The Invisible Husband of Frick Island - Colleen Oakley Page 0,112
there just for this purpose. He handed it to her, and his chest puffed up a bit, wishing Mrs. Olecki could see him now.
“I forgot to thank you for the Girl Scout cookies,” she said, dabbing at her eye with the cloth.
He raised his eyebrows. He had begun to assume that she hadn’t opened the packages he’d sent.
“And the Taylor Swift record.”
“You’re welcome,” he said.
She sniffed again. “And the video.”
“Did you watch it? I didn’t know if you had a VCR.”
“Jeffrey has one. We watched it together.” She dabbed the handkerchief at her eyes, her nose. “You are a spectacularly bad dancer.”
“I know.”
“You would have been a terrible stripper.”
He grinned. “Yes.”
She sighed and slipped her arm through the crook of Anders’s elbow. “Come on. I guess you can stay at my house tonight. Since you’re stranded.”
“Really?”
“On the couch,” she said, eyeing him purposefully.
“Next to the bugs?”
She smiled and Anders’s entire heart filled. He stared at her beaming face, wishing with everything in him that he could kiss the smile right off of it. But he knew for now he’d just have to imagine it. Something he learned could be almost as good as the real thing.
Almost.
Chapter 31
Nearly Six Months Later
August
Pearl Olecki stood in her lemon-dotted apron, mixing the yellow batter with her rubber spatula and holding the bowl slightly away from her so her rapt audience of fifty people or so on the green space in front of the church could see the proper consistency. She spoke into the tiny microphone clipped onto her apron strap.
“You don’t want to overmix it. That’ll take the air right out of it and then your layers won’t rise properly.” That wasn’t true, of course. With Frick Island cake you didn’t want the layers to rise too much, because then they wouldn’t stack right. But she wasn’t about to give away all her secrets.
She glanced over at Lady Judy, who was under the white tent next to hers, hawking her new line of Frick Island Bay Breeze candles, along with the only officially licensed What the Frick? merchandise: T-shirts, hats, key chains, tote bags, baby bibs, and coffee mugs.
Pearl looked back at the crowd gathered round her, including the Barretts, a new family that had just moved to the island, buying the abandoned house next to Lady Judy, along with four others. The wife had been a general contractor on the mainland and spent her days renovating the homes, with the intent to sell them when she was done, and the husband was a stay-at-home dad to their three young boys. Kids! Bobby took to them instantly and had been running them ragged all over the island since the day they moved in. And they weren’t the only new residents. A young man had also renovated a storefront on the main road, turning the top floor into his apartment and the bottom into his own private practice. A bona fide doctor. And good-looking, to boot! At least Jeffrey seemed to think so. Pearl smiled, remembering how close they sat together at the One-Eyed Crab last Friday night during Jeffrey’s shift break—they might as well have only had one chair. Anyway, she wasn’t sure of the doctor’s specialty, but she hoped he at least knew a little about cancer, seeing as how everyone was now going to be afflicted with it thanks to that godawful cell tower. She glared at the metal contraption just beyond the church, and then gave her head a good shake. Never mind that for today.
“Now, we’ll put these pans in the oven.” She slid them on the shelf beneath the table she was working on. “And with the magic of Frick Island, they bake in an instant.” She snapped her fingers and then pulled the layers she had baked earlier from the same shelf and set them on top of the table, grinning. Take that, Julia Child.
As she began the icing part of her demonstration, Pearl, who wasn’t overly prone to nostalgia, found she was suffering from a touch of it anyway. This Cake Walk was as big as the ones from twenty years earlier or more. If not bigger.
Not that it surprised her, of course.
It just reminded her of what BobDan always said: Everything ebbs and flows like the tide.
And she supposed he was right.
* * *
—
Piper zipped up her suitcase and set it on the floor, where Anders hefted it up by the handle. “Is that everything?”
Beyond Piper’s open window, they could hear the low rumble of tourists