A Long Line of Cakes

by Deborah Wiles

  “You said you weren’t going to do it!” she shouted into the phone, without even a hello. “And now you’ve gone and done it! I should have known. Eula!”

  “Good morning, Mattie!” said Miss Eula in a voice like sunshine itself.

  “Don’t you good morning me!” shouted Miss Mattie. “I told you I needed the space next door that Doc MacRee vacated so I can have more storage. I told you a dozen times!”

  “I said I’d take it under consideration,” said Miss Eula, more somber now.

  “Well, consider again!” snapped Miss Mattie.

  “It’s my building, Mattie,” Miss Eula said in an even voice. “Garnet left it to me.”

  “My brother never did have any good business sense,” said Miss Mattie. “I thought you might develop some, being married to him for as long as you were. Heaven knows one of you needed it!”

  For a beat, neither of them spoke. Then Miss Eula said, “Doc MacRee can’t use the building anymore, Mattie. I can do with it whatever I like.”

  “I suppose that includes turning it into a summer camp!” said Miss Mattie. “There are seven bicycles strapped to the van out back. Seven!”

  Miss Eula laughed. “This should be interesting!” she said. “We’ll be right over! Although I arrived home only hours ago and I haven’t seen Ruby yet.”

  “We?” Miss Mattie erupted. “Do not bring that child! Do not bring those chickens! Do not, do you hear me? Do not!”

  “You’re about to have your hands full, Mattie,” said Miss Eula. “You’ll need all the help you can get!”

  At just that moment, four boys carrying baseball gloves, a wooden bat, and one beat-up baseball came through the back door, hungry. They wore the clothes they’d gone to bed in, which were the clothes they’d had on all day the day before.

  Miss Mattie slammed the phone on the counter.

  “We’re closed!” she snarled.

  “We’re hungry!” one of the boys said. “Our mom and dad are still sleeping! And we don’t have any food!”

  “What do you want me to do about that?” asked Miss Mattie, hands on her hips.

  A fifth boy, a slip of a thing, came tiptoeing into the store. He looked at Miss Mattie with big round eyes. “Is this where the cereal is?” he asked in a timid voice. Behind him, outside the back screen door, four dogs whined and begged to come inside. They were hungry, too.

  Ben snatched a box of oats from the shelf, in his twelve-year-old Lord Baltimore, ringleader way, and held it over his head. “This is cereal!” He beamed. He tossed it to ten-year-old Jody, who caught it in his glove and tossed it to eight-year-old Van, who tossed it to seven-year-old Roger, who dropped it. The box split open and rolled oats spilled all over Miss Mattie’s clean wooden floor.

  “Vaaan!” Roger whined. “You made me drop it!”

  “Did not!” Van protested. “You’re a butterfingers!”

  Miss Mattie planted herself smack in front of Ben as if she was going to make a citizen’s arrest and take Ben across Main Street to the sheriff’s office herself, but then Gordon began to cry, which brought everything to a halt. Even Miss Mattie seemed to be deciding what to say.

  Everyone stared at Gordon for a quiet moment, which made him stop crying. He sniffed. Then all eyes were on Miss Mattie.

  Jody, suddenly angelic, said, “We could sweep it up. We have breakfast recipes at our house. We’ve got flour, sugar …”

  Miss Mattie recovered herself. “This is a recipe for disaster,” she said. “All of you! Out! And take that sniveling small creature—and those dogs—with you!” She winced as she said it, but she was firm. She could not afford nonsense like this on a Saturday morning, when the store would soon be full of customers. This was so much worse than she’d thought it could be.

  Ben tucked his glove into his armpit. “Please don’t be mad at Gordon, ma’am.” He looked Miss Mattie in the eye—he was tall for his twelve years. “He can’t help it.”

  The boy’s manners impressed Miss Mattie, which was his intent.

  “You stay,” she said. “You should be a better example for him.” She grabbed a broom and dustpan by the back door and shoved it at Ben. “Clean this up. You can work off what you owe for those oats.”

  “Ma’am?”

  “You heard me. I have a whole list of chores you can do.”

  Ben blinked. “But—”

  “But nothing, young man. Consider yourself indentured. Hand me that glove.”

  Ben relinquished his glove with a stricken look. He fervently hoped he’d get it back. He took the broom and the dustpan. His brothers banged away from Miss Mattie’s back door as quickly as they could, screaming, “A ball field!” at the top of their lungs. Ben, miserable, watched them race across the sandy lane with the dogs, across a stretch of grass to the field where the Aurora County All-Stars played.

  A ball field! A real ball field! Now that the sun was fully, gloriously shining, they couldn’t miss it. The grass was dewy, the birds were singing, the shadows of night were gone. And Ben was stuck inside with Miss Mattie Perkins. She stared him down. He began to sweep. Oats were scattered everywhere.

  “Don’t miss a one,” Miss Mattie snipped. “I pride myself on my spick-and-span floors.”

  She put Ben’s glove on her long counter. She donned her work apron. She turned on all the lights and the big electric fan. It would be hot today. She turned the CLOSED sign in the front window to OPEN. She unlocked the double front doors and opened them wide so that the screen doors with the Sunbeam Bread signs would bring in a breeze all day. And that’s when she was almost run over by a redheaded, ponytailed girl in blue overalls blowing through the double screen doors.

  Ruby Lavender had arrived.

  “Oh, for pity’s SAKE!” cried Miss Mattie.

  But Ruby did not stop. This path through Miss Mattie’s store was the shortest one to the silver maple tree, and she knew she had a note from Miss Eula in its knothole. “Good morning, Miss Mattie!” Ruby called as she ran by her great-aunt and straight through the store, past the barrel of crackers and the boxes of shoes and the wall of fabric and the refrigerated case of soda and milk and eggs and butter. She ran past the new sweeper, Benjamin Lord Baltimore Cake, without so much as noticing him. She was a girl on a mission.

  “Who … ?” said Ben, but Ruby was already gone.

  She pushed through the back screen door of the Mercantile and saw the boys playing baseball and the dogs running the bases with them. The sight made her stumble like a locomotive jumping its tracks. She picked herself up, brushed her unruly red hair out of her face, and ran across the sandy lane.

  “Hey!” She waved her arms. “Hey! New kids!”

  “You’re out!” shouted Jody in his high, angelic voice.

  “Am not!” shouted Van in his thick, chocolate voice.

  Then the pushing started.

  “Come onnnn!” whined Roger, the black cloud. “Can we find something to eat now?”

  Gordon was practicing stag leaps back and forth over the third-base bag when he saw Ruby. He stopped to stare at this girl, just as the dogs found her—somebody new!—and swarmed around her, greeting her, happy-happy-happy!

  “Good garden of peas!” said Ruby, laughing and patting all four dogs at once. The big black one snuggled under her arm for a hug. He looked so much like Dismay, Comfort Snowberger’s lost dog. She gave him a squeeze and he kissed her. Ruby laughed, then yelled at the boys, “Who are you?”

  “It’s a girl!” screeched Gordon, and the boys stopped their scuffling. Jody, Van, and Roger ran, like a one-celled organism, to where this new girl stood. Gordon trailed behind them.

  They stopped before they barreled over Ruby, who took a step backward as they caught their breath. They were smiling all over their faces. A new friend already.

  Ruby opened her mouth to speak, but another voice interrupted her.

  “Boys! Breakfast!” It was their mother, Arlouin, calling from the back door of their new home. She stepped off the
stoop carrying an enormous basket—they recognized it, it was the muffin basket—and walked next door to the back door of Miss Mattie’s store. She motioned to her boys to join her. “Oatmeal raisin! Your favorites! Come on, let’s meet the neighbors! Cakes always make good first impressions!”

  A whiff of nutmeg laced with brown sugar filled the air. Everyone’s stomach rumbled. Ruby stared from the wrinkled boys to their cheerful mother, while the dogs raced to the muffins to see if they might successfully beg for one.

  “We can’t go in there,” whined Roger. “We’re banned!”

  “There’s a crazy lady in there,” warned Van.

  “She took Ben hostage!” yelled Jody.

  “That’s nuts!” said Ruby.

  She marched to the back door of the Mercantile and opened it. “Miss Mattie wouldn’t hurt a gnat,” she said. “And she’s as sane as yesterday’s news. Go on in.”

  Arlouin smiled. “Thank you, sweetheart.”

  Ruby corrected her. “I’m Ruby. And I’m not very sweet.”

  The boys watched their mother disappear inside the store.

  “Go on in,” Ruby told the boys. “I’ll vouch for you. You play ball, you’re all right.”

  The boys looked at this strange girl they hadn’t met as they filed into Miss Mattie’s store, their hunger overcoming their fear. Gordon even made a little hop over the threshold.

  The dogs stayed outside with Ruby.

  As much as she wanted to see what was going on inside the Mercantile, Ruby wanted her note more, and she had to retrieve it while no one was looking. She did not want to give away her hiding place.

  She peered into the knothole of the silver maple and blinked in surprise.

  “Two notes!” she whispered. She tucked them deep into her front overalls pocket. Before she could read them, she had some vouching to do. She’d better hurry up. She would meet these new boys, and she would have a muffin baked by their very nice mother. She’d bring some muffins out for the dogs, too. And she’d unwind the hose and fill a bucket with some water for them. Good thing she hadn’t brought her chickens!

  She looked around at the empty ball fields, the empty lane, and the empty town, this early in the morning. Who else in Aurora County would have written her a note?

  She couldn’t guess that the letter writer was directly above her, watching everything unfold from a second-story window and wondering how to introduce herself.

  Emma Lane Cake had helped her mother make the muffins. She had put on fresh clothes and combed her hair. She had kept watch on the silver maple tree.

  And now, here was a girl in pink flip-flops and a sloppy ponytail, taking her note out of the knothole. Emma clasped her hands together at her chin. She could hardly contain her excitement. But on the heels of her happiness came thoughts about how it would once again hurt to leave new friends.

  The best way to avoid hurt was to avoid making a friend, to avoid adding one more friend to her Friend Atlas. At some point, if she kept moving and adding friends, the atlas was going to be so big, one room and four walls wouldn’t be able to hold it.

  These were daytime thoughts, the kind of thoughts the light of the sun illuminated. In the soft dark, you could think anything was possible. Trees warmed at your touch. Breezes spoke. Making friends was a magical matter of leaving a note in a knothole. Ridiculous.

  She had been wrong last night, in her moment of weakness, her moment of wanting something she knew she couldn’t have without eventually hurting. And now it was too late to take her note out of that tree.

  “Hey, Girl Scout,” said her dad as he walked into the kitchen for coffee.

  “Hey, Daddy.”

  “I smelled those muffins in my sleep!” Leo said as he rummaged in a box for a coffee cup. He pushed his glasses up on his nose as he looked.

  “They’re an exceptionally good batch,” said Emma Lane Cake.

  “They always are when you have a hand in making them.” Leo squeezed her shoulder then gave it a pat as he moved from box to box.

  “Never thought I’d see this town again,” he mumbled.

  Emma’s scalp began to tingle. “You’ve been here before?”

  “Long ago, I think. Or a town just like it.” He gave her a half smile. “We never go anywhere twice. So if I was here before, I must have been passing through.”

  They were always passing through.

  “Was I born then?” Emma asked, a wild sort of hope in her voice. Maybe that would explain the tree and the wind and her crazy feelings of maybe this place is finally the one.

  “Let’s see …” said her father. He rubbed the bottom of his chin with the backs of his fingers, because that was his habit.

  “Yes. No. I don’t remember.”

  “Daddy! How can you not remember?”

  “I only remember today, potato pancake,” he said in his absentminded and affectionate way. “And today, I need to start a bakery!” He turned on the radio. A twangy old country tune spilled into the kitchen. “Boy, you can tell we’re in the South again!” said Leo Cake.

  He took his daughter’s hands and started to whirl her around the kitchen, bumping into boxes, singing off-key: “How’s about cookin’ somethin’ up with me?!”

  Emma had to wait for the song—and dance—to end, and she laughed in spite of herself. But she wouldn’t let her father change the subject.

  “I think this might be the town, Daddy,” she said.

  “What town?”

  “The town we settle in for good,” Emma continued. “I had a thought about it, last night.”

  “What kind of thought?”

  She couldn’t say.

  “We don’t settle down, Emma,” said Leo. We come from a long line—”

  “—of itinerant bakers,” Emma finished with him.

  “Exactly,” said her father, happy to have passed on the family history.

  “But we could stay here!” said Emma. “Why not?”

  Leo Cake gave his chest a thump. “Because!” he thundered. “We are Citizens of the World! And proud of it! That’s what my father—Archibald Carrot Cake, Blue Ribbon Bona Fide Grand Champion Baker!—always told me, and it was good enough for me, growing up.”

  Emma knew that story. Archibald Cake took his young son Leo with him to spread love and confectionery goodness all over the world, never going to the same town twice. When Emma was little, the story felt romantically delightful, especially as told by her fervently optimistic father.

  But now that she was eleven, Emma was tired of it. She halved a muffin and stared at it. “We’re from nowhere, then,” she said.

  Leo Cake used one finger to push up the nose of his glasses. He cleared his throat. “Emma Lane Cake!” he spouted. “Our line of itinerant bakers stretches from the Russian Steppes across Asia to Norway to Germany to Spain to England to the shores of the United States of America on boats like the Mayflower! Who do you think baked their bread, made their cake, kept them alive and well fed?”

  But Emma had heard this speech before, too. She shook her head.

  “We’re nomads, Daddy. We have no home.”

  Her father shoved the peanut butter across the counter to Emma. “This is our home,” he said with feeling. “For now.”

  “For how long?” Emma asked.

  “For as long as it takes,” her father said, as he always said, which meant nothing to Emma. Nothing. She slathered peanut butter on half a muffin.

  Her father went back to fishing for a coffee cup. “It’s Saturday. Aren’t you going to go exploring? I’ll bet this town is full of kids your age.”

  Emma handed her father his muffin half. “I’m full up with friends, Daddy.”

  Leo Cake paused before taking a bite of muffin and said, “You can never have too many friends, Emma. Why, I’ve got friends from Kingdom to Come, and glad for every one of them.”

  He waved his muffin in the air for effect. “My friend Albert Stacks—best mechanic in three counties in Texas—was just on my mind this
morning.” He took a giant bite of muffin. “Ummmmph. Goooood.”

  Emma sighed. She couldn’t remember the last time one of her father’s friends had visited. But he seemed to be a happy man. She watched him eat the other muffin half. The radio played “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry.”

  “It’s a Hank Williams bonanza!” said her father. “Boy, that’s an old song.”

  A little muffin, a little music, a little sleep, and he was a happy man. There was no arguing with him, either. Her life was what it was. She had better get used to it. Again.

  Her thoughts returned to her Friend Atlas still rolled up in her suitcase. She wouldn’t even unroll it this time.

  She made up her mind. She would be sensible and practical.

  No friends here. None. She wanted to be happy, too.

  She would start now.

  Ben Cake didn’t feel very Lord Baltimore anymore. After he had swept up the oats on Miss Mattie’s wooden floor, she had him empty them into the compost she kept in a neat bin in the wide dirt alleyway between her store and the building that had been Doc MacRee’s office and was now Ben’s new home.

  She also handed him a bucket of spent produce—kale, mostly … no one was buying the kale this week—from the refrigerator case. Into the compost it went. Then she’d made Ben water the compost, turn it with a pitchfork, and water it again.

  “Well done,” Miss Mattie said, hands on her shirtwaist dress and broad hips, as she surveyed Ben’s handiwork. The gnats were fierce and the flies were biting.

  “Thank you,” Ben replied, because he didn’t know what else to say. He looked with great longing at the baseball field.

  “You show up here for a few hours on Wednesdays and Fridays, and you’ve got a job,” said Miss Mattie. “I pay in cash, and you’ll have spending money.”

  “But …” began Ben. He looked at Miss Mattie, his unhappiness plastered all over his face.

  “No buts,” said Miss Mattie. “Your mother approved it, and I need an extra set of hands. Those are our busiest days, aside from Saturdays when I have Eula’s help. You’ll be working with my great-niece, Ruby. You met her a bit ago.”