Second Time Around (26 page)

“Hey, what’s in the box?”

Anna dropped her knife with a clatter as she realized she was no longer alone in Pranza’s kitchen. She whirled around to find Trish Selway standing right behind her.

“What’s in the box?” Trish repeated.

“Stop sneaking up on me!” Anna had to tilt her head back to meet Trish’s gaze. She backed up in an attempt to reclaim some personal space and said, “And go away. It’s my night, free and clear. Check the schedule.”

“Simmer down; I’m just here to put the finishing touches on a cake I had to leave in the walk-in. I’ll be in and out in ten minutes. Seth already cleared it. Go ahead and call him if you have a problem.” Trish switched her focus from the cardboard box to the baking sheet. “And what’s this jacked-up yeasty mess supposed to be? Looks like epoxy in a pan.”

“It’s
brioche au fromage
,” Anna said in her snottiest French accent.

Trish laughed out loud. “I know a brioche when I see one, and that? Is no brioche.”

“Oh please. Like you could do any better.”

“I absolutely could. It’s bread, babycakes, not rocket science.”

“I couldn’t agree more. And since I’m following the recipe to the letter, I can only assume the instructions are flawed.”

“Don’t blame the recipe. It doesn’t get more basic than brioche.” Trish leaned over and skimmed the list of ingredients. “Just flour, eggs, butter, sugar, yeast, and Gruyère. But, you see, it’s the simple classics like this that separate the true chefs from the poseurs with Williams-Sonoma catalogs and too much time on their hands.”

Don’t engage, don’t engage
. With the grocery store fracas fresh
in her mind, Anna spun on her heel and stalked over toward the refrigerator. Then she heard an ominous utterance behind her:

“Oops.”

She raced back to discover that a bottle of blueberry syrup had splashed across the vintage cookbook.

“Gosh, I’m sorry,” Trish said with a simper. “Pregnancy has made me so klutzy.”

Anna adopted Trish’s earlier tone of condescension. “Don’t blame the Bug. Between this pitiful attempt at sabotage and that stunt you pulled with the Hobart mixer, I now understand how truly insecure you are.”

“The fact that you’re still accusing me of taking that mixer attachment shows how delusional you are,” Trish countered.

“I guess we both have our crosses to bear.” Anna sectioned out the damaged pages of her cookbook, headed back to the sink, and tried to salvage the brioche recipe with a hot, damp dishcloth. But the text was irreparably obscured.

This whole thing with Trish was so petty. So high school. Scratch that—more like middle school. Anna reminded herself that she was a mature adult, with a home and a husband and lots of friends and a rich, multifaceted existence. She refused to debase herself by stooping to dirty tricks and passive-aggressive mind games.

Then she gazed down at the sticky, sodden cookbook that Jonas had given to her on the hot summer day they’d moved in to their house in Albany. She’d thrown together a simple tomato salad for dinner, and then they’d made love on the floor in the empty living room and giddily assured each other that they’d just created the first of the children who would eventually fill up the spare bedrooms.

Now her cookbook was trashed, her house was empty, and Jonas was on the other side of the ocean.

Suddenly, Anna was back in seventh grade.

When Anna returned to the prep area, Trish was chatting on her cell phone. “Hi, this is Trish Selway, calling about the cake delivery. … Yeah, I just want to double-check everything to make sure it’s perfect. You want me to pipe ‘Congratulations, Terrence’ on the top in red, right? … No flowers, no scallops, no other decoration? … Okay. Got it. I’ll be over to drop it off ASAP. See you in a few minutes.”

Anna leaned back against the metal countertop and waited. When Trish ended the call, she asked, “Who’s the cake for?” She figured there couldn’t be too many Terrences running around Thurwell, New York. “Is it for the college president?”

“Mind your business, Legacy.” Trish packed a pastry bag full of red icing and started piping.

For several minutes, the two bakers pointedly ignored each other and the tension thickened to the consistency of Anna’s brioche dough.

Finally, Trish broke the silence. “Shouldn’t you be trying to fix your slab of fancy French
merde
over there?”

Anna peeked over Trish’s shoulder at the sheet cake, which now featured elegant red cursive across the smooth white icing. “Oh my God.”

“What?”

Anna tittered behind her hand. “Nothing.”

Trish flushed.
“What?”

“Don’t you worry. You’ll find out soon enough.” Certain that Trish was still watching her, Anna made a big show of digging out her cell phone from her coat pocket and retreating to the restaurant’s dry-storage area. There, surrounded by
huge metal cans and Lexan containers full of flour and sugar, she pretended to dial the phone and then, tamping down a momentary stirring of shame, pretended to be talking to Jamie.

She pitched her voice to be loud enough for Trish to overhear but hushed enough to sound as though she were trying to be secretive. “Hey, Jamie, it’s me. Did you let Terrence’s staff order a cake through that other baker?”

She paused for a moment to listen to her nonexistent conversation partner’s nonexistent reply. The rest of the kitchen had gone totally, eerily still, which meant that Trish had to be listening in.

“Jamie, how could you? … Yeah, yeah. Well, it doesn’t matter, anyway, because”—Anna lowered her voice even more—“she spelled his name wrong on the cake! Swear to God. She spelled Terrence with
e-n-c-e
when he spells it
a-n-c-e
. I know! … Of course I’m not going to tell her! Are you kidding me? Anyway, yeah, once she shows up with the typo cake, I doubt they’ll be hiring her again.” She strolled out of the pantry and feigned shock when she saw Trish scurrying away from her eavesdropping post around the corner.

“Oh, hello. You’re still here?” Anna exclaimed.

“For about thirty more seconds.” Trish leaned over the cake and picked up her pastry bag. “Then I’m out the door.”

“Well, be extra careful not to trip, won’t you?” Anna cooed. “I certainly wouldn’t want you to drop that beautiful cake, what with all your pregnancy klutziness.”

Trish folded down the lid of the large rectangular bakery box. Anna strained to catch a glimpse of the top of the cake. Sure enough, Trish had changed the spelling to “Terrance.”

Mission accomplished. Revenge was a dish best served with buttercream frosting.

But instead of basking in smug satisfaction, Anna felt a twinge of remorse. She couldn’t help envisioning the party host’s reaction and Trish’s public humiliation in front of an entire roomful of supercilious “legacies.”

Her resolve splintered and she threw up her hands. “Wait,” she said. “You need to change the spelling.”

Trish snorted. “Oh please, I’m not falling for that. I know how to spell ‘Terrance.’ Just because I don’t have some overpriced degree doesn’t mean I’m illiterate.”

“No, you were right the first time. It’s an
e
, not an
a
. I made the whole thing up back there.” Anna couldn’t even look at her. “I wasn’t really on the phone.”

“Every time I think you can’t possibly get any crazier, you prove me wrong. I bet your husband hides your chef knives before he goes to sleep, doesn’t he?”

Anna started toward Trish. “Come on. I’ll help you fix it.”

“Stay away from me!”

“But I can’t let you—”

“If you take one more step, the pepper spray comes out.” Trish gripped the cake box tightly and edged toward the exit, glaring at Anna as she went. “When I want spelling tips, I’ll ask for them.”

T
wenty minutes later, the kitchen door flew open and a blast of frigid winter wind blew in.

“You evil, lying, conniving
hag
.”

In her haste to confront Anna, Trish hadn’t bothered to scrape the freezing rain from her boot treads, and tiny ice crystals scattered across the tile.

“You’re tracking slush all over the floor,” Anna pointed out.

“You screwed me over on purpose.” Trish threw down her coat and rolled up her sweater sleeves.

Anna had never been in a fistfight, and she had no intention of starting now. Especially with an opponent who was in her second trimester. She retreated to the other side of the counter, trying to put a few barriers between herself and the enraged Amazon in the Fair Isle sweater. “I will admit that things got out of hand, but I honestly tried—”

Trish held her body ramrod straight with her fists balled at her sides. “You can’t stand that anyone from that college still hires me for anything. You think you deserve to have all my business handed to you on a silver platter.”

“That’s not true!” Anna cried.

“Well, let me tell you something: I was here first. And I’ll still be here, long after you’ve given up on the pastry chef fantasy and moved on to basket weaving or beekeeping or whatever your next whim happens to be. I went to school for this. I work my ass off. This isn’t some fun little side job for me. This is my
life
.”

“Oh, spare me the guilt trip. You’re the one who started this whole thing!” Anna nodded toward the blueberry syrup. “From the second I met you, you’ve been nothing but nasty, with the tricks and the threats and the ‘Legacy’ crap—”

“You
are
a legacy! What culinary credentials do you have, other than watching the Food Network?”

Anna had no response for this.

“I’m waiting. Do you have any professional training at all?”

“As you yourself said, just because I don’t have a fancy degree doesn’t mean I can’t do a good job.”

“Whatever.” Trish wrinkled her nose in disgust. “You’re
spoiled and self-entitled, and I hope you choke on that hot mess you call a brioche.”

Anna opened her mouth to respond, but her words died on her lips when she noticed the dark red stain spreading at the juncture of Trish’s light khaki trousers.

“Hey!” Trish’s voice sounded far away. “You’re not even listening to me!”

Anna stepped forward, her hand outstretched. “Are you all right?”

“What do you mean?”

Anna glanced at Trish’s crotch as delicately as possible.

“What now?” Trish followed Anna’s gaze and yanked at the plackets of her pants. She dabbed at the stain with a single paper napkin, then blinked down at the crimson smears on the napkin’s crisp white surface.

After a few seconds, Trish looked back up, her expression completely blank. “Oh.”

“Are you hurt?” Anna asked.

“No. I mean, my back hurts, but I thought that was from hauling around a ginormous slab of cake all day. Oh God. What do I do?”

Anna pointed to the bathroom door. “Go check it out. Call if you need help.”

Two minutes later, Trish returned from the restroom. Her face had gone pallid. “It’s not stopping. There’s a lot of blood down there.”

Anna grabbed her car keys. “Let’s go. The clinic’s only a few blocks away. This’ll be faster than waiting for an ambulance.”

Trish waved her off. “I can drive myself.”

“Are you kidding me?”

“I’m fine, seriously, I’ll just—” Trish took two steps toward the door and slipped on the melting slush she’d tracked in a few minutes ago. Her arms pinwheeled wildly as she started to fall, and Anna lunged across the kitchen to steady her.

“I’m not letting go.” Anna clutched one of Trish’s forearms with each hand. “Now shut the hell up, get in the car, and cross your legs until we get to the clinic.”

I
s there someone we should call?” Anna asked once they’d been whisked past the clinic’s admitting desk and straight into the E.R.’s “GYN room.” “Your husband?”

Trish folded her hands over her abdomen and kept her gaze fixed on the exam room ceiling. “My boyfriend is out of town and no, we definitely shouldn’t call him yet.”

“You want to wait until you know for sure,” Anna said.

“Give me a break. I look like the Red Sea parted in my pants.” Trish closed her eyes. “I think we already know for sure what’s happened.”

“Don’t say that. You have to keep your hopes up until—”

“And on top of everything else, I ruined your car upholstery.”

Anna blinked. “Are you honestly thinking about my upholstery right now?”

Trish curled her fingers into the starched bedsheets. “What is taking that ultrasound chick so long?”

According to the physician’s assistant who’d performed Trish’s intake assessment, the only on-call obstetrician was currently in surgery performing a C-section, which meant that Trish would first be checked by an ultrasound tech. But, due to the small hospital’s limited resources, the ultrasound
techs had already gone home for the night. So Anna and Trish were left to talk amongst themselves while they waited for the on-call tech to respond to her emergency page.

“Should be here momentarily,” Anna said. “They said she only lived about ten minutes away.”

“It’s been eighteen minutes. I’m counting.”

Right on cue, the ultrasound tech bustled in, wearing maroon scrubs and a harried expression.

“Hey.” Trish raised one hand off the bed. “Sorry to drag you in after hours.” She sounded meek; totally unlike the bully in the baking aisle.

“No problem. Sorry to take so long getting here, but the roads are getting a little dicey with all this freezing rain.” The tech took a seat and switched on the monitor. “Ready when you are.”

Trish tucked in the paper sheet around her hips and yanked up the hem of her flimsy cotton gown, exposing a bare, pale strip of belly. “I’m ready.”

The tech squirted a dollop of clear gel onto Trish’s abdomen, then produced the ultrasound wand and got to work. “Okay, lie still and try to relax.”

A few faint bursts of static crackled through the silence. Then they heard the unmistakable pulse of a heartbeat. Trish’s and Anna’s gazes locked.

“Well, from what I can see, your little guy looks fine,” the tech announced after a few minutes. “There’s the heartbeat. He’s moving, he’s breathing. Look, he’s sucking his thumb.”

“Hold on.” Trish lifted her head off the pillow and peered at the fuzzy image on the screen. “It’s a he?”