Last Kiss of Summer

by Marina Adair

  Almost as powerful an emotion as the choking fear of not knowing what was next. Of how she was expected to pick up and move on—again.

  Torn between laughing and crying, Kennedy settled on staring out at the Georgia sky and letting the gentle evening breeze be her guide. Like Kennedy, Edna lived in the greater Atlanta area, which meant that the city lights snuffed out most of the stars, leaving an inky blanket over the city. But tonight, there were a few bold ones whose twinkle was bright enough to break through the night and be seen. And for some reason that made Kennedy smile.

  “I miss that girl,” Edna said, wrapping a pudgy arm around Kennedy’s shoulder and pulling her close.

  “I do, too.” Without hesitation, Kennedy snuggled in deeper, wrapping her arms around Edna’s middle and breathing in the familiar scent of cinnamon and vanilla and everything that was safe. One sniff and Kennedy felt her smile crumble and the tears well up.

  “They were doing it during the light of day against the wall of a dressing room,” she whispered. “With their shoes on. He’s never asked me to keep my shoes on.”

  “Of course he didn’t,” Edna cooed. “You’re a respectable woman who knows the value of a good pair of shoes.”

  Oh God. Even her grandmother thought she was respectable, and everyone knew that respectable was just another word for boring. And boring people wound up living in their childhood bedroom at thirty with the neighborhood crazy cat lady as their roommate. “What if I wanted to keep my shoes on?”

  “With what he’s been stepping in lately, you should count yourself lucky,” her grandma cooed.

  “Gloria’s the lucky one. He’s taking her to Argentina next week.” And there went the tears.

  She tried to hold them back, but sitting there in her grandmother’s arms, once again being the one snuffed out by something—or someone—bigger and brighter, brought back every time her mom had taken off with some guy on some other adventure, leaving Kennedy at home.

  “He’s the one who cheated, the one who lied, and he still gets to go teach in Argentina, and cross something off his bucket list. And I am stuck in another life time-out.” A realization that not only sucked, but also challenged every belief she’d ever held dear. Including the belief in herself.

  “That just means you get to check something off your own list now.”

  “That was my list. Argentina was my dream.” Then it became their dream, and somehow Philip would get to be the one to live it.

  “Ah, child, then find a new dream, something fun that doesn’t include listening to all that wheezing the jackass does when he gets excited,” Edna said, stroking Kennedy’s hair.

  Kennedy chuckled. “One time he snored so loud, our neighbors thought we were doing it all night.”

  “Probably thought he’d taken one of those blue pills,” Edna said in the same tone she’d read a bedtime story. “Philip doesn’t strike me as the most resilient man.”

  He wasn’t, but Kennedy hadn’t been interested in sprinters; she was looking for someone who was slow and steady. Only her best chance at going the distance had handed his baton to another woman.

  “How can I have any fun when I know he’s out there living his life, having shoes on while making whoopee, and tangoing all over my future?”

  A future Kennedy had worked so hard to make safe. With a man she thought she could trust.

  Edna tsked. “Even as a little bit of a thing, you were so busy making checks and balances, you let the fun pass you by. Maybe this was God’s way of saying you need to let go of the future you planned, and take some time to taste the icing.”

  The size of a large child, Kennedy still was a little bit of a thing who didn’t know the first thing about life’s icing. Hadn’t had the luxury. Between her unstable childhood then working toward gaining fiscal stability, she hadn’t had a lot of time for dreaming, let alone something that whimsical. Sadly, the closest she’d ever come to eating the icing was a fun four years working the morning shifts at a little bakery near campus to put herself through business school.

  “I wouldn’t even know where to start,” she admitted, her voice thick with emotion.

  “How about with one of these?” Edna pulled an old journal out from beside her and set it on Kennedy’s lap. It was pink, pocket sized, had a well-worn spine and a picture of a cupcake with sprinkles on the cover.

  The hurt and disappointment had settled so deep inside, it had turned into aching numbness by the time she’d walked out of her downtown loft for the last time, so she assumed any more pain would be impossible. Yet as she clicked open the gold-plated latch, which was rusty from years of neglect, and saw the swirly handwriting at the top, her chest tightened further.

  This disappointment felt different, as though it originated from someplace old and forgotten, and it packed the kind of punch that made speaking impossible.

  Kennedy wasn’t sure how she managed to let herself stray so far from her life’s goal. She hadn’t felt the kind of hope and excitement that was apparent in the words she’d written since she discovered that while most people were looking for a copilot to happiness, not everyone had what it took to be more than just a brief stopover. Sadly for Kennedy, she’d figured out early on which category she fell into.

  “‘Life’s short so eat the icing first,’” she read as her finger traced lightly over the words on the first page. Edna had given it to her the summer she’d turned thirteen, when Candice Sinclair had taken off with a truck driver from Ashland, leaving a brokenhearted Kennedy behind with her grandmother.

  Kennedy was still naive enough to believe that one day her mother would take her along. That one day the two of them would see the country together like Candice promised. By July, Kennedy had realized that if she were going to live an exciting life, then she’d have to make it happen herself. And she took the icing first rule to heart and entered an apple and rhubarb pie in the State Fair. She’d found the recipe in an old cookbook, and Edna had spent hours with her in the kitchen helping her perfect it. Her entry won third place in the junior category, earning her two tickets to the theater in Atlanta. Something she’d always wanted to do, but her grandmother could never afford.

  “Look at you, set to take on the world,” Edna said, pointing to a photo of Kennedy as a teen. She stood in front of a table filled with winning cakes, lanky and still finding her feet, but the smile she wore was so bright, it burned Kennedy’s heart.

  She was wearing her favorite blue summer dress that her grandmother had made especially for the fair, and pinned to the front was a third place ribbon.

  “I thought I lost this recipe,” Kennedy said, looking at the swirly writing on the adjacent page. She’d also forgotten how excited she’d felt when she’d won that ribbon. It was as if she’d finally found some kind of tangible proof that maybe she was special.

  Kennedy turned the page and a watery smile spread across her face. There was a photo of her grandma dressed like the queen, wearing pearls, white gloves, and a hat fit for a royal wedding.

  “I borrowed the pearls from Pastor Cunningham’s wife, and the gloves from Mabel,” Edna said, nostalgia lacing her voice.

  “You made me that dress,” Kennedy said. She’d loved that dress, wore it until it went from midi to mini, and Edna said she was giving too much away for free.

  “It’s still in the attic.”

  Beneath each photo was the sweet creation that made that moment possible. A three-tier coconut cake, a recipe straight from her grandmother’s Southern roots, that she made the following year. It took second place and she won high tea at the Ritz-Carlton in Atlanta.

  It was her fourth attempt, though, a perfect Southern apple and red currant pie with a Georgia pecan crust, that took first place, then took her on a six-week Down Home Sweets journey at the local culinary school, cementing her fascination with small town living, Southern eats, and a deep love for baking.

  Kennedy carefully thumbed through the pages of photos capturing some of the most precious mom
ents of her childhood, the respective recipes that made it all possible. Ignoring the photo of her and Edna cooking snowball cookies in their pajamas on Christmas morning, since that recipe would now forever be connected to that rat-fink lo-bar and his pathetic “Uh” in the throws of passion, she stopped when she found what she was looking for. At the back of the journal was an extensive and itemized list she’d assembled, her LIFE’S ICING list, which indexed every recipe she wanted to try, every competition she wanted to enter, and every goal she wanted to accomplish, complete with coordinating check boxes.

  Not a single one was marked off.

  With a shaky breath, Kennedy flipped the page and scanned each item, stopping midway through when her heart gave a little stir.

  ☐ 39. Make a Rogel torta with dulce de leche.

  She wasn’t sure that she had quite mastered the flair for creating the soft, but crumbly texture of that variation of dulce de leche in the Confections of South America class she took over the summer. Let alone something as intricate as the layers of puff pastry required to make one of Argentina’s most treasured desserts. But since Philip had robbed her of checking off the first and most important recipe on her list, a Five-Tiered Wedding Cake, she was taking what she could get. Because somewhere along the way she’d forgotten that she needed to be in charge of her own destiny.

  She remembered it now.

  “What I need is a job.” One that would allow her to get a new apartment, get back on her feet. Although she had some savings, she needed to make sure her bank account had enough padding so that when she started writing those checks, they didn’t bounce.

  “Already got you one lined up,” Edna said, handing her a printout of a job listing for a pie shop. “It comes with a little frosting, too.”

  “What’s this?”

  “Sweetie Pies,” Edna said, snatching the paper back and flipping to the next page to display several photos of a quaint brick storefront and their award-winning pies, including the five-pound Deep Dish HumDinger. Between the sixteen Gold Tins hanging in the window and the title of “Best Apple Pie in the Country,” the two women in the photo were undoubtedly looking for a true, down-home baker. Kennedy was sadly neither.

  “My old friend Fiona owns it with her sister-in-law. She e-mailed me that ad.”

  “You called her? About me?”

  “Of course I did.”

  “When?” Kennedy’s life was still shoved in her trunk.

  “The second you said you were heading home,” Edna tutted. “Picked up the phone to see if she was looking for some help for the harvest season. Even told her that my granddaughter is a college graduate with a fancy degree from a fancy school, and works at Le Cordon Bleu.”

  Kennedy was the first Sinclair to finish college, something that gave Edna bragging rights on her side of town. Because people who grew up in this neighborhood seldom got out. But Kennedy had, and there was no way she could go back.

  “I worked in an office at Le Cordon Bleu. Writing checks and balancing payroll, not baking pies,” Kennedy reminded her grandmother.

  “You bake on the weekends, take classes every chance you get,” Edna said. “And still manage to win awards.”

  “I was a teenager, it was the junior category, at the Georgia State Fair.” Kennedy looked at the picture of the shop again. It was exactly what she’d dreamed of working in when she’d been a girl. Charming, welcoming, and looked like a mother’s kitchen should look—sweet, warm, and a safe place to land. Then she read the address and her head started to pound. “The shop is in Washington State?”

  “Destiny Bay. It’s a little town on the southern border of Washington, nestled between the Cascades and the Pacific Ocean. Known for apples and, since Fi started baking, pies. It’s the perfect place for you to find a new future.”

  “Destiny Bay?” It sounded perfect. Even the way it rolled off the lips implied it was the kind of place she could go and forget about her problems at home. Create a new life.

  Only running away was a classic Candice move, and Kennedy would rather take dance classes from Gloria than be like her mother. Then again, she didn’t really have a home any longer, so it wasn’t as though she would be technically running away. “Isn’t that where you met Grandpa Harvey?”

  “I met him in Seattle, near where I grew up, but followed him all the way to Destiny Bay, where he got down on one knee, right there in the middle of town, with a bouquet of spring posies and his mama’s ring.” Edna sighed dreamily, as if remembering the day, and Kennedy gave in to the romantic nature of her story. “Met Fiona there, too, she was my maid of honor, my best friend, and the person who took me in when Harvey moved to Tuscaloosa, making it clear it was a journey for one. Fi gave me a job selling apples on her family’s plantation so I wouldn’t starve to death.”

  Kennedy sat up and shook all that romantic naïveté right off.

  She was a finance girl, not a frivolous girl—and baking pies in the meantime to get over a broken heart only prolonged getting her life back on track. And kept the Sinclair curse alive and well. Which was why she refused the urge to make a life-changing decision because of a man.

  “I don’t want to spend the last few weeks of my summer baking pies. I need to buckle down and find a new job.”

  “Oh, you wouldn’t just be baking, honey.” Edna leaned in and lowered her voice as though she was imparting a national secret. “I have it on good word that Fi isn’t looking for short-term help, she and her sister-in-law co-own it, and are looking to pass on their legacy. They’re looking for a strong-willed, sensible woman, who loves baking and is brave enough to carve out a little slice of life’s pie for herself.”

  “And there aren’t any of those in their hometown?”

  Edna laughed. “Fi’s got herself a slew of nephews, and Paula a son, but not a single female in the family. And Paula’s got the arthritis, which is why Fi’s still baking pies every day even though she’s got more miles on her than my old DeSoto. She’s ready to slow down and retire, and Paula needs to give her joints a rest and go on that cruise they’ve been blabbering on about. They’re just waiting for the right owner to come along.”

  Now it was Kennedy’s turn to laugh. “And you think that’s me?”

  “I think this is one of those opportunities we always talked about, where with a little courage and a lot of hard work, you can change your life.”

  Kennedy felt her throat tighten. How many times had she sat right there on the porch swing and wished she could change? Her situation, her options…her life.

  And she had.

  It’d taken years of hard work and perseverance, but Kennedy had created that new life she dreamed of. A posh downtown apartment, a respectable job, and a man who represented everything her childhood and upbringing lacked.

  Only as fate would have it, Philip found her lacking, and Kennedy had lost it all.

  Nope. Courage wasn’t the problem. Neither was hard work. Kennedy hadn’t figured out the difference between an option and an opportunity—between loyalty and love.

  “We don’t know if it would be a change for the better,” Kennedy said.

  “That’s what’s so exciting,” Edna said, her eyes lit with excitement. “You can either spend the rest of your life like I did, pushing someone else’s pencils and dreams, and end up right here on this front porch, or you could start making some of your own come true.”

  A strange lightness filled her belly, warming the parts of her soul that had moments ago felt hollow, because suddenly the ridiculous idea didn’t seem so ridiculous.

  Kennedy had gone into business because she loved the idea of owing her own company, building something of her own that no one could take from her. And this opportunity seemed to combine her two loves with what she was trained to do. But there was one thing Kennedy couldn’t seem to get past.

  She rested her head on Edna’s shoulder and admitted, “I can’t even plan my own life, let alone a business.” Especially a pie shop in small town Washington.<
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  “Honey, you came out of the womb planning. It’s what you do.”

  A slow panic started to churn in her stomach, moving faster and faster, until she regretted eating three dozen snowballs. Because wasn’t that exactly what Philip had said?

  “She’s willing to sell it to you for a bargain.” Edna pulled out a packet from underneath Amos, who let loose a throaty growl, and handed it over. “She almost sold it last year to another buyer, but changed her mind when the woman started talking franchising. Here is the contract she’d had drawn up, told me to have you look it over and give her a call if you were interested.”

  Kennedy straightened and flipped through the papers. Fi and Edna had both gone through a hassle putting this together so quickly; it was the least she could do.

  She took her time, read every word, and decided that it was a standard sales agreement, straightforward and easy to understand. Then she reached the overview of the financials and felt her eyes bulge a little. “Her pie shop made more money last year than Philip did.”

  “And it was a slow year since they closed up for ten weeks last spring to take one of those senior trips to Alaska,” Edna said, sounding wistful.

  Kennedy looked over at the woman who had raised her and felt her heart turn over. The dreamy look on her face over the idea of a vacation was a painful reminder of just how much Edna had sacrificed. She’d spent some of her best years raising Kennedy, and most of her retirement savings sending Kennedy to Georgia Tech. Kennedy was diligent about paying her grandmother back, but with her student loans and bills, it was slow coming. Owning this business could change all of that.

  “How much is she asking?”

  Her grandmother rattled off a number.

  “That’s it?” Not that it wasn’t a lot of money. It was. In fact, it would nearly wipe out Kennedy’s entire life savings. But based on the shop’s financials, the price seemed extremely low. Which meant either that Edna needed to get her hearing aid checked, or Fi wasn’t being honest about the profits.

  “Oh, that’s the down payment, honey. But since Fi owns the property outright, she’s willing to carry the note so you can pay her in monthly installments, with a small balloon payment due at the end of every fiscal year. She also said she’ll sell you a few acres’ worth of her special apples at cost for the lifetime of the shop and let you stay in her caretaker’s house for six months rent-free, so you can get the apartment above the shop cleaned up.”