Chapter 4
Chapter 4
P aley learned a lot that week, namely that she was woefully unprepared to bake and decorate a thousand cut out cookies.
To start out with, she took her car to the shop. It was going to be fifteen hundred dollars, everything she would make from the sale of the cookies. But at least it hadn’t cut into the two thousand dollars that now amounted to her life’s savings.
Next she began looking at the logistics of a thousand cookies. Quantifying recipes was a tricky business. Her normal cookie recipe made two dozen. If she multiplied it enough to make a thousand, it would likely destroy the integrity of the recipe and be a big mess. She felt comfortable doubling it because she had done that before, but that would still only give her four dozen cookies when she needed eighty four dozen. And she had to do it all in her mother’s small kitchen, in her mother’s small oven.
“Hey, I know. The church,” her mother said on the first day.
“You want to go pray I’ll actually be able to do this?” Paley guessed.
“No, the church has a commercial kitchen that sits empty unless someone is using it for a wedding or funeral. Let’s call and see if it’s open. We could do this there.”
“Mom, that’s brilliant,” Paley said, already reaching for her phone.
The church had been available and Paley and her mother lugged all their supplies there. In addition to having the increased space they needed, they also had extra baking sheets, saving Paley the hassle of having to wait for her cookies to cool before she could load up another tray. The first day she made three hundred cookies, with the help of her mother.
The next two days were spent the same, minus her mother. Within four days, Paley baked and froze twelve hundred cookies, leaving herself with plenty leftover, in case she broke some or messed them up.
On the fifth day, she made mass quantities of frosting and practiced piping until she had the design perfect. Thursday and Friday were spent frosting. And frosting. And frosting. On Thursday she frosted for fifteen hours, until late into the night when the church was dark and deserted. Paley packed her boxes carefully and loaded them into her car. She would finish the final few hundred cookies at her parents’ house, and then she would have to drive into the city to deliver them.
She arrived at the venue a half hour earlier than the designated time. Acacia met her there, check in hand. Paley had been prepared to unload all the cookies herself, but an entire crew of workers met her at the door and carried the boxes. Acacia opened a box and inspected them.
“Perfect, Paley, so perfect. Thank you. We might call on you again sometime. Do you by chance have any cards, in case someone asks and wants to hire you?”
“Um, no, but I could scrawl my number on some napkins for you,” Paley said, smiling so Acacia would know it was a joke. It was the kind of statement that would make Aaron furious, as if he thought she would really scratch her name on a napkin and hand it to a high-powered lawyer.
Acacia laughed. “If worse comes to worse, that’s what we’ll do.”
“Thank you so much for thinking of me,” Paley said. “I hope the cookies are a hit.”
“I’m sure they will be.”
It was time for Paley to go, but she paused, saying a mental goodbye to the cookies.
“Was there something else?” Acacia asked.
“No, I was…I was saying goodbye to the cookies. We spent a lot of quality time together this week. It feels a bit like leaving my baby for all-day preschool the first time, except people are going to be biting my babies’ heads off and devouring them,” Paley said, and Acacia laughed again.
“You’re too cute,” Acacia said, swiping beneath her eyes.
I am? Paley wondered. When was the last time anyone called her cute? It filled up a little bit of her crumbling heart, even if it was coming from a middle-aged secretary she would likely never see again. “Thank you. Have a nice party.”
Acacia nodded, smiling, and gave Paley a little wave before turning her attention back to the task at hand. That’s that , Paley thought. It had been a fun project, a pleasant distraction from her troubles. But it was over and, despite what Acacia said, unlikely to be repeated. People didn’t actually taste a cookie at a party and want to hire the baker for more. Did they?
Yes, as it turned out. Paley got three calls for cookies and one asking if she did birthday cakes. “Absolutely,” she remarked. Cakes were actually more of her specialty than cookies, seeing as how it was what she did for a living, if the paltry amount she made at the grocery store could be called such.
She made an additional five hundred dollars. Flush with cash now, she blamed herself for what happened next.
“Why’d you put that there?” Trudy hovered over Paley’s shoulder, inspecting her work as she did every day.
“What?” Paley asked, inspecting the cake. She thought it looked good, perfect, in fact.
“That comma.” Trudy pointed.
“That’s not a comma, it’s an apostrophe,” Paley reminded her. “See the word is it’s, it’s a contraction for it is.” The request had been for a cake that said, “It’s Friday!”
Trudy shook her head. “That’s not right.”
“Yes, it is. If you say it without the comma, it’s wrong.”
“That don’t look right. Take it off.”
“No,” Paley said, and the bakery came to a stand still as everyone looked at the two women.
“I’m your boss, and I say take it off,” Trudy said, her tone filled with a gleeful sort of authority.
“I’m someone who has a degree in English literature, and I say no. This is how it’s written. The apostrophe stays,” Paley said.
While still holding eye contact, Trudy reached out and scraped off the apostrophe with her bare hand. Paley mashed down on that hand, pushing it all the way to the bottom of the cake. Trudy shrieked. “What are you doing?”
“Making sure you got it all,” Paley said.
“You’re fired,” Trudy said, withdrawing her hand and flinging bits of cake and icing all over the place.
“You can’t fire me,” Paley said.
“We’ll see about that,” Trudy said and stormed away.
In the end, Paley was fired. Whatever little rebellious spark had lit in her had wanted to quit, to rail against Herb and Trudy and tell them all the many, many ways they were wrong. The more rational portion of her, the one now terrifyingly close to poverty and homelessness, bit her tongue and thought warmly of the unemployment benefits she could now collect.
Thanks to her recent baking ventures, she had three thousand dollars to her name and a functioning car. And that was all—no health insurance, no house, no job, and no prospects. She planned to go home and hibernate in the basement, despite her mother’s protests. She certainly had no plans to answer the phone, but then she saw Acacia’s name and leapt for it.
“Hello, Paley, this is Acacia.”
“Hi, Acacia, how are you?”
“I’m well, how are you?”
“I’m…” the worst I’ve ever been, literally minutes from being homeless, destitute, and divorced. “Well.”
“I have a bit of an awkward question for you, and I want you to know in no way will you hurt my feelings if you’re not interested in what I’m about to propose.”
Paley wriggled in her seat, thinking whatever Acacia was about to say sounded more interesting than the reality of Paley’s life. “Yes?”
“Do you cook things other than cookies and cake?”
“Yes, I can cook anything,” Paley said.
Acacia let out a little breath, as if this were a relief. “Are you good at cleaning?”
“Yes.”
“My boss is looking for a housekeeper. I know this is probably a long shot, but you were the first name that came to mind, at least temporarily until I can find somebody else.”
“A housekeeper?” Paley repeated. “Like a maid?”
“It’s a bit more than that. Yes, there would be cleaning and laundry involved, but also cooking. He works long, crazy hours. Basically he needs a version of me, but at home. Someone to make sure he’s being looked after. It’s a live-in position normally, but I know you’re married so…”
Paley interrupted her. “I’m not, actually. Not anymore.”
Acacia paused. “Oh, I’m sorry.”
“Thank you, but please continue about the job. I’d like to know more about it so I can give it my full consideration.” She glanced at the interior of her car, still parked in the grocery lot. The shabby sedan represented all she now owned in life, and suddenly Acacia offered her a way out, a hand up, not only a job but a place to live, at least until she found something better. No matter the next words out of Acacia’s mouth, Paley would take the job. Even if she said the guy spent his free time dressing like a clown and hunting humans for sport, it was likely a better option than her current reality.
“Piedmont is…he’s sweet, don’t get me wrong. In that way, he’s a nice boss. He never yells or makes crazy demands. But he’s also a genius who lives in his own head most of the time. He needs someone to sort of float peripherally around him and pick up the slack, to anticipate his needs before he realizes he has them.”
“Sounds like a wife,” Paley noted.
“Yes, that’s exactly it, minus any romance. He’s not…he recently suffered a terrible heartache, and he’s not up for dating right now. But he needs someone to be there to make things work when I’m not around. To be honest, if I’d known you and your husband weren’t together, I wouldn’t have asked. You’re young and pretty, and I don’t want it to be like…” she trailed off, not knowing what to say.
“Let me assure you romance is the very farthest thing from my mind right now, both men and lawyers,” Paley said. If Acacia heard the hard edge to her tone, Paley hoped she realized it was directed at Aaron and not her. “I need a place to regroup, to lick my wounds and figure out what’s next. This sounds so ideal I feel like an angel beam should be filtering through the phone, from your head to my ears. I can definitely cook and clean, and I’ll try my best to do the other stuff, to settle his life without being intrusive or obvious about it.”
Acacia let out a little breath that sounded like a sigh of relief. “Excellent. Your face popped to mind when we learned his last housekeeper quit, and I hoped…Anyway, can you stop by tomorrow? I’ll give you a key and go over everything with you.”
“That sounds excellent. Thank you so much,” Paley said. She was in the parking lot of the place she’d been fired from, and yet she felt a bit of hope and release, as if maybe things were beginning to look up, at least a little.