The Bracelet (5 page)

 

C
HAPTER
T
WO

Monday, November 29 . . . Twenty-five days until the wedding

S
ome people were named for beloved relatives, honored historical figures, favorite characters in fiction, or admired movie stars. Piper was named after her mother's passion: Terri Donovan was never happier than when she was piping sweet icing on a wedding cake.

Pacing back and forth in the hallway of the rehearsal studio on Manhattan's West Side, Piper found her mind wandering. Based on her mother's criteria, if Piper were to have a daughter, what would she name her?
Encore? Brava? Ovation?

The door to the audition room opened, and a young woman emerged. She looked very similar to Piper and the other four girls waiting in the hallway. Piper braced herself, knowing she was next on the list. Her heart pounded.

“Piper Donovan?”

Breathe,
she told herself, wondering how she had survived all twenty-seven years of her life, even though everyone thought she didn't breathe well enough. Her acting teachers, her karate, yoga, and Pilates instructors, her mother and father were always reminding her: “Just take a deep breath, Piper.”

Entering the audition room, Piper studied the man sitting behind the long table. The casting director would size her up within just a few seconds and determine if she was right for the role. His laptop computer was open as he finished tapping in his notations about the previous actress.

The man turned his attention to the pile of photographs on the table and picked up Piper's head shot. “Good morning, Piper. I see here you spent a couple of seasons on
A Little Rain Must Fall,
” he said as he scanned the information printed on the back.

Piper nodded. “Until they killed me—uh, I mean, until they killed off my character.”

“Tell me about your character.”

“I played Maggie Lane's long-lost younger sister, Mariah, who was always wreaking havoc. Neither of our characters was aware that we weren't actually related, but, you know how the soaps are, the viewing audience knew that we weren't really sisters. Glenna Brooks, who plays Maggie, is, like, über-tiny, brown-eyed, and dark-haired. I'm obviously tall, with the whole ‘green-eyes-and-blond-hair' thing. They had me dye it platinum for the role. I was into it, so I kept it that way.”

“How did you die?”

“DWI. The writers wanted a cautionary tale.”

“Big deathbed scene?”

“Yeah—eleven days! It's a soap; you die in installments.”

The director smiled. “And I see you did a shampoo commercial,” he said, glancing at the head shot again. “
That's
where I know you from! You're the girl on the horse with the mane of golden hair. That commercial used to be on during the first season of
Glee
.”

Piper nodded. “I wish it was still running in prime time. Miss the residuals.”

The director returned to the information on the back of the photograph. “So what have you been doing lately?”

Um, giving myself pep talks,
thought Piper, but she answered with the standard “Oh, you know. Reading a lot of new scripts.”

“How are you paying the rent?”

Piper shrugged. “I waitress.”

“Where?”

“The Sidecar above P. J. Clarke's.”

“Which P. J. Clarke's?”

“The original one at Fifty-fifth and Third.”

“There's a restaurant above there?”

“Yeah, it has a separate entrance with a doorbell and a more sophisticated menu, but they still have the burgers.”

“Huh. I'll have to check it out.”

“You should.”

She wondered how this happened so often. How did she end up spending more time on the merits of P. J. Clarke's than on her actual audition?
Mind-blowing.

As if he were reading her mind, the director asked, “What do you like about this role?”

Piper hesitated. The fact was, there wasn't much she liked about the role. It was too close. She was coming off her own epic romantic failure, and playing a woman with a broken heart night after night would really just be masochistic. But Gabe, her agent, insisted she was perfect for it. Gabe, love bug that he was, thought she was right for every role. Bummer that Gabe wasn't a casting director.

When the audition was over, Piper couldn't even remember what words she had strung together in response to the question. She hoped they were coherent. All she knew was that before she got halfway through her monologue, the casting director turned his attention away from her and back to his laptop. When she was done, he thanked her but made no further comments. Piper knew she wasn't going to get the part.

Still, as she gathered up her coat and scarf in the hallway outside the audition room, she allowed herself to hope that maybe she was wrong. For Piper, hope was everything.

As she made her way toward the exit, Piper pulled out her BlackBerry and switched the ringtone from silent to normal.

“Ohmigod! It's Mariah Lane!” The squeal came from a pair of young women exiting the Starbucks a few yards away.

“It totally is!” cried one of them in a stage whisper. “She was the best part of
A Little Rain Must Fall
.”

Both women made a beeline to the target of their enthusiasm.

“Hi, I'm Piper Donovan.” She held out her hand.

“Oh, we know who you are. We love you!” said one of them, giggling. “We hated when they got rid of you.”

“We follow you on Twitter and we're friends on Facebook,” said the other.

“Good one! I'm actually just about to send out a tweet,” said Piper. “Why shouldn't it be about the two of you? What are your names?”

“Oh, awesome. I'm Heather and this is Nina.”

Piper tapped out the letters with her thumbs:

JUST MET NINA AND HEATHER WHO SAY THEY LOVE ME.

LOVE THEM !

The girls didn't have any paper, so they insisted Piper sign their Starbucks cups. As Piper used the blue highlighter that she kept in her bag for marking scripts, to scribble her autograph on the still-warm cups, she had to laugh. Was it pathetic that this was totally making her day?

Still, Piper felt grateful that she had been given a sign. She wasn't forgotten and she was on the right path.

Her luck was going to change.

 

C
HAPTER
T
HREE

T
here was a giant window on each side of the entry to The Icing on the Cupcake. One offered a view of tempting layer cakes, brownies, cookies, and pastries displayed on colorful hand-painted plates resting on glass shelves and pedestals. The other allowed people on the sidewalk to watch Terri Donovan decorate her beautiful cakes.

Nothing gave Terri more pleasure than seeing the delight on the faces of family, friends, and customers as they admired her creations. She was expert in squeezing out buttercream stars, shells, flowers, hearts, vines, dots, and bows in every conceivable configuration. Equally important, she had a wonderful eye for color. The combination of her skill and imagination added up to culinary works of art.

The Icing on the Cupcake was Terri's dream come true. When her children were very young, years before she actually had her own bakery, Terri had dreamed of what she wanted her place to be. It wouldn't be large, and the variety of baked goods might be limited, but everything for sale would be luscious and almost sinfully pleasurable—the types of desserts that made people take a bite, close their eyes, and groan with pleasure.

Terri was determined that presentation would count at her establishment. Her cakes weren't going to be sold on circles of cardboard. They would be purchased and served at home on a pretty piece of flowered porcelain or painted pottery. The plate would be Terri's gift to her customer. Season after season, Terri purchased odd pieces and partial sets of china at tag sales and thrift shops, storing them in the basement of her split-level home, to the point where she could barely make her way to the washing machine, and her husband couldn't get to his tool bench and the rest of his “man cave.”

Now, The Icing on the Cupcake was in its fifteenth year, and the stacks of plates in the Donovans' basement had long since been depleted. But Terri and her friend Cathy still trawled the garage sales to replenish their stock. Customers, too, came in carrying plates they had received with past purchases, recycling them, and always buying another cake on another plate before they left.

The idea to decorate her cakes in the window for all the world to see came to Terri when she, Vin, and the kids took a rare vacation to visit relatives in Sarasota, Florida. The sidewalk in front of a local fudge shop was always crowded with people craning their necks to watch as the molten mixtures of chocolate, sugar, milk, and butter were poured from shiny copper pots onto huge white marble slabs. The fudge maker, clad in an immaculate uniform, folded and spread the mixture back and forth, back and forth, as it gradually cooled and was shaped into long bars of candy. Viewers were mesmerized, and Terri noticed most of them ended up going into the shop to buy. Terri added the picture window to her plan.

When Piper and Robert were both in school full-time, Terri got a job at the Hillwood Bakery. She worked the counter for eight years while perfecting her skills. When the owner decided he wanted to retire, Terri and Vin Donovan took out a loan, purchased the business, and Terri got her chance to implement her long list of ideas.

Now Terri, her curly hair covered with a net, squinted as she worked at her table. The sun streaming through the window caused a bothersome glare, to which she found herself becoming more and more sensitive over the last months. She picked up her pair of light-yellow-tinted glasses, positioned them over her prescription ones, and tried to concentrate.

She was terrified that all she had worked for could be coming to an end.

 

An Excerpt from

T
HE
L
OOK OF
L
OVE

 

P
ROLOGUE

S
he often walked from room to room, pretending the place was hers. This fantasy never failed to help her get through the hours of dusting, scrubbing, and vacuuming. Esperanza imagined what it would feel like to own a huge, beautiful house like this instead of being the woman hired to clean it once a week.

As she returned the broom to the kitchen closet, she told herself that this was as good as any housekeeping job could be. The owner was very neat and spent most of her time at work or with her fiancé. Some weeks Esperanza could tell by the perfectly plumped pillows and the lack of footprints on the carpet that Jillian Abernathy had never even entered a room since the last time it had been cleaned.

Still, dust accumulated, silver tarnished, and windows got dirty. Esperanza kept on top of every chore and prided herself on the fact that Jillian had never left a note about something that had been missed or reminding Esperanza of a task left undone. She tried to see it all through Jillian's eyes and anticipate the way Jillian would want things. She did everything she could think of to satisfy Jillian.

How she wished she
were
Jillian.

Though Esperanza was born in the United States, her parents had been illegal Mexican immigrants. Her father had been a day laborer with landscapers and contractors. Her mother did housework herself.

But Esperanza longed to live the real American dream. How fabulous to be beautiful and rich, to have a father who operated on the faces of other wealthy people and owned one of the most luxurious spas in America, to have a handsome fiancé who was also a doctor. It would be amazing to live and work every day in lush surroundings, wear designer clothes, and have your employees bend over backward to please you. It would be fantastic
not
to have to clean other people's toilets. Esperanza went to the dining room and began straightening the boxes stacked in the corners and accumulated on the table and sideboard, packages representing stores she had seen only from the outside when she got up the nerve to walk along Rodeo Drive. She peeked at the wedding gifts she recognized as new arrivals since last week: sterling-silver flatware and crystal glasses from Tiffany's, bed linens from Frette, a Lladró figurine, Hermès towels.

She was momentarily startled as she caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror that hung over the sideboard. Esperanza still wasn't used to seeing herself as a blonde. Though the box of hair color she'd purchased at the drugstore hadn't transformed her jet-black hair into the various golden shades of Jillian's, it was close enough.

Satisfied that all was in order, Esperanza hurried down the hall. She liked doing Jillian's room last. It was her reward, the high point of her workday. Sometimes Jillian left a shopping bag for her on the bed containing a barely worn pair of shoes or a seemingly brand-new purse she didn't want anymore. But today there was nothing.

Esperanza shrugged as she headed to her favorite spot in the house: Jillian's walk-in closet. She opened the double doors, looked inside, and gasped. Hanging from the middle of the ceiling was the most beautiful dress she had ever seen. As she reached out to gently touch the frothy white taffeta ruffles cascading down the A-line skirt, the thought crossed her mind.

Unable to resist, Esperanza peeled off her clothes and carefully took the gown from the satin-padded hanger. She stepped into the dress and pulled it up over her body. She was a bit bustier than Jillian, and her breasts strained against the sweetheart neckline. Other than that, the dress fit her almost perfectly.

She spied a pair of white silk-and-lace high heels perched on the shelf. Taking them down, she slipped them on her feet. She was preening and admiring herself in the full-length mirror when she heard the buzzer. Esperanza gathered up the skirt of the gown and hurried to the intercom.

It was a messenger delivering another wedding gift.

“Just a minute,” she said. “I'll be right there.”

She kicked off the shoes, then took off the dress and meticulously laid it out on the bed. Pulling a robe from the hook on the closet door, she wrapped it around herself and hurried down the hall. Her heart pounded in her chest. She was relieved it was only a messenger. What if it had been Jillian? What if she'd been caught?

Reaching the foyer, Esperanza was thinking of how quickly she wanted to get back to Jillian's bedroom and restore everything to the way it was. As she opened the front door, she caught only a glimpse of dark sunglasses and a blue cap before the burning liquid hit her face and she began to scream in agony.