Pupcakes

by Annie England Noblin

  “Excuse me?” she said to him, getting as close as she could without actually touching him.

  He didn’t notice her.

  “Excuse me?”

  Still nothing.

  This time Brydie reached out to touch him. “Excuse me?”

  The man jumped back, dragging a line of purple icing across a white sheet cake. “Shit!”

  “Oh, I’m sorry!”

  “What the hell are you doing sneaking up on me like that?” The man pawed at his face, pulling the hairnet away from his beard, which unfurled into a long braid. “What are you doing back here? Customers stay behind the counter.”

  “I’m . . . I’m not a customer,” Brydie replied, unable to keep herself from staring at his beard. “I’m Brydie Benson. I’m new.”

  “Bernie didn’t mention you.”

  “But I’m the new hire.”

  The man frowned at her, and then his eyes lit up. “Oh, you’re Bridget!”

  “Brydie.”

  “Well, Bernie had your name tag made up. I’m Joe. You can call me Joe, not Joseph and not Joey.” He pushed past her and lumbered into the back. When he emerged, he handed her the tag. “You’ll have to wear this until we can get a new one made up.”

  “I told her my name was Gaelic for Bridget, not that my actual name was Bridget,” Brydie replied, grudgingly placing the name tag on her shirt.

  “Well, you ruined my cake, whatever your name is.”

  Brydie looked down at the cake. “I can fix it.”

  “I ain’t even trained you yet.”

  “I know how to fix a cake,” Brydie replied. “It’s pretty basic.”

  “Fine,” Joe replied. “Go wash up. I’ll get you a hairnet.” He disappeared into the back once again.

  Brydie scrubbed her hands, dried them, and then walked back over to the cake. Without thinking, she picked up the frosting and began to create a flower over where the accidental line had been made. By the time she finished, Brydie found herself quite pleased and rather breathless. It was the first time she’d been this close to a cake without eating it in months.

  “Nice job,” Joe said. He was suddenly hovering over her, his beard braid covered once again.

  “Thanks,” Brydie replied. She smiled up at him. Maybe she was going to like this overnight thing after all.

  Joe handed her a hairnet. “But if you ever go to work on anything without a hairnet ever again, I’ll fire your ass.”

  “Don’t listen to him,” came a voice from the other side of the counter. “He’s all bark.”

  “Watch it, Rosa,” Joe replied, without turning around. His voice was gruff, but he was smiling, something Brydie could tell he didn’t do often—it made his face look awkward and stretched. “You’ll be next.”

  Brydie watched as two little women walked around the front counter, through the double doors, and finally to where she and Joe were standing. At first she thought they were sisters. Then she realized one of them, the one who spoke and the shorter of the two, was leading the other, holding her hand as if she were a child.

  “I’ve been working for you for five years,” the first woman said. “How often do you threaten to fire me?”

  “Every day.”

  “And he never does,” the woman said, grinning at Brydie. “I’m Rosa. This here is my daughter, Lillian.”

  “Hi,” Brydie replied, relieved that she and Joe were no longer alone together. “It’s nice to meet you both. I’m Brydie.”

  Rosa let go of her daughter’s hand and reached out to Brydie. “Your name tag says Bridget.”

  “Bernie made a mistake,” Joe said. “Big surprise there.”

  Rosa laughed. “Don’t worry about it,” she said. “We asked her to put ‘Lillie’ on Lillian’s name tag, and when we showed up for our first night of work, she’d put ‘Billie’ instead.”

  “Took them six months to fix it,” Joe chimed in.

  “My Lillie doesn’t always respond well in general,” Rosa said. “You can imagine how well it went over with people calling her Billie.”

  Brydie looked at the woman behind Rosa. She hung back, her head covered by a St. Louis Cardinals baseball cap. She looked a lot like Rosa—they were both short and petite, with smooth caramel-colored skin and a smattering of sprinkles across the bridge of their nose. But there was something different about Lillian that Brydie couldn’t put her finger on. She made no attempt to talk to any of them and was instead staring intently at the cake on the table.

  “But she’s the best cake decorator in the South,” Rosa finished, her voice barely above a whisper. “Been here five years, and ain’t had a complaint yet.”

  “Well, it’s nice to meet you both,” Brydie said.

  “That’s enough chitchat,” Joe said, clapping his hands together. “We’ve got five orders to fill and a new employee to train.”

  “See?” Rosa whispered to Brydie. “All talk.”

  Brydie grinned. It was true that working at ShopCo wasn’t going to be anything like owning her own bakery. She was no longer the boss, and she was going to have to learn to follow someone else’s lead. But for now, her big, gruff new boss didn’t bother her. For now, she was just happy to be doing what she loved.

  CHAPTER 10

  BRYDIE KNEW THAT SHE SHOULD GO STRAIGHT TO BED ONCE she got home, but she simply couldn’t. She found herself feeling more awake, more alive than she had in a long time. She felt awake, but at the same time exhausted, a delicious mix she wasn’t used to. It made her feel drunk. Although her first night at work had gotten off to a rocky start, the rest of it had been more exciting than she’d expected. Joe and Rosa showed her how to take orders and fill them, and how to stock the bakery so that everything looked lovely and fresh. Then she’d spent at least two hours watching Lillie decorate a cake with the most intricate design she’d ever seen, without messing up or stopping once. Joe practically had to pull her away to clock out at the end of her shift.

  All she wanted to do once she got home was bake, and although Teddy was more than a little disgruntled by the time she returned that morning, he sat in the kitchen and watched her curiously as she went to work, cocking his head from side to side as Brydie whisked the cookie dough batter together, dropping in miniature chocolate chips as she went.

  She’d done a bit of shopping after work—just enough to get supplies to bake with. On a whim, she’d also purchased some dog treats for Teddy. “Here you go,” she said to him. “Try one.”

  Teddy gave the treat a sniff, took a step back, and promptly sneezed.

  “You don’t want it?” Brydie held the treat up to her own nose. “Ew,” she said, nodding in agreement. “It does smell pretty gross.”

  As she turned away from the dog and continued on with her baking, she wondered if she would ever find anything that suited Teddy. He all but refused to eat his food, and he clearly didn’t want the treats, the fairly expensive ones, she’d bought for him at work. She looked down into her batter and decided she would make him a couple of cookies without the chocolate chips. The rest of the ingredients wouldn’t hurt him, and maybe she could win him over with her cookies—she’d never met anyone she couldn’t win over with her cookies.

  In fact, that was how Brydie and Allan had gotten the idea for their bakery. She’d made four dozen cookies for a fundraiser at her mother’s realty company, and she’d sold out within fifteen minutes of being there. After the umpteenth person told her she should have her own bakery, Allan had said to her, “You know, it’s not a bad idea. Why should we work for someone else, when we can work for ourselves?”

  It was an idea that had never occurred to Brydie. In fact, she’d been thinking about trying to get a job at the culinary school. She liked the idea of teaching others to bake, but she also liked the idea of working alongside Allan. She couldn’t help but feel that their chemistry in the kitchen was unrivaled. By the end of the next week, Allan had turned in his resignation and they were well on their way to starting their own business.<
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  They started Bake Me A Cake from their apartment kitchen, baking birthday cakes, cookies, anything really. It caught on, and after two years, the business was too big for them to continue in the cramped conditions, so they began searching for a storefront.

  Everything was so expensive, and there were problems no matter where they turned. Allan’s credit and finances were less than desirable, and Brydie was just twenty-one and had hardly any credit of her own. If the bakery was going to become reality, Brydie would need to quit her retail job—which she’d kept to make ends meet—to bake full-time, and they’d have to use what little money they’d managed to save over the last two years. The way it looked to them, nearly all they had saved would go into the start-up, leaving little room to survive.

  “I have a solution,” Brydie’s mother said to them one afternoon over lunch. “I own a couple of stores in that strip mall on Caraway—you know, over by the Elephant Carwash? One of the tenants skipped out of the rent last month and it’s sitting empty, which looks bad for the other businesses there, and,” her mother emphasized, “it looks bad for me.”

  Brydie told her mother they’d have to think about it, and she and Allan went home to discuss the possibility of renting from her mother.

  “Absolutely not,” Brydie had said. “She’ll never leave us alone. She’ll pester us all the time. She’ll tell us how to do everything.”

  “Your mother’s never baked a cake in her life!” Allan replied.

  “Exactly,” Brydie said. “That’s what will make it so awful.”

  Allan, of course, couldn’t understand why she thought it was such a bad idea. He’d never had understood why Brydie was so hesitant to take anything from her mother, and truthfully, Brydie didn’t know, either. It wasn’t like her mother was an ogre. It was nice of her to offer her help. But Brydie always worried that there would be strings attached, that her mother would storm in and take control just like she did at home with Brydie’s father and every other aspect of Ruth Benson’s life.

  In the end, they rented the storefront from her mother. She gave them a good deal, much less than they would have paid anywhere else, even though it was located on a prime street. Brydie was thankful, she had to admit, for her mother’s smart business sense.

  It ended up being Gerald Benson who spent most of his time at the bakery, not his wife. He’d show up in the mornings with a copy of the Jonesboro Sun tucked under one arm. He’d sit at the smallest table by the window and wait for his coffee and cranberry scone, tippling whiskey into his coffee and chatting idly with Brydie as she prepared for the morning rush of people grabbing breakfast on their way to work.

  Gerald hadn’t gone to work since not long after Brydie was born. He stayed home with her while her mother went to work. Once she started school, her father went back to the real estate business part-time and had just hedged into full-time when the accident happened. It had been a small accident, really, almost comedic—Brydie’s father falling off a ladder while hanging Christmas lights the year Brydie was sixteen. He’d joked he was Clark Griswold, as he told the story from his recliner, over and over again into the new year.

  The reality was something grimmer, crushed disks in his back leading to degenerative disk disease and constant pain. The next year he could scarcely get out of bed at Christmas, let alone attempt to hang Christmas lights. The jokes stopped. Everything stopped but rye whiskey, doctor’s visits, and fights with Brydie’s mother.

  By the time Brydie and Allan opened the shop almost a decade later, Gerald Benson had been subjected to more than a dozen surgeries and was on a daily cocktail of medication and monthly epidural injections in his back. It hurt to walk. It hurt to sit down. It hurt to sleep. Basically, everything hurt. But Brydie’s father tried not to complain, at least not in public, and it seemed to Brydie that getting out of the house and coming to her bakery in the mornings was better medicine than most of what he was already choking down with his coffee.

  It was around this time that he began asking Brydie and Allan when they were going to make him a grandfather.

  “You know I love children,” Brydie’s father would say. “I wanted your mother and I to have more, but work just got in the way.”

  “I’m glad you didn’t have any more,” Brydie said, pouring him more coffee. “I don’t like to share much.”

  “That’s the truth,” Allan grumbled from behind the counter. “She thinks this whole place belongs to her!”

  It wasn’t as if Brydie hadn’t thought about having children. She had. She and Allan always said they’d have children someday. They wanted to wait until they got their business off the ground and had more money. They wanted to wait until they had a bigger house. They decided to wait until they had more time. There was always a reason that the timing wasn’t right.

  “There is no perfect time to have children,” Brydie’s father said. “If you wait too much longer, you’ll run out of time.”

  As much as Brydie loved her father, she chafed against his insistence. She couldn’t have known that in the end, he wouldn’t live to argue much longer. She couldn’t have known that her father would die before she had a baby or that the weight of that guilt would follow her all the way across state lines and into the iridescent lights of Memphis.

  BRYDIE FELT ALMOST human again after a shower, but it was difficult to appear awake as she entered the nursing home, even after what amounted to an entire pot of coffee. The effects of the night before, coupled with her frenzied baking afterward, hadn’t given her much time to sleep or wind down.

  Teddy, however, was full of spit and vinegar. This time when they entered the building, Teddy wiggled to free himself from Brydie and pranced right up to the receptionist’s desk.

  “Hello,” the receptionist said. She was the same woman from last time. “Ms. Pauline has been expecting you.”

  “I’m sorry we’re a bit late,” Brydie replied.

  “Oh it’s fine,” she said. “Y’all can go on back if you’d like. Just sign here for me.” She pointed to the same book Brydie signed on her first visit.

  “Okay, thank you.” Brydie tugged on Teddy’s leash, and he trotted happily in front of her. She smiled to herself, despite her exhaustion. Teddy seemed to know where he was going, as if he remembered their last visit. Maybe he knew they were going to see his real owner.

  When they got to Mrs. Neumann’s suite, she was sitting in the same place she’d been last time. This time a woolen blanket covered her, and instead of reading a book, she was staring out of the window.

  Brydie knocked on the door as Teddy struggled to free himself from the leash she held. “Mrs. Neumann? Is it okay if we come inside?”

  “Of course,” she said, turning around to greet them. She patted her lap, and Teddy scurried over and jumped up. “I’ve been waiting for your visit all week.”

  “I’m sorry we’re late,” Brydie said as she sat down. “It took me longer than I thought it would to get ready this morning.”

  The old woman studied Brydie, narrowing her clear, blue eyes at her. “You look tired, my dear.”

  “I am,” Brydie confessed.

  “You’re quite a lot younger than me,” Pauline replied. “But you’re not so young that you don’t need your beauty sleep.”

  “I started my new job,” Brydie said. “And it’s overnights. It’s going to take some getting used to.”

  “You haven’t slept all night?”

  “No.” Brydie saw the worry in the old woman’s eyes and was quick to continue, “But I promise Teddy won’t be neglected. We’ll both feel better once we’re adjusted to the schedule. And I won’t always work on the Saturday before we come to visit. It’s just through training.”

  “My first husband was a delivery driver for a dairy in Stuttgart, Arkansas,” Pauline said. “He had to get up at three o’clock in the morning to make his deliveries. I used to get up at two o’clock to make his breakfast and pack his lunch for the day. Sometimes he would come home from work to
find me asleep on the couch with a magazine in my lap, dinner burning in the oven.”

  “I don’t blame you,” Brydie said. “I thought that I was going to fall asleep on top of the counter at about four A.M.”

  “Six months of that and I was done,” Pauline replied. “I left him to make his own breakfast and moved to Jackson, Mississippi, with husband number two.”

  Brydie remembered Mrs. Neumann telling her on her first visit that she’d been married four times, and she wondered what happened with numbers two and three. The person sitting in front of her looked like any other little old lady, but it was clear Pauline Neumann had lived quite an interesting life, and Brydie found herself wondering what she’d been like as a young woman.

  “Anyway,” Pauline continued, “you’ve got to make sure you get your beauty sleep.”

  “I will,” Brydie replied, a smile playing at her lips.

  Just then Teddy let out a woof and jumped down from Pauline’s lap. Brydie turned around to see Dr. Nathan Reid standing in the doorway. He bent down to give Teddy a pat on the head.

  “I was just making the rounds,” he said. “I saw you and Teddy in here and thought I’d stop to say hello and apologize for rushing off the other day.”

  “Oh, that’s okay,” Brydie replied, trying to ignore the nervous flutter in her stomach. “I hope that whatever it was wasn’t too awful.”

  “An entire wedding party showed up to the ER with food poisoning after the reception,” Nathan said. “Nobody died, but it sure wasn’t a lot of fun for anybody.”

  “I can’t imagine anyone not having fun with you, Doctor Sexy,” Pauline said, winking at Nathan.

  Brydie looked quizzically at Pauline and then at Nathan. “Doctor. . . . Sexy?” she asked.

  “It’s just a nickname,” Nathan said. His cheeks were pink. “A nickname I’ve asked Mrs. Neumann several times not to use.”

  “It’s because he’s such a dish,” Pauline replied, ignoring the doctor. “We all call him that.” She leaned in closer to Brydie. “Even the nurses.”