by Jackie Lau
Ah, okay. This guy and I totally do not run in the same circles. Yet he’s personally asked me to cater his party.
I can’t help the thrill that runs through me.
“Out of curiosity,” I say, “how much oven space do you have?”
“Um, the usual amount?”
The meat pies retain heat quite well, and we can probably fit a hundred and twenty into our two ovens, then bring them over already warmed. I expect that’s what we’ll do, but I want to know my options.
I head to the back, then return with a list of our pies. “I was envisioning meat pies—and vegetable or chickpea ones for the vegetarians—for the main course, then lots of dessert pies. Is that what you had in mind?”
He nods. “Though I confess, I’m not really the party-planning type. Usually my assistant figures out these kinds of things, but this time...” He glances out the window, and the smile slips off his face. “This one is different.”
Okay. I wait a beat in case he wants to elaborate, but he doesn’t, so I hand over the list. “Here’s what I can make, though if there’s something else you want, just let me know, and I’ll see what I can do.”
“Hmm.” He reads through the list. “Anything with hazelnuts?”
What the...? It’s such an odd request.
And then I remember the name of his company.
“No, nothing with hazelnuts, but...” I think as quickly as I can. “But I could try an apple hazelnut crumble pie? Or something with chocolate.”
He snaps his fingers. “Nutella. I want you to make me some kind of Nutella pie, and something else with hazelnuts—whatever you think would work.”
“Since these are custom items and I don’t have my own recipes, I’ll have to charge you extra for their development. I’ll need to make some trial pies.”
“Sure.”
“What’s your budget?”
“Whatever it needs to be.”
Right. I suppose for guys like Josh, the cost of the party will be just a drop in the bucket.
“You can take the list,” I say. “Email me what you want, and I’ll give you the cost.”
“I also want to try every single thing that will be served.”
“I assure you, everything will be top quality. You’ve already tried a number of our pies, haven’t you? I can arrange for you to try the hazelnut ones I make specially for your event, but it’s not necessary for you to—”
“Yes, it is. It has to be perfect. I want many different pies at this party, and I want to have tried every single one.”
“You’re a control freak,” I say, before I can think better of it.
He chuckles. “Sometimes.”
He leans forward, as though he’s about to tell me something secret, intimate. He’s got such a charming smile, and God. Usually I’m pretty good at focusing on work, but I admit, he makes it difficult.
Really difficult.
I inhale sharply, preparing myself for whatever he’s going to say.
And then he steps back, much to the disappointment of my body, and taps the list. “I’ll take this and get in touch soon.”
I grab a business card from the counter. “Here’s my email. And phone number.” To my annoyance, I sound desperate, and then, to my great horror, something else pops out of my mouth without my thinking about it first. “I’m sorry about Wednesday.”
He frowns.
“You know, the butter tart filling? On your lip? When I invaded your personal space?”
Sarah, stop talking!
“Ah.” He nods, and the corner of his mouth curls up. “I didn’t mind.”
Heat coils deep inside me at his words. I can’t help it.
He winks at me before putting on his jacket and heading out, but even as cold air blows in through the door before it shuts, my cheeks feel like they’re on fire.
He was flirting with me, wasn’t he? I might have spent most of the past dozen years in a kitchen, but I’m pretty sure I can recognize flirting.
Not that it matters. Some people are just flirty, and it’s only natural that he would be one of them, considering how attractive he is.
Plus, nothing can happen anyway. I need to focus on my business, and for the next month—Pi Day isn’t very far away—making him happy is my number one priority.
In a business sense, of course.
* * *
I get home at five o’clock—an early day. I’m not ready for dinner, but I help myself to a glass of the wine I opened yesterday. It’s not like anyone else is here to drink it.
After checking Happy As Pie’s social media accounts, I can’t help myself from Googling Josh Yu. I discover his company has made a few of the apps I have on my phone, and I find a brief interview with him in a “20 Young Canadian Entrepreneurs to Watch” article.
This guy is some kind of tech hotshot. I can’t believe I’m planning a party for him.
To my surprise, I also recognize another person in the article: Caitlin Ng. As in, the Caitlin who came into Happy As Pie the other day, asking for a pie buffet for her wedding. Apparently, she started the dating app Match Me. Huh. I wonder if that’s how she met her fiancé.
I make my way through the search results and come across another recent article: “35 Most Eligible Bachelors Under 35 in Toronto.”
So he’s single!
I shut down that line of thinking. I did not move to Toronto to score a guy on some most-eligible-bachelors list. I’m here for the food and opportunities.
In the photo—because there has to be a photo for a list like this—he’s got his arms casually crossed over his chest, and he’s looking away from the camera, smiling. He is, once again, wearing a Henley. Perhaps it’s the only kind of shirt he owns. Not that I’m complaining. He wears it well, and maybe no one expects you to wear a suit when you work in tech?
I picture him in a suit, his tie loosened, the top buttons of his shirt undone...
Okay, Sarah. Not a good use of your time. Think about Nutella pies instead.
* * *
Whenever I need a break from work, I take a short walk around the neighborhood. Saturday afternoon, after being in the kitchen for seven hours straight, I put on my winter coat and head outside.
It’s not a nice day. The wind is brisk, and it’s far below freezing. It won’t be a long walk, maybe ten minutes, and then I’ll head back.
I glance at the empty storefront across the street from Happy As Pie. It’s been leased, and a little work has been going on there over the past month, but I’ve never seen anyone inside.
Until now.
I walk across the street to take a closer look. There are two women painting the back wall a vibrant pink. From the look of things, they’re going to be selling some kind of food, and I’m curious to know the details. When I first opened Happy As Pie, there was a sushi restaurant here, but it closed down a few months ago.
One of the women—a petite Asian woman—glances toward the door and sees me staring.
Shit.
I turn to walk away, but she opens the door before I can leave.
“Can I help you?” She sounds guarded, suspicious.
“I’m Sarah,” I stammer. “I own Happy As Pie. Just wanted to know what’s going in here, that’s all.”
She nods and relaxes a bit. “A homemade ice cream shop.”
An ice cream shop! How fun!
The other woman bounds to the door. She has dark brown hair and a wide smile. “You own the pie place?”
“Yep.”
She extends her hand. “I’m Chloe, and in two months—I hope we’ll be open in two months—I’ll be running Ginger Scoops. Asian-inspired ice cream flavors. Taro, Vietnamese coffee, green tea, and lots of other things.”
Is she Asian? I think maybe she’s biracial, but I’m not sure.
“Cool,” I say.
“This is Valerie, my employee.” She laughs as she gestures to the other woman.
Valerie rolls her eyes. “I can’t believe I’m working for you.”
I get the feeling they’ve been friends for ages, and I’m hit with a bolt of jealousy. I imagine setting up my business with a close friend. Having someone I care about there for every triumph and setback.
In fact, I’m jealous of anyone who has a close friend, period.
“What do you think of the pink?” Chloe gestures at the wall. “Valerie thinks it’s a bit much.”
“Depending on what kind of look you’re going for, it could work.”
“I still think you should have gone with black,” Valerie says. “Then you could have written ‘Ginger Scoops’ on the wall in blood red.”
“Don’t mind Valerie,” Chloe says. “She’s actually a very sweet person.”
Valerie chuckles. “Thank you. You’re hilarious.”
“I should be going,” I say. “It was nice to meet you both.”
“Nice to meet you, too.” Chloe waves at me.
I head down Baldwin Street, and when I’m back in my kitchen ten minutes later, working on some apple pie filling, I still feel a twinge of longing.
Maybe I should have asked, “Will you be my friend?” like we were six-year-olds on the playground.
Chapter 5
Sarah
Ann pokes her head into the kitchen the next day. “There are some girls here to see you.”
“Girls?” I say, wiping my hands on my apron.
“Well, they look like they’re about twenty-five. They’re girls to me.”
I head to the front. Chloe and Valerie are standing by the counter, each holding a plate with a meat pie.
“It smells delicious,” Chloe says. “I got the beef and mushroom.”
“I have the pulled pork,” Valerie says.
“We thought we’d stop in and see you for lunch.” Chloe tilts her head. “Unless you’re busy?”
“No, no. I’ve already eaten, but I could use a coffee break.” I pour myself a cup of coffee and join them at a table. I feel like I’m auditioning for a role.
Valerie looks around. “Do you do catering?”
“We haven’t catered any events yet, but I have our first customer lined up. The CEO of a tech company wants to throw a Pi Day party. He came in yesterday.”
“A Pi Day party?” Chloe laughs.
“Which company?” Valerie asks.
“Hazelnut Tech.”
“Ah.” Valerie nods. “Yeah, I know them. They do mobile app and custom software development.”
“Valerie used to work in that field,” Chloe explains.
Valerie looks away, a shadow passing over her face. I want to ask her what happened, but that’s not the kind of relationship we have.
Not yet, anyway.
She pastes a smile on her face. “You said the CEO came in to talk to you? Party planning doesn’t seem like the sort of thing a CEO would normally do—he’d have some unlucky subordinate do it for him. What did you think of Josh Yu?”
“You really know a lot about this company,” Chloe says.
Valerie shrugs, then digs into her steaming pie.
My face heats as I think of Josh, of the way he winked at me before he left yesterday. And the way he filled out his shirt.
And how he scrambled my senses.
“Based on your expression,” Chloe says, “I’m guessing Josh Yu isn’t a middle-aged man with a horrible comb over.”
“No, he’s quite attractive.” Valerie takes out her phone and pulls up his picture on the Hazelnut Tech website.
“Ooh,” Chloe breathes. “Very nice.”
“I touched his lips,” I blurt out.
God, what’s wrong with me? It’s like my mouth isn’t connected to my brain.
“You mean you kissed him?” Valerie asks.
“No, the first time he came in, he got butter tart filling on his lip and I...” I shake my head. “I wiped it off! I couldn’t help myself! Then I apologized for it the second time he was here.”
I swear, I’m not normally socially incompetent, but I sure feel that way now. These women came here for lunch, and they wanted to see me. This is the best opportunity I’ve had to make friends in ages, and I’m screwing it up. I sound like a loon.
“Let me get this straight,” Chloe says. “After you touched his mouth, he came back a second time and asked you to cater his party?”
“Um, yes. Something like that.”
Chloe and Valerie look at each other, and then Chloe turns to me and grins.
“He liiiikes you,” she says.
I feel a twinge of excitement at the thought but quickly tamp it down. “I don’t think so. He’s just flirty. He, uh, winked at me when I apologized and said he didn’t mind.”
“I bet he’s interested,” Valerie says.
“It doesn’t matter. He’s a customer and I have to be professional. This is my chance to start catering.”
I don’t quite launch into a detailed description of my five-year business plan, but I do tell them a little about my plans for catering and selling pies in grocery stores. It’s been a long time since I’ve had people I can really talk to.
“We also do special orders,” I say. “If you have to bring a pie to Christmas dinner but don’t bake. Or if you want to propose to your girlfriend using pumpkin pie or butter tarts.”
“Seriously? Those both happened?”
“On Valentine’s Day. The butter tart guy wanted fifteen butter tarts, one letter on top of each tart to spell ‘Will you marry me?’ Then he contacted me the day of, wondering if he should have six more butter tarts to add ‘please’ to the question.”
“So polite and Canadian,” Chloe says.
“I know, right? I told him it was too late to make the extra butter tarts. I heard from him yesterday, though. She said yes.”
For some reason, I picture Josh Yu proposing to me with butter tarts, and Chloe and Valerie being bridesmaids at my wedding.
What the hell is wrong with me? I just met these people.
Yeah, I really am starved for meaningful relationships.
Interesting that I was thinking about my wedding, though. Marriage isn’t part of my five-year plan.
I talk with Chloe and Valerie for another ten minutes before they head back across the street to finish painting, and then I return to the kitchen, whistling as I work on the filling for some chicken and leek pies.
* * *
Every Sunday night, I treat myself to a dinner out.
I’ve lived in Toronto for over a decade, but I’m still amazed by all the food you can find in the city. After growing up in a small town with only a Tim Hortons and a diner, it’s a luxury.
The cold spell isn’t over, and a bowl of ramen sounds perfect. So I head to a place on Queen Street, sit at the counter, and order their special for the day. The broth is delicious, and the first spoonful makes me sigh in bliss. It’s also nice to eat something I didn’t cook myself. I love cooking, but I love eating other people’s cooking, too.
I considered asking Chloe and Valerie to come with me, but I feared they would see the desperation for companionship rolling off me. Maybe next Sunday.
Sunday nights are my going-out nights because we close an hour earlier, and we’re not open on Mondays. Tomorrow I’ll make food that isn’t pie, go grocery shopping, and watch a lot of Netflix—my usual Monday routine.
When I get home from the ramen restaurant, I settle onto the couch and call my mother.
“Sarah!”
I pull the phone away from my ear. “Can you keep your voice down?”
We go through this every Sunday. My mom talks too loud, I tell her to quiet down, and she does...for about thirty seconds, before she starts yelling again.
I asked Megan, my sister, if she had the same problem, and she had no idea what I was talking about. Apparently, Mom doesn’t yell on the phone with her.
My bizarre theory is that she thinks she has to talk loudly to be heard in Toronto, like the entire city is one big cesspool of noise, and even in my own home, I can barely have a phone conversation. She wa
s disturbed when I told her that I can hear street noise from my apartment (it’s really not that loud!) and she’s horrified by the amount I’m paying in rent for a small apartment.
Yes, my mother is one of those people who has lived in a small town her entire life and is scared of the city, and her mind is blown by the simplest of things. She rarely visits me in Toronto—she can’t stand the traffic driving into the city, and I totally understand—but she’s come once since I opened Happy As Pie. When I took her to Baldwin Street, she snapped a picture of the street sign, amazed it had Chinese characters on it. She wanted to carefully examine each restaurant, and she didn’t understand how there could be four restaurants in a row. She wondered how they all survived.
Baldwin Village, despite its small size, has food from all over the world. Japanese, El Salvadoran, Indonesian, even a Korean-Polish fusion place. My mother and I ended up at the Chinese seafood restaurant. Although she’s mainly a meat-and-potatoes cook at home, she’s a good sport at trying other things. She enjoyed the food, though she was a bit weirded out by the tanks of lobsters and crabs.
“How’s business?” she asks, her voice now at a normal volume. Temporarily, I know.
“It’s not bad.” I consider telling her about my foray into catering, but I’m not in the mood. “We had a number of special orders for Valentine’s.”
My mother taught me how to cook and bake. It started with shortbread cookies at Christmas—I would “help” with the cookie cutters and decorating from the time I was three. She taught me how to make pie crust when I was seven or eight.
Yet despite our shared love of baking, there’s a gulf between us now. She didn’t approve of my plan to move to Toronto. She wanted me to go to college in London, Ontario, which is about half an hour from Ingleford. London is a decent-sized city, but it’s Toronto, the big metropolis, that I’ve loved since my first visit when I was seven.
I hear her words in my head again, as I do every time we talk.
You’ll never make it.
I’m going to prove her wrong.
We don’t talk much about my business, soon moving on to her grandchildren—my nieces and nephews—and then my love life, one of her favorite topics.
“I heard about something new called Tinder,” she says.