Ignoring that, Damon looked anew at his chocolate samples. “Maybe,” he mused aloud, “what I have here is an image problem, not a taste problem.”
Doubtfully, Jason picked up a fluted paper cup full of pea-size, candy-coated chocolate pieces. He sniffed at their TC-imprinted exteriors. He rattled the cup. He tasted a chocolate.
“Nah, dude. It’s a taste problem,” Damon’s friend assured him, making a face. “These allergen-free candies are nasty.”
“Those are the standard-issue Torrance Chocolates’ take on M&M’s.” Damon crossed his arms. “You eat them by the pound.”
“Oh.” Awkwardly, Jason tried another one. He nodded. “Yeah. Yeah, now that you mention it, they
are
the same. Delicious!”
“Actually, I was wrong. Those
are
the allergen-free ones.”
“Huh?” Jason looked unhappy. He hung open his mouth, looking for a place to spit. He waved his hands in disgust.
“Oh, grow up, Huerta,” Wes said. “You’re proving Damon’s point for him. He was obviously doing blind taste tests with a group of biased participants as volunteers. They expected the allergen-free candy bars to taste ‘weird,’ so they hated them.”
“Right. And they didn’t come back for more.” From the open doorway, Jimmy Torrance spoke up. He strolled inside, hand in hand with his wife, Debbie. “Probably because you made the taste tests voluntary. Always make the tests mandatory, son.”
“That’s right,” Debbie agreed. “At this point, you’ll need an all-new test group, Damon. Because the idiot savant of chocolate testing had it correct.” She gave a cheerful wave to Wes. “Hello, Wesley. Thank you for that enormous donation to my children’s aid charity. It’s much appreciated.”
Red-faced, Wes gave her a “shut up!” wave. “You said you wouldn’t tell anyone about that! I have an image to consider.”
But Damon didn’t have time for Wes’s not-so-secret altruistic streak. He boggled at his parents. “Mom? Dad? What are
you
doing here?”
Jimmy sighed. “We tried not to be here, believe me.” At his side, Debbie cuddled up to him. “We were
enjoying
our time together away from this place.
If
you catch my drift.”
Momentarily mystified, Damon looked from his dad to his mom. They so rarely took time off. Then, “Oh. Gross! You were—”
“Repairing our relationship,” Jimmy said smoothly, patting Debbie’s hand. “I neglected it for far too long. I didn’t even know how to find my way back. All I did was work. I didn’t know how to retire. But luckily for me—”
“Luckily for him,” Debbie finished with an impish look, “I took matters into my own hands and kidnapped him! I took your father to a lovely resort, where we could both be alone—”
“The seafood platter there is
excellent
,” Jimmy put in.
“—then I gave him an ultimatum. ‘Choose your marriage or choose to be a full-time chocolatier,’ I told him, ‘but if you choose the business over me, I’m through.’”
“Obviously,” Jimmy said. “I chose her.”
“Wow,” Wes breathed in awe. “You don’t mess around.”
“No, she doesn’t.” Jimmy gave Debbie an adoring smile. “That’s just one of the many things I love about her. Somehow, Debbie knew just how to snap me out of it—just how to make me realize that I was about to lose the best part of my life.”
“Dad, you have a son, too,” Damon complained. “I’m
right here
. What am I? A big pile of stale, leftover chocolate?”
His parents sighed. “You’re important, too, son,” his mother assured him. “But we’re married. It’s different.” She gave him a piercing look. “I saw you on TV, by the way. On that gossip show. You’re cruising for a kidnapping of your own, Mister Smarty-Pants. If you think you’re too old for a little parental intervention to cure your bad behavior, you’re wrong.”
Wes blanched. “I think that’s my cue to leave.” He seized a few more chocolate samples for the road, then waved. “Later, all.”
“Me too,” Jason said. “If I get home too late, Amy invariably thinks I’ve been hit by a bus.” Sheepishly, he shrugged. “It’s kind of her thing. She’s a worrywart.”
“Only because she loves you!” Debbie called after him, waving. “Say hello to your lovely wife for us!”
Left alone with his parents, Damon stared at them in continuing disbelief. “Seriously. What are you doing here? Are you going to tell me you had a sudden urge to go all Chocolatier Rambo on a few hundred pounds of Tanzania seventy perecent cacao?”
Jimmy and Debbie shook their heads. “Several of the longtime employees here called us,” Jimmy said. “We didn’t get their messages for a few days, because we were ... preoccupied. But once I turned on my cell phone to find a whole slew of panicked voice mails telling me that
you’d
gone off the deep end again—that you’d been working in the lab night and day,
sleeping
here, running emergency thrice-daily test panels—we were concerned.”
“If you
have
lost it again, dear, we’re here for you,” his mother promised him warmly. “We were distracted by our marital problems for a while there, but now that’s all settled. So don’t worry about a thing.”
“No, I haven’t ‘lost it’ again. I’m fine.” Damon gave them a brief recap of his split from Natasha, offered a synopsized version of his ideas for the new candy-bar line, then finished up with a rundown of his nearly 24/7 progress so far. “... except for the testing snag I just hit.”
Worriedly, his parents listened. Then, his father said, “We think you should make up with Natasha first. Don’t wait too long, like we did!”
At their newfound synchronicity, Damon couldn’t help smiling. He really was glad they’d worked out their issues.
“I can’t think about that now,” he said. “First, I have to deal with this testing issue—”
And prove, tangibly, that I’ve accomplished something for once
. “—
then
I’ll talk to Natasha.”
Jimmy nodded. “All right. It sounds as though the boy’s decided. Let’s get down to brass tacks on this testing issue, Damon. Do you know of another group you could approach?”
“Actually,” Damon said, “I do. One just came to mind.”
“Good,” his father said. “Then the next thing to do is—”
“Wait.” Damon put his hand on his dad’s arm, recognizing that Jimmy was about to bustle forward and take charge of the chocolate lab. “Are you really going to help me? I thought—”
“You thought your father had given up on you?” Debbie asked.
At his mother’s blunt, spot-on assessment, Damon frowned.
“Well,” he hedged, “I haven’t given either of you much reason to believe I’d amount to anything on the creative side of things. Especially after Las Vegas.” At the memory, Damon shuddered. “Knowing how much I messed up, why would you—”
“Because we’re your parents, that’s why. We’ll never give up on you. We might get wrapped up in our own lives some of the time. We’re only human. But that doesn’t mean we’ve given up on you. Far from it.” Gruffly putting an end to the discussion, his dad picked up a nearby chocolate sample. He chewed. Savored. Swallowed. “I think you need less sugar here.”
Damon still couldn’t believe Jimmy was going to help him.
“But ... this is
your
territory, Dad. I’ve never been good at the creative stuff! What if ...” Suddenly, Damon could scarcely say it. With effort, he forced himself to. “What if I really try, and I
still
can’t do it? What if this is Las Vegas, all over again?” He gestured at the lab. “This is your life! You
are
Torrance Chocolates! How would you feel if your legacy was handed over to a colossal, globe-trotting screwup?”
At that, his father gave him a serious look. Through wise and experienced eyes, Jimmy examined him. He smiled. “You’re not a screwup, son. You just need some practice.” He shifted his gaze to Debbie. “If I hadn’t been hogging all the creative duties to myself, you might have gotten that practice sooner.”
Well. That
might
be true, Damon reasoned. Still ...
“Besides,” Jimmy told him, “it’s not the result that matters. It’s having the courage to try. Without that, you’re doomed from the start.” He looked around at Damon’s cot, his samples, his notes and packaging mockups and everything else. “You’re got courage to spare, Damon. You always have. I’m proud of you for that.”
Incredibly, Damon felt tears clog his throat. With a burst of self-conscious emotion, he cleared it away. Damn, but this bawling stuff was hitting him hard lately. What the hell?
“Okay.” Roughly, Damon attempted a more manly tone. “Okay, good. Thanks, Dad. Just so we’re clear on things. Because—”
Because I’ve been afraid of doing this for years
, he realized then,
and now it’s finally happening. With you
.
“Because,” Damon tried again, smiling, “you’re going to want to retire soon and get on with all that resort-going.”
“He means whoopee,” his mother informed his father shrewdly. “He knows what we were up to at that resort, Jimmy.”
“I know that, Debbie.” Damon’s father clapped Damon on the back. “By the way, son—there’s something I’ve been meaning to tell you. So while we’re here clearing the air ...”
Cautiously, Damon nodded. “Okay. Go ahead.”
“Okay.” His dad nodded, too. “Ever since you were a little boy, you’ve had the idea that you were especially ‘lucky,’” Jimmy began. “We let it slide because we thought it was cute. But you’re a grown man now. You need to face the facts—”
“You’re no luckier than anyone else,” Debbie broke in urgently. “You’re just not. We’re sorry, but it’s true.”
Stricken, Damon gazed at them. “Yes, I am,” he insisted. It was a bedrock belief of his life. “I’m
really
lucky.”
His parents only laughed, then rolled up their sleeves.
“Whatever you need to tell yourself, son,” his dad said.
Then, leaving Damon no choice but to come along for the ride, they all got down to the serious business of turning raw cacao into something even better: artisanal chocolates made with love.
Chapter 26
Natasha was in her garden-shed workspace, putting the finishing touches on a new piece she’d been inspired to design, when the sound of someone rustling around outside caught her attention. Going stock-still, she paused at her worktable and listened. Soon enough, the sounds came again—a scrape and a thump from outside, followed by a very human-sounding grunt.
Alarmed, Natasha put down her artwork. Wiping her hands on her grungy jeans and then straightening her T-shirt, she headed outside to investigate. There, she glimpsed her backyard, her own slice of blue San Diego skyline. . . and her next-door neighbor, Kurt, who was in the throes of what looked like a wrestling match with a potted blossoming Jacaranda tree ... or at least a very large sapling. Its branches were already covered with slender green leaves and myriad purple blooms, several of which dropped off in a flurry as Kurt maneuvered the potted tree toward—
“Is that a
hole
in my lawn?” Natasha blurted.
Kurt started. Almost dropping his tree, he gave her a guilty look. “Natasha! You’re supposed to be at an interview.”
“I canceled it.” Bewildered, she gestured at what had obviously been a lot of work. “Kurt, what are you doing?”
“Something I agreed to do a couple of weeks ago,” her neighbor replied with cheerful determination. “Since no one ever told me there’d been a change of plans, I’m finishing the job.”
“You’re digging a hole in my yard and secretly planting a
tree
?” Natasha wanted to glower at it to prove her point, but she loved the flowery beauty of Jacaranda trees way too much to pull off a bad attitude about being given one. Not that Kurt knew that. She settled on crossing her arms. “Did Carol put you up to this? Is this supposed to cheer me up or something?”
Kurt shook his head. With another manly grunt, he released the tree from its container. “I promised not to say.”
“You have to say,” Natasha insisted. “It’s
my
yard!”
“It’s supposed to be a surprise.” Diligently, Kurt loosened the potting soil around the tree’s root ball. With an awkward movement, he rolled the tree into position, then started planting it. “But I
will
tell you it wasn’t Carol’s idea.”
“Then whose idea was it? Amy’s? Jason’s?
Milo’s
?”
Her neighbor merely shoveled more dirt. “You weren’t this nosy the last time I did some secret yard work for you.”
“When did you ... ?” At Kurt’s raised eyebrows, Natasha remembered. “When I got back from Las Vegas! My whole yard looked fantastic.” She gave him a sly look. “You acted as if you were as surprised by my ‘garden pixies’ as everyone else.”
“What was I supposed to tell you? That I couldn’t take your yard’s Godzilla-size weeds anymore?” Kurt wiped his brow. “I was trying to be a good neighbor. It was just a little tidying up.”
“Then it
wasn’t
part of my lucky streak,” Natasha murmured, half to herself. Kurt’s semi-puzzled headshake confirmed it.
Hmmm. If
that
experience was being called into question, it suddenly occurred to her, what did that mean for the other things that had happened to her recently? The things she’d attributed to good luck? Like her magically well-running Civic? Her minor lottery win? Her airborne flirtation and date with Lance the neurosurgeon? Her thousand-dollar jackpot from the airport in Las Vegas? Her newfound ability to enchant, ensnare, and get lucky with Damon?
Were all those things just easily explained
events
, too?
They could have been, Natasha realized. Her Civic had been running better lately because she’d become more conscientious about getting routine maintenance done. She’d been buying weekly scratch-and-win lottery tickets for years now; she’d been bound to win sometime. She’d been feeling pumped-up and proud on the plane back from Las Vegas, psyched over finally standing up for herself with Damon; no wonder she’d been attractive to Lance. And the odds of winning an occasional jackpot on a slot machine weren’t that bad, especially in a high-traffic area like the concourse at McCarran International, where many people pumped in their quarters and hoped to get lucky before their flights left.