Devils in the Sugar Shop by Timothy Schaffert

Author:Timothy Schaffert
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Unbridled Books
Published: 2006-09-14T16:00:00+00:00

Ashley, Deedee & Viv

Ashley, distracted, scalded a delicate buttermilk pudding and wrecked a torte, so she put on her pea coat and abandoned her kitchen, heading off to La Buvette. Her party was only a few hours off, but she couldn’t quite stand another minute alone in the apartment. She took the usual table in the back near the dusty jars of exotic spices and boxes of water crackers and bags of basmati rice. The happy-hour crowd was subdued. Her glass near her lips, she watched the flicker from a candle on the wall reflected in a row of black bottles of red wine.

Her hearing tried to catch up with the flow of the song from the speakers overhead, and finally she recognized it, Roy Eldridge doing a rainy-day riff on “If I Had You.” A cork popped, a spoon rang as it stirred sugar in a cup, an old woman, smoky-throated, laughed a laugh that echoed. A wine glass fell and rolled but didn’t break, and those who witnessed applauded.

At the front of La Buvette, the walls on either side of the front door were not really walls at all but rather French doors of a sort that unlocked and unlatched down the middle, the wine bar and grocery having originated years ago as a fruit stand in the marketplace. In the spring, the waiters pulled open the walls and pushed the tables out, and the sunlight rushed in to make everyone squint and perk up. Ashley felt transported whenever she saw those doors open on the first warm day of the year. Omaha was at its most magical when it most resembled some other city.

“Smell me,” Deedee said the second she arrived, holding out the back of her hand. She’d gone home to clean up. She still wore that pelt of chinchilla but beneath it now was a violet-colored dress swirled with paisley. “Smells like cedar chips in a guinea pig’s cage, right? It’s spray-on tan.” She pulled her hand back and sniffed at herself, wrinkling her nose.

Deedee ordered a shot of chilled Southern Comfort from Jones, the waiter they always demanded, a skinny twentysomething with a drooping faux-hawk who played the dulcimer in an indie band.

“What are you thieving now?” Deedee asked. Ashley had taken out her little notebook and golf pencil.

“Spray-on tan,” she said. “Guinea pig cage.” Since her new erotic novel was meeting with rejection, Ashley was de-sexing it and re-peopling it, taking notes, filling the book with her friends’ and family’s oddball idiosyncrasies. Maybe she would render this book impossibly personal, unpublishable. She missed her old life already, in many ways, back when publishing a novel had been simply a dream. And now Peyton was in college, Lee weirdly almost of age, Troy so suddenly mysterious despite her having gotten to know him backward and forward many years ago. She thought ahead and saw herself an old lady wishing she’d recorded all those years of conversation with Viv and Deedee at La Buvette. The

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