A New Family for the Cowboy by Liz Isaacson

Author:Liz Isaacson [Isaacson, Liz]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: AEJ Creative Works

The following weekend, she sucked in a breath and held it as she watched the timer she’d set for the six pie crusts she had in the oven. Aunt Shirley busied herself with tart pans, seemingly unconcerned, but the tension in the air was a palpable being.

The buzzer went off, and even though Erin had been staring at the timer, she still jumped. She snatched the towels off the counter and pulled open the oven. She searched the tins, her heart leaping against her breastbone.

“They look brown,” she said. She reached for one, careful to not disturb the flaky pastry she’d so delicately pinched into a pattern along the edge. Erin slowly slid the tin onto the counter, the way she’d seen Aunt Shirley do. After she retrieved all six piecrusts, she beamed at them like they were her babies.

“They look beautiful,” Aunt Shirley said. “In go the next ones.”

Erin startled. “Right.” She collected the next six piecrusts from the fridge and got them in the oven. She twisted the timer, an extraordinary sense of pride filling her. She hadn’t felt like this in a long time. Everything in her life had been coming up as a failure for years, and while something as simple as a piecrust shouldn’t make her so happy, those six, golden pastries brought her inexplicable joy.

“No time for staring. You’ve got fillings to make.” Aunt Shirley laughed, and Erin joined in. She reached for the recipe for lemon curd, the first pie her aunt was trusting her with. Seemed like a lot of whisking.

“And these go on the cooling rack,” Aunt Shirley said as she passed with a tray of tart shells. She stuck them in the bottom oven and helped Erin get the piecrusts where they belonged. Erin had no idea pastry could sweat, and she didn’t want to ruin what she’d worked so hard to achieve.

Nothing could dampen her mood that day, and the hours selling doughnuts, rolls, bread, and cookies passed in a blink of an eye. She headed upstairs, where her routine had really started to get into her blood. Shower. Eat lunch. Take a nap. In the late afternoon, when she woke, she wandered through Oxbow Park behind her house. She’d found a footbridge about a half a block down from the bakery that led across the stream, and though she’d been visiting for a few days, the park was so large that she hadn’t explored all of it yet.

She always returned to her apartment by five o’clock, hoping to see Blake, but he hadn’t come all week. He’d been texting her, and she’d learned that he wasn’t one for phone conversations. The one she’d tried to engage him in had gone poorly and lasted for only three minutes and twelve seconds.

She smiled just thinking about him. If he didn’t come down to the bakery tonight, she was planning to get in her car and get herself up the canyon. The road went both ways, and if he was too

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