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Category:
Action/Thriller
Publisher: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform
ISBN-10: 1463573545
Type: Fiction
Pages: 246
Copyright: July 9, 2011
ISBN-13: 9781463573546
Price: $3.99 (eBook)
The events of Sept. 11, 2001 ripple into Elaina Brady's life, changing her perspective from that of a diner's pie maker to a woman taking charge of her life.
"Men like pie." Who would know the truth behind those words better than Elaina Brady's mother Maria? Months after she showed her teenage daughter how to bake perfect pie and hours after offering that culinary wisdom, Maria abandons Elaina, her sister Dee Dee and their father Walt. All it took was a lingering, lusty look from a Missoula trucker who stopped by their family's diner and ordered a slice of lemon meringue. Maria hitches a ride west with him, and with that impulsive decision, sixteen-year-old Elaina loses her mother and gains a job baking pies at the diner.
A decade after Maria's departure, Elaina is still working at The Terminal Diner, just around the bend from an upstate New York airport. Her humdrum life is defined by pie-baking routine. Elaina realizes painfully that all she still knows about the opposite sex is summed up in the three last words her mother spoke to her. Then one deceivingly beautiful morning in September 2001, horrifying acts committed by terrorists a hundred miles away upset her world, bringing new influences into her life and inspiring her to be like her mother-impulsive. Will Elaina survive the consequences of her actions?
Excerpt
“Men like pie.”
Maria Brady gave her oldest daughter that advice when she was 16 years old and Elaina still recalls the moment. It was a misty September morning and frost-nipped vermillion maple leaves tumbled around them as they waited for the marigold flash of the school bus in the distance. Elaina was thinking about that new boy in her class, a transfer from a high school down South. She wanted to get his attention and was desperate for advice. Of course she was too embarrassed to tell her mother she was interested in him. Instead, Elaina mustered up the courage to casually ask her mother what the opposite sex liked, what attracted them. Maria suspected a young man had caught her daughter’s eye. She smiled as the bus pulled up. “Men like pie,” she said and then waved goodbye. It was the last time they saw each other.
It didn’t take Elaina long to discover the truth—and irony—of her mother’s words. Later that day she was suddenly promoted to pie maker at The Terminal Diner, the Brady’s upstate New York restaurant. The job had been Maria’s until the moment she abandoned Elaina, her younger sister Dee Dee and their father Walt after a trucker from Missoula gave her a lingering, hungry look when she slid a perfect slice of lemon meringue pie in front of him.
If Elaina had spent her teenage years like a normal girl, she’d probably understand more about men, such as how one lusty glance can make you dump everything you hold dear and hitch a ride with a stranger on the first interstate going west. Normal never arrived, and its lack of an appearance meant Elaina never could figure out men or her mother’s decision. All she knew for certain was the pie thing. Apple, blueberry, lemon meringue, pecan—my God, a man couldn’t end a meal without a slice. Every day there had to be pie.
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