Chapter 4
CHAPTER FOUR
RACHEL
“ A urora Bakery,” I answer, wedging the phone between my ear and shoulder as I give Mr. Kidaris his change. “This is Rachel. How can I help you?”
“Hi, honey. Where’s Hailey?”
It takes me a moment to place my mother’s voice. “She’s on lunch break.”
“Oh, will you tell her I called? She said the ice maker was acting up upstairs.”
“Yes, I will.” I smile at Mr. Kidaris as he leaves, my pleasant expression dropping as soon as he’s gone. “Actually, I need to talk to you about something.”
I head in the back and ask Sydney to cover the register while I talk to Mom, then head into the miniscule office in the back corner of the bakery, shutting the door behind me.
“How long have you been giving five hundred cookies to the fire station?”
She laughs, a breezy sound that sets me on edge. Nothing’s ever serious with her.
“I already explained that to Hailey the other day.”
“Okay, but you never told me about it. You know, me? The person who handles the finances? The person in charge of anything business-related?”
“No, this is a donation,” she says, as if that explains everything.
“I understand that. But it messes up my inventory system when that many ingredients go unaccounted for. And when the rest of us don’t know it’s happening.”
She sighs. Probably because we’ve been over stuff like this before. “Rachel, it’s for the kids. How are you going to deny children delicious cookies?”
I pinch the bridge of my nose. “Half of those kids can’t tell the difference between a chocolate chip and an oatmeal raisin. A cookie is a cookie to them.”
“We would never trick them with oatmeal raisin,” she says in a shocked tone. “That’s cruel.”
I’m actually in agreement with her, but that’s not the point. “Do we at least have some kind of signage at the event letting them know the cookies come from Aurora Bakery?”
“Oh, you and your advertising.” I ignore the irritation in her voice. “Honey, we don’t need to advertise. We’re the only bakery in town.”
And we’ve definitely been over this before, too.
Little does she know I’m putting an ad in the paper for Mother’s Day.
What she doesn’t know won’t hurt her, though.
“People have more options than ever. We need to stay in people’s minds.
Otherwise they can order from places online, go to the grocery store—”
“They don’t even have a proper bakery.”
A small smile touches my lips, thinking of me saying the same thing to Nick the other day.
I frown, wiping my smile clear. Stay focused.
“Well, they just opened the supercenter in Kaysville.”
She makes a sound of dismissal. “That’s half an hour away. No one’s going to drive that far.”
She’s delusional. She’s lived in Aurora her whole life, where it takes no time to drive anywhere.
Even better, the bakery is smack dab in the middle of town on the main road.
And even better than that, her and Dad live in the apartment above the bakery, so they don’t own a car and have no concept of driving anymore.
“Regardless, we need to put stuff like that in the system.” I’m not even going to bring up that we probably shouldn’t be doing unpaid work to begin with, because I have something more pressing to discuss.
“Anyway, now that you and Dad have been gone for about a month, I have a better idea of our staffing needs. We’re running ragged on this ten hours a day, six days a week schedule—”
“Oh, it’ll be fine. We’ll only be gone five more months.”
I repress the deep sigh that wants to escape. “You and Dad make up forty percent of our staff and—”
Her laugh cuts me off. She literally laughs at me.
“You just need to muscle through. We all have to make sacrifices sometimes.”
Sacrifices? She’s on a half a year vacation sailing through Italy right now.
“Besides,” she continues, “I said you could hire that high school girl on the weekends.”
I bristle at the way she says it. As if she did me a huge favor. “But that’s only for the counter. She can’t help with baking.”
“You’re worrying too much about this. It’ll be fine. Now I don’t want to talk about boring business stuff. I have to tell you about the most amazing cannolis I had yesterday.”
I roll my eyes as she rambles on, glad she can’t see me.
“They were stuffed with ricotta and honey—but this specific Sicilian ricotta made with sheep’s milk. We have to make it at the bakery.”
It takes me a second to switch gears. “You want us to sell cannolis?”
“Not any cannolis. These Sicilian ricotta ones. I was trying to ask the baker how to import the ricotta, but his English wasn’t very good—”
“Hold up,” I interrupt her. “You want to import the cheese from Italy? For this recipe we’ve never tried before? Do you even know the exact recipe?”
“From Sicily,” she clarifies, as if that makes a difference. “And we can figure it out. We’re bakers.”
My fingers move to my temple, massaging the beginnings of a headache away. My conversations with Mom usually end up like this. “How expensive will this be? Also, we’ve never sold cannolis before. We can’t guarantee people here will buy them.”
As usual, she dismisses my concerns. “You worry too much about the details. Baking is about creative expression.”
“But we’re also running a business. This sounds like it’ll cost more than we can reasonably charge. If people even want the product in the first place.”
She makes a sound I can only describe as a scoff. “Listen. I know you think you know everything because you took some business and marketing classes, but I’ve been working at the bakery longer than you’ve been alive. And I’m the owner. I make the decisions.”
I force a measured breath through my nose, my jaw tightening even as I do everything I can to keep my voice even. “You asked me to come back to Aurora to handle the finances for the bakery. Because you were having trouble after Grandma died. So that’s what I’m doing.”
Whimsical ideas like this are exactly why she was running it into the ground. If I hadn’t left Philadelphia to come here and turn things around, the bakery would have gone under in a few years, if not sooner.
“So that means you can figure out a way to make this work.”
I bite back the retort that springs to my lips. I can’t be her yes-man for every hare-brained scheme she comes up with. Who knows what it’ll be next week as she keeps traveling through Europe? Authentic German pretzels with imported Bavarian salt?
“Let’s talk more later,” she says before I can tell her we’re not doing this. “It’s almost dinner and they’re serving a butternut squash ravioli that’s to die for. Give my love to Hailey and Sydney.”
She hangs up before I even say bye.
Setting the phone down, I take a moment to collect my thoughts. As usual, nothing was truly resolved. She didn’t care about not putting the cookie donation in our online system. She didn’t care her daughters are overworked. And she didn’t care that the cannolis are an impossibility.
Why did I come back to Aurora to work here again?
I slump in the creaky desk chair, massaging my temples harder.
I’d gotten a nice job after college in a marketing firm.
Well, not nice, exactly. It’d been entry level and involved a lot of grunt work while I paid my dues.
But if I’d stayed there the last two years instead of coming here, maybe I could have been promoted by now.
Instead… I glance down at my never ending to-do list. We have three custom orders to finish in the next two days on top of all our normal baking.
I need to contact our supplier because part of our weekly delivery was missing this morning.
And the Richardsons are insisting on a payment plan for a cake they’ve ordered, saying Mom said they could do that when we’ve never done that before.
Sydney opens the office door, leaning against the doorframe. “How’s Mom?”
Ah. And there’s half the reason I returned. The other half must be back from lunch break. They wouldn’t be able to handle all this without me.
“She wants to sell authentic Sicilian cannolis with imported sheep’s milk ricotta.”
Her brows raise. “I shouldn’t be surprised, but she somehow still manages it.”
“It’s a real gift,” I agree, rolling my eyes.
“So I’m guessing we’re not selling cannolis?”
“We’re not. Must have been a bad connection all the way from Italy to here. I couldn’t understand a word of what she was saying.”
She grins. “International calls are the worst.”
I pull the schedule for the week toward me. “Listen, I need to take Saturday morning off. Jae signed me up to work at this fundraiser at the fire station. I’ll come in afterward to help with Sunday prep, but you and Hailey should be okay since Desiree is working the counter.”
Her interest sharpens. “The fire station? With Nick?”
Now why is that the first thing she focuses on? “Not specifically with Nick. I mean, that was Jae’s motive, but she didn’t know the background.”
“You told her?”
I nod. “Maybe if I had to begin with, she wouldn’t have pulled this.”
She makes a noncommittal sound. “Well, good luck. I have a feeling you’ll need it.”
She gives a smirk before leaving, and I stare after her, not liking the return of that unsettled sensation.
I get up and walk past Sydney, my legs moving of their own accord. “I’m taking a break,” I call out, not giving her the chance to argue.
I continue out the back area to the front and tell Hailey the same, the bell above the door jingling merrily as I exit. My feet move one in front of the other without direction, almost as if the faster I walk, the faster I can outrun any thoughts of disquiet.
Inhaling deeply, I let the fresh air outside and the midday sunshine work its magic.
Aurora in the spring really is something, the breeze greeting me gently as it blows past, warm but teasing with the faintest nip of leftover cool.
Birds chatter overhead from the trees lining the street, and I turn down the next block, where the businesses give way to a more residential area.