STORM: A Standalone Romance (81 page)

She was babbling now, her words high pitched and so quick that I could barely keep up with her. I reached across the table and took her hand.

“Who were they? Where do they live?”

She shrugged. “I don’t know much about them. I was only given their first names—Dale and Robin. They lived in upstate New York then, but it was fifteen years ago.”

“Fifteen years?” I shook my head, trying to imagine that I was a father. And that my child was fifteen years old.

It was overwhelming.

I stood up and tossed a handful of bills on the table before walking out. I made it to the corner before I lost what little I’d eaten on the sidewalk.

I was a father. I had a child out there somewhere and someone chose to hide that information from me.

I knew who it was. My father. He’d never wanted me to teach. He’d never wanted me to have a normal life. He groomed me from the time I was a toddler to take over the business, to become the CEO I was now. He had all these grand plans for his children. My brother, Randy, let him down from the very beginning. So he put all his hopes and dreams on me. And his death—if I didn’t know it was impossible, I might suspect he got sick on purpose.

My father did this. He hid my child from me.

If he hadn’t, how different would my life be now?

“You have to go find him,” my sister, Libby, told me a few days later when I poured the whole story out to her. “He’s your kid. You owe it to yourself to know he’s okay.”

And that was exactly what I planned to do.

Penelope

I rushed into the house, yelling at the top of my lungs.

“JT, get up! We’re late!”

There was no response. But I hadn’t really expected there to be.

JT was my fifteen year old brother. And, since I go to bed at eight o’clock every night because I have to get up at three to make donuts at our family owned bakery, he’s pretty much left to his own devices most night. And he takes advantage of that. He usually stays up until one or two o’clock, watching horror movies and eating everything in the house. The evidence of his late night escapades were scattered around the living room in the form of empty potato chip bags and several dishes with everything from congealed butter and melted cheese stuck to their surfaces.

I gathered dishes as I made my way through the house, dumping them in the sink with aloud clatter.

“JT, seriously,” I muttered as I shoved open the door to his bedroom a minute later.

“Penny, get out!”

I stared at him a second, surprised to see him up and nearly dressed for once. “Sorry,” I mumbled as I backed out of the room.

JT and I had been on our own for three years now, ever since our parents died in a late night car crash on their way home from their weekly date night trip into the city. I had to give up my fledgling career and come home to take care of JT and take over the bakery. It was my mother’s dream, you see, the reason why they moved from New York to this small town in the middle of farm country in Texas. A bakery that served everything from donuts to fancy cakes to simple gingerbread cookies. I worked in the bakery all through high school, but I was determined to have a life in the city, working in anything having to do with art. I was an artist. Not good enough to have some show in a fancy gallery dedicated to my work, but good enough to work in a Fifth Avenue advertising firm. And then the accident and everything changed.

“Hurry up, JT. We have to leave in like five minutes. I have this huge cake I’m supposed to deliver in two hours and we just started on the fondant.”

“I’m right here. You don’t have to yell.”

He brushed past me and burst into the kitchen, searching the pantry for something…Pop Tarts, I suppose. But we didn’t have any. That was another thing I needed to add to my to-do list. Grocery shopping.

“Are you coming to the bakery after school today?”

“I have football practice.”

“After that.”

He shrugged. “I don’t know. Sean said something about hanging out at his house tonight.”

“Did you do your homework?”

He shrugged again. That seemed to be the only way to communicate with him: reading the subtle messages in his gestures.

I sighed, wondering what kind of trouble he and his best friend, Sean, were getting themselves into every afternoon. I’d heard rumors I didn’t want to believe. It was a very small town, there wasn’t much he could do that I didn’t eventually hear about. But I hoped that some of the rumors—like tagging the neighboring town’s scoreboard the day before the big rivalry football game—weren’t true.

I didn’t know what to do with JT half the time. He was a good kid. But I barely had time to spend with him between running the bakery and attempting to get a decent amount of sleep every day. But if the bakery failed, we would be financially ruined. But if I didn’t stop spending so much time at the bakery, JT might end up in juvenile detention. It was one of those damned if you do, damned if you don’t situations.

We jumped into the bakery delivery van—the one with my mom’s smiling face on the side under the words,
The Happy Bakery
—and sped off for the high school across town. We had only gone a mile or two when my cellphone began shouting at me.

I slid it out of my pocket and recognized the prefix for the high school.

“What have you done now?” I asked, shooting a glance at JT.

He simply shrugged once more.

“Hello?”

“Mrs. Monroe?”

“Penelope.”

There was a slight hesitation. Then a clearing of the throat.

“This is Mr. James, JT’s English teacher?”

“Yes, Mr. James,” I said, pronouncing the name with emphases so that JT couldn’t miss it. “What can I do for you?”

“I was wondering: could you come up to the school and discuss JT’s performance in my class?”

“Today?” I asked, already running my schedule through my mind. I wasn’t sure I could fit it in even though I knew it had to be important or else the teacher wouldn’t be calling.

“Yes, ma’am. My conference period is from eleven to noon. Or I could see you after school.”

“It’ll have to be after school.”

“Great. I’ll see you at four.”

He hung up before I could say anything else. I glanced at JT again.

“What’s going on in English?”

JT shrugged. “Don’t know.”

“There must be something going on or he wouldn’t have called.”

JT just stared out the window.

“I really don’t want to go in there without some sort of idea what’s going on. Are you failing? Did you do that essay he assigned last week?”

“Yes.”

“Are you sure? Maybe you forgot to turn it in.”

“I didn’t forget.”

“JT…”

But we had pulled up to the school by then. He grabbed his backpack and jumped out of the van before I even had a chance to pull to the curb. I groaned as I watched him rush off toward the main doors, high fiving several of his friends as they came over to greet him.

JT had always been something of an enigma to me. I remembered the adoption process. I was nine when my parents first met with his birth mother. That day sticks out in my memory because my mother was crying when they came home and my mom never cried in front of me. She showed me a sonogram picture the woman had given her, talking about the little brother I would soon have. And, sure enough, two months later, my parents disappeared in the middle of the night and arrived home with a screaming little baby wrapped in a heavy blue blanket. I wasn’t the kind of little girl who played with baby dolls, so I wasn’t terribly impressed with JT—Jonathon Tyler. As time went on, and JT took up more and more of my parents’ attention, I liked him even less. And then we moved and I was forced to leave my school, my ballet classes, my friends, my house…I had to leave everything. I was heartbroken. And I blamed it on JT.

Sometimes I thought that resentment toward JT is what brought me to this place. I mean, I learned to tolerate him as I matured. By high school, I was pretty much okay with having a little brother. I was relieved to go to college and be on my own, but I was okay with JT. But then, just as I started my own life, I had to come home and take custody of him. If not for him, if not for the bakery my mom loved so much, if not for all the regret and guilt that settled on my shoulders along with the grief, the loss, the pain of their deaths, I might have stayed in New York. But I owed it to my mom and dad to make sure their dreams stayed alive in both the bakery and JT. They wanted JT to have the experience of growing up in a small town like they had. Both my parents were from small towns—my dad from a small town in Florida and my mom from here, this little town in the panhandle of Texas—and both had wanted that for JT. So my dad quit his job as a literature professor at the State University of New York at Albany and we moved here. And I spent the next eight years trying to get back. And I did. And it lasted eight months.

I eased the van back into traffic and turned back toward the town square where the bakery waited for my return. I parked the van out front—free advertising—and stepped out, waving to Mrs. Olsen as she walked out of the bakery with a box of donuts balanced on her arm. Everyone knew everyone around here. I could tell you who owned and worked in each of the businesses along the square. The bank building across from us housed the doctor, a small pharmacy, an insurance office, and, of course, the bank on the bottom floor. Next to it was the library. Beside that was the county museum. Then there was the bakery, the bookstore next to it, and the city offices down on the corner. That was about it, all of downtown.

It was a very small town.

I pasted a smile on my face and pushed through the front doors of the bakery, nodding to all the familiar faces standing in line to get their morning sugar fix. Angela, one of only two employees I was able to afford, flashed a genuine smile as I slid behind the counter. I don’t know how she could always be so happy. It was like nothing bad had ever been bad enough to steal Angela’s joy. I wish I could be that optimistic.

Nick was in the back, carefully laying fondant across the cake we were working on when I left. It was a seven layer cake for an afternoon wedding that was taking place in less than five hours. We were due to deliver it in two. We weren’t going to make it.

“How many is that?”

“Four.”

I shook my head as I washed my hands and quickly dried them. “Why don’t you get started on the flowers and I’ll finish the fondant.”

He just nodded, silently finishing what he’d begun.

I’d known Nick since high school. He was a few years older than me, but with the town being so small, we had a couple of classes together. Then he started working for my parents his senior year and never really left. He attended college locally, graduating the same year I did. Yet, he stayed. I didn’t understand it. But, of course, there were generations and generations of people who elected to stay in this little town for reasons I would never fully understand.

I grabbed another layer and set it on the table, taking a ball of fondant and running it through the rollers to flatten it to the proper thickness. We worked in silence, covering the remaining layers in half the time it would have taken otherwise. Then I began to stack them on the hidden supports while Nick created delicate flowers out of buttercream frosting.

“JT’s English teacher called me. Said he wanted to talk to me, but JT claims he has no idea why.”

“Maybe he’s doing well and the teacher wants to enter him into some kind of competition. Remember that essay contest you and I did my senior year?”

I glanced at him. “I believe you placed higher than I did.”

Nick smiled. “I often did.”

I groaned. “Yes, and me the daughter of the literature scholar. I think that’s why my dad always liked you so much. You were the daughter he always wanted.”

Nick tossed a ball of frosting at me and I laughed.

But the laughter died quickly as I thought about JT. “What if he’s failing?”

“Then you let me have a talk with him. I’ll straighten him out.”

“We tried that last month when he was failing geometry.”

I pressed the last layer of cake down on the supports and stepped back to look at it.

“I don’t know what to do with JT. I’m not a parent, never really wanted to be one. Especially not to a teenager.”

“JT is basically a good kid. He’s just going through that thing all teenagers go through: adolescence.”

“I wished I believed that’s all it is. But I’m afraid there’s more to it than that. I don’t know what he’s doing half the time. He barely talks to me. What do I do if he gets arrested or, God forbid, something worse?”

“Take it one step at a time, Penny,” Nick said, coming to stand beside me. “It’s only a teacher calling for a conference. Do you know how many times my mom had to go to the school to talk about me?”

“I’m sure it wasn’t all bad.”

“Then you’d be surprised.” He kissed my cheek gently before returning to his flowers. “Don’t worry until you have a reason to worry.”

Much easier said than done.

~~~

I walked into the school still brushing flour from the front of my pink t-shirt. I hadn’t had time to go home and change. After delivering the wedding cake, we had three orders of cupcakes that had to be prepared, decorated, and delivered. And then the sponge cake for two cake orders had to be baked before tomorrow. I still had to go back and finish the last set of cakes.

So, I brushed flour from my shirt, hoping the white splotches didn’t show too much. I paused outside the classroom and tugged at my hair, making sure my ponytail was still fairly straight and ran my hands over my jeans, wiping away imaginary frosting, food coloring, and anything else that might have been stuck there if I hadn’t washed my hands twice before leaving the bakery. Then, with a deep breath and a feeling that I’d somehow stepped back into time and become an awkward teen again, I stepped into the classroom.

“Mr. James?”

He was sitting behind the generic yellow desk that adorned the front of most high school classrooms, his head bent as he looked over a student essay. He was wearing jeans and a white dress shirt, a tie loosened at the collar. His hair was dark, a mass of curls that reminded me of the unruly disaster that was JT’s hair when he let it grow out. Thank goodness it was cut short right now, a requirement set by the football coach.

And then he looked up and my heart skipped a beat.

He was…his eyes were dark, a deep brown that was like caramel that was just on the verge of burning. He had a heavy jaw and full lips, a long patrician nose that somehow worked with his face, and a subtle dimple in his left cheek when he smiled.