Chapter 8 Under One Condition #2
“You were the one who wanted me to be your star dancer. If you think about it, Sticks and Dicks isn’t a bad name if you have hockey players here,” I muse.
“Perfect. We’ll be a bakery that provides nighttime entertainment. Now, sit still.”
“I don’t think I was moving,” I say with a laugh.
“Then be quiet for a second.”
Glad she’s the one distracted now, I peer around as she roots in her bag for supplies, then opens a bottle of peroxide and dabs some on a cotton ball. She presses it to my back. It’s cool to the touch. Gently, she swipes it down. I fight off a wince. It’s just a sting from the peroxide. That’s all.
“That’s going to leave a scar,” she says.
“It’ll have good company,” I remark.
She pauses, then says, “Yeah, I see another one here.” She taps my other shoulder.
“Yup. And here.” I point to my abs, but she’s behind me.
As she leans over me to get a look, her hair tickles my shoulder. That feels too good.
“Where?” she asks.
I clear my throat, then point to my lower stomach, on the right side.
“Did you take a blade to your stomach?” she asks with avid curiosity, like she’s trying to figure out how that’d work. That’s not an easy injury to pull off.
“Nope. This one’s courtesy of fate. Ruptured appendix when I was ten.”
She laughs, then smacks my shoulder. “And I thought you were showing me your hockey war wounds.”
I lift my right arm, showing her the underside, home to a long, jagged scratch. “Now that one’s from a blade.”
She reaches for it, slides her thumb down the scar like she’s tracing it, memorizing it maybe. Now it’s my turn to suck in a breath. I don’t really know how we went from her brother asking me to finance a bakery to exploring wounds and touching scars. But I also don’t entirely want it to stop.
She might though. A few seconds later, she straightens and says, “Let me finish up your back.”
Focusing on her nursing mission, she grabs supplies from the sink where she set them down, cleans my arm, then returns to my back. She rubs more peroxide onto the cat scratch there before reaching into her first-aid kit and pulling out a large bandage.
When she puts it on my back, I groan in protest. “You’re really doing that?”
“Did you want to mess up another shirt with your blood?”
“I don’t have another shirt with me. This seems to be a recurring theme in my life—the ruination of shirts when we’re together.”
She seems to give that some thought. “Hmm. That’s true. Maybe I need to keep some extra shirts around for you.”
“Yeah, you do that, Mabel.” I rise and toss the bloody one over my shoulder rather than pulling it back on. Why wear it when she seems to enjoy the shirtless view so much? I’m a nice guy after all. This is a nice thing to do.
She drops the supplies into her backpack, picks it up from the tiled floor, and heads to the door.
“All right. Are we doing this?” I ask as we leave the bathroom.
“You’re saying yes?” It comes out as a squeak.
“I mean, talking about the bakery.”
“Yes. Of course.” But she stops in the bathroom doorway, surveying the combo dressing room-slash-kitchen space in front of us, her brow knit.
“I keep wondering why she bought this for me. At first, I thought it was a joke. But she wouldn’t buy this as a joke.
There are so many family connections here—my great-grandmother working here, then my grandma taking photos for a calendar.
But the connections stopped after that. My mom’s an academic—like her dad, in a way, since he was a teacher.
I’m a baker. Theo’s a lawyer turned GM. But Grandma gives me a firehouse? ”
She shrugs as she seems to search for an answer neither one of us has.
“I bet you wish you could ask her.”
“I do,” she says, soft and a little sad. “I really do.”
“There are things I wish I could ask my mom.”
“Right? That’s one of the hardest parts about losing someone. Not being able to ask those questions anymore.”
“Yeah. I always want to ask her about Charlotte. How to handle things.” I shake off that memory and try to focus on the present, on questions that have answers, maybe in this kitchen and that huge sink and all those cupboards.
There might even be some answers in the dressing room.
Who knows? “It’s yours now, though, and you know what you want it for. ”
“Right. I do. Let’s talk about the bakery and check out the rest of the firehouse. Like the kitchen.” She sounds as if she’s about to explore a quaint alleyway in Paris with possible treasures around every corner.
“Lead the way through your inheritance,” I say, as we head past the mirrored dressing room toward the kitchen. Cabinets loom high above the appliances, so that’s a plus—lots of workspace and storage.
Mabel stops in front of one of the two industrial-sized ovens, running a hand across the top with a happy sigh. “I could see this as my bakery.” Then she quickly corrects herself. “Ours.”
But that’s the thing I don’t get. “Mabel, why do you want to start a bakery with me?”
She opens the oven and inspects it. “Why not?”
I laugh, but the sound is quickly snuffed out by…reality. “That hardly seems like a reason.”
“Your monkey bread was good,” she says with a mischievous grin, but it fades too quickly.
“And you tried it after you and Theo asked me,” I press.
“I know, but I’ve had your baking before.”
“Right, but that doesn’t answer the question.”
She’s quiet for several thoughtful seconds. When she speaks, her voice is pensive and vulnerable. “I think some things just happen at the right time. My grandmother always said If not now, when?”
Those are powerful words, and I understand why they’d drive her to act. But even so, she’s talking about huge changes. “So that’s why you decided to turn a firehouse into a bakery when you hadn’t even planned on returning to Cozy Valley?”
“Yes. I don’t want to move here. I love the city, and I still want to open a bakery there, but I have this now, and it’s a place to start. I’ve been wanting to open a bakery since I went to college. It was always my dream.”
“You think that adage applies to us going into business too?”
“Sure. I think that’s the point of the saying. Take a chance and all.”
But it’s not that simple. I gesture from her to me.
“It’s a big deal going into business. Sure, some of the work is done.
But there’s so much more to do.” I leave the kitchen, motioning for her to join me as we return to the garage area.
“We’d need a glass garage door for natural light and street visibility.
The cool kind you see in trendy restaurants in Brooklyn.
” I gesture to where the counter would have to be.
“We’d need to buy display cases, and of course, we’d have to paint the exterior bricks some pretty, frothy, bakery color.
Something…you know, floofy. We’d need to paint the inside too. ”
I pace toward the garage door, sweeping my hand across the space.
“We’d need tables and chairs and merch. We’d need to plan the offerings.
Are we a cupcake bakery, Mabel? Are we doing cake and cookies and brownies?
What about bread? That’s a whole other area, and one I’m just not that into.
And will there be muffins? That’s a deal breaker for me.
I hate muffins. Then there’s the issue of nuts.
Some people hate nuts, though I’m not sure I could ever get along with such a monster. Pecans are proof of life.”
And I shut up because she’s smiling at me. A pleased, wide, closed-mouth grin.
“What’s that for?”
“You can see it,” she says, delighted with her gotcha. “The bakery.”
Maybe, but I’m not ready to admit that out loud. “I’m just saying it needs a lot of work.”
“But you can see it turning into a bakery. You can picture it. You just listed off nearly everything. You’ve clearly mapped this all out.
I know you wanted to wait till you retired, but Corbin…
” She pauses, twisting her fingers together.
“I need the help. I can’t afford it all, but this place is amazing, and it landed in my lap.
I can use it to keep my existing business going, and I can run everything from here.
I’ll handle things, and you don’t have to do much.
Just benefit from it and, like my grandmother used to say, you won’t know unless you try. ”
She presses her hands together in a plea.
Dammit, she’s pulling on my heartstrings. But I can’t make this choice just because I want to help. So, I’m not sure why the next thing out of my mouth is: “I don’t like pumpkin stuff.”
Tossing back her head, Mabel laughs. “But I do. I can make the pumpkin things, and I won't make you taste-test them. And I hate peanut butter. Most nuts actually.”
I sneer. “How is that possible?”
“Peanut butter tastes like cardboard.”
“That makes no sense.”
“But see, this makes perfect sense. I can be the pumpkin taste-tester, and you can be the nut taste-tester.” Again, she has a solution to every problem I fling at her.
“Also, I can’t stand muffins either, so they will never be on the menu.
And I don’t want to bake bread. I don’t need this bakery to be all things to all people or to compete with the café in town that makes bread.
I just want it to be full of really great sweet treats that satisfy cravings.
So it sounds like we’re kind of on the same page.
” She flashes me another flirty, dirty, hopeful grin that’s working its magic on me. “Are you in?”
Am I? This is a huge leap. “Mabel, we barely know each other as friends, even less as business partners. We might screw this whole thing up. Then what?”
“We clean it up and move on. Like we did with the cake in my hair and with your cat scratch. You tend to the problem and move on.”
Like we’ve moved past that white-hot kiss. “This is more complicated than a scratch or a smash cake, but point taken. What happens to our friendship, though, if this business doesn’t work out?”
Things didn’t work out with Eliza, and though our breakup was cordial, we’re not in touch. We don’t really need to be. Moving on was easy since our lives weren’t entangled. What would a business breakup with Mabel do to this tentative friendship we have going on? Would it turn it to ash?
“We act like adults,” she says, giving a simple and real answer. “We handle it like grown-ups. And we give ourselves a time limit.”
My ears perk up. I do great with deadlines. I eat them for breakfast. “What are you thinking?”
“I gave myself a year to make a success of this or I’ll go corporate.”
I can hear the clear desperation in her tone. I hate that she’d have to give up her dream.
She steps closer; she’s a foot away now.
“And to answer your original question as to why I want to go into business with you? It’s not just the money, though I’m not going to downplay that.
I need the money, clearly. But you actually like the same things I do.
You like cake. You like frosting. You’ve always enjoyed my treats. ”
That sounds vaguely dirty, but I resist the opportunity for innuendo, letting her talk.
“And look,” she continues, “I have a lot of experience making and selling baked goods. I’ve studied the bakery business too.
I can tell you the best bakeries in any city.
Plus, I take amazing pictures of what I make.
My grandmother taught me some of the basics of photography, but I taught myself food photography.
I know what’s pretty, what looks good, and what looks mouth-watering in a photo.
I can hustle like nobody’s business. I can market my ass off on social media. ”
“I can’t do any of that stuff. Nor do I want to,” I admit.
That seems to drive her on, the simpatico-ness of this all.
“Like Theo said, this is something you want to do. I can help you learn what it takes, for when you want to run your own bakery someday. And I can keep growing my brand and then hopefully open a bakery in the city.” She takes a beat, then offers a hopeful smile. “I think we’d make a good team.”
She’s a vibes person. But she’s also a methodical baker and a persistent human. I listen to my gut, and I’m also a big-picture guy, plus I’m organized to a T.
I can’t believe I’m seriously weighing this wild, crazy, outrageous idea of going into business with her.
I have plans. I have a timeline. I’ve even devised names for my one-day bakery. But I’m also shit at designing the way bakeries have to look these days. And I know, I fucking know, how important the whole pink, pretty décor thing is to these kinds of businesses.
But that’s just not something a color-blind guy can pull off without a lot of help.
My mind keeps spinning as I think of how Mom never pulled the trigger when she could.
How she regretted that. How she wished she’d taken the chance.
My chest tightens at the memory of her hands, of the tremors, of the way she couldn’t work a mixer in the end.
I turn away from Mabel, taking in this space one more time, the way it’ll look with natural light streaming in through the garage windows, the kitschiness of the polished fire pole, the roominess of it all. I try to see it through my mom’s eyes.
She would have loved this place.
There’s just one little issue. Or, maybe one big issue.
Here goes nothing.
I turn to Mabel. “I have one condition.”