Just Desserts by Barbara Bretton Page A

channels. You could say what you wanted about the law and the way it was practiced, but sometimes you needed the cold-blooded distance it provided.
    She had known something was going on. That look of cynical hope in her eyes had made him feel like a shit.
    This was the age of celebrity journalism. Paparazzi haunted Main Street in East Hampton like it was the lobby of the Chateau Marmont the day Belushi died. At the first hint of news, they would jump into their SUVs and descend on Lakeside, New Jersey, like a horde of hungry vultures. The Goldstein girls wouldn’t stand a chance.
    Tommy’s kids knew the drill. They had grown up in and around the chaos that came with fame. Their lives were an ongoing reality show that they had been starring in since birth.
    For that matter, so had he. His earliest childhood memories were of arenas packed with crazed After Life fans waving light sticks overhead while Tommy and his father made magic onstage. Onstage was where it all happened. Onstage was their reality. The rest was filler.
    He remembered the long bus trips before they could afford to lease a jet to take them from city to city. The endless rumble of the road beneath the wheels, the engine’s growl, laughter, the faint chords of a guitar rising above the clamor. Everyone he loved all safe and together in the big green bus.
    Sometimes he dozed with his head in his mother’s lap, listening while she stroked his hair and chatted softly with his father who sat across from them, tuning his guitar while he listened to her dreams for the future.
    One day we’ll get off the road and —
    The sentence remained as unfinished as their lives.
    Would they have pulled away one day and settled down somewhere far from the spotlight? Not many people turned away while the spotlight was still shining down on them. Leaving the band would have been like abandoning family. His father and Tommy had been best buds, closer than brothers. Creative, mercurial, deeply decent men whose genius sometimes made them seem scattered and distracted when it came to the stuff of real life.
    Real life was the kitchen of Goldy’s Bakery where a fourteen-year-old kid negotiated contracts while her mom iced a cake for a group of overweight real estate agents. Real life was a van with a bad transmission, an aging Buick, the look of wariness and hope in her eyes when he signed his name on the dotted line.
    He wasn’t sure if any of the people in Tommy’s extended family, including himself, would handle real life with as much grace and competence as Hayley Maitland Goldstein and her daughter, Lizzie.

7
    Goldy’s—Around seven a.m.
    â€œYou look awful!” Michie announced from the doorway between the shop and the kitchen. She worked the seven-to-noon shift two days a week. “Don’t tell me you’ve been up all night.”
    â€œI’ve been up all night,” Hayley said, hiding a yawn with the back of her hand, “and I have nothing but garbage to show for it.”
    Frank and Maureen, the married couple who had been coming in at four to bake bread for Goldy’s for more than thirty years, waved good morning to Michie from across the room.
    â€œShe was here when we came in,” Frank called out. “We thought maybe she had a hot date last night and just got home.”
    Maureen elbowed him in his well-padded ribs. “Less gossip, more bread,” she ordered and drew him back to the task at hand.
    â€œLet me see what you’ve got,” Michie said.
    Hayley pushed the rough sketch toward her former sister-in-law. “Tell me this isn’t as awful as I think it is.”
    Michie glanced at the sheet of paper then met Hayley’s eyes. “It’s worse.”
    â€œOh God!” Hayley buried her face in her hands. “I knew it! I never should have taken on this project. I can’t make a bass drum out of cake. There isn’t a pan big enough on the