“We planned to pick cherries this afternoon so her mother can teach us her pie recipe. I take it you don’t know where she is?”
Gordy laughed into his mug.
I turned to face the old man, wondering what had sparked his laughter.
Jeff understood, but didn’t seem to share Gordy’s inclination to laugh. Instead, he frowned. “It’s a good thing I came to see her now instead of later, then. I won’t delay her long, but please let me speak with her before you go, Mina.” He looked at the staircase. “Actually, I’ll go find her and tell her you’re here.”
Jeff hurried upstairs, where there were a few rooms available for overnight guests.
I raised an eyebrow at Gordy, who was still laughing.
“You’re making a pie with Kayla, are you? Be careful to follow Mistress Hervor’s instructions instead of watching her daughter. I’dsay you can’t go wrong making a treat under Mistress Hervor’s direction, but I’ve had the misfortune of tasting one of Kayla’s creations before. Then again, Bethany's pastries are as good as her mother’s. Maybe you’ll be fine.”
A few steps brought me close to Gordy’s table. I lowered my voice in case Kayla came downstairs. “I wondered why Kayla would be learning her mother’s recipe at her age. I thought Mistress Hervor was being kind and including Kayla so I wouldn’t feel embarrassed about not knowing how to bake a pie. Is that not the case?”
“Oh, she’s being kind, all right. Not to you, though. Having a woman the same age as Kayla with no baking experience probably seemed like the perfect opportunity to try to teach her daughter. Again.”
“Can Kayla at least identify the best cherries to pick? Because I’ll admit that I am city-girl enough to have no idea how to identify a ripe fruit.”
Before Gordy could answer, Jeff came bounding back down the stairs. “Kayla will be ready in a few minutes. She needs to finish dusting the last bedroom first.”
Gordy huffed out a breath. “You didn’t offer to help her?”
Jeff's teeth sank into his lower lip. “I have to get back to the shop. I stopped by because I wanted to ask Kayla... well, I had an important question for her. But I really need to get back.”
Gordy raised a single bushy eyebrow. “You didn’t propose while she was in the middle of cleaning, did you?”
“No.” Jeff sounded horrified enough that I knew he understood exactly how big of a mistake that would have been.
Kayla was the type to require an over-the-top, romantic proposal. She’d turn a man down for asking the wrong way, even if she wanted to marry him. As far as I knew, Kayla didn’t favor Jeff over any of her other suitors. She considered him handsome, but that wasn’t enough for Kayla. Jeff was the younger son of the village’s cobbler and not in a position to offer her the prestige she wanted.
Though Sam had mentioned that Jeff would soon go to Haiwella to work in his uncle’s shop in the city for a few months. There was even a chance that he could take over that shop one day, if he was willing to leave Skorsa permanently. Perhaps that was what Jeff had wanted to speak to Kayla about.
Jeff left, and I spent a few minutes discussing the village’s Midsummer Festival with Gordy. The celebration sounded much tamer than the entertainments in Haiwella, but I still looked forward to it. The larger scale festivities in the city left little room for personal interactions.
“Mina!” Kayla bounded down the steps, a smug smile on her face. “Jeff told me you were waiting. You must be so excited to learn how to make a pie to get here early.”
I didn’t point out that she was, in fact, late. “I am excited. Let’s go pick some cherries.”
???
With my fingersstained red from cherry juice, I attempted to crimp the edges of my pie. I debated wiping my hands again, but with the amount of filling spilling over the edge, I figured it wouldn’t matter. I swore I had poured the same amount of filling into my pie as Kayla, yet the other woman’s didn’t leak.
While I fought to seal my pie, Kayla cut decorative slits in the lid of hers. She smirked when I slid mine into the oven next to hers. One pie looked like an artist’s masterpiece and the other a bleeding, lopsided fatality of a pie war.
I turned away from the oven with a sigh and cleaned up the mess I had made.
“Don’t worry, Mina. Yours is a respectable looking pie for the first try. Besides, taste matters more than appearance.” Mistress Hervor scraped the last bit of filling from my bowl with a spoon, tasted it, and smacked her lips. “Delicious.”
Kayla shoved her bowl at her mother.
Scraping a much smaller portion from her daughter’s bowl, the tavern keeper slowly raised the spoon to her lips again. Suddenly, she jerked the spoon to eye level instead. “Is that a pit?”
Mistress Hervor glanced at the counter where we had worked. Two red-stained spots showed where we had chopped the cherries. In the corner of one of those spots, a pile of pits and stems waited until I could scrape them into the waste. The other held nothing but juice.
All three of us stared at where the pits should have been.
“I pitted the cherries,” Kayla whined. “Why does this always happen to me? I do everything right, but something always goes wrong.”
