The Crème de la Crème Bakery had been Glendora’s Café when Sugar Beth was growing up. Unfortunately, the new owner needed someone who could do maintenance work as well as bake, and when she handed Sugar Beth a monkey wrench to demonstrate her skills, the gig was pretty much up. Everything rested on the antique shop.
The charming window display at Yesterday’s Treasures included a child’s rocking horse, an old trunk filled with quilts, and a spool-legged chair with a hand-painted pitcher and washbowl. Sugar Beth’s spirits lifted. What a wonderful place to work. Maybe the owner was new to Parrish, like the woman at the bakery, and wouldn’t know Sugar Beth’s reputation.
The old-fashioned bell above the door tinkled, and the soft strains of Bach’s cello suites enveloped her. She inhaled a spicy potpourri along with the pleasantly musty scent of the past. Antique tables gleamed with English china and Irish crystal. The open drawers of a cherry highboy displayed exquisite old linens. An unusual rosewood desk showcased an array of watch fobs, necklaces, and brooches. Everything in the shop was top quality, perfectly arranged, and beautifully tended.
A woman’s voice called out from the back. “I’ll be right with you.”
“Take your time.”
Sugar Beth was admiring a cheery tableau of Victorian hatboxes, silk violets, and handmade reed baskets filled with speckled brown eggs as a woman stepped from the dim depths at the back of the store. Her dark hair fell in a sophisticated cut that ended just above her jawline. She was neatly dressed in pale gray slacks and a matching sweater with a simple strand of exquisitely matched pearls at her neck.
An icy finger crept along Sugar Beth’s spine. Something about those pearls . . .
The woman smiled. “Hello. How can I—”
And then she stopped. Right where she was, underneath a French chandelier, one foot placed awkwardly in front of the other, the smile frozen on her face.
Sugar Beth would have recognized those eyes anywhere. They were the same shade of crystalline blue that looked back at her from the mirror every morning. Her father’s eyes.
And the eyes of his other daughter.
“If I had a daughter like you, I would be ashamed to own her!” said Mr. Goldhanger, with real feeling.
G
EORGETTE
H
EYER,
The Grand Sophy
CHAPTER FOUR
Old bitterness curdled in Sugar Beth’s stomach. Intelligent men kept their legitimate children separated from their illegitimate ones, but not Griffin Carey. He’d plunked them both in the same town barely three miles apart and, in his utter selfishness, refused to acknowledge how difficult it would be for Sugar Beth and Winnie to go to school together.
He’d gotten two women pregnant within a year—first Diddie, then Sabrina Davis. Diddie kept her head high, expecting him to outgrow his infatuation with a woman she regarded as a mealymouthed nobody. When he hadn’t, she’d chosen to be philosophical. A great woman learns to rise above, Sugar Beth. Let him have his piece of trash. I have Frenchman’s Bride.
Whenever Sugar Beth raged over being forced to go to school with Winnie, Diddie turned uncharacteristically harsh. Nothing’s worse than other people’s pity. You keep your back straight and remember that someday everything he owns will be yours.
But Diddie had been wrong. In the end, he’d changed his will and left everything to Sabrina and Winnie Davis.
The stylish woman standing before her bore little resemblance to the introverted outcast who used to trip over her feet if anyone spoke to her. The old sense of powerlessness crept through Sugar Beth. As a child, she hadn’t been able to control the behavior of any of the adults in her life, so she’d exerted her power in the only way she knew how—over her father’s illegitimate daughter.
Winnie stood motionless near an old pie chest. “What are you doing here?”
She could never say she’d come looking for a job. “I—I saw the shop. I didn’t know it was yours.”
Winnie regained her composure more quickly. “Are you interested in anything special?”
Where had her poise come from? The Winnie Davis Sugar Beth remembered had turned red when anyone spoke to her.
“N-no. I’m just looking.” Sugar Beth heard the stammer in her voice and knew by the flicker of satisfaction in Winnie’s eyes that she’d heard it, too.
“I just got a new shipment in from Atlanta. There are some wonderful old perfume bottles.” She curled her fingers over the strand of perfectly matched pearls at her neck. Sugar Beth stared at the pearls. They looked so—
“I love perfume bottles, don’t you?”
All the blood rushed from her head. Winnie was wearing Diddie’s pearls . . .
“Whenever I see an old perfume bottle, I always wonder about the woman who owned it.” Her fingers caressed the necklace, the gesture deliberate. Cruel.
Sugar Beth couldn’t do this. She couldn’t stand here and look at Diddie’s pearls around Winnie Davis’s neck.
She turned toward the door, but she moved too quickly and bumped against one of the tables the same way Winnie used to bump against desks at school. A brass candlestick wobbled, then fell and rolled to the edge. She didn’t stop to pick it up.
D
inner’s gonna be nasty tonight, and not just because we’re having steak, which I
ree-
fuse to eat due to global warming, et cetera, but because of Her. Why can’t she be more like Chelsea’s mom instead of having such a stick up her butt all the time? I’m not anything like her, no matter what Nana Sabrina says. And I’m not a rich bitch, either.
I hate Kelli Willman.
“Gigi, dinner’s ready.”
As her mother called from the bottom of the stairs, Gigi reluctantly closed the spiral notebook that held the secret diary she’d been keeping since last year in seventh grade. She pushed it under her pillow and swung her legs in their baggy corduroys over the side of her bed. She hated her bedroom, which was decorated in this gay Laura Ashley crap her mother luvvved. Gigi wanted to paint the room either black or purple and trade in all the prehistoric antique furniture for some of the awesome stuff she’d seen at Pier One. Since Win-i-fred wouldn’t let her do that, Gigi’d stuck up rock posters everywhere, the nastier the better.
Setting the table was her job, but when she got to the kitchen, she saw that her mother had already done it. “Did you wash your hands?”
“No, madre, I dragged them through the dirt on my way downstairs.”
Her mother’s lips got tight. “Toss the salad, will you?”
Chelsea’s mom wore low-riders, but Gigi’s mom still had on the boring gray slacks and sweater she’d worn to work. She wanted Gigi to keep on dressing like last year in seventh grade, in all kinds of crap from the Bloomingdale’s catalogue. Her mother didn’t understand what it was like to have everybody call you Miss Rich Bitch behind your back. But Gigi had fixed that. Starting last September she wouldn’t wear anything that didn’t come from the Salvation Army Thrift Shop. It drove Win-i-fred nuts. Gigi’d also stopped acting like such a geek at school. And she’d found cool new friends like Chelsea.
“Mrs. Kimble called about your history test. You got a C.”
“C’s okay. I’m not as smart as you used to be.”
Her mom sighed because she knew it wasn’t true, and for a minute, she looked so sad Gigi wanted to tell her she was sorry for being such a brat, and that she’d start working up to her potential again, but she couldn’t say it. Her mom didn’t understand anything.
Gigi hated being thirteen.
Win-i-fred set the last salad plate on the table. They were using the tea leaf ironstone china tonight, probably because her dad was home for dinner for a change. Their oak pedestal table wasn’t nearly as cool as this awesome French farm table Win-i-fred had sold right out from under them, even though Gigi’d loved it and they didn’t need the money. Gigi wished she’d close the store, or at least hire more people to help out so they could eat something decent for dinner once in a while instead of frozen crap. Her mom said if it bothered Gigi so much, she should cook a few meals herself, completely missing the point.