Sweet Masterpiece - The First Sweet’s Sweets Bakery Mystery

by Connie Shelton

  Chapter 13

  Beau came walking up, just as she cut the truck’s engine and got out. She waved helplessly at the red car. His face collapsed into the same oh shit expression that Sam imagined on her own.

  “I have no idea what she’s doing here,” she said. “She lives in L.A. and only visits me when—”

  “When there’s trouble,” he finished. “I’ll go. You sort it out and call me later. Let me know if you need any help.”

  He gave her a lingering kiss and walked down the driveway.

  Sam knew she should have expected this. Kelly had borrowed her bank balance a few weeks ago. That was the warning, the clue that should have let her know that her daughter would show up on her doorstep.

  She walked to the back door, dreading the conversation that was about to take place.

  Kelly, the girl who alternately charms my heart and wrenches my guts, Sam thought. The young woman who should be out on her own—she’s thirty-four years old, after all—but who shows up uninvited at the worst possible times.

  She paused at the door, the past flooding back. Thirty-five years ago Samantha Sweet had been this dumb girl just out of high school in small town Texas, seeing no future whatsoever in her job at the Dairy Queen. Billy Roy Farmer, from a long line of cotton-farming Farmers, was sniffing around like a horny dog. They’d lost their virginity together but truthfully Sam just couldn’t see herself settling into a life of Tupperware parties, Friday night football games, Wednesdays and Sundays at the Baptist church, and forever looking out a kitchen window at miles of flat. Cause that’s what a cotton farm in Texas was—flat.

  Her life would become her mother’s, and at night in the room Sam shared with her sister Rayleen, she’d nearly scream out loud at the thought of it. To keep from going entirely insane she thought of other places she might go, but truthfully, nobody she’d ever known had ever traveled any farther than Dallas so she didn’t have much to compare to. In the 1970s a trip to Six Flags Over Texas was every local kid’s idea of a dream come true.

  Then one day she’d just taken her paycheck—$52.47 after taxes—and put half of it into her precious little savings account, which totaled nearly three hundred bucks after two summers and about a million Saturdays of making chocolate sundaes. She was on her way to the library to return a Kathleen Woodiwiss romance novel (that sort of reading was going to get her into trouble with Billy Roy, she just knew it). She knew there was such a thing as birth control, but Kathleen’s characters never bothered with it and Sam was a little fuzzy on the details of how it worked anyway—they didn’t discuss it much in the Baptist church.

  Anyway, walking down Main Street, she passed Bobbie Jo Hudson’s Travel Agency and a shiny new poster in the window caught her eye. Alaska. Everything in that picture was blue and green, with snow on top. And nothing about that landscape was flat. And she fell in love right then and there. Sam must have stared for ten minutes because Bobbie Jo Hudson came out and asked if there was something she could help her with. And Sam just blurted out that it sure would be great to see Alaska some day, and Bobbie Jo laughed and said, “Well, a ticket to get you there would cost almost four hundred dollars.” That’s how she said it: four hundred in a big italicized voice. It was pretty clear that she’d never sold a ticket that pricey before, and as Sam thought about it on her way to the library she kind of wondered how on earth anyone made a living out of a travel agency in this town anyway. Nobody ever went anywhere.

  She turned in Kathleen Woodiwiss and found herself wandering to the Jack London novels and before she knew it she was back in her room at home, blazing her way through The Call of the Wild.

  Scraping up every cent she could, including her birthday money and busting open her childhood piggy bank, she took the bus to Seattle, a long series of boat ferries (now that’s an amazing thing to a Texas kid), and eventually found her way to the employment office for the new pipeline they were building. When asked what her job skills were she couldn’t think of a single thing so she blurted out that she could bake brownies and grill hamburgers and she made a heck of an ice cream sundae. And that got her a job as a camp cook.

  Sam made more money than she could have ever dreamed of, and she met a blue-eyed charmer named Jake Calendar. By that October, when it became obvious that it was going to stay nighttime for the next five months and when she got her fill of trudging out in the snowy dark of the line camp to puke into a latrine every morning, Sam decided that another change was in order. She never told Jake about the baby that would arrive the next summer. She just took the company shuttle to Anchorage and spent a little of her earnings on a plane ticket. She still couldn’t face the idea of heading back to flat, Baptist Texas so she landed in Denver. Longer days, but not a whole lot warmer. She bought a used Jeep and headed south, determined not to let the mountains out of her sight. When she landed in Taos, New Mexico, she stopped.

  Kelly arrived on a beautiful May morning and it was scary to see that the child had the same brilliant blue eyes, curly brown hair and charm-you-out-of-anything ways as her father.

  Those blue eyes fixed on Sam now, as she walked into the kitchen.

  “Mom! Hi! Surprise!”

  “Kelly. What are you doing here?”

  She’d made herself right at home. Dishes were piled in the sink, smeared in red sauce from the spaghetti Sam had left in the fridge a few days earlier. Through the door to the hall, she saw a large black suitcase on the bed in the guest room. A guest room now. At one time it was Kelly’s and she still obviously felt entitled.

  “You look great, Mom. Have you lost weight?”

  Hardly. But that’s the kind of charmer Kelly was. She had an amazing ability to ignore criticism and just plow forward with a sunny outlook and a batch of compliments. That cheery disposition got them through her teen years without a death in the house.

  Sam plopped her pack on the counter and washed her hands at the sink.

  “What time did you get in?” she asked. “You should have told me you were coming. I would have made dinner.”

  “Oh that’s okay,” Kelly said. “I found something.” As an afterthought she asked if Sam had eaten anything and offered to warm the rest of the pasta. The tea kettle was hot and so Sam pulled mugs from the cabinet and dunked teabags for both of them.

  “So, you got a few days off?” she asked, once they were settled at the table.

  “Well, that’s the thing.”

  I’m in trouble, Sam thought. “What ‘thing’?”

  “You know how I’ve been stressing over Deborah lately.”

  Kelly’s supervisor truly did sound like the office witch at the mid-sized corporation where she’d been working her way up the ladder.

  “This week was the pits. She’s been on my ass for two weeks, but it got to be more than her usual PMS or whatever. She has it in for me, Mom. I can’t handle her anymore.”

  They’d had this discussion by phone quite a few times. Kelly swore she’d discussed Deborah’s behavior with company management, that everyone else in the department agreed with her, but that nothing ever changed. Sam had been sympathetic but was getting the uneasy feeling that tea and sympathy wasn’t what Kelly was after now.

  “I’ve quit,” she said.

  “Quit? A seventy-thousand a year job, and you’ve just quit?”

  “It’s not like there aren’t better jobs, Mom. I’m getting my résumé out there.”

  How many places could have possibly received her résumé since, what, Friday? All sorts of thoughts went through Sam’s head—mainly, how was Kelly going to pay back the cash she’d taken. Unemployment money wasn’t an option if she’d just walked out. And there certainly wouldn’t be any golden parachute.

  Kelly got up and went to the cookie jar, helping herself to the last of the butter cookies. “Don’t stress over this, Mom. Something great is going to come through.”

  Sam rinsed her mug and put the dirty dishes into the dishwasher, refusing to guess at why Kelly left Los Angel
es on a moment’s notice, or to dwell on the fact that she’d never find a job of that caliber here in Taos.

  “I’m tired,” Sam said. “We’ll talk about this tomorrow.”

  She closed her bedroom door and put on her nightshirt. A quick call to Beau to let him know there was no emergency and that they could talk more tomorrow. From the living room a reality show began blaring on television. The smell of microwave popcorn drifted through the house. This was too much like the last time Kelly’d shown up, right after her college graduation. Sam pulled the pillow over her head and tried not to think.