The Great Peach Experiment 1, Erin Downing [books to read romance .TXT] 📗

Great Peach Experiment succeed. She’d seen her dad get passionate about work projects plenty of times before, of course, but none of those ventures had ever involved or interested her; they’d just been excuses for him to disappear. With the Peach Pie Truck, however, everything felt different. Lucy was starting to sense that things were changing; she had begun to feel like life was creeping a little closer to the way it used to be.

“Dad?” Lucy said, yawning as they passed Gary, Indiana. She was hungry and sleepy and the book she was reading had not yet captured her attention. On both sides of the highway, lines of smokestacks belched steam into the air, offering a stark contrast to Chicago’s bright and shiny skyline. “You said you used to take road trips with your cousins when you were a kid?”

Dad nodded. “Yep.”

“With Great Aunt Lucinda, right?” Lucy asked.

“Indeed,” Dad said quietly.

“Will you tell me about some of those trips?” Lucy asked, settling deeper into her seat. She knew very little about Dad’s childhood, only that his mom had died when he was still in elementary school. And Lucy’s grandpop had been in the army, so they had moved around a lot when Dad was growing up. He didn’t talk about it much, but Lucy got the feeling that Dad and Grandpop had never been very close. Though he died before Herb was born and they hadn’t visited him very often when he was still alive, Lucy could remember the smell of his cigars, and the way he laughed out loud when he rubbed his prickly beard stubble on her cheek.

“Sure,” Dad said. He changed the channel to a pop music station. Then he told Lucy how, every summer starting when he was eight, Dad had joined Aunt Lucinda, Uncle Martin, and his cousins on their road trips. “Some of my happiest memories are from those adventures,” he said. “We’d stop and camp at night, cooking dinner over the fire. My cousins and I would poke around in the woods and explore fun little towns during the day. One summer, we drove up to a water park in Canada. Another time, we stopped to explore some caves in Kentucky. But the best trips came later—when Lucinda and Martin drove us all the way across the country to North Carolina, right on the Atlantic Ocean, and we camped close to the beach for a week.” Dad gazed out the windshield into the hazy night sky. “We’d swim, play in the waves, eat ice cream for lunch. I liked swimming back then just as much as Herb does now.”

“Why haven’t we ever done that?” Lucy asked, feeling bold for just coming out and saying something that was on her mind. She’d blurted out questions to her mom, plenty of times, but it was harder with Dad.

“Everything’s different now,” he said wistfully. “Prices out East have shot up, the campgrounds have all been bought out to build big houses and hotels, and hurricanes keep eroding the beaches. Also, with work as busy as it is, it’s just an awfully long way to go to sit around and do nothing.”

Lucy frowned. “Why was it Aunt Lucinda and Uncle Martin who took you? Why didn’t Grandpop go along?”

“My father didn’t get much time off work, so trips like that never made sense,” Dad said. “That’s just the way it was.” There was silence for a few moments while neither of them said anything more.

Lucy considered the way things used to be in her family and wondered if Dad ever thought about how much things had changed since Mom died. She felt a little guilty for thinking it, but everything had been so much better before. Lucy often wondered if their life would ever go completely back to normal.

Finally, Dad flipped on a podcast, explaining, “I’m starting to get sleepy—do you mind if I turn this on so I have something to focus on? Still hoping to make it to Ann Arbor tonight so we don’t lose a day of sales tomorrow. We’re really in the zone, and I don’t want to lose momentum in the weeks leading up to the Food Truck Festival. Lots to do to if we want to be ready for the big event so we can call this summer a success.”

“Go ahead,” Lucy said. She opened her book and pretended to read. But the words just swam in front of her eyes. She was too busy trying to process what her dad had said. The beach didn’t sound like nothing to her. All of the trips Dad had taken with his cousins and Great Aunt Lucinda sounded marvelous. Obviously, they had been wonderful, or he wouldn’t have such fond memories.

A summer of blissful nothing, without a care in the world. Could the four of them ever have an adventure like that? She tried to imagine what it would be like to spend time together as a family, doing something—or nothing—with the only goal being to enjoy one another’s company. They used to do that all the time when Mom was still around. But no matter how hard Lucy wished she could get that old life back, her wish didn’t seem likely to come true.

This trip wasn’t quite like the ones Dad and his cousins used to take, but it was a chance for the Peaches to create a few special new memories as a family. If the Great Peach Experiment could help patch up some of the holes in their lives, Lucy decided it would be worth giving up half her summer break to bake and sell pies. Figuring out some way to paint her dad back into the picture would be a game changer.

They were bumping along I-94, making surprisingly good time, when suddenly the food truck began to hiss. It whined, clanked, and then steam began to puff out of the slits on either side of the hood. Lucy glanced at her dad, who didn’t appear to have noticed any