by
Nina Lane
© Copyright 2013 Nina Lane ~ All rights reserved
Chocolate pies topped with mountains of whipped cream. Spicy pumpkin pies. Apple pies with gooey, cinnamon fillings. Tart lemon meringue pies. Cheese pies. Berry pies. Brownie pies. Rhubarb pies.
Josh Piper slid a key lime pie into the cold case and calculated he’d have to make five more custard pies tomorrow morning. Like the number pi, Josh thought that pie was also a mathematical constant. Always there. Unchanging. He’d lived most of his nineteen years in his father’s pie shop. A life of pie.
Josh figured that if he knew the meaning of pi, he’d at least learned something in his first year at King’s University. Not that he knew how pi was at all relevant to… well, anything.
Pie either, for that matter.
He pushed his overlong brown hair off his forehead, shut the cold case, and went to grate more chocolate shavings.
A melancholy sigh came from the front of the shop. Josh’s two friends, Leo Myers and Penny Dove, were sitting at a table by the window. Penny was eating a piece of apple pie, and Leo was slouched in his chair with his ever-present fedora pulled over his forehead.
“The private dick is always down on his luck.” Leo stared morosely out the window. “Low on dough. Nursing the last of his hooch. Smoking his last cigarette. Threatened with eviction for not paying the rent.”
Josh and Penny exchanged glances. She rolled her eyes slightly, which made him grin. He and Penny had long suffered through Leo’s love for old detective movies, not to mention his tendency to blur the lines between fiction and reality.
“Then in walks the dame,” Leo continued, his voice heavy. “Blonde, curvy, sultry. And the dick knows he’s doomed. He knows she’ll drag him into a maze of treachery and betrayal, but still he follows her. Willingly. That’s the power of the dame, my friends.”
“The power of some dames,” Penny corrected, digging her fork into the apple pie.
“The power of all dames,” Leo said grimly.
“I have never led a man—dick or otherwise—into any sort of maze,” Penny said, “let alone one of treachery and betrayal.”
“Oh, you will, my shiny Penny.” Leo shook his head, expelling another gusty sigh. “One day, you will.”
Josh doubted that. Not because Penny wasn’t pretty, but because she wasn’t the betrayal-treachery type. She was the loyal girl-next-door type, always wearing jeans and T-shirts, her reddish hair pulled into a ponytail.
Josh picked up the coffeepot and went to the table. Penny had a terrible sense of how to maintain a decent pie-to-coffee ratio, always finishing her coffee before her pie was half done. She gave him a smile of thanks and extended her empty mug.
“Funny shirt,” she remarked.
“Huh?”
“Your shirt.” She nodded to his black T-shirt, which bore the slogan Bacon Gives Me A Lard-On.
“Oh. I was… uh, in a hurry this morning. Just grabbed it.” He thought he’d better change before his dad saw the shirt. Not appropriate for The Pied Piper, his father would say. He wouldn’t like Josh’s torn jeans either.
“I’m telling you,” Leo said, sounding annoyed that he was being ignored. “Samantha broke up with me, and her betrayal is bacon my heart.”
Josh and Penny both laughed. After Josh refilled Penny’s coffee, he went to check on the customers who sat at the tables outside the pie shop. Locals, as usual, all enjoying the summer evening. The Pied Piper was off the beaten track, not easily accessible to the tourists who populated Avalon Street and the lakefront, but the shop was still doing okay thanks to loyal customers.
The creaky, wooden sign his father had carved years ago swung in the breeze that drifted in from Mirror Lake. The blue-striped awning was faded from the sun, the gilt paint letters starting to flake.
Josh stopped in a patch of sunlight. The air outside the shop smelled sweet. Cinnamon, hot cherries, buttery pastry, lemons, melted chocolate. Smells that reminded people of happy childhoods and cozy kitchens, making them wish there was a way back into the past.
Smells that made Josh wish there was a way out.
He went into the shop to finish sprinkling the chocolate cream pies with cocoa powder and chocolate shavings. Leo and Penny were back to discussing dicks and dames. She reached across the table to pat Leo’s hand.
“It’ll only hurt for a little while,” she assured him.
“How do you know?” Leo grumbled. “You’ve never been in love. You’ve barely dated.” He pinned her with a sudden, sharp look. “Have you ever even kissed a guy, Penny?”
Josh paused to glance at Penny, noticing the blush on her cheeks. She was seventeen, though she’d graduated from high school last spring. She’d skipped fourth grade and had always been the youngest, and smartest, in her class.
Josh had been friends with Penny since his sophomore year of high school, when she’d moved into the neighborhood and started at Lakeview High as a freshman. It had been right when his mom got sick. He’d liked being able to hang out with Penny to get away from all the crap that came with having a parent who was dying, like everyone always telling the kid that everything “was going to be all right” when of course they all knew it wasn’t.
Penny had never tried to tell him that. And even though she was smart, she never made Josh feel stupid despite his struggle with schoolwork and disinterest in going to college.
“Of course I’ve kissed a guy,” Penny said, and Josh wondered if Leo noticed the slight hesitation before she spoke.
“Have you?” Leo kept staring at her. “Who?”
Josh realized he was leaning on the counter, waiting for Penny’s answer. She concentrated on her apple pie with one scoop of vanilla ice cream, which he’d put on the edge of the plate so that it wouldn’t break the crust or melt too fast from the hot filling. He knew it annoyed her when that happened.
“None of your business who,” she told Leo.
“Not Dave Thurgood,” Leo said. “Tell me you did not allow Dave Thurgood to touch your kissable lips.”
“I did not,” Penny assured him, her cheeks still red.
Josh thought he should rescue her from Leo’s interrogation, but he really wanted to know the answer. And for once Leo was right. Penny did have kissable lips. Not that Josh knew that from personal experience.
“Then who?” Leo persisted.
“Never mind.” Penny swirled the pie filling around on her plate. “It always works out in the end, right?”
“What does?”
“The dame and the private eye. They solve the mystery, send the bad guy to jail, end up falling in love…”
“You’re changing the subject,” Leo said.
“I’m telling you that if there’s a happy ending for the sultry dame and the washed-up private eye, there will be a happy ending for you.”
“Ah, Penny.” Leo sighed again. “You need to be more of a downer if you want to be a great writer.”
“Lots of great writers wrote books with happy endings,” she replied.
“Like who?”
“Like Shakespeare,” Penny retorted. “A Midsummer Night’s Dream. He gave his characters happy endings. Sometimes, anyway.”
“Hey, Josh man, you believe in happy endings?” Leo asked.
“No.”
Penny swung her gaze to Josh. “You don’t?”
“By definition, an ending is an end to something, right?” Josh said. “So by its very nature, it can’t be happy.”
He rubbed a spot on the glass countertop. He swore Penny was looking at him with disappointment, which bugged him more than he wanted to admit. He didn’t want to talk about happy endings anymore.
“Hey.” Josh snapped his fingers at Leo and pointed at the clock. “You gotta go.”
Leo swore and shoved away from the table. “You realize tonight begins my own seventh circle of hell? I’m forced to wait tables alongside the woman who dumped me and has no idea she still wants me.”
“There’s the rub,” Penny remarked.
“Where’s the rub?” Leo waggled his eyebrows at her. “And what, exactly, are you rubbing?”
Penny threw a packet of sugar at him.
“Out,” Josh ordered Leo.
Leo tipped his fedora and strolled out into the summer evening. Josh followed him outside to bring in the sandwich board that sat on the sidewalk. He locked the door and flipped the Closed sign in the window.
“Still looking for help?” Penny asked, nodding to the Help Wanted sign on the sandwich board.
“Yeah. Morning shifts and Tuesday afternoons. My dad wants to do the deliveries himself, so we need someone to help with prep, then run the counter when we open.”
It had taken work to convince his father that Josh could take over the morning prep and baking so that Simon Piper could get some sleep after driving all over the state for deliveries and overseeing the shop’s new advertising campaign.
After one of their employees quit a few weeks ago, Simon had tried to fill in himself until Josh insisted that he could do it. He’d been glad when his father finally relented. Simon had worked eighteen-hour days for years in an effort to save enough money to send Josh to college.
Josh only wished he’d actually wanted to go to college. And after finishing his first year, he still wished he wasn’t going just to avoid disappointing his father.
“I’m doing all the baking,” he told Penny, “but we’re having trouble filling orders because I also have to work the counter until Tom comes in at noon. And I can’t work in the afternoons because of class and baseball. I’m only working tonight because Mary needed to babysit her grandson.”
“I can help out,” Penny said. “I know how to work a cash register. And I can sell that apple pie to any customer, no matter what they come in for.”
“The hours are early,” Josh warned her. “I’m here by four, and we open at seven.”
“Fine. All my classes are at night, and I work at the clothing store on Wednesdays and Thursdays, so I’m available on Tuesday afternoons too. I can even start tomorrow.”
“Okay.” Josh hesitated. “Uh, the pay’s not great.”
“Doesn’t matter.”
But he knew it did. Unlike him, Penny had wanted to go to King’s, but couldn’t afford the tuition. She’d missed the scholarship deadline because, in the disorganized mess of her parents’ house, her mother had thrown the university paperwork away.
So Penny was taking classes at a local community college trying to get enough credits to transfer to King’s in a year or two. And she was doing it on her own.
Josh sometimes thought it should annoy him that Penny was so… plucky. Like one of those Disney princesses who sings through heartache.
Except that was exactly what he liked the most about Penny. She didn’t want to end up like her deadbeat mother or her sister, who had two kids by the time she was eighteen and no way to support them.
But Penny wasn’t just a bookworm or some airy-fairy dreamer. She was one of those girls who believed what she read about brave heroines and overcoming the odds. She lived it. If anything, Josh wished he had the guts to do what she did.
“Come on.” He went toward the back door of the kitchen. “I’ll walk you home, then come back and finish up here.”
En route to Penny’s house, they passed the industrial buildings and auto-body repair shops that populated the east side of town before crossing the railroad tracks bordering the edges of downtown proper.
Penny lived with her parents and two younger brothers in a modest tract home near the tracks. There was a sad-looking tire swing in the front yard alongside a rusted tricycle and a few other kids’ toys.
“My sister had to move back in with the kids,” Penny explained, pushing the trike aside with her foot to clear the path. “Broke up with her boyfriend again.”
“Crowded house,” Josh offered.
They went inside. The noise of a video game blared from the TV where Penny’s brothers were shooting space aliens. The smells of burnt pizza, cigarette smoke, and beer depressed Josh more than they usually did. He almost didn’t want to leave Penny, feeling like she didn’t belong here.
Nothing seemed right to Josh these days. It wasn’t right that his dad had worked so hard for so many years to pay for Josh to go to a university that he didn’t want to attend. And it really wasn’t right that Penny—smart, ambitious Penny—wanted nothing more than to go to King’s University and yet was stuck taking night classes and working two jobs.
“I’ll pick you up tomorrow morning,” he said, stepping back onto the porch. “Four, okay?”
“I’ll be ready.”
Josh put his palm against the door to stop Penny from closing it. His heartbeat kicked up a notch, and a strange feeling filled his chest. Painful, like a bunch of pinpricks.
“Who did you kiss?” he asked.
Her blue eyes met his. He noticed—not for the first time—that they were a really pretty color.
“Just a boy,” she said.
“What boy?”
“A boy I’ve loved for a while now.” She started to close the door again.
“What boy?” Josh was surprised by the edge to his voice.
“No one you know.”
Josh lowered his hand. Irritation snarled through him as he went toward the street. He and Penny had been friends for almost five years. He should have known that she loved some guy. Especially for a while now. And he sure as hell should know who the guy was.
“Hey,” Penny called after him.
He turned. She was still standing in the doorway.
“Do you really believe endings are inherently unhappy?” she asked.
Josh scratched his head. “Uh, I haven’t really given it much thought.”
“Because that’s kind of a sad worldview,” she said.
“Well, not everything is happy,” he muttered. “Besides, why do you even need to think about how things end? Why don’t you just think about how they are?”
“I’m a writer. Of course I have to think about how things end. The mystery is solved, the hero and heroine fall in love, the villain gets caught, the treasure is found.”
“Old Yeller dies,” Josh reminded her. “Scarlett O’Hara loses both of the guys she’s in love with, right? The Titanic sinks. Charlie Brown never kicks the damned football.”
He felt like a jerk when Penny’s expression clouded over.
“Penny—”
“So Josh Piper never gets what he wants?” she interrupted. “He struggles through college only because it’s what his dad wants him to do? He never fulfills his dream of becoming a chef and opening his own restaurant? He doesn’t even try to find a way?”
“No.” Josh swallowed hard. “He doesn’t.”
He turned and trudged down the street. He felt Penny’s disappointment in him like the burn of a hot pan, sharp and blistering.
~~~~
Josh scrubbed his hands over his face and yawned. A single lamp burned in the kitchen, casting a weird yellowish light over the cracked linoleum. The table was scattered with papers, bills, and a calculator. After draining a cup of coffee in a few gulps, Josh put his cup in the sink and went to the entryway.
As he grabbed his sweatshirt from the front closet, his father emerged from the bedroom.
“Dad, go back to bed. It’s not even four yet.”
“Yeah. Just wanted to finish up some stuff.” Simon Piper scratched his chin. He was tall and bulky, but seemed diminished because of his slouched shoulders and the dark circles under his eyes. “I should get some supplies reordered too.”
“I’ll do it after prep.”
“You have class and practice right after work.” Simon glanced at the foyer clock. “Got money for lunch?”
Josh nodded. Sometimes he wondered if there would ever be a time when his dad didn’t treat him like a kid. Since his mother had died, it had just been the two of them. And Josh knew his dad only wanted the best for him�
�� but Simon Piper’s definition of best was different from Josh’s.
“Any luck with hiring someone for morning shifts?” Simon asked.
“Yeah, Penny said she’d take the job. She can work Tuesday afternoons too.”
“Penny Dove?”
Josh suppressed a rustle of irritation. How many Pennys did his father know?
“Of course Penny Dove.”
“Okay.” Wariness flashed across Simon’s face. He poured a cup of coffee. “You’ve got a full plate, and you’ve got to pass this summer class. If you don’t, you’ll get kicked off the team, and you can’t apply for a scholarship next year. Don’t let Penny be a distraction.”
“She’s not.”
The knot in Josh’s chest tightened even more. He shrugged into his sweatshirt and left the house. This business of happy endings and Penny kissing some guy had turned his thoughts in a direction they’d never gone before.
Sure, he’d noticed that Penny was pretty, that she had a cute, curvy body and blue eyes. Kissable lips. But he…
He what?
In high school, there had always been someone or something else. Baseball, The Pied Piper, parties, other girls, trying to keep his grades up enough to get him into King’s University, then trying to find another way when it became clear he’d never make it in on academics alone. He’d barely squeaked into King’s because of his pitching abilities, but he wasn’t even good enough at baseball to earn a sports scholarship.
Through all of that, Penny was always just around. The one person who never made him feel like he wasn’t good enough.
Josh drove his beat-up truck to her house. She was sitting on the second step of the front porch. She’d waited for him on that same step after his mother had died. Josh had been working at The Pied Piper when his dad had called from the hospital with the news.
Without thinking, Josh had texted Penny and gone to her house. She was sitting on the porch step when he got there. She didn’t say anything as he sat beside her. He put his head on his knees. Felt her hand on his back. He’d started to cry, horrible, gut-wrenching sobs that tore his chest apart. Penny sat beside him in silence. Even the girl who loved books knew that sometimes words were useless.
Stories for Amanda Page 19