Free Finding Colin Firth: A Novel by Mia March Page B

good measure.

    By four o’clock, Veronica’s house was sparkling clean for tomorrow night’s pie class, she had her recipes printed to hand out, and she’d written her résumé. On her cover sheet, she briefly described leaving Boothbay Harbor just months shy of her seventeenth birthday—but not why—and making her way, alone, to Florida, where she’d gotten a job in a diner, then a few years later heading slowly west, to Louisiana, Texas, New Mexico, and then back to Maine. She wrote a paragraph about working at the Best Little Diner, how she loved her regulars and enjoyed the tourists. She didn’t know if that would be remotely interesting to whoever was in charge of hiring the extras. She went on Google and learned she wasn’t off base about what extras did. Lots of sitting around and waiting. Apparently, there wasn’t much about what made for a good extra, what would make her be chosen over anyone else. But if they wanted “real people,” Veronica was as real as they got. According to the articles she read about extras, the one thing an extra wasn’t supposed to do or be was star crazy, so she’d left off her enduring love of Colin Firth.
    Veronica put away her laptop, made a neat pile of her recipes, and did a check of her cupboards, pantry, and refrigerator to make sure she had everything she needed for tomorrow’s class. Enough flour, shortening, baking soda, and sugar, both white and brown. She’d have to replenish her salt supply, pick up eggs, sticks of butter, and a pound of apples and a few pints of blueberries. She added cherries, blackberries, bananas, Key limes, and chocolate to her list. She used her jar of molasses so infrequently that she didn’t have to worry about coming up short for Leigh DeMarco’s shoofly pie.
    For the first class, she’d focus on good old apple pie—even though it wasn’t apple season—and making piecrust from scratch, but if students wanted to make special elixir pies, they would be able to; Veronica had a professional oven that could handle many pies at once, and every possible kind of pie filling at the ready, from fresh fruit to good chocolate to coconut to custard.
    Her phone rang. Hopefully it was Penelope Von Blun dropping out of class.
    “Hello, Veronica speaking.”
    “I’d like to order a pie, a special pie.” The voice was raspy, thirties, Veronica thought, and there was a tinge of anger, of bitterness, but also sadness.
    “Sure. What kind would you like?” From the woman’s tone, Veronica had the sense she’d order Amore Pie or maybe Feel Better Pie.
    “The kind of pie that would get someone off someone else’s mind. Do you make that kind?”
    Her boyfriend or husband was having an affair. Or in love with someone else, Veronica thought, but that didn’t seem quite it.Usually Veronica could tell so much by just a voice, but there was something complicated here that Veronica couldn’t put her finger on. “Well, I’ll need to clarify if you mean in a romantic sense or just someone you’re trying to purge from your life.”
    “Maybe both,” the woman said.
    Cast-Out Pie. Veronica had made a few like that, just twice here in town and several times down in New Mexico. The first time, one of the busboys at the diner, an emotional wreck of a young man who cried while clearing the tables of any woman who had red hair, like the ex who’d broken his heart, had been on the verge of getting fired for all his crying. So Veronica had stayed late and found herself using peanut butter for its stick and coconut for its grit, figuring a lighter cream-based pie that felt airy couldn’t dislodge and lift, whereas the heavier peanut butter and the texture of coconut could get in there, take those feelings of gloom and doom, and carry them away from the stomach, such a source of upset. She’d baked up her Cast-Out Pie and given the poor guy a slice the next morning while having a chat in the kitchen. She told him that he was stronger than he thought, that