Chapter 2
Saturday mornings were our busiest at Keller’s Bakehouse.
Well, that wasn’t quite true. Saturday mornings during leaf peeper season took that prize by a long, exhausting shot. Peeping was a misnomer. These tourists weren’t subtle about wanting to experience the magic of autumn in Vermont.
Mrs. Keller whisked around, in her element. She excelled at warm efficiency, which was a nice way of saying she kept the line moving without offending anyone.
Okay, that might have been a bit extreme, but Mrs. Keller had married into the Keller tradition, and she took her role as Keeper of Keller Recipes seriously. In her mind, adding glazes or tweaking spices was tantamount to heresy.
The door closed behind a customer, its chime ringing for the seven-zillionth time that morning. Mrs. Keller and I both let out a breath.
“Looking to be a busier season than ever.” She reached into one of the glass display cases and nudged a tray a half an inch to the left. She liked everything centered—trays, pastries, the chairs around the few small tables we had. She could sniff out asymmetry like a bloodhound.
“That’ll be good for the town,” I replied, erasing maple bars off the menu board with controlled precision. I thought of May Carver’s oversupply of maple. She’d made it sound like not even a particularly busy season could put a dent in what she had.
“Yes,” Mrs. Keller said absently as she wiped down a counter.
I toyed with the idea of suggesting we add a couple more maple-based products to our list, only to discard it.
The Keller’s Bakehouse menu is set.
That would have been her response. I’d learned long ago to stop making suggestions.
“Morgan will be coming into town next week,” she said.
The eraser in my hand nicked a nearby letter. I stifled a sigh. I’d have to rewrite the whole line.
“Oh,” I said, trying to keep my tone upbeat.
Morgan was Mrs. Keller’s daughter. She would be inheriting the role of Baker in Chief when Mrs. Keller retired.
“How long will she stay?” I asked, hoping it sounded off-hand.
It wasn’t that I disliked Morgan. Three just felt like a crowd at the bakery.
Okay, fine. I may have harbored a bit of simmering resentment toward her.
I’d been at Keller’s Bakehouse for a long time.
I knew our products better than anyone but Mrs. Keller herself—and all the dead Kellers who’d come before, of course.
Meanwhile, Morgan was living her best life in Boston managing client accounts for some big mortgage company.
She made trips to Autumn Ridge twice each year. Twice.
She had long, pointy nails that ripped through all of our gloves, and she constantly confused baking soda and powder.
It made no sense at all that Mrs. Keller would entrust her precious bakery to such an unqualified person when she could have chosen me. Then again, I lacked one critical trait: the Keller name.
“A few weeks at least,” Mrs. Keller said. “She wants to get more hands-on experience.”
I took in a steady breath as I erased the line I’d nicked. That had to mean Mrs. Keller was getting closer to retirement.
“Speaking of which,” Mrs. Keller said, opening a drawer and taking out a box of chalk, “I’ve been looking at the schedule…”
With precise movements, I wrote apple muffins.
“Paying three full-time bakers instead of two is a stretch for the books.”
My perfect line of chalk faltered as the chalk broke between my fingers. I didn’t even care.
I turned to look at Mrs. Keller. Was she about to fire me?
She pulled out a new piece of chalk and handed it to me. “I hope you understand.”
I blinked. “A-a-are you letting me go?”
“What? No! I only meant that I might not be able to give you your usual hours.”
I let out a breath of relief.
“I think I can safely promise twenty-five or so—I’d like to have you come in three mornings a week to prep everything, then I’ll be here with Morgan the other mornings so she can get experience with that and how things run in the later part of the day. Does that work for you?”
I was so relieved I still had a job—and would have less overlap with Morgan than I’d feared—that I nodded quickly.
But once I headed upstairs to my apartment, my relief had shapeshifted into something very different.
My hours had been cut for the first time in years. No, ever.
That meant less income, which hadn’t exactly been flowing freely before.
I was an assistant baker in a small town, not Mary Berry.
But the reduction in hours also brought up a whole lot of questions.
Questions like, was this the beginning of the end?
What would happen to me when Morgan took over for real? Would she even keep me on?
What would I do if she let me go? Baking was all I knew.
Unlike most of my friends from high school, I hadn’t gone off to college and learned skills. I’d dreamed of culinary school, but it had always felt out of reach. I’d save money, only to have it disappear when I chipped a tooth or my car’s alternator needed replacing.
I didn’t usually bake when I got home, but I had three bottles of syrup sitting on my counter, so I stress-baked some maple cream puffs in my tiny kitchen.
I’d lived with my mom and dad until about a year ago. Moving above the bakery had been my desperate attempt for some dignity as a twenty-six-year-old woman. For Mrs. Keller, it had been a way to finally sleep in until five after years and years of waking at 2:30.
The apartment was a studio. A small studio. I couldn’t even fit a regular 9x13 pan in my oven. Three jars of maple syrup took up a frightening percentage of my counter space, and the only dishwasher I had was my own hands.
When my phone timer went off, I pulled my cream puffs out. Not too shabby for my glorified Easy-Bake Oven.
Once I’d filled them, I drove half of them over to my mom and dad’s.
My car was an old Civic my three brothers and I had all used throughout high school. It had been old even then.
Mom and Dad lived in a house a couple blocks from the center of town.
Neither of their cars were there, but my brother Wade’s was.
He was a year older than I was and much less self-conscious about living with our parents than I’d always been.
Then again, as principal at the high school—Dad’s position until recently—he had a much more adult-sounding job, and sounding was the operative word.
Wade wasn’t often accused of acting very adult-like.
I petted our blind Irish setter, Rusty, set the plate of maple cream puffs on the counter, then walked over to the pad of paper Mom kept by the fridge. Rusty sniffed the plate while I scribbled a note to tell my parents hi and that I was sorry to have missed them.
When I turned around to set the note next to the plate, I started, my hand flying to my chest. “Jeez!”
Wade had the foil cover lifted and was trying to steal a cream puff.
I ran over to take it from him, but he stuffed it in his mouth before I could snatch it.
I set a hand on my hip. “Real mature, Wade. Those were for Mom and Dad.”
He smiled, teeth and mustache full of cream puff, then started chewing. His brows bunched in concentration. “Mm. Is that maple?”
I went over and firmly clamped the foil back down. “Yeah.” I kept my fingers busy tightening the foil rather than looking at him because I just knew I got it directly from May Carver was tattooed across my forehead.
“It wouldn’t happen to be Carver maple, would it?”
My gaze darted to his.
He smiled knowingly. “Illicit cream puffs. No wonder they taste so good.”
“You make it sound like I laced them with drugs.”
“Carver maple is its own sort of drug.”
It really was. The Stevenson family were recovering addicts.
We hadn’t bought Carver maple since the falling out between Ryan and James.
The boycott had never been explicit. A few weeks after James had left Autumn Ridge, Ryan had brought home a case of syrup from a neighboring town, and the Stevensons had been their customers ever since.
I’d lapsed a couple of times over the years and bought some Carver syrup. Always in secret, though.
“Please don’t tell Ryan,” I said.
“I won’t.”
I opened my mouth to say thank you, but he cut me off.
“In exchange for four more of those.”
I pressed my lips together as he ruined my precise foil job and filled his hand, balancing the puffs against his chest, but I wasn’t mad he liked the taste enough to want four more.
“But seriously, Sade,” he said, “you should sell these at the bakery.”
I put a hand to my heart and blinked at him in feigned horror. “And desecrate the Keller menu?”
He made his way out of the kitchen. “You can sell them to me under the table, then. Or better yet, make them for me in exchange for keeping your dirty maple secret.”
“If I’m going down, you’re going down with me!” I called after him.
There were just three cream puffs left, so I added a post-script to my note letting them know to thank Wade for the blank space on the plate.
But for all his thievery, Wade had given me an idea.
Mrs. Keller looked at me, hands on her hips.
It had taken all my self-persuasive powers to ask the question, but the suspenseful silence after it was worse.
“What exactly would that look like?” Mrs. Keller looked as dubious as if I’d just pitched her a money laundering scheme.
I gave a little shrug. “I’d spend some of my hours at the farm, helping Mrs. Carver.”
Mrs. Keller’s eyes narrowed. “And why would you want to do that?”
I lifted my shoulders. “Because she needs it. Autumn Ridge wouldn’t be the same without Carver Maple Farm, and I get the feeling that she’s struggling there.”
She grimaced sympathetically. “How could she not be?” She let out a sigh and folded a hand towel. “Losing a husband and a son within a year…”
She made it sound as though James was dead.
I waited for her mind to return to the issue at hand. I wasn’t brave enough to bring up my idea twice in two minutes.
She hung the folded hand towel, then looked at me. “The Keller menu is set, Sadie.”
“But this wouldn’t be part of the bakery per se,” I hurried to explain. “It would be something…separate.”
She raised a brow.
“Goods to sell at town events and at the maple farm, for instance.”
“Under the Keller name.”
“Only with your approval. I could make you samples.”
She gave this some thought, then shook her head. “We don’t have the space in our kitchen for it.”
“I wouldn’t be using this one, though. The farm has a kitchen in the sugar shack.” I remembered it well. The broom cupboard had been my go-to spot during hide-and-seek.
Mrs. Keller’s mouth twisted to the side as she looked at me.
My body was tense as I waited.
She grimaced. “I’m sorry, Sadie. I just can’t agree to something like that. But”—she said before I could look dejected—“I feel for May Carver, and it would be a shame if the farm went under. Our menu does rely on them to an extent.”
I nodded, ignoring her somewhat selfish view of the potential demise of the farm. I was too curious where she was going with her comment.
“You’ll have fewer hours here,” she said, “which leaves you more time for your own projects. I have no problem with you helping May on your own.”
I kept quiet, thinking through what she was saying. She was making it possible to pursue my idea—just not under the Keller name or on its dime. She didn’t trust me to create anything worthy of the Keller name, but I’d already known that.
Then again, if I did this on my own, the profits would go to me instead of the bakery.
That thought was intriguing.
I’d been at Keller’s for a decade. My entire existence was centered around the bakery and the space above it. Add in Morgan’s impending arrival, and the walls felt like they were closing in.
Maybe this was exactly what I needed. Spend more time outside of the bakery, help May Carver, and get to use a bit of my own culinary creativity.
The more I considered it, the more my body started to buzz with the idea.
I liked this plan.
The real question, though, was whether May Carver would also like it—and trust me enough to carry it out.