Eighteen-time consecutive winner of the Daughters of Honey Hollow Dessert Competition, and it looks like someone staged an entire photo shoot specifically designed to make my pudding feel inadequate.
On the surface it looks ordinary—with layers of vanilla wafers, pudding, and whipped cream stacked neatly in a glass trifle dish.
But Midge’s pudding has a deep golden color that borders on orange.And it’s not from food dye. I’ve eaten enough of it. After all, I’m a baker; I should know all about ingredients. But that’s the funny thing. I don’t know what special ingredients Midge has been using all these championship-garnering years, and it vexes me to no end. And worse yet, my own banana pudding looks pale and sickly in comparison.
“Is that Midge’s pudding, or did someone build a shrine to dairy products?” Carlotta squints at the display.
“Both,” I mutter, clutching my own humble offering a little tighter. “Definitely both.”
The crowd in front of us is a sea of women in full 1950s regalia—poodle skirts swishing, tea-length floral prints brushing against calves, and the occasional daring pencil skirtpaired with a prim Peter Pan collar blouse. White gloves flutter like the wings of doves, wide-brimmed sun hats shade perfectly powdered faces, pin curls bounce, pearls gleam, and there’s enough hairspray here to personally expand the hole in the ozone layer.
A smattering of men dot the landscape, mostly husbands who’ve been dragged along and now stand in uncomfortable clumps, tugging at their period-appropriate collars like they’re slowly being strangled by nostalgia.
“The Daughters really went all in this year,” Carlotta observes.
The Daughters of Honey Hollow started back in the 1950s when the old farm plots were carved up into tract houses and the founding mothers banded together to make sure the new families didn’t lose their sense of community. Potlucks, porch gossip, emergency childcare, morally questionable casseroles—the whole Honey Hollow spirit.
This weeklong reenactment is their tribute to that era, and everyone who’s anyone in Honey Hollow is here in full costume, ready to pretend it’s the 1950s and gossip is a competitive sport.
“It’s the seventy-fifth anniversary of the founding,” I say. “Mom said it was either go big or go home.”
“And Miranda Lemon does not go home.” Carlotta grins. “But thankfully, she takes home any strays I happen to offer.”
I shoot a look her way.
When I was a newborn, Carlotta dropped me off at the Honey Hollow Fire Department, and Miranda Lemon was the saint who adopted me. Carlotta tried to pull the same maneuver a year later with my sister, Charlie. But she saw that my mother was in the family way herself, which meant poor Charlie ended up being raised by Carlotta.
Some might say worse things could happen, but at this moment, I can’t quite think of any.
Something catches my attention in the swirl of bodies moving through the opulent backyard.
There, holding court near the raised platform like a queensurveying her kingdom, stands Vivienne Pemberton-Clarke herself.
She’s tall and imperious, with silver-white hair styled in immaculate vintage finger waves that probably require their own staff. Her ice-blue eyes scan the crowd with the perpetual disappointment of someone who expected more from humanity and has been let down at every turn.
A triple-strand pearl necklace rests against her pale pink suit, and everything about her screamsI could ruin your social standing with a single raised eyebrow.
“Well, get a load of that one.” Carlotta nods in the woman’s direction. “She looks like the kind of woman who could kill you with a glance and then bill you for the inconvenience.”
“And she’d probably itemize it.”
“With late fees.”
“And charge interest.”
I spot Mom near the dessert table, wrangling the twins’ stroller while Lyla Nell appears to be chasing something through the crowd. Hopefully, a living creature. Although hopefully not someone’s small dog. The last time she got her hands on something furry at a public event, we had to issue a formal apology and a muffin basket. They also suggested I put Lyla Nell on a leash.
Believe me, I’ve given it serious consideration a time or two.
I watch as my mother executes a complicated maneuver involving the stroller, a cloth napkin, and what appears to be a preventative cookie deployment aimed at my toddler.
“Glam Glam looks as if she’s got everything under control,” I say.
Glam Glam would be my mother’s official grandmother nickname. Carlotta’s nickname would be Cray Cray. Both are more than fitting.
No sooner do I get the words out than the crowd shifts.
A ripple of murmurs runs through the sea ofpoodle skirts as heads turn in one direction, fans fluttering faster and pearls are clutched with renewed vigor. Even Vivienne Pemberton-Clarke pauses mid-sentence to stare.
