“Ohhh, that could be fun. Paul could do something cool with that.”
“Paul’s video editing skills are sick. He can make dust look interesting.” Ella would rather produce content at the old Dove home than wander around town anyway. Being a Dove in Dove Pond inspired the exact kind of expectations she hated. People watched her as if she might wave a wand and make all their dreams come true. Her magic was in her cooking, in making a cake that could allow a person to relive a prized, sometimes-forgotten memory. When compared to her sisters’ abilities, her magic seemed pretty tame.
“Terrific!” Tiff said. “And get some vid of your sister Ava’s Pink Magnolia Tearoom. I saw the website and it’s perfection.”
“Sure,” Ella said. “I’ll go down there tomorrow and—” There, right above her wrist, rested a vivid slash of pink strawberry frosting that hadn’t been there a second before. Her heart sank. Stupid frosting. She swallowed. “I’ll get that content to you ASAP.”
“Great. We can’t wait to see what you come up with.”
Ella ended the call and reached for her tote bag from where it sat on the passenger seat. She pushed aside a wrinkled newspaper, pulled out a napkin, and cleaned the frosting from her wrist.
She’d told Tiff she was coming home to take care of some family matters, but that was a lie. Over the past four months, she’d been plagued by annoying dreams in which she was chased by a giant, silver-papered cupcake with strawberry frosting. In every dream, the huge cupcake chased her through the tree-lined streets of Dove Pond to the highest point of Hill Street. The dream always ended with her standing alone and terrified in front of the Stewart house.
She might have been able to ignore those dreams, but every time she had one, sometime after the dream had ended, strawberry frosting would appear somewhere on her arms or legs. Sometimes it showed up as a plump rose, perfectly made, as if ready for a wedding cake. Sometimes, like just now, it showed up in a long, delicate curlicue. The frosting was always pink, always smelled like strawberry, and was always annoying. And it was why she’d come back to Dove Pond. There was only one person who might understand what was going on.
She turned her car down Main Street and fell in behind a faded blue pickup truck. The sun shimmered on the hot asphalt as a faint breeze rippled through the stifling air and flapped the red awnings that adorned the storefronts, the smell of heat, hay, and summer diesel hanging in the air. The early-evening sun warmed the small American flags still on the light poles from the July Fourth parade a month ago, and glinted off the plate glass fronts of the small stores she knew all too well.
People who didn’t know Dove Pond would see only the names of the businesses, but she’d grown up here. She knew Paw Printz was “Maggie and Ed Mayhew’s pet store” and the Ace Hardware was “Stevens’s hardware,” while the Moonlight Café was “Jules’s place” and had the best meatloaf on earth.
Ella slowed down as she passed her sister Ava’s new tearoom. The old brick building featured a beautiful wrought-iron bow window filled with colorful pastel canisters of Ava’s specialty teas. Ella absently wondered when she, or any of the other town residents, would drop the “new” part of “Ava’s new tearoom.” Probably never. The people of Dove Pond weren’t the sort to embrace change. That was one of the many reasons Ella had left. She loved change. It kept her from drowning in boredom.
Sadly, Ava and Sarah didn’t understand Ella’s aversion to sameness. Their unbridled enthusiasm for Dove Pond and everything in it was as irritating as their heavy-handed attempts to convince Ella and her other sisters to move back home. Together, the two were as subtle as a dump truck rolling downhill without brakes.
Ella reached the end of the street, but instead of turning onto Elm Street toward the Dove house, she headed in the other direction. At the edge of town, the houses were smaller, had less trim, and were much farther apart. Ella turned off a windy, narrow road and into the driveway of a familiar yellow house.
Aunt Jo sat on her front porch, her cane leaning against the windowsill near her chair, her chunky bulldog Moon Pie asleep at her feet. Her colorful dress of blue and pink flowers clashed with her fluffy purple slippers as she steadily snapped green beans from a brown paper bag into the yellow bowl in her lap.
Ella parked under the huge oak tree, grabbed her purse, and climbed out, the humidity stealing her breath. Whew. Paris got humid, but not southern US humid. She climbed up the stairs, loving that the porch floor was painted a deep aqua while the ceiling above was a familiar but welcome haint blue. “Good afternoon.”
“You’re late.” Aunt Jo dropped some green beans into the bowl in her lap. “I expected you last week.”
Ella dropped her bag beside a faded wicker chair and sat. “Sarah told you I was coming.”
“She never said a word.” Aunt Jo snapped a bean in half with a bit more force than necessary. Although she was sitting in the shade, she shone with dampness, the humidity dewy on her dark skin. “You Doves aren’t the only ones who know things.”
Ella nodded toward the two glasses of lemonade sitting on the side table. “I hope one of those is for me.”
“One is. This heat is something else.” Aunt Jo pulled a handkerchief from her pocket and wiped her shiny brow, her eyes twinkling. “They say the water’s so hot in Lake Fontana that the fish are jumping into boats fully cooked.”
Ella laughed and took a sip of the lemonade. The drink was the perfect combination of tart and sweet. No one knew flavors better than Aunt Jo. “Don’t order lemonade in France. You’ll get a nasty beverage called citronade.”
“France.” Aunt Jo made a face. “Why did you have to move there, anyway?”
“A lot of reasons. It’s beautiful.”
Aunt Jo’s gaze moved past Ella to the large fields around them where yellow and purple flowers dotted the green rye grass. “It’s beautiful here, too.”
“I know, but—” Ella shrugged. “I just wanted more. Not money or fame, but more… happiness, I suppose.”
“You can’t move to happiness. You have to find it where you’re at so you can take it with you everywhere you go.”
Ella tamped down her impatience. As if it were that easy to “find happiness.” She forced a smile. “Plus I wanted to learn patisserie from the best.”
“I could have taught you everything you needed to know right here.”
Ella couldn’t argue with that. Aunt Jo had a remarkable understanding of pastry, which Ella hadn’t truly appreciated until she’d gone to cooking school and realized that, thanks to Aunt Jo, she already knew most of the methods that were taught. Ella swirled the lemonade in her glass, an icy drop splashing onto her knee. “I wish I could have taken Momma to Paris. She would have loved it.”
Aunt Jo’s eyes grew shiny. Moon Pie lifted his head and looked at Aunt Jo, who bent down and gave him another pat. “I still miss your momma. We were as different as day and night but had a lot in common. That’s the mark of true friends. You’re different and yet the same.”
Ella couldn’t argue with that. Momma’d had a heart condition—which eventually took her—and it had made her quiet and slow-moving. Meanwhile, Aunt Jo was as loud and powerful as a freight train. When she laughed, her round belly shook like a TV Santa Claus, and she laughed often. But while the two women had been physical opposites, both had strong, determined spirits.