The Magic of Lemon Drop Pie Read online

  “Okay,” he said, seeming to brace himself. I’d never seen him shirtless before, and I could feel my cheeks warming at the sight of all that exposed freckly skin. My cheeks were the only part of me that was warm, however. My thighs felt frozen already. And once we jumped in, we’d have a long, cold, wet walk home. I hesitated. I could feel Rory beside me, looking at me. Trying to be brave, I dipped a toe in the water and gasped. It was so cold it physically hurt.

  “Ready?” Rory reached out and took my uninjured hand. His palm was warm against mine. I nodded and took a deep breath. This was a terrible idea.

  “One . . . two . . .” he counted slowly, his eyes on me. I could feel him tensed to spring forward into the water.

  “Stop!” I shrieked at the last second. “It’s just too cold and I’m chicken.”

  Rory let out a huge exhalation. “Me too,” he said, grinning wide. “I was kind of worried we’d get hypothermia before we made it home, but I didn’t want to back out. We can be chicken together.”

  “Sounds perfect,” I said, grinning back at him. I clumsily worked my leggings and sweatshirt back on using my one good hand, laughing although my teeth were chattering. We dressed as fast as we could, a little giddy with relief.

  “Want to hang out a little bit here or go straight home?” I asked, zipping myself into the warmth of my puffy coat. Pure bliss.

  Rory looked around. “Let’s stay. If I go home, I have to help my dad take the Christmas lights down. This is way more fun.”

  “Come on then,” I led the way to a huge bleached-white driftwood log that had been lying on the beach for as long as I could remember. In the lower part of the trunk, near the base of twisted, gnarled roots, was a sheltered spot in the sand, perfect for two people to sit in. I sank down in the sand, careful of my injured hand, and gestured for him to join me. He slid down next to me.

  “Do you know where you are right now?” I asked him.

  He gave me an amused look. “Is this a trick question, like for head injury victims? Date, time, current president?”

  I laughed. “It’s not a trick question. This is my favorite spot in the world.”

  He sobered and looked around him. “I can see why.”

  It was breathtaking from this vantage point. Snowcapped mountains, the choppy gray glint of the water, the rocky beach empty of people. It was majestic and serene and a little wild. I loved it.

  “Sometimes you can see baby seals resting on the shore over there.” I pointed. “And usually there’s no one on this part of the beach.”

  Rory rested his forearms on his knees, leaning back against the trunk, looking relaxed and at peace. “This is so much better than spending the day taking down Christmas lights,” he said. “My dad always uses up all his swear words for the year in like an hour. Thanks for rescuing me.”

  “You rescued me first,” I said lightly.

  My parents had come home at one a.m. and found me on the couch, hand bandaged and elevated, and my head on Rory’s shoulder. Both of us were asleep, and the TV was still on. I think they felt guilty that I hadn’t been able to reach them and that Rory and I had been forced to handle my medical emergency by ourselves. My mom was so grateful to Rory for taking care of my injury that she talked Mrs. Shaw into letting Rory come with me for part of the day today. I’d convinced her to just drop us off and let us walk home. Now we had half the day to spend how we chose.

  “I’ve never brought anyone here before,” I confessed.

  Rory looked at me curiously. “Why me?”

  I shrugged. “I wanted to share it with you.”

  And that was the truth. I’d never even shared this place with Ashley. But looking at Rory next to me on the sand, I knew it was the right decision. He belonged here, sitting next to me.

  I don’t know how long we stayed there that day. It must have been hours. At first we were silent, just enjoying the wild beauty. But then, gradually, we started talking, sharing back and forth. We talked about everything. Rory told me all about his dream of becoming a sports medicine doctor and working with a professional sports team. I told him about my dream of opening my own restaurant. When we got hungry, he pulled out a slightly smashed Snickers bar, and we shared it, keeping an eye out for harbor seals and watching the mammoth container ships steaming south toward the Port of Seattle.

  Sitting there together, with our backs against the smooth driftwood log, alone with the water and sky and the cry of the gulls, it felt like we were the only people in the world. We chatted about music, AP English, Rory’s last soccer season. We discovered we both loved Keith Urban and To Kill a Mockingbird. I told him that if I ever had a daughter I wanted to name her Scout after the protagonist. Rory did an impression of the nasally tone of our AP English teacher, Mrs. Keen, and I laughed so hard that I tipped over in the sand, which made him laugh until he couldn’t breathe. Lying in the sand, ribs aching from laughing, I felt a bloom of happiness. I could be silly around him or serious. Either way, he looked at me like I was the most special person on Earth. Under the warmth of his gaze, I felt bright and funny and favored. When we finally rose to hike back up the trail and make the mile walk back home, I did so with a pang of regret.

  “Hey, thanks for bringing me along today.” Rory shoved his hands in the pockets of his jacket. He hesitated. “Can we come back again sometime?” His expression was hopeful and a little vulnerable.

  “Sure.” I shivered and tried to wiggle the circulation back into my frozen toes. “This was fun.” That was an understatement. The afternoon had been one of the happiest I could remember. Not even Ashley and I had so much fun.

  Rory held out his hand, little finger crooked. “Pinkie promise?” He said it in Mrs. Keen’s twang.

  I grinned and hooked my pinkie with his, and we shook on it. “Promise,” I replied in my best impression of a robot voice.

  Rory reached out and tugged the end of my ponytail. “You’re something else, Lolly Blanchard.”

  I looked down, feeling bashful. “Come on, we’ve got a long walk home.”

  I didn’t know it then, but those few hours on the beach were a turning point of sorts. That was the day we truly became friends. And that was the day, without even realizing it, I started to fall for Rory Shaw.

  6

  “Rise and shine, morning glory.”

  Blinking in the pale morning light filtering in through the window above my pantry-office desk, I lifted my head from the stack of invoices and bills where I’d accidentally fallen asleep. I’d been dozing, half dreaming about Rory and that long-ago New Year’s Day on the beach. Aunt Gert was standing over me with her hands on her hips. I squinted at her. She was wearing a khaki ensemble that I was pretty sure I’d last seen on Jane Goodall in a National Geographic documentary. She looked like she was ready to venture into the wilds of equatorial Africa in search of a family of chimps. The only thing missing was the pith helmet.

  “Greetings and salutations,” she said, eyeing me suspiciously. “Did you sleep here all night? Terrible for your spine.”

  I sat up, scrambling for coherence and searching for my glasses. I found them and slipped them on. “I came in early to make the pies and must have drifted off.”

  The pies were now sitting in two perfectly gleaming rows on the counter, cooling. My life might be a slow-burning bushfire, but my pies were perfectly composed.

  “Humph.” Aunt Gert pursed her lips. “I fed Bertha and let her out to have a wee before I came over. By the way, you left this on the prep table.” She held out my diary, open to my life goals page. I snatched it from her, embarrassed. Had she read it? We didn’t have a close relationship. The thought of her scalpel eye dissecting my life goals made me shrink a little inside. She, who had accomplished so much.

  Besides being a professor at a prestigious women’s college in New England, Aunt Gert had worked for the United Nations on a special council on wor
ld religions during the Cold War. She’d hiked the Atlas Mountains and lived with Bedouins and studied the religious practices of remote tribes along the Amazon. Compared to her, my accomplishments looked paltry.

  Aunt Gert was eyeing me in a way that made me uncomfortable. She was generally a pull-yourself-up-by-the-bootstraps sort of woman, not high on empathy or displays of affection, but occasionally I caught glimpses of a tenderheartedness and compassion that surprised me. She was looking at me now with an expression that hovered somewhere between disapproval and sympathy. It made me squirm.

  I turned away and tucked the diary in my top drawer. “Daphne found my old middle school diary when she was looking through some boxes for a school project.” I shook out my hopelessly rumpled kitchen apron, which was smeared with lemon filling. “It’s funny to look back on the things we wanted when we were young, isn’t it?” I tried to brush off the life goals list as inconsequential, a childish fancy.

  “On the contrary, I think we’re the most honest when we’re young,” she replied brusquely. “It’s later in life we get good at lying to ourselves.”

  I took a moment to let that sink in. “Do you have any regrets about your life?” I asked suddenly. “Would you change anything if you could?”

  I knew only the broad strokes of Aunt Gert’s life. Her hardscrabble upbringing on a berry farm in southern Ohio. How she’d gotten herself a full ride to Columbia University through sheer perseverance and a brilliant intellect. She’d had an illustrious career, but I didn’t know how she felt about her life. What, if anything, did she think of longingly when lying in her narrow twin bed at night?

  She paused for a moment, then shook her head decisively.

  “Life is too short for second-guesses.” She sniffed. “You make the best choice you can, and then you stick with it. I don’t look back.” She gave me a shrewd look. “What about you? Are you regretting your life choices at so tender an age?”

  “I don’t know if I’d call them regrets,” I hedged, tucking a stray strand of hair back into my ponytail and smoothing my bangs. I could feel them swooping wildly to the left across my forehead. “Maybe just thinking about what-ifs. I had to make a lot of hard decisions; a lot of things happened that I didn’t have control over.”

  She made a small grunt of agreement. “Your mother’s death.”

  I nodded. “Sometimes I wonder what my life would look like if she were still alive.” I pictured Rory, and my voice faltered. “I know it can’t be changed, but I do wonder what if. What would my life look like now?”

  Aunt Gert eyed me speculatively. “If you were given the chance to find out, would you take it?” she asked.

  It was obviously a theoretical question, but she was staring at me intently, as though my answer really mattered.

  “Of course,” I stammered. “Why wouldn’t I? But it’s impossible.”

  She cocked her head at me. “Is it? Often we say ‘impossible’ when what we really mean is ‘unknown.’ So many things are possible; far fewer are known to us. You will discover this soon enough.”

  I just sat looking at her, unsure how to respond.

  “Well, you’re young.” Aunt Gert clapped her hands together briskly. “You still have time. You have so much opportunity still laid out before you despite your present circumstances. You must try, as my dear colleague the esteemed mythology professor Joseph Campbell used to say, to ‘follow your bliss.’ ”

  “Follow my bliss?” It sounded like a slogan in a yogurt commercial.

  Aunt Gert nodded again. “You must follow your bliss no matter the circumstances life thrusts upon you.”

  “But what does that mean? I have responsibilities. I can’t just up and leave everything to pursue my own happiness,” I protested.

  Aunt Gert snorted. “Who said anything about happiness? Don’t be a ninny. You are mistakenly equating bliss with happiness. They’re not the same thing.”

  “They’re not?” I asked in bewilderment, wondering briefly if anyone in my life had ever called me a ninny before. “What’s the difference?”

  “Happiness is fleeting, fickle, often based on our circumstances.” Aunt Gert waved a hand dismissively. “If you chase happiness, you will more often than not end up disappointed by the very nature of life. Life is hard, brutal at times, and often unfair. But following your bliss, that’s entirely different. It means facing your present reality with honesty and courage and, in the midst of it all, continuing to pursue each spark of joy, even if it is a tiny pinpoint in the darkness of your life. Do not give up. Continue to look for the light in your life—it is always present somewhere, some small thing to be grateful for, something to celebrate, a way to give joy to others, a new way to grow. Move toward the light in life; seek it out no matter what. This is the essence of what it means to follow your bliss. You must be honest. Pay attention. Seek joy.”

  “ ‘Be honest. Pay attention. Seek joy,’ ” I repeated. “Is that Joseph Campbell too?”

  “No, that’s Gertrude Lund.” She paused to let the self-reference sink in. “By the way, the toilet in the women’s washroom is clogged.” And she turned on her heel and marched out.

  7

  “Okay, so you’ve got a month to accomplish one goal on the list, right?” Eve, my best friend of more than a decade, handed a waiting customer two bars of her homemade orange blossom goat milk soap and tucked the payment into her metal cash box. It had been half a day since my very-early-morning conversation with Aunt Gert, and now I was perched on a stool under the awning of Eve’s stand at the Ballard Sunday Farmers Market, brainstorming ways to complete at least one thing on my life goals list.

  “Right. One month. One goal.” I shivered and rubbed the arms of my cashmere, pearl-button cardigan. It was only early afternoon, but it felt like dusk, with dark gray clouds piling up in a threatening sky. Despite the looming gloom, the farmers market was doing a brisk business, and the street between the rows of stalls was bustling with shoppers.

  “And if you don’t?” Eve asked.

  “I will have failed at everything I wanted to accomplish in my life,” I said lightly, my tone belying the bleak truth of my words. In the cold light of day, the stakes felt even higher than when I’d made my vow in the kitchen in the early dark of the morning.

  Eve raised her eyebrows at me. “Read the list again,” she commanded.

  I drew my diary from the pocket of my vintage cherry-red poodle skirt and complied. Taking advantage of a momentary lull in customers, Eve leaned back against the table stacked with wares, listening intently. Today she was wearing a long, plain white apron, like a butcher’s apron, with jeans and a tank top that showed the arboreal tattoos snaking around her slender, toned right bicep. Even though it was drizzly and February, hovering somewhere in the low fifties, she seemed impervious to the cold.

  With her pixie cut, shaved up the sides and dyed a cotton-candy-pink hue, she radiated a distinct wholesome back-to-nature aura combined with a razor-sharp punk edge. Indeed, she personified her entire brand of organic handmade goat milk products, Gritty Girl Soap Co. No one would guess that five years ago she’d been the youngest hotshot marketing executive at a high-powered New York City firm with the accompanying panic attacks and developing baby ulcer to prove it. We’d met during a junior year semester study abroad in England and bonded over trips to the British Museum, the Borough Market, and Notting Hill, two fresh-faced American girls with the world as our oyster. Life had turned out quite differently than what we’d imagined all those years ago in London, but we’d been best friends ever since.

  “Get a horse. It’s the easiest thing on the list to accomplish,” Eve said when I finished reading. “You can keep it at my farm.” She dusted her hands, problem sorted.

  “Yes, but unfortunately I don’t really want a horse anymore.” I’d actually crossed out number five in red pen. “And I think for it to really count, the goal
has to be something I still want now.”

  That left just four items. Three, actually.

  Eve seemed to read my mind. “Number four?” she asked quietly.

  “Is already impossible,” I responded quickly. My family would never be happy together 4 ever. That goal had slipped through my fingers ten years ago.

  I worried my lower lip, ping-ponging between the remaining three in my mind. Which one had the best chance of success?

  Eve crossed her arms and considered the remaining options. “Number one and number two are problematic. If you live in another country or own your own restaurant, you’re probably not going to be able to manage the Eatery at the same time. Are you willing to give that up?”

  I paused, considering. “I don’t know how that would work,” I admitted finally. “Dad and Daphne can’t survive without me.”

  Eve gave me a sideways look. I knew she disagreed with me on this point. On a lot of points, actually. She paused to offer a sample of basil cuticle balm to a woman pushing two Boston terriers in a doggy stroller. The woman took the sample, then moved across the street to the organic bakery stand to examine their sourdough boules.

  “So that leaves”—Eve counted back on her fingers—“number three. Fall in love.”

  “Yeah, fall in love,” I affirmed. It made me feel a little panicky just thinking about it, but I had to admit it was the most likely one on the list.

  Eve snapped her fingers. “A Russian mail-order husband off the Internet,” she suggested. “I’m always getting spam ads promising that love is just a click away.” She grinned at me.

  “I don’t think ordering a husband off the Internet actually qualifies as falling in love,” I protested, laughing. “Plus, I’m pretty sure it’s illegal.”

  She shrugged. “Technicalities.”

  I gazed down the street of the Ballard Avenue Historic District at the couple of blocks of white awnings fluttering in the breeze. Unlike our local Magnolia Farmers Market, which ran only in the warmer months, Ballard, the Seattle neighborhood to the north of us, ran their market all year round, and Eve was there each week manning her stand. Often I’d slip away from the diner for an hour or two on Sunday afternoons, ostensibly to help Eve handle the customers, but really I just hung around behind the counter and chatted with Eve.