Courtship of the Cake (25 page)

DASHBOARD CONFESSIONAL

I was out of the car before he even had a chance to throw it into park.

“Dani!” He slammed the door shut and followed me, leaving our drunken dates to sleep it off in the Jeep. “What do you want me to say?”

“How about starting with the truth?” I hissed. “Like why you crashed my sister's wedding and turned my life upside down.”

I whipped around to make my grand exit . . . and tripped on the old limestone foundation and right into Mick's arms.

“Look. I'm a baker. I spend half my life at weddings. The last thing I ever thought I would do was crash one. But I had to. I had to take that chance, after I saw you on Royal Street. I couldn't just let you dance away. And I'm sorry . . .”

“For lying to me?”

“That, yes. And for letting that evening end! I was trying to be a gentleman that night.”

“And it looks like you've been trying to make up for
that
ever since.”

“What the hell does that mean?”

“You wouldn't stoop to having sex with a drunk girl that night because of your so-called ‘scruples'”—I air-quoted—“and now I think the challenge of trying to sleep with me when I'm sober is too tempting of a prospect for you. Isn't that what all this cake courting is about?”

“No. It's about getting to know you. And you, getting to know me. No masks. No charade,” Mick said quietly. “Don't we deserve a second chance?”

He loosened his grip on me, so he could look me in the eye.

“For what it's worth, I think we deserve the truth,” I said, meeting his gaze.

CAKE AND A PROMISE

You'd better know exactly what you want, and what it's worth to you
, I heard her sister warn.

“Is it true you were living with a girl?” Dani now asked, quiet in my arms.

“A woman,” I corrected. “Much older than me. That would've been Rebekkah. She made your sister's cake.”

In fact, she made all the wedding cakes needed for that establishment, and most for the nearby catering venue. She had taken me in when I moved to New Orleans, and I had been working with her for the better part of two years, waiting for the day when she'd allow me to bake one. I had been relegated to king cakes like I was some supermarket employee, churning out the oval-shaped pastries New Orleans was famous for, day after day and double the amount during Mardi Gras. Stuffing baby after baby into the box beside the cinnamon-flavored ring gaudily sprinkled with gold, green, and purple sugar.

Yes, every cake does indeed have a story. And king cakes were famous for having a tiny plastic baby trinket hidden inside. Old legend
had it that he who found the baby would have to buy the next king cake, but it also had symbolism dating back to 1800s France and represented baby Jesus. Our clients wanted them for the kitsch and tradition, and the more modern fortune of finding a baby in their slice: luck and prosperity.

I had never found a baby in any slice I'd ever eaten. And at the bakery, we were instructed to serve up the baby on the side for the customers to place themselves, lest any liability arise. Rebekkah had been riding me all that day of Posy's destination wedding, ever since a phone call came in from a customer complaining no baby had accompanied his cake. Apparently I hadn't put one inside the box.

It was a sore topic with Rebekkah. She had been waiting for years for someone to put a baby inside her, and I refused to be the guy to do it. And she'd been holding my promotion hostage in her twisted quest for intimacy. I could've used her to climb into the cutthroat culinary pocket of the French Quarter, but I wanted, I deserved more. It wasn't until I met Dani that I realized what it was. And I knew I had to set things to rights.

Rebekkah had already taken matters into her own hands.

After leaving Dani at her hotel that night, I found my clothes strewn on the brick sidewalk in front of Rebekkah's Dauphine Street residence, and spilling into the narrow road. “Fuck you and the suitcase you rode in on!” she raged from her balcony, before slamming the French doors on me and on the better (or worse) part of two years. I'd had no power in that relationship, she had had no faith, and in the end, I guess we were both justified.

I'd packed my belongings in the case she had upended and headed straight for Café Du Monde. It was open twenty-four hours, and I would wait all night and day for Dani if I had to. “Just keep pouring me coffee every hour,” I'd instructed the waiter, and put my head down on the table.

I should've given Dani my last name, I thought. I should've given her my number. I shouldn't have left her but if I hadn't . . . story of my life.

“Why are you telling me all this?” Dani asked, shaking her head as I finished my tale. Sadness laced her voice as she turned back to the Jeep to help rouse our drunken dates. “It doesn't matter now.”

“You wanted the truth. And sometimes the truth is messy, inconvenient and fucked up, and no one's fault.”

We both regarded the couple passed out in the backseat. While they kept themselves at arms' length in their sober, awake hours, Nash and Quinn were intimately wound together now, under the cover of the night and the guise of alcohol. Her head was nestled on his shoulder, where it fit perfectly. He had one arm wound protectively around her, and his other hand, palm up, in her lap.

“Sometimes,” I added in a whisper, “it's better to let sleeping dogs lie.”

Dani's sigh wasn't one of defeat; it was one of agreement. “It's warm enough out here, right? To leave them?”

I reached into the front seat for my keys. Nash's bet money was still on the seat. I swept it up and deposited it back into his upturned hand. I had no desire to see his bet, raise his bet, or drag his drunk ass into the house.

Dani kissed my cheek at room number twelve. “Thanks for the double date . . .”

“From hell?” I joked. “Anytime. Think someday we might be destined for a do-over?”

TRUTH TAKES A TOLL

I woke up before everybody. Or perhaps I never really went to sleep. It was early, even for an early bird like me.

Slipping out the front door, I stretched my hamstrings on the old limestone foundation I had tripped over the night before. A burning desire for new scenery propelled my feet forward, not slowing until I crossed 32 and skirted the old New Hope cemetery. Like massage, jogging provided me time and space for my mind to wander. Thinking about all that Mick had said about truth and trust, and about letting sleeping dogs lie. And recalling memories that lingered long before that. Taking advantage of a drunk girl may have been against Mick's principles, but not all guys were that noble.

•   •   •

“This is crazy,” Laney grumbled, tripping over a low gravestone in her Docs. “We are crashing a fucking funeral because you glimpsed a hottie out the car window?”

“You know you love the macabre; just play along. Consider it comic book research.”

“Like
Tales from the Crypt
,” Laney whispered as we approached the open earth and people gathered there. “Cool.”

•   •   •

I couldn't take my eyes off the young guy standing to the side. He stood stoic and sad, legs splayed in what looked like expensively tailored dress pants. His tie matched my eyes, and the sky that was just starting to brighten. His cheeks were high and round, blotched red with emotion. “Like a Botticelli cherub,” my nana would've said. And he was holding the hand of a woman who might have been his own grandmother, a regal-looking woman dressed impeccably.

In fact, the entire funeral procession had an air of expensive grief, in tailor-made black with a snaking line of imported cars parked along the cemetery road. Beside me, Laney tugged uncomfortably at her miniskirt, trying to cover up the hole in her stocking.

I shivered in the aftermath of the summer rain, wearing a tiny cap-sleeved white tee under my nineties black bib-overall minidress. All the cool girls had been wearing them that year, like me, with thigh-high black stockings and black chunky-heeled Mary Janes.

I must've looked like the sluttiest funeral-goer ever, but the guy's tear-filled eyes seemed to lighten as he caught sight of my approach. The woman he stood with had moved forward, clutching a handkerchief, to the cluster of her supporters near the fresh-dug earth, leaving him on his own.

“I'm sorry for your loss,” I said firmly, reaching for his hand. And I was. I had lost my grandfather that past winter, and the loss was still keen and sharp within me. What had hurt most of all was watching those left behind, like my nana, who seemed incapable of speaking, seeing, or hearing that day. And my dad, a man who never cried, but whose
face profoundly displayed his grief as people from his past, whom I had never seen in my life, moved to embrace him, one after another.

“Thank you.” There was no trace of accent in his voice, like most of the boys we knew on the island. Having spent my younger years in New Jersey, I would've been able to pick out that subtle difference, too. Nor did he have the telltale Staten Island twang, or a hint of the other outlying boroughs. No doubt “summer people,” as Laney would spit as we walked past their fancy hulking mansions shadowing our beach. “It was nice of you to come all this way,” he added.

“Jackson. Come here, my dear boy.” The grandmother had an aristocratic accent that sounded like she had been bred in a boarding school, neither American nor British, but somewhere in between the two. Like an old Hollywood actress. She gestured, a small shovel in her hand, and the boy gently squeezed my fingers before dropping them and proceeding up to perform the grim and traditional task of spreading dirt on the casket that had been lowered into the earth.

“Did you get his number?” Laney asked in a loud whisper. “Can we go now?”

“Shhh.” I stood up straighter as the clergyman, who looked older than the dirt itself, began to speak of the Davenport legacy. Raised by headshrinker parents, I was probably more attuned to family dynamics than the average teen, and this family seemed to be aligned in two different camps: those who appeared to be rallied around the family matriarch, and those who had turned their backs, literally, on her as they fixed their gaze on the ground before them.

“You know I would follow you anywhere, but this is just weird.” Laney's hushed breath brushed my curls against my cheek, and I was surprised to feel them wet with my tears. “We don't know these people at all.”

The guy, Jackson, shook back his thick, sandy hair and solidly met my eyes.

“Not true,” I murmured to Laney. I felt I knew him, that I had always known him.

“I want to go.”

“Fine, go.” I slipped her my keys. “Take my car and leave it at Allen's. I'll find my way there and meet you at the show.”

“Are you crazy?”

The guy had skirted back toward us, fumbling with two rocks he must've picked up in the dirt. I just motioned for her to go. She gave me a long
“
have it your way” look, and scuttled off.

He stood stock-still beside me, until the two divided sides at the gravesite began to give way and quietly disperse. Then he threw down one rock. And then the other.

“Are you okay?” I asked.

“What's it to you?” His tone was venomous, and took me by total surprise. “Our grandmother's dirty little secret changed the will and has totally fucked my family in the process. Yeah, I'm fine.”

He glared at me with eyes that weren't the same. And there was nothing cherubic, or charitable, about him anymore. His cheeks weren't even red . . . but his tie was.

“Dex. It's not her fault.” Jackson stepped up. “The New England cousins aren't in on this fight.”

Twins! They were twins. And they thought I was some distant cousin in their soap opera.

“I'm not your cousin,” I blurted, just as a thin, blond woman approached and overheard our exchange.

“Boys, this must be the nanny for Aunt Camilla's three. She does have a striking resemblance to cousin Beth, though, doesn't she? Darling, you were supposed to meet Camilla at the house; she was frantic when you didn't arrive. No matter, she left the children with the maids. You'll ride there with us.”

I had gone from stranger to family to hired help, before the body was even cold in the ground.

“The house” turned out to be one of Montauk's grandest mansions, bustling with activity. Whatever children I was mistakenly told to
nanny were off somewhere, probably playing hide-and-seek in the rambling house.

“I'm Jax, by the way.” The guy smiled as we followed the crowd into the house.

“Dani. Hi.”

“You're not really a nanny, are you?” The one Jax had called Dex was coldly regarding me, and I fessed up and told them everything.

“Whatever, that's cool. Come hang for a while, before you have to leave for your concert,” Jax said. “Sweet game room upstairs.”

Uniformed servants scurried around the kitchen, preparing food for the bereaved more elaborate than a wedding. His brother grabbed a bottle of rum and jerked his head toward the back service stairs. “What are you guys waiting for?”

•   •   •

The trees of the Half Acre rustled above me, shaking the last of their summer leaves as the long-ago memory faded. I had looped all the way back without even realizing it. I willed my feet to stop running, practically tripping over them as they slowed while the rest of me kept hurtling. Hands out, I used the big maple to break my fall, my lungs burning and heaving.
Darlin'
. I could practically hear the cluck of Shonnie's tongue and see the shake of her head.
Where's the fire?
My former boss and favorite singer always called me out on my on-the-run personality, and blamed it on my New York upbringing.

I had tried to leave New York, and so many of its memories, behind. Pushing blindly forward. Making myself useful everywhere else, trying to help. Trying to please. Doing what I do best.

My breathing and heart rate returned to normal, and I popped in my earbuds, drowning out my own inner voice with Shonnie's as I continued to walk it off. Letting her tell me to face my soul forward, because it was easier to hear it from someone else sometimes, than from yourself.