The Second Chance Café (Hope Springs, #1) (5 page)

“Tell me about Thanksgiving dinner.”

Ten. He was still here, and she…she was drifting off as if he had all the time in the world to wait on her. As if he cared about the years she’d spent in this house. As if his knowing who she’d been then would make a difference now.

Don’t look to where you’ve come from. Look to where you’re going.
How many times through the years had Kaylie thought back on May’s words? She’d known returning to Hope Springs would be as difficult as it was essential, but she had to get a grip. This house was her anchor, her island. From here she could safely face the past.

And so she took a tentative step. “I doubt it was much different than yours. Turkey, gravy. Cornbread dressing with all the sides.”

He came into the room then, walked toward her. She heard his footsteps on the hardwood, saw his reflection in the glass, found her nose lifting, scenting. He moved to the window’s other side and leaned a shoulder against the wall.

“No,” he said, looking out at the porch instead of at her. “Tell me about that first Thanksgiving dinner in this room.”

Too late she wondered if she had the words, or if this intimacy was a good idea at all. But something told her he wouldn’t laugh or judge or think her crazy. That, like May, he knew how to listen. That he was willing to listen. That for whatever reason, he wanted to know about that day.

Absently, she brought her fingers to the base of her neck, felt her pulse there, racing. “I was pretty sure it was the best meal I would ever eat in my life. And it wasn’t just the food, though I’d never seen so much on one table. There was another girl here with me by then, Cindy, and a boy who was five named Tim, and you’ve got to know the money the Wises were paid by the state was not why they volunteered to be foster parents. They truly wanted to make a difference.”

“Anyway, we had turkey and all the trimmings, but also homemade rolls the size of softballs. Winton would wind up like a pitcher and toss them to us. I think as many landed on the floor as we caught, and Cindy was horrified every time she missed one. Tears started streaming from her eyes, but she never made a sound. May finally realized what was happening. I guess she knew about Cindy’s home life, that she was afraid she’d be whipped for wasting good food, and for the mess.”

“And you?”

“I’d lived in some heinous conditions, so food on the floor was nothing. It was May trying to make Cindy feel better that nearly did me in.” Kaylie turned around, curled her palms over the lip of the windowsill, and sat. “May had baked pies. Like dozens of pies. Pumpkin, cherry, chocolate, lemon, apple…imagine a pie and it was there. Most would go to friends over that weekend, but she made sure we knew we could have whatever we wanted.”

“Cindy cried without making any noise, and all May could think to do was feed her. So there were all these slices of pie, and the smells were crazy amazing, spicy and sweet and hot sugar, and Cindy just sat there, like a statue, rivers running down her face. May’s eyes puffed up and she started crying, feeling helpless, I guess, or guilty for traumatizing a girl who’d been through so much, and I couldn’t stand it. I started shaking, then sobbing.”

“The five of us, me, Cindy, Tim, and the Wises ended up on the dining-room floor, all of us crying, then laughing. Cindy was the first one to pick up a roll and throw it back at Winton. It was a free-for-all after that. The biggest food fight you can imagine. The floors, the walls. Our clothes. Our hair. We were rolling in mashed potatoes, dripping with gravy. May ground an entire coconut cream pie in Winton’s face. And finally,
finally
Cindy stopped crying.”

A shoulder still propped on the wall by the window, Ten—who had turned out to be a very good listener—waited until he was sure she was done, then grinned. It was the kind of grin that took over a face, and it hit her like a hot roll to the head that Jessa Breeze had been right. Separate from the way he made her itch, he was really nice to look at, and even more so when he smiled. His hair had started to dry and was falling over his ears and forehead and almost into his eyes. And his eyes were sharp and attentive and that beautiful shade of honey brown.

“Sorry about all of that,” Kaylie said, because never in a million years would she have told that story to a stranger, and she couldn’t figure out what it was about Ten Keller that had her sharing it with him. “It’s just this house. It…takes me back.”

“I’m guessing you’ve got hundreds of memories to go with every room in the place.”

“At the very least.” But it was time to get down to business and leave him with just the one. “Okay, the way I’m picturing the café, I need to be able to set up tables of different sizes to fit different sizes of groups. I’m thinking friends will come for lunch while the kids are in school. Maybe some will have book club meetings, birthday celebrations. Things like that.”

“And you want walls knocked out to make this room larger?”

She breathed in, out, smoothed the hair bound into a tail at her nape. Back on track. This was good. He was her contractor, not a confidant, and why things felt otherwise…“I don’t see how else I’ll manage the seating.”

“Hmm. What if…” Ten left the question incomplete, and stepped from the dining room into the hallway that ran down the center of the house.

Kaylie followed him as far as the dining-room door, then waited as he walked into the adjoining parlor before reversing course and checking out what had been Winton’s den. The next door opened into a large bedroom May had used for sewing. Ten spent a couple of minutes in all of them, the rap of his knuckles on the walls echoing like woodpeckers hammering at the chinaberry trees.

Her hands stacked on the door facing behind her, Kaylie leaned back, wondering what he saw, what the sound of his knocking told him about the walls. Was he figuring out which ones bore weight and had to stay? Or deciding they’d been here so long, done their job well, and all deserved a pardon?

She got his respect for the century-old workmanship, understood he wouldn’t be who he was if he didn’t weigh the integrity of the structure against the client’s demands. But this was her house, and she had specific plans, ones she’d spent months fine-tuning. If she had to go through the hassle of interviewing multiple contractors, instead of using the one the locals swore was the best, she would.

“Are you married to the idea of one big dining area?” he asked as he exited May’s old sewing room and came back to where Kaylie waited.

“Well…I’m married to the idea of not shunting people off to eat in small spaces. For romantic dinners, maybe, but that’s not what I’m planning to serve, and the acoustics would be terrible in cramped quarters. Not to mention navigating in and around the tables—”

“That’s not what I was thinking.” He walked to the center of the dining room and stopped. “What if you got rid of the door from this room into the hallway, did the same to the ones on either side, and widened the entries to allow better access? Then instead of taking down the walls, cut similar openings between the rooms. The arches can be designed to match the ones on the porch, keeping your Queen Anne look.”

“It would give you the space you want,” he said, walking toward her, his hands shoved in the pockets of his khakis, his shoulders hunched like a boy hoping to get his way. “But it would also keep my preservationist heart from breaking.”

“A compromise.”

“Something like that.”

Winton’s den, where Kaylie had curled into the corner of his huge leather sofa and listened to him read
Moby Dick
and
Gone with the Wind.
May’s sewing room, where Kaylie had sat cross-legged on the tufted top of a pink storage ottoman and counted knitted-and-purled stitches. The dining room, where Kaylie had been filled to the brim with good food and good fun and been encouraged to throw hot rolls like softballs.

She wasn’t concerned about Ten Keller’s preservationist heart, but his solution meant keeping most of each wall intact, and that made her happy. What made her even happier was the idea of using all three rooms, rooms where she’d emerged from the cocoon that had kept her from breaking, and grown into her own skin.

Her smile came easily, as did her words. “Let’s do it.”

When Kaylie was twelve years old, May Wise introduced her to brownies, starting her off with boxed mixes rather than batter made from scratch. Boxed mixes were nearly impossible to mess up, and even batches left in the oven too long were softened when topped with ice cream.

Kaylie took to brownies like a butterfly to new wings, and she quickly worked up to May’s family recipes. Oh, the bounty she found in the collection of handwritten and creased sheets of stationery. Growing confident, she’d added chocolate frosting with pecans, then feeling adventurous, swirled in cream cheese and thick melted caramel and marshmallow crème. She’d even tried her hand at blondies, but always came back to her true love.

She’d baked after school once a week, then handed out the goodies at school. The other kids made for perfect
market research, willing to try anything and full of teenage opinions. She’d listened to the good, the bad, the worst, more interested in what her taste-testers had to say than in who was doing the saying—probably why she’d hadn’t remembered Carolyn Parker and Jessa Breeze. Or maybe leaving Hope Springs so soon after graduation was the culprit behind her faulty recall.

On that day in June when she’d turned eighteen, she’d packed eight years of her life in cardboard boxes, tucked the memories that didn’t fit into the back of her mind, and left town. She didn’t want to miss what she no longer had. She didn’t want to depend too much on her old life to get her through her new one. She was on her own, a legal adult. The time had come to put away childish things.

For the most part, she’d done a good job. The scene with her mother in the kitchen, or the one of Ernest handing her over to social services, rarely surfaced. She sent cards and gifts to Winton and May on the appropriate holidays, but May was the one to initiate most of their sharing-the-latest phone calls, to drop by for catching-up visits while in Austin.

Kaylie loved seeing the older woman, but it took her hours to get over the calls, days to move beyond the visits. The state and her caseworker said she was all grown up, her connection to the Wises severed. The same state that had incarcerated her mother, that had no idea who, much less where, her father was.

And though the state had provided her college tuition, her two bakery jobs had covered the rest of her expenses as well as funded her savings. One had her up at three a.m. making doughnuts, but it was the other that she’d loved. The other that had taken her from brownies to places even
May Wise hadn’t tried. Tarts and tissue-thin phyllo and tiered cakes with fondant. Desserts that required hours to assemble, commanded high dollars, garnered the bakery the notice of Zagat.

There Kaylie learned about royal icing and meringues, about candied nuts and custards and gold leaf. It took her six years to finish her business degree, but those same six years gave her a hands-on education that was even more valuable, and at twenty-four she opened the doors to the Sweet Spot.

For the next four and a half years, the bakeshop had been Kaylie’s bread and butter, her creations in demand by event planners and brides-to-be and small eateries who offered her desserts off menu. Customers would find an extra brownie added to their order and become regulars, just as Kaylie had planned. And now she had new plans, ones designed to take the place of the old.

Strange as it was, she trusted implicitly that Tennessee Keller would do right by her. His honesty was at the root of her trust; he hadn’t agreed to knock down her walls to land the job and an easy paycheck. He’d negotiated terms that worked better for them both and, more important, preserved the house’s integrity. She liked that. She liked it a lot. Plus, Magoo approved.

But the curious fluttering in her belly when he was around…it bothered her. She hadn’t come here for this. She hadn’t expected it. She wasn’t sure what to do with the things he made her feel. But she was bothered even more by the desire she had to let him take over. A weekend into their working relationship, and she had a notepad full of his ideas—
his
, not hers—designed to streamline her project,
giving her more time to spend on the personal reasons behind her return to Hope Springs.

He was a professional. She knew nothing about tearing apart a house and putting it back together. She should be happy for the help. But leaning too heavily seemed a weakling’s way out, and she prided herself on her strength. She had to be here, up-to-her-neck involved, digging in the emotional muck waiting to take her down, because how else would she find her answers? That was what mattered, right?

Learning why her degree, her independence, the success of the Sweet Spot had never given her what this house had. Finding out what had happened to bring her to the Wises in the first place. Discovering the truth of what she’d done to cause her mother to want to leave her. And most of all—what about her four-year-old self had driven her father away.