Stephanie Doyle - The Way Back

“House salad, oil and vinegar dressing is fine.” Then she caught herself. “On the side. I need the dressing on the side.”

“Oy.” The girl rolled her eyes. “One of those. On the side this, on the side that. If you want it all on the side to put together yourself, go buy groceries and do it at home.”

Said the girl with the long legs, tiny torso and high cheekbones. She was gorgeous—model thin with long, straight brown hair that looked as though it might actually touch her bottom.

Gabby naturally hated her on sight.

“Zhanna, give it a break.” Adel finished stacking the cups under the counter and stared at Gabby for a moment. “You look hungry. You sure a salad is going to be enough to hold you?”

“Absolutely.” Not. But this is what happened when you let yourself get careless. When you enjoyed food instead of counting calories. When you didn’t accept you were thirty-three and not twenty-three and couldn’t shed five pounds in a weekend. When your metabolism worked against you, but no one let on there was a problem until it ended up costing you your job.

A woman had to pay the price.

Gabby felt her price might have been slightly steeper than any another woman’s, but those were the breaks. Especially in television.

“A salad is fine,” she said.

“Right.” Adel exited through the swinging door and Gabby was left with the decidedly unfriendly Zhanna. If she was staying on the island for a while, it would probably help to make an effort to get to know the locals.

“Zhanna, that’s a beautiful name. Where are you from?”

Zhanna stared at Gabby as though trying to discover her true intention in asking. She must have concluded it was no more than mild curiosity because she answered, “Russia.”

The way the R rolled off her tongue was dramatic and Gabby couldn’t help but be a little impressed. She was just chubby Gabby from Philadelphia. While this girl was the exotic Zhanna from Russia. That comparison made Gabby wish she had more of an accent. “How did you find yourself here?”

“How did you?”

Not exactly a conversationalist, this Zhanna. “I took the ferry.”

“Me, too.”

Small talk over. Okay. Clearly, this local wasn’t someone Gabby was going to win over. After a few minutes of silence, the kitchen door swung open again. Adel set the large plate of green stuff in front of her.

Gabby wished she could be more excited about it, but veggies had never really done it for her. Still, she needed to fill her stomach, so she started eating. Halfway through she was actually starting to feel better. Then Adel came out of the kitchen carrying a slice of pie.

Hot apple pie if the smell and tendrils of steam emerging from it were any indicators. To compound the evil temptation she scooped up some vanilla bean ice cream—the easy-to-detect brown bean flecks suggested it might be homemade—and plopped it on top.

“Figured you ate the salad, you might as well have a little pie.”

Don’t do it, Gabby told herself. Do not eat that pie. Being forced to eat the pastries, the gourmet cupcakes and all those delightful things the local chefs who were featured on the show’s kitchen segments had ended up killing her career.

Gabby didn’t think she wanted to ever return to television to expose herself to that scrutiny again, but she couldn’t shake the feeling she had been responsible for destroying her life and not the show’s executives.

“It’s not going to kill you,” Adel said as she simultaneously slid the pie in front of Gabby while she cleared the salad plate. “It’s pie. Not poison.”

“You don’t understand,” Gabby said wearily. “I’m trying to change my life.”

“Really?” Zhanna asked, leaning on the counter. “Your life? Why do you need the changing of it?”

Oh, sure, Zhanna couldn’t talk about making her way from Russia to Maine, but Gabby was supposed to come clean with all of her secrets. The odd thing was, late at night, alone in a café with a girl who rolled her R’s and a woman who looked as though she knew what a lifetime of hard work meant, Gabby found herself wanting to confess.

“I got fired from a morning talk show because I put on too much weight and I’m getting too old.”

“Bastards,” Adel hissed. “A woman’s always got to be young, thin and beautiful. Is that it?”

“For men,” Zhanna said. “Yes. Go on.”

“I realized I had nothing in my life but the job. Which meant without it I had nothing. I was nothing.”

“Tragic.” Zhanna’s face was a study of sympathy. “Russians, we understand tragedy.”

“I needed a job, so I took this entry-level position at a publishing company, but I know it’s not where I want to be. I feel like an old lady among kids.”

“You must find a new path for yourself.”

“Yes,” Gabby declared. “That’s what I want to do. I thought this job would help me buy time, but now I think it’s given me something even better to do. I think I want to write.”

Adel leaned on the counter next to Zhanna. “Writing. Interesting. What are you going to write—murder mysteries, thrillers, romance?”

“I love the romance books,” Zhanna said. “Especially the American ones where nobody dies at the end.”

“No, I’m not a fiction writer,” Gabby said. “I was sent here to get Jamison Hunter’s story and damn it, I’m not only going to get his story, I’m going to tell it.”

At the mention of his name both women straightened. Zhanna scowled and Adel frowned. Gabby was trying to figure out what she said to garner this reaction when Zhanna grabbed the plate of pie and dumped it under the counter.

“On second thought, you don’t need the pie.”

CHAPTER TWO

GABBY FOLLOWED THE scent of coffee downstairs the next morning. She could only hope Adel and Zhanna hadn’t made it a point to stop by the B and B to rat her out to the owners. Their reaction to the news she wanted to write a book about Jamison was startling, and took her completely off guard. She understood wanting to protect a friend’s privacy, but their instant hostility had been extreme. Even after explaining she wasn’t some seedy journalist from a trash magazine, or a person looking to earn a quick buck by writing a lurid tell-all, the two women had still been cold. They’d accepted payment for the food, but had refused to take any tip.

Gabby had left the café with her head down and her enthusiasm for a new start somewhat diminished.

She’d left without a taste of that gorgeous pie, too.

Based on their conversation last night when she’d checked in, the inn’s owner Susan had seemed like a nice middle-aged woman with a gift for making people feel welcome. Gabby didn’t peg her as the type to withhold essentials such as coffee and toast simply because she didn’t like what Gabby was planning to do.

Unfortunately there really was no way of knowing. If Zhanna and Adel were any indication, Gabby probably wasn’t going to be the most welcome person on the island.

But this was a new day and she’d woken herself up with a pep talk.

She’d been fired. Nothing remained to go back to so she needed to make this new job work. If she could accomplish what no editor had accomplished to date, maybe she could leapfrog over a few people in the company and have an above entry-level position. If she actually convinced Jamison to tell his story to her while she wrote it, maybe the publishing company would line up more biographies for her. That was a role she could get behind.

Jamison’s biography, as written by her, would hit bestseller lists. She would be back on the talk-show circuit, only this time as the interviewee. A sneaky thought drifted through her conscience, pointing out this crazy need to have more instead of being happy with what she had, but she squashed it before it fully formed.