Chapter Three
“Thin, Rebecca! Thin like a windowpane!”
Beck closed her eyes and tried to shut out her aunt’s instructions so she could concentrate on the dough. “Aunt Sarah, please. I’m trying.” She stretched the gooey mass…and a hole popped open in the middle, making her grunt. “And failing.”
“Well, so’s this business,” Sarah said on a sigh, hugging an old-school ledger to her chest as out of date as the fridge and decades-old oven.
“Maybe you need to actually install a computer and do those numbers on a spreadsheet, Aunt Sarah. I can help you with that.”
Sarah dropped her head to look down at her books, the roots of her frosted hair looking more gray than brown. When she looked up, Beck could have sworn the crease between her brows had deepened in the three months since Uncle Mike’s stroke. Her complexion was drawn, and her mouth was set in a perpetual pucker from the stress.
“You’re doing enough,” Sarah said. “I can’t make pizza.”
Beck snorted and slapped the doughball on the counter, making a yellow semolina cloud puff, probably because she’d used too much of the sandy base. “That’s funny, neither can I.”
Sarah didn’t even smile, but let her narrow shoulders fall. “I’d hire someone if I could afford it, Rebecca. I’m already worried about paying Carly next week,” she said, referring to the only part-time help they had left.
“I know,” Beck said sympathetically. “But we’ll get through this, Aunt Sarah. We’ll get Uncle Mike better and back in here.”
Sarah rolled her eyes. “He has to want to get better, honey. Right now, he doesn’t want to get out of bed.”
And without him making the best pizza in town, business was as thin as the last batch of sauce Beck made.
Well, they’d fix it, Beck told herself, shifting her attention to the doughball, which seemed even gummier than usual.
“I need to ask Uncle Mike about the water and weather thing again.” More water if it’s warm, less if it’s cold. Or was it the other way around? She looked around for the tattered cheat sheet she’d memorized. Didn’t matter if she followed his instructions to a T. She knew every aspect of making pizza, from yeast to oven. She knew the timing, the temperatures, the thickness of each topping. But she didn’t have…the touch. That simply couldn’t be learned, no matter how hard she tried.
“You can ask him,” Sarah said. “But you know what he’ll say.”
Nothing, Beck thought glumly. Her uncle could still talk after his stroke, and he was even mobile, but he’d sunk into a silence that was as scary as it was maddening.
When Beck didn’t answer, Sarah turned and placed the book on the top shelf over a work desk. “You’ll get the hang of it, honey.”
Yeah? She’d been here almost two months and the hang still eluded her. If only she liked pizza, could stand the smell of red sauce, or wanted her hands covered in flour and dough. If only she were as good as Charlie, who’d be twirling a couple of perfect dough pies in the air like a circus juggler right now and cracking jokes as he performed.
Still, she appreciated her aunt’s uncharacteristic optimism. That trait had resided firmly in Beck’s mother, Sarah’s sister, and Charlie had inherited it in spades. Beck had merely learned optimism, as a coping mechanism, she supposed. But to Sarah Leone, the glass was usually not only half empty, it was cracked, leaking, dirty, and sitting right in the spot where the sky happened to be falling.
That was only one of the many ways Aunt Sarah differed from her younger sister, Karen. Sarah Fitzgerald had married later in life, was childless by choice, and was not a natural nurturer. Karen, on the other hand, had made mothering an art form, was rarely bothered by life’s ups and downs, and firmly believed that life happened and you made the best of it.
But there was no making the best of a car crash on the Pennsylvania Turnpike that took the lives of Karen and John Spencer. However, Aunt Sarah had tried hard to make a horrible situation tolerable, and Beck loved her for the effort.
As the legal guardian of her sister’s children, Sarah hadn’t hesitated to take in her niece and nephew after the accident, even though kids—and certainly not a teenager and a preteen—had not been in the plan with Uncle Mike. Sarah had stressed a lot then, too, thrown by grief and worry and the fact that the four of them didn’t fit in the little apartment she and Mike lived in above this restaurant.
Once they’d moved, though, and settled into a new normal, Sarah had done her best to be a mother, especially to eleven-year-old Beck, who’d suffered mightily after her parents died. No, Sarah would never be the vibrant, joyous, witty, and tender nurturer that Beck’s mama had been, but she’d tried. And Uncle Mike was gruff and opinionated, but he was funny and loved his unexpected little family, taking care of them like they were his own. They were not the ideal version of family that Beck once had, but they were family and all Beck had left. Of course, she’d do anything to help them in this difficult time.
If Mama were here, she’d say, Turn your face to the sun and you won’t see the shadows, or something that sounded like it belonged on a coffee cup. And that was why Beck was standing in a kitchen she’d never enjoyed, stretching pizza dough she wouldn’t eat, and living in a town she’d spent a good deal of her life wanting to leave.
She brushed the thoughts away with the stroke of her hand over a counter-top covered with semolina, clearing her workspace to start again. “Okay, Aunt Sarah, the pizza isn’t going to make itself, even though it might taste better if it did.”
Sarah smiled at that. “I tried your pepperoni yesterday, and it…wasn’t the worst pizza ever.”
Beck laughed and pointed to the dining room. “On that whopping compliment, you go and be sure we’re ready for the lunch rush.”
“I think I can handle the three people that will storm the doors of Slice of Heaven.”
“You never know,” Beck said in a singsong voice as Sarah walked out. “Yesterday, we had four. Today could be five!”
Once Sarah left, Beck returned to her dough, squeezing it with all her strength to get the ever-elusive texture that would mean she had a snowball’s chance—a doughball’s chance?—of making this pie round. Hers were never round. Oblong, misshapen, and too fat on one side, Beck Spencer’s pizza was not worthy of being served at the institution that had earned a Best of Bitter Bark medallion twenty-four consecutive times.
She rolled and folded and flipped the doughball. Or should she fold, then roll? Why did it matter so much?
At the slight smell of something burning in the oven, she dropped the ball and headed toward the stainless-steel beast that lined one wall. She eyed the red line, drawn with Sharpie on the dial, carefully setting it at 647 degrees, because ol’ Bessie stopped working if you accidentally went over 650.
Shaking her head, she tamped down the money worry again. They couldn’t afford part-time help, so they certainly couldn’t get new kitchen equipment. What they needed was customers who lined up like they used to. That wasn’t happening now, though many of the townsfolk had come after Mike’s stroke to support the business.
But, over time, the customers had dwindled, choosing the far superior product at Ricardo’s or one of the newer delivery places that had popped up with Bitter Bark’s recent growth.
Truth was, Beck could coax a smile out of a gassy seven-month-old sitting inside a fur-lined basket to take the perfect picture, but she couldn’t turn flour, water, and yeast into a decent pizza crust. And forget the sauce. She could mix Elmer’s Glue and ketchup and it would taste better.
Not that she would actually taste it. The response from the customers, or lack of them, told her all she needed to know. And there was that one-star review on Yelp. Ouch.
She forced herself to hum a happy tune, but stopped when she heard a dog bark at the back door, slowing the kneading process to listen.
Funny place to walk a dog. There was nothing in that alley but parking spaces for the retailers on this street, shared dumpsters, and locked doors.
And if that was a lost tourist looking for a way into Slice of Heaven, they’d find the door locked to them in the front, too, metaphorically speaking. Because dogs were not welcome in this pizza parlor.
It sure didn’t help their dwindling profits that Aunt Sarah’s bone-deep fear of dogs meant she was one of the few storeowners in Bitter Bark who refused service to guests who wanted to come in with leashed dogs. Sarah had bucked the local tourism-building campaign that officially changed the town name for one year to Better Bark to position it as the most dog-friendly town in America. That decision cost as many pizza sales as Beck’s not-thin-enough crust.
The barking dog reminded Beck that she still hadn’t heard back from Dr. Kilcannon about the status on Ruff. Until she did, she wouldn’t break that news to Sarah, though. She had enough to worry about, and a dog in the mix might put the poor woman over the edge.
Sighing, Beck lifted the dough and stretched it out, narrowing her eyes to gauge the thickness. A windowpane? More like a window shutter with that hole in the middle, but this was the best it was going to get unless she started all over.
So she did, throwing the dough down for another pass.
“Roll, sucker,” she commanded of the dough. “Roll like you’ve never rolled before.”
The dog barked again, loud enough to be right outside the back door. She thought she heard a man’s voice, but that didn’t quiet the noisy, persistent barking. Sarah came marching back into the kitchen, wild-eyed at the sound.
“Who’s barking back there?” she demanded.
“My guess is a dog.”
Sarah grunted. “This whole town is overrun by them.”
“You know what’s overrun, Aunt Sarah? Ricardo’s is overrun,” Beck said with a pointed look. “With customers who have dogs. Lots of customers. Paying customers.”
Sarah shrugged. “We were fine before this whole Better Bark thing happened.”
“Because Uncle Mike was making the pizza. Now the competition is beating the pants off us.”
The dog barked again, followed by three hard knocks at the back door. Beck lifted dough-covered hands. “I’ll get—”
“No,” Sarah said. “I’ll send them away.”
“You hate dogs.”
“I’m afraid of them,” she corrected, heading back there. “I don’t hate anyone. I’ve got this.”
Beck kept kneading, listening to the sound of the thick drapes sliding back as Sarah looked out the bank of windows to the alley.
“Well, I’ll be damned,” she muttered.
Beck glanced over her shoulder, but the walk-in fridge blocked her view of the door. Still, she heard the heavy lock unlatch. Almost immediately, the barking became deafening.
“Quiet.” The man’s voice was louder than the dog’s, deep and certain, but still didn’t drown out Sarah’s loud gasp.
“Down, boy!” he ordered.
Finally, there was a second of quiet, long enough for Beck to hear Aunt Sarah ask, “What are you doing here?” The question was cool, making Beck huff out a breath of frustration. Okay, he had a dog, but was that any way to treat a potential customer? He might only want some takeout.
“Hello, Mrs. Leone. How are you?”
Beck abandoned the dough altogether, inching back from the counter as she tried to place the somewhat familiar voice. Who was that?
The dog barked again, making her aunt give a quick cry of fear. “Get it back! Please.”
“He’s harmless, I promise. Easy, Ruff. Sit.”
Wait. Did he say…Ruff?
“Mrs. Leone, I need to—”
“I’m sorry, Aidan. We’re getting ready for our lunch rush. Another time.”
Aidan? And Ruff?
Beck whipped around, wiping her hands as she started toward the back, but the door slammed closed. As Sarah came around the refrigerator and into view, there was agony in her green eyes, and pain turned her thin lips downward.
“Was that Aidan Kilcannon?” Beck asked, knowing full well the answer was yes. “With a dog named Ruff?”
“I’m sorry, Rebecca. I’m not ready to make small talk with him.” Her voice trembled, the way it did when life was too much for her.
“But I am.” So, so ready. She launched toward the back door, but Sarah snagged her sleeve.
“Where are you going?”
She gave a grin. “To get my dog.”
“What?”
Beck strode to the back door, yanked it open, and bolted outside to peer from one side of the alley to the other. Daylight spilled between the buildings, highlighting parked cars, dumpsters, and a full bike rack, but no people.
She started to jog toward Ambrose Avenue, her feet on the pavement thudding to the same tempo as the pulse in her head.
Then she saw a man with a dog, a big, dark boxer she immediately recognized from Charlie’s pictures. They rounded the corner, heading toward Bushrod Square. She continued a slow jog toward him, her gaze moving between the muscular dog and the equally muscular man.
Aidan Kilcannon was older, broader, bigger than she remembered, but it was the same boy who’d busted into her brother’s life in the dark times and made life brighter for Charlie. An old resentment bubbled up, but she tamped it down because nothing was as important as Ruff.
Her dog named Ruff! How she loved Charlie for this sweet parting gift.
When she was about twenty feet away, the dog turned and barked over and over, warning Aidan of her arrival. He looked, but she didn’t see his expression, because all her attention was on the mahogany tones of the dog’s face, those big dark eyes, the thick shoulders, and the enormous paws that pounded the pavement and fought the leash that held him.
This dog looked exactly like the original Ruff, even more so in person than in Charlie’s pictures and descriptions.
“Ruff!” she called out, breathless as she ran. Just as she reached them, she dropped down to the dog, who reared up and threw both paws on her chest, knocking her on her backside.
“Whoa, Ruff! Stop!” Aidan yanked the leash, then dove forward to snag the dog’s collar and pull him back. “God, I’m sorry. Ruff! Bad boy! Are you okay?”
Beck looked up at him—way up—and blinked at the way the sunlight poured over Aidan Kilcannon, making his tawny-colored locks gleam and his blue eyes match the sky behind him. “Do you remember me, Aidan?”
He didn’t answer, but stared at her for a second, maybe two, long enough for Beck’s beating heart to skip when a whole bunch of female hormones decided they liked the view. Whoa. Young Aidan Kilcannon had turned into one very fine grown man.
Then the dog made another playful lunge at her, barking and demanding all her attention.
“Oh my, you’re a wild one.” She dodged the giant head, laughing, trying to reach for a hug or at least a pet, but he was having none of it.
“Careful,” Aidan said, who seemed to be using all his strength to hold him back. “He plays hard.”
“Of course he does,” she said. “That’s why he’s named Ruff.” She looked up at Aidan in time to catch well-defined muscles bunch under an olive-green Army-issued T-shirt as he battled the excited dog.
“I’m Beck, if you hadn’t figured that out yet,” she said, wiping her hands as she pushed up to one knee. “And I can’t believe he’s finally here!” She punctuated that with another attempt at a hug, but the big dog jerked in the other direction. “That’s okay, Ruffie. You’ll get used to me.”
Glancing up, she saw Aidan react with a slight flinch. “He’s essentially untrainable, you know. You won’t believe how bad he is.”
That made her laugh, a cascade of pure joy rolling through her. “Thank you so much for bringing him, Aidan. I really thought your father would call, but I guess he wanted to surprise me. I love that.”
“Yeah, yeah, it’s a surprise for all of us.” Aidan managed to get his hand on Ruff’s head, and he must have added just enough pressure to calm the dog down. With his other hand, he reached to help her up, his gaze locked on her with more emotions than she could begin to read swirling in his crystal-blue eyes. “It’s been a while, Beck.”
She sighed and gave him an easy smile. “Yeah, it has. It’s good to see you, Aidan.”
He nodded, and she tried not to take it personally that he couldn’t return the compliment. She looked enough like Charlie, at least in coloring, that he was probably being swamped by a wave of grief.
And if it weren’t for this big, beautiful dog, she would be, too.
“I like that you brought him to me,” she said, sensing he needed some reassurance. “I thought your dad would, but it’s very thoughtful and sweet of you.”
Ruff pulled on his leash, hard enough to jerk Aidan away from her. “Whoa, boy. Like I mentioned, tough to handle,” he said. “Really a very strong and willful dog.”
So was the first Ruff. “Boxers can be.”
“But he’s like really, really stubborn. And your aunt hates dogs—”
“She’s afraid of them, no hate.”
“—and even our best trainers struggled with him, so I’m happy to keep him. It’ll be so much easier for you.”
She looked up at him, feeling her face form a you can’t be serious expression. “Keep him?”
“I mean, if you’re dying for a dog, then I can get you one so easi—”
“Charlie was the one who died, Aidan,” she reminded him. “And he left me his dog, as you know. So, if you’re dying for a dog, get one. Ruff is mine.” She slid her arms around the dog’s neck and tried to nuzzle him. “Ooh, I’ve waited so long for you, boy.” Seventeen years, to be precise.
But he jerked away, gave a deafening bark, and looked up at Aidan as if begging for an escape from her.
She didn’t care. Charlie had found “the reincarnation of Ruff,” as he’d written in his letter to her. It had been a long time since she’d had to say goodbye to the first Ruff and get in a car with Aunt Sarah and Uncle Mike to be taken away to a new, empty, pizza-heavy life with no Mama and Daddy and no Ruff. Her brother had kept his promise to replace Ruff. He’d gone across the world, given his life, but managed to keep that promise.
No one could ever take her Ruff away again.
She stroked his head and tried again to nuzzle him. “You’re mine now,” she said softly.
But his only response was a noisy bark and a sudden lunge. He almost knocked her over as he took off with the leash flying behind him, running at full speed down the sidewalk like he couldn’t get away from Beck fast enough.
And just as he took off after the dog, Aidan’s eyes flashed like he was a little bit happy about that.