Pies and Prejudice Read Free Page B

day planner, penciling Ella Mae in to handle the desserts for The Havenwood School of the Art’s summer open house.
    “I’m not serving blueberries, that’s for damn sure,” Ella Mae spoke to the fog-covered mirror in the bathroom. The air was muggy and close and she threw open a window to let it ooze outside. Wrapping herself in a towel, she went back to the bedroom, unfolded her jeans, and laid them out on the floor.
    It was summertime in Havenwood. That meant average temperatures in the nineties with enough humidity to keep the damp hair on Ella Mae’s neck from ever drying. Smiling in anticipation, she picked up Reba’s fabric scissors and began to cut the legs off the jeans. She began at a conservative length, just above the knee and then, feeling brazen, sliced off a few more inches. The moment she tried on the jean shorts, she felt ten years younger.
    She slid on her canvas Keds, which she’d also worn on her last day of culinary school, and drew her whiskey-colored hair into a high ponytail. She owned no makeup and had only her watch, a pair of diamond studs, and her wedding rings as accessories. She stuck the rings in the drawer of the nightstand and stared at them for a long moment, seeing how the gold and diamonds were rendered dull without the benefit of the light. Touching the bare skin of her ring finger, Ella Mae vowed to find a way to keep herself occupied so she wouldn’t spend the day brooding over her broken marriage. She decided to begin by cooking bacon and eggs for herself and Chewy.
    The kitchen was quiet. Reba didn’t start her housekeeping duties until midmorning and her mother was a nocturnal creature. Last night, long after Ella Mae had fallen asleepwith the lamp burning and the paperback copy of
To Kill a Mockingbird
from her high school freshmen English class splayed open on the quilt, she’d been awakened by the sound of mother padding around the house.
    Ella Mae hadn’t slept well. She’d tossed and turned, disturbed by the absence of noise. In Manhattan, she was accustomed to the constant cacophony of sound enveloping her apartment building. In Havenwood, the police and ambulance sirens, blaring taxicab horns, and the shouting, swearing, or singing of strangers was replaced by the gentle sawing of crickets and the resonating croaks of bullfrogs. It was a different symphony, lacking the dissonance to replicate an urban melody.
    In the empty kitchen, the quiet continued to rattle her. She ate breakfast, read the newspaper, and drank a cup of coffee. Wrens and finches twittered outside the window and the drone of cicadas began to increase in volume as the sun rose higher in the milky blue sky. Sighing, Ella Mae found her gaze wandering to her unencumbered ring finger again and again. Slamming the paper shut, she jumped out of her chair.
    “Let’s go for a bike ride, Chewy,” Ella Mae said and hastily loaded the dirty plates into the dishwasher. She then led the leaping, exuberant terrier into the garage. “It’ll give me a chance to come up with a menu for Sissy’s event.”
    Her bike was exactly where she’d left it, in the far corner behind the wheelbarrow. She cleaned it off with a wet rag, inflated the tires, and tried out the bell. She rang it three times, smiling at the merry trill, and settled Chewy in the roomy straw basket attached to the handlebars.
    “Do not gnaw your seat,” she admonished her grinning dog as she began to pedal, but there was no need to worry. Chewy took to bicycle riding instantaneously, his dark chocolate eyes glimmering with excitement, his tongue lolling from between gleaming white teeth. As they passed under a lane of ancient magnolia trees, the sunlight streamed through the branches.
    She rode for a mile, turning from the residential road onto the dirt path leading to the swimming hole.
    “I wore a bikini last time I was here,” she told Chewy. “And when I jumped off the rope swing into the water, my top floated away. I about died when