Second Time Around

by Beth Kendrick

  “You said ‘Mrs. Elquest.’ I heard you.” Trish seized Anna’s hand and examined the address scribbled on her skin. “I can’t believe this.”

  “I can’t believe you’re lying in wait for me again.” Anna snatched back her hand and stuffed it into her coat pocket. “The terms of our arrangement are crystal clear: From nine o’clock on, this kitchen is mine. Be gone.”

  Trish ignored this and kept right on seething. “I don’t know who’s worse: you, for luring away my loyal clients, or Belinda, that two-faced traitor, for calling you. I made her high school graduation cake, her wedding cake, her baby shower cake. I gave my all for that chick—blood, sweat, and the best frickin’ buttercream of all time—and this is the thanks I get?”

  “Did you ever stop to think that your attitude might have something to do with the mass desertion?” Anna said. “Besides, I don’t have to ‘lure’ anyone; I’m getting the orders because I’m the superior baker.”

  Trish snorted. “You’re a hack!”

  “Is that so? What was it Mrs. Elquest was saying about the dessert tray I did for the college reception? Oh yeah—she said I’m the confectionary equivalent of a ninja.” Anna flashed her most insincere smile. “On that note, I’m off to make a grocery run.”

  “Good riddance.” Trish’s scowl deepened. She rubbed her forehead and produced a tiny blue foil packet from her shirt pocket.

  Anna glanced at the label. “Is that ibuprofen?”

  “Yeah. So? You planning on stealing that, too?”

  “You can’t have ibuprofen.” The words were out of her mouth before Anna could stop them, a reflex honed from years of paging through What to Expect When You’re Expecting. “Not if you’re pregnant. You can only have acetaminophen, and only in extreme cases.”

  “Gee, the Bug and I really appreciate your concern,” Trish said with an exaggerated eye roll. “But maybe you should have thought of all that before you gave me a splitting headache, you snooty—”

  Anna frowned. “Did you just refer to your unborn child as a bug?”

  “Not just a bug,” Trish corrected. “The Bug.”

  “That’s horrible!”

  “Why? Haven’t you ever seen an ultrasound picture? It looks like a blurry little bug.”

  “Well, you could at least call it something cute: the bean, the peanut, even the Gummi Bear.”

  “Gag. When you get pregnant, you can use whatever vomitous little nickname floats your boat. But I’m sticking with the Bug. Mind your own business for once.”

  “Fine.” Anna bristled. “Call the kid whatever you want. Ingest whatever you want. I have ingredients to buy and cakes to bake, and you better not be here when I get back, or I’ll call Seth and take your kitchen time along with what’s left of your client base.”

  She pivoted on her heel, stalked back out into the alley, and let the heavy door swing shut behind her with a satisfying slam.

  When Anna returned from the grocery store forty-five minutes later, she was relieved to find the restaurant kitchen vacant and a whole night of baking-induced Zen stretching out before her. She plugged in her mp3 player’s portable speakers, queued up the Pulp Fiction soundtrack, and prepared to improvise a sophisticated version of the first ’50s dessert on her catering list: Coca-Cola cake with buttercream frosting. The scent of sugar and cocoa and the familiar clatter of her metal measuring cups soothed her. So many things in her life had gone wrong lately, but a good recipe was always guaranteed to turn out well, provided you followed the directions.

  After she measured out her dry ingredients and sifted together the flour, baking soda, and salt, she filled a white stoneware crock with room-temperature butter and locked the huge stainless steel bowl into the base of the industrial-grade Hobart mixer.

  That’s when she realized that the mixer’s attachments were nowhere to be found. During Seth’s introductory tour of the kitchen, he’d mentioned that the mixer accessories were all stored in a metal drawer beneath the counter, but Anna searched and came up empty. Then she searched the drawers above and below—still nothing.

  She was rooting through the contents of the condiment supply cartons, figuring that someone might have absent-mindedly stashed the beater attachment in there, when her phone rang again. Jonas’s name flashed up on caller ID. Again.

  For the first time in days, she picked up. “Hello?”

  “Hi.” He sounded a bit startled. “Finally. I was about to call our mobile provider and ask if you’d canceled your service.”

  “No,” she said shortly. “I’ve been busy.”

  “You’ve been avoiding me.”

  “You’re the one who took off for another continent,” she pointed out.

  “I didn’t have a choice, Anna. I have. To work.” She could practically hear him gritting his teeth.

  She forced herself to relax the muscles knotting in her neck and shoulders. “You know what? I don’t have time to fight with you right now. I have work to do. I have deadlines.”

  “What’s up?” He sounded heartened by the prospect of problem solving.

  She gave him a thirty-second summary of the night’s events. “… and honestly, what is the point of signing a lease and paying all that money to use this space if I’m going to be constantly harassed by the world’s bitterest townie and I can’t even count on having the proper equipment? This is bullshit, Jonas! Bullshit!”

  “Calm down,” Jonas said. “You’re getting way too emotional.”

  “Of course I’m emotional! I’m tired, I’m exasperated, I miss you, I have no idea what’s happening between us, I’ve got a client depending on me, and the clock is ticking, and—”

  “Anna. Ease up.” His voice got slower and calmer, the aural equivalent of Xanax. “One thing at a time. Don’t freak out about what’s going to happen twelve hours from now. Just concentrate on what you’re baking tonight.”

  “That’d be a lot easier to do if I could get my hands on the fucking mixer attachment!”

  “Ohhh-kay. I hate to do this, but I’m going to remind you that you ovulated thirteen days ago.” He cleared his throat. “Which means that right now, you may be kind of, uh, irrational.”

  She sucked in her breath. “I know you did not just play the PMS card.”

  “Sorry, I take it back.” He waited a beat, and then, mistaking her enraged silence for forgiveness, forged ahead. “But you asked what I would do in this situation, and I’m telling you, if it were me, I’d stop ranting and raving and start doing something productive. Starting with finding an alternative mixer.”

  “Of course.” She threw up her hands. “It’s so simple. Why didn’t I think of that?”

  “I’m picking up on your sarcasm.”

  “Well, I’m picking up on your condescension. The whole point of leasing this space is so I have industrial-grade equipment. Where am I supposed to come up with another Hobart mixer in the middle of the night up here in the Adirondacks?”

  “What about the one you brought from home?”

  “Jonas, I’m supposed to be feeding fifty people. It’s going to take forever to do everything that needs to be done with a single-batch mixer.”

  “All the more reason to get started right away.”

  She closed her eyes and curled her fingers around the edge of the counter. “I’m so glad we had this talk.”

  “Me, too.” She could hear faint strains of music in the background on his end of the line. “So I was thinking about you today,” he said.

  “Oh?”

  “Yeah. You’re going to ovulate again pretty soon.”

  Anna’s eyes popped open.

  “And we’re on different continents,” he continued, with what sounded like optimism.

  “Where exactly are you going with this?” she asked.

  “Well. Isn’t it kind of a relief?”

  “Not to me. Why would you say that?”

  “Because the pressure’s off.” He forced a chuckle. “We don’t have to, you know—”

&n
bsp; “Have sex? Have a baby? Have a future?”

  “Force anything.”

  Anna picked up her measuring cups and held on to them tightly, until the rims dug into her palm and the thick metal walls began to warm against her skin.

  “We’re spending time together because we want to,” Jonas continued. “Not because your basal body temperature dictates that we have to. See? Progress.”

  Anna wanted to ask him a million questions. Most of all, she wanted to ask him when he had stopped thinking of her as the love of his life and started thinking of her as a problem to be handled.

  How much of this is my fault? When did we stop listening to each other?

  All she said was, “I’m glad you want to spend time with me. On separate continents.”

  “That can’t stand in our way. We could have phone sex.”

  That caught her off guard. “No, we can’t.”

  “Not right now, obviously,” he said. “You’re on deadline. But once you finish up with everything there, you could call me back and we—”

  Anna hung up on him, set the oven timer, and allowed herself exactly five minutes to sob into a linen napkin. She thought about their wedding night, when she had also wept, not from joy but because the emotional strain of spending a five-hour reception trying to head off conflicts between Jonas’s divorced parents and Anna’s divorced parents and a seemingly endless parade of easily offended step-relatives and in-laws had left them too drained to do anything but lie motionless in the huge four-poster bed in their honeymoon suite.

  “Families suck.” The down pillow under her head had rustled as she gazed at her brand-new husband. “Individually, everyone’s fine, but as a group, they suck.”

  “Yeah, they do,” Jonas had agreed. He was still wearing his rented tuxedo, looking simultaneously suave and vulnerable. “But that’s the whole point of getting married, right? We get to start our own family. Speaking of which, we better get crackin’. How many kids did I promise you? Four? Five?”

  “Let’s start with one.” She’d laughed. “Tomorrow. I don’t think I have the energy to try for a wedding night baby.”

  He’d reached over and stroked her cheek. “How about a hot shower and a foot rub?”

  She kicked off her high heels and wiggled her toes, which had lost all feeling right around the cake cutting. “This is already the happiest marriage of all time. And don’t worry. We’ll make up for lost time on the honeymoon.”

  “You’re worth the wait.” He trailed his hand along her neck, bare shoulder, and arm until he laced his fingers with hers. “Always have been, always will be.”

  They’d rested together in silence for a few minutes, their bodies relaxing into each other. Then Anna had mustered the energy to raise her head and prop herself up on her elbows.

  “Promise me we’ll never be like that.” She’d squeezed his hand. “Promise me that our kids will not have to spend their weddings worrying about whether we’re going to start brawling over stupid crap that happened fifteen years ago.”

  “I promise.” He squeezed back. “We’ll always be on the same team, no matter what.”

  “But life can surprise you.” She thought about how all the fractured, feuding families downstairs had started in rapturous honeymoons. “Marriage is tough.”

  He pulled her back down and wrapped her in his arms. “We’re tougher.”

  The oven timer dinged. Anna wiped her eyes, splashed cool water onto her cheeks, and called in the family she’d created for herself, the sisters who’d stuck by and supported her during the toughest times of all.

  Coca-Cola cake?” Jamie peered dubiously at Anna’s recipe notes. “With actual soda in it? No offense, but that sounds kind of—”

  “Iffy,” Caitlin finished for her.

  “It’s a Southern classic,” Brooke said. “Don’t you people ever go to church potlucks?”

  Anna ignored the commentary and guided each of her friends to the individual prep stations she’d set up. “I’m using gourmet dark cocoa imported from France and making the marshmallows from scratch. That’s what the cream of tartar and the gelatin are for.”

  “You’re making marshmallows from scratch?” Jamie asked.

  “You’re making marshmallows from scratch,” Anna corrected her. “It’s easy once you get the knack of spreading it on the marble slab. We’ll do the cake first, and then, while that’s cooling, we’ll tackle the velvet Jell-O salad, the bread-and-butter pudding, and the Fruit Fool.” She laughed at their expressions. “Hey, it’s an authentic 1950s cocktail theme. The heyday of Wonder Bread and fruit cocktail. Our job is to take these ingredients and elevate them to an unprecedented level of playful refinement.”

  Cait and Brooke exchanged a look.

  “Tell me what to do and I’ll do it,” Jamie said. “But the refinement part’s all on you.”

  “Fair enough,” Anna said. “I really appreciate you guys coming in to save my ass yet again. This is probably going to take all night, so I apologize in advance.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” Cait said. “We live for all-nighters.”

  “I’m just so frustrated about not being able to use the Hobart mixer,” Anna said. “It would cut my work time in half. I know the beaters are supposed to be stored right here in this drawer, and I’ve torn this whole place apart looking for them. Now we’re all going to be inconvenienced because of someone else’s carelessness.” She paused, her mouth hanging open. “Unless …”

  “Unless what?”

  Anna’s mouth snapped shut. “I smell sabotage.”

  Two minutes later, they had located the local phone book in the back office and Anna was dialing Trish Selway’s home number.

  “Hi, Trish, it’s Anna McCauley. Listen, I know it’s late, but I was wondering if there’s any chance you might have misplaced the mixer attachments while you were working tonight. Accidentally, of course.”

  “Who is this?” Trish mumbled.

  “Anna. The other baker at Pranza.”

  A stifled yawn on the other end of the connection. “What time is it?”

  “Listen, I’m sorry to disturb you, but I can’t seem to locate the flat paddle attachment for the Hobart mixer.”

  There was a long pause, and when Trish finally replied, her voice dripped with schadenfreude. “Really? Hmm. That’s too bad.”

  “I knew it!” Anna raised her fist in vindication.

  “Knew what?” Trish asked.

  “Don’t play innocent with me. You made off with it while I was at the grocery store, didn’t you? Have you no shame?”

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  “Come off it. Save yourself a world of hurt and just tell me where you hid it.”

  “Are you kidding me? You call me up, at home, in the middle of the night, to accuse me of—what are you accusing me of, again?”

  “Concealing essential kitchen equipment with malice aforethought. You can’t stand the thought of having competition, so you’re sabotaging me!”

  “Wow. Do you have any idea how insane you sound?”

  “Oh right.” Anna pounded her fist on the metal countertop. “I’m the insane one.”

  “You’re the one rousting a pregnant woman at midnight and having hysterics,” Trish pointed out. “Leave me alone, you psycho. The Bug and I need our sleep.”

  Click. Anna listened to the dial tone for a minute, then slowly turned around to face her friends.

  “Good for you,” Jamie said. “You really gave her what for.”

  “Yeah, she won’t screw with you again,” Cait said.

  “She claims she has no idea what I’m talking about.” Anna chuffed. “She called me a psycho.”

  “The nerve!”

  Brooke, Cait, and Jamie turned to one another, exclaiming their assent with increasing force and frequency until Anna said, “Although.”

  The other three shut up.

  “Now that I’m thinking this over, I have to admit that there may be a tee
ny, tiny, very remote possibility that I jumped the gun here.” Anna ran her index finger along the countertop. “I mean, you have to agree that these are not the actions of a rational woman. Calling up my competitor in the middle of the night and flat-out accusing her of theft and sabotage? Am I losing my grip on reality?”

  “Of course not.” Brooke cleared her throat delicately. “I will say, however, that you do seem to be wound a little tightly today. Forgive me for asking, but is it possible that you’re PMS-ing?”

  Anna burst out laughing.

  “What?” Brooke asked, flushing pink.

  “Nothing.” Anna gasped for breath. “Everything. Let’s get to work.”

  And they did, working magic with marshmallows and maraschino cherries until after dawn, when Trish Selway swept through the door. She drew up short when she saw Anna. “What are you still doing here?”

  “We’ve all been slaving away for the last twelve hours.” Anna tapped her whisk against the rim of her metal mixing bowl. “What are you doing here?”

  “I have a breakfast meeting with Seth.” Trish thinned her lips. “Not that it’s any of your business.”

  “Well, I’m glad to hear that Seth is on his way. I have a lot to discuss with him, starting with the mysterious and oh-so-conveniently timed disappearance of the Hobart beater.”

  “Oh my God, you’re still on that?” Trish marched over to the metal drawer, bent down to rummage through the utensils, and yanked out the flat paddle. “Is this what you’re bitching about? This beater right here?”

  “How the hell … ?” Anna could feel the blood rushing out of her face. “I looked through that drawer twenty times! That was not in there.” She appealed to Cait, Brooke, and Jamie. “That was not in there.”

  “Sure. It just materialized out of thin air.” Trish tossed it on the counter with a clang as she strode toward the dining area. “Sucks for your friends they had to stay up all night for no reason. Still want to talk to Seth, you paranoid legacy lunatic?”

  “I am mortified.” Anna couldn’t look away from at the paddle still rocking gently on the counter. “I’m also PMS-ing. And blind. And a self-destructive maniac.”