Just Desserts Page 3

  “Maybe she misses us.”

  “Have you met your grandmother? She loves us, but we’re not the center of her life.” She didn’t mean to sound harsh but that was the reality of being the daughter of a renowned scientist. The work took precedence over everything else.

  “Aunt Fiona said Meals On Wheels won’t be delivering tomorrow so maybe we could bring her some mac and cheese or something.”

  “We’ll do better than that,” Hayley said. “I’ll put a pot roast in the slow cooker in the morning. We’ll bring her a feast with all the trimmings.”

  Fiona was Jane’s younger sister. Hayley had stayed with Fiona and her late husband during junior and senior year of high school. The fact that Aunt Fee deserved the Croix de Guerre wasn’t lost on her.

  “Ms. Hughes e-mailed the schedule for next month’s mentor meetings. She also wants to know if you could take on two more boys from the vo-tech.”

  “If they don’t mind heavy lifting, tell her absolutely.”

  “Ginger’s driving down to Philly next week. She wants to know if you can get away for lunch.”

  “I’ll call her later.”

  “Aunt Paula wants to know if you’re bringing the circular needles to the knit-in at the Friends of the Library party on Friday.”

  “Good thing you reminded me,” Hayley said. “I totally forgot.”

  “Aunt Karen and Aunt Dianne IM’d. They said Aunt Paula’s turned into a knitting nazi and they blame you.”

  Paula, Karen, and Dianne were Hayley’s best friends since high school. They were the backbone of Lakeside’s Friends of the Library. The fact that a knit-in attracted more guests than anything book related wasn’t lost on any of them.

  Hayley laughed. “I’ll take care of it later.”

  “I paid the utility bill,” Lizzie said, “the prop tax, and the quarterlies. Do you want to pay the restaurant supply store in full or in two installments?”

  “You decide,” Hayley said. Nothing like having a fourteen-year-old financial genius in the family.

  “In full,” Lizzie said with assurance. “We don’t need more bills hanging over our heads.”

  “Amen to that.”

  “Don’t forget I’m having supper at Aunt Michelle’s tonight. She wants me to run TurboTax on last year’s returns.”

  Hayley tried not to dwell on the fact that her former sister-in-law still hadn’t filed her tax returns. “Stuffed peppers?”

  “Aunt Michelle’s gone veggie. They’re stuffed with tofu.”

  “I’ll have nightmares all night,” Hayley said with a shiver. “I want you home by ten. Tell Michie she has to drive you. On second thought, I’ll call and tell her myself.” She wanted to remind her former sister-in-law that she was scheduled to open the bakery on Saturday while Hayley and Lizzie went on Lakeside High School’s mentoring program spring picnic.

  “I can walk.”

  “Not at ten o’clock at night, you can’t.”

  “Lakeside is one of the safest towns in New Jersey. I read the state demographics on safety and—”

  “You’re not walking home alone. If Michie doesn’t want to drive you, call me and I’ll pick you up.”

  “I’m fourteen. I can—”

  “No.”

  Lizzie’s jaw stiffened and Hayley had a quick flashback to a stubborn two-year-old pitching a fit on the floor of the produce department of ShopRite. Where had the years gone?

  The dark cloud lifted as quickly as it had appeared and Lizzie promised she wouldn’t walk home.

  “Now scram,” Hayley ordered as her daughter grabbed another cookie, “or I’ll have one hundred angry Cumberland County real estate agents screaming for my head tonight.”

  Lizzie darted back upstairs and Hayley tried to center her thoughts for what seemed like the thousandth time that afternoon. Working with rolled fondant wasn’t her favorite thing in the world, but it wasn’t exactly making phyllo dough by hand either.

  It shouldn’t be a big deal but today it was. For some reason, everything had felt like a big deal today.

  She had woken up feeling unsettled for no reason that she could figure out, as if something was looming just out of sight, waiting to pounce like a monster in one of the horror movies on late-night TV.

  “Maybe Lizzie’s right,” she mumbled as she manipulated the fondant into position on the next layer. She had turned worry into an Olympic event. Creative types were supposed to drift through life without a care. Where had she gone wrong?

  She had a brilliant mother, a budding genius daughter, and a thriving business.

  Why not relax and enjoy?

  Other people were able to relax and enjoy at the drop of a hat. Her mother had been known to fall into a deep, rejuvenating sleep in the middle of turbulence over the Indian Ocean. Her daughter had an ability to live happily in the moment that would throw the Dalai Lama into a swoon of spiritual envy.

  When life was running smoothly, Hayley worried that she wasn’t worrying enough, at which point life usually gave her something to worry about.

  Funny how it always seemed to work out that way.

  It was probably fate’s funny little way of paying her back for all the worry she’d caused Aunt Fee and Uncle Bernie when she was a teenager.

  Trish and Rachel were up front manning the counter. Lizzie was upstairs thinking great thoughts. The family pets were all accounted for. She could spend a little time worrying about living under the same roof with her mother, her daughter, three cats, a dog, and a parrot, but that seemed excessive even to Hayley.

  Murmuring a prayer to Elizabeth of Hungary, patron saint of bakers, she got back to work.

  “I don’t get it,” Anton said as Finn hung a left onto Lakeside’s tree-lined Main Street. “Why don’t you just ask one of the chefs at the hotel to make a fancy cake for the after-party?”

  A four-hour drive to a family bakery in a small South Jersey town for a layer cake was hard to explain.

  Not to mention the fact that Finn was a lousy liar. Sins of omission. Plain old evasion. And that old legal standby: obfuscation. He was no damn good at any of them.

  “He wants a cake from Goldy’s Bakery.”

  “Why?”

  “Why?” Finn parroted. “What are you, four years old? Because he wants it.” Superstars wanted what they wanted at the exact moment they wanted it, and as a general rule nobody on the payroll ever asked why.

  At least not to the superstar’s face.

  “You know I’ll figure it out sooner or later.”

  Anton was his closest friend. He would trust the guy with his life, but not with Tommy’s secrets.

  “When you do, explain it to me,” Finn said. “I didn’t see this one coming.”

  He had done everything he could to talk Tommy out of this, with no luck. “What’s the problem?” Tommy had asked him during one particularly heated exchange late last night. “I’m not trying to hurt her. No matter which way it plays out, she’s in a win-win situation.”

  Finn didn’t believe in win-win situations. Somebody always came out on the short end of the winning stick and normally it was his job to make sure it wasn’t Tommy Stiles. In a perfect world, the idea made perfect sense: a business transaction conducted in a public venue with little chance for messy emotions to come into play. Unfortunately Finn knew Tommy too well. The second he saw this woman who might be his daughter, logic and reason would fly out the window and they would all end up screwed.

  “That’s it?” Anton said. “That’s all you’re gonna give me?”

  “I shouldn’t have given you that much.”

  “This better be some cake,” Anton muttered.

  “Looking to steal a few trade secrets?”

  “I’m an amateur, baby,” Anton said with a laugh, “but I wouldn’t mind copping a few riffs from a master baker.”

  “You’re sounding cynical, m’man. She’s supposed to be damn good.”

  “I’ll be the judge of that.” Anton had taken a few series o
f classes at the Culinary Institute upstate and periodically threatened to quit the band and cook full time.

  “We’re looking for Goldy’s,” Finn said as he rolled to a stop at a traffic light. “Number four eighteen.”

  A bank. A card shop. A one-hour photo shop with a FOR RENT sign in the window. Blockbuster. Two dentists. One gynecologist. A holistic therapist who sold handmade candles on the side.

  East Hamptonites liked to say they moved out to the end of Long Island for the “small-town” atmosphere, but they were kidding themselves. The Hamptons had become Manhattan East, almost as fast-paced, and definitely as competitive as anything you’d find on the little island on the other side of the East River.

  Lakeside was the real deal and it would send most of them screaming for their air-conditioned Range Rovers.

  “Up there,” Anton said, pointing. “Next to the dry cleaners. Somebody just pulled out.”

  Finn angled Tommy’s shiny black Escalade into the parking spot. He was beginning to see the hand of fate at work.

  “It’s small,” Anton said, gesturing toward the storefront with the sign GOLDY’S…SINCE 1969 stenciled across the plate-glass window. An old man sat on a lawn chair in front of the dry cleaners next door and watched them the way most men watched the Super Bowl.

  “It’s Jersey,” Finn said with a shrug.

  Which pretty much explained everything.

  Trish, one of the high school girls Hayley was currently mentoring, burst into the kitchen looking like she had just bumped into Justin Timberlake and then ricocheted off Johnny Depp.

  “There’s two guys outside who want to see you and they’re unbelievably hot!” Trish was seventeen, the age when the arrival of any biped with a Y chromosome rated a breathless announcement. “One of them looks like a rock star from, you know, way back in the eighties.”

  Ouch. She had been Trish’s age in the eighties.

  “A rock star?” she asked, lifting a brow. Rock stars were in short supply in Lakeside.

  “A rock star,” Trish confirmed. “And he’s wearing leather.”

  There was only one reason an aging leather-clad hottie would show up at Goldy’s Bakery at three o’clock on a Wednesday afternoon and it had nothing to do with brownies, cheesecake, or bagels.

  “Tell him Mr. Goldstein doesn’t live here anymore.” And that Mrs. Goldstein couldn’t be happier about it. Not even sending him his monthly share of the store’s profits dimmed her joy.

  “But he didn’t ask for Mr. Goldstein. He asked for you.”

  Why did that surprise her? She was the Goldstein with a bank balance, after all. It had been a while since someone had come looking for her ex but the knot in her stomach was painfully familiar. The faint stench of danger still lingered in the air. She wished she had a dollar for every angry enabler who had shown up at Goldy’s in search of the reluctant Mr. Goldstein. She’d be able to buy him out once and for all and still have money to spare.

  “Then tell him I’m not here.”

  “But, Mrs. G., I already told him you were.”

  “Then tell him the truth,” she said. “I’m busy working on a cake that should have been finished an hour ago. I can’t spare a second.” And here she’d thought her life would settle down after Michael moved to Florida to mooch off his mother. The man’s problems had the half-life of uranium.

  Trish rearranged her pretty features into an even prettier frown. “He really wants to see you, Mrs. G. Maybe—”

  Hayley could feel the hot breath of the Cumberland County Association of Female Realtors on the back of her neck. She whipped out The Look, the same look every mother on the planet had down cold, aimed it in Trish’s direction, then hoped for the best.

  “I’ll tell him,” Trish mumbled, then pushed through the swinging door to deliver the bad news.

  The Look had stopped working on Lizzie when she was seven, but it was nice to know she still had enough maternal firepower at her command to keep her young staff in line.

  She pressed her ear against the swinging door but she couldn’t make out Trish’s words, just a high apologetic string of female sounds that was followed by a male rumble. Leather Boy had a good voice, baritone, a little smoky. She couldn’t make out his words either but Trish’s answering giggle conjured up some painful memories of herself at that age.

  First a girl giggled, then she sighed, and the next thing you knew she was in Vegas taking her wedding vows in front of a red-haired Elvis with an overbite. You knew you had made a bad choice when Elvis slipped you his divorce lawyer’s business card while you were still shaking the rice from your hair.

  She listened closer. Trish said something girly. Leather Boy rumbled something manly. This time Rachel, her other counter girl for the week, giggled too, a sound that sent Hayley’s maternal early-warning system into overdrive.

  Rachel Gomez was a serious straight-A student bound for Princeton next year on full scholarship. She needed the paycheck more than any mentoring Hayley might have provided her. Rachel had probably never giggled before in her life.

  If Rachel giggled, then even Lizzie might not be immune. Fourteen was when it started, that fizzy sensation in your veins, the yearning for things you couldn’t define, the sudden realization that boys were infinitely more interesting than global warming or the fate of the humpback whale.

  Fourteen was also when young girls parted company with their self-confidence and traded in their love of math and science for a date for the prom.

  Sometimes she wanted to lock Lizzie away in her room with her computer, her books, and a cell phone (maybe), and not let her out again until she was twenty-one. Thirty sounded better but even fantasies had their limits. The advisor at Olympia Prep had suggested that Lizzie might be better served intellectually by skipping the rest of high school and starting college in the fall but Hayley was dead set against it. Lizzie might be brilliant when it came to science but when it came to life, she was still only fourteen.

  The world could be a scary place. A mother did her best to protect her kid from fast cars, drunk drivers, broken bones, flu, the common cold, but there was nothing she could do to protect her kid from growing up. No matter what you did or how well you did it, your little girl wasn’t going to stay a little girl. Right before your eyes she was going to grow up on you anyway and all you could do was pray she didn’t follow in your foolish footsteps.

  Once upon a time, Hayley had believed that a good woman (her) could turn a bad boy (her ex) into a knight in shining armor (pure fantasy). Ten years of marriage to Michael Goldstein had finally drummed the truth into her head. People didn’t change with time. They just became more of who they were to begin with.

  In the real world bad boys didn’t turn into knights in shining armor. Bad boys grew up to be even worse men and the world would be a much happier place if little girls were taught that basic fact along with their ABCs.

  Why didn’t women teach their young how to cope with the things that were really important instead of how to walk in their first pair of heels? Why didn’t they make a point of sitting their girl children down and telling them the truth about men instead of letting some guy in a leather jacket seduce them over a tray of black-and-white cookies?

  That was one of the many reasons why she had helped institute the mentoring program at the high school. Lizzie claimed her overflow worrying needed an outlet but it went far deeper. She saw herself in those girls, insecure, struggling, hungry for love, and ready to hand over their futures to the first guy who came along.

  Those idiot girls out there were like ripe fruit on a very low-hanging branch. The slightest breeze would be enough to shake them from the tree and into the waiting arms of Leather Boy or someone just like him and their entire lives would be changed forever.

  Except it wasn’t going to happen on her watch. With apologies to the good real estate agents of Cumberland County, it was time to prepare for battle.

  3

  “Stay here,” Finn said to Anton. “I’
m going to make a call.”

  He smiled at the dark-haired counter girl who was pretending she wasn’t listening and ducked out to phone Tommy. The old man was no longer sitting in front of the dry cleaners. He was perched in the window looking out. The wind had kicked up and a light rain was falling. He ducked under the bakery awning but couldn’t get cell service on his phone.

  He finally managed a connection by climbing into the backseat of the car and leaning against the window.

  He dialed Tommy’s cell and was flipped immediately to voice mail. He hung up, then dialed again just in case. Same thing.

  “Damn,” he muttered. He had forgotten all about the daylong string of interviews Tommy was giving in support of next week’s hospital benefit.

  It was probably a waste of time but he left a message.

  “Listen, I’m here in front of the bakery. I’ll do it if you feel that strongly about it, but as your attorney and your friend, I thought it was in your best interest to give you one more chance. I’ll call you when we’re on our way back.”

  Finn had no compelling argument on his side. No relevant facts or figures to help plead his case. Just a gut-deep instinct that this was the wrong way to go.

  He punched in the number for the house and was routed to voice mail there too.

  Calling Willow’s cell didn’t strike him as a good idea. That would make one hell of a voice mail message. Hey, Willow. I’m trying to find Tom. Tell him I’m parked in front of the bakery owned by his (maybe) thirty-eight-year-old daughter who’s the ex-wife of a guy who has more judgments against him than you have Vogue covers…

  Nope. Not a good idea.

  It’s not your life, he told himself. Not his family. No matter how close he was to the extended Stiles clan, he was still an outsider. He could advise, he could warn, he could question, but when push came to shove Tommy was the one driving the bus.

  All he could do was pray he wouldn’t drive that bus right off a cliff.

  The last time Hayley had seen that much leather was at a Village People reunion concert in Atlantic City fifteen years ago. This guy was basically wearing a longhorn. Leather pants. Leather vest. He probably chewed leather instead of tobacco. He was built like a wrestler, stocky and muscular with forearms larger than most people’s thighs. He sported the requisite tats, diamond studs, and more rings than fingers. His shaved head gleamed under the fluorescent light.