The Doughnut Fix Series, Book 1

by Jessie Janowitz

  “It will only take a second.”

  “Sure,” Josh said to my mother. “Really. It’s fine,” he said to me.

  “Thanks so much. Just fifteen minutes.”

  “Fifteen minutes? Didn’t you just say, ‘a second’?” I said.

  “Oh, and I had an idea for where you could order all of the dairy you need for the doughnuts.”

  If she thought I wouldn’t notice that she wasn’t answering my question, she was wrong. “Seriously, how long are you going to be?”

  “I bought this amazing cheese from a local farm,” she went on, ignoring me. “I mean, truly amazing. The guy makes milk, butter, and cream too. You guys should really think about ordering from him. Great products, no delivery costs. Local. Stinky Cheese Farm, it’s called.”

  “Oh, yeah. I know about this place. The farmer’s name is Riley, right?” Josh said.

  “You know him?”

  “I just know who he is. He grew up here, but he was away for college and stuff.”

  “I tasted the cream. It’s out of this world. Like from magic cows or something.”

  “Magic cows?” I said.

  “You know what I mean.”

  “We should check it out, right?” Josh said.

  “Sure,” I said.

  “Great. I’ll arrange it for you as a thanks for taking care of Zoe for an hour,” Mom said and then ran up the stairs.

  “An hour? Now it’s an hour?” I yelled after her. “Sorry,” I said to Josh. “You can go upstairs. I’ll come up when she comes back.”

  “I’m fine here. Don’t worry about it.”

  “Yeah,” Zoe said. “We’re fine here.”

  “So, what kind of food do you serve at Zoe’s Purple Giraffe?” Josh said.

  Josh was a natural at this stuff, way better than even Jeanine, who’s been a big sister almost her whole life. Jeanine doesn’t really do make-believe.

  Zoe handed Josh a torn piece of construction paper with crayon scribbles in different colors. “Here’s the menu.”

  Josh pretended to study it. “I’ll have a hamburger and fries.”

  “Can’t you read? We have spaghetti and carrot cake and cheddar bunnies,” she read, following a scribble with her finger. “Where do you see hamburger and fries?”

  “Sorry. I’ll have the spaghetti then.”

  “Aw, too bad,” she said as she flipped an ice cube into the air with a spatula. “We’re all out.”

  This is where I’d have told Zoe I was finding another place to eat, but Josh just laughed and kept playing along.

  After an hour and a half, Mom came back, and Josh and I finally headed up to my room to start figuring out the script for our supplier calls.

  “I’m so sorry,” I said as we climbed the stairs. “My friend Charlie never wanted to come over because we always ended up having to watch Zoe.”

  “Does he have any younger brothers or sisters?”

  “A younger brother.”

  “So he probably does enough babysitting. It’s just me at home, so I don’t mind. Plus, Zoe makes me laugh. Are all little kids that funny?”

  “You mean completely wacko?”

  “I guess.”

  “I don’t know, but I don’t think so.”

  As I held the ladder still for Josh to climb up, I thought about why I hadn’t told him that actually Charlie never does babysit for Justin. His parents used to ask him to, but he always said no, and they never made him. It felt bad, letting Josh believe something I knew wasn’t true. I guess I just didn’t want him thinking that Charlie was the kind of kid who wouldn’t take care of his younger brother, even though he was.

  • • •

  Since it’s hard to concentrate when your teeth are chattering, Josh and I worked in jackets, hats, and gloves. Judging from the ice crystals I found every morning in the glass of water I keep next to my bed, the Purple Demon had been keeping the attic at a toasty thirty degrees.

  Though warmer, working in the living room was not an option. Now that the family computer was set up in there, Jeanine was permanently camped out on the couch Skyping with Kevin Metz. She’d convinced him to email her photos of all the G&T assignments, and they reviewed the answers together on Skype. When they ran out of schoolwork, they’d play chess, study for the Solve-a-Thon, and giggle, at least Jeanine would. Kevin didn’t say much except, “Nice move, Jeanine,” or, “Sorry, Jeanine,” every now and then. They’d even had a Skype sleepover.

  It was a round-the-clock Skype-a-Thon, and I couldn’t take it. Not because I felt stupid hearing them talk all that math, which was so beyond what I’d probably ever be able to do, it sounded like a different language. I hated that, but I was used to it. That wasn’t the reason I walked around the house with earphones on. That was because Jeanine and Kevin were still JeanineandKevin.

  I hadn’t spoken to Charlie since he’d called about Thanksgiving, and I’d never emailed him back after he’d told me he’d made the basketball team. I tried to blame whatever was going on with us on my moving to Petersville, but every time I did, JeanineandKevin went off like an alarm. If they were still JeanineandKevin, why weren’t we still TrisandCharlie?

  By lunch, Josh and I were ready to make the calls. We downed grilled cheese sandwiches and then shut ourselves up in my parents’ office.

  I was so nervous dialing the first number, I could feel my heart beating in my fingertips.

  “Lucky’s Food Corp. May I help you?” said the lady who answered.

  “Uh…” My mind had gone blank.

  Josh held up our script.

  “Excuse me?” the woman said.

  I took a deep breath. “My name is Tris Levin, and I want to know how much it would cost to order some ingredients to make doughnuts.”

  “Uh-huh. And where is it you’re calling from?” Something, gum probably, snapped painfully in my ear.

  “Petersville.”

  “No, I meant, what company?” she said in a tone that made clear she thought I should have known what she’d meant.

  “Oh, I’m not calling from a company. I’m calling from a stand, or it’s not a stand yet, but it will be.” This wasn’t going at all how we’d planned. “I can’t do this,” I whispered and shoved the phone at Josh.

  “No.” He pushed the phone back at me. “Keep going.”

  “A stand?” the woman repeated. Another pop.

  “Yeah, you know, like a lemonade stand? A hot dog stand? This is a going to be a doughnut stand, a chocolate cream doughnut stand.” Now that I was saying the words out loud to someone other than Josh, I couldn’t believe how stupid they sounded: I’m going to open a chocolate cream doughnut stand?

  “I see, a chocolate cream doughnut stand. Really?” the woman said. She obviously couldn’t believe how stupid the whole thing sounded either. I couldn’t tell for sure, but I think maybe she was laughing a little too. “Then you need to speak to Sal. Hold on a sec. I’ll connect you.”

  “Great, thanks,” I said, but she was already gone. Maybe I was wrong, and she hadn’t been laughing at me.

  “What’s happening?” Josh whispered.

  “She’s going to get Sal.”

  “Who’s Sal?”

  I shrugged. “The guy who deals with stands?”

  Josh gave me a thumbs-up.

  I don’t know what this lady told Sal, but a minute later, a man had picked up and he was yelling, “Who is this?”

  “Um, it’s…this is—”

  “Anton?”

  “Who? No.”

  “How many times have we talked about this?”

  “But this is—”

  “You just keep quiet before you dig yourself in even deeper.”

  I must have looked like I felt because Josh whispered, “What’s wrong? What’s he saying?”

 
; I shook my head and tried to get a word in with Sal.

  “Enough!” Sal yelled so loudly that I almost dropped the phone. “You’re gonna hang up this phone and go tell your mother you’ve been pranking again, and I mean now. Got it?”

  “Got it,” I said.

  “What was that?” Sal said.

  “Got it, sir,” I said louder. Sal seemed like a sir kind of guy.

  “All right then. See you tonight. But we’re not done with this. Not by a long shot. Copy me?”

  “Thank you.” I was so relieved my time with Sal was coming to an end.

  “Thank you? You still think this is funny?”

  “No, sir. Sorry.”

  “Okay then.”

  “Bye,” I said and hung up.

  “Look at the bright side,” Josh said when I told him what had happened. “You’re not actually Anton. That kid won’t know what hit him when Sal gets home.”

  14

  Once I’d gotten my lines down, our food supplier calls went much better. And by better, I mean by the end of the day we’d gotten prices from everyone on the list, though one guy did insist on talking to “my mommy” before we talked business.

  Josh and I had set a timeline for ourselves. We had only two weeks to figure out where we were getting our ingredients, but Mom made us promise we wouldn’t make any decisions until we’d gone to Stinky Cheese Farm. She was sure it was the perfect place for us to buy the butter, milk, and cream we’d need, and Josh and I agreed that if we could get a good enough deal, it would be cool that the doughnuts were made with dairy from cows right here in Petersville. It might even be a good hook. Starting Your Own Business for Dummies says it’s good to have a hook for your product, something that makes it especially cool or different.

  Mom knew we were in a hurry to figure out our suppliers so she arranged for us to visit Stinky Cheese Farm the Saturday after Josh and I had made the calls. The catch was, she wanted Jeanine to go too. To sweeten the deal, she promised to take Josh and me to the movies if we could get Jeanine to come. Basically, she just wanted Jeanine to leave the house, which she hadn’t done in days.

  I hadn’t seen a movie in forever. Back in the city, there was a theater three blocks away, but the closest one now was almost an hour’s drive. I didn’t even care what we saw. I just missed the whole sitting-in-a-dark-place-on-someone-else’s-adventure feeling.

  And the movie theater popcorn. I missed that too. What is it about movie theater popcorn?

  When I came downstairs that morning, Jeanine was in her usual place on the couch studying for the Solve-a-Thon. Mom was there too, already working on her. “Not just cows, baby cows. Look how cute.” Mom was shoving her phone right up in Jeanine’s face.

  “They’re called calves,” Jeanine said, underlining something in her study guide.

  “You’re not even looking.”

  “Because I don’t care.” Jeanine fled to the other side of the couch.

  “C’mon,” I said, “Josh is gonna be here any minute. You’re not even dressed.”

  “I’m not going.”

  “We won’t even be gone that long. We’ll just bike there, see some cows, eat some butter, taste some cream. Then we’re outta there, and you can come right back here and study for the rest of your life.”

  “I’m not interested, thanks.”

  If I weren’t such a nuddy, I’d have gotten Mom to say she’d take us to the movies just for trying to get Jeanine to come with us.

  Mom shuffled down the couch and shoved her phone in Jeanine’s face again. “You haven’t even looked. Tell me you don’t want to see this adorable calf, and I’ll leave you alone.”

  “I don’t want to see this adorable calf.”

  “Well, I don’t believe you.”

  “What happened to, ‘I’ll leave you alone’?”

  “Ask Zoe how cute they were. Zo Zo, tell Jeanine how cute the baby cows were,” Mom shouted.

  “So cute!” Zoe called from the kitchen.

  “See,” Mom said.

  “Are you saying they won’t be cute after the Solve-a-Thon?” Jeanine said.

  “Less cute.”

  “They’re going to get less cute in two weeks? How much less cute exactly?”

  “I wanna go see the cows again!”

  “No! The cows need a Zoe break!” Mom yelled back.

  “Why do the cows need a Zoe break?” I asked.

  Mom didn’t answer. Instead, she put her hand under Jeanine’s chin and tipped back her head so she had to look up. “Please, honey, you need to get out of the house. It will actually make you study better. It’s true. There’s research.”

  “Where? Show it to me.”

  Mom didn’t have any research. She had photos of cows, and those weren’t getting the job done. There was no way we were getting Jeanine to Stinky Cheese Farm or anywhere else. Maybe we could get Josh’s mom to take us to a movie if we let her pick which one. Really, I would have agreed to see almost anything.

  “Jeanine, this is ridiculous.” I could tell Mom was about to lose it because she was cracking her knuckles, something she tells us not to do. “Nobody needs to study this much. Plus, you’ll love the farm.”

  “I can love it in two weeks,” Jeanine said.

  “Tom!” Mom yelled.

  Dad appeared at the door to the living room. “What do you think?” He held up a picture frame filled with wine bottle corks all glued together.

  “What is it?” I said.

  “I made a corkboard. Get it? Corkboard. For the restaurant, you know, for posting specials. What do you think?”

  “Great idea, sweetie,” Mom said.

  Dad turned the frame around and admired it. “Yeah, I thought so too. And since we talked—”

  “Tom, honey, I need you to focus.”

  “On what?”

  “Jeanine doesn’t want to go to the farm.”

  “What farm?” He was still smiling at his creation like he’d just invented tinfoil.

  “Stinky Cheese Farm, remember? Tris and Josh are riding out there to talk to the owner, and it’s so close, I thought Jeanine should go too. You know, to get out a bit.” Mom had that just-say-what-I-say tone.

  “Sounds good to me.” No way did he actually remember.

  “After the Solve-a-Thon,” Jeanine said.

  “After the Solve-a-Thon?” Dad said to Mom.

  “That’s not for two weeks,” Mom said to Dad.

  “That’s for two weeks,” Dad said to Jeanine.

  “Tell her to go,” Mom said to Dad.

  “Go,” Dad said to Jeanine.

  “You can’t make me bike someplace. It’s physically impossible.”

  “This is true,” Dad said. “But I could drive you and your bike over there, push both of you out, and then drive off.”

  “You’re not funny,” Jeanine said.

  “Who’s joking?”

  “Honey, you need light and air. You’re wilting,” Mom said, petting Jeanine.

  “I’m not a plant. I don’t rely on photosynthesis for survival.”

  Mom cracked a few knuckles. “You know what I mean.”

  Jeanine laid the study guide down and looked at Mom. “What if I eat lunch on the porch?”

  Mom twisted a finger, but it was all cracked out. “Fine. But you have to stay out for thirty minutes. And I’m locking the doors, I swear I am.”

  • • •

  “Tell Riley I loved the Farmers’ Wish!” Mom called from the porch as Josh and I walked our bikes down Terror Mountain.

  “Farmers’ Wish?” Josh said.

  “Some cheese she bought when she was there. Those grilled cheese sandwiches she made, that’s what she put in them.”

  “Oh, those were awesome!” Josh blew at the wall of hair hanging in front of
his face. He needed both hands to keep his bike from taking off down the driveway. “But I think that bread your mom makes is awesome even on its own.”

  “I know. I don’t think I can go back to store-bought now.”

  “Yeah, the packaged stuff is so much worse. It should be called something different.”

  “Like what?”

  “I don’t know.” He thought for a minute. “Something like bread, but something less than bread, like maybe just…‘ed.’”

  “That’s so good,” I said, laughing. “The ads would be like, ‘Why eat bread when you can have Ed? Ed never goes bad because it starts out that way.’”

  “I was telling my mom the other day how good the homemade stuff is. She thinks it’s really cool you guys make your own bread.”

  Josh had been spending so much time with us, it made sense he’d talked to his mom about what it was like at our house. I just hadn’t thought about it before now. He’d probably told her that Zoe liked to eat frozen peas and uncooked pasta and that the Purple Demon got her kicks by turning out all the lights and that Jeanine studied for the Solve-a-Thon 24/7. I would have told her that stuff too if I were him. But it felt good to know he hadn’t just told her about the crazy stuff.

  “You know, making bread’s not as hard as you think,” I said. “I’ve done it with my mom. I could show you, I mean, if you wanted.”

  “Oh, yeah, definitely! And you think I could make it myself then?”

  “Sure. I mean, you’d need a recipe, but yeah.”

  “Cool! Maybe then I could surprise my mom with it, like for Christmas or something.” Even through all that hair, I could see he had a huge smile on his face.

  I’d been trying not to think about Charlie since I’d gotten that last email. But right then, something popped into my head so fast, I didn’t have time to push it back out.

  Charlie and I had never baked anything together.

  He’d tasted almost everything I’d ever made. My peanut butter–white chocolate chip cookies were his favorite dessert in the whole world, or at least that’s what he said, but I’d never showed him how to make them himself, and he’d never asked me to. And somehow, I’d never thought how weird that was until right then.