Jim picked up a cupcake that looked like a ladybug. The body of it was red with black spots, with a black face. Tess had added white eyes, a red nose, and a bright white smile. She’d also made a green turtle with Tootsie Roll legs and head. But her pièce de résistance was a bright yellow, smiling chick with closed eyes and happy little wings that made him look as though he was about to take off flying.
“You ought to go into business,” Jim said as he picked up a cupcake covered in pink and yellow flowers with tiny white centers.
“No,” Tess said slowly, “I’m just good at bossing lazy men around.” She picked up an uniced cupcake and looked at it. “What do you think? Shall I try a bumblebee?”
“I think that whatever you attempt, it’ll come out good,” Jim said as he glanced at Jocelyn, who was straining a batch of spinach purée. They’d been working on the cupcakes for days now, and the biggest surprise to them all was how good Tess was at decorating them.
The first day, Jim had taken over. When he and Joce couldn’t find Luke in the garden, Jim drove them to Luke’s house to borrow his pickup. Jocelyn was curious to see where Luke lived, but all she saw was the outside. It wasn’t a large house, but it had a deep porch across the front, and it was beautiful. She didn’t know what she’d expected, but it didn’t take an expert to see that the house had cost a lot. The windows were double paned and deeply trimmed with hardwood. The roof looked to be slate. When she peeked around the side, she could see what looked to be a fabulous garden in the back.
When she glanced at Jim, he was wa
tching her. “I take it you haven’t been here before,” he said as he pushed some numbers on a keypad and the garage door opened.
“No. Is the town saying I have been?”
“This town says everything.” When the garage door opened, he said, “He took the car.”
“Luke has a truck and a car?”
Jim gave her a sharp look but didn’t answer. “He must have gone into Williamsburg to see his grandfather.”
“I thought his grandfather passed away.”
“Told you that, did he?”
“Yes,” Joce said cautiously as she got into the passenger side of the truck. Was there some secret about Luke’s grandfather?
“My guess is he went to see the other one, my wife’s father.”
“Oh,” Joce said but said no more. Just as she’d suspected, in front of the truck were three motorbikes: a muddy Honda dirt bike, an old Indian, and a sleek red Kawasaki made for the road. As she got into the truck, she wanted to ask more about Luke, but Jim didn’t seem to want to say much about him. Actually, the man didn’t seem to want to say much about anything, so they rode in silence for a while. “You wouldn’t like to fill me in on what’s going on with all these cakes, would you?”
“Beats me,” Jim said. “Luke said he wanted me to organize a big party for Saturday where you sell cupcakes for twenty-five dollars each—or thereabouts. Sounds good to me. What kind of equipment do you need?”
“The kind that comes for free,” she said without thinking.
“How about if I get you time payments that don’t start for eighteen months?”
“To get terms like that you must have sold your soul to the devil.”
Jim gave a little chuckle. “Worse than the devil, I owe my soul to the company store.”
“Whadaya expect when you load sixteen tons?” Joce said without so much as a smile.
As Jim backed the truck out of the garage, he gave her a smile that almost cracked his face. “Anybody who can quote Tennessee Ernie Ford is my kinda gal. How does a forty-eight-inch six-burner with a grill and two ovens sound to you?”
“What are the BTUs?”
“At least sixteen thousand.”
“I’d say that no wonder you were so good at your job. You talk porno to women.”
He took her to a warehouse outside Richmond and introduced her to what seemed to be a hundred men, all of whom he’d trained, and all of whom were still in awe of him. Jim had been regional manager for the entire southeastern United States and had always topped his yearly sales quota by at least 4 percent.
What he was able to get for Jocelyn were damaged appliances. The huge range had a dent in the back of it that wouldn’t be seen, but no customer paying top dollar would want it. He also got her a giant freezer that was in a discontinued color of pale yellow. “It looks like butter,” she said.
“That’s the problem,” Jim said. “Today people don’t even want to think about butter. They want to think about lettuce.” The way he said it made her laugh.
By the time they got back to Edilean Manor, there were three cars in the driveway. “It looks like my wife is working hard to get rid of me,” Jim said. “Maybe you and I should go into business together.”