Chapter Two

Brandy

“Thank you, see you next time!”

The door opened, the customer walked out, and slowly, achingly slowly, the door closed behind him.

“You asshole!”

“Brandy!”

I turned to look innocently at Basil Harrison, my best friend and the only other person I trusted with keys to Madie’s.

“What?”

“You’re bad,” Basil said, shaking her head and pursing her lips, doing everything she could to hide the smile that wanted to spread across her face.

“You say stuff like that all the time,” I said, “sometimes while they are still in the building.”

“Yes, but under my breath. Like a lady.”

I laughed as I looked my friend up and down critically. She was the furthest thing from what most West Texans would think of when they thought of a ‘lady.’ At six-three, flat chested and tattooed from her neck to her toes, Basil looked like a Batman villain. Unfortunately for her, she had the personality of a foul-mouthed creampuff.

“All right, lady ,” I said, “close it up. We’re done for the day.”

Basil looked at her smartwatch and shrugged.

“Four is a new record,” she said. “You sure you don’t want to stay open for dinner?”

“On a Sunday?” I asked. “Everyone in this town is either at church or home. No one is coming all the way out here for a sandwich.”

“Fair enough,” Basil said. “And you and me?”

“Watching crappy movies and eating ice cream?”

“We are out of ice cream.”

“Crap. Want to drive to Odessa?”

“Not particularly,” Basil said. “Our budget is pretty thin, and if we spent the gas money to get to Odessa, we’d be dining on that budget ice cream at Wal-Mart.”

“Ugh.”

“Big ugh.”

“All right, so, ice cream’s out. Pizza?”

“You mean we make French bread pizzas here and then bring them back to the house?”

“Yes.”

Basil shrugged and sighed.

“I’ll go get the pepperoni sliced. We ran out with that guy with the hat.”

“Which guy? They all wear hats.”

“The not cowboy hat. Either kind of cowboy.”

“You mean the fedora guy?”

“That’s the one. You’d be pleased to know he wrote down his phone number with his name.”

“Why?”

She stared at me for a long second.

“Oh. Right. Wow. You or me?”

“I think he was equal opportunity,” she said. “He looked like he would take what he could get.”

“Well, that’s a new rock bottom. You know what? Ice cream is back on the menu. I’ll go into the savings.”

“You spoil me,” Basil laughed.

“You get to drive, so don’t feel too spoiled.”

Basil laughed and headed around the counter to lock the door. As we went about the business of closing up shop, I checked the register receipt and groaned. It had been a slow Sunday, which was doubly bad since Sunday usually accounted for about half our sales for the week. Lots of lunches came out of Madie’s to the Sunday crowd, between church trips or whatever they were up to.

It had been tradition for many of them for decades. Until Madie herself shut the place down about nine years ago. My grandmother had had arthritis and a bad hip and a host of other ailments and decided to close her beloved sandwich shop while it was still one of the most popular places for fifty miles in any direction. She essentially retired a local legend in Foley.

But no one knew the real story behind it being shut down. How the dementia was creeping in already, and how she tried to get my mother to take over, even if meant she just hired people to run it. How my mother simply took seventy thousand dollars, ran off to Vegas, and blew it all before throwing herself off a high-rise. It nearly broke Grandma, and it was one of the many devastating blows I ended up enduring over several years.

I closed the register, leaving the meager amount of cash in it inside rather than making a deposit. What was the point? I’d just make one later in the week. It was a far cry from where I had been several years ago, and as I passed a picture in the office, one of Basil and me in much happier times, it hit me how far I’d fallen.

Crumpling into the office chair that I was positive was going to disintegrate one day, I shook the mouse on the ancient desktop computer and entered in the day’s sales. There had been a time, when my bakery in Times Square was open, that I would be entering numbers with five zeros at the end. Now? One.

One.

I hadn’t even made a hundred dollars today in profit.

Closing QuickBooks, I stared at the smiling face looking back at me from the desktop. It was me, holding my award from winning a baking competition, just months after I had been eliminated in the last round of a TV baking competition. It had been a gut punch to lose, but my career skyrocketed afterward. Viewers thought I’d been screwed over, and I had sympathy. Investors came out of the woodwork to help me set something up somewhere.

On top of that, one of the other contestants and I started dating. He was an incredible baker, and we fell in love immediately. I thought I’d found the love of my life, and it was just the beginning. I was offered an opportunity to open my own shop in Times Square. It came with magazine spreads and TV commercials. I was becoming a celebrity.

Or so I thought.

Five years later, the shop closed, bankrupt. The fiancé I thought was the love of my life had married me, then left me for his new girlfriend, moving to Thailand where he was going to be the star of his own world-traveling chef show. Which was still on the air.

I owed everyone. The only money I had was what my mother left me in a life insurance policy that wasn’t already taken paying back my grandmother. It was enough to tuck my tail firmly between my legs, pack up everything I owned, and move back to Texas. I was positive I’d be alone.

But Basil stuck by me. She was tired of living in the city, and having listened to me talk about Foley and my grandmother’s shop, wanted to come with me and help me reopen it. We pooled our resources, and I got one last loan and bought the building and restarted the most famous restaurant in the history of Foley, Texas.

So now I had roughly two thousand dollars to my name. In savings.

One thousand and nine hundred and twenty dollars, actually. Because I was taking eighty out to put gas in the car, drive to Odessa, and buy the best ice cream Wal-Mart carried.

I checked the list of bills again, their due dates written in red dry erase marker on a big whiteboard calendar. The savings might have to pay for the lights again. Which, considering we were in desperate need of new equipment since all the equipment we had was still the stuff from when Grandma ran the place and had sat for nine years unused, was going to be a problem pretty soon.

I needed a gimmick or something. Something to bring people in. Something to get them talking. It was down to the point where I was almost ready to let the secret out. As far as everyone in Foley was concerned, I was just Madie’s granddaughter. The fact that I had been on TV and had a shop in New York had been hidden, mostly because the folks of Foley were historically not big fans of big-city influences. But I was getting desperate. Something needed to change, and being talked about negatively was at least being talked about.

Basil came into the office, grabbing her ever-present buffalo plaid printed shirt and slipping it on over her black tank top. Removing her nametag, she tossed it on the hook and turned to look at me expectantly. I took off my nametag and put it next to hers and sighed.

“You ready?” I asked.

“Are you?” she responded. “Do you want to check on Madie first?”

“Yeah, that’d be a good idea,” I said.

Grandma was usually pretty good during the daytime. She puttered around the downstairs of the house and crocheted and scrapbooked and watched TV. She seemed rather happy about her retirement in that way. It wasn’t until nightfall that I had to keep an eye on her. That’s when she would start to forget what year it was, or why there was a baby gate blocking off access to the kitchen, or why she couldn’t remember how much she’d made at work that day.

Or worse, where Mom was.

Mom had lived with her the entirety of her life with the exception of eight months. From the day she got married to my father to the day she left him while six months pregnant was the only time she wasn’t in the three-story house at the edge of what Foley considered “downtown.” When she moved back, Grandma didn’t ask questions, which she probably should have, and didn’t pass judgment. She just welcomed her daughter and her impending granddaughter happily and put Mom to work in the shop.

Mom wasn’t built for it, though. I knew that from the time I was very little. Mom just didn’t quite ever get the hang of adulthood. Grandma was the one who took care of me. Grandma was the one who paid the bills. Grandma was the one who tucked me in at night. Mom was there. She just wasn’t present.

I saw the signs before I moved away, but I couldn’t do anything about it. Mom had been cracking for a long time. But I had a chance to go to culinary school in New York and wasn’t going to skip it at my grandmother’s insistence. She always believed Mom would wake up one day and just get it. She never did.

The door was locked, which was good. Being able to walk from the house to the shop was a huge upside for Grandma back in the day, and for me now, but it was an added stress now. Grandma had a tendency to sometimes leave and forget to come back. She’d wander around downtown, going into stores to shop, realizing she didn’t have her purse, and then leaving to go get it. Only she’d just wander into the next store and do it all over again.

Or she’d come to work. I’d find her in the kitchen, trying to start the ovens or chopping vegetables. One time I walked in and found her with a knife in her hand, looking at a tomato with a confused stare. She’d forgotten how to slice it.

“Hey, Grandma,” I said as I walked inside.

“Hey, darlin,” she said from her favorite spot, sitting in her easy chair in front of the TV with a crochet project in her lap.

“I was just checking in before Basil and I headed to the store. Is there anything I can get you?”

“Oh, are you going up to Odessa?”

“Yes.”

“Do you want me to drive?”

“No, Grandma, it’s okay. I can drive.”

“Oh, all right. It’s just that your mother never wants to drive. I’ll stay here with her. Bring me back some chocolate.”

She smiled warmly, and I tried to return it. She’d forgotten Mom was dead again. I wasn’t going to correct her.

“All right,” I said. “Hershey’s?”

“Hmm?”

“The chocolate?”

“Chocolate? Why yes. I’d like some.”

“All right, Grandma.”

“All right, love.”

I closed the door slowly and made sure it was locked. When I turned, Basil was standing behind me with a sad smile. She’d overheard it all. She was unfortunately used to it, living with us in the upstairs of the house, which was essentially hers exclusively. Grandma often mistook her for Mom. She got very upset when she thought Mom had gotten a bunch of tattoos and cut her hair short.

“Come on,” Basil said. “Let’s go get that ice cream.”

“Sure thing,” I said. “But you’re driving.”

“That’s fine. I’ll even relinquish the control of the music.”

“Thank God,” I said.