Sarah picked up a tray of glazed doughnuts and carried them to the front of the store. She placed them in the glass display case and glanced up at the clock. An hour ago, the parking lot had been empty, but now she counted several vehicles out there. They didn’t close until noon, so Macy might be making more doughnuts after all.
Folks depended on the shop being open until noon. She glanced around to be sure that the four tables were cleaned off and all the crumbs had been swept up from the floors. The black-and-white-tiled floor hadn’t changed in more than fifty years, and neither had the four red chrome table-and-chair sets—two on the east end of the long room, two on the other end. The glass doughnut case stretched across the length of the room, with the old cash register sitting at the far end. Pictures of the women who had run the shop in the past hung on the walls, along with old pictures of the town of Devine—from back when the railroad had come through the area and all the way up to the newest sign that had been put up to welcome folks to their small town.
Audrey ignored Sarah but stopped every few minutes to sigh loud enough to raise the dead right up from the Devine Evergreen Cemetery.
“I’m not your boss, as you have told me many times, girl,” Sarah finally said, “but you might take a word of advice here. If you will notice, there are folks coming in, and you’ve already had more than enough time to clean the front of the display case. Get a move on it, and once everyone is inside, work on the door. When they leave, you can clean it again because there will be smudges on it. Your mama wasn’t joking when she said she’d make you snip off that strand of blue hair that is sneaking out from your hairnet right now. You might want to put more muscle into work and less into pouting.”
“I’m not pouting,” Audrey snapped. “And I thought you’d be on my side.”
“Own your mistake and do the time for it. That will teach you to be accountable,” Sarah told her.
Audrey stomped her foot, tucked her hair up under the net, and went back to work. “They weren’t even my cigarettes. I don’t smoke, and I told Mama that.”
“Who did they belong to?” Sarah asked.
“I’m not a rat,” Audrey grumbled.
“Was ityourwhiskey?” Sarah asked. “And if so, where did you get it?”
Audrey shook her head. “Like I said . . .”
“Well, then, your friends are getting off free and probably having a good time over spring break while you are doing chores and will be getting up every morning before daylight,” Sarah told her.
“But they’re still my friends, and they wouldn’t be if I ratted them out,” Audrey answered as she finished the door.
“And, honey,” Sarah said, lowering her voice, “if they were really your friends, they would take responsibility for their own actions. They’re using you, and true friends don’t do that.”
Audrey shrugged. “It’s my life, and I’ll live it the way I want to.”
“Yep, you can, and you can learn all your lessons the hard way.” Sarah turned and went back to the kitchen.
Audrey had been a pretty baby who’d grown up into a cute teenager. She wouldn’t ever be tall, not with her genetics. Grace was barely over five feet tall, and Audrey’s father, Justin, was only about five feet, six inches—or at least, the sorry sucker had been when he was twenty-one and left Grace to raise his child alone. She’d gotten her long blonde hair from her mother, her brown eyes from Justin, and her smart mouth from her Aunt Sarah.
“I wish I’d given her something other than genes that are constantly getting her into trouble,” Sarah muttered as she picked up two more trays of doughnuts.
“What was that?” Grace asked.
“Nothing,” Sarah answered. “I was just talking to myself. Do you ever wish that Justin had stuck around and been a father to Audrey?”
“Of course I do, especially on days like today.” Grace got started on filling a dozen doughnuts with a fluffy cream cheese pudding. “But he disappeared when he found out I was pregnant. Remember the story of the frog and the scorpion?”
“Yep,” Macy answered, “and the moral is that you can’t change a person’s nature. Justin was the best-looking guy I’ve ever seen, but he really was a bad-boy type. He probably hasn’t grown up or accepted responsibility for anything, even yet.”
“And that’s why I have to make Audrey accountable,” Grace said. “She’s got his genes as well as mine. From the time she was three months old, she could flash that smile of hers and bat those brown eyes, and we’d do anything to make her happy.”
“Just like you did with Justin, right?” Sarah headed toward the dining room.
“Yep.” Grace nodded. “But I learned my lesson about bad boys the hard way. No more of that type ever for me again. If I hadn’t been past twenty-one, Mama might have putmein a convent during those few months that Justin was around.”
Sarah remembered those days well. She had just finished her first year of college and would have been on probation in the fall if she hadn’t quit. Grace was pregnant, Justin was in the wind, and they had no idea where he had gone. Macy was a sophomore in high school, and Sarah was needed in the doughnut shop. She had loved the party life at college—but the classes, not so much. She had managed to pass a couple of basic business classes, and those had helped when a blood clot went through her mother’s heart, killing her instantly, two months before Audrey was born. She was resentful, angry, and grieving all at the same time; but after a while, all that passed, and she had settled into the family business and routine. Sometimes she wished for a few days off, but that just wasn’t possible.
“What are you thinking about so seriously?” Grace asked.
“Life in general and how things can turn around in the blink of an eye.”
She carried the trays into the dining area and noticed that Audrey was trying to hide behind the counter. “What’s going on here? That door hasn’t been cleaned.”
“That is”—she pointed toward the door—“Crystal’s and Kelsey’s mamas coming this way.”
