Candy Store

the night before, but by 8 a.m. the streets were nicely plowed and the sidewalk slush had melted.
    Callie had spent her whole life in Saratoga, but the Saratoga of today was very different from the town she knew so well as a child. When Callie was a little girl, she used to ride her bike into town with her friends, fifty cents in her pocket, straight to the candy store. They’d fill up their bags with jujubes and Necco wafers and jawbreakers and then head to the park and stuff themselves full of sugar under an elm tree. As a teenager, when Callie realized she had been blessed with the gift of candy making, she knew that, as soon as she could, she would open up her own candy store on Main Street.
    Her dream became a reality when she was twenty-five years old. She had saved every penny from her various cooking and catering jobs over the years, only spending the bare minimum on her cottage, and all of the sweat and grease was worth it when she signed the lease for her very own candy store.
    The first time she walked by the vacant storefront that was now Callie’s Candies, the old rundown ice cream shop didn’t look like much good for anything other than for breeding spiders and mice. Narrow but deceptively long, with a large kitchen in back, it was covered in dust and neglect.
    But for Callie, it was her first brush with true love. She immediately envisioned the space a buttery yellow, glass display cases full of truffles and fudge, old wine barrels on the floor with fresh, homemade saltwater taffy.
    The past five years had been the most rewarding time of her life. She made candy in the evening and sold it by day. She loved watching the glee on the children’s faces as they flew in off of their bikes, strewn haphazardly on the wide sidewalk, anticipation glowing in their eyes.
    They knew that Miss Callie would always give them free samples of whatever she had just made that day, whether it was vanilla swirl fudge or chocolate turtle pie. And even when they pulled a dollar out of their dirty shorts and handed it to her for a bag of taffy, they couldn’t wait to get outside and see what little “extra” Callie had thrown in for them, maybe a lollipop or a wax-paper-covered slice of fudge.
    If they were really lucky, and they had been given money from their mothers for a box of truffles to take home, Callie gifted them with a handful of lollipops and gummy worms.
    But now that popular chain stores ruled the street along with swanky restaurants and wine bars, Callie’s rent had doubled, then tripled in the past five years. With every year, she found it harder and harder to put something away in the bank after she had paid her bills. People were always telling her to put up a website and advertise, but she didn’t know the first thing about that kind of stuff.
    And she didn’t want to. She just wanted to make candy and watch the joy on her customers’ faces as they ate it.
    Callie pulled into the plowed parking lot behind her building, then walked through the narrow alley between buildings to the sidewalk. She always made it a point to enter her store by the front door in the morning. Her first sight of the pretty yellow, blue, and white striped awning over the window and the fanciful cartoonish painted letters of Callie’s Candies on the flag beside the door made her incredibly happy.
    She unlocked the front door and walked in, pulling up the shade on the door, scanning the glass for smudges or smears. Satisfied that it was clear and clean, she headed for the back room, breathing in the scent of sugar and cocoa powder, feeling settled for the first time since the wedding the day before.
    Her store didn’t open until 11 a.m., Monday through Friday, but Callie always had plenty to do in the morning. The best was making fudge or coating truffles in coconut and peanuts. The worst was going through her inventory and doing her orders for the week.
    This was inventory day, of course. Callie sighed with dismay. Today of all days, she could have used a long, therapeutic session with some caramel and nougat.
    “Figures,” she muttered, as she walked into her small office at the back of the store and put her purse down. She took off her suit jacket and laid it across the back of her desk chair. Unbound by the jacket, her breasts felt free and immodest in the white lace camisole, reminding her yet again of her wanton behavior at the wedding.
    “Forget about it. You’ve got work to do,” she lectured herself and got