© 2018 Amy Willoughby-Burle
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without permission in writing from the publisher, Shadow Mountain®, at [email protected]. The views expressed herein are the responsibility of the author and do not necessarily represent the position of Shadow Mountain.
All characters in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Willoughby-Burle, Amy, 1972– author.
Title: The lemonade year / Amy Willoughby-Burle.
Description: Salt Lake City, Utah : Shadow Mountain, [2018]
Identifiers: LCCN 2017040905 | ISBN 9781629724119 (paperbound)
Subjects: | LCGFT: Domestic fiction.
Classification: LCC PS3623.I57767 L46 2018 | DDC 813/.6—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017040905
Printed in the United States of America
PubLitho, Draper, UT
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
For my husband and my children.
For my parents and my siblings.
For my family and my friends.
I thank God for you all.
Contents
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
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23
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26
Acknowledgments
Discussion Questions
Interview with the Author
About the Author
1
When someone buys two dozen lemons, a box of tissues, and a whole carrot cake at midnight, you have to figure something is wrong. The cake is for the minute I walk in my condo. The tissues are for my father’s funeral. The lemons mean I’m losing my job.
I’m Nina Griffin, food stylist and photographer. One of those people who artistically arranges food and then takes pictures of it. The pictures that make almond-crusted salmon look like the best almond-crusted salmon with blanched, baby asparagus that ever was. The pictures that are meant to inspire you to cook, despite the knowledge that you’ll never be able to recreate the dish the way it appears in the book. Yeah, that’s what I do.
I make it all seem possible.
It’s just a ruse.
Right now my publishing house has me working on 32 Ways to Make Lemonade. Seriously? Are there really thirty-two ways to make lemonade? This is why I think my job may be in jeopardy.
But I don’t have time to worry about that. It’s past midnight, and I’m driving home from the grocery store with a carrot cake strapped down by the seat belt on the passenger’s side and there’s a white owl standing in the middle of the road. I get closer and closer but all the bird does is swivel its head around like that kid in the Exorcist and stare at me. I start slowing down, sure that at any moment the bird will lift off like it’s capable of doing. But it doesn’t. It just stands there, eyeing me, daring me. I fishtail to a halt, reaching my right hand out to catch the cake if it comes loose from the seat belt, while I watch as the front end of the car passes over the owl until he’s out of sight.
I grip the wheel. Alone on the highway, forty years old, my marriage over, my teenage daughter sleeping at my sister’s house to prove a point, my long-fought-over career slipping through my fingers, and my father’s funeral two days away. But here I am, terrified by the possibility that there may be a dead owl on the grill of my car. So far—so far—I’ve been holding it together. But something about a dead bird with its hollow, little bird bones broken against the front of my car is the last straw. There has to be one, right?
I push open the car door in a panic, like maybe I can get there in time to give the little thing mouth-to-beak and he’ll be ok—he’ll be ok. It’s all my fault. I should have just kept driving and perhaps the car would have just passed over him as he stood in the middle of the road, but, no, I slammed on the brakes and that made the front end go lower—like I was aiming for him, for crying out loud.
Geez, woman, I hear him say to me. Can’t a bird stand in the street anymore? What’s the world coming to?
I get out, slam my door, and slip around to the front of the car. It’s late at night and I’m on a back road, but still a car screams past me in the other lane and I shudder. My headlights are blazing, and I expect to find the owl crushed against the grill, wings spread—trying to take off at the last second—to no avail. But there’s nothing.
I should be thrilled, but panic digs deeper. Where did he go? Is he under a tire? Is there still time? Can I save him? I kneel down on the pavement to look under the car. Then whoosh—up from beneath the bumper and grazing my head, the owl rises and zigzags off—its wings clipping the hood on the way up and off into the black sky, a fluttering white speck headed for the safety of the trees.
I sit down in the wash of my own headlights and cry.
On the day my father died, the lady sitting next to me at the café across the street from my office had two bites of a bacon, lettuce, and tomato sandwich left on her plate. One of the bites had no bacon. The tomatoes were too ripe, and the lettuce was the pale green color of giving up.
When the charge nurse called, I excused myself from lunch with coworkers, saying I needed to get back to the office—that something was wrong with the layout and they need to speak to me.
“Who?” the nosy junior copy editor, whose name I couldn’t recall, questioned. “I thought you were working on the lemonade thing. That’s miles from press.”
I’m not a very good liar on the spot.
“No,” I said, standing up, trying my best to get out of there. “The other one.”
There is no other one. They haven’t acquired anything new in a while. All we’re doing is catching up on commitments. In my department, this lemonade thing is the bottom of the barrel. I should have freelanced, but I took the staff position because of the security.
There
