CHAPTER
ONE
Joelle Young carried a clear plastic tote up the wide steps at Uncle Morris’s house. “Keep going, Ana,” she said to her younger sister, who carried two grocery sacks. One had a loaf of bread and a bag of hot dog buns in it, and the other had two bags of chips.
The girl had just turned eight years old, and she exuded spunk and sass. She loved ponies, coloring, and hula hooping, and Joey loved her with her whole heart.
“In the kitchen,” she said to her sister as she crossed the threshold of the house. The tote she carried had been labeled “office,” and Joey detoured to the left just off the foyer of this great big mansion that Uncle Morris and Aunt Leigh had built for their family.
It sat on the northern highway of Coral Canyon, just inside the city limits, and had taken them almost a year and a half to get to today—moving day. Everyone in the Youngfamily had been recruited to help move five children and two adults, as well as a pet lizard, asecretpet snake—that Uncle Morris and Aunt Leigh had found out about and steadfastly refused to move from their other house—and a hot tub.
Joey barely weighed a hundred pounds, but she’d tied back her white-blonde hair and was determined to help her aunt and uncle however she could. She usually ended up doing something with the kids to keep them out of the way, and she didn’t mind that.
Today, she went back and forth with OJ and Ana, each of them carrying something light that someone had set in a pile for movers just like them.Many hands make light work, as Grams said, but sometimes it could also put a lot of bodies in a small space, and that didn’t help anybody.
Joey had moved back to Coral Canyon after her first and only year at the Culinary Institute in New York City, and she had been working two jobs and living with her grandparents since. She told herself she was only twenty-two years old, and she didn’t need to have every step of her life mapped out.
She liked working at the bakery and had graduated from being a roller-skating runner of orders to a baker. That meant she had to be awake, dressed, and alert by four a.m. so she could have pastries ready to be bought and picked up when Cake Bites opened at six.
Her boss, a woman named Miriam, was a smart businesswoman. She had built and opened her bakery right next to a coffee shop. Aunt Michelle owned Daily Grind, and thetwo ladies often ran specials for each other’s shops. Aunt Michelle had stopped her own in-house baking and simply purchased from the bakery next door.
Joey’s new baker position meant she had to quit at Michelle’s coffee shop. She didn’t mind working in the food service industry; she loved to cook, after all.
To fill her evenings, she had gotten a job with Ev’s brother, Shawn. He owned a catering company called Pork & Beans and had expanded it to a single restaurant in Coral Canyon. Joey worked on the catering side, which meant she didn’t have to interact with people very often, and she once again got to put her cooking skills to use.
When she wasn’t working in either of those places, she tested recipes in her granny’s kitchen, fed her grandparents, and kept them company while spending afternoons with her tablet, taking them for walks, or lying in bed watching crime documentaries.
She wondered if her life would simply be baking cupcakes in the morning and smoking meat in the afternoon.It wouldn’t be a bad life, she told herself as a commotion broke out in the kitchen.
“I told you now wasn’t a good time to do this egg experiment,” Aunt Leigh said, handing Eric a roll of paper towels. “Clean them up and get out of here.” She sounded stressed, and Joey wanted to help.
She waited while Eric muttered his apology and started cleaning up the broken eggs that had fallen to the floor—their brand new, pristine tilefloor.
She met Aunt Leigh’s eyes. “Can I take the kids somewhere where we could help you unpack?” she asked.
Aunt Leigh ran her hands through her hair, pushing her bangs back as she sighed. “Yes. Why don’t you take the girls into the sewing room? Rachelle helped me pack it up, and she’ll be able to help you guys get everything put away.”
Joey nodded and glanced over to Eric, a gangly fifteen-year-old who’d been making messes since he was a little boy.
“Eric’s going to go outside with all of Luke’s kids and Uncle Gabe. They’re working on setting up the shed out there.” Aunt Leigh gave her son a severe glare, and he tossed the ruined paper towels in the trash and stalked out.
“All right,” Joey called. “Rosie, you’re with me. Corinne, Rachelle, Liesl, Grace, Celeste, Melissa, Carter, Pippa, Keri, and Clay. Let’s go unpack the sewing room.”
That was basically every child between the ages of five and twelve in the Young family, and Joey led the way down the hall to the room where Aunt Leigh had put all of her sewing things. Joey had underestimated how many boxes there would be, and she and all the kids could barely fit in the room with them.
“Okay,” Rosie said, whipping a pocketknife out of her back pocket. Joey simply blinked and stared at her. She wasn’t even sure if she’d everhelda pocketknife before, but in Rosie’s hand, it looked like a natural extension. Rosie was all wild cowgirl, while Joey was more of a stay-indoors-and-read type of girl.
Rosie had started riding horses by age four, following her daddy, her cousin Cash, and her brother into the rodeo.She’d just started training to ride the barrels, and Joey actually couldn’t wait to see her do it at next summer’s rodeo.
“Rachelle, you get up here and help,” Joey said. She turned and found the wall to her right completely full of built-in shelves. “What do you think your mama wants to put over here?”
“Her fabrics will go there,” Rachelle said.
Rosie lifted out patterns, set the box down so that smaller hands than hers could take the things out of them, and sliced open another box.
“Okay, everyone,” Joey said. “You’re going to take something out of the box, bring it to me or Rachelle, and we’ll decide where to put it. Okay?”
Severalokay’schorused back to her, and Joey had been part of the Young family long enough to be used to this sort of chaos. Her family hadn’t moved since Daddy had married Georgia when Joey was only eight years old. Joey herself had moved to Jackson Hole to go to college and then to New York City to go to the Culinary Institute, and then back.
