Cupcake Queens

by Darlene Everly

For as long as he worked with me, it only took him a second to realize that the front didn’t look right.

  He came into the kitchen, his brows knit together, and his mouth a thin line as he took in the fact that the half-full cases were all that was on offer today.

  “Ceecee, what’s going on?” His voice was tentative, each word slow and deliberate, like he was defusing a bomb.

  “The landlord came this morning as I was prepping,” I said, sitting on a stool and staring at the twice-cleaned counter in front of me.

  Marcus waited, letting me sit in this place I couldn’t think a way out of. In this spot where I had to find the words.

  “You came in through the alley, right?” I looked up and met his eyes as they cleared. He looked toward the back door he had walked through.

  “Like always.”

  “Did you see the front of the building at all?”

  “No.”

  “Come with me. I haven’t had the guts to look either.” I climbed from the stool, my legs didn’t feel like they could move properly, but they did it.

  We walked side by side. He kept glancing at me, as if he thought I would fall over at any moment.

  And I might have.

  Opening the front door, it was worse than I had imagined.

  The door wasn’t blocked, but just above our heads were massive reams of white sheeting affixed to the side of the building, wrapping all the way over the edge of the roof. And in the road, a crew was trying to erect a scaffold on the uneven cobblestones.

  “Scaffolding? Was there an earthquake I missed?” Marcus asked, leaning back to look up the wall. A smattering of rain fell on his face making him squint his eyes.

  “No.” I tugged on his arm and ducked back inside, the cold of the day leeching into my bones, bringing shivers that wracked my body.

  “What is going on out there?” He rubbed at the back of his neck and started pacing.

  “McCarthy said it was asbestos and lead paint. They are doing mitigation and then reroofing the whole thing.” My throat was so dry, the last word came out as a croak.

  “Oh, no, Ceecee. What do we do?”

  We.

  He said we.

  No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t hold back the tears. They streamed down my face in a torrent of pain. The shivers running through me only got worse.

  Marcus wrapped me up in a hug, patting my back with one hand and wiping his own tears away with the other.

  “It’s going to be okay. You can do this,” he said.

  Swallowing hard, I nodded and pulled away.

  “I think I need to show you something.” I nodded again, trying to convince myself I was doing the right thing.

  He sniffed and gave me a grim smile, taking my hand.

  We walked back through the bakery to the office and with my hand on the door, I bit the inside of my cheek.

  It took more than a moment of just standing there to get up the nerve to open the door.

  Finally, I turned the knob and showed him what was inside.

  “Ceecee,” he looked at me, his mouth hanging open, and back at the room, “When did this happen?”

  “The first time I hired Theresa. There was no money to do it, but I had to. And all the funds I thought were extra…they paid for Mom’s stone. Now there’s nothing left.” Telling him, getting it out in the open so someone else knew just how bad it was, loosened the tightness in my chest. But the shaking grew worse.

  “How bad is this,” he waved a hand in the direction of the front door, “going to be?”

  I collapsed into the desk chair, leaning back with my arms wrapped around myself, fighting off the tremors running through me.

  “If it goes on for more than a couple weeks, I most likely won’t make payroll. And I might not make rent, to say nothing of the other bills.”

  There. I said it. I admitted out loud that I couldn’t afford to keep paying him, that I was going to need to let him go. And I was close to losing The Bake Place altogether.

  “Don’t worry about payroll,” he said, crouching down next to me.

  “You have bills, too. I can’t do that to you.” I shook my head. Seattle wasn’t exactly a cheap place to live. As it was, I wasn’t sure I would ever be able to find someone as good as Marcus to work here, and I didn’t want him to leave me.

  “Ceecee, I know you love me.”

  And I did. So much. I put my hand on his and squeezed.

  “But you can’t afford me, and I refuse to contribute to you living here. I will find something else, come and help here when I can, and when business picks up again, you can hire three people for the money you pay me.”

  “Marcus, I don’t want to lose you.” All I had left was him and the bakery.

  He wrapped me up in a hug again, tighter this time, while I cried harder than before.

  “You will never lose me. I don’t need to be your overpaid employee to be your best friend.”

  Theresa

  Maybe I should have given it more time before I went back to try and get Ceecee to go out with me, but I didn’t want to.

  Maybe I should have at least gone home and changed first, but I was too excited after work.

  I wanted to take her out, have fun, pretend that there was nothing going sideways in her business for a few hours. She seemed to need the break.

  And I wanted to see her again.

  But the construction traffic was even worse than it had been, and Pike Place was dead.

  It was never dead.

  At least not to the point of whole shops not being open.

  Heading toward the bakery, I ran into a bunch of scaffolding lining the walls of the buildings.

  “What on Earth?” I mumbled, looking up at the sheeting on the buildings and the scaffolds being erected.

  This wasn’t part of the construction going on, and it spanned multiple buildings. But not necessarily the ones directly next to each other. It seemed like only some of them had anything happening.

  I passed the bakery the first time. It was so hard to see because the scaffolding blocked the windows, and the sign was covered by the sheeting.

  “Oh, Ceecee, no.” My heart ached standing outside. This would destroy her business as long as it was going on.

  She didn’t deserve this. Her landlord had to have plotted with some of his buddies who owned the other buildings to have all this go on at the same time.

  Just suspecting it made me shove my fists into my jacket pockets.

  Damn it, I needed to do something.

  I walked into the bakery to find the front empty, but there were voices in the back.

  “Ceecee? Marcus?” I called, not wanting to go back there if I didn’t have reason.

  Before, I probably would have. But now I wanted to date her. It was a different thing to barge in on someone I wanted to date.

  They came out from the back, wiping their eyes and smiling. Marcus wasn’t wearing an apron which made me raise an eyebrow.

  “What’s going on?” I asked, unsure exactly what to say because there was too much.

  “I’m helping Ceecee get ready for my absence, she’s suggesting places I should find a job, and the entire street is a mess,” Marcus said, with a wave of his hand toward the front door.

  He seemed drunk, but I didn’t think either of them were. Unless they had decided day drinking was the best solution under the circumstances.

  “Um, well,” I looked back and forth between them and realized today was possibly the worst day ever to ask her out. “I’m planning a thing for my mom’s work crew. Is it okay if I clean you out?”

  Ceecee’s smile went from sharp at the edges, like desperation was impersonating her, to warm and soft as she looked at me.

  “See?” Marcus said, turning to look at Ceecee, “I told you that no matter what, you have people who will walk through all of that to come and buy from you. It isn’t over.”

  While Ceecee nodded, they asked me about how many people worked for mom.

&
nbsp; After I told them, I stood back and watched as they boxed everything up.

  No matter what, some people would go out of their way to buy from her. That was true, and I bet if I called a few people, I could prove it.

  “Do you remember exactly what the landlord said he was having done?” I asked, after the entire case was ready to go. Ceecee and Marcus had their coats on, ready to help me carry it all to the work truck. I was tired of speculating about how long this was going to drag on without knowing details.

  “He said something about asbestos, lead paint, and a new roof,” Ceecee said, piling some boxes in my arms and Marcus’s before she grabbed a stack herself.

  That would take a month at least. Just a guess, but we had to call in the abatement guys a while ago on a job. It delayed everything by two months because it was so extensive.

  I looked up at all of it as we passed onto the customer-free street.

  Somehow, I didn’t think someone who was living in the office, had just fired her best friend, and looked like she was about to scream when I showed up, was going to keep her business afloat that long.

  Other people called in their family when there was a problem. The military in old movies called in the cavalry.

  For me, I was about to call all my friends to Seattle’s Best Karaoke to not sing.

  This was an emergency.

  But I knew, even their help was a stop gap.

  What I really needed, was for Mom to come through.

  Ceecee

  “Okay, is there anything else I can do?” Marcus asked, closing the door to the office on my freshly-washed clothes.

  “Not unless you can work miracles. But at least Theresa bought everything today. Now all I have to do is put these up all over and hope people listen,” I said, gesturing to the signs we made and had laminated down the road.

  “Well, then let’s go. You tape and I’ll hold.” He smiled at me and picked up half the stack.

  “Marcus, what are you going to do now? Have you looked at anything out there?” I grabbed my own stack and we headed out to the Market.

  “There were quite a few that seemed interesting in my short little search. And I ran into my neighbor while we were doing your laundry. He said that they are looking for someone where they work. That one sounds like it would be a lot of fun.”

  He held one of the signs up to my existing poster on a bulletin board at the end of the street and I fumbled with my stack to get a hold on the tape.

  Biting my lip, I used the tape dispenser and managed to only have a couple lumps and bubbles in it.

  “There.” I stood back and looked at it, wondering if making ‘we’re open’ the biggest message on it was the right choice.

  “It’s great. Anyone coming this way to Pike Place should see it. It will help.” He nodded, standing back and looking at it with me.

  But I still wasn’t sure.

  I hoped.

  But surety was a long way off.

  We moved on to the telephone poles and our stand-up sign in the Market itself, repeating the process.

  “So, tell me about this possible job your neighbor suggested.”

  “He works at a microbrewery. They make their own beer and are talking about expanding into distilling. But they need someone to do the tours and tastings.”

  Of all the things I thought he would do next, alcohol was not on my radar. It made me smile.

  “That actually sounds like something you would be fantastic at. Especially if they expand. I can see you traveling all over the place and making people have so much fun while drinking that they think the booze is amazing.”

  Marcus laughed and bumped my shoulder, shaking his head.

  But he didn’t argue with me.

  “At the end of all this, when your bakery is thriving, and I am setting the world on fire in some way, we will look back to right now and wonder why we were sad,” he said, holding the last of the signs so I could tape it.

  I tried, but the tape got stuck to itself.

  Struggling to get it ripped off the dispenser without ruining the rest of the roll, tears started to drip down my cheeks.

  Marcus put a hand on mine, stilling the frantic ripping movements.

  “Ceecee, it’s okay.” He ducked his head into my vision, his face soft and his smile gentle.

  “I know. But this last year is…”

  What?

  Too damn much?

  Yes.

  But it was a lot more than just that.

  In the last year I lost my mom, Marcus was leaving the bakery, and I lost everything else in the process of keeping the place going.

  At what point was I supposed to give in and start to think the universe was trying to tell me something?

  “You’re right. It has been. But that means that you’re due. Something good will come of all of this. But you don’t stop halfway across the trail of embers on a fire walk. You and I will keep going.”

  He nodded again, and this time I did too.

  “Okay,” I said, holding up the tape, “Let’s get this done and go get a drink.”

  “Deal. But I’m buying, and we will be going to a movie and dinner, too. We’ll just pretend it’s a date and confuse everyone we meet.”

  I laughed out loud at that.

  “Good plan.”

  Theresa

  “Did we really need to ‘drop everything and get here now’?” Katie asked, piling her hair on top of her head and tying it off.

  She was cross-legged on the sofa in our usual room at Seattle’s Best in her sweatpants and two layers of hoodies.

  “Are you sick? I never see you in sweats,” I said, momentarily distracted from my mission.

  “No. I have so much homework, it’s ridiculous. So, let’s make this quick.” She grabbed a cinnamon roll. Her eyes widened, a smile on her face, and I knew I was forgiven for pulling her away from her work, even if she wasn’t going to say so.

  “You’re only swamped because you wait for the last minute for anything,” Deacon said, around a big bite of his second roll.

  “Where are Olivia and Campbell?” Katie asked, her eyes shut as she rocked from side to side, her mouth stamped in a grin.

  “Good, huh?” I asked, smiling at her even though she couldn’t see me, and shaking my head.

  “Oh, so good,” Katie cooed.

  Deacon just nodded and grabbed a different treat.

  Campbell opened the door and Olivia rushed in behind him, shaking the rain off her hair.

  “You brought snacks.” Olivia almost clapped her hands when she brought them together, bending over the boxes on the table.

  “Is this all from The Bake Place?” Campbell asked, grabbing a cinnamon roll too.

  They really were the most popular thing on the menu.

  “Yes. And that’s why I called everyone to get here right away.”

  I launched into the story of how bad the situation was for Ceecee and her bakery. Although I left out that she was living in her office, I did mention she had to move out of her apartment.

  That seemed too personal to share, especially since I wasn’t technically supposed to know that little part of the story.

  Everyone stopped chewing when I mentioned that Marcus was getting another job. All of the sugar-induced happiness in the world couldn’t distract my friends—the same people who dropped whatever they were doing to answer my call—from realizing how crappy it was for Ceecee and Marcus.

  “Damn,” Katie said, shaking her head and looking down at the half of a cinnamon roll in her hands.

  “So, what do we do to help?” Deacon asked, grabbing yet another treat from a box.

  “Today, nothing. Because I bought out everything she made today.”

  Eyebrows went up all over the room and mouths dropped open.

  “All the food she made?” Campbell asked.

  “Yep. It was only half what she normally does, and it wasn’t nearly enough to keep her afloat. I don’t think she’s going to get any customers a
t all while all that is going on.”

  “Well,” Olivia looked at the boxes piled on the table and down at the roll in her hand. Her mouth pinched, and a line formed between her brows. “Each of us could put in some kind of special order. Joe’s could even have a special cinnamon roll added to the menu for a while, but we won’t sell enough to make up all her lost revenue.”

  I took a deep breath. She was right, but it was all we could do until I managed to find something else.

  “Right, but I bet I could add a few orders to it if I talked to coach,” Deacon said, grabbing another treat.

  “That would be great,” I said.

  “And I could spread the word on Greek row.” Katie took another bite then went back to smiling.

  “You guys are the best. This should help until I can get everything else in place. It isn’t forever, because hopefully I can come up with a better long-term answer.”

  “I hope so, because even if we get her through this thing, that landlord sounds like someone who needs to be punched in the throat,” Katie said, her voice hard.

  Everyone laughed, but I was enjoying the picture in my head of Katie doing it. She would, too.

  “What’s your long-term plan, then?” Campbell asked, the only one who seemed to be slightly less distracted by the food. He looked right at me, his face open and paying attention.

  I glanced at Olivia, wondering if I should say anything, because they might not be on the same page.

  “Okay, so it seems clear that Ceecee needs a different location for the bakery, but space in this city is nuts.” Now, I finally grabbed a cinnamon roll for myself.

  “Right, so do you know any people in real estate?” Katie asked, leaning back against the couch like she was going to fall into a sweets coma.

  “Sort of. My mom has agreed to give me access to my college fund money to buy a fixer upper if I work on it myself and grow the equity,” I said.

  Katie sat up straight, her eyes wide.

  Deacon stopped eating.

  Campbell froze with a bite halfway to his face.

  Olivia held a hand over her open mouth.

  “You’re going to buy a building?”