Life is Sweet (7 page)

Olivia shrugged. “I'm sorry I blurted out the bit about Grover and his brother spitting on Walt. I didn't mean to tell him that part. I hope he's not upset.”

“He'll be okay. He's survived worse, I think.”

Her attempt to make Olivia feel better caused Matthew to smile in gratitude. He mouthed a thank-you at Becca and pulled Olivia away, back toward home.

“It would be so awesome if I could learn to ride,” she said, obviously unable to suppress the dream. “And on Harvey!”

“I know, but . . .”

“Mom'll never let me,” she finished for him. “Why does she have to be against the one thing I really want?”

“She's looking out for you. She doesn't want you to get hurt.”

Olivia rolled her eyes. “I wouldn't get hurt. Doesn't she know what this means to me? It's all I ever talk about.”

“But you've probably wanted other things and then forgotten about them once you had them.” He was thinking about her Xbox, which she seemed freakishly indifferent to.

She crossed her arms as she marched alongside him. “When I grow up, I'm going to get a horse, and maybe I'll go to the Olympics and get a gold medal. And then Mom'll see that she was wrong.”

He would have smiled, but her solemn expression sobered him. It would be easy to shrug off her words as the dreams of a ten-year-old. But if ten-year-olds didn't dream big—and occasionally realize those dreams—where would the world be?

“I wish you could talk to her,” she said.

“I do, too,” he said. “But she's your mom, and I'm . . .”

Olivia's head bobbed in a sage nod. “I know—she'll never listen to you. You're just the babysitter.”

 

After closing, Becca rushed upstairs to get ready for Not-Book-Club night. Her apartment, which for untold years had been used as warehouse space above the hardware store, remained half-finished—a testament to her weak financial planning skills. The only part she had renovated was the kitchen, because she'd had to install it from scratch and fixing it up had cost more than she expected. So now one side of the cavernous loft held a gourmet kitchen with granite counters, custom cabinets, the biggest refrigerator she could afford, and an island surrounded by almost-comfortable bar stools. The rest of the place was rough exposed brick and unfinished Sheetrock, peeling ceiling and window paint, pitted flooring and baseboards missing in action.

For a while, she'd tried to use partitions to divide the open room into homey stations—a living room station, a study area, her bedroom. But after Erin had dubbed her décor “call center cozy,” she'd scrapped most of the partitions. Now there remained just one decorative screen blocking off her bed and old wardrobe from the kitchen. Although sometimes she wondered why she bothered. Except on Not-Book-Club nights, she was the only person up here.

Still, she thanked heaven for the screen now as she tossed unfolded laundry, shoes, and cat toys behind it. Then she did a quick sweep of the wide pine plank floors.

Soon after she moved to Leesburg, she'd bought the building with the intention of opening the bakery on the ground floor and renting out the upstairs. By the time of her wedding, the loft still remained unrenovated and unrented. In hindsight, she suspected there was a subconscious reason she'd set the rent so high that she'd had no takers. Even before the wedding, when she'd debated the wisdom of marrying Cal so quickly and moving out to Butternut Knoll, the thought
if it doesn't work out there's always the warehouse
had flitted through her mind on more than one occasion. The memory made her cringe in shame. Jumping into a marriage with one eye on the groom and one eye on an escape hatch/refuge had been wrong. Just wrong. She'd been old enough to know better, but foolish enough to plunge ahead anyway.

The marriage, of course, was a huge misstep, which she'd realized almost before the ink was dry on the license. The only thing she could say in her defense was that she'd tried to right the wrong as soon as possible, moving into the warehouse before their six-month anniversary had rolled around.

She performed a swift tidying up of the kitchen, and went over her one rug with the vacuum, which never failed to send the cats scurrying under the bed. Seeing as how they had both been rescued from much rougher lives as barn cats, Willie and Cash should have been fearless. Willie, a scrappy gray tabby, was three-legged, and her black cat, Cash, was missing an eye. Both were old-to-ancient. Cal had been contemplating putting them down before a fox finished them off, the fate of one of their contemporaries, so Becca had stepped in and brought them to the loft. Except for their terror of the vacuum, they had made the transition from near-feral barn cats to pampered feline domestic royalty surprisingly well. To spare their feelings, she ran the vile machine as rarely as possible. Also, she hated to vacuum.

Pam was the first to arrive. She eyed the ubiquitous cupcakes Becca had arranged on a platter and sighed. “I brought a salad assortment.”

“I thought you were going to make lasagna.”

“I was.” She nodded toward the cupcakes. “But lately I've been eating so many of those little bastards, I have to go light to compensate. Ever since I started working at the shop, my diet consists of equal parts butter, sugar, and celery.”

“I know that feeling. In the beginning, about eighty percent of my daily intake of calories was cupcakes.” Now that her recipes needed less “testing” and her days weren't quite so frantic, she'd achieved a better nutritional equilibrium.

“And yet you're still thin,” Pam said in disgust. “Must be your Hollywood genes.”

That was rich. In Hollywood, during her worst gawky adolescent phase, she'd been hanging out offstage during a long day of filming when she'd overheard the director tell someone to “get the little heifer onto the set, pronto.” She'd laughed to herself and peered through a crack in the wall to see who would be dragged onstage. Abby Wooten had been really snarky to her lately, so she'd secretly hoped it was her.

Becca was still peeking when the assistant director had tugged on her sleeve.

“You're needed, kiddo,” he'd said.

She could still remember flailing through the next scene, heat shooting through her body in waves. She'd only had two lines of dialogue, but her flubs had caused six retakes. Just moving her arms and legs had required effort—with every movement of her awkward body, she could feel the director's cold eye on her. Even her mouth and lungs couldn't seem to coordinate that day. She wondered how many others on the set had caught the “little heifer” comment. When she looked over and saw Abby's smirk, she had her answer. Everybody had heard it.

Usually she was able to laugh at herself, but not that afternoon. She had been too worried that she'd open her mouth and a ruminant bray would come out.

“They want waifs,” her agent had said sharply, months later when she was out of work. “Waifs are in. Or gamins. Maybe when you get a growth spurt and you lose that daddy-long-legs thing, you'll be a gamin.”

The growth spurt had come, but gamin or not, casting directors no longer cared. By that time, Becca's name had become synonymous with cancelled sitcoms and shelved pilots. She'd lost her momentum. The only other part of any significance came when she was almost fifteen, when she'd gotten the mean girl guest part in
Malibu High School
. Abby was a regular cast member on the show, playing the queen bee mean girl at MHS. After a few episodes, the producers suddenly decided that they had one meanie too many, and sent Becca's character over a cliff in a convertible. The fiery crash had also finished off her career, and any semblance of friendship with Abby.

During her late teens and early twenties, she'd told herself that she didn't care, that she could fit in somewhere else. She found a job with a production company when she'd dropped out of college, but working behind the scenes had never felt right, either.

So, no, she didn't carry the Hollywood gene, whatever that was. She just bore the scars. But that was hard to explain without provoking a cry-me-a-river reaction. Most people didn't get the concept of being washed up at the age of fifteen, or couldn't guess what it felt like to become a has-been before you'd ever had a chance to consciously decide to be anything.

To divert the conversation onto a more pleasant topic, she snapped open Pam's Tupperware lids and hunted down serving spoons. “The stuff you brought looks yummy.”

Pam sighed, and Becca sensed it wasn't about the food. “What are you going to do about Walt?” Pam asked her.

“Why should I have to do anything about him? He's fine.”

“No, he's not. He's a hobo with a criminal record.”

She'd felt compelled to warn Pam about Walt's jail time, since she would probably be in the store alone with him from time to time. “He's not a hobo,” she said. “He has a place to live.”

Mentioning the Marquis didn't help her case any. The whole town knew what Pam thought of that seedy place. “He passed out on the sidewalk,” Pam said.

“He just nodded off. It could've happened to anybody.”

“On a bench?” Pam shot her a disbelieving stare. “Who does that?”

Hobos, Becca thought.

“Also, have you noticed his skin? It's so flaky you can see it coming off of him in drifts. It's disgusting.”

“Okay, so he's a little crusty.” Becca uncorked a bottle of wine. “Have some sympathy. He's old, poor, and he lives in a noisy apartment complex.”

“He's not that old. He's still young enough to be a serial killer,” Pam said. “Anyway, lots of people are old, and they don't sleep on the job.”

Becca poured out two glasses. “I'm not going to fire him for falling asleep on a break.” She wasn't Steve. “That's what breaks are for.”

Pam drummed her nails on the granite. “You'll feel different about your protégé when you discover he's taken all the money from the register and hotfooted it out of town.”

“That's not going to happen.”

“Wanna bet?”

Becca thought for a moment before she decided to call Pam's bluff. By the time Erin knocked at the door, twenty dollars was riding on the chance that Walt would rob her blind.

“Great,” Becca said as she went to answer the door. “If I lose, I'll be broke. I'll have to borrow the twenty dollars from you to pay off the debt.”

Pam laughed. “You're right. Either way, I'm out twenty dollars.”

Erin crossed the threshold, nonplussed by their laughter. “What's so funny?”

“We were placing bets on whether Becca's new employee will rip her off.”

“The hobo?” Erin asked.

Becca sighed. Maybe she was fighting a losing battle. But she wasn't ready to give up on Walt yet. She told him she'd keep him on for a couple of weeks, and that was what she intended to do.

Erin put her clutch purse down on the counter, handed Becca a baguette and another bottle of wine, and perched on a bar stool next to Pam.

“I heard you have a boyfriend,” Erin said to Becca. “Some dreamy single dad who likes cupcakes.”

Becca had to think for a moment before she realized that Erin was talking about what's-his-name. Matthew. She shot a playfully accusatory look at Pam.

“The guy with the kid is cute,” Pam said, “you have to admit that.”

“He's also married,” Becca added. “Or as good as. The kid is his girlfriend's daughter. The girl's come into the store lots of times—she loves to yak at me about horses—but I don't think I've ever seen her mother.”

Pam took a moment to absorb this new information. “What a jerk. He flirts with you every time he comes in.”

“No, he doesn't. He's never tried to pass himself off as available. We've just talked a few times—idle chitchat.” Becca frowned. “Except the one time I met him by chance at the grocery store. I was worried about what to do about Walt, and Matthew gave me some advice.”

“Is he who I have to thank for having a serial killer as a coworker?” Pam asked.

“Walt is not a serial killer. And Matthew warned me against blindly taking Walt's word—so there.”

“So I have him to thank for giving you advice that you chose to ignore,” Pam grumbled. “I wish you'd asked me instead.”

“I knew what you'd say.” Becca tried to veer the conversation off the subject of Walt. “The point is, Matthew's as good as married, he has an adorable kid, and I'm not a home wrecker. So that's that.”

Pam looked vaguely disappointed. “It's so strange that you haven't dated anybody since your divorce. Poor Cal would probably have felt better if you
had
met someone. I think he's still confused about why you would run away and move into this squat. He's in a rut.”

Becca and Cal had never analyzed their bust-up in depth. It had been obvious that their marriage had been a mistake brought on by infatuation intersecting with an alcohol-fueled weekend in Vegas, so a full rundown of its failure had never seemed necessary to Becca. Pam usually seemed more curious about the state of their post-divorce relationship than Becca was. “Cal was always in a rut,” she told Pam. “The rut of permanent adolescence.”

Erin, who had been uncharacteristically silent up to now, gazed around the apartment almost affectionately. Which was odd, since Erin had fussy decorative taste and usually complained about the cat fur and the echo. Now she looked as if she'd never been there before. “This place. I love it. It's so minimalist.”

“That's a generous way to describe it,” Pam said.