The Memory of Lemon (19 page)

Luke caused quite a flutter as soon as we went in the front door of Rainbow Cake. Both the brides-to-be and their mothers seemed to know who he was, if not from football, then from those car commercials he did. Luke was his charming self, signing autographs while I packed up a box of mocha cupcakes for him to take, his favorite and so
Luke.

I couldn't help it. Part of me still believed that if he had nurtured the best parts of himself—like the affable white chocolate that gets along so well with other flavors, the take-charge coffee, and the strong-shoulder-to-lean-on dark chocolate in the frosting instead of the risk-taking devil's food cake—we might have made our marriage work. But Luke had to be the constellation of flavors that he was, and things happened as they did. I couldn't—and now wouldn't—change a thing.

When the fuss died down, I took Luke back to my inner sanctum and had him sign the papers.

Jett was still listening to her music, making tiny marzipan apricots for a special order we'd received. I waved my hands in front of her face, her eyes widened as she looked up, and then she smiled. She took out her earbuds, wiped off her hand on her apron, and extended it to Luke when I introduced him. “Pleased to meet you. I decorate everything here.”

Luke shook her hand, grinning. “I can see that,” he said, holding her hand so he could admire the poisonous color of her manicure.

Before the infamous Luke Davis charm could bedazzle even my nonconformist pastry artist, I said, “Gotta go,” pushing him to the front of the bakery.

“Don't forget your cupcakes,” Maggie said when we got to the door. She handed him the box.

“Great place you have here,” Luke said to me and Maggie. “I'll definitely be back.” He whistled as he walked to the parking lot.

“Your latte foam never mentioned anything about Luke turning up,” said Maggie. “Unless he arrived in a station wagon or a Jeep Wagoneer.”

We both ran out the door, just in time to see Luke drive off in his rental car, a silver Lexus.

“Stupid oracles,” I said.

Inside, we went to our stations—Maggie to wait on customers, me to check my list for the umpteenth time before I finished packing the van for Lydia's wedding.

I walked back to the workroom to get the container of extra baked pastry decorations, just in case some of the tartlets didn't make the journey intact. A little edible glue and a pastry cutout to match, and they'd look like new. Hopefully, I wouldn't need them, but I had to be ready for anything.

But maybe not this. Jett was smiling dreamily at a tall, pale, nerdy-looking guy I hadn't seen come in. He didn't have one ounce of goth in him, but he looked pretty taken with Jett.

“Boss, this is Nick, my lab partner in biology.”

“Nice to meet you, Mrs. . . .” And he stumbled.

“Just call me Neely. And it's great to meet you. As you can see, our Jett is very creative,” I said, indicating the tiny marzipan apricots she was crafting.

“Nick is all about science,” explained Jett. “He has this cool telescope. We're going to look at the stars tonight.”

“Maybe you'll get some new ideas for designs,” I said.

“If you pay me overtime.”

I gave Jett my best lopsided grin. It was good to see her getting back to her old, sassy self.

I was on the road a little before noon.

The day was turning warm and I feared for the pastries, so I turned on the air conditioner. I popped in my
Foreverly
CD to
get in the mood. I loved to sing along with Billie Joe Armstrong and Norah Jones, always the harmony, never the melody.

My mind wandered. What did that wagon wheel mean?

My phone buzzed. The bakery. “You'll never guess who just came in,” whispered Maggie.

“The Professor?”

“He's wearing blue jeans and a fitted shirt with the cuffs rolled up. I can't believe it. He looks a little like Sting, I think.”

Sting? That was maybe taking it a bit too far, but I was glad I had put that bug in his ear. Maybe he decided he needed a makeover before pursuing Maggie seriously. If so, it had worked.

“Well, his grande latte, skinny, and his lemon and blueberry breakfast cupcake are on the house. Even if it's lunchtime. Tell him we're glad he's back. And don't let him get away this time.”

“Don't you worry about that,” Maggie said. “And you meant to say
muffin
, right?”

I smiled and snapped my phone shut.

The Professor had come back, as had Maggie's sense of humor. The wedding tartlets and cookies looked luscious. Luke had signed the papers. My van hadn't broken down. The ferry was running and I was on it. I would soon see Ben.

As the ferry plied its way over to Augusta, I stepped out of my vehicle and felt the power of the river beneath my feet.

I texted Ben:
Luke signed the papers.

Everything was going to be all right.

Soon, I was driving off the Augusta ferry, passing the historic brick town houses on Riverside Drive, then turning off Bracken Street and up the winding lane. I parked my van near the cabins, the garden, and the tobacco barn at the crest of the hill. I was
lucky to find a spot not already taken by the other vendors putting this wedding together.

I checked my display again. No text from Ben.
He's busy, too,
I told myself.

As soon as I opened the door of the van, I breathed in the aromatic scent. I could taste it, too, even more vibrant than when I had been there a few months before.

My gift was being able to glimpse a key scene in someone's past when I focused and then let my intuition kick in. The signature wedding dessert usually evolved from that revelation.

Without one key story this time, the trial and error process had taken much longer. But we finally got there. I had to be thankful for that. Lydia Ballou and Cadence Stidham loved the wedding pie and the little tartlets.

They'd love this “hillbilly” wedding, too.

I breathed in the fresh scent, felt it refract into two bands of flavor that I tasted one by one. Citrus. Spice.

Now that the pressure was off and I was more relaxed, I could finally see these flavors like two broad brushstrokes capturing a simple scene: sunlight over a cabin on a hillside near a river.

The scent wafted closer as a guy in a dirty baseball cap, a torn T-shirt, and jeans took a bundle of green branches out of the back of his pickup truck.

I ran over to him.

“What is that you're carrying?”

“Spicebush, ma'am. Grows wild in these parts by the river. Mr. Nichols is using this and the rest of the stuff I foraged.” He indicated the tangles of wild grapevines and the buckets of water holding pink wild roses and branches of late-blooming dogwood. “I
also found white-flowering viburnum”—he indicated another set of buckets—“florists love the shape of that one.” And then he looked at me, his eyes widening in alarm. “These are all legal to pick.”

“Oh, no,” I assured him. “If Gavin hired you, you must be good at what you do. I'd just like to smell fresh spicebush for a moment. I've only tried it dried.”

“Whatever floats your boat.”

I breathed in the fragrance and tasted the flavor, all at once. After all the previous misfirings, the first flashes of story took me by surprise. In quick progression, I saw a young man in buckskin pants bearing a striking resemblance to my father. Who was he? I saw a woman hanging herbs to dry in a cabin, drowning in a winter flood. Who was she? I saw the woman who must be Vangie with Cadence and her brother when they were little. And I saw Lydia as I first encountered her in my front parlor, frowning and insisting on wedding pie.

Spicebush was the “tell,” the flavor that tried to explain an inner state. But whose inner state? And why had it taken me so long to get a first glimpse of story?

With a prickling sense of awareness, I thought of Gran and Vangie.

Suddenly, it came to me. There were two flavors in spicebush, two families whose stories intertwined. Lydia's and mine.

This place was the touch point. The cabin, the garden, the river, the barn. This was where the two stories had come together at some time in the past. And then went their separate ways.

“Neely!”

Roshonda power walked up to me. She was in full wedding planner mode with her iPhone in one hand, her iPad in the other.

“What are you doing sniffing twigs, girl? Gavin's waiting for those. And we've got work to do.” She snapped her fingers in front of my face. “Wedding. Three hours. Wedding pie. Big clients. Remember?”

I hugged Roshonda, thanked the forager, then went around to the back of the van and opened the double doors. Roshonda followed me.

“Luke stopped by, just as I was getting ready to leave. But he signed the papers.”

“Now you don't have to keep letters in your bra anymore, but you do have to invite us all over when Luke is on TV. Have you told Ben the coast is clear?”

“I texted him. When is he supposed to get here?” I pulled out the handcart and started stacking boxes of tartlets.

Roshonda pressed her tablet and the security schedule came up. “Let's see. Dave's here already. He's got a guy at the ferry, one stationed at the riverside parking lot where the shuttle will pick up and drop off, and more up here at the barn, all starting at four p.m. I'm surprised Ben isn't here yet. Maybe he had last-minute stuff to do.” Roshonda looked up from her tablet. “Promise you two won't get all lovey-dovey until the place is empty?”

I grinned. “I can't promise anything.”

I was glad I had work to do. The hours would pass quickly.

I couldn't wait to see what Gavin had created in the barn; his line drawings, with the barest wash of watercolor, had looked wonderful when he presented them at the final planning meeting. My little works of pastry art were part of the scene.

When I wheeled the handcart through the wide-open double barn doors, I stopped in my tracks.

Gavin had used Audubon's description of a nineteenth-century Kentucky frolic as an inspiration. Burlap with crystal. Simple with sophisticated. Country with city.

In the soaring, weathered wood heights of the barn, crystal chandeliers sparkled from long burlap-wrapped cords hung from the rafters. Along the perimeter of the barn, Gavin had placed large ficus trees in tubs, the branches strung with tiny white lights. At night, they would look magical. Between the trees hung large framed Audubon prints festooned with garlands of greenery—I recognized the glittering green Carolina parroquets, passenger pigeons with speckled plumage, and red-winged blackbirds from the Ohio River Valley.

Roshonda put her arm around me and we took in the scene together. “Isn't this the best! For all the trouble this ‘hillbilly' wedding has caused, I think it was worth it.”

“When I think of all the fancy weddings I've been to at the most expensive hotels,” I said, “this barn puts them all to shame. I hope the Stidhams like this as much as we do.”

“Oh, they'll like it,” said Roshonda with a sly smile. “I've got every wedding magazine editor on speed dial and free pick of all the wedding photos afterward to help a big story happen. I've got a writer here who freelances for
Garden and Gun
. Just make those pies look good. She might ask you later for the recipes.”

I wheeled the handcart over to long tables in the back, draped with burlap. Gavin had found long, rectangular tiered stands in weathered tin, so all the tartlets of one flavor could be displayed together on each tier.

“Neely!” he exclaimed, coming down off a ladder, another Audubon print hung. He gave me a sweaty hug, a first from
fastidious Gavin. He must be
really
into this. “I've got more greenery for you to place around those tarts if you want.”

He put his arm around me and steered me over to a round table in the center with a weathered tin cake pedestal. “I thought this might be good for the wedding pie.” An antique, wood-handled pie server lay next to the pedestal. I could just imagine the pie-cutting photo—all of this texture contrasted with Lydia's simple white gown.

“Perfect!” I said.

I unpacked the wedding pie first, carefully placing it on the tin pedestal, then arranged the greenery around it. When I tucked in a slender twig, my fingers brushed the leaves.

“Spicebush,” I said, raising the branch to inhale its fragrance again.

“Don't you love the way it smells?” said Gavin, coming down off the ladder. “We wanted this to look like the best version of ‘my old Kentucky home.'”

I unloaded and arranged the tartlets, the yellow lemon with a pressed fork-tine design around the rim, lattice-topped blackberry, bourbon chocolate with a center pastry cutout of a tiny log cabin, golden spicebush custard tartlets with tiny circles of dough for a scalloped effect, and strawberry-rhubarb with a pastry leaf design. My old Kentucky home.

I arranged the individual bags of cookies in rustic, handwoven baskets.

I stepped back to survey my work, then snapped photos with my phone.

Almost done.

I took the handcart back to the van, slipped off my chef's jacket,
and grabbed my dress on its hanger and my overnight bag. I tucked a box of tartlets and cookies under my arm.

The wedding would start at four thirty and I wanted to change before the wedding party arrived and needed to use the cabins for last-minute touch-ups.

I climbed the few steps to the dogtrot porch that connected the two small cabins. The door to what Lydia called the “abiding cabin” was unlocked. I walked into one room with a fireplace to the right, a small bathroom, and stairs going up to the loft on the left. An old quilt covered the back of the small sofa. An antique rocking chair in old blue paint looked like the perfect place to comfort a child or play a fiddle. Blue-green jelly jars held bouquets of flowers and herbs that looked like they had been picked from the garden. I put the tarts and cookies on the old pine table in the little kitchen.