Bill wondered how soon he would regret his magnanimous gesture. Jellybean sensed a change in the air and tried to bolt, but Bill had managed to snag the leash before the dog escaped.
Fiona held up her hands, wanting to hold the leash.
“You can take charge of Jellybean, Fee, but let’s wash first,” Bill said, eyeing the red smears on her fingers. “You’re all sticky from the lollipop. Go in the bathroom and clean up.”
Fiona’s mouth pinched into a stubborn pucker, and she shook her head.
“Go now, Fee,” Bill said, “or you can’t hold the leash.”
Fiona refused. When she did not get the coveted leash, she sat hard on her bottom, stuck her fingers in her mouth, and began to smack her feet against the floor. Soon tears gushed down her face. Bill looked on in confusion.
“Uh…”
Fiona’s shoes whomped harder, vibrating the linoleum. Jellybean would have thrown himself onto the pounding limbs if Bill hadn’t held fast to the leash.
Fiona’s face grew wet with tears, and her nose ran.
Bill felt panic building inside as he looked around for someone to come and handle the problem, until he realized he was now that someone. The choices spooled through his brain. Should he reason with her? Carry her to the bathroom and forcibly wash her hands? Give her the silly leash already to stop the eruption?
“I haven’t seen her do this before,” he said out of the corner of his mouth to Misty.
Misty cocked her head. “It’s a temper tantrum. Pretty common for this age.”
Common? He’d never seen her do it when Dillon and Bella were alive. It was the kind of thing he would call his mother about if he wasn’t so worried that his father would answer the phone. Then it would be a tense chat in which he tried to paint the success of Chocolate Heaven in glowing colors and his father attempted to sound interested in his son’s newest ridiculous venture. Nope. He’d have to figure this one out on his own.
Fiona kicked so hard one of her shoes flew off, sending Jellybean into a barking frenzy as he lunged for it until Bill pulled him back. Misty appeared completely calm.
“What should I do?” he asked.
“Nothing.”
Nothing? “Huh? That doesn’t seem right. She’s really upset. I should be doing something.”
“Doing nothing is doing something. You just let her have her blowup, and most importantly, you don’t let her get her way until she does what you want.”
He tried to keep the doubt from his voice. “Are you sure? She’s been through a lot.” His voice dropped to a whisper. “Losing her parents and moving here. It turned her world upside down.” Along with mine, he thought. It was a nutty world indeed when Bill Woodson became the disciplinarian.
“That’s true, but she needs to feel like you’re a parent, and a parent says no sometimes. She needs walls to bounce off of so she knows she’s safe.”
The word parent startled Bill. It was the first moment it had actually dawned on him that he was now, for better or for worse, Fiona’s parent. The notion started twin rivers of love and terror coursing through him. “I haven’t really thought about it like that…I mean, that I’m her parent now. Not just Uncle Bill.” He stared at Fiona a while longer. “This is a permanent job, isn’t it?”
A note of something shone in Misty’s face. Could it be admiration? He didn’t see how.
“Yes, it is. You’ve taken on a lot.”
He blew out a breath. “There was no other choice, really. My parents aren’t in good health, and Fiona’s aunt, Bella’s sister, is a geophysicist for an oil company, so she’s all over the world. She was in Africa at the tail end of a yearlong assignment when the accident happened.”
“There is always another choice.” She reached out and put a tentative hand on his forearm. “You stepped up. That took an amazing amount of courage.”
Yes, it was admiration he saw in her coffee-colored eyes. He let himself savor the feel of her hand on his arm for a moment until doubts crept in. Dillon and Bella were smart achiever types, a far cry from a guy who was struggling to make a living selling sweets. His heart, not his head, had led him to take in his little niece. He would never measure up in the parenting department. There were just not enough YouTube videos to shape Bill Woodson into a sharp enough parent for Fiona. Worry bubbled up inside him.
His mother’s words echoed in his heart. “God made you to shine a light, Bill. You don’t get to pick what kind of candle you get.” He figured he’d been allotted a tiny birthday candle compared to a petawatt laser he’d seen on TV. Still, he thought, straightening, if God gave him a puny birthday candle, he might as well make the flicker useful.
“Okay. So I do nothing,” he murmured to bolster his courage. “Right.”
Together they watched the tantrum build to storm levels, Jellybean barking his concern. Just when he was about at his breaking point, when he feared Fiona was about to asphyxiate in her rage, it was over. She sat up and looked at Bill. Bill looked at Misty. Misty gave him a reassuring nod. Jellybean shook his ears as if in encouragement.
Bill cleared his throat. “Go wash now, Fiona.”
Fiona got up, put on her runaway shoe, and went to the trailer bathroom to wash her hands.
Bill tried not to gape outright at his first parenting success.
“You were right. It did work.”
Misty laughed. “Yeah.”
When Fiona returned, Bill handed her the leash, and Jellybean was delighted to lead her outside into the sunshine.
In a flood of excitement and gratitude, Bill gave in to his feelings and wrapped Misty in a hug.
“Thank you,” he murmured, pressing his lips to the perfect shell of her ear.
His heart danced up to a faster tempo at the feel of her soft body, the press of her silken hair against his cheek. He imagined she relaxed in his embrace, leaned her head to his chest, welcomed their sudden connection.
When he released her, his senses were dizzied.
She blinked, cheeks pink. “You’re welcome,” she said. “Anytime. You can, um, Skype me or maybe even call if you come across anything else.”
He’d made her uncomfortable. He sighed. “Where did you learn how to handle a tantrum? Child psychology classes?”
“Nope. Having five siblings.”
“Can’t learn stuff like that in a classroom, huh?”
“I had to rub elbows, so to speak.”
He laughed and she joined in.
Misty was still feeling off balance as they returned to Chocolate Heaven. Bill, Fiona, and Jellybean rode in the golf cart, and this time Misty followed in her grumbly VW. She’d wanted to make a clean break of it, but Wilson was having a staff meeting in his trailer, and she dared not disturb him to tell him of her imminent departure, so she resolved to return after she collected Nana Bett. It was the upheaval that left her feeling nonplussed, she told herself, not the lingering feeling of Bill’s embrace.
He was grateful, that was all, and she was out of practice with the hugging of men. Bill was an amazing man, a patient, helpful soul to take on the rascally Jellybean, and she resolved to send him a very graciously worded thank-you note for his dog assistance and a heartfelt apology that she might have inadvertently put the kibosh on his grand opening. Maybe she should send along a little something. A plant? A fruit basket? A subscription to a doggy-treat-of-the-month club?
She sighed. Knowing Jellybean, a doggy straitjacket might be more useful.
Nana Bett still stood watch in the empty store. She beamed, gesturing to the empty top shelf of the glass cabinet.
Bill tied an outraged Jellybean to the lamppost outside the store and hurried in. “What happened? Were we robbed?”
“No,” Nana said. “A certain wonderful customer came in and bought the whole batch—violins, jelly jumbles, and all.”
“Who?” Misty asked, incredulous.
“You’ll never guess.”
Gunther came in from the back. “That wackadoodle actor.”
Misty tried to decipher the mystery. “You mean…”
Nana Bett nodded. “The great Lawrence Tucker himself.”
“When? Where did he go? Why?” Misty sputtered, running to the window to peer out.
“He left in a taxi about a half hour ago.”
She sagged. “Did he say where he was headed?”
Nana clucked her tongue. “He’s had a hard time. The acting business is a meat grinder, especially if you’re not a spring chicken anymore.”
“But he walked away from all those people who are depending on him. He just…turned his back on them.”
Nana pursed her lips. “Sometimes that’s the only way a person can cope.”
Misty remembered those days when she’d hidden under her father’s bed, praying that no one would find her. Her heart lurched until she reminded herself she’d been a child then, a little girl. But aren’t you doing the same thing now? her conscience prodded. A tiny apartment from which you hardly ever emerge? A life lived through Skype? She zipped up her jacket and refocused. This isn’t about me. It’s about Lawrence.
“I’m going to tell the director that I’m leaving.”
“Isn’t there another way?” Nana asked, a dangerous plea in her voice.
“No,” Misty said firmly. “There isn’t. Come with me back to the set, and then I’ll drive you home.”
“But what about the festival?”
“What festival?”
Bill shrugged. “We were planning a six-week festival for the duration of the shoot. Just special sales and weekend activities for the tourists. The history museum was going to put up a WWII display and stuff like that. I guess that’s all off if the film is belly-up.”
“Isn’t there something you can do, honey?” Nana Bett beamed her laser gaze on Misty.
A ribbon of discomfort snaked through her belly at the thought of Bill and all the others and the end of their festival plans. But what could she do? Lawrence was gone. She was not the man’s keeper, or his dog’s.
“There really isn’t,” she told Nana. “I’m sorry, Bill. Very sorry.”
Their eyes met, and though she saw disappointment in his spring-grass eyes, they held no blame. Bill was too good a man for that. If things were different, if she was different, one of those self-assured, charming women, like the one from Bill’s high school, she might have hugged him, gathered close the muscular frame of that man who had taken on the mantle of parenthood in spite of his fear. She would have relished the connection that she’d experienced in the trailer, the sweet sensation of being close to another, cherished the proximity, basked in the easy affection.
Instead, she gave him an awkward wave as she guided her grandmother out of the shop and back to her car. “Thanks for everything, Bill.” She patted Jellybean on the head as she went by. He plopped his fuzzy bottom on the sidewalk, and she thought the look he gave her was full of reproach.
Nana wasn’t about to let the chance to meet a real live movie director sail by, so she accompanied Misty to Mr. Wilson’s trailer, where he was lying on his back with a damp washcloth over his eyes.
“Who is it?” he said. “I’ve already given my pound of flesh, so unless you’re bringing coffee or my missing actor, go away.”
“Er, it’s Misty Agnelli.”
“Who?”
“The violin tutor.”
“And her grandma,” Nana put in.
Mr. Wilson didn’t answer, but his gusty sigh briefly inflated the washcloth.
“I just wanted to tell you I’m leaving. Bill Woodson, a shop owner in town, the one who makes those chocolates…you know, the ones with the little sprinkle things on top?”
“Well, he’s got Jellybean. He agreed to take care of him until Mr. Tucker comes back.”
Mr. Wilson bolted to a sitting position, the washcloth splatting to the floor. “I don’t give a rat’s patootie what happens to that dog. I’m shooting all the scenes we can until Friday, and if Lawrence Tucker isn’t back by then, my producers are pulling the plug, and that dog can stay with the candy man for all I care.”
“Pulling the plug?” Misty queried.
Nana nodded. “That means they won’t make the movie, not now. Say, since you’re up, Mr. Wilson,” she said, offering up her blue autograph book, “would you mind giving me your autograph?”
He blinked, grabbed the book, and signed it as if it were one of the zillions of papers his assistant handed him each day. “If Tucker doesn’t return by Friday, this movie won’t ever see the light of day,” Wilson snapped.
“Maybe you could get another actor?” Misty suggested. “One without a dog?”
Wilson huffed. “Let’s face it, this isn’t exactly a blockbuster production in the first place. Tucker is past his prime, and he was lucky to get this gig, but if he doesn’t haul himself back to the set by Friday, there will be no movie. And once word gets out that he abandoned ship, Tucker won’t have a career either.”
“Mr. Tucker,” Nana corrected.
“Yeah, well, he’ll be a has-been, because no one will sign him once they hear how he bugged out on this film. He’ll be lucky to get work on denture commercials.”
“That’s terrible,” Misty said.
Wilson lifted a shoulder. “That’s business.”
“So all the actors and film crew…they’ll be out of work too?”
“We’ll land on our feet. We can go back to Los Angeles and find other gigs.”
And when that happened there would be no more festival, no more tour buses, and likely no more career for Lawrence Tucker. Her stomach tightened down to walnut size.
This is not your problem, she reassured herself. There is nothing you can do about it. “Okay, well, thanks very much, Mr. Wilson.”
He nodded absently. “Hey, can you tell that Bill guy to bring us some more of those sprinkle candies?” He waved a hand. “Ah, never mind. You’re leaving. I’ll have my assistant phone him.”
On the way to the car, Nana looked for Larry, the unfortunate Jellybean wrangler. “I want his autograph too. He was hilarious trying to get that dog out of the tank. I think he could have a future in physical comedy.”
But Larry must have been elsewhere, so Misty started the car slowly along the narrow road that led out of Albatross, her mind churning along with the wheels.
No Tucker.
No movie.
No help for Bill.
Nana was uncharacteristically quiet.
“There’s nothing I could have done,” Misty blurted out.
Nana nodded.
“I mean, I don’t even know where Mr. Tucker is.”
“That’s true.”
“And even if I did, it’s not my job to talk to him. These people, these actors, are from a different world. I’m just a musician. I can’t talk anybody into anything. I’m not good with people in the first place, let alone movie people.”
More nodding.
They were approaching the one and only stop sign at the end of Main Street. Then Albatross would be behind them. Permanently. It would become an odd adventure to add to her journal. Really, the only adventure she’d recorded in a very long while. But what a sad ending for Lawrence, for Jellybean.
For Bill.
“It’s not my responsibility,” she repeated firmly, allowing the words to stoke her courage. “There is no reason for me to stay here.”
“Just one thing,” Nana said, peering into the side-view mirror as they rolled away from the stop sign.
“What?”
“The dog doesn’t seem to care about your reasons.”
“What dog?”
Nana pointed out her window at Jellybean as he jogged along the side of the road, trailing a section of chewed leash, keeping pace with the car. “That one.”