PART ONEhoney
Chapter One
FRIDAY, APRIL 1
Honey’s Helpful Hint, from
Honey Frost’s Southern Cookbook for Recipes Gone Wrong:
The first thing you need to know about making cornbread is that food is magic.
A holler is best at just that: hollering.
If the folks of Foxe Holler—a crumb of a town way down on a forgotten, lonesome shelf in the pantry of the South—are good at anything, it’s making a fuss.
From behind the safety of the counter, I absorb the chaos of the hunger-fueled Friday-morning rush at the Frost Apothakery, the town’s only bakery and apothecary of culinary cures. Family run, of course.Epicures, Momaw Frost used to call them, despite our efforts to gag her stubborn wordplay.
Your Apothakery now, girl. Momaw’s voice chimes in my head from beyond the living world. Not literally. We Frosts don’t have that kind of magic. You’d have to trek miles over to a larger town for a Tombwitch.
Right.Mine. Honey Frost’s Apothakery. My insides squelch.
But I don’t have time to dwell on how my twenties didn’t go according to plan, because Ms. Buchanan is on one helluva tear this morning.
“And if I have to listen to that woman tell me about her canned pineapple one more time, so help me—Gertha, I said, you would think angels blessed you the way you carry on, but I know the good Lord does not care a lick about your church luncheons…”
I mumble a quickIs that the truth?and bite my tongue. Anypolite nodding—ingrained in my DNA like aYes, ma’am—is only encouragement for a hurricane like Ms. Buchanan. I pass a still-warm honey bourbon bread pudding over the head of the chatty old woman to the man behind her, for his insomnia.
“Thank you kindly,” he says, already sniffing the bag.
“Sure thing, Mr. Earl,” I answer, hoping my eyes sayPlease save me from this conversation. No luck. He’s already munching on his remedy as he walks out the door, and I’m grateful he’s got a short drive home ’cause my bread pudding worksfast.
“—but between you and me, the only thing she yammers on about more is her grandbabies. I told her, Gertha, I said, the only reason you got a litter of grandbabies is because your children are trying to distract you so you quit bothering them—”
“Ms. Buchanan—” I try, but she’s been chugging along for five minutes, oblivious to the line that’s now ten deep. And I’ve still got to rescue the cornbread from the oven. The Apothakery is not meant to stop. It operates as quickly and efficiently as the Frost women who’ve been running it for decades. And I’m pretty sure one of Gertha’s prolific children in question is just out of earshot by the door, perusing the apple butter I jar myself. My mom calls it the curse of small towns; Momaw Frost would’ve gleefully declaredkarma.
I stretch around Ms. Buchanan to hand Eva Mae a fresh Louisville Benedictine sandwich, for her pregnancy fatigue. The young woman doesn’t wait to take a bite as she cedes her place in line to the next customer, her dark eyes already clawing back some sparkle as the cucumber hits her tongue.
Inheriting the Apothakery way earlier than I was supposed to—or wanted to—makes me a battlefield-promoted Farewitch. But seeing someone’s expression after the first bite of something I made never gets old. It’s as addictive as any sweet.
Ms. Buchanan, however, does get old.
“Ma’am, please…”
“Oh, you should have seen Gertha when we were younger, a real hellcat that one, and now all she’s got time for is grandbabies, canning, and spewing that nonsense about magic and the downfall of the Holler. She won’t even buy from you and I know she needs something for her arthritis. So I told her, Gertha, I said, you quit what you’re on about, bad apples stirring up trouble don’t make the magic itself bad, and no Witch’s magic is gonna hurt you worse than the cigarette I know you sneak when you think no one’s looking—”
“Ms. Buchanan!” I exclaim. The customers behind Foxe Holler’s self-proclaimed most-informed church lady (but don’t say that in front of Gertha Fudge) take a collective step back.
The old woman eyes me, her wrinkled cheeks swelling with ahmph. “No need to shout, sugar. I’m old, not underwater.”
With tired fingers that spent hours kneading this morning, I push a large yellow box across the counter. Enough for a week. “Yes, ma’am. It’s just your jam cake is ready.”
“My jam cake?” Her silver hair glimmers in the late-morning haze peeking through the windows. Gossip and sunshine, a typical Southern spring day.
“Yes, jam cake. Every week.”For six years.
“Well, whatever for? I ordered apple dumplings.”
“For your memory. Ma’am.”
