I Want Candy

  Candy tried to fight it, but she smiled, and at that very instant, Turner swore to heaven above that she’d be doing a lot more of it and he’d be there to see it. Maybe someday he’d even be the reason for it.

  “Nobody else givin’ you a hard time?”

  Candy shook her head. “Lorraine Estes is a trip. Not the most pleasant chick I’ve ever met.”

  Turner nodded. “That grumpy old hen could start an argument in an empty house.”

  Candy laughed. “Meat loaf’s getting cold.” She leaned a hand on the counter and shifted her weight to one hip, which accentuated her already killer curves. Turner had to drag his eyes away.

  “Right.” He dug his fork into the too-firm hunk of mystery meat.

  Candy sighed. “And then there’s bizarro Gerrall Spivey.”

  Turner put the fork down. “Oh, right.” Turner managed to sound casual. “He works out there, doesn’t he? So he’s buggin’ you, too?”

  Candy shrugged. “Gerrall’s harmless, I suppose, but sometimes he creeps me out just the littlest bit, you know, going overboard with the compliments and stuff. He doesn’t mean anything by it. I think he’s just kind of clueless, and because I’m nice to him he’s under the mistaken impression that I’m hot for him. It’s a little awkward.”

  Turner nodded as if he were barely interested in what she was saying. The truth was, he was so pissed off that the top of his head felt like it was going to blow off. If that little motherfucker even came close to touching Candy, he’d bust him up something awful.

  “You might want to try to avoid him as much as you can,” Turner said with a sigh, hoping his words sounded like friendly advice and not an official warning.

  “Seriously? Why?”

  Turner shrugged. “Oh, nothing really. That it must be kind of uncomfortable for you is all.”

  “Counter order up!”

  “I should get back to work.” Candy straightened and smiled at Turner warmly, the skittish discomfort gone from her expression. “Anything else I can get you? Everything okay?”

  “It’s incredibly good.”

  Her gaze wandered to his plate and she laughed. “You haven’t even tasted it yet, Turner.”

  “I mean it’s incredibly good to see you, Candy. I’ve missed you.”

  His words seemed to catch her off guard. She got all flustered again, and began wiping her hands on her apron. “I—”

  “You’re not doing me any favors by keeping your distance.” Turner surprised himself. It wasn’t his style to come on this hard, but for some reason it seemed like the natural way to handle this situation, to handle her. “And I damn well know it’s not what you want, either.”

  Candy paused for an instant. Her lips parted in shock. And Turner watched a dozen different emotions pass over her expression before she seemed to snap out of it. “I really have to get back to work,” she said, slapping his check down on the counter in front of him.

  When Candy turned away, her blond ponytail flipped across the back of her neck, and right there in the middle of meat loaf central, Turner caught a whiff of the delicate, feminine essence of everything Candy.

  * * *

  Two more praline chocolate turtle cakes. An angel food cake. A devil’s food cake with fudge icing. A carrot cake with cream cheese icing. And the pineapple upside-down cake Mildred Holzmann had requested, already perched on a foil-covered piece of heavy-duty cardboard and readied for delivery.

  The cakes were lined up on the prep counter in Lenny’s kitchen like girls in cotillion dresses, all fluffy and lacy and exactly as she’d envisioned them in her head. Candy felt immense satisfaction at the sight.

  “You’re a damn genius,” Lenny said. “Seriously. If these taste as good as that mouse-sized crumb you brought me this morning, you can slap me upside my head and call me silly.”

  Candy laughed. “I told you, the bridge club ate nearly every bit of it! I had to run for my life just to bring you in that little sliver!”

  “No matter,” Lenny said, reaching out to pinch a piece of devil’s food. “I can eat as much as I want now, right?”

  Candy smacked his arm. “Don’t pig out on your profit, Lenny!”

  “All right, now. No need to get violent.”

  Candy grabbed the pineapple cake and her keys and headed for the employee exit. “I gotta run if I’m going to look at that apartment and get to Cherokee Pines in time for dinner. See you Monday!”

  “Yes you will!”

  She’d barely taken three steps through the parking lot when she decided to turn right around. Candy peeked through the glass window of the back entrance, only to see Lenny sticking his finger in the cream cheese icing, just as she’d suspected.

  “Stop it!” Candy yelled, pounding on the glass with her free hand.

  Just a couple minutes later, Candy arrived at the old Victorian house on Chester Street. She felt ridiculous driving, and would have been happy walking if she didn’t have Mildred’s cake to worry about. As she headed up the steps to the house, Candy calculated how much money she would save without a gas tank to fill every week, and the thought made her giddy.

  She knocked on the door. A harried-looking woman a few years older than Candy answered, three wide-eyed kids clustered behind her legs. The scent of spaghetti sauce wafted out onto the porch.

  “I’m sorry,” Candy said. “I hope I’m not disturbing you, but I’m Candy Carmichael. I called about seeing the—”

  “Oh, sure!” The woman welcomed her inside. “Follow me upstairs. It’s on the third floor.”

  About fifteen minutes later the two women were on the front porch, and Candy was so frustrated she was near tears. The place was completely perfect! It was exactly what she needed! The apartment was furnished—nothing fancy but not threadbare, either—and available month to month. It featured a small bedroom, a sitting room, a compact galley kitchen, and full bath, plus it was privately tucked away from the rest of the house. All this for only $400 a month!

  But the woman insisted on first and last month’s rent up front, and Candy couldn’t swing it.

  She tried one last time to make a deal with her. She reached into the pocket of her jeans and pulled out the roll of bills that had been burning a hole in her pocket since about ten that morning, when she walked to the First National Bank of Cataloochee County on her break and cashed her paycheck.

  Candy held out the cash to the woman. “This is six hundred and ten dollars. I’ve got another thirteen stashed at my mother’s. And it’s all yours, right this very minute, if you’ll only let me pay the rest two weeks from now, when I get paid again.”

  The landlady crossed her arms over her chest and shook her head. “I wish I could,” she said. “Please don’t take this the wrong way, but I’ve been burned giving people breaks like that before. I hope you understand.”

  Candy shoved the money back in her jeans pocket. “Can you hold the apartment for me, then?”

  “No. I’m sorry. I just can’t. But if it’s still here in two weeks, it’s yours.” The woman snapped at her oldest child to close the screen door, then returned her attention to Candy. “Listen,” she said. “You seem like a nice girl and I’d like to rent the place to you but I learned a long time ago that if a tenant has trouble scraping together the rent at the start they’re gonna struggle every month after, and I just don’t have the energy to mess with that.”

  The woman wished her luck and went into her house.

  By the time Candy reached Cherokee Pines, any payday elation she’d felt had disappeared. The sense of accomplishment from baking was gone. All the whirling thoughts of Turner had been pushed aside. All she could think about now was what she’d do in two days, when her time was up at Cherokee Pines. Where would she go?

  Candy parked her junker of a car in its usual spot, hidden behind the senior vans at the edge of the lot, and trudged inside, balancing the cake in one hand as she entered the double glass doors.

  She was greeted by Mr. Miller.

&
nbsp; “Just what do you think you’re doing?”

  At first, Candy wasn’t even certain she was the target of his attack. “Pardon me?”

  He flicked his fingernail on the foil-covered cardboard she was holding. “This. This … cake. Just who do you think you are, bringing unauthorized food items into the dining hall?”

  “Uh…” Candy’s first instinct was to laugh. This guy could not be serious. Unauthorized? Food items? Who talked like that? “It’s a dessert, Mr. Miller.”

  His lip curled. Sweat began to bead on his bulbous forehead. “I have never liked you, Miss Carmichael,” he hissed. “You are a condescending girl, which I find particularly odd seeing as how you are a guest here only because I allow you to be.”

  It was right then that Candy realized she’d be sleeping in her car that night if she couldn’t find a way to deal with Mr. Mean-n-Chubby standing in front of her. And the truth was, she was dog tired. She was heartbroken about the apartment. She was still all worked up from seeing Turner at lunch. And dammmit, she did not want to sleep in her car again! She’d slept in her car for three nights before finally agreeing to stay with Gladys Harbison—something she’d never admitted to anyone! She’d parked in a deserted warehouse parking lot and taken showers at the Tip Top Truck Stop for a dollar-fifty a pop. Compared to that, Jacinta’s couch was pure luxury, and that’s where she planned to stay that night. After Hugo had been thoroughly entertained, anyway, since it was Saturday.

  Oh, shoot—it was Saturday! Candy rolled her eyes at the realization that it would be many hours before she could relax.

  “You think this is some kind of joke, don’t you?” Mr. Miller asked.

  Just then, Candy noticed the usual predinner-bell crowd beginning to gather outside the dining room doors. But on that particular evening, she and Mr. Miller were more interesting than the menu posting, and several residents began to move closer in order to hear what was being said.

  Candy answered his question politely. “Not at all, Mr. Miller. I meant no disrespect.”

  The crowd continued to inch closer. Out of the corner of her eye, Candy saw Mildred Holzmann pushing through, her stare focused like a laser on the large rectangular-shaped cake topped with rows of brown-sugar-drizzled pineapple slices.

  Mr. Miller wasn’t finished. “As executive director of Cherokee Pines, it is my duty to see that our residents receive the highest-quality meals and snacks…”

  Uh-oh. Mildred looked really excited. And now Hugo and Jacinta were advancing from the other direction.

  “… and our qualified staff sees to it that meals are designed…”

  Miller was too busy lecturing Candy to notice that about three dozen old people were now giving him the stink eye. It was all Candy could do not to laugh out loud.

  “… with the specific nutritional needs of the elderly in mind. And that’s why you cannot go around tempting our residents with just any old high-fat, high-calorie, sugar-coated—”

  “Step away from the pineapple upside-down cake and no one will get hurt,” Mildred said from her position, which was all up in Mr. Miller’s face.

  Though he gasped in surprise and tried to retreat, Hugo and Jacinta blocked his escape. Mr. Miller scanned the hallway to discover he was outnumbered.

  Mildred shook a knobby finger at him. “This young lady was nice enough to bake that for me and you’re not going to take it away. Do you understand? I haven’t had a decent dessert since I moved into this place!”

  “Besides,” Hugo added, his nose in the air. “We’re old as dirt and we’re gonna die anyway, so let us at least die with a smile on our faces.”

  “The food here stinks!” someone yelled.

  “The tapioca pudding tastes like glue!” Candy was almost certain that complaint came from Lorraine Estes.

  Just then, the intercom system rang out with the series of electronic beeps that signaled dinner was served, and the crowd began to shuffle toward the open dining room doors. “I’ll take this,” Mildred said, relieving Candy of the cake. “We’ll save a seat for you at our table, dear.”

  Mr. Miller’s lip was still twitching when Gerrall Spivey arrived for his Saturday shift just moments later.

  “What’s happening?” he asked, setting his laptop on the front desk and staring at Mr. Miller and Candy as if they were the oddest sight he’d ever seen.

  Miller pointed at him. “In my office—now!”

  Chapter 12

  After the library reading room closed, Candy passed a good thirty minutes in the health and beauty aisle of the Piggly Wiggly, trying to decide between the mascara brand that promised length and definition and the one that would plump and curl. What if she wanted all those things? What if, as a modern American female consumer, she wanted mascara that plumped, curled, lengthened, and defined the living hell out of her lashes?

  “Shit outta luck, I guess,” she mumbled to herself, tossing her lackluster selection into her little handheld shopping basket. She wandered around the rest of the store, snagging some off-brand deodorant, shampoo, conditioner, and moisturizer. Then she compared prices on disposable shavers, thinking back to the old days when you didn’t need a quadruple-blade, pivoting-head, no-slip-grip wonder of engineering to scrape the stubble off your kneecaps.

  In a last-minute surge of wildness, Candy grabbed a bag of caramel corn from the snack aisle and headed for the checkout. Damn—she shook her head as she handed over the cash—more than twenty-seven dollars for a grocery bag of no-name toiletries and high-fructose corn syrup. That seemed like an awful lot of money to waste on stuff that didn’t amount to anything, that wouldn’t get her any closer to renting her own place or getting out of this town.

  As she walked to the car, Candy tried to recall the orgy of the senses that was once her lifestyle, the best of anything and everything, and all of it taken for granted. Chanel perfume had been dabbed on her wrists. Perfectly prepared cuisine was paired with just the right wine. Only the richest fabrics and butter-soft leathers brushed against her body. Cleanly designed fine furnishings filled her home. Then there were the decadent services she’d convinced herself she couldn’t function without. Exfoliating scrubs and silky body wraps that left her skin like velvet. Aromatherapy massages that loosened her muscles and relaxed her mind. The pedicures, the manicures, and the dancing fingertips of spa professionals upon her brow and cheekbones. God, she’d wasted so much of her life shopping for—and living in—luxury.

  Now she shopped and lived in Bigler.

  Candy tossed the Piggly Wiggly bag in the passenger seat of the Chevy and decided to take a walk around town. She still had an hour to kill before she could even think of going back to Jacinta’s, and it was a warm, still summer night, the kind she’d loved when she was a kid. Candy laughed with delight as every one of Main Street’s historic streetlights flickered on at once, as if putting on a show just for her, turning the old downtown into a storybook scene. She gazed up just in time to see the very last flash of orange before the sun settled behind the dark mountains.

  All right, so her hometown had its own kind of subtle charm—Candy admitted it. If a person actually wanted to live in a small Appalachian mountain village with no obvious purpose for existing, she supposed they could do worse than Bigler.

  She strolled along, though most everything in town was closed. Lenny’s Diner was dark and Lenny was no doubt home watching TV while chowing down on a piece of his profit. The sewing shop, the hardware store, and the half-dozen mountain craft stores were shuttered, along with the chamber of commerce office, the electronics repair shop, and the …

  Candy stopped, sticking her hands into the back pockets of her jeans and standing in silence. She’d driven past this storefront every day since she’d returned to town, but she could honestly say that tonight was the first time she’d really noticed her father’s old office. The painted lettering was still visible on the glass display window—JONES CARMICHAEL INSURANCE, AUTO, HOME, AND LIFE—though it was beginning to peel away fro
m the effect of weather and time. Obviously, the place had sat empty since his death, and Candy wondered why that was. She also wondered who owned the three-story brick building. She’d have to ask Jacinta.

  Candy continued down Main Street and was pleasantly surprised to see that the corner ice cream parlor was open. She quickened her step, drawn by the shop’s bright white light pouring onto the curb and the remembered taste of the butter brickle of her childhood.

  She passed by the wide marble steps of Trinity Lutheran and its gated courtyard garden, then reached the corner, stepped into the ice cream parlor’s open door, and Turner nearly knocked her over.

  “Candy!”

  She grabbed onto him to keep from falling on her behind, and screeched when an ice-cold blob landed on her bare chest and began to slide down into her cleavage. “Ohmigod!” she yelped, bending and pulling at the neckline of her stretchy cotton T-shirt, trying to prevent the painfully cold confection from slipping down her belly.

  “I am so sorry!” he said. And then, unbelievably, Turner just reached down into the opening of her shirt to retrieve the ice cream, which had come to a stop in the vee between her underwires. In doing so, his fingers brushed over the swell of her breasts. What the hell? All Candy could do was stand there on the sidewalk with her eyes bugging out, breathless from the shock of cold ice cream and the touch of Turner’s fingers on her flesh. She watched as he doubled over in laughter and tossed the melting scoop in the trash can, along with his now useless sugar cone.

  “Glad you think it’s funny,” she said, still holding the neckline of her shirt away from her skin. “Can you get me a napkin or something?”

  “Of course. Sure. Sorry.” Turner continued to laugh as he jogged into the shop and came out with a handful of napkins and a couple packages of moistened towelettes, which he displayed proudly.

  “I sincerely apologize,” he said, looking sheepish. He tried to stop laughing but wasn’t particularly successful.

  Candy shook her head. “Whatever,” she said, fighting her own laughter as she reached out to snag the napkins from his grasp. But Turner pulled away.