Page 1 of Hound Dog
Chapter One
Haylee
Six years ago…
Wednesday, 2:36 p.m.
Aunt Meryl snappedher blinker on and backed her Cabriolet convertible into a tight spot in the center of the small Lakes Region town.
Her swift parallel parking job alone would have pegged us as out of towners. Add to that Aunt Meryl’s black jumpsuit, oversized zebra-print sunglasses, and quirky flowered headpiece—yes, headpiece, not just a headband—and we may as well have been carrying giant, neon signs that read,Tourists!
She whisked past me, holding the key fob high in the air, her black shawl billowing behind her.
I tugged on the hem of my denim shorts, glancing around at the other people milling about. “Aunt Meryl,” I said over the sound of her car locking, “shouldn’t we check into the hotel first?”
I didn’t mention the fact that it seemed wildly ridiculous to lock a convertible. Most of our bags couldn’t even fit in the trunk and were piled in the tiny backseat.
“We will, my love. We will!” She swung an arm dramatically overhead before spinning to face me again. Cupping my cheek, she gave me a tender kiss on my forehead, then pointed to a sign above a buttery yellow door.TheMaple Grove Cupcakery.
Cupcakery? Was that even a word?
Meryl flipped her pointed finger up toward the sky, eyes shining in that way they always did when she was about to impart her wisdom upon me. “Life Lesson Number Twenty-seven: when there are cupcakes, everything else must cease!”
I giggled, but the sound was brittle, cracking a bit at the edges.
Life Lessons!She’d been doling out a lot of them lately. Ever since my mom died last month—three and a half weeks prior to my eighteenth birthday.
Even though I was almost an adult when Mom died, the state didn’t see it that way for those three and a half weeks. And Aunt Meryl rushed to be with me. To take care of me. And she’d taken every opportunity since to try to instill into me her quirky rule book.
Aunt Meryl was actually mymom’saunt. Mygreat-aunt. And even though she was in her sixties with streaks of gray in her jet-black coiled hair, she acted as vibrant and young as anyone I’d ever seen.
“Exactly how many lessons are there, Aunt Meryl?”
Pausing with her manicured hand on the doorknob, she slid her sunglasses lower on her nose to reveal her piercing blue eyes that I was insanely jealous of. “As many as there need to be.”
Whipping around, she swept into the bakery with the bells on top of the door announcing her arrival like she was some sort of celebrity.
Spoiler alert: she wasn’t.
But my dadwas.
He was the lead singer of a grunge band back in the 90s. And apparently, he and my mom had a whirlwind, drug-addled fling over the course of a weekend. When two lines showed up on the pregnancy test, and my mom told him about me, he chose to offer a weekly check rather than parental love.
Mom mailed him back his check… shredded into a hundred pieces.
Two years later, he overdosed in his trashed hotel room at the Waldorf-Astoria.
My mom had been protecting my identity from the tabloids for eighteen years. A fact for which I was grateful. But also, sometimes I wasn’t exactly sure why. What did it actually matter? It wasn’t like I knew the guy. Hell, he didn’t even give enough of a shit about me to include me in his will. So why would the tabloids care, either?
“Oh, Haylee!” Meryl shrieked and rushed to the glass counter, pressing her nose to it like a kid in a candy store. “Look how beautiful! We should get some to take back to the Airbnb with us. What do you think? A dozen?”
I gaped at my aunt. “Adozen? For the two of us?”
She nodded, her expression growing momentarily serious. “You’re right. Two dozen it is.”
A cough lodged in my throat. “Twodozen? Aunt Meryl, that’s insane. No person should ever have that many cupcakes.”
“Life Lesson Twenty-eight: you can never have enough cupcakes.”
