They were about two months out from high school graduation, and Caro knew for sure she didn’t want to go to a four-year college. What she wanted was pastry school; it was like she’d known it her whole life. She could tell her feelings were right and true because she didn’t detect even the slightest twitch of jealousy about her best friends’ plans after high school. Kasey had already been accepted to her dream school on the East Coast. Rosemarie was taking a gap year before going to school in Seattle, and Ada was interested in culinary school or interior design, but her family had so much money it didn’t even matter what she did after high school, because she’d be fine no matter what.
There were times when Caro felt guilty about not wanting to leave Goldie; it seemed like everyone else couldn’t wait to leave the small town they’d grown up in. There were countless country songs and movies about this, and it was all Kasey talked about sometimes. That was what hurt Caro’s feelings the most—the fact that Kasey acted like she couldn’t escape Goldie fast enough. But Caro knew how desperate Kasey was to get away from that monster Roy, even if she was scared to leave him with her mother. When she saw Kasey close her eyes in a silent wish listening to “Wide Open Spaces” while they were driving with the windows down, faces turned to the sun like flowers, hair blowing in the wind, Caro’s heart hurt.
Caroline liked the comfort that came with thinking about staying in Goldie and perfecting her pie recipes at the diner for the day in the far-off future when she and Ada would open their own restaurant—Oh Plum, after both of their last names—together.
Caro liked that Goldie was a small, touristy town that had such cute, trendy boutiques and shops that it felt like a big one. She liked living so close to the lake and the little fuzzy ducks that her grandma stopped for on their drives home so they could cross the street. Caro wasn’t ashamed of living in a trailer park either. Their trailer was nice and cozy. The outside of it was a skyish pale blue draped in twinkle lights. There were kitschy gnomes next to the steps and, for as long as she could remember, a ladybug welcome mat in front of the door. Whenever it got too faded, her grandma bought another exactly like it.
That was what her grandma had always called her too, her whole life: Ladybug. There were lots of places she wanted to go and things she wanted to see, but Caro loved living in Goldie, and she didn’t have plans to leave her grandma alone. Simple as that.
*
At Myrtle’s Diner, Caroline built on the recipes her grandma passed down from her mother and her mother’s mother. “All the way back to Eve,” Mimi would say. Caro loved baking anything—cookies, cakes, tarts, doughnuts, cupcakes, cobblers, pies. Being in a kitchen with sugar in the air made her feel better about the world.
Caro was thinking about turning her grandma’s gooseberry pie into a special at the diner. She’d made the crusts a day early and par baked the bottom one so it wouldn’t get soggy. Now she was in the diner kitchen boiling down a mess of gooseberries she and Kasey had picked at Kasey’s farm over the summer. Her grandma taught them both how to can them; Mimi knew how to do everything.
Myrtle walked around the corner.
“Your grandmama ever tell you about how when we were little, we used to try and sell those mud pies we made down by the church?” Her laughter twinkled like small, sunny bells. Miss Myrtle was one of Caroline’s many surrogate mothers. Her real mom might’ve been a bust, but Mimi made sure Caro grew up surrounded by women who could run the world.
“Oh yes, I do remember her telling me about those mud pies, Miss Myrtle,” Caro said, smiling. Myrtle had some hilarious stories about her grandma, and Caro never got tired of them. She listened to Myrtle talk while she waited for the gooseberries to pop; then it’d be time to add the sugar, flour, and nutmeg. And! Her new additions: orange and ginger.
“Okay then. Well, let me know how your pie turns out, but since you’re making it, I already know it’ll be good. I’m heading home. See you tomorrow,” Myrtle said, getting her white fringe purse off the hook.
“Bye!” Caro said, stirring. She was going to make the pie real pretty with pastry circles and a couple of gooseberries on top. She loved decorating with lattice crust and cutout designs as much as she loved making them. A week ago she’d decorated one of her new favorites—honey pear pie—with little hearts on top.
When the pie was cooling, Caro put it in front of a couple of her favorite customers—two older gentlemen named Louie and Pete who came in almost every night for black coffee and warm treats after dinner. They looked like Statler and Waldorf—the grumpy old men from The Muppet Show who heckled from the balcony—but they were never mean. She cut two slices.
“So, whatcha got for us tonight, Reds?” Pete asked.
Reds. It was what a lot of the customers called her. Between her girlfriends and her grandma, she had a million nicknames already, and her red hair added even more opportunities. She’d heard every possible nickname for a redheaded girl. Big Red because she was five foot ten. Red Delicious by some of the guys who liked to holler out their truck windows as they whizzed by.
Ginger. Ginge. Fire Crotch. Do the carpets match the drapes?
She didn’t mind when the old men called her Reds. They were harmless and they loved her pies.
“Brand-new recipe, testing it out. I could wait for it to cool down some more but since you’re here now, give it a try. It’s my grandma’s gooseberry pie. Canned the gooseberries myself! And then I added some secrets,” Caro said, winking at them.
They both took big bites and dramatically mmm-ed at how good it was. Caro refilled their coffees as they talked to her about the Goldie High baseball team. They tipped more when she pretended to care about sports, and Caro didn’t mind listening.
When they left, there was a crisp twenty-dollar bill slipped underneath the pie plate.
More people had been coming from all over the country to eat at Myrtle’s ever since it’d been featured on one of those American road trip shows on the Food Network some months ago. Caro’s red hair made it onto the broadcast, whipping around the kitchen corner. Rosemarie, Ada, and Kasey liked to tease her about having a famous ponytail.
Myrtle’s was well-known for its double bacon burger platter, its grilled cheese too. Almost every day after school, Caroline was waitressing, sliding plates of fish and fries, meatloaf and potatoes, barbecue sandwiches, and cinnamon apples across the tables. The diner sat down the street from Plum Bakery, next to the antique shop, right where it’d been for almost fifty years after Myrtle’s father had opened it, naming it in honor of his only baby girl.
*
Mimi was waiting out front in her yellow Wagoneer right at ten, and like always, she asked Caro if she’d had time to do her homework.
“A little,” Caro said, lying.
Sure, she’d had the time to do it, but no, she hadn’t done it. Instead, on her breaks, she had sat out back and smoked with Beau, her favorite cook. She’d asked him to teach her how to French inhale, and he was trying his best. Caro didn’t normally smoke, but she smoked with Beau.
Beau had served in the military and now he was home. Beau had a fuzzy shaved head, a pretty mouth, and a way of looking at Caro that made her feel like she was a hologram floating in space. He smoked Camel Lights and loved Cash and Coltrane, drove a white truck with a tackle box in the back. Sometimes when he didn’t know she was looking, he’d put his unlit cigarette between his teeth and flick it back and forth with his tongue the same way Leonardo DiCaprio did in Titanic. And sometimes Beau called her Muffin Mix. He looked at her one day and said it out of nowhere. For all the nicknames she had, Muffin Mix was definitely her favorite.