“I can’t fucking believe we’re doin’ this!” Tyler said, closing the walk-in door. “This is gonna be great!”
We planted our asses on the pristine prep tables and threw a bunch of ideas back and forth, our voices echoing in the empty building. Most of them came easily enough. Back at South Hill, we’d always talked about what we’d change if we ran the place, and now we actually had the chance to put some of those ideas into place. We hashed out a plan for opening week, figuring out what we needed to make and how much. I was keeping the menu simple for now. Bobby said he expected we’d get about two hundred people on our first day, so we decided to workoff that estimate. If we sold out early, too bad, but since Bobby was adamant that everything be made fresh daily, it was better than making too much and having to put it in the trash at the end of the day. Might as well just throw money straight in the dumpster. Bobby had also spread the word that we were giving out a bunch of free samples.
“Fucking mini cupcakes, though?” Tyler bitched. “I fucking hate frosting those things.”
“Well, too bad,” I said with a shit-eating grin. “Because I say customers will love them, and I’m the boss!”
He flipped me the bird.
“We’ll do cookies too,” I said. The great thing about cookies was that you could prep and freeze them in advance, and people tended to buy a bunch of them at once.
Tyler nodded and raised his eyebrows. “We’re gonna do pastries, right? You gonna make some biko?”
I hadn’t even thought about it, but I snorted. “You think Goose Run is ready for biko?”
“Fuck that,” Tyler said. “That’s Henry talking, not you. Besides, you said you’d teach me.”
“Maybe not in our first week,” I said. “But okay, yeah, we’re gonna do it.”
The idea of making traditional Filipino pastries and desserts, the same dishes that had gotten me interested in becoming a baker to begin with, had pretty much been stamped out of me at South Hill Bakery, but this was a new bakery, and like I’d just reminded Tyler, I was the boss. I felt a thrum of excitement in my gut as I thought of all the recipes I could create here in Goose Run. The same recipes I’d learned from my lola. She’d be over the moon when I told her I was making them in my own bakery.
“And those purple cookies too,” Tyler said.
“Ube cookies.”
“Fuck yeah,” he said with a grin. “Those are the bomb.”
“Maybe,” I said, but I was already mentally calculating costs. Ube was expensive and could be hard to source, so we’d need to check if there was actually any demand before I chased down a supplier.
Holy shit, look at me, acting like a manager already and we haven’t even opened the doors yet.
I grinned at Tyler and hopped down off the table. “Let’s get to work.”
I was wipedby the time I got home to Emporia that evening. We were as set up as we could be for opening day, and we’d worked hard all day to get there. Tyler had liberated a bunch of sourdough starter from South Hill when he’d left there and I’d set it up and fed it, and now we had a batch of sourdough loaves prepped and ready in the walk-in to bake first thing, as well as a heap of different flavored cookies and pastry dough. There were also two hundred mini cupcakes baked and ready to be frosted in the morning before we opened. If I never saw another fucking cake again in my life, I’d die a happy man.
“Lee!” my sister Sam yelled from the doorway. “Look what I made you!”
I laughed when she brandished the lopsided cake. Brandished it so wildly that it almost slid off the plate, which wouldn’t have made it any uglier, at least. Mom and Sam liked to troll me with ugly cakes made from store-bought mixes, and since they tasted okay I didn’t complain. They didn’t just use the frosting from the mix, though. They added all sorts of coloring. This one was orange and green. It looked radioactive. Definitely winning in the ugly stakes.
Sam was wearing her usual uniform of pajama pants and a hoodie. She and Mom fought about it at least once a week, though never seriously. Mom always reminded Sam that the school had sent out an email saying kids couldn’t wear pajama pants—it was such a trend that yeah, they’d had to address it—and that she’d get in trouble, and Sam always said they weren’t going to yell at the girl who hadcancer.
Pretty sure she was going to milk that as long as she could, and who could blame her? Chemo wasn’t exactly a fun time, so we were all pretty fucking relieved she could joke about it now. Mom and I still couldn’t, but we weren’t going to tell her that she had to be all serious about it. She’d been through hell over the past year. She’d earned the right to troll her teachers over pajama pants if she wanted.
“That is a fuck-ugly cake,” I said and gave her a hug.
She grinned. “I made it especially for my fuck-ugly brother.”
“Bitch.”
“Asshole.”
“Language, you little shits,” Mom yelled from inside the house.
I followed Sam in and hung my jacket by the door. Mom stuck her head out of the kitchen door, and I smiled at her. She wasn’t really pissed at our language—it would make her the biggest hypocrite in the world, obviously, and she knew we didn’t mean it when we called each other names. Also it felt good to call Sam a bitch again. Mostly because there’d been a time when I’d been scared to do it, in case it was the last thing I said to her. But now it felt like things were getting back to normal, the way they were supposed to be. There wasn’t a cloud hanging over every conversation we had, or every hug we shared.
The future was something to look forward to again.
“I made chicken,” Mom said. “With some sauce from a jar.”
