Wedding Cake Crumble

by Jenn McKinlay

  “I’m so sorry.”

  “That’s mostly why we took the book-signing gig. Angie said she needed something else to think about.”

  Joe nodded. He swallowed and then asked, “Have you heard from Stan?”

  “Not a word,” she said. “He put a detail on everyone, including Oz, who is not enjoying Officer Hayley Clark, not even a little.”

  “Is she cute?” Joe asked.

  Mel looked at him.

  “I just meant if she was cute, it shouldn’t be such a hardship,” Joe said.

  “She is cute,” Mel said. “I think that makes it worse.”

  “Why?”

  “His girlfriend, Lupe, has been away for a long time and the last time she was here . . .” Mel stopped talking. She didn’t like to gossip about her employees.

  “They didn’t get along?” he guessed.

  “It seemed tense.”

  “Do you think they broke up?”

  She shrugged. Oz hadn’t said anything, but whenever Mel asked him about Lupe, he got a weird look on his face.

  “Poor Oz,” Joe said. “It’s hell realizing you love someone and can’t be with them.”

  Mel leaned back to study his face. “It’s even worse when you think they’re out of your league.”

  “But it’s magical when they finally become yours,” he said. He hugged her and Mel dropped her head onto his shoulder, smiling when she felt him plant a kiss in her hair.

  If someone had told her terminally awkward and pudgy twelve-year-old self that she would one day be engaged to Joe DeLaura, the man of her dreams, she would have looked them dead in the eye and said, “Shut up!”

  Instead, she turned and kissed his cheek and said, “It sure is.”

  They were quiet, watching Captain Jack attack scraps of paper, climb the shelves of the bookcase, and smack the fronds of the plant hanging in the corner of the room as if they had done something to offend him.

  When Joe finished his third slice, he crumpled his napkin and tossed it onto the box. Mel finished her third as well, except she had to dump the crust. She just couldn’t finish it.

  A sharp rap sounded on her office door but before Mel could call out a greeting the door swung open. Her mother, Joyce Cooper, stuck her head in and her face lit up at the sight of them.

  “Melanie,” she said. “And dear Joe.” Joe had been “dear Joe” to her mother from the moment they had started dating and remained so even during their brief breakup. Mel wasn’t sure, but sometimes she suspected her mother loved Joe more than her.

  “Hi, Mom,” Mel said. She started to scoot off of Joe’s lap, but her mother held up her hands in a stop gesture.

  “Don’t move on my account,” she said. “I just came by because my friend Ginny said that she heard from Monica Wexel, who was talking to Abby Dresden at the art gallery, that you were making the cupcakes for Elise Penworthy’s book signing tomorrow night at the Orange Blossom Resort, but I said that couldn’t possibly be true because you would have told me, because you know that I know most of the people who were written about in that book, and surely, you’d want me to know.

  “I mean, Elise Penworthy is said to have dragged her ex-husband and his hot young wife through the proverbial wringer in that book, of which I would love to get a copy. Not only that, but she goes on to destroy everyone in her neighborhood who took her husband’s side in the divorce, which because of his wealth and influence was just about everyone.”

  “Uh.” Mel stalled. She wasn’t sure what to say and she was a bit worried that her mother had run out of oxygen and was about to pass out. She didn’t. Pity.

  “Mel just got the job a few hours ago,” Joe said. “In fact, I’m sure she was about to tell me that she was going to call you after her dinner break and share the news.”

  “Really?” Joyce clasped her hands in front of her chest and gave him an Aw look.

  Truly, if Joyce’s eyeballs could shoot hearts out of them like an emoji, Mel was pretty sure Joe would be covered right now. While she was thrilled that her mother liked Joe, she couldn’t help but notice that her mother was so besotted she didn’t really hear what Joe said sometimes. As in, he told her he was sure Mel was about to tell him she was going to call her mother, not that she actually was going to call her.

  What a conniver! She hadn’t been about to do any such thing. Then again, it did keep her mother from thinking she was out of the loop. Joyce hated that.

  “I’m sure it was one of the top fifty things I was about to do,” Mel said. “Maybe even top twenty-five.”

  Joyce frowned at her.

  “I’m kidding,” Mel said. “I would have called you. Promise.”

  She hopped off of Joe’s lap and circled the desk and hugged her mom. The blue-green hazel eyes so like her own had faded over the years and were now more blue than green. Mel thought about all her mother had been through, losing her husband, managing two children who were barely adults on her own, and it was small wonder the worry line in between her eyebrows was so deep. It looked deeper today.

  “You heard about Blaise, didn’t you?” Mel asked.

  “Are you all right?” Joyce asked. It was unspoken acknowledgment that she was really here for that reason but didn’t want to say it.

  “I will be,” Mel said.

  “And Angie and Tate?” Joyce asked. “It had to be an awful shock to lose their friend.”

  “It was,” Mel said. “Tate went with Uncle Stan to tell Blaise’s mother. He didn’t go into it with me, but I gathered from Angie it was one of the hardest things he’d ever done.”

  Joyce nodded. “Are they here? I’d like to say hello.”

  “You mean check on them?” Mel asked.

  “Yes, but with more subtlety than that,” Joyce admitted.

  Mel smiled. “You’re such a good mom.”

  To her surprise, Joyce blushed.

  “They’re in the kitchen with the brothers,” Joe said. “I’ll walk you in so they don’t think you’re a robber and try to tackle you or pelt you with cupcakes.”

  “Thank you, dear Joe,” Joyce said.

  Mel and Joe exchanged a look and she gave him a small shake of her head. Because Joyce was a worrier, Mel did not want anyone to tell her that Stan suspected someone was out to sabotage Tate and Angie’s wedding by killing off their vendors. Joyce would worry herself sick about it, so just like Joe’s and Tate’s parents, she was to be kept ignorant of the possibility.

  Mel scooped up Captain Jack and snuggled him close. His soft white fur soothed her and when she looked at him with his black patch of fur over one eye, she couldn’t help but smile. He batted her nose and she put him down so he could continue his shenanigans. The boy did have a pirate’s soul.

  Back in the kitchen, Mel scrubbed up with the detail of a surgeon before continuing the baking. For the tops of the champagne cupcakes, she had gathered a variety of decorations. She wanted champagne buttercream on top with different sized balls to make it look like the frosting was actually bubbles. If her idea proved out, it was going to be incredibly festive-looking and even the high-maintenance Elise Penworthy would approve.

  She glanced at the table in front of her. She did a quick mental calculation. Using their industrial cupcake pans, which baked thirty-six cakes in a batch, they were almost halfway there with a little more than two hundred of the champagne-flavored cakes done. She glanced at the clock. It was almost nine.

  No worries. They could do this. Still, she began moving a little faster as she started the next batch. It was going to be a long night.

  * * *

  • • •

  Angie stood behind the table and yawned. Not a petite, bride-to-be yawn—oh, no, this was a jaw-cracking-bear-going-down-for-hibernation yawn. Mel was pretty sure she saw the filling in Angie’s back molar.

  “Drink your coffee,” s
he said.

  She pushed a large paper cup in Angie’s direction. Feeling as wrecked as Angie, Mel had already done caffeine recon at the resort and managed to talk the managing chef in the kitchen into hooking her up with some supersized java.

  “You’re a goddess,” Angie said.

  They had finished the last of the champagne cupcakes in the wee hours of the morning. The results were pretty amazing, although she wouldn’t say it was worth the lack of sleep.

  The conference room in the Orange Blossom Resort on the north end of Old Town Scottsdale was big and posh. The Mission-style lighting was a nod to Frank Lloyd Wright with stained-glass panes of rectangles in varying earth tones. The room was large and rectangular with rough stone walls and thick wooden beams running across the ceiling.

  Mel and Angie were manning the cupcake towers—there were five—at the back of the room next to the bar. While they arranged the towers, the resort staff scrambled to set up the upholstered chairs. A raised platform at the far end of the room had two comfy armchairs with a table in between them. This was where Cassie would interview Elise.

  Mel had heard the event had been sold out for weeks. The price of admission paid for a signed book, a cupcake, and a seat at the talk. Given that most of the crowd was local, Mel had brought plenty of brochures advertising the bakery.

  “So, let me get this straight. This chick writes a fictionalized tell-all about her neighborhood, sells it to a small local press, and now it’s being optioned for a movie?” Ray asked.

  Ray was the brother on duty for the evening. For the past half hour, he’d been slouched against the wall behind them, reading Elise’s book.

  “Yup,” Angie said. “Did you get to the part about the wife-swapping parties yet?”

  “No, I just finished the bit about the doctor’s wife and her affair with the delivery guy,” he said. He fanned himself with the book. “Steamy stuff. You sure Tate is okay with you reading this?”

  Angie blinked at her brother and then scowled. “Yes, he even lets me watch R-rated stuff on TV.”

  “Hey, now,” Ray said. “There’s no need to get snarky.”

  Angie rolled her eyes and Mel maneuvered herself between Angie and the cupcake table on the off chance Angie decided to lob a cupcake at her brother’s head.

  “Where is Tate, anyway?” Ray asked. “I didn’t think he’d let you out of his sight.”

  “He had a meeting with our attorney who vets all of the franchise applications,” Angie said. “He couldn’t get out of it, but he’ll be here before the talk is over.”

  Ray nodded. He glanced down at the book and then back up to scan the room.

  “Go ahead and read,” Mel said. “They haven’t opened the doors yet.”

  “Thanks.” Ray flashed her a smile and then stuck his nose right back in the book.

  “I never pictured Ray as a reader,” Mel said. “Is it the beautiful prose or the salacious tidbits?”

  “Tidbits, for sure,” Angie said. “The last book Ray read cover to cover was Captain Underpants to our niece and nephew.”

  Mel nodded. She could see that. She chugged her coffee, hoping to fight off the urge to crawl under the table and take a nap. She hoped that Elise was an entertaining speaker, because right now she and Angie were running on fumes.

  She checked the time on her phone for the third time in as many minutes, when the doors to her right were opened and a crowd started to shuffle in. Cassie had instructed Mel and Angie to hold off on passing out the cupcakes until after Elise had given her talk, that way the people waiting for their book to be signed would have something to do.

  At the time this had seemed like a great idea, but all Mel could think now was that if they gave out the cupcakes ahead of time, they could get the heck out of here.

  The crowd surged in, hurrying towards the seats in the front. A few people looked longingly at the cupcakes, but several resort staff stood in front of the table directing people to their chairs and explaining that the cupcakes were for later.

  As soon as the door opened, Ray put the book facedown and came to stand in between Mel and Angie. In their matching Fairy Tale Cupcakes pink aprons with the bakery’s retro logo on the front, Mel knew they represented the bakery well. With Ray standing between them with his thick gold chain tangled in the chest hair that sprouted out of the collar of the skintight black V-neck T-shirt he wore under his leather jacket, well, he was definitely giving a mixed signal.

  One woman, with her bleached blond hair swept up in a cloud on her head, her skin a shade of copper not found in nature, and her girls pushed up and out leading her way like two beacons, paused to take Ray in. She eyed him like he was a cupcake and then batted her false eyelashes at him while biting her lower lip. Ray was halfway over the table before Angie cuffed some sense into him with a quick slap upside the head.

  “Get ahold of yourself,” she snapped.

  The woman frowned at Angie and then at Ray before she spun on the heel of one stiletto and moved up the middle aisle to a seat close to the front.

  “Sorry,” Ray said. He ran a hand over his face, which had become red and sweaty. “It’s just been a while.”

  Angie held up a hand and closed her eyes. “Things a little sister does not need to hear.”

  Ray shook himself from head to toe, like a dog shaking water off its coat, and said, “I’m good. I got this.”

  The three of them stood smiling at the incoming crowd. Well, Mel and Angie smiled while Ray maintained his resting bitch face. Mel was pretty sure that alone kept people from coming any closer.

  Once the crowd settled, Cassie appeared on the platform. She did a quick mic check.

  “Good evening, everyone,” she said. She paused to smile at the crowd. “Can everyone hear me?”

  Mel and Angie, being at the back of the room, gave her a thumbs-up. The sound was a go.

  “Great,” she said.

  She surveyed the room, trying to acknowledge everyone with her bright blue gaze. Her tousled brown hair was cut in a pixie style that accentuated her heart-shaped face. Cassie was somewhere in her forties, although Mel wasn’t sure if it was on the younger or older end. She was funny and vivacious and whip-smart, so Mel knew that this interview with Elise would be entertaining on Cassie’s end for sure.

  “I want to thank you all for coming tonight,” Cassie said. “Before I bring out our guest author, I want to thank the Orange Blossom Resort for letting us meet here. There are just too many of you to cram into my little shop. Also, I want to thank Mel and Angie from Fairy Tale Cupcakes for providing the refreshments. If you haven’t had one of their amazing cupcakes, you are in for a treat.”

  Mel and Angie waved when most of the crowd turned to glance at the cupcake towers behind them.

  “She didn’t mention me,” Ray said. He sounded grumpy.

  “Why would she?” Angie asked. “You didn’t do anything.”

  “I’m here, aren’t I?” Ray said. “Standing right here.”

  Angie shook her head and Mel concealed her laugh with a delicate cough. What Ray lacked in fashion sense, he more than made up for in self-esteem.

  “And now, I’d like to bring out our guest author tonight,” Cassie said. “Please welcome Elise Penworthy.”

  The crowd applauded, a few more enthusiastically than others, and Mel wondered how many of them knew Elise from before she was published. How many of these people could really call her a friend or neighbor or even an acquaintance? Was the crowd mostly known to her or was it people who just wanted to pretend they knew her before she was famous?

  Mel squinted to get a good look at Elise as she strode through a side door into the room. It was quite the grand entrance. She was dressed in pricey designer clothes—white slacks and blouse with a beige cardigan that flattered her middle-aged girth, topped by a long white-and-brown silk scarf looped around her ne
ck with one end trailing behind her almost down to the floor.

  Perfectly manicured and coiffed, Elise had bloodred fingernails and her hair was styled in a choppy shoulder-length bob that had been hit so hard with copper and platinum highlights that it dazzled almost as much as the diamonds at her ears and wrists under the overhead lights.

  She had the face of a woman who had once been a looker, but wrinkles marred her forehead and the corners of her eyes, jowls pulled at the once delicate face, and her teeth, while blindingly bright, were a bit out of alignment, with one incisor protruding on one side of her mouth, giving her smile a sarcastic twist.

  She paused as she made her way through the room to clasp people’s hands or give them an air kiss and a gentle hug. If this crowd adoration was honey, Elise was lapping it up.

  She blew the room a kiss and climbed the three short steps up to the platform, where she enfolded Cassie in a hug. To Mel, it was the first one that seemed genuine. The two women took their seats, Cassie handed Elise a mic of her own, and the crowd settled in to listen.

  “Tell us, Elise,” Cassie said. “What inspired your novel The Palms?”

  “Well.” Elise drew the word out, moving her gaze over the crowd as she let the anticipation weave its way around the audience, tightening about them until the tension had them in a stranglehold, barely breathing as they waited for her disclosure. “I was inspired by my hus—”

  “Liar!”

  Six

  The shout came from the middle of the crowd. Elise drew back as if she’d been slapped. She scanned the crowd and her eyes narrowed as she found the source of the disruption.

  “You husband-stealing slut!” Elise jumped up from her seat. She clutched the mic in her hands as if it were a club that she intended to use to bludgeon someone. “How dare you show your face here!”

  “How dare I?” The accuser stood. She ripped the wide-brimmed hat off of her head and her long blond hair fell in fat curls down her back. “That’s a laugh. How dare you write these horrible disgusting lies?”