The Cupcake Queen Read online

  “Thanks, Penny,” my mother says, stepping around the table to where I am quickly replacing rosebuds on some of the cupcakes. To my mother’s credit, her smile only slips the tiniest bit when she sees what I’m doing. “Penny, go ahead and set the rest of the cupcakes out on the platters around the cake stands.”

  Just as I am carefully transferring the last of the cupcakes to the trays, Mr. Wharton starts walking toward us. As big as Mrs. Wharton is, Mr. Wharton is bigger. And I don’t mean just a little bigger. I mean like he left the town of Three Hundred Pounds and is careening toward the city of Four Hundred Pounds. His wife looks at her watch. “Let’s all gather around the birthday girl for a photo. That’ll give us time to get some food before we start the fashion show.”

  I back up from the table so that I can see the stage they have set up at the front of the room. This gives my mother enough room to step up to the table to adjust the cupcakes that I had set out. Mr. Wharton walks over and pokes one of his fingers into a cupcake, stealing a glob of frosting. My mother smiles stiffly at him. He winks at her and turns to watch as Charity has her picture taken from every possible angle.

  “Okay, Charity, you go first,” her mother says. But Charity is already halfway across the floor and coming toward the table. Something tells me Charity always goes first.

  “Hi, sweetheart,” Mr. Wharton says when Charity walks up to dish up some fruit and select a cupcake. She barely glances in his direction. Mr. Wharton is not about to be separated from the food, so instead of going to stand beside his wife, he decides to lean against the dessert table. Maybe if an average-size person had leaned against it then everything would have been fine, but as I already said, Mr. Wharton is not average-size.

  The rest all happens as if in slow motion. As the table tilts under Mr. Wharton’s weight, the upper tiers of the cupcake stands begin to teeter. My mother makes a grab for the tower on one end, attempting to keep it upright by pushing on one of the columns. The upper two tiers tip sideways and then topple. My mother catches half a dozen cupcakes with her hands and a couple more with her face. The second tower is positioned right in front of Charity, who at that very moment has her hand poised over a particularly large cupcake. Charity apparently doesn’t have the hand-eye coordination of my mother. She ends up wearing a dozen or more cupcakes like a hat while half a dozen more slide slowly down the front of her dress.

  “Oh my goodness,” is all Mrs. Wharton can manage. She hustles over to the table, pushing her husband, who has also been hit by a few flying cupcakes. Unfortunately, instead of pushing him out of the way, she pushes him into the table. Now, I know those kinds of tables have to be built to hold a lot of weight, but I don’t think the builders had someone like Mr. Wharton in mind. When his right hip hits the end of the table, it buckles slightly—enough to tip over one of the melon baskets and send the punch bowl sliding down the tablecloth.

  “Oh my goodness,” Mrs. Wharton repeats. She grabs at the punch bowl as it slides toward her. The bowl bumps against her stomach, which stops it, but the contents of the bowl keep going, splashing up and over her, turning the whole front of her white dress pink. All of the extra cupcakes begin sliding along the length of the table, too. Trying to prevent more damage, Mr. Wharton grabs the closest end of the table—the lower end—and lifts it up. Unfortunately, he lifts too fast and too far, sending everything flying. Mr. Wharton snatches a couple of the cupcakes that shoot in his direction and stuffs one into his mouth. The forks that my mother had so carefully arranged in a circle become dangerous projectiles. The glasses—luckily not glass at all, but heavy plastic—clatter loudly to the floor.

  “Save the melon!” Mrs. Wharton shouts over the noise, as if saving one piece of fruit will make any difference. My mother manages to grab one of the melon boats, catching it like a football. The other upends right in front of Charity, sending balls of watermelon flying in every direction. I manage to snag a couple of the plates, but the rest of them crash to the ground. Some of them shatter, but others land on end and make lazy circles on the floor before flopping over. Not everyone ends up wearing some sort of food. Several girls manage to stay clean. I am one of them; something my mother is not likely to forget.

  After a lot of apologies and promises to refund their money, my mother and I spend an embarrassing twenty minutes cleaning up the mess. About halfway through, Charity comes out of the bathroom, where she had fled immediately after the accident. She has a tablecloth clutched around her; her dress either abandoned in the trash or left for her mother to retrieve. Her mascara has left long trails of black on her cheeks, and her hair is matted. Her friends stay close to her as they walk past me. I bend to scoop up another handful of melon balls before I realize that the group of girls hasn’t walked past after all but has stopped in front of me. Charity stands there, her pink high heels peeking out from under the tablecloth. I look at her and watch as a glob of pink frosting slowly slides from her hair and comes to rest on her shoulder. “I’ll see you in school, Penny.” She stares at me for several seconds without blinking. I start to stammer an apology, but she just shakes her head at me. She walks out, followed by her entourage, each of them pausing long enough to give me the ice stare.

  “Great,” I say, dropping the handful of melon balls into the empty box. “Now she remembers my name.”

  chapter three

  Saying the ride hack is a lit tle uncomfortable would be like saying that walking across pieces of glass and then a pile of salt smarts a little. My mother is taking the sighing thing to a new level. It’s at the point where I’m afraid she’s going to hyperventilate. I tell her it’s going to be okay. She just nods and keeps watching the road.

  We ride in silence for the rest of the way into town. I stare out the window, seeing the big wooden sign for Hog’s Hollow. WELCOME HOME, it says at the bottom. The brochures my mother keeps in the bakery describe about the rustic charm of the area. If rustic means “old,” they’re right. Main Street still has a whole section of cobblestone, and most of the store signs are made out of wood that’s been carved and painted. When we lived in the City, my family used to go to the shore in the summer, to towns that are faux rustic. You can tell that they’re not the real deal because everything seems a little too perfect. All the signs match; there are identical iron lampposts on every corner. Flowers are planted in barrels; trash cans have wooden boxes built around them. Even the McDonald’s look rustic. They’re like Hollywood studio sets. But Hog’s Hollow isn’t fake rustic, it’s the real deal.

  My mother turns down one of the side streets and swings around to the back of the bakery, where she parks near the Dumpster. I climb out and go to the back of the van and start sliding out boxes and crates and stacking them on the back porch. It takes only a few minutes to get everything inside. I start to put the cake stands in the dishwasher. “Just leave them,” my mother says softly. “It’s late.”

  We walk back out to the van and head to Gram’s house, a Cape near the beach. I heard my mother talking to her on the phone before we left the City. “Just until we get settled,” Mom said when Gram offered to let us live with her. Of course I’m not about to settle. Settling means staying. We turn onto the gravel road that takes us toward the water and the house. At the corner is a sign for JOY’S PHOTOGRAPHY STUDIO. Sometimes I hear Gram working down in the darkroom until late at night, and yet she’s still up at dawn to get to the bakery. Even though she just turned sixty-five, she has more energy than my mother and me put together.

  My mother pulls the van around the house and parks it in front of the garage. She looks at me for a long moment, but then she’s out and walking toward the back porch before I can say anything. I hear the screen door snap shut behind her as she goes inside. I take my blue hoodie out of my backpack and pull it on before sliding out of the van and heading toward the path down to the water.

  We got here in June, right after school was out. It was only going to be for the summer at first. Mom told me she just needed to get away, and
I know that meant she needed to get away from my dad. And I hope that’s all it is. Like they just need a break from each other.

  For a long time I would hear them arguing when I was supposed to be sleeping. They’d fight about everything—my school, who left crumbs in the butter, whose turn it was to take Oscar to the vet. That was bad. But it was worse when they stopped. It was like as long as they were arguing, they cared. Once they stopped it seemed like everything stopped.

  I’d like to say I saw it coming—the move, I mean. But the truth is, until she started hauling the suitcases out of the closet, I had no idea Mom had even been thinking about leaving the City. The only thing I noticed was that she notched up the intensity level a little. But with my mother, that’s like increasing things from an 8 to a 10, so it’s just more of more. I guess the other thing was that she went kind of crazy. But it was a quiet crazy, one that only I could see. She started obsessing about everything. Even simple decisions, like what kind of jam to buy at the store, seemed to have huge consequences in her mind. She would stand there, staring at the jars until I’d finally just pick one for her. It was right after that that I found the packet from the Hog’s Hollow Chamber of Commerce on my mother’s desk. Only a week later a moving van was double-parked in front of our apartment building and guys with names like STAN and PAUL stitched in red on their jumpsuits were hauling boxes of books and clothes down the stairs and out into the rain.

  My dad moved out first. He told me the separation was good, because they needed time to heal. The problem was that they didn’t tell me from what. He said everything was going to be fine, but he didn’t bother to show up at the diner for our last breakfast. He just left a message on my mom’s cell that something had come up and he was really sorry, but to call when we got there so he’d know we were safe. And I know something probably did come up and that the something was probably important, but sometimes I just wish the something important could be me.

  And for the entire drive to Hog’s Hollow, as I sat there in my mom’s blue Toyota hatchback, I kept thinking about what my dad had said. That everything was going to be fine. And I realized maybe that’s all we can hope for from life: fine. Not happy, not good, but just fine. And in my case “fine” is an acronym for Freakin’ Irrational Nightmare Existence.

  I take off my socks and shoes at the top of the stairs, roll my socks into balls, and shove them into the tops of my sneakers. The sand feels cool on my feet as I walk down toward the water. I stand at the edge of where the wet sand meets the dry and try to figure out if the tide is going in or out. The wind is cold off the water. It feels good after a whole day stuck inside, but it raises goose bumps on my arms and makes me shiver.

  About a month after we arrived, my mom did the whole we need to have a talk thing. She brought me down to the beach and I thought, Finally, she’s going to tell me what’s going on, but instead she just talked about finding herself and her roots and figuring out what was really important. When she said, “I’m going to open a bakery,” dumb me, I thought she meant in New York. And while it was surprising, I wasn’t really surprised. My mom has always been what she calls “vaguely artistic.” I started to get excited as she talked about the bakery idea. I pictured a tiny shop in SoHo that made specialty cakes and got featured in the Food Section of the New York Times. Then she told me the bakery wasn’t going to be in the City at all, but out here. Here, in Hog’s Hollow, where they actually crown a Hog Queen every fall.

  If my life were a movie, I would have calmly outlined all the reasons why a bakery would be a bad business move. I would have told her why city life suits us better than life out here in the sticks. But my life isn’t a movie. Not even close. And I wasn’t calm and cool and convincing. Instead, I ran away. I took off down the beach and ran until I couldn’t run any more and then I just collapsed on the sand and cried. The next thing I did was e-mail my dad and beg him to talk some sense into her. I wanted him to drive here and ask her to come back, maybe even beg her to come back. Because opening a bakery seems really final, like the first step in their splitting up for good. But as much as I tried to fight it, on that day a summer turned into forever. That is, until I can figure out a way to convince my mother that we need to move back to the City.

  I watch the water, still trying to figure out which way the tide is going. Every time I think I figure it out, it seems to change. I hear a dog running behind me. I turn to see him coming straight toward me, fast, kicking up sand as he goes, and all at once he is on me, big wet paws, big wet tongue. His paws are on my chest as he tries to lick my face. He’s so happy that I just start laughing. It’s the first time I’ve laughed in forever, and it feels strange in my mouth, like the first time I had sushi. Good, but weird. The dog backs off a bit and begins running around me in circles, making a chuffing sound in his throat. I bend and put out my hand, and he comes right to me again. I pet him, scratching behind his ears. His fur is thick and golden and damp from the ocean.

  “Good boy,” I say. He smells good, like seawater and salt, but also bad, like wet dog.

  “Sam, no.” I look up to see a guy running toward me and I stand up again. The dog, who I now know is Sam, sits down beside me and thumps his tail. “I’m so sorry,” the guy says, reaching for Sam’s collar. Sam leans into my legs, making me laugh. “Sam, no.”

  “It’s okay,” I say.

  The guy looks at me. “He gets a little excited,” he says. He smiles and pushes his curly brown hair back from his forehead. Even in the dim light, I can see that his eyes are really deep brown, like Sam’s, and when he smiles, the corners crinkle.

  “A little.” I smile and bend down to pat Sam on the head. Sam keeps thumping his tail on the sand, making a weird sand angel with each swish.

  “He likes you.”

  “I suspect that Sam likes everyone.” I look up. The guy is watching me, and suddenly I’m self-conscious in my rolled-up jeans and my sandy hoodie. He smiles again and pushes up the sleeve of his sweatshirt. He has a braided leather bracelet on his wrist that slides down toward his hand when he moves his arm.

  “Sam’s actually pretty selective.” Sam keeps pushing his head into my hand, petting himself on my fingers.

  “Is he?” I bend and scratch Sam behind the ears again.

  “He’s a very good judge of character.” He blushes slightly after he says it and pushes his hair off his forehead again. Sam thumps his tail once more and tears off down the beach. We hear him bark, but it’s too dark to see him. “I guess I better—”

  “I guess so,” I say. He smiles again. Crinkle. He backs away and lifts a hand in my direction before turning and running after Sam.

  “Bye,” I say, but it’s just to myself, because he’s too far away to hear. I walk back to the steps and stuff my socks into my pockets before I slip on my high-tops, pushing the laces down inside of them. The kitchen light is on, but the rest of the house is dark. I walk quietly up onto the porch and settle into the glider. I lean my head back and close my eyes. I hear barking from way down the beach and smile, wishing I knew the guy’s name and not just his dog’s.

  “It was awful.” I can hear my mother in the kitchen. I hold still and listen.

  “Tea?” Gram asks. I imagine her holding up the kettle as she asks. Tea fixes everything, she always says.

  “Please,” my mother says. Her voice sounds tired, more than ever. Ever since she came here, she sounds different, like just holding her body together and moving around is hard.

  “Tell me everything,” Gram says, and I cringe. It’s enough that my mother thinks I’m a screwup. Not Gram, too. My mother does tell her everything. She doesn’t even leave out Charity’s parting comment, which I didn’t think she had heard. And when she finishes, they’re quiet. I hold my breath and wait, wondering what Gram will say. Wanting to know and not wanting to at the same time. And then I hear Gram laughing. She starts out soft and gets louder and louder until I can hear her gasping, and I know tears are rolling down her cheeks. It feels awful, h
earing her laugh at me.

  “Mother,” Mom says, but Gram doesn’t stop. And then I hear a surprising thing. My mother starts laughing, too. Which just makes Gram laugh harder. “You should have seen her face.” I wonder who they mean. Me?

  “Oh, what I would have given to see that,” Gram says. The laughing begins to die down, and I hear a lot of whoo’s and sighs. This time happy ones.

  “The look on Eugenia’s face when the first cupcake hit her.” My mother starts laughing again. I try to figure out who Euge nia is.

  “And her daughter. What’s her name?”

  “Charity,” my mother says, and I realize they are talking about Mrs. Wharton.

  “Charity, oh yes. What a preposterous name for such a selfish family.”

  “Maybe Stingy was already taken.”

  “I was surprised when you got the call to do the cupcakes for her daughter’s birthday,” Gram says. “After everything . . .”

  “I can’t afford to be choosy. It’s such a small town.”

  “I know, but still . . .” They are both quiet for a moment. “How was Penny with all of it?” Gram asks. I sit forward a little to listen, but all I hear is my mother’s sigh, then silence.

  “I don’t know,” my mother says finally. “I wish we didn’t—” But then she stops talking, leaving me wondering what she wishes we didn’t do. Move here? Open a bakery? Make a thousand pink cupcakes for Miss Ice Princess?