Hilary Fields - Bliss

Pie.

Glorious pie.

Her nose told the tale before her taste buds even got involved. Tangy, sweet, and buttery engaged in a naughty ménage à trois upon her senses, first wafting to her nostrils in sinful delight, then seducing her eyes as Sera took in the airy lightness of the crisscross crust, the perfect crystallization of sugar and caramelized filling oozing through the latticework cracks. And when she tasted the pie… The things the flavors did to her tongue were positively unspeakable—and utterly unforgettable.

Mama, I’m home, Sera thought, and dug in with a will.

After the ludicrously nummy slices of heaven they proceeded to consume—strawberry rhubarb for Sera and cherry with crumble crust for Aruni—Sera thought perhaps she’d need not just dancing shoes but a full day at the gym to work off the unexpected midday calories. More important, she had decided that pie had to be on her bakery’s menu. She rubbed her tummy and sighed.

“I forget how awesome a good old-fashioned slice of pie can be,” Sera commented. “Pastry chefs in New York are always trying to one-up one another with new techniques. I’ve seen cooks concocting desserts with everything from liquid nitrogen to cigarette-smoked salt crystals. Half the time you can’t figure out whether you’re taking a bite or dismantling a fusion reactor, at some of the places I’ve worked. But this… This really hit the spot. The crust isn’t quite as flaky as mine,” she said ruminatively as she stared at the last delectable bite on her fork, “but man, that filling is just ridiculously tasty. It’s not easy to get rhubarb to cooperate this nicely, the way it just practically melts under your fork. And the strawberries. Damn, they’re good. So fresh, so tender. I wonder if I could have a word with their pastry chef…”

Aruni choked on a sip of her decaf tea. “Um, I don’t think you’d want to do that.”

“Really?” Sera asked, popping the last morsel in her mouth and closing her eyes to savor the taste. “Why not?”

“Well, I happen to know they get their pies from an outside vendor and he… well, he’s not…”

“Not what?” Sera asked when Aruni seemed reluctant to continue.

“Not… er… nice,” Aruni finished lamely. Sera could tell she was uncomfortable bad-mouthing anyone, farkackte ex-boyfriends notwithstanding.

“Is that right?” Sera mused, thinking of the pastry chefs she knew. Contrary to popular opinion, bakers weren’t all sugar and spice. Some of them were fire and brimstone. A bit of an attitude in a fellow pastry chef wasn’t going to put her off. “Well, I’d still like to meet the guy, talk shop for a couple minutes. Maybe I can get his name and number from the waitress…” She started to look around for Janice.

Aruni looked alarmed, but she didn’t try to stop Sera. “I guess it can’t do any harm, but don’t say you haven’t been warned. The guy’s on a really bad karmic streak. But I suppose it may be your only chance to get a taste of these pies again, if what I heard from Janice is true.”

Sera arched an eyebrow in question.

“Janice told me the pie whisperer is getting fired—that’s one of the reasons I suggested we come here particularly, so we wouldn’t miss our last chance to get ’em. Apparently, he’s insulted one too many customers, and the management is sick of soothing ruffled feathers all the time. He has a bakery nearby and he caters out of it, but he keeps scaring all the customers away, and now most of the local restaurant managers are tired of his attitude, too. I heard his whole operation’s shutting down. Everything’s going up for auction next week.”

“Huh,” Sera mused. “This pie whisperer wouldn’t be named Malcolm, by any chance?” she inquired.

“Yeah, how’d you know, girl?” Aruni was round-eyed. “You psychic or something?”

Sera shook her head. Santa Fe really is just a small town at heart, I guess. “Asher told me about a restaurant auction he thought I should check out. Said I should look for a guy named Malcolm, but not to take anything he says too personally.”

“Yup, that’s the one, I’m pretty sure. Malcolm the Meanie’s putting it all up for sale.” Aruni shrugged. Then her eyes twinkled as her train of thought switched rails. “So I guess you’ve met our sexy landlord, eh?”

“He’s your landlord, too?” Sera didn’t have to ask if they were talking about the same person.

“Asher owns our whole placita, pretty much. At least, the buildings are his, and he leases all the shops.”

“Wow,” Sera said. “He must be well off.” Sexy, wildly talented, and wealthy. Women must hunt him down with a spear.

Aruni nodded. “I heard he was a world-class whatchamacall it, that instrument-making word… loo, lute-something, back in Israel.”

“Luthier,” Sera said. “I had to ask him what it meant, too.”

“Well, it must be pretty lu-crative, because Pauline told me one time that his violins used to go for, like, fifty K a pop.”

Sera smiled to herself, noting Aruni sounded a bit more hard-nosed Chicagoan than woo-woo Santa Fe head. “Wonder why he gave it up,” she mused.

“I heard it had to do with his wife,” Aruni said, looking suitably somber. “We think he’s probably divorced, or maybe even a widower. None of us really knows the story, but we all suspect there’s some terrible tragedy there.”

Sera felt a pang, thinking of what Asher must have lost. Given the way he’d reacted in his shop earlier when she’d asked if Lupe was his wife, she had to agree—something awful had happened in Asher’s past. “Who is ‘we’?” Sera wanted to know.

“Oh, us Back Roomies. Asher comes up in conversation at our shindigs quite a lot, as you can imagine. I mean, seriously…” Aruni drew the word out like a veritable Valley Girl. “Who wouldn’t have sexual fantasies about that guy? I don’t care if you’re happily married, gay, or stark stone dead, one smile from Asher Wolf and your libido will sit up and howl.” Aruni flapped her hand as if to cool it off.

You ain’t just whistling Dixie, Sera thought. But she declined to offer an opinion on the subject. She had decided she liked Aruni rather a lot, but she wasn’t quite ready to start sharing girlish confidences with the other woman yet. She wasn’t the type who dished about her love life with anyone.

That’s because there’s nothing to dish up, other than a heaping plate of failure with a side of humiliation, Sera’s inner critic reminded her. In her mind’s eye, she could hear Blake’s scornful laughter, and her mouth went dry with vestigial longing for a drink. Down, girl, she ordered the little fiend that lurked in the dark corners of her mind, always ready to prey on moments of self-doubt. Time to get my butt to a meeting; remind myself I’m two thousand miles and a world of recovery away from all that negativity.

“Not that Asher pays the slightest attention to our mooning over him,” Aruni went on, unaware of Sera’s morose musings. “He’s, like, the nicest, sweetest guy, and no way is he into guys or anything, but I’ve never seen him notice a woman in that way. Not even Lupe,” Aruni said, making the name sound as if she’d scraped it off her shoe. “And if that hussy can’t get a rise out of him, with all her cleavage plumping and ass wiggling, I doubt the rest of us have much of a shot. Whatever it was that happened to him back in Israel, it really did a number on him.” Aruni shook her curly head feelingly. “But hey, that’s what a lot of us come to Santa Fe for. To ditch the past and find our second chance. Well, those of us who didn’t follow our putz of a boyfriend out here.” She laughed unself-consciously. “Oh, I never asked. What’s your man sitch, Sera? You married? Dating? Getting over someone?”

Sera grimaced. “No, there isn’t anyone special in my life, and there hasn’t been for a long time. Kind of got my buns burned, if you know what I mean.”

Aruni nodded sympathetically.

“Right now, I’m really more focused on getting my bakery up and running than on getting laid,” Sera continued. “But please,” she hastened, “don’t tell that to Pauline. She’d have a spazz if she knew I wasn’t keen on finding someone to hop in the sack with.” Serafina flushed, lowering her voice to an agonized whisper. “You can’t know what it was like, growing up with Aunt Pauline always pushing me to be more ‘out there,’ as if getting some would solve all my problems…”

“I hear ya, sister. I love Pauline like she was my own aunt, but seriously, I can’t keep up with that dame. Tell you what. You keep me in sweet stuff, and I’ll keep your sex life—or lack thereof—our little secret.”

The two women high-fived across the Formica table. “Deal.”

I’m so glad you’re not giving up on the orgasms, dear.”

Serafina started, face instantly flaming. She glanced around to see if anyone had heard Pauline’s overly loud comment, but the aisles of the Whole Heart supermarket were free from tittering eavesdroppers. Could Pauline actually know? Sera thought with a spurt of panic. Visions of what Pauline would say—and do—if she knew the truth about her niece sent tendrils of dread down Sera’s spine. Then she relaxed a bit as realization dawned. Her aunt was talking about tonight’s meeting of the Back Room Babes, and Sera’s agreement to allow the club to continue despite the shop’s changing hands.

I’m just groggy from the flight, she reassured herself. She’d only returned late last night, and the supermarket was their first stop this morning, since Sera needed some basics for the house. More than that, she’d wanted to scope out the grocery situation and get a feel for what everyday life would really be like in Santa Fe. The answer, she’d already decided, was A-okay. Sure, Whole Heart was wildly pretentious. Pauline liked to call it “Whole Paycheck” and mutter about how much better the place had been—how much more authentic—when it was still just a local grocery called Wild Oats. It seemed pretty authentic to Sera—at least, as authentic as earnest, sustainable supermarkets could get. It smelled like a health food shop, the dry air carrying a whiff of the musty, tangy scent that always reminded her of the inside of a vitamin bottle, commingled with the odors of homemade soaps, bulk cereals that tasted like hamster feed, and always, always, the faint hint of patchouli that emanated from no evident source. She figured it must be the echoes of generations of hippies who had settled into middle-aged complacency but couldn’t quite leave behind their bohemian youth, wandering the aisles in search of enlightenment and lower cholesterol.

While you could get any kind of spelt flour, seventeen varieties of organic low-foaming shampoo, or a free-range bison steak complete with birth certificate and pictures of said buffalo frolicking on the prairie as a calf, nowhere in evidence were such simple pleasures as Oreos and Diet Coke. For that, Pauline had assured her, her needs could be amply supplied at the local Albertsons. But for the kind of yogurt Pauline preferred—goat’s milk with locally gathered honey (great for vaginal balance, if Serafina knew what she meant)—and granola that would convince Sera that granola actually tasted good, nowhere but this supermarket, with its cool sea foam décor and wide, well-stocked aisles, would do. Sera had to admit, compared to the cramped, tiny-carted, uptight grocery stores she’d frequented in Manhattan, this was a pretty sweet deal, Oreos or no Oreos.

Pauline was wheeling their cart through the deli section, passing displays of farmer’s cheese and sourdough bread that made Sera’s empty stomach rumble longingly as she followed her aunt toward the dairy case at the back. Today Pauline had braided her rough-and-tumble hair into a long rope, just a few frizzy strands escaping to frame her lined but lively face. Her T-shirt invited readers to “Ask me how I DO IT,” and Sera was grateful the accompanying diagram was covered by the gray cashmere cardigan she was sporting—a gift from Sera last Christmas that already looked like it had seen nearly as much love as its owner. Her skirt was a cheerful red broomstick affair, threaded with silver tinsel and chiming with the little Tibetan bells Pauline loved so much.

“You’re still serious about keeping the back room the way it is, right, kiddo?” Pauline persisted as she scanned the yogurt selection. “I mean, I’d hate to have to tell the gals that tonight’s their last get-together. Their climactic moment, if you get what I’m saying.” She gave a burlesque-worthy pelvic thrust that set her skirt bells chiming.