8. Daisy
***Daisy***
“Aunt Daisy? Is the cake supposed to look like that?”
I turned from the sink to check on my students and found all three of them crouched in front of the oven like it was a television.
The light was on, which explained why the door had been opened four times in ten minutes, and my poor vanilla cake had given up the fight.
The middle had sunk low enough to serve soup in.
“Charlie.” I wiped my hands on my apron and joined the huddle. “What did we say about opening the oven?”
“That the cake needs privacy.” He didn’t look guilty. “But I thought I heard it talking to me.”
“Cakes don’t whisper, doofus.” Hazel was at the island with her measuring cups lined up like soldiers, every scoop of flour leveled with the back of a butter knife exactly the way I’d shown her. “That was the oven fan.”
“It said Charlie.”
“It did not say Charlie.”
“It said Charlie, help me it’s too hot in here.”
I fought a laugh and lost. The kitchen was a war zone of flour and cracked eggshells, Poppy had left two perfect white handprints on the back of my dress that I planned to keep forever, and my cake looked like it’d been stepped on.
A month earlier, at my bakery, a fallen cake would’ve ruined my whole shift.
In the Calloway kitchen it just felt like Tuesday.
“Okay, gather ‘round, my little disasters. Lesson time.” I pulled the cake out and set it on the trivet so we could all mourn together. “What do we do when a bake goes wrong?”
“Cry,” Poppy said solemnly.
“Feed it to Hank,” Charlie said.
“Figure out what happened so it doesn’t happen again,” Hazel said, and then side-eyed Charlie hard enough to knock him over.
“All valid answers. Well, not the Hank one, he’s on thin ice with the vet regarding his eating habits as it is.
” I poked the sunken middle. “Here’s a special secret I'm going to let you all in on. Even when you do it right, sometimes a bake just fails. I once made a wedding cake so beautiful that I cried when I finished it. Five tiers. Sugar magnolias. A masterpiece.”
Poppy’s eyes went round. “What happened to it?”
“The delivery van hit a pothole and the whole top tier dove headfirst into a box of napkins. I rebuilt it in a parking lot in July, in Atlanta, sweating through my dress while the mother of the bride watched me like a hawk who wanted to bite my head off.”
“Did the bride cry?”
“The bride never knew. That’s the other secret. You fix what you can, you frost over the rest, and you hope nobody notices the mess you created.” I handed each of them a spoon. “Now. Fallen cake is a delicacy in some kitchens. Mine, specifically. Dig in while the next one bakes.”
They attacked the warm wreckage like a pack of wolves and I started a fresh batter, letting their sugar induced laughter wash over me while I worked. It was the same noise that had filled the last week of these late June afternoons and I’d stopped pretending I wasn’t attached to it.
“Aunt Daisy?” Poppy scraped her spoon along the pan. “I’m glad you’re here. Baking with you is the best.”
“The best,” Charlie agreed around a mouthful. “Uncle Tyler never taught us stuff. He just looked at his phone and told us to go play. You’re way better than stupid Uncle Tyler.”
“Charlie,” Hazel hissed.
“What? He is stupid. Dad said so. He said it with worse words.”
The praise hit me like a hug and a paper cut in the same second. This was what I’d wanted my whole life, a loud kitchen and flour handprints and kids fighting over my attention. I’d just always assumed Tyler came attached to it.
Poppy licked her spoon clean and looked up at me with a question that almost made me trip. “Why aren’t you and Uncle Tyler together anymore?”
Hazel went still at the island, waiting to see how I'd answer. Sugar Honey Iced Tea. I needed a response that was age-appropriate, emotionally mature, and did not contain the phrase giant lying cocksucker. The bar was on the floor and I was somehow still going to have to limbo under it.
“You know how we followed the recipe today? We measured right, we used good ingredients, and it still fell.” I tapped the ruined cake. “Love is like that sometimes. Tyler and I did a lot of it right. But we didn’t rise. It’s nobody’s fault. We just weren’t the right ingredients for each other.”
It was mostly true. It was true enough for small ears.
The fuller truth was that Tyler had asked to move in with me six months ago and my stomach had twisted itself into a pretzel before my mouth even opened.
I’d said no without knowing why, just a gut-deep no that refused to explain itself, and I’d spent every day since wondering if I’d broken us.
Standing in his brother’s kitchen, covered in his nieces’ flour, I was starting to think my gut had known the recipe was bad long before I did.
“Oh.” Poppy nodded like I’d confirmed a suspicion. “It’s too bad cause you would have made the best auntie.”
The moment might’ve gotten heavy if Hank had allowed it. He did not. He surfaced from under the kitchen island and had somehow gotten an entire stick of butter in his mouth and moved toward the back door at the fastest speed a basset hound could legally achieve.
“Hank! That’s a whole stick of butter!”
He did not stop. He had committed to his crime the way he committed to all his crimes, and his ears were flying behind him like streamers.
“Get him!” Charlie launched off his stool. “Before he poops inside again!”
“Take him outside!” I hollered after the stampede. “He’s going to need it after that! And count his poops, the vet needs me to keep count now!”
The screen door slammed behind three kids and one buttery criminal, and the kitchen went quiet leaving me with the feeling of being alone. I braced my hands on the island and let out a long breath, then reached for my phone where it sat propped against the flour canister.
“You handled that well,” I sighed to myself but I was trembling inside. I had wanted to be her auntie more than anything too.
I jumped hard enough to knock the phone flat. Wes stood at the foot of the back stairs in his marina shirt, arms crossed, and judging by his face he’d been there longer than a second. Long enough to hear me and the kids talking about Tyler.
“OMG, wear a damn bell.” I pressed a hand to my chest. “How does a man your size move like that?”
“Practice. Especially if you’re trying to catch three kids up to no good.
” He came closer and stopped at the other end of the island, in his usual breakfast spot, and studied the half-eaten sunken cake like it was a boat engine he might be able to fix.
He cleared his throat. “I’m sorry. About my brother.
That you had to explain him to the kids,” he sighed.
“Anyway, the ingredients answer was good. Better than he deserved. If it were me I would’ve told them the truth. ”
“Which is?”
He locked his eyes with mine.
“That my brother had the best woman on this lake and he wandered off to Europe like a toddler at a fair.”
My throat closed. I looked down before he could see what his words did to my face, which was a mistake, because looking down meant looking at my phone.
The screen had lit up with my personal Instagram account when I knocked it over and it was still glowing, open to exactly where I’d left it at two in the morning.
Brooke’s profile. Brooke on a balcony in Positano.
Brooke’s caption about ‘finally choosing happiness’.
Wes looked too.
His jaw went granite. He reached across the island, slow enough that I could’ve stopped him, and turned the phone to face him. I watched his eyes track over my sister’s social media feed, and I watched the muscles twitch in his cheeks.
“How often do you look at this?”
“I don’t.” His eyes lifted to mine again, and my lie curled up and died. “At night. When it’s quiet. I just. I check.”
“Delete the app.”
“Wes.”
“Delete the fucking app, Daisy.” There was no meanness in it.
It came out closer to a plea than an order, which was somehow worse for my heart.
“You’re in here teaching my kids that a fallen cake isn’t the end of the world, and then you spend your nights grading yourself against her?
” He slid the phone back across the island to me.
“She got Tyler. Congratulations to her. She’s spent her whole life taking what you built and calling it luck.
You’re better than her. You’ve always been better, and I’ve thought so since the first weekend Tyler brought you up here.
Every person in this family can see it except my idiot brother. So delete it.”
Nobody had ever said that. Not once, not my parents, not a teacher, not a boyfriend of three years. You’re better than her. I stared at him and he stared back, arms crossed again, breathing intensely.
“There.” My voice came out unsteady as I deleted it from my phone. “Happy?”
“Getting there.” He nodded at the oven. “How long on the new cake?”
“Twenty minutes.”
“Good. I haven’t eaten since lunch.” He walked over and settled onto a stool beside me and flipped open his ledger like the earth hadn’t just tilted.
Then his arm brushed mine and didn't leave.
He turned a page. Another slow drag of his skin against my skin.
Nobody had ever made accounting feel filthy before, but there I was, gripping my whisk like a lifeline.
The screen door exploded open right before I was considering jumping into his lap.
“AUNT DAISY!” Charlie stood breathless in the doorway, flanked by Poppy and a very smug dog. “Hank pooped, and the butter paper came out whole, and Poppy says it’s a miracle and I say it’s gross, and Hazel is doing the tally chart, and I am having the best summer ever, and can we have cake?”
Wes didn’t look up from his ledger. “Wash your hands first. All of you. The dog too, somehow.”
I turned back to my mixing bowl, smiling so hard my cheeks ached, lighter than I’d felt in weeks. The first cake had fallen. The second one was starting to rise.