Lavender grunted, pushing away her coffee as she rubbed a fist over her diaphragm. “They gave me indigestion, the rats. Guess I’ll have to have some namby-pamby milk.”
This little cake is the first that I’ve made in my Airstream oven. It’s a cold night in the mountains, even though it’s summer, and I had to bake something to feel normal again. Not a fun day driving, my friends! I had to pull off early, thanks to wind, but it gives Willow and me a chance to have a good night’s sleep.
Halfway there!
Comments [119]
Pippin987
Stay safe, Ginny! The candle I lit for you is still burning strong.
nobodyknowsnuttin
That cake sounds like something my mom used to whip up after school. Yum!
justbake
The gang in Idaho can’t wait to meet you, Ginny! We’re preparing a big feast. Let us know if you’re running behind. There have been fires around here.
READ MORE >>>
Chapter 11
Ginny wrote her cheerful blog sitting at the table in her trailer, peering out into a storm that flung lightning bolts like arrows. It had just sprung up, noisy and furious. Rain pounded on the roof, as loud as an entire drum company. Her hands ached from gripping the steering wheel like a vise to keep the trailer on the road as it snaked down through the mountain passes. The wind had been a plague all day.
She supposed she was due a challenge. The previous two days had been easy, despite the mountains.
There had been no rain today until just a little while ago, only that blustery, buffeting wind. She was less than sixty miles from her planned stop on the Great Salt Lake, but there had just not been another hour of driving in her. When she’d spied this truck stop perched at the end of a small town, she grabbed a spot with relief. A handful of semis were parked along one end in a wide lot, their engines rumbling in the cold afternoon.
Her simple little cake scented the air with sugar and comfort, and her empty plate attested to the fact that it had been a better-than-decent experiment. She had worried a lot about being able to bake on the road, to keep the photos going for the blog. She hadn’t known how it would be to bake in such different circumstances.
But she’d also decided the blog was hers and she made the rules. If she took photos of other people’s baked goods on the road, it was no big deal. It wasn’t as if she was a genius of a cake baker, anyway—the appeal was her photos.
Overhead, rain pounded on the roof. Willow dozed on her foot.
It was very cozy knowing there were eggs and milk in the fridge, along with some cherries she’d picked up at a farm stand in western Colorado. The romance of the road was not exactly present at the truck stop, but that was part of the game, too, she supposed. She’d hoped to spend the night on an island in the Great Salt Lake, but now, to stay on time, she’d have to scrap that idea. She pulled out her map and spread it flat, trying to figure out her next leg.
It had been a bit optimistic to plan for four hundred miles every day. Pulling the trailer up and down the passes was a slower process than she had expected, for one thing. It was slower driving, period. Sometimes it was embarrassing to be the slowest vehicle on the road. Cars and trucks roared by her, impatience winking in their taillights.
At least they could pass like that. It was harder for Ginny, pulling the trailer, but sometimes she, too, was impatient, plodding behind a farm truck loaded with hay or an RV’er ambling down the road. This morning she’d seen a couple she met in Grand Junction, and the old man waved as she passed. She tooted her horn. It made her feel known, part of the community.
Now she plotted out her next leg, then carried a book back to her bed and propped herself up on the pillows. It was so gloomy she had to turn on a lamp, and that gave an even richer sense of coziness to the day. Willow padded down the minuscule hall and jumped up on the bed with her. Ginny buried a hand in the dog’s thick fur, propped her glasses on her nose, and began to read.
Happy. This was what happiness felt like. She hadn’t realized you could feel it when you were all alone.
She must have dozed off, because she woke up hearing music and the clink of glasses. A woman’s throaty laugh wafted through the trailer, and she could have sworn she smelled onions cooking in fat. Her stomach growled. She popped open her eyes, blinking.
There was nothing, of course. Just a dream. Willow stretched, her claws touching the far wall with a soft snick. No onions. No woman laughing.
Her stomach, however, was definitely growling.
One thing about parking at the truck stop was that she could have a hearty, hot meal that she didn’t have to cook. It was still pouring rain. Leaving Willow curled up in a deep sleep on the bed, Ginny grabbed her umbrella and dashed across the parking lot, splashing through puddles that soaked her jeans up to the knees. She dove through the glass doors of the diner and shook herself and her umbrella.
A woman in a retro-style uniform, pale brown with a ribbon of pink stripes down one side, came over. “How ya doing, hon?” she asked. “One?”
“Yes, please.” Ginny followed, head down. There were lots of other single diners in here, but it still made her feel awkward in a way. Across the room, she spied the redheaded Aussie, her braid hanging over the shoulder of her plaid shirt. The woman waved and Ginny waved back.
“Here you go,” the server said.
Ginny needed to be able to eat by herself, in public. “Thanks,” she said, sliding into the booth.
The menu offered home-style cooking: meatloaf and mashed potatoes, and country fried steak, and biscuits and gravy. She studied it luxuriously, rubbing her growling belly.
Someone approached the table, and Ginny looked up, expecting the Aussie or a server. Instead, it was a man, who said, “Hey. Aren’t you the lady with the dog?”
His face came into context. He was the guy who’d petted Willow at the rest stop back in Colorado. The man whose dog had died. “Oh! Hello. Yes, that’s me.”
“How’s the trip going?”
“Good.” She frowned, turning the menu side to side on the table between her two index fingers. “Today was a bit challenging, but I guess that’s to be expected.”
“It definitely happens.”
“I must not be doing too terrible if I caught up to you.”
His eyes twinkled. “Well, I live in Grand Junction. I had a layover. Fresh load now.”
Ginny laughed. “Okay, that makes more sense.”
“Mind if I join you?” He pointed at the empty spot across from her. “As you might have discovered by now, a person can get a little tired of their own company.”
She hesitated, more because she found herself sitting straighter, admiring his rich voice and good-looking face, than because she thought he was dangerous. “Uh—”
“No, no. Don’t worry.” He stepped back. “I’m not offended. But they know me around here. They’ll tell you that my name is Jack Gains and I run loads from Grand Junction to Portland about twice a month.”
Ginny flushed. “I didn’t think you were dangerous,” she said. “I’m just kind of new to all this.” She gestured, including everything. The restaurant, the road, the trailer outside.
He nodded. “I thought so.”
For one more minute she hesitated, a voice in her head blaring, HE IS A STRANGER. The voice sounded suspiciously like her mother’s. “I’d love to have you join me, Jack Gains,” she said, and indicated the other side of the booth. When he slid in, smiling, she said, “I’m Ginny Smith.”
“Nice to meet you. Where’s your dog?”
“Sleeping. It’s been a boring afternoon. We pulled in here around two and have been holed up in the trailer ever since.”
He rubbed his face. “Yeah, that wind was no fun. I was stopped on I-70 for nearly three hours. I heard over the radio that a truck jackknifed south of here on I-15.”
“It’s a relief to know even an experienced driver was rattled by those winds.” She stretched out her hands, feeling the ache in
the joints and tight tendons. “I was afraid we were going to end up in a canyon a couple of times.”
“No, it was bad. I heard it’s whipping up some forest fires up north.”
“Seems like the rain would put them out.”
“If they get it. Weather patterns in the mountains are unpredictable.”
The server came over. “You want your usual, Jack?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
She scribbled on a pale-green tablet. “Are you ready to order, sweetheart?”
“Meatloaf, please. No gravy on the potatoes, just some extra butter. And coffee.”
“Got it.” She winked as she picked up the menu. “Don’t let him sweet-talk you, now. This one is a charmer.”
“Oh, it’s not like that,” Ginny said, showing her wedding ring. “We just met.”
They both chuckled, and Ginny realized that it had been teasing. A flush roared through her cheeks, over her ears, down her neck.
“It’s all right,” Jack said, leaning over the table. “She’s got a little crush on me and was staking out her territory.”
Ginny still couldn’t look at him. “I see.”
“I’ll be right back, folks.”
The woman ambled away and Ginny became acutely aware of the placement of her feet under the booth, her hands on the table, the shine of her wedding ring. The silence around them seemed alive, buzzing.
“So, where’re you from, Ginny?”
Stop being so missish, she told herself, using a phrase from the historical romances she loved to read. She was also partial to memoirs about cooks and women who had been brave for their times. She looked him right in the eye. “A little town outside Wichita, Kansas.”
“I’m familiar with Wichita. I do a run to St. Louis once every coupla months. What’s the town?”
“Dead Gulch,” she said, and it sounded funny to her, a made-up name for a dusty western town. “Do you know it?”
“I’ve been through it once or twice. Right on Highway 50, right? There’s a grain mill on the edge of town on the north.”
She smiled. “That’s it.”
“Farm country. Not much to it, is there?”
“You don’t choose where you’re born.”
“True enough.” He nodded, tapping a sugar packet against the table. He had long thumbs, with clean oval nails. “You grow up on a farm?”
“I did,” she admitted. “My daddy grew soybeans, mainly. My mom kept chickens and sells eggs, produce, that kind of thing, from a stand alongside the road. It wasn’t the most glamorous life, I can tell you. I hated it.”
“A pig farm is worse,” he said, half-smiling. The waitress brought big mugs of coffee and hustled away, calling out to somebody coming in the door. “That’s where I grew up.”
“Really?” Ginny winced. “They do stink.”
He opened the sugar packet and poured it into the cup slowly, watching it. “I hated it, too. Thought about a million ways to escape, and you know what I did? I ended up taking agriculture classes at school. Thought maybe I’d grow peaches.”
“Not all farming is equal,” Ginny said. “Peaches sound like a good option. Did you try it?”
“Nope. Got married right out of school and had to figure out a way to make a living quick, so I was a farmhand instead of the boss, then a truck driver headed for divorce.”
“Sorry.” She watched him open one plastic creamer and pour that into the cup, stir, and pick up another. “It’s not exactly a good life for a family man, is it?”
“No, that’s true.” He seemed to get his coffee precisely right and took a sip. Made a soft noise of approval. Ginny felt the sound at the edge of her jaw, down the side of her neck. She found herself watching his mouth.
She looked away, alarmed.
“I say something wrong?” he asked. “You’ve gone all flushed on me again. Does that strike a nerve? You know a truck driver who done somebody wrong?”
“Um, no,” Ginny said, and laughed a little. “I’m just—”
“New to all this, right?”
She leaned over the table, her cup clasped between her hands, opened her mouth, hesitated, and decided to just be herself, whole cloth, for once in her life. “What if I told you I’d hardly ever left Kansas before last Sunday?”
“Ever?”
“Once, to go to a wedding when I was a teenager. We drove to Minneapolis.” She pressed her palms against the cup, taking comfort in the solidness of ceramic and heat. “I have never been on a plane, or seen the ocean, or been to the mountains, before this week.”
Tenderness turned his mouth up at the corners, gentled something in his gray eyes. “And now you’re driving yourself and a trailer across the country.” He inclined his head. “What brought that on?”
And keeping with her decision to be honest, Ginny said, “My friend invited me to come to Oregon and celebrate her eighty-fifth birthday with her,” she began. She told him about Lavender—“another farm!”—and the Foodie Four. “We’re kind of an odd bunch, honestly. Kansas housewife, a hipster foodie, Lavender, and Valerie, who was a prima ballerina in Cincinnati. She used to write about wine.”
“But if there are four of you, why are only three meeting at the farm?”
“Valerie is doing something else,” Ginny said, and paused. “Two years ago, her husband and two of their three daughters were killed in a small-plane crash. Her daughter is not handling it all that well, and Val is taking her on a tour of Indian country. It’s her big passion.”
“That’s bad luck. How old is the girl?”
“Fourteen now.”
“Don’t get over that in a hurry, do you?”
“No,” Ginny agreed. She thought of the frantic emails at the time, the looming horror of it. Both Lavender and Ruby had flown to Cincinnati for the funerals, but even though Valerie and Ginny were the closest, in terms of both friendship and distance, Ginny had not gone. She hadn’t found the bravery.
Then.
Tonight she was braver. “I was mad at myself for not going to the funerals, for being so afraid.” It was maybe the most honest thing she’d ever said out loud. “And I decided I didn’t want to be that person anymore.”
“So you bought that fancy trailer and took yourself on a road trip?”
“Pretty much.” She took a sip of coffee, feeling a different version of herself reflected in his eyes. It was odd—and weirdly freeing—to tell her story to a stranger, a person who hadn’t known her for the whole of her life. “I write a blog about cakes, and I’m meeting some of my readers along the way.”
“Blog?”
“You don’t know what a blog is?”
His mouth twitched. Amusement? Annoyance? “Of course. I was just asking more about it.”
“Sorry.”
“It’s all right.”
Ginny said, “I used to be a supermarket baker.” She gave him a rueful smile. “Glamorous work, I know, but it was pretty creative and I liked it. Then one day I just decided to start this blog about cakes, and I took a photo of a German chocolate cake I had baked and posted it.” She fell silent, thinking about how that single decision had shifted her life so massively. The woman she had been that lonely afternoon could not have imagined this moment.
Across the table, Jack watched her over the top of his mug. His eyes were clear, the corners creased with laughter and squinting for hours into the sun.
“It changed everything,” she said. “Have you ever had that happen—done some small thing and it ended up changing your life?”
“Couple times,” he said. “The first time, I fell out of a tree and shattered my shoulder. It never was quite the same after, which meant that my plans to be a professional ball player went right out the window.”
“Ow!”
He looked down, plucking at the edge of a napkin. “The other time was when I stole my wife from my best friend.”
“Wife.” The word felt heavy between them, even though Ginny had a husband, too, waiting at home. In a wa
y it made it safer, and she breathed a bit deeper. “Were they married?”
“No,” he said. “We were all in high school. She moved to town when we were juniors, and Carl flipped for her. They dated for almost a year, and then he went on vacation with his family, and we ended up at an inner-tubing party at the same time, and she looked so damned hot in a yellow bikini that I decided I had to have her.”
Ginny smiled. “That’s kind of romantic, actually. Especially as you ended up married.”
“I guess.” His voice was raspier. “Except Carl never forgave me. Lost him for good over it, and then Debbie and I ended up being just about as miserable together as two people could be.” He lifted a rueful eyebrow. “Bad fit.”
“Kids?”
“You don’t know what kids are?”
Ginny laughed.
“I do have a couple. Grown now. A daughter who lives in Texas, and a son who can’t get his act together and still lives with his mom in Denver. How about you? Got any kids?”
She told him about Christie. “She is so smart. She’s a resident at a hospital in Chicago. I’m very proud of her.”
“You should be.”
Somehow, it was easy to talk to him. They kept talking. And talking. And talking. He told her about a dog he’d had when he was a teenager, a daring and irrepressible Lab. She told him about the goldfish she won at the county fair that ended up living for twelve years. They touched on movies and books—she liked dramas and romances, and he liked science fiction and action adventure. He said he listened to a lot of books on tape—currently it was A Game of Thrones, which made her revise her estimation of his brain. “That’s a pretty dense series,” she said, folding an empty sugar packet into an accordion.
“You read it?”
She nodded. “My daughter insisted, and although I don’t always listen, I was intrigued by this one. It’s really romantic and magical and all that, you know?”
He nodded, smiling. “I do. I love it. Who is your favorite character? No, wait. Let me guess. Daenerys.”
“I love Daenerys,” Ginny said, thinking of the dragon queen and her bravery, “but I love Tyrion the most. You?” She smiled. “Wait. Let me guess.”
The All You Can Dream Buffet Page 9