The Magic of Lemon Drop Pie

by Rachel Linden

Genres: Magical Realism; Women's Fiction; Romance

Synopsis

“Heartfelt, heartwarming, joyful, and uplifting. You can't go wrong with a Rachel Linden book.”—#1 New York Times bestselling author Debbie Macomber

An uplifting novel about a heartbroken young pie maker who is granted a magical second chance to live the life she didn’t choose. . . . from the bestselling author of The Enlightenment of Bees.
 
Lolly Blanchard's life only seems to give her lemons. Ten years ago, after her mother’s tragic death, she broke up with her first love and abandoned her dream of opening a restaurant in order to keep her family’s struggling Seattle diner afloat and care for her younger sister and grieving father. Now, a decade later, she dutifully whips up the diner’s famous lemon meringue pies each morning while still pining for all she's lost.  
 
As Lolly’s thirty-third birthday approaches, her quirky great-aunt gives her a mysterious gift—three lemon drops, each of which allows her to live a single day in a life that might have been hers. What if her mom hadn’t passed away? What if she had opened her own restaurant in England? What if she hadn’t broken up with the only man she's ever loved? Surprising and empowering, each experience helps Lolly let go of her regrets and realize the key to transforming her life lies not in redoing her past but in having the courage to embrace her present.

Release date: August 2, 2022

Publisher: Berkley

Print pages: 352

Sample

1

My life is a lemon.

I faced the truth afresh, bent over a cold stainless-­steel mixing bowl, whipping egg whites and sugar into stiff French meringue peaks.

“ ‘Lolly’s life goal number two,’ ” my sister, Daphne, read aloud, perched on a stool across the gleaming stainless-­steel prep counter of the diner’s kitchen. She paused and eyed the list of adolescent ambitions a far younger me had optimistically scribbled in sparkly purple gel pen in my middle school diary.

“ ‘Own my own restaurant somewhere amazing.’ ” She glanced over at me skeptically. “Does managing our family diner in Magnolia count?”

I shot her a wry look. “I don’t think Danish comfort food in a fifty-­year-­old diner was quite what I was imagining when I wrote that.” So much of my life was not what I’d imagined when I wrote that. I leaned over the hand mixer with renewed vigor.

Outside the huge French-­paned windows, the winter darkness was beginning to lighten with a touch of pearl as morning broke. More than likely the clouds would settle into a daylong light drizzle. Late winter in Seattle was often wet, chilly, and unremittingly gray. I usually loved this time of the morning—­pie-­making time, alone in the kitchen with a serene sense of purpose and Tanya Tucker warbling plaintively on the radio—­but not today. Today the weather matched my mood.

“ ‘Number three. Fall in love.’ ” She paused and squinted at the page. “You scribbled a note in the margin that says ‘I’d like him to look like Freddie Prinze Jr. or Brad Pitt.’ ” Daphne shot me a curious look and wrinkled her nose. “Who’s Freddie Prinze Jr.?”

“Did you ever see She’s All That? No, I guess you were too young.” I brushed a wisp of hair back into my bouncy ponytail. “It was the nineties. Freddie was dreamy, a total heartthrob.” I redoubled my efforts on the meringue, which was now stiff enough to stand by itself in frothy white peaks.

Daphne studied the page. “What was this list for anyway?”

Closing my eyes, I was instantly catapulted back to my seventh-­grade classroom, the buzz of hormones and invincibility, the smells of old linoleum, adolescent boys wearing too little deodorant, and girls wearing too much fruity body spray.

“Ms. Beeson’s English class. We were supposed to write out a life goals list, a plan for the next twenty years. Which is sort of crazy given that most of us couldn’t plan our way out of a paper bag when we were thirteen. She was big on plans. Pencil skirts and plans.”

“That’s ambitious.” Daphne said, looking again at the list.

“It’s kind of sad to read it now,” I commented lightly.

“Sad how?”

I turned off the mixer. “Next month I’ll turn thirty-­three. It’s been almost exactly twenty years since I wrote that list, and I haven’t done a single thing on it.” My tone was matter-­of-­fact but the realization stung, sharp and true. I had not thought about the list in years, but the reality that I hadn’t managed to accomplish even one goal was disappointing.

Daphne closed the diary and tossed it on the counter, then stretched, young and lissome in her yoga gear. Her sleek chestnut hair swung over her shoulders. Hair color was the only thing we shared in terms of appearance. Daphne took after our dad, small and leanly muscled, a dancer’s build. I favored our mother’s Danish side of the family—­taller with rounded curves and high, broad cheekbones. She slid off the stool and surveyed me. “Do you still want all those things?”

“Freddie Prinze Jr. has aged really well. I like the whole silver fox look.” I grinned, spooning meringue onto the deep-­yellow fillings of six lemon pies, dodging her question. I wasn’t even sure I knew the answer or could risk thinking too hard about it. I’d stopped dreaming about what I wanted roughly a decade ago. It was a luxury I simply could not afford.

Daphne glanced at her phone and gave a yip of alarm. “I’ve got to teach a vinyasa session in fifteen minutes.” She yanked open the huge industrial refrigerator and grabbed an apple. “I’ve got class till four thirty, and then I’ll come help with the dinner rush. Damien will give me a ride.”

She was in her junior year studying for a dance degree at Cornish College of the Arts in downtown Seattle and was teaching yoga on the side to help pay for the outrageous cost of tuition. Her boyfriend, Damien, was a student at Cornish as well. I sighed and wiped my hands on my fifties-­style green-­and-­white-­polka-­dot frilled apron, the standard uniform at the diner ever since I could remember.

“Help with dinner would be great. It’s tough going when it’s only Aunt Gert and me handling all the tables.”

We exchanged a knowing look at the mention of our feisty great-­aunt.

“Okay, see you tonight.” Daphne threw open the back door and blew me an air kiss. “Love you much.”

I caught it against my cheek. “Love you more.” It was a childhood exchange Mom had taught us and one we still copied.

Daphne traipsed out the door, then poked her head back inside, looking thoughtful. “You know, it’s not too late for you to do those things if you still want to.”

I waved away her words. “Who would keep everything together around here? Who would be the glue?”

“I knew you would say that.” Daphne pulled a face. “That’s what they’re going to put on your gravestone when they find you old and gray and collapsed face-­first into one of your lemon meringue pies. ‘I was the glue.’ ”

It was a horrifying thought. And sadly probably not untrue. I stuck my tongue out at her.

“Aren’t you late for something?”

She shrieked and darted out the door. I watched her go with a mixture of maternal fondness and sisterly exasperation. Twelve years younger than me, Daphne had been only ten when Mom died. I’d stepped in to fill the hole in her life as best I could. Some days I thought it was almost enough.

In the sudden quiet of the kitchen, I made decorative peaks in the meringue with the back of a large kitchen spoon, then checked each of the six pies. Good, they had meringue all the way to the edges. It helped keep them from weeping, a peculiar pitfall of meringue. I’d been making six lemon meringue pies almost every day for the past ten years. My dad, Marty, the diner’s chief cook, handled everything else food-­related with the help of his assistant cook, Julio, but I made our famous pies, the best in Seattle. Only I knew my mom’s secret recipe. She’d made me memorize it the night before she passed away.

Popping the pies into the industrial oven, I set the timer and glanced at the clock. Still an hour until the doors opened at eight. Soon Dad and Julio would be in to start prepping for the day. My diary lay on the counter, a blast from the past with neon unicorns jumping over a bright rainbow spangled with stars. At thirteen I had loved that Lisa Frank diary with its luridly cheerful cover, its crisp lined pages just waiting to be filled with the dreams and aspirations of my young, idealistic heart. Daphne had unearthed it a few days ago in a box of our childhood memorabilia.

I touched the cover with my fingers, lightly, wistfully, torn between wanting to toss it away and crack it open to eagerly devour every line. If I did, could I relive, if only for a moment, the confidence of endless possibilities, the naive presumption that just because I wished for something it was bound to happen? How brash that seemed now. And yet, still, how alluring.

I sniffed. Beneath the citrus scent of the pies beginning to bake I caught a whiff of regret, pungent and bitter as rosemary. I clicked on the old-­school combination radio/CD player sitting under the window, tuning it to a classic country station, and opened the back door to get some fresh air, but in gusted a cool, wet wind that smelled like sorrow, sharp and briny as the sea. On second thought, I shut the door again and turned up the radio. Nostalgia was no match for Shania Twain’s rockabilly girl power.

Scooping up the diary, I crossed the kitchen and tossed it onto my desk in the converted walk-­in pantry I used as an office, then shut the door firmly. I had a family to care for and a struggling diner to keep afloat. I had no time for nostalgia or regret.

2

“Is that fresh pot of coffee ready?” Aunt Gert barked, bursting through the swinging kitchen door an hour after we opened for breakfast. “Norman is asking for another refill already.” She clucked her tongue in disapproval.

“New pot should be ready by now. I started it.” Dad looked up from a cutting board piled high with potatoes. Both he and Julio were up to their elbows in prep for the day. I stuck my head out the door of my little office, where I’d been crunching depressing financial figures.

“I’ll get it.”

Our breakfast offerings were simple—­pastries from Petit Pierre, the French bakery down the street, and endless refills of mediocre diner-­quality coffee. It was easy to handle the morning rush, although in the past few years, rush was too generous a word for the skimpy trickle of customers who darkened our doorway before lunch. Now, in the doldrums of winter, it was even slower than usual.

Aunt Gert gave me a regal nod. “Much obliged.”

This morning she was wearing an orange-­patterned caftan heavily bedecked with wooden beads that clacked as she moved. A matching turban perched over her wispy white hair. Beneath it, her hawk nose and icy blue eyes gave her the visage of a highly ornamented bird of prey, a falcon perhaps.

Dr. Gertrude Lund, my great aunt on my mother’s side, was an eighty-­year-­old esteemed professor emeritus of religion and mythology who had relocated from New England to live in the tiny cottage in our backyard almost two years ago. She was an opinionated, stubborn character with outrageous fashion sense and a razor-­sharp intellect. Although her acerbic personality wasn’t particularly suited to waitressing, she insisted on helping out at the diner, pulling her weight, as she put it. Regular customers had learned to fear the heavy tread of her orthopedic shoes.

I grabbed the pot of coffee from its place by the door, and Aunt Gert followed me into the dining room. “That old coot’s just cheap if you ask me. Coming in here every morning and taking up a booth for hours and only ordering a cup of coffee.” She pursed her lips and scowled in the direction of Norman, one of our morning regulars, who was occupying his usual table by the big plate-­glass front window.

“I think he’s just lonely. It hasn’t even been a year since Mabel died,” I reminded her. I had a soft spot for Norman and regularly slipped him day-­old pieces of coffee cake if we had any left over. I understood grief, and while a piece of coffee cake couldn’t soothe the pain of his wife’s passing, I knew from experience that little acts of kindness were often a balm for hurting hearts.

Behind me Aunt Gert harrumphed. “You, my dear, are entirely too tenderhearted,” she said. Then, pitching her voice loudly enough so Norman could hear across the room, she added, “You know what the Bhagavad Gita says about greedy people? Lust, anger, and greed are the three doors to hell. Not my words. Lord Krishna’s.”

“What a cheerful thought.” I passed a middle-­aged couple in hiking gear who were sitting in one of the booths, watching our exchange quizzically. Aunt Gert stumped behind me in her incongruously sensible black oxfords.

In the pale morning light, the diner looked quaint but a little down at the heels.

The original warm, golden fir floor was scuffed and worn from more than sixty years of foot traffic. Some of the mint-­green piping at the edges of the white vinyl booths was flaking at the edges, but the diner still retained much of its nostalgic charm.

The Eatery had been in our family since my maternal grandparents opened it as newlyweds in the 1950s, using their honeymoon money as a down payment on this little spot. It was located on the main street of the charming village of Magnolia, a quiet neighborhood nestled on the far west side of Seattle, swathed by Puget Sound on three sides. Magnolia was the kind of place where neighbors would pop by to drop off a pound of Manila littlenecks after an afternoon of clamming on Hood Canal, where you always recognized friends and neighbors standing in line at Petit Pierre for chocolate croissants on Saturday morning, and where the local bookshop, Magnolia’s Bookstore, was ready with the perfect recommendation as soon as you came through the door.

I loved Magnolia and the Eatery. I’d grown up here in this diner, learning to walk by tottering from the vinyl booths to the round barstools tucked below the long white Formica counter. This was home. I inhaled sharply, taking in the decades-­old scent of strong, bitter coffee and cracked vinyl overlaid with just a whiff of tangy lemon meringue pie. The scent of my childhood.

“Good morning, Norman.” I topped up his coffee.

“Morning, Lolly,” Norman greeted me. He was struggling to open a paper packet of sugar.

“Can I help? Those can be tricky.” I tore the paper off the top of the packet and handed it to him.

Norman took the sugar and patted my hand. “You’re a good girl, Lolly. And pretty as a picture. Why hasn’t some fella scooped you up by now?”

“She’s not lentils in a dry-­goods bin. ‘Scooped her up’ indeed.” Aunt Gert snorted from behind me. She had never married and had strong opinions on the subject of women’s rights. She’d once shared a podium with Gloria Steinem at a women’s liberation rally.

Swallowing a smile, I replied as neutrally as I could, “I don’t have time for love right now, Norman. I’ve got my family and the diner. I’m very busy.”

Norman blinked up at me with rheumy eyes, then looked thoughtfully past my shoulder for a moment as if trying to recall something. “Whatever happened to that boy, the one who was so sweet on you? He used to work here all those years ago, bussing tables as I recall. Such a nice young man, so polite. Had hair like a shiny new penny. What was his name?”

For a moment my mouth went dry. I had not uttered that name aloud in years. “Rory. Rory Shaw.”

Norman’s face brightened. “That’s it. He seemed so smitten with you. Mabel always said he reminded her of a sunflower and you the sun. Whenever you’d come in the room, she said, he turned toward you like he was following the light.”

I pushed my vintage cat-eye glasses up the bridge of my nose, careful to keep my face pleasantly blank. I could feel Gert eyeing me curiously, and Norman too. The truth was, Rory had had the same effect on me. We’d been each other’s flowers. We’d been each other’s suns. On the lists of regrets in my life, Rory Shaw easily topped them all.

“I guess some things just aren’t meant to be,” I said finally, giving Norman a small smile, trying to brush off his comment even though Rory’s name sent a needle-­fine dart of remorse straight through my heart.

“Well, I hope you meet another nice fella soon. Mabel and I were married for almost sixty years. We were so happy together. You deserve your own happiness, Lolly.”

I nodded, wondering with a touch of chagrin just what it was about today that was bringing up so many reminders of my unfulfilled aspirations. “Someday maybe I’ll be so lucky,” I told him.

I glanced up and met Aunt Gert’s shrewd gaze. She was watching me closely beneath the puckered folds of her turban, eyes narrowed as though trying to crack some cryptic code.

“Maybe you will,” Aunt Gert said mysteriously. “Or maybe you’ll choose another path altogether.”

I glanced at her, surprised. Her tone seemed laden with significance. She couldn’t possibly know about the life goals list sitting in my office. I looked away from her discerning gaze, afraid of what she might see. The disappointment, the longing. I felt laid bare today. I needed to pull myself together.

“Say, Lolly, you have any leftover pie?” Norman asked hopefully. “This morning I think I’d like a nice slice with my coffee.”

“Sure, Norman. Let me check and see.” I walked over to the glass-­fronted refrigerated pie case that faced the front door, positioned to lure customers in as soon as they set foot inside. It was a strategy that had been working pretty well for more than sixty years. We rarely had pie left over at the end of the day. There was one lone slice of yesterday’s lemon meringue pie sitting on a dessert plate inside. I pulled it out for Norman and then stopped, struck by a memory so vivid it rooted me to the spot. I’d been standing in this exact spot when I’d first laid eyes on Rory Shaw.