Oops, Wrong Bride? Fine. No Wedding. novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: Help in the Back

Liza walks out of her mother's bakery with the recipe book and the whole staff, loses her home and her money, and rents a loft from Hayes, until the police pull in.

"Help in the back," Hayes said under his breath. "Want me to drop the cake on her?"

"No," I said. "It's a good cake."

I took the tier back from him and walked out of the Harbor House with it held in front of me.

Nobody stopped me.

I slept that night on Emmy's couch in her apartment over a laundromat, still in half my gown, with Biscuit snoring on my feet.

Emmy Cayce had decorated cakes beside me at Sweetgrass for six years.

She ate the top tier of my wedding cake straight off the gold board with a fork, cross-legged on the floor, and cried harder than I did.

"Your daddy," she kept saying. "Your own daddy, Liza."

"I know."

"Gave our bakery to that bottle-blond Instagram witch."

"I know, Em."

"I'm going to key her car."

"You're going to work Monday," I said. "We both are."

At four on Monday morning, Sweetgrass smelled the way it always did.

Butter, yeast, burnt sugar, the lemon oil my mother swore by.

I tied my apron and turned on the ovens.

The crew came in one by one, yawning, and every one of them hugged me without a word.

At four forty-five, the back door banged open.

Shelby walked in with a ring light on a stand and her phone already filming.

Trey trailed behind her carrying two iced coffees, in loafers, on a flour-dusted floor.

"Good morning, team!" Shelby sang. "Day one as owner! Say hi, everybody!"

Nobody said hi.

She aimed the phone at me.

"And this is Liza, our baker. She's been with Sweetgrass, like, forever."

"Since I was in diapers," I said. "My mother opened it."

"Okay, so today we're doing my signature pink cupcakes," she went on, to the phone. "Strawberry, with a little edible glitter. Liza, babe, can you get started on those?"

"We don't make pink cupcakes."

"We do now." She smiled. "It's my bakery."

I looked over at the shelf above the mixer.

My mother's recipe book sat where it had sat my whole life.

A fat green clothbound ledger, its spine held together with tape, the pages stiff with thirty years of butter fingerprints.

I took it down.

"What are you doing?" Shelby said.

I opened the cover so the ring light lit it up.

In my mother's slanting hand, in blue ink: For Liza, when it's hers.

"Taking what's mine," I said.

I untied my apron and laid it folded on the steel table.

For a second, nobody moved.

Then Emmy pulled her bandana off her red curls and dropped it on top of my apron.

"I'm out," she said.

The two bread bakers looked at each other and untied theirs.

Then the dishwasher, who'd worked there since before I was born.

Then the girl who ran the register, who was nineteen and shaking, and did it anyway.

Five aprons on the table.

Shelby's phone was still filming.

"You can't just leave," she said. "We open at six."

"Then you'd better learn to bake," Emmy said.

Trey stepped in front of the back door.

"Liza, come on. You can't do this to Shelby."

"Trey," I said. "Move."

He moved.

We walked out the front instead, all six of us, at six o'clock sharp.

The line of regulars out on King Street watched us go past in our street clothes.

The old man who bought a lemon square every morning for his wife looked at me.

"Where you going, sugar?"

"I don't know yet," I said. "I'll tell you when I get there."

Trey's condo was in a new building off East Bay. I'd lived there with him for two years.

My key didn't work.

My things were on the curb out front in black trash bags.

My mixer. My winter coat. My mother's cast iron skillet, sticking out of a bag, already rusting from the dew.

A neighbor walking his dog stepped around it.

I sat down on the curb beside my life and opened my banking app.

Our joint account had held eleven thousand four hundred dollars, the last of my savings after the wedding.

It held twelve dollars.

The transfer had gone out at two in the morning. Memo: honeymoon upgrade.

I called Emmy.

"My couch is yours," she said. "Biscuit will share."

"Your couch is four feet long, Em."

"Biscuit will share less."

I hung up and looked at the bags for a long time.

Then I called a cab with a big trunk and gave the driver an address in Mount Pleasant, across the river.

The boatyard sat at the end of a shell road on Shem Creek.

Two big sheds, a blue travel lift, a wooden sailboat up on stands with half her planks off.

The shrimp boats were coming in past the docks, gulls screaming behind them.

Hayes was under the sailboat's hull with a plane in his hand and wood curls stuck to his forearms.

He saw the cab, then me, then the trash bags.

He set the plane down.

"You said there was an empty sail loft," I said. "I want to rent it."

"It's full of old canvas and one dead raccoon."

"I'll take the raccoon out myself. How much?"

"Nothing. Just use it."

"Then no deal. I don't take free things from Mattoxes anymore."

He looked at me for a long moment, wiping his hands on a rag.

"Nine hundred a month," he said finally.

"Done."

I stuck out my hand. He shook it. His palm was rough and warm and he held on a second too long.

Then tires crunched on the shell road behind me.

A Charleston police cruiser pulled into the yard and stopped beside my trash bags.

Right behind it came my father's silver Lexus.

The officer got out with a notepad.

"Ma'am, are you Liza Gatling? We've had a report of a stolen item from a business on King Street. A recipe book."

In the Lexus's passenger seat sat Shelby, her phone pressed to the window, filming.

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