“How’s that bum ankle of yours, Hank?” Janice asked.
“I can tell you when it’s going to rain,” he said lightly, but the grimace gave away the apparent pain he was in, one side of his mustache lifting oddly. He looked away and I thought he must be uncomfortable being the center of attention.
Mabel stood up from her seat and rested her wrinkled hand on Hank’s forearm. “Here, Hank. Do you want to sit?”
Mrs. Branford used the rubber end of her cane to push the chair closer to him. “Take a load off,” she said. She preened less than her three friends, but I still detected a glimmer of something mildly flirtatious. Take a load off ? That was so not Penelope Branford.
And yet she’d said it, so maybe I was seeing a new side of her. As I watched the four women tumble over their words around Mustache Hank, I smiled to myself. Getting older—or just plain old—didn’t mean your emotions shriveled up and died. These women definitely had libidos and poor Mustache Hank was the nucleus of their attention.
“You look pretty down in the dumps,” Mabel said to Hank, concern on her face.
He shrugged and nodded his head. “Lost a friend.”
The five women, including Olaya, frowned in sympathy. “That’s never easy, is it?” said Janice. “Funeral?”
He shook his head. “No, no funeral,” he said, but he didn’t offer any more than that.
Olaya slipped behind the counter, returning thirty seconds later with a flakey chocolate croissant on a white ceramic plate. She set it on the table in front of Mustache Hank and laid her hand on his shoulder. “Por usted, Hank.”
He nodded and smiled, but sadness emanated from him. I cataloged the things I observed about him. The mustache, of course. It hid a good part of his face, but defined him. A simple gold band on his ring finger. A trail of lines that showed the trials of his life.
He took a bite of his pastry and smiled. It lightened his face and softened the sadness in him. Olaya’s baked goods had a tendency to help people deal with their woes. Whether she put in a dash of lavender, a sprinkle of anise, or a hint of lemon, her breads seemed to help the people who ate it.
“Thanks, Olaya.”
Such a gentleman. I wondered what his story was. I left the Blackbird Ladies to their fawning and went behind the counter to help the other customers who’d come in and lined up. Olaya worked the register while I filled the orders. The Blackbird Ladies and Mustache Hank sat at their table, the women doing most of the talking. At one point, Alice actually stood behind Hank, leaned down, and whispered into his ear. I couldn’t see his face, but he bowed his head slightly and I wondered if he’d smiled, or maybe even blushed.
I didn’t have time to think about it anymore, however, because the bread shop buzzed with activity and I got wrapped up in the selling of bread. A half an hour later, Mrs. Branford sidled up to the counter and knocked on the glass. “I’ll see you later, Ivy?”
“I’ll stop by.” I’d moved to my Tudor house on Maple Street a few months back and now I lived just half a block from Mrs. Branford. The street was a hotbed of historic-committee conflict, but I loved it there. At thirty-six, I was finally a homeowner, but at the same time I was close to my father and brother and missed being in my family home.
“Stop by Baptista’s first,” she said.
I stopped myself from rolling my eyes at her. She was being Little Miss Matchmaker, and she wasn’t subtle at all. Sure, Miguel Baptista and I still had chemistry. We’d spent half of high school together, after all. But then he’d up and left with hardly a backward glance, I’d gone to college in Texas, and we’d both moved on. I still didn’t know what had happened that he’d left me so suddenly, and part of me would always care about him, but I also thought that maybe our time in the sun had passed. I put my hands on my hips. “And why would I do that, Mrs. Branford?”
She waggled her eyebrows suggestively. “He came by a bit ago. Said he has a question for you.”
I couldn’t imagine what kind of question Miguel might need to ask me. He and I were trying to be friendly since I’d been back—trying to let bygones be bygones—but we hadn’t gone out of our way to seek each other out. I usually saw him when my best friend and I headed to Baptista’s for Mexican seafood, which had been about once a week lately. Baptista’s was the best in town and I couldn’t pass up queso. I couldn’t help but wonder what kind of question Miguel might have for me. My curiosity was definitely piqued. “Maybe he wants to marry me,” I said with a wink. Which, of course, was utterly ridiculous. I’d gone through the stages of grief after he’d left me—and town—so abruptly. I was in denial, and then unabashedly hurt. Finally the anger set in. I’d planned to spend my life with him, and suddenly he was gone. I thought I was long over it, accepting the change in my life plan long ago, but a pang of anger surfaced unexpectedly.
But Mrs. Branford didn’t take it as the joke I’d intended. She nodded sagely and replied, “Oh, my dear, of that I have no doubt. It’s just a matter of time.”
I notched an eyebrow up. She was so wrong about that. But I let it go. She had nearly as much energy as me, but by anyone’s standard, she was elderly. I’d seen her be forgetful; it stood to reason that she was also, at times, delusional. Of course, I really didn’t believe that. She was of sound body and mind, but Miguel and I would never be together.
Like I said, bygones.
One by one, Olaya and I worked our way through the small crowd until everyone had been taken care of. The bread shop cleared out. The Blackbird Ladies had gone. There was no bell on the door to the bread shop, so I hadn’t noticed them leave. Mustache Hank was gone, too. I hadn’t gotten the feeling he had been keen on the company, but then again, what man didn’t love the attention of a bevy of fawning women? In passing, I wondered what magic Olaya had baked into the bread she’d given Hank and if it would lift his spirits. I didn’t know him, but I hoped so.
I spent the next half an hour restocking the display cases with fresh pastries and breads for the rest of the afternoon, cleaning the counters, and tidying the brochures, business cards, and general register area. The bread shop had become a second home for me, the place where I felt welcome, as if I’d been enveloped in an aromatic cocoon of yeasty baking bread.
As I looked around to see what else I could do, Olaya took the soft rag from my hand. “Go on,” she said. “I will finish.”
“I have yard work to do,” I said, ignoring the little grin playing on her lips. I grimaced, realizing that she’d heard Mrs. Branford telling me that Miguel had wanted to talk to me. “Flowers to plant. Weeds to pull.”
“Ivy,” she said, with a little lilt at the end of my name.
Before I could reply, the shop’s phone rang. Olaya picked it up with a snappy, “Yeast of Eden!” The bell on the door tinkled and a customer came in as she listened for a moment. “Por supuesto, she is right here beside me,” she said and handed the phone to me, a little sparkle in her eyes.
I, on the other hand, narrowed mine. Nobody called me here, which probably meant . . .
I took the handset from her and stepped away from the counter. “Hello?” I said into the phone.
“Hey, Ivy.”
Just as I suspected. Miguel’s voice was low and gravelly. It used to have a way of washing over me like a warm blanket. I took a deep breath and could almost smell the salt of the ocean and the seafood of Baptista’s, but I pushed the thoughts away.
“Hey.”
There was an awkward pause. After so many years, we didn’t know what to say to each other anymore. “Settling into your new house?” he finally asked.
Reference to my 1930 Tudor brought a smile to my lips. It had taken a good month before I’d gotten used to the fact that I was actually living in my dream house. The tree-lined street made my heart happy. “I am, slowly. I love the Galileo thermometer, by the way.”
Miguel had gotten the hand-blown glass cylinder with the colorful vessels bobbing up and down inside from the custom glass shop on the pier. He�
�d left it on my new front porch on the day I moved in; now it stood sentry in the entryway on a vintage sideboard I’d found at a local antiques store in town. I was shedding my past, bit by bit, and in the process, I was discovering more about who I was.
And who I was, was my mother’s daughter. Same curly, ginger hair. Same emerald eyes. Same moral compass. Same fiery spirit and insatiable curiosity. And same dogged determination. I’d wanted nothing more than to resettle in Santa Sofia after being gone for so many years, and now I had. More than that, I’d found a place in my town where I really belonged.
“I guess I still know you,” he said, but his tone was off. Strained, somehow.
I paused, thinking about how to respond to that. The fact was, he didn’t know me anymore. “I’m not so sure about that.”
Now he paused, a thread of tension forming between us. “Ivy, I—”
But I cut him off, thinking it was best to change the subject. “Mrs. Branford said you wanted to talk to me?”
He was silent and for a few seconds I wondered if he’d hung up. But then he spoke again, a shift in his tone, and he sounded more upbeat. “That woman is everywhere, isn’t she?”
“Well, she is a Blackbird Lady—”
“A what?”
I pushed a loose strand of hair behind my ear as I explained. “Mabel Peabody, Janice Thompson, Alice Ryder, and Penny Branford.”
“They named themselves the Blackbird Ladies?”
“They didn’t,” I said, clarifying. “I did. They wear these hats. Kind of like the Red Hat Society?”
“You mean those women who wear purple clothes and the red hats everywhere?” He sounded a bit puzzled by the idea.
“Yes, Miguel. Those women. Those spunky, stylish, sassy over fifty women who wear purple and red. That’ll be me someday.”
There was a pause, and then he said, “I can see that.” I could hear a hint of a smile coming back into his voice. “So why blackbirds?”
“All their hats happen to have blackbirds on them. By accident or by design, I’m not sure. I just thought the name fit for their collective group.”
“The Blackbird Ladies,” he said, as if he were seeing how it sounded. Trying it out.
“Yes, the Blackbird Ladies,” I said.
The tension from a moment ago dissipated as he laughed, the sound deep and rich. Against my will, I went a little tingly. The chemistry was still there, but so was the memory of him leaving me. No good-bye. No regretful glance in his rearview mirror. Just the back of his head as I stared at him driving away. Even after what felt like a lifetime, those feelings reared their ugly head. It was hard to forget that heartache.
“How’s your grandmother?” I asked, pushing those emotions away.
“She’s exactly the same as—” He stopped and I knew he was remembering something about our past, just as I had. “—as whenever you saw her last. I don’t think she ages. She actually knows Mabel Peabody.” He cleared his throat. “Of the Blackbird Ladies,” he added.
I conjured up an image of Miguel’s grandmother. From my recollection, she stood about five feet, was soft and stocky, and had thinning hair. She hadn’t spoken a word of English, which made me wonder how she and Mabel Peabody were friends. “Does Mabel speak Spanish?”
“Interestingly enough, she does. Better than me, in fact.”
As far as I knew, Miguel spoke fluently, so I didn’t understand how Mabel Peabody could be better. Before I could ask that question, he answered: “She used to teach Spanish at the high school. If I’m remembering right, she got her degree in Spanish and then lived in Spain for a few years.”
I leaned against the back counter, folding one arm across my chest, my fingers clasping the crook of the other arm. “But it was your first language,” I said, that memory of his history coming back to me.
“But once Laura and I were in school and learned English, that’s all we wanted to speak.”
“But not to your parents,” I said.
“Right, but everywhere else. I was gone too long. I lost a lot of it. My vocabulary and proficiency are pretty limited.”
I guess that made sense. Not speaking anything but English, it was hard to get my head around Miguel’s Spanish fluency compared to Mabel Peabody. “Mrs. Branford said you had a question for me,” I said, getting back to my octogenarian friend’s comment.
He took a beat before he spoke, and I wondered if he even remembered what he’d wanted to ask me. Or maybe he’d changed his mind. “I do have a question,” he said, and then he launched into it. “I saw the brochure you did for Yeast of Eden. I’d like to hire you to take some pictures of Baptista’s. For a new menu. And the website. I’m having it revamped. And maybe for some promotional material. I’m thinking about doing some direct-mail advertising.”
I don’t know what I’d been expecting, but it certainly hadn’t been about a photography job. And I wasn’t sure how I felt. Relieved? Disappointed? Maybe both. I exhaled, not realizing that I’d been holding my breath. “Oh. Yeah. Yes, of course,” I said. “What kind of pictures are you wanting? Food? The building?”
“I’m not really sure, Ivy. I have some ideas, but—”
“I guess I could come by the restaurant—”
“No, don’t do that!”
I felt my jaw drop. “What—?”
“Not you, Ivy. God, sorry. There’s a server here putting his fingers inside the clean glasses—Stop!” His voice was stern, but not cruel. “Blake, like this. No fingers where the beverage goes.”
“Maybe we should talk lat—”
“No, sorry. Yes, yes, come over. Let’s talk in person. I’ll show you what I have in mind.”
He was still distracted, but he was trying to focus on our phone call. “Sure,” I said. “I’ll stop by later.”
“Anytime. I’m always here,” he said, but then he covered the mouthpiece and said something, presumably to Blake again. He seemed to remember that I was on the line. “Okay?”
“Okay,” I said, but after I hung up the phone, I regretted the promise, thinking it a bad idea—a very bad idea—to go and see Miguel Baptista.
Chapter 2
I put it off, and later turned out to be two days. I got wrapped up with Yeast of Eden and the upcoming Winter Wonderland Festival, and with some work my dad needed help with at the house. But the majority of my time had been spent helping my brother move in with the love of his life. Em and I had been friends for more than twenty years, and we’d known each other for longer than that. Our mothers had done playgroup together, but even back when both of us were knee-high to a grasshopper, Emmaline was tough. She played by the book, but all that meant was she’d become a master manipulator at an early age. I had never been able to hold onto a single pack of gum or candy bar—or Barbie doll, for that matter—until I was ten years old. I had been on the receiving end of her manipulation through elementary school, finally getting wise and turning the tables on her in junior high. I’d learned what to say, and when to say hold back.
We’d developed a mutual respect of each other, and from the age of twelve, we’d been inseparable. Things had changed since we’d grown up and gotten lives outside the school grounds, but we were more like sisters than friends, and now, with her and Billy finally together, it looked like we might be sisters for real.
Helping Em and Billy move in together was the best reason to have put other things on hold. Truth be told, I had also dallied a bit on purpose. I wasn’t the type of woman to jump just because a man said jump, especially if that man was Miguel. I refused to do anything unless it was on my terms. And my terms meant I would stop by Baptista’s when I had time.
My mother left an indelible mark on me, as all mothers do on their children. I grew up loving walks on the beach, collecting seashells, and reading mystery novels (Agatha, my sweet fawn pug, was named after the grande dame of mystery, after all). She also gave me my love of photography by gifting me with my first camera and sending me out for the afternoon. I took pictures of
everything I saw. That was that. My fate was sealed, for better or for worse.
The one thing she did not impart on me was her cooking ability. She had had finesse in the kitchen, and she worked to the very end to get better and widen her skills, but I’d always been too busy to spend much time baking and creating stews and casseroles and things in Dutch ovens. That all changed after she died. The kitchen was the very place I found the most solace. I hadn’t known it would be like that, but Olaya Solis, before I’d ever formally met her, had me all figured out. She’d become a surrogate mother to me, but no one could replace the real thing. I saw my mother everywhere and in everything. Most of all, at the ocean.
Now, as I parked my mom’s car—my car—in the Baptista’s parking lot, it was the beach that called to me. I slung my camera bag over my shoulder and started toward the restaurant, but abruptly stopped and redirected my footsteps toward the pier and the wooden steps that led down to the sand. The day was cool, a brisk breeze blowing in from the water.
A few people strolled along the shoreline, walking their dogs or playing with children in the surf. I did none of those things. My feet seemed to direct themselves; I ended up at a cluster of rocks and perched on the edge of the flat bolder that sat in front of the formation. I tilted my head back against the cool breeze and let my eyes flutter closed. This spot on the beach had been one of my mom’s favorite places in Santa Sofia. Maybe in the world. At this moment, it almost felt as if she were here with me.
A mist of water kissed my cheeks and a shiver passed through me. The breeze seemed to call my name. I smiled to myself. Maybe she actually was. I grabbed my camera from my bag, walked along the shoreline, and took a few shots of the pier to capture the moment: the rocks off in the distance, the breaking waves, the seaweed strewn on the water-packed sand.
“Ivy!”
The light wind carried my name across the surf.
“Ivy!”
I turned toward the restaurant. It wasn’t the wind calling my name. It was Miguel. He stood on the pier and waved.
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