by Tara Dairman
“I’d be doing you a favor?” Parm sounded skeptical. “Okay, I mean this in the most loving way possible, Gladys, but . . . you’re a weirdo.”
Gladys grinned. “A weirdo with all the skills you need. What time does your practice end on Sunday?”
“One o’clock,” Parm said.
“Then have the team meet me at Mr. Eng’s at one fifteen,” she said. “We’ll buy the ingredients, then bake at your house. Who knows—maybe you’ll even enjoy it!”
Gladys could practically hear Parm wince at the other end of the line, but she agreed to the plan. “Okay—thanks a jillion. Maybe this won’t be a complete disaster after all.”
Gladys sauntered off to bed after hanging up, visions of soccer-ball-iced cookies dancing in her head. She couldn’t wait for the weekend.
Chapter 12
BODACIOUSLY FUNKY
THAT THURSDAY NIGHT, SITTING OUT ON the porch, Aunt Lydia told Gladys that she’d had a phone call while Gladys was at school.
“A call for me?” Gladys interrupted before her aunt could say more. “What did he—I mean, who was it?”
Aunt Lydia gave her a funny look. “No, it wasn’t for you, my Gladiola. It was for me, from Mr. Eng. He wants me to come in on Saturday and work all day to help with the weekend crowds. See, I told you I did a good job on my first day there!”
“Oh.” Gladys tried not to let her disappointment show. It had been three days now since she’d left Hamilton that message—why hadn’t he called her back? “That’s great,” she told her aunt. “More work means more savings, right?”
“Right,” Lydia said. She lowered her voice. “But that means we won’t be able to go eat in Queens that day. I’m sorry.”
“Oh—that’s okay.” Gladys still wanted to try her hand at some Salvadoran cooking before heading to that restaurant, so unless Parm wanted to sell pupusas (traditional stuffed cornmeal pancakes) at her team’s bake sale, she was pretty sure she’d have to wait for her cooking day at home next week to make some. Putting off their reviewing trip until the next weekend meant that Gladys would be cutting it close to get her review in on time, but she’d worked on tight deadlines before.
“You just focus on doing a good job at Mr. Eng’s,” she told her aunt. “You know, do what he asks and try not to cause trouble.”
“Trouble? Moi?” Aunt Lydia harrumphed. “I would never!”
• • •
The school week finished off with an announcement from Madame Goldstein that the French Club would hold its inaugural meeting the following mardi (Tuesday). Several of Gladys’s classmates seemed happy to hear this news, but Charissa waved a distressed hand in the air.
“Madame!” she cried. “Student Leadership Council already meets on Tuesdays. Next week we’re having our officer election!”
Madame frowned. “I am sorry to hear that, Charisse. But this is the only time that works for us. Perhaps you can switch off between the two, every other week?”
As the bell rang, Charissa sank back into her seat, pouting. “I already have to switch off between Mathletes and debate on Wednesdays,” she told Gladys. “Plus I’ve still got dance class, gymnastics, tennis, and horseback! And, you know, homework.”
“Sounds like you might be overcommitted,” Gladys said.
“You say that like it’s a bad thing.”
Charissa made Gladys agree to call her the next Tuesday night and tell her about everything she’d missed from the first French Club meeting. “And could you get me any handouts, too?” she said, glancing up at the wall clock. “Shoot, I’m gonna be late for tennis. Have a good weekend, Giselle!”
• • •
Gladys spent Saturday morning searching online for recipes for the soccer bake sale and planning out a list of ingredients. She also raided the kitchen for the right kinds of baking utensils and pans. She was happy to have access to Aunt Lydia’s things, since her own collection was not complete.
Then, that afternoon, she and Sandy headed to Mr. Eng’s to shop for ingredients for the next battle in the War of Gross Foods.
“You don’t think he sells fried crickets, do you?” Sandy asked. “I was doing some research online, and people eat them for snacks in Cambodia. One blogger said they tasted just like popcorn . . . only with legs that sometimes get stuck in your teeth.”
“I don’t know,” Gladys told him. “I mean, Mr. Eng imports a lot of interesting stuff, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen any bugs there.”
When they reached the shop, things seemed even more chaotic than they had been on Gladys’s last few visits. The aisles were crowded, shelves were half bare, and Mr. Eng was fielding a line ten customers deep at the cash register. But instead of hurrying around to help customers or restock, Aunt Lydia was standing near the door, a large plate of cheese in her hand.
“Free sample?” she asked customers as they entered the store. “Would you like to try our new Danish blue? It’s very robust.”
Customers, of course, stopped to try the cheese, which was creating a bottleneck at the store’s narrow entrance. Gladys noticed that the light in the cheese refrigerator was still out, though it seemed that half of that fridge’s contents were now cubed or sliced up on Aunt Lydia’s sample platter.
“Gladys! Sandy!” Aunt Lydia cried. “Bienvenue! Would you like to try some cheese?”
“Yeah!” Sandy cried, barreling straight over. “Which one’s the grossest?”
Aunt Lydia looked slightly taken aback by this question, but recovered quickly. “Well, this aged Limburger is rather bodaciously funky, if that’s what you’re looking for . . .”
She grabbed a toothpick from the tray and speared Sandy a generous chunk. He sniffed at it and almost gagged. “Oh, yeahhhh,” he said. “That’s the stuff!”
Though she was happy to see Aunt Lydia help Sandy find a food for his battle, Gladys was also concerned at the amount of food her aunt was giving away for free. “Um, Aunt Lydia,” she said quietly. “Did Mr. Eng ask you to hand out samples?”
“Technically, no,” her aunt responded, passing a toothpick of sharp cheddar to another customer, “but I’m sure he’ll appreciate my taking the initiative. Well, if he ever makes it out from behind that register, that is. I’m afraid I might run out of samples and have to cut some more up before he even notices!”
Gladys highly doubted Mr. Eng would be pleased if he did find a moment to spot what was going on. “You know what?” she said, trying to keep her voice light. “I think you’ve been generous enough. I mean, you’ll want to leave some cheese for the customers to buy, right? Speaking of which, it’d be great if they could see well enough to read the labels. Did you notice that the light in the cheese fridge is out?”
Aunt Lydia glanced over in the fridge’s direction and frowned. “Hmm. Someone really ought to change that bulb.”
Yes, someone should, Gladys thought exasperatedly. You!
Gladys loved her aunt, but she couldn’t ignore the fact that she did not seem to be doing anything Mr. Eng asked of her. Had she been this bad at listening to her new boss’s orders at the café in Paris? Gladys had been sure that the new owners were horrible people and that her aunt was in the right to quit in a huff. But now, after witnessing Aunt Lydia’s behavior at work multiple times, she wasn’t so sure.
“Here—why don’t you let me and Sandy handle the sample tray for a few minutes while you go change that light?” she suggested. “I think Mr. Eng keeps spare bulbs back in the storeroom.”
“Okay, okay,” Aunt Lydia said, “but make sure you push the Limburger.”
“‘Bodaciously funky’—yeah, right,” Sandy muttered as Aunt Lydia moved away. “It’s unpopular because it tastes like a foot!” He grabbed another sample and held it out to a man entering the store. “Excuse me, sir, but would you like to try some Limburger? It’s vomitously delicious!” The man gave Sandy a strange look
, and Gladys couldn’t help but laugh as he hurried away.
“You’re terrible,” she said.
“No, this is terrible.” He waved the sample under Gladys’s nose, and her eyes watered. “I’m gonna win on Monday for sure.”
A few minutes later, the cheese fridge was bathed in glorious light, the sample platter was bare (thanks, in most part, to Sandy, who forced down several more bites of Limburger “to build up tolerance”), and Mr. Eng was none the wiser. Still, as Sandy lined up to buy his package of putrescent cheese, Gladys couldn’t help wondering how many times she was going to have to swoop in and save her aunt from her self-destructive instincts at work.
• • •
Luckily, Aunt Lydia wasn’t on duty the next day when Gladys returned to the Gourmet Grocery to meet Parm and her teammates. Still in their practice clothes, the girls peeled off in groups of two or three to troll the aisles for the ingredients Gladys assigned them. Somehow, talking to kids she didn’t know was less scary when the subject was food.
Parm, however, did seem a little scared. “How many different things are we making??” she asked, her voice panicky as she looked over Gladys’s list.
“I thought we’d do three recipes.” Gladys showed Parm the first recipe she had printed. “The frosting pattern on these cookies makes them look like soccer balls, see? Then there’s this brownie recipe I got from Sandy’s mom, because kids love chocolate and her brownies are the best. And then, finally, I wanted to make something gluten-free, for the kids who can’t eat wheat.” Gladys shuffled to a new page. “I did a bunch of searching and finally came up with these Indian confections made with chickpea flour.”
Parm looked at the picture on Gladys’s printout. “I know those. There’s a sweets shop in Jackson Heights where my family likes to go sometimes, and they sell them. But wait! Don’t they have some kind of nasty name?” Parm looked at the paper again, then pointed to the subtitle. “Yeah, that’s it: barfi.”
Gladys nodded. “I thought maybe we’d just keep the name to ourselves until after the kids had tried them.”
“Good plan,” Parm said. “I’m sure it actually means something else anyway, right?”
“I looked it up, and it comes from the Hindi word for ‘snow,’” Gladys told her. “Now come on, let’s get these last few ingredients.”
Their bill at Mr. Eng’s was not cheap, but Gladys promised the team they would make plenty more in profits the next day. “The good thing about selling three different items is that kids will want to try them all, so hopefully you’ll get more than one sale per kid,” Gladys said. Parm agreed that that made sense.
At Parm’s, under Gladys’s watchful eye, everyone rolled up their sleeves and busted out the mixing bowls. Pretty soon, Gladys could tell who was better at making precise measurements and who was better suited to more physical work, like cracking eggs and mixing dough. With eighteen girls working hard on their different tasks, it didn’t take long before there were several trays of cookies baking in the oven, multiple pans of brownie batter on deck, and another large tray of barfi batter firming up in the refrigerator.
The trickiest part of the entire dessert-making adventure would be icing the cookies so they would look like soccer balls. Gladys had found a video online for how to stretch dots of black icing into pentagon shapes using toothpicks, and she demonstrated for Parm and her teammates on a cooled cookie. It was painstaking work, but the results looked pretty good. Soon, five of the most artistic girls on the team were hard at work on the designs.
At one point, Parm’s older brother Jagmeet wandered into the kitchen. A few self-conscious giggles arose from the bakers, but Jagmeet definitely seemed more interested in the food than in the girls. “Cookies! Nice,” he said, and reached for the one Parm had just finished decorating. Gladys had never heard her friend scream so loud—or seen Jagmeet, who was a star basketball player at Dumpsford Township High, run so fast.
Parm had taken a few deep breaths to calm herself down before she realized that Gladys, her teammates, and her mother, who had recently joined them in the kitchen, were all staring at her. “What?” she snapped. “Each of these takes five minutes to decorate! No way was I gonna let him steal one.”
Her mother smiled. “It’s nice to see you taking pride in your work, Parminder.”
When her mom stepped away from them, Parm shook her head. “Don’t be fooled,” she said quietly to Gladys. “She’s just hoping that I’ll steal one of these cookies. Which I will not. Mom still thinks that one of these days I’m gonna wake up and like eating all sorts of things I didn’t like the day before. She’s living in a fantasy world.”
At that, Gladys couldn’t help but think of her own parents. “Hey, you don’t think your mom will tell whoever picks me up that we were cooking here, do you?” she asked. “Because my parents are also living in a fantasy world—one where they think access to the kitchen once a week is enough for me.”
“I’ll make sure she’s busy when your ride comes,” Parm promised, and Gladys would have hugged her if Parm hadn’t been in the middle of decorating another soccer-ball cookie.
Eventually, the icing on the cookies was set, the brownies were cooled, and the barfi was solidified and cut into tasty-looking cubes. The team agreed to set prices for the items according both to size and the effort it had taken to prepare them: the barfi cubes would sell for a dollar apiece, the brownies for two dollars, and the soccer-ball cookies for three dollars.
“That way, there are also different price points for students who have different amounts of money with them,” Parm pointed out. Gladys was impressed—her friend really was getting into the spirit of the bake sale now.
They had just finished wrapping all the goods in plastic when Gladys’s dad honked his horn outside. Parm immediately moved off into the living room to distract her mother so she wouldn’t head outside to talk to Mr. Gatsby, and Gladys quickly reloaded her blue backpack with the cooking tools she’d brought over. She still missed her lobster, but she had to admit that the new bag had a lot more capacity.
Gladys collapsed into the station wagon’s backseat a few minutes later. It had felt like fun in the moment, but now the exhaustion of directing three separate baking projects for several hours seemed to hit her all at once. How did professional pastry chefs do it, day after day? Gladys thought of Classy Cakes, the “dessert bistro” in Manhattan that had been the subject of her very first review for the Standard. Her review had been positive, but even so, she wondered if she’d given the bakers enough credit.
Gladys’s eyelids had just started drooping when her father slammed on the car brakes. “What the . . . ?”
They were in the parking lot of Pathetti’s Pies—or, what had been Pathetti’s Pies. Gladys shook the sleep from her eyes as her dad jumped out of the car. The sign overhead, with pizza pies inside each giant P, had been taken down, and the building looked abandoned.
Gladys followed her dad to the building’s front door. Where the restaurant’s hours had been posted, now there was only a sign that said PROPERTY FOR LEASE BY OWNER, CALL BOB. A phone number was listed underneath.
“I can’t believe this,” Gladys’s dad said, shaking his head. “I mean, I knew that business was getting slower for them, but now they’re just . . . gone? Our favorite pizza place!”
“Sorry, Dad.” Pathetti’s certainly wasn’t Gladys’s favorite pizza place—she could do a much better job with her own homemade dough and fresh toppings. But she knew that her parents loved it, so she felt at least a little bad for their loss. “But hey, maybe something better will come in!”
“Better than Pathetti’s??” Her dad’s head shook as he spoke. “Impossible.”
He was still muttering about it fifteen minutes later when they arrived home with sacks from Sticky Burger. “I thought we were having pizza,” Gladys’s mom said, and her dad filled her in on the bad news.
“For lease by owner? That means he doesn’t have a real estate agent,” Gladys’s mom murmured. “I could be his real estate agent and handle the leasing process for him! Did you write the number down, George?”
“Write it down? Of course not,” Gladys’s dad said. “I was too busy thinking about how I’d never have another triple-cheese-and-bacon pizza again!”
Gladys’s mom made an exasperated noise, and a few moments later she was heading out to the car. “I’ll be back!” she called, and drove off in the direction of the former Pathetti’s Pies.
It was at that moment that Gladys realized she hadn’t seen her aunt since they’d come into the house—but she heard the TV playing in the den. She made her way back to that room, where she found Aunt Lydia in her old position on the couch in her sweats and stained T-shirt, staring listlessly at the screen.
“Aunt Lydia!” Gladys cried. “What’s wrong?”
Her aunt turned to her with tears in her eyes. “Oh, my Gladiola,” she said. “Your auntie has lost her job again.”
Chapter 13
TASTE TEST
“LOST YOUR JOB?” GLADYS CRIED. “But . . . how? When? You didn’t even work today!”
“Mr. Eng called,” Aunt Lydia said glumly. “He didn’t fire me outright, but he said that when I come in tomorrow, we need to have a ‘serious discussion about my future at the store.’ That’s almost exactly what the new owners of the café in Paris said before . . .” Her voice trailed off.
Gladys had to agree that this didn’t sound too good. Maybe Mr. Eng had noticed how much expensive cheese was missing from his display case . . . but even if he hadn’t, he knew by now that her aunt wasn’t the most focused worker.
Then again, Mr. Eng was a reasonable man. Maybe, if Aunt Lydia really made a commitment to doing better, he would give her another chance.
Aunt Lydia sighed. “It’s probably for the best,” she said. “Now we can just call Fiona and tell her that we’ll—I mean, Gladys will—take that full-time restaurant-reviewing job.”