as shy and thin as her sister was chatty and chubby. “You’ve grown up so, um, pretty,” she said.
“Thanks,” Mariah said, though the woman was obviously just being polite. Mariah’s fingers flew to her curly hair, the tips of which she’d bleached white, and she looked down at her baggy pants, black tank-top and studded bracelet. Pretty, she wasn’t. Arty, maybe. Interesting, but not pretty.
“Is that my girl I hear?” Her father’s booming voice came to her and he marched down the hall toward her. He wore his big green cooking apron, so she knew he’d been in the mixing room. “About time you got here. Ole Nate’s been champing at the bit to put you to work.” He put his arm around her. “Come on, I’ll take you to him. Isn’t it great to see her?” he asked Lenore.
“Just wonderful,” Lenore chirped.
“We’d better get going,” Mariah said, uncomfortable in the Kodak moment of it all. She hurt inside, feeling loved and valued and dead certain she’d disappoint these people. She had the urge to run before she could actually let them down. Instead, she followed her father down the hall past his office to a frosted-glass door, stenciled with Nathan’s name and title.
Nathan looked up, then glanced at his watch and frowned. He’d noted how late she was. She tried to look innocent.
“Here’s your new partner,” her father said to Nathan.
“Dad, I’m not a partner, I’m—”
“Observing, yeah, yeah. Anyway, Mariah, Nate here has been my right hand. He knows everything I know and does half of it better,” her father said, resting a hand affectionately on Nathan’s shoulders.
“I’ve just done what needed doing, Abe. You set up the business and now it practically runs itself.”
Affection passed between the two men and Mariah felt a surprising jolt of loneliness. What would it have been like to share the workday with her father in the family business? To have him describe her as his “right hand.”
Suffocating, that’s what it would have been. She’d have been controlled, bossed, fussed over, and watched every minute. Thank goodness she’d escaped.
“You should be very proud, Abe,” Nathan continued. “You’ve left a tremendous legacy.”
“Hold on. I’m just retiring, not dying. I’m just handing it over to you two.”
“Dad, I’m just—”
“Observing. Right. Well, I’ve got to get back to the gumdrops. I’ll leave you two…all on your own.” He gave Nate a wink.
A wink! Like there was going to be hanky-panky or something. She felt herself blush and fought it down. She was relieved to see that Nate had turned a matching pink. She changed the subject. “I guess I’m a little late.”
“Ninety-two minutes,” he said, his brow dipping. “I thought you’d reneged on our deal.”
“I just lost track of time. I tend to do that. My mind is such a whirly-gig.” Her stomach tightened at the words. She usually fought the airhead impression she sometimes left because of the way she dressed and how her brain spun, kaleidoscope-like. She believed you could be professional without being all linear and uptight. With Nathan, however, her job was to intensify the effect. She needed to be airhead incarnate.
The misrepresentation would be worth it to be done with this and gone. Plus, the more irritated he was with her, the less attractive he’d be. Men who got annoyed with her were complete turnoffs. Which was exactly what she needed to be around Nathan—turned off. “I just can’t help being a butterfly.”
“Right,” he said, rolling his eyes at her. Perfect. She’d already gotten the eye roll. Soon she’d get the heavy sigh, the head-shake, then the lecture. She’d argue, and it would be happily downhill from there.
He looked her over. “I see you’re dressing for success.”
Oooh, even better. He was already insulting her. “So, this is your office,” she said, ignoring the dig.
“It could easily become yours.”
She gave an exaggerated shudder. It was so not her. The place looked like a museum display of an office—practically shellacked into neatness. Perfectly arranged file folders, everything at right angles. There were no stacks of paper, no open books, scattered pens or left-over fast-food meals. If Nathan was as hopelessly anal-retentive as he seemed, frustrating him would be easier than she’d thought.
“I’m just finishing up analyzing the month’s receipts and the profit-loss statement,” Nathan said. “It’s all on computer. I’ll show you if you’ll step over here.”
“Oh, I believe you,” she said, barely glancing his way.
“I had this software customized to suit our process,” he said. “With it, I can track cost per candy, and—”
He looked up as she started the steel-ball perpetual motion pendulum toy clacking on his desk. “Go on,” she said innocently. “You can track…?”
With an irritated sigh, he reached out and stopped the steel balls from knocking together. “Would you come here and look at this?”
“Maybe later. I’m deadly with numbers.” She grinned sweetly at him, then picked up a manipulable desk sculpture made of small metal diamonds shaped around a magnet, and changed its rectilinear shape to a helix.
He did not like that, she could see. This was fun. “Why don’t you show me the plant?” she asked.
“All right.” Nathan pushed away from his desk, stood and came toward her, wearing a long-suffering expression.
At the doorway, she paused to brush her finger on a bad painting on the wall, so that it hung slightly crooked. Then she picked up a huge geode from the top of his bookcase to examine its purple-and-white crystal interior before placing it on a lower shelf before she walked out, watching Nathan as he followed.
Sure enough, he paused to straighten the picture and replace the geode. She smiled. Things were going like clockwork.
At the end of the hall, Nathan pushed open a double door into a wide hallway where the factory began. The hum of human activity, machinery, and steam filled the air, along with the familiar smell of her childhood—candy cooking. Nathan led the way to the first archway. “The mixing room. Where we put it all together.” He led her farther into the room.
“I remember,” she said. “When I was a kid, everything in here seemed so huge.” She’d loved to watch her daddy work with the gigantic mixing bowls with their huge mechanical stirrers.
“Almost all of our products—the jelly, jellied candies, taffy and lollipops—come from the juice of the prickly pear cactus fruit,” he said, sounding like a tour guide. “Summer is prickly pear harvest time. Over just six weeks each summer, we process all the juice we’ll use for a year’s product. We had an exceptional harvest this year. In fact, we’ll be freezing a substantial amount for next year. Here’s where it starts.” He indicated a huge vat where red bulbs of cactus fruit bobbed and bubbled in boiling water.
“Once the fruit is softened, we crush it
