I Only Have Pies for You, page 10
“Then this will be quick as a wink,” Julip said.
“Mom,” I said, easing past Julip, “I’ve got to go.” I glanced at Chayton. “We could walk to school together?”
Chayton opened his mouth, but Julip jumped in with, “That’s sweet of you, Dacey, but I need Chayton’s help unloading some things from the truck. He’ll be at school shortly.”
Behind Julip’s back, Chayton tugged on his hair and mouthed, Help me! I nearly burst out laughing, partly from his theatrics but partly from the relief of knowing that things were still normal between us. Or, as normal as they could be after our almost-kiss. My face flushed, and I realized how much I wanted that almost to become definite.
“Okay,” I said to Chayton. “I’ll see you later.”
I hurried out the door, happier than I’d been in hours. It was only when I was climbing the school steps that I remembered I still hadn’t told Mom about the Heartstring recipe. Well, I reasoned, the recipe had been waiting for someone to discover it for over forty years. A few more hours wouldn’t matter that much.
When I arrived at school, I realized I was very wrong.
The comments started when I reached my locker, where I found a dozen kids waiting.
“Dacey!” Tad offered me a high five. “It’s huge news about the pie. Can I swing by the shop after school and grab a slice for my dad? Maybe it will change his mind about my grounding.”
“Hey,” Caroleen interjected, elbowing Tad, “I called the first slice! It’s going to get me the solo in the spring glee concert.”
Talking over Caroleen was a chorus of other kids, all asking for pie ASAP.
“Guys …” I yawned, wondering how I was going to make it through the day on so little sleep. “I’m lost. Which of my mom’s pies are you fighting over?”
That curbed them, and they all trained their eyes on me.
“Come on, Dace.” Tad laughed. “You were the one who found the recipe.” At my confused silence, he added, “Hazel Culpepper’s Heartstring Pie?”
The blood rushed from my head to my toes, and I gripped the edge of my locker door, trying to make sense of what he’d just said. “I don’t—how do you know about that?”
“Everybody knows about it.” Caroleen heaved a world-weary sigh, as if this were all completely obvious. “Your bestie’s the one who gave us the play-by-play. In today’s Buzz?”
I shook my head. That couldn’t be right. Zari wouldn’t have …
Caroleen raised her phone to my face, and Zari’s article stared back at me from the screen, the headline announcing: FAMOUS HEARTSTRING PIE REDISCOVERED AT LAST!
I fought the urge to clench my eyes shut, anger broiling inside me.
“So?” Tad persisted. “When can we get our hands on a piece?” He clapped his hands and cried, “Let the healing begin.”
I slammed my locker, making them all jump. “That’s not how it works,” I muttered, pushing past them. Of course, I’d never seen the pie in action, so I couldn’t say that for sure. But hadn’t GG Hazel been the one who decided who to give the pie to and when? Somehow I didn’t think eating it so you could sing in the spotlight or get out of trouble with your parents was what the pie was meant for. Wasn’t that why she’d hidden the recipe in the first place, to protect it from situations like this one?
“Come on, Dace, help us out,” Tad called after me as I walked down the hall.
I ignored him. My hands trembling, I checked my watch. Five minutes until the bell rang. I turned in the direction of The Beehive’s pressroom, my pace quickening as my anger grew.
Zari was exactly where I guessed she’d be, at her press desk about to slip her tablet into her messenger bag. Her burgeoning smile faltered at my frown.
“How could you?” I planted my hands on her desk, staring her down. “You wrote about the Heartstring Pie recipe?”
Zari’s eye widened. “Wait … you’re angry?” She said it with an innocent disbelief that I couldn’t fathom.
“I’m furious!” I cried. “You had no right, and you shared it with everyone!”
She held up her hands. “Dace, I didn’t think it would be a big deal. Everyone was going to find out when you and your mom made the pie anyway. And it’s good news! Way better than having to report on people selling houses and closing up their restaurants. I thought it would be nice to write about something positive.”
“But it was my story to tell! My mom’s story.” I glared at her. “I haven’t even had the chance to tell my mom about the recipe yet, and now—” A molten lava of words formed in my mouth. I knew they would sound awful, but the erupting volcano was unstoppable. “Now she’ll hear about it from your gossip column! You turned my GG into a cheap tabloid!”
Zari’s head flew back as if I’d slapped her, and now her eyes gleamed with as much anger as I felt. “My column’s not gossip or cheap.” She walked around her desk to face me. “I want my writing to be taken seriously—”
“Then don’t invade people’s privacy!” I threw up my hands. “You never stop to think how it affects people around you! How it feels to be the subject of one of your pieces! You wrote about me and Chayton, and now this! You went too far.” I turned away from her. “I don’t want to talk to you anymore about anything. I can’t ever trust you again. Not when whatever I tell you will end up in your stupid articles.”
I stopped, not quite believing that I’d just called Zari’s writing “stupid,” especially when I knew how much it meant to her. Guilt squeezed my heart, but my anger consumed it.
“Then don’t,” Zari said. She turned for the door. “Don’t tell me anything. I don’t want to hear it anyway.”
With that, she walked out into the hallway. I stared after her, my eyes pricking with tears. I swiped at them in frustration, then dragged myself to class, dismayed and miserable.
“What happened with you and Zari?” Maria asked as soon as she met me in the cafeteria lunch line.
“Yeah, she texted me a 911 during history class to meet her in the bathroom with tissues.” Bree’s face crinkled with concern. “She wouldn’t tell me what you fought about, only that you weren’t going to speak ever again.”
“We’re not.” I spat the words, and Maria lifted her eyebrows. “She messed with GG Hazel. My family. And I can’t be friends with someone I can’t trust.” Maria opened her mouth, and I blurted, “And don’t you dare tell me to relax, or that it’s not a big deal.”
“I wasn’t going to.” Maria voice was resigned, as if she knew nothing she could say to me right now could have any calming effect.
Bree blanched. “But you and Zari can’t break up!” She pressed her fingertips against her temples. “I’m a child of divorce. You can’t make me choose between the two of you.”
Maria rolled her eyes. “Don’t freak, Bree. This isn’t a divorce. It’s just a fight.” She scrutinized my expression. “This is about the Heartstring Pie article, I’m guessing?”
“Of course it is!” I snapped. “She had no right to use that story. She didn’t even ask me—” My voice cracked with fury, and I didn’t trust myself to say anything else.
Bree, ever the peacemaker, chimed in with, “You know Zari’s heart is always in the right place even though she can be … impulsive about her writing—”
“Look, guys, you don’t have to choose between me and Zari. But I don’t want to hang out with her anymore.” I swallowed. “Ever again.”
Maria’s eyes widened at my seriousness. “You don’t mean that, Dace—”
“I do,” I said flatly. I stared at my feet, then put my hand in my shorts pocket. Maybe it was for reassurance or comfort, but I wanted—needed—to feel GG Hazel’s recipe there. My body turned ice-cold when my hand found nothing but the empty lining of my pocket. The Heartstring Pie recipe was gone.
I stumbled out of the lunch line, feeling sick to my stomach, nearly dropping my empty tray in my hurry to set it back on the pile with the others.
“Dacey?” Bree said. She and Maria started to follow me, Bree’s face pale with worry.
“The recipe,” I blurted breathlessly. “I put it in my pocket but it’s not there …”
“We’ll help you look for it,” Maria offered, but I shook my head.
“It could’ve fallen out anywhere between the shop and school. I’ll have to retrace my steps,” I said, my mind spinning.
“But we still have two more class periods left,” Bree started.
“I’ll go to the nurse. Say I’m sick.” It wasn’t even a lie, with the nausea roiling inside me. Then I was jogging toward the cafeteria exit, waving at them over my shoulder. “You have to stay. We can’t all go home early. The nurse will never believe us.”
I heard Bree call, “Text us later!” as I burst through the door.
But I didn’t respond, because I’d slammed into Chayton.
He caught me against him. “We have to quit meeting like this,” he said teasingly. He took one glance at my face, and his laughter died.
“What’s wrong?” His hands settled on my shoulders in a protective, sweet way that made me want to stay there and tell him everything. Then I thought of Julip Freedell and the hungry persistence she’d been using, bit by bit, to wheedle her way into my mom’s trust to gain access to Culpepper recipes. How much more would her persistence grow once she learned I’d found the Heartstring recipe? I imagined her Prairie Living crew staking out our house, peering into our windows, jabbing microphones in our faces. My stomach lurched again. No, I decided, it was better to keep this problem from Chayton for now, if only to spare him from his mom’s haranguing.
“I—I’m sick,” I managed. My face was slick with perspiration. “I’m on my way to the nurse right now.”
“Oh, I’m sorry.” The worry in his eyes was genuine, and my heart panged at the sight. “Is there anything I can do?”
“I’ll be fine.” I stepped away. “I should go.”
Confusion flashed across his features, and he gave me a questioning look, as if he sensed there was more to what was going on than what I saying. “Okay … Feel better?”
I gave him a thumbs-up, then balked internally at the gesture, so out of character for me. I turned before my expression gave anything else away and hurried to Mrs. Hines, the school nurse.
I must have looked awful, because she didn’t even bother taking my temperature before calling Mom at the shop.
“Your mom’s got some pies about to come out of the oven,” Mrs. Hines told me as she hung up. “She said you can wait fifteen minutes for her here, or you can walk, if you feel up to it.”
“I can walk,” I said, probably a little too hastily. It was in these kinds of moments that I was particularly grateful to live in a place like Bonnet, where no one batted an eye at the idea of a student walking home midday without a ton of paperwork and parental approval forms.
Five minutes later, I carefully retraced my steps from my walk to school that morning, scouring the sidewalk for GG Hazel’s recipe. I hoped I’d find it before I had to face Mom.
“Dacey, is that you?” Mom hurried out from the kitchen as soon as she heard the shop door jingle. The shop was more packed with customers than it had been in weeks.
A quick survey of the room—Mrs. Gonzalez’s hopeful eyes, Mrs. Beaumont’s arthritic hands clasped tightly—and I understood that they’d all heard about the Heartstring Pie. They were waiting for their own slice, just like the kids at school had been.
“Mom—” I started, head bowed.
“Are you all right?” Mom pressed a hand to my forehead, and then, when she had reassured herself that I didn’t have a fever, peered into my eyes, confused and excited. “Can you please tell me what’s going on? Half of Bonnet has stopped by in the last few hours, asking about Heartstring Pie. I couldn’t understand why until Selena showed me Zari’s article.” She led me behind the display counter and whispered, “Did you really find the recipe?”
“Mom—” For a moment, I couldn’t speak. My eyes burned with tears, and I blinked rapidly to keep them from falling. “When the picture frame broke yesterday, I found the recipe hidden inside. I didn’t want to tell you in front of Julip’s camera crew, and then you were out last night. The recipe was in my pocket, but this morning—” I gulped, hating what I was about to say next. “It must have fallen out when I went to school, or maybe before I left the shop. I don’t know. But I don’t have it anymore.” My lips quivered. “I don’t know where it is.”
Mom was still as a statue, her eyes downcast, and I waited through the long, torturous seconds as she processed what I’d told her. “Oh,” she finally said. Then again, “Oh.”
My heart ached. “I’m sorry—”
“Shhhh.” She squeezed my hand in hers. “We have to find it, that’s all.” Her voice was calm and decisive. “We’ll retrace your steps and—”
“I already did. The whole way here from school. I looked everywhere.” I shook my head. “The only other place to look is the chair. The one I slept in last night.”
“Yes!” Mom’s face lit up. “Of course! It has to be there!”
With dozen of customers’ eyes glued to our every move, Mom and I hurried to the armchair. We lifted the cushions, pressed our hands into the deep recesses of the chair’s seams, looking underneath and around it. As we searched, so did everyone else in the shop, checking under tables and napkin dispensers. None of them had to be told what was happening; they all seemed to understand and appeared just as desperate to find the recipe as we were.
When twenty minutes of searching turned up nothing, a mood of mourning settled over the shop. Everyone turned their eyes toward my mother. I understood, more than I ever had before, how much Mom meant to our town. She wasn’t only a Culpepper matriarch, she was a Bonnet one. Even though this was her loss—my family’s loss—more than theirs, everyone was waiting, with suspended breath, for her to comfort them, just as she always had.
“Well.” She straightened up and cast a smile around the room. “That’s that. We’ve done fine without Heartstring Pie until now, and we’ll have to keep doing fine, with … or without it.” She brushed her hands on her apron, as if she were wiping the last remnants of hope from them. “Now … who wants some blackberry ganache?”
No one moved for a long minute, and then slowly, Mrs. Beaumont offered up a soft, “I’ll have some. That’s always been my favorite anyway.”
Within seconds, others were ordering pies, all mustering smiles to let my mom know that they would be all right. We’ll all get through this together, they seemed to be trying to say. Only they weren’t fooling anyone.
Mom turned to me, a trace of sadness in her eyes. “Are you feeling up to helping me, or would you rather go home and rest?” The way she asked the question, I could tell she knew I wasn’t really sick. She was going to let it go, though, which only made my guilt worse.
“I can help,” I said, following her into the kitchen.
Once we were alone, I noticed her expression droop with disappointment. “Mom?” My voice came out as a whisper. “I’m so, so sorry.”
She pressed a finger to my lips. “It wasn’t your fault. Maybe GG Hazel didn’t want anyone to find the recipe. Maybe this is fate’s way of keeping it a secret forever.”
“I don’t believe that,” I blurted, and Mom looked at me in surprise. “Why would I have found it in the first place if that was what she wanted?” Mom turned away, focusing her attention on adding whipped cream to the top of a chocolate banana cream pie. “You used to say that the recipe was biding its time, waiting for the right person to find it.”
“Dacey.” Mom sighed. “I remember what I said, but there’s nothing to be done about it now.” She picked up the pie, then motioned for me to pick up the blackberry ganache pie still sitting on the counter. “Come on. No sense crying over burnt pie.”
Normally, I would’ve rolled my eyes at Mom’s corny expression, but I didn’t have the heart for it today. Maybe, I thought, my losing the recipe wasn’t an accident. Maybe I simply wasn’t the right person to find it in the first place.
The mood in the shop grew more melancholy each time a customer burst in with a request for Heartstring Pie, only to be told that we didn’t know when, or if, we’d be able to bake it. I thought about escaping to the stables to ride Ginger but I forced myself to stay at the shop. No matter what Mom said, this was my fault, and I was going to help her through it.
I was never happier for closing time to roll around, and it was with a sigh of relief that I finally lifted the OPEN sign from the door, preparing to flip it to CLOSED.
Only I saw one more face waiting behind the glass door. “What do you want?” My voice was so cold, even to my own ears, that I shivered involuntarily.
“I know you’re closing,” Zari said, “and I know you hate me right now. But I need to come in. It’s an emergency.”
I hesitated. “I don’t want to talk—”
“I know what happened to the recipe,” she said. “Please let me in.”
“Is that Zari?” Mom called from the back of the room, where she was sweeping. “Did she just say something about the Heartstring Pie recipe?”
Reluctantly, I nodded and opened the door, seeing from Mom’s anxious expression that I had no choice. Zari rushed inside, pulling her phone from her pocket. She glanced at me sheepishly, then turned to my mom.
“Okay, so after dinner I was scrolling through YouTube, and this video from Prairie Living came across my feed.” She handed her phone to my mom. “You have to watch it, Miss Edie.”
I peered over Mom’s and Zari’s shoulders as the video began, acutely aware of the tension, heavy as a stone, between Zari and me.
“Hi, y’all, and thanks for watching Prairie Living!” Julip beamed from Zari’s phone screen, her cheeks rosy and her lips glossed to perfection. “Now I know I don’t usually post at this hour, but I have an incredibly exciting announcement to make!” She clapped her hands, obviously thrilled, as the camera panned out to reveal a beautifully wrapped present sitting in Julip’s lap. “This coming Saturday—five short days from now—I’ll be unveiling the great state of Texas’s most legendary pie!”
