The Devine Doughnut Shop

The Devine Doughnut Shop

Carolyn Brown



Chapter One


Where’s the nearest convent or boot camp?” Grace Dalton stormed into the kitchen of the Devine Doughnut Shop that Friday morning. “This daughter of mine needs to spend some time in whichever one that will take her.”

“What has Audrey done now?” Grace’s younger sister, Sarah, asked.

“She sent me a text last night after I’d gone to bed and said that she had been suspended for today,” Grace answered as she slipped a bibbed apron over her head and tied the strings in the back. She tucked her hair up into a net and moved over to the sink to wash her hands.

Their cousin Macy, who was a partner at the doughnut shop, set the bowls up on the counter to get the dough made and rising. “Good Lord! What did she do?”

Grace flipped the hot doughnuts into a bowl of powdered sugar glaze, turned them over, and set them out on a different rack to cool. “She got caught with a pack of cigarettes and one of those little sample bottles of whiskey at school. When she goes back after spring break, she gets to spend two days in the in-school suspension building. I’m paying for your raising, Sarah June, not mine. I was the good child.”

“Thank you for that. But, honey, you were every bit as bad as me. You just hid it better.” Sarah turned around, saw what her sister was doing, and pushed a strand of platinum hair up under a net. “I appreciate you glazing those doughnuts, but you’ve got severe memory-loss problems if you think you were the good child.”

“None of us can brag about shiny halos and big white fluffy wings,” Macy said.

“Amen to that,” Grace said, “and I have to remember that Audrey’s father was one of those bad-boy types that mamas warn their girls about. She’s got his genes as well as mine, but she wasn’t this rebellious until she started running with those two girls, Crystal and Kelsey. She was so much easier to live with when she hung out with Raelene Andrews and that group of kids.”

“I’m glad that Neal and I have decided to have all boys when we start our family,” Macy said as she punched down a bowl full of dough, flipped it out on a floured board, and began to knead it. “This is the last of what we’re making this morning. If we hadn’t sold out early to those fishermen, we wouldn’t have had to make more.”

“Good luck with only having boys.” Grace grimaced. “You might remember that Justin did not have a halo. Your boys might grow up to be like him.”

Macy gasped. “No!”

“Could happen,” Sarah said.

Grace nodded. She and Sarah both had a thing for the bad-boy type. She’d gotten over hers when Justin deserted her, but Sarah still walked on the wild side. An unlikely bunch of roommates, the three women and Grace’s daughter all lived in the same house, not far from the back door of the shop. Grace felt that she was in the middle of the scale and Sarah was on the far-left end. Tomorrow night, since it was Saturday and the shop was closed on Sunday, her little sister would be off to a local bar to drink, dance, and maybe even go home with a two-steppin’ cowboy.

On the opposite end of the scale—the far right—Macy was a Sunday school teacher and engaged to be married in June. Dozens of her bridal magazines cluttered up the old yellow chrome table in the back of the Devine Doughnut Shop—the Double D, as the folks in town had called it for years.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Macy rolled out the dough and cut out the doughnuts.

“It means,” Sarah piped up, “that you’ve got a fifty-fifty chance of having boys, but you could have all girls. Look at our family. We haven’t had a boy in it since before Texas became a state. There’s us three, and before that there was our Mama, Liz, and Aunt Molly; Granny and her sister, Gloria; and Great-Granny, who started this shop, and her sister, Edith. We are a family of sisters.”

Grace thought of their great-grandmother, who had inherited a chunk of money from a land sale when her father died. She’d used the funds to buy the acreage, build a small house, and start a pastry business. She was already famous all over town for her pastries by the time her husband was off to fight in the war. Now the fourth generation was reaping the financial benefits of that small endeavor.

“And a couple of girl cousins thrown into the mix back along the way.” Grace nodded toward Macy. “Four generations of us have lived in the house and run this business, and now I have a daughter who hasn’t got enough ambition to pick up her dirty socks. She’s more interested in being as popular as her two new friends are than thinking about running a business in the future. We may be the last group to keep this business alive.”

Grace was glad that she’d lived on her salary from the bakery all these years and put her profit-sharing check at the end of the year into savings and investments. Not that she was patting herself on the back for being frugal. Her sister and cousin had done the same thing. The one thing she missed was having the time to spend a small portion of that money on vacations, but the shop had been open six days a week since it began, and none of them could bear to break the routine.

Audrey pushed the back door open, slouched down in a chair, and opened a bridal magazine. Her blonde hair hung down to her shoulders and looked like a brush hadn’t seen it in a week. She tucked a strand with a blue streak behind her ear when it fell down over her right eye. Her jeans had holes all up and down the legs, and her T-shirt looked like something a stray dog would have tried to bury in the backyard.