mother’s or Merry’s striking beauty or outgoing personality. That just wasn’t who she was. And that was okay. She would have never been comfortable being beautiful. Happily married to Nick and eight months pregnant, Merry still drew constant male looks wherever she went. Janey couldn’t imagine that. She would have hated it.
Convincing Dan of that, however, would have been impossible. An old family friend, he’d known her all her life and made no secret of the fact that he thought she was every bit as beautiful as the rest of the family. Returning his hug fondly, she promised, “I’ll do what I can.”
She told herself it would be easy. She would make a point of seeking him out when he came by the nursing home for rounds, and she was bound to run into him at the hospital when she was working rescue with the volunteer fire department. There wouldn’t, however, be much time to talk during work, so she had to find another way to make him feel welcome.
“I’ll make him a cake and take it over to the cabin,” she decided as she drove home after her shift. It was the neighborly thing to do, and her mother had an excellent chocolate cake recipe. She’d never made it before, personally, but how hard could it be? All she had to do was follow directions.
Wednesday night was the regular meeting of her mother’s bridge club at Myrtle’s, so Janey wasn’t surprised to find the house deserted when she got home. Her mother loved bridge and seldom missed a night out with the girls. Thankfully, Janey knew where she kept her recipes. Taking time only to change out of her nurse’s uniform into jeans and a T-shirt, she hurried back downstairs and tied on an apron.
She should have known she was in trouble when she finally found the recipe in her mother’s recipe box and discovered that it was nothing more than a list of ingredients written down in Sara’s neat hand. There were no directions, no indication of what order the ingredients were mixed or even what temperature the cake should be baked at. Frowning, Janey considered calling Sara at Myrtle’s, but she really hated to disturb the game, especially for something so minor. She’d watched her mother make the cake dozens of times over the years. Surely she could figure it out by herself. Quickly gathering all the ingredients and setting them out on the counter, she began.
Her memory wasn’t the best, but if she remembered correctly, the sugar, chocolate, butter and vanilla were in the icing, so by process of elimination, she deduced the contents of the cake. Pleased with herself, she tossed everything into the mixing bowl and turned the mixture on high. Now all she had to do was grease and flour the sheet cake pan and she could start baking. Grinning, she could just see her mother’s face when she came in and discovered she’d actually baked a cake. She’d be shocked!
The scent of burning chocolate hit Sara in the face the second she stepped through the front door. Surprised, she frowned. What was going on? She was sure she hadn’t left anything in the oven, and Janey didn’t usually venture into the kitchen on her own unless it was to heat up something in the microwave. Scrambled eggs was about the extent of her culinary repertoire, and with good reason. The last time she’d tried to bake something, she’d been twelve, and she’d nearly set the house on fire.
Alarmed by the memory, Sara rushed into the kitchen to find Janey peering doubtfully into the oven. “Janey!” she sighed in relief when she saw there was no smoke filling the room as she’d half feared. “What’s going on? I smelled something burning and thought the house was on fire!”
“I was making a cake,” she replied in disgust as she looked around in vain for the pot holders, “but I think I burned it. Don’t you put the oven on five hundred when you bake a cake?”
“Good Lord, no, honey! Not if you want it to be edible.” Quickly grabbing the pot holders she kept on a hook next to the stove, Sara jerked open the oven door and rescued what was left of the cake. Not surprisingly, it was a pitiful sight. Shrunk to half the size of the sheet pan, it was nothing but a hard, charred glob.
When Janey groaned at the sight of it, it was all Sara could do not to laugh. Pressing her lips tightly together, it was several long moments before she could manage to turn to her with a straight face. Even then her voice had a tendency to wobble with laughter. “Is that my chocolate cake recipe?”
Janey nodded glumly. “Somehow it didn’t turn out like yours does. What’d I do wrong besides cook it to death?”
From the looks of it, everything, but Sara couldn’t bring herself to say that. Not when Janey had gone to so much trouble. Pulling out a chair at the kitchen table that had been in the family longer than anyone could remember, she patted the spot next to her. “We’ll get to that. First, sit down and tell me what brought this all about. The last time you wanted to cook, you still had braces on your teeth.”
Wincing, Janey remembered that occasion all too well. Her brothers still teased her about it. “Please,” she begged, “let’s don’t even go there. I was just trying to be nice to Reilly, like Dan asked me to, and I blew it.”
“Reilly?” her mother repeated, surprised. “All this was for Reilly Jones?”
Janey nodded and told her about her first meeting with Reilly several days ago, then her encounter with him earlier in the day at the nursing home. “He’s a very unhappy man. Dan thinks he needs a friend, so I thought I would make him a cake and take it over to the cabin. You know, sort of a welcome-to-the-neighborhood type thing.” Wrinkling her nose at the miserable excuse for a cake, she had to laugh. “So much for good intentions. I guess I should have just stopped at Ed’s on the way home from work and bought a pie. At least that would have been edible.”
So why hadn’t she? Sara wondered. What was it about Reilly Jones that had inspired her to make a cake for him? Janey had never done such a thing before for any man, let alone one she’d only just met. What in the world was going on?
Questions buzzing around in her head, Sara told herself not to be nosy. Janey was a grown woman and certainly didn’t have to answer to her mother. And Sara didn’t want to say anything that might make her feel self-conscious. Not when she appeared to be showing an interest in a man for the first time in her life. “Don’t give up hope,” she said, dumping the burned cake in the trash. “He’ll be able to eat yours, too. We’ll just make another one.”
Sara could have whipped up her famous hot fudge cake in record time, but this was Janey’s cake, not hers. So after helping her assemble fresh ingredients, she patiently gave her step by step instructions, then watched her every move to make sure she didn’t make any mistakes.
Pleased with herself when she finally pulled the finished product from the oven, Janey had to admit that the cake didn’t look anything like the one her mother usually made, but she couldn’t complain. It might not look pretty, but compared to her first effort, it was a virtual masterpiece.
“Thanks, Mom,” she said, hugging her. “I don’t know what I would have done without you. Do you think it’s too late to take it over to the cabin tonight?”
“No, it’s early yet, and I’m sure Reilly will appreciate the gesture,” she assured her. “While you’re there, why don’t you invite him to join the decorating committee for the Christmas festival? The festival’s just two weeks away, and the first committee meeting is Monday.”
It was a great idea, one Janey knew she should have thought of herself. Every year the town celebrated Christmas by turning the town square into a winter wonderland the second weekend in December. There were food and crafts booths, not to mention a complete village for Santa and his elves, and they were all constructed by the decorating committee, which was comprised of volunteers from all over the county. Because the committee meetings were as much fun as the festival itself,
