down, work harder, develop, expand, and put everything I had into my business.
A little voice that was telling me I was on the verge of something big.
And that whatever was waiting for me on the other side of all of this hard work would vanish like smoke if I didn’t give it my all.
That little voice had been speaking loud and clear lately, yet I felt bad in some ways for listening to it so intently. For thinking only of myself and my career. For not thinking about Daniel and what he wanted, which I knew was a couple of little Cinnamons and Daniels running around our backyard.
And I couldn’t be sure that that little voice wasn’t just a voice of fear. Starting a family was a big deal, and something not to be taken lightly. Maybe I was afraid. Maybe it was as simple as that. Like the fears I’d had over getting married a second time.
Maybe if I just kept thinking about it, one day soon, I’d be able to wrap my mind around the idea of becoming a mother.
I knew I was facing the dilemma that so many women these days faced, including my best friend. Forced to juggle career and family, it seemed so easy to me for one or the other to get compromised.
But I guessed I wouldn’t know how it really was until I actually made the decision to—
I gasped loudly as a figure appeared at the kitchen window, seemingly from out of nowhere. A rush of air flooded my lungs, causing me to cough and sputter out my coffee.
A moment later, I slammed my mug down on the counter, and walked on over to the door, my heart thundering in my ears.
“Jeez, you scared the hell out of me,” I said, opening it. “What are you doing here?”
My heart was still beating like an oil barrel rolling downhill.
He looked like a deer in the headlights, clearly jarred by my reaction, though I didn’t know how else he expected me to react. Seeing a guy appear outside the window at this hour of the morning would have that effect on most people.
“I’m sorry,” he said quietly, his accent so thick I could hardly make out what he was saying. “I didn’t mean to frighten you.”
I held the door open farther and stepped out.
“I thought you weren’t coming in until eight,” I rasped. “It’s still dark.”
“I know,” he said. “But I don’t sleep all that much anyway, Mrs. Brightman. And I know that you were only trying to be nice earlier when you said for me to come at 8. Work at a bakery starts much earlier than that.”
I raised my eyebrows in surprise.
A teenager getting up this early had to be a damn sight rare on either side of the pond.
It seemed to me that maybe I heard him wrong or maybe it was some sort of cultural misunderstanding.
“So… you’re saying you want to get to work?”
Ian nodded.
“Well I’ll be,” I said, shaking my head in disbelief. “If that’s what you want to do, then I won’t argue. I’ll accept your offer gladly.”
I held the door open for him and he stepped inside, nearly having to duck to get past the low overhang of the doorjamb.
My quiet moment before the storm had come to an end.
But that was okay, I reckoned.
Because when it came to the Fourth of July this year, I was going to need all the help I could get and more.
Chapter 16
It wasn’t even 10 a.m. yet and the line was already clear out the door and beyond my view, meaning its end could have been anywhere between here and Rip Lawrence’s Back Alley Brewing on the far edge of town.
The storm of the century, as far as Cinnamon’s Pies was concerned, had arrived. A storm that none of us had seen the likes of ever before. Not even during the Thanksgiving pie season.
“I asked for the Moundful Marionberry,” a scrawny woman wearing an oversized, faded Hawaiian tourist shirt and wraparound sunglasses shouted over the patriotic brass music booming from the Main Street parade.
She pushed her plate of half-eaten pie and melted ice-cream toward me on the counter.
“This is some sort of mixed berry nonsense. Not the Marionberry I asked for.”
I shot a quick look over at Ian, who had been the one to help the woman a few minutes earlier.
It was the third such mistake he’d made in the last hour.
“I am so sorry about that,” I said, shooting the ornery tourist my best smile before quickly wiping away the dribble of sweat that had tracked down the side of my face. “Let me get you a fresh slice of the Marionberry. On the house, of course.”
“You know how long I waited in line for this?” the woman said, seemingly disregarding my attempts to make the mistake right.
I took her plate.
“Yes, I do know,” I said, getting her the slice. “And your patience is so very much appreciated.”
I got her a brand new plate with a larger-than-normal slice of Marionberry and extra ice cream. I handed it to her, along with her money.
“You have yourself a wonderful Fourth,” I said, forcing my smile so wide, my cheeks burned.
“I’d rather just get what I paid for,” she retorted, turning and walking away, her tennis shoes scuffing across my dining room floor.
Tiana looked over and rolled her eyes. And though it was a silly gesture, it went a ways toward making me feel better.
I went back to ringing up customers. It wasn’t something I normally did, but we needed all hands on deck. And since most of the pies had already been made early that morning, I put the extra time I had into helping Tiana, Tobias, and Ian in the front of the house.
“I’m sorry, Mrs. Brightman,” Ian said after coming back from the kitchen with a steaming stack of freshly-washed plates. “That was my fault. It won’t happen again.”
“It’s okay, Ian,” I said, having a feeling that it would indeed happen again. “It’s your first day, and you’re doing really good.”
He nodded, but he looked glum. As if he’d spilled a pot of hot coffee on somebody instead of harmlessly mixing up a pie order.
“Why don’t you take your break?” I said to him. “You’ve more than earned it.”
The line was long, but breaks were important. I’d always subscribed to what I called the Oregon Trail Logic when it came to my employees. Families on the trail in the olden days who took the Sunday Sabbath as a day of rest got to Oregon in the same amount of time, if not sooner, than families who hit the trail hard every day. Taking a few minutes out of the work day to breathe every now and then could do wonders.
Ian pulled out his phone from his apron pocket, looking at it. Then he nodded at me.
“I’ll take a short one,” he said.
He went into the back.
Thus far, Ian wasn’t all that great when it came to his customer service skills. He spoke quietly, and with that thick accent of his, he was almost impossible to understand. Not to mention the fact that he seemed to get the different pies confused pretty easily, and seemed pretty awkward when it came to interacting with the customers.
But in the kitchen, Ian had been completely different. He followed directions well and he seemed to have a natural sense when it came to ingredients. I’d left him in charge of making up a batch of crusts, and they’d turned out just as good as if I’d made them myself – something that didn’t sound all that hard to do, but in reality, was. For inexperienced chefs, it was often easy to measure ingredients incorrectly or touch the crust too much with their hands, or not salt it enough. But Ian had done none of those things.
I’d been somewhat impressed.
I rang up a couple of more tourists in Santa hats who looked like they’d been poolside all week without the good sense to wear sunscreen. I was just serving them some slices of the Orange Creamsicle when Tobias came up to me, looking like he had something rather urgent on his mind.
“Mrs. Brightman, I know we’ve got a big crow
d on our hands,” he said in a low voice, a stack of dirty, berry-stained plates in his hands. “But I… I was wondering if I could take my break now? Won’t be more than 15 minutes.”
I glanced at the line, wiping away another bead of sweat that was starting to dribble down my temple.
There was no end in sight. And I had just let Ian take his break.
But looking at Tobias, I couldn’t say no to his request: he looked like a man in dire need of a breather.
“Sure thing,” I said.
“Thank ya, miss. Thank ya.”
He quickly took off his apron before walking around the counter and out into the crowd, weaving his way through the tourists with some polite nudging.
I stole a glance in Tiana’s direction, a bad habit I’d acquired whenever Tobias left the room.
And even though she did her best to conceal it, I could tell:
She was as smitten as ever with Tobias.
I looked away and went about helping the next customer.
I wished there was something I could do to help make it easier for the two of them.
Chapter 17
“Happy Independence Day! What can I get for you this fine morning?”
The man next in line stroked his thick black beard and looked at the pie case intently, taking the decision as seriously as if he were buying a car.
It was the customer I called The Plaid Hipster.
I didn’t know the man’s name or what he did here in Christmas River or anything else about him. All I knew was that the man had started coming to the shop this spring, and since then, had become my most dependable regular. Every day, come rain, shine, or dustings of snow, The Plaid Hipster waited in the line, no matter how long it was, to get his daily pie fix. He took his decisions at the counter seriously, and he rotated the flavor variations frequently, never having the same pie two days in a row.
I called him The Plaid Hipster because of his penchant for black-rimmed glasses and tapered leg jeans and of course, for wearing plaid of every color and variety. He also had a brainy, no-nonsense disposition about him that was a hallmark of the typical hipster male. He was the very sort that had started frequenting my pie shop with more regularity since the Sunrise Magazine article had come out.
As the lines had been so long this summer, I hadn’t had much time to chat with him – something I liked doing with all my regulars under normal circumstances.
“Tell me about the Four Berry Pie,” he said, looking up from the pastry case, his bushy eyebrows still set in that intense expression.
“Of course. The Four Berry Pie is our Fourth of July special,” I said. “It’s a mix of blueberries, blackberries, cherries, and raspberries – all fresh from the Pacific Northwest, sitting pretty atop a creamy, sumptuous layer of vanilla pudding. And because we don’t want our pies to be too sweet, the Four Berry’s got just a splash of Grand Marnier to give it a little something extra. All of that goodness is wrapped in a flaky sea salt brown butter crust that I guarantee you’ve never tasted the likes of before.”
The corners of his mouth turned up at the last part.
“All right, you’ve convinced me,” he said. “I’ll take two slices of the Four Berry.”
“Good choice, sir.”
He moved on down to the other side of the counter where Tiana was serving up the orders.
“Happy Independence Day! How can I help you toda—”
I looked up at the next customer in line, but found my words drying up faster than a puddle of rainwater in the Mojave when I saw the group of girls standing there.
It wasn’t so much the group of college-age girls that made me stop midsentence as it was one girl in particular.
The tall redhead was dressed in a short, tight sundress with a low neckline. On her wrist, the former Christmas River High School prom queen carried a massively large Louis Vuitton. In her arms, she was carrying something else.
She was laughing in a grating, high-pitched tone at something one of her friends had just said.
Either she hadn’t heard me address her, or she was ignoring me. And knowing her, I figured it was probably the latter.
I felt my arms ball up into small fists at my side.
“I like dogs as much as anyone, Haley,” I said, glancing down at the prim and proper poodle in her arms. “But I’m afraid I can’t allow him in here.”
That got her attention. Haley Drutman, the daughter of George and Meredith Drutman, gave me a sharp look. The kind of look that her mom must have taught her before she was even old enough to walk.
I swear, no matter how I tried to avoid the Drutman family, they just had a way of always showing back up in my life.
My feud with the family wasn’t all that old: it only really became official this past November when Meredith, Haley’s mother and George’s wife, had insulted not only Tobias, but had also said some pretty vile things about an innocent 11-year-old boy.
But Meredith wasn’t the first Drutman I’d had a run-in with. The first one had been Haley, and it had been several Christmases ago. Haley had mistakenly thought me a romantic rival for Deputy Owen McHale, and had called me something along the lines of a cradle-robbing cougar, if I remember correctly.
Haley, who I figured was back in town from college for the summer, glared at me now.
“I see you come in with that black dog all the time,” one of Haley’s friends said, stepping in. “Seems kind of hypocritical to me.”
I shifted my weight onto my other foot and bit my lip to keep from saying what I really wanted to.
I didn’t have time for this today.
“Well, I own the damn place,” I said. “Now I’ll take your order, Haley, but you’re going to have to wait outside with your dog.”
“Naw,” she said. “I didn’t come for pie, anyway.”
She stared me down. A stare that was unmistakable in its hatred.
“Stay away from my family, cougar. Or you’ll be sorry.”
Her friends laughed.
I found that I was completely speechless.
Both at her utter rudeness, and at how completely out of line she was, considering how her father had almost run me over.
I was about to say as much, but she was already leaving the line.
“C’mon, girls.”
I watched as she exited the pie shop, feeling the hair on the back of my neck stand up on end.
I was so sick of that damn family.
Chapter 18
When I walked into the kitchen to grab a stack of clean plates from the dishwasher, I found a 6-foot 3-inch tall elf rifling through one of my cookbooks.
“What the—”
He slammed the book down, whirling around to face me.
I placed the stack of dirty plates that I was carrying down on the counter and stared at him, perplexed.
The man had never once come to my establishment for a slice of pie the entire time he’d run the brewery down the street. Now he was here, looking like a North Pole reject, manhandling one of my cookbooks on the busiest day in the pie shop’s history.
He smiled. The expression looked all wrong on him.
“Didn’t mean to startle you, Cinnamon,” he said, surprising me even more by the fact that he actually knew my name.
“What are you doing here?” I said. “Shouldn’t you be at the parade?”
“The Beer Elf needed a break,” Rip Lawrence said, taking off his hat and running a hand through his matted, oily hair. “And as to your question, well, I’ve got something I need to talk to you about.”
The surprises just kept coming.
Rip Lawrence needed to talk to me about something?
“Well, now’s not the best time,” I said. “I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but I’m kind of in the middle of the busiest day of the year here.”
Most folks, I would have made time for, easy. But I didn’t much care for Rip. And him flashing a smile or two my way and knowing my name for once wasn’t going to change that.
&nbs
p; “That’s fine,” he said. “I was thinking later anyway. Your grandfather told me that you’re going to be helping out at his brewery tonight. Can we talk sometime then? Maybe after the fireworks?”
I crossed my arms, leaning back on my heels.
“What’s all this about anyway?”
I didn’t like the look in his eye. There was something malicious there. Something that chilled me right down to my bones, though I couldn’t rightly explain why.
“Something about a mutual friend of ours,” he said.
“My grandfather?”
“I’ll explain it all later,” he said, backing away. “But let’s just say this is the kind of news you’d be interested in. For now, though, you go back to baking your pies, little Cinnamon.”
I watched as he headed out the back door. The same door he’d walked in without being invited.
He paused for a second before stepping out, glancing back toward me.
“Say,” he said. “Whatever happened to that hot friend of yours?”
I narrowed my eyes at him.
“Are you talking about Kara?”
“Yeah. That’s right. Kara.”
Christmas River was a small town. But for someone like Rip, who mostly stuck to his own circles, it seemed plausible that he might not have heard about or talked to Kara in a long time.
“She’s happily married with a brand new baby,” I said.
He smiled, stroking his beard some.
Then he chuckled. A scratchy, grating chuckle.
“Well, isn’t that nice,” he said. “But you tell her should she ever find herself unhappily married sometime, my door’s always open.”
He sighed nostalgically.
“I always did have a soft spot for that girl.”
I felt the vomit reflexes in the back of my throat contract.
“Well, I don’t know about that,” I said. “What I do know is that you were pretty damn good at making her think you did.”
He smiled again.
“Aw, you’ve got it all wrong. That angel just came into my life at the wrong time,” he said, placing a hand over his heart. “I was involved with somebody back then, you see. And Kara was practically jail bait, anyway. I was only looking out for her.”
