The Magic of Lemon Drop Pie Read online

  “I think he’s just lonely. It hasn’t even been a year since Mabel died,” I reminded her. I had a soft spot for Norman and regularly slipped him day-old pieces of coffee cake if we had any left over. I understood grief, and while a piece of coffee cake couldn’t soothe the pain of his wife’s passing, I knew from experience that little acts of kindness were often a balm for hurting hearts.

  Behind me Aunt Gert harrumphed. “You, my dear, are entirely too tenderhearted,” she said. Then, pitching her voice loudly enough so Norman could hear across the room, she added, “You know what the Bhagavad Gita says about greedy people? Lust, anger, and greed are the three doors to hell. Not my words. Lord Krishna’s.”

  “What a cheerful thought.” I passed a middle-aged couple in hiking gear who were sitting in one of the booths, watching our exchange quizzically. Aunt Gert stumped behind me in her incongruously sensible black oxfords.

  In the pale morning light, the diner looked quaint but a little down-at-the-heels.

  The original warm, golden fir floor was scuffed and worn from more than sixty years of foot traffic. Some of the mint-green piping at the edges of the white vinyl booths was flaking at the edges, but the diner still retained much of its nostalgic charm.

  The Eatery had been in our family since my maternal grandparents opened it as newlyweds in the 1950s, using their honeymoon money as a down payment on this little spot. It was located on the main street of the charming village of Magnolia, a quiet neighborhood nestled on the far west side of Seattle, swathed by Puget Sound on three sides. Magnolia was the kind of place where neighbors would pop by to drop off a pound of Manila littlenecks after an afternoon of clamming on Hood Canal, where you always recognized friends and neighbors standing in line at Petit Pierre for chocolate croissants on Saturday morning, and where the local bookshop, Magnolia’s Bookstore, was ready with the perfect recommendation as soon as you came through the door.

  I loved Magnolia and the Eatery. I’d grown up here in this diner, learning to walk by tottering from the vinyl booths to the round barstools tucked below the long white Formica counter. This was home. I inhaled sharply, taking in the decades-old scent of strong, bitter coffee and cracked vinyl overlaid with just a whiff of tangy lemon meringue pie. The scent of my childhood.

  “Good morning, Norman.” I topped up his coffee.

  “Morning, Lolly,” Norman greeted me. He was struggling to open a paper packet of sugar.

  “Can I help? Those can be tricky.” I tore the paper off the top of the packet and handed it to him.

  Norman took the sugar and patted my hand. “You’re a good girl, Lolly. And pretty as a picture. Why hasn’t some fella scooped you up by now?”

  “She’s not lentils in a dry-goods bin. ‘Scooped her up’ indeed.” Aunt Gert snorted from behind me. She had never married and had strong opinions on the subject of women’s rights. She’d once shared a podium with Gloria Steinem at a women’s liberation rally.

  Swallowing a smile, I replied as neutrally as I could, “I don’t have time for love right now, Norman. I’ve got my family and the diner. I’m very busy.”

  Norman blinked up at me with rheumy eyes, then looked thoughtfully past my shoulder for a moment as if trying to recall something. “Whatever happened to that boy, the one who was so sweet on you? He used to work here all those years ago, bussing tables as I recall. Such a nice young man, so polite. Had hair like a shiny new penny. What was his name?”

  For a moment my mouth went dry. I had not uttered that name aloud in years. “Rory. Rory Shaw.”

  Norman’s face brightened. “That’s it. He seemed so smitten with you. Mabel always said he reminded her of a sunflower and you the sun. Whenever you’d come in the room, she said, he turned toward you like he was following the light.”

  I pushed my vintage cat-eye glasses up the bridge of my nose, careful to keep my face pleasantly blank. I could feel Gert eyeing me curiously, and Norman too. The truth was, Rory had had the same effect on me. We’d been each other’s flowers. We’d been each other’s suns. On the lists of regrets in my life, Rory Shaw easily topped them all.

  “I guess some things just aren’t meant to be,” I said finally, giving Norman a small smile, trying to brush off his comment even though Rory’s name sent a needle-fine dart of remorse straight through my heart.

  “Well, I hope you meet another nice fella soon. Mabel and I were married for almost sixty years. We were so happy together. You deserve your own happiness, Lolly.”

  I nodded, wondering with a touch of chagrin just what it was about today that was bringing up so many reminders of my unfulfilled aspirations. “Someday maybe I’ll be so lucky,” I told him.

  I glanced up and met Aunt Gert’s shrewd gaze. She was watching me closely beneath the puckered folds of her turban, eyes narrowed as though trying to crack some cryptic code.

  “Maybe you will,” Aunt Gert said mysteriously. “Or maybe you’ll choose another path altogether.”

  I glanced at her, surprised. Her tone seemed laden with significance. She couldn’t possibly know about the life goals list sitting in my office. I looked away from her discerning gaze, afraid of what she might see. The disappointment, the longing. I felt laid bare today. I needed to pull myself together.

  “Say, Lolly, you have any leftover pie?” Norman asked hopefully. “This morning I think I’d like a nice slice with my coffee.”

  “Sure, Norman. Let me check and see.” I walked over to the glass-fronted refrigerated pie case that faced the front door, positioned to lure customers in as soon as they set foot inside. It was a strategy that had been working pretty well for more than sixty years. We rarely had pie left over at the end of the day. There was one lone slice of yesterday’s lemon meringue pie sitting on a dessert plate inside. I pulled it out for Norman and then stopped, struck by a memory so vivid it rooted me to the spot. I’d been standing in this exact spot when I’d first laid eyes on Rory Shaw.

  3

  NINETEEN YEARS AGO

  JULY

  “Lolly, this is Rory, the new neighbors’ boy I was telling you about.” My mother stood in front of the pie case, her hand on the shoulder of a boy about my age. “He’s just turned fourteen, so I’m sure you’ll be friends.”

  I stopped squirting vinegar cleaner on the glass front of the pie case and surveyed the newcomer. He was tall and gangly, with pants that were a little too short, as though he’d shot up in the night and surprised everyone. His hair was a bright coppery auburn, like a new penny that still had some shine to it, and cut close to his head so that it tufted up a bit at the back. He had freckles and warm brown eyes. I couldn’t decide if he looked geeky or cool. Maybe a little of both.

  When I glanced at him my stomach did a funny little flip. I wasn’t interested in boys like my best friend, Ashley, who had sported a parade of boyfriends since the fifth grade. But there was something about Rory’s face I was drawn to instantly. Looking at him felt familiar, like walking into a warm room from the chill of a rainy afternoon. It wasn’t love at first sight with Rory Shaw. But it was certainly a strong like. I backed up a little, feeling suddenly self-conscious. I was thirteen, all ponytail and flat training bra and pointy elbows. Boys were foreign territory.

  “Want some help?” he asked, gesturing to the bottle of cleaner in my hand. I met his eyes, the color of root beer, I noticed, and just as lively.

  “Okay.” I showed him how to crumple pages of newspaper, and together we wiped down the plate-glass window at the front of the dining room while our mothers sat in a booth and had coffee. My mom gave us each a quarter, and we took turns choosing songs on the jukebox. The jukebox had been a splurge for my parents when they took over the diner the first year they were married. My mother adored old country and western music, and they’d found it cheap when a western-themed bar had gone out of business in Tacoma. It seemed incongruous in a diner that served Danish food, but m
y mother hadn’t cared a bit. She always kept quarters in her pocket just so she could hear track C9, Tanya Tucker crooning “What’s Your Mama’s Name.” I’d grown up on Johnny Cash and Hank Williams and Loretta Lynn singing about love and heartbreak and feeling so true and so blue while my mom served customers the flaeskesteg daily special.

  I chose track F4 on the jukebox menu, Dolly Parton’s song “I Will Always Love You,” which I thought was the most tragic and romantic song in the universe. Then Rory picked a Johnny Cash song. Over the music I eavesdropped on the adults’ conversation as my mother cheerfully interrogated Rory’s mom, Nancy. In the first week of July the Shaws had moved from the Bay Area into the 1950s rambler across the street, and my mom, a self-appointed welcome wagon for any new neighbors, had promptly taken them a lemon pound cake and invited them to stop in at the Eatery. Which they’d done this afternoon. By the end of their conversation my mother was already planning to hire Rory as a busboy at the diner when he was old enough and had invited the Shaws over for a cookout that weekend. My mother had a plan for everyone’s life.

  While our mothers talked, Rory and I worked together silently. He was lanky but not awkward. He seemed remarkably easy in his own skin. It made me breathe easier just to be around him. I could smell him—the laundry scent of his soccer jersey and, beneath that, a hint of boyish clean sweat. There was something else too, something that reminded me a little of oak leaves and the sweet sun tea my mother brewed on our back deck in the summer. I kept sneaking glances at him as we worked. When our elbows bumped little sparklers of electricity shot down my arm, straight to my stomach. All we were doing was cleaning fingerprints off a window, but I would have cleaned that glass forever if it meant standing next to him.

  That was the beginning.

  4

  Three a.m. and I was back in the diner’s kitchen, rolling out six piecrusts in staccato bursts of agitated energy. I’d tossed and turned for hours in my little gabled bedroom before giving up on sleep, quietly slipping past our snoring basset hound, Bertha, and walking the half mile to the Eatery through the silent, chilly streets of Magnolia. Now I was making the daily pies and listening to Johnny Cash’s greatest hits turned down low, trying to calm the tumult of my heart. I couldn’t get that life goals list out of my mind.

  I eyed the diary sitting on the stainless-steel countertop next to a slab of French butter, the frolicking happy unicorns oblivious to my inner turmoil. Wiping my hands on my apron, I flipped it open to the place where Daphne had stopped reading. In glittering purple letters the list read:

  Lolly’s Life Goals

  1. Live in another country

  2. Own my own restaurant somewhere amazing

  3. Fall in love

  4. Help my family be happy together 4 ever

  5. Get my own horse

  I smiled ruefully at number five. Get my own horse. The desire to have a horse had faded away about the time I got my driver’s license, but in those early teenage years I’d dreamed of being an equestrian champion.

  Number four . . . Help my family be happy together 4 ever. I winced at the blithe optimism of that goal.

  “Turns out we don’t get to decide whether the people we love the most are safe or happy,” I murmured to my younger self. Ten years after I’d written this list, our happy little family was shattered as we lost the linchpin of our lives.

  But the other three items . . . I traced the loopy script on numbers one and two. Live in another country. Own my own restaurant somewhere amazing. I’d always dreamed of living in another country. My junior year at Portland State University I’d done a semester studying abroad in London and fallen head over heels in love with England. For a while I’d planned on moving there and opening my own restaurant.

  “Toast.” I hadn’t said the name aloud in years. It was my ideal café—eclectic and quirky (a little like me) and focused on sustainable, local, organic food. I could still conjure it up in my mind, the bright airy space with a vintage twist. I dreamed of creating a place for people to gather, a space with unhurried rhythms. I wanted it to foster an appreciation for simple, good food to invite meandering conversations, folks lingering over local wine, discussing great books and films. My dream for Toast was not just about serving a good meal, it was about creating an experience that invited people into a stronger connection with the Earth and with each other, into gratitude and thoughtfulness. I wanted to bring simple joy and goodness with every bite.

  “Gather. Savor. Toast.” I murmured the slogan I’d painstakingly created in a marketing class in college. I still dreamed about England and Toast sometimes, wistfully, with a touch of longing. It had never happened. Life got in the way. After Mom’s sudden death, I came home and never left. I couldn’t leave my dad and ten-year-old Daphne to cope alone, so I had stayed and taken on Mom’s role at the diner and in our family as best I could.

  I looked around the kitchen. I’d done all I could, but so many days it seemed like it wasn’t enough. The truth was, I disliked many of the things about my role at the Eatery—crunching numbers, keeping up with ever-changing regulations, making the day-to-day operations run as smoothly as possible. I was responsible and organized, but I was not particularly keen on the logistics of running a struggling diner. It was a far cry from how I’d pictured my life running Toast. Yet I was the only choice after Mom died. Dad struggled with severe dyslexia; he could jerry-rig a burst pipe with some duct tape and a plastic bag and make a tasty karbonader, but the business side of things was alphabet soup to him. And Daphne had been so young when we’d lost Mom, too young to shoulder any of the responsibilities Mom had left behind. There had really been no one else but me to take her place. So I did.

  I put down the diary abruptly and went back to the piecrusts. Life lists were tricky. Pie I could do. Sliding the circles of dough into the battered aluminum pans, I crimped the edges with quick pinches, then covered them with parchment paper and added pie weights. Setting the timer, I popped the pans into the oven to partially blind-bake the crusts. Cracking five large eggs, I separated the yolks and the whites, setting aside the whites for the meringue top. On the radio Johnny was singing “I Walk the Line” in his signature gravelly voice.

  I whisked water, granulated sugar, cornstarch, salt, lemon juice, and lemon zest together over medium heat. Mom’s secret recipe used Meyer lemons for a sweeter, richer flavor. That was one of her tricks. That and European butter. With its higher fat content than American butter, it made a flakier crust.

  “Lolly, what are the three secret ingredients that make this the best lemon meringue pie in the world?” She’d drilled me that last night before she died, demanding I recite every ingredient, every step, until she was satisfied I had it down pat.

  “The three ingredients are Meyer lemons, European butter, and a leaf of lemon balm boiled into the syrup every time,” I’d dutifully recited in her hospital room, feeling the weight of grief, of responsibility rest heavier on my shoulders with every word.

  Lemon balm was an unorthodox choice for pie, but Mom had loved cooking with edible flowers and herbs. She’d taught me everything I knew about them. I reached for the little lemon balm potted plant growing on the windowsill over the sink and carefully pinched off a leaf.

  “In the language of flowers, lemon balm means sympathy or good cheer,” she’d explained once. “So every bite of this pie can help brighten someone’s day.”

  I crushed the leaf of lemon balm between my fingers and inhaled the scent, hoping it would work on me. No such luck. I dropped the leaf into the pot and stirred. Every time I made these pies I felt her presence. She had loved lemons—their sharp, fresh scent and cheerful hue. She would slice a lemon in half and sniff deeply, happily.

  “See, Lolly,” she’d say. “Lemons brighten every day. They are a touch of kitchen magic, and we all need a little magic in our lives.” She’d rub the peels beneath her fingernails so her hands alway
s smelled like the brightest summer sunshine. But since her sudden death and everything that had come after, I had not been able to see lemons in such a positive light. They represented duty and loss more than anything else to me now.

  I stirred the contents of the pot, thin and cloudy, about as appealing as dirty dishwater. In a few minutes it would begin to thicken and bubble happily. The scent rising from the pot was enticing, the sharp tang of lemon juice and the sweetness of dissolving sugar with just a kiss of the lemon balm beneath. I leaned against the counter and shivered in the cold kitchen, all tile and steel. I’d thrown an apron on over my joggers and sweatshirt when I came in, but I still felt the chill. While I waited for the filling to boil, I glanced over at the list still open on the counter, my eyes skittering away from number three. I knew what it said. Fall in love. Technically, I had accomplished that goal.

  In an instant, a series of images flashed through my mind, bright and fleeting as sparklers on the Fourth of July. Tawny eyes crinkling at the corners with laughter. The cinnamon-colored stubble along his jawline that he’d rub across the tender skin of my neck just to hear me squeal. A constellation of freckles along the smooth planes of his shoulder blades. His strong arms wrapped around me, us fitting together so perfectly, my cheek nestled against the nubby wool shoulder of his fisherman’s sweater, his mouth pressed against my hair. The way he said my name, like it was the answer to a prayer, so husky and tender it made me melt inside like a pat of French butter.

  Rory Shaw. No question that I had fallen for him. Our path to love had not been smooth, but I’d fallen slow and hard, so thoroughly it took me years to recover. I wasn’t actually sure I had recovered. For a moment I could have sworn I caught a whiff of sun-warmed skin and the honeyed oak scent of bourbon and sweet tea. For a moment the sorrow was so strong I couldn’t catch my breath. He was the first and only boy I’d ever loved. The boy whose heart I broke. The boy who’d smashed my own heart into a thousand pieces.