“That’s what I was just asking her,” Mom said.
As we stood there in that cramped hallway, about a hundred lies fluttered through my brain like butterflies in a meadow. But I knew each one would result in more questions and more lies, and I’m a horrible liar.
My shoulders slumped in defeat. “These are tarts. I was trying to come up with a recipe for the baking contest. I was afraid you’d be mad that I wasn’t making cupcakes, so when I heard you coming in, I ran onto the fire escape.”
They both looked at me as if I had just told them I’d robbed a bank. Which right about then, sounded like a better way to make some cash than trying to make jam tarts in a cupcake house.
“I’m sorry, okay? I shouldn’t have gone out there. It was stupid, I know.”
“I’m disappointed in you, Isabel,” said Dad. “The fire escape is off-limits. You know that.”
I hung my head and nodded.
Mom took the tarts from my hand. She looked so sad, I thought she might start to cry. “You really aren’t going to submit a cupcake recipe for the contest?”
I shrugged and tried to look her in the eyes, but it was too hard. I looked down at the floor again. “I, uh, I don’t know. I was just playing around. You know, experimenting. I don’t know what I’m going to submit yet.”
Dad put his arm around Mom and took the pan of tarts with the other hand. “They look good, don’t you think, Caroline? Want to try one?”
She shook her head. “No, thanks. I’m going to go lie down and read. I’m tired.”
“You do that.” Dad nodded. “Isabel and I are going to have a little chat about the fire escape and how it’s only to be used when, you know, there’s an actual fire.”
The way he said it, I couldn’t help but smile. My “thanks for trying to lighten the mood” smile.
He took her to their room while I went into the kitchen to clean up. He came out a minute later and set the jam tarts on the counter, then walked over to me and gave me a hug.
“What am I going to do, Dad?” I said, my head resting on his chest. “Jam tarts or cupcakes?”
He pulled away and brushed my bangs out of my eyes. “I’m afraid I can’t answer that for you, sweetie. It’s your decision.”
I sighed. He didn’t have to say it with words. His eyes were begging me to make it easy on her. Easy on him. Easy on all of us.
He looked at his watch. “I gotta run. I have an appointment with a vendor downstairs. We’re getting bids for the glass cases.”
“Okay. See you later.”
He started to walk away, then turned around. “Oh, and Is?”
“I know, Dad, I know. Stay off the fire escape. Unless there’s—”
“—a fire,” we both said at the same time.
“Good girl,” he said as he waved and scurried out the door.
I went to my room and plopped down in my desk chair. The thing was, jam tarts were different. Special. When I was thinking about them, and baking them, it really seemed possible that I might actually get out of Willow some day.
I took out my passport book and made a note:
A fire escape is really not
an escape at all.
Traveling to New York,
now that would be an escape.
—IB
Chapter 9
fudge brownie cupcakes
THE BEST OF BOTH WORLDS
The next couple of days were not ducky at all. I walked around like a dazed and confused cartoon character with question marks floating above my head.
Mom seemed to have her heart set on me entering a cupcake recipe. I wasn’t sure it mattered, and I wondered if it would really be as great for our cupcake shop as she thought it would be.
Finally, after thinking about it so much my head actually hurt, I decided I needed to get over it and just do a cupcake recipe.
I threw myself into creating the best cupcake recipe ever. I became determined to come up with something no one had ever heard of. Nothing in the kitchen was off-limits. Boy, did I make some strange cupcakes that week.
Peppermint bubblegum cupcakes. Fruit salad cupcakes. Peanut butter, banana, and marshmallow cupcakes. The list went on and on.
I played around with recipes all week, in addition to helping Mom move all the equipment downstairs and testing a gazillion recipes for her. About then, I think I would have been over the moon with happiness if someone had told me I’d never have to eat another cupcake as long as I lived.
The shop downstairs looked better each day as we got closer and closer to the grand opening. They still needed to paint the walls inside and get the glass display cases moved in, along with a few other things. But the kitchen space in the back of the shop was ready to go. Now Mom spent most of her time down there, getting familiar with everything. After Stan raved about her cupcakes, her nerves settled down, which I felt thankful for.
Dad had taken on the role of marketing director. He was placing ads in the newspaper and on the radio, trying to get the word out about the grand opening. The telephone poles throughout town were plastered with pink and green flyers.
Things seemed to be going along pretty well, I guess. So I probably should have known something terrible would happen. I mean, isn’t that how it works? Just when you think you have it made, bam, something bad happens.
I was on my way home from the library, the day before Sophie was due to come home, when a disaster of the worst kind happened. A disaster no one could ever have predicted. Not a natural kind of disaster. No, this disaster was of the man-made kind. A disaster called Beatrice’s Brownies.
Beatrice’s Brownies was the latest chain to take the nation’s sweet tooth by storm. There had been stories on the news lately of cars lined up for blocks and blocks when one opened in a new location.
Part of it was the fact that the brownies had unique flavors. Bavarian cream brownies, banana split brownies, mint chocolate chip brownies, and lots more. But the other part was the experience the customer had once inside a Beatrice’s Brownies store. Each customer was greeted with a brownie sample and a Dixie cup of cold milk. Then they could walk upstairs and get a firsthand view of the kitchen down below, where huge vats of brownie mix were stirred and then poured into extra-large pans. My parents and I had watched an entire TV special on the Beatrice’s Brownies craze a few months back.
I about fell off my bike when I saw the sign being hoisted onto the old Burrito Shack building. They had been working on remodeling the building for a while, but not a word had been said about who or what was moving into the building. It had all been very hush-hush. But not anymore.
Cars slowed to a crawl, everyone’s eyes fixed on the sign. I watched as people pointed and put their hands over their mouths. This was the biggest thing to happen to the town of Willow since the big flood of 1997, when the whole west side of town basically went under water.
I stood there, feeling sick to my stomach, like I’d eaten two dozen carrot cake cupcakes. How could we compete with Beatrice’s Brownies? As the question ran through my brain over and over, only one answer kept popping up: We couldn’t.
And then an even bigger question popped up. How could I tell Mom the news?
I told myself I just had to come out and tell her when I got home. But she was so happy with the strawberry lemonade cupcakes she’d made that afternoon, I couldn’t do it. Then I told myself I had to tell her over dinner. Except Dad wouldn’t stop talking. He told us he had passed out those strawberry lemonade cupcakes to all the workers downstairs, and they had praised her name up and down and sideways. I didn’t want to be the wet blanket! Or in our case, the burnt cupcake.
Luckily, they didn’t turn on the TV at all that night, so they didn’t see the local news. After dinner, Mom went back down to the shop and Dad left to play cards with some teacher friends. I decided I could wait until Sophie came home to tell Mom. Sophie could help me figure out how to break the news. How to break her heart was more like it.
With the place to m
yself, I went into the kitchen to work on my recipe some more. The deadline was only five days away. As I pulled a bowl out of the cupboard, I thought of Mom’s final list of cupcake flavors for the first month. Her list of eight looked like this:
Old-Fashioned Vanilla
Cherry Devil’s Food
Carrot Cake
Pineapple Right-Side-Up
Peanut Butter and Jelly
Chocolate Coconut
Banana Cream Pie
Strawberry Lemonade
If it had been up to me, I’d have had at least one more chocolate recipe on the list. People love chocolate. Beatrice’s Brownies proved that.
And that’s when it hit me like a chocolate coconut cupcake upside my head. Chocolate jam tarts. Flaky, chocolaty pastry with fresh strawberry jam in the middle.
It was perfect.
Brilliant!
And absolutely, positively not a cupcake recipe.
Still, I wanted to try it and see how the tarts turned out. I couldn’t help it. I had to know, would they taste as good as I thought they would?
I made a batch of tarts, writing the ingredients down on a recipe card as I went along.
They tasted so good! In a word, amazing.
I paced the kitchen floor as I finished the tart, my thoughts and feelings chasing each other round and round, like a puppy chasing his tail.
After a good thirty minutes, I figured out, it really came down to one question: Make myself happy or make my mother happy?
I had to choose. Simple as that.
Except there wasn’t anything even close to simple about it.
Chapter 10
s’mores cupcakes
CAN’T GO WRONG WITH CHOCOLATY MARSHMALLOW PERFECTION
I thought about calling Grandma and asking her for advice. But I’d already asked her that day when I first told her and Mom about the contest. She’d told me to follow my heart. She’d said I had a good heart. A good heart?
A girl with a good heart would set her own feelings aside, I thought. That was the good thing to do. The right thing to do. Even if it was the sad thing to do. Sad to me, anyway. Submitting a cupcake recipe would make Mom happy. I needed to do it for her.
With that, I made up my mind. For good this time. I dumped the rest of the tarts into the garbage can, hoping I hadn’t just dumped my chances to go to New York City right along with them.
Then I got back to work, wishing and hoping I could come up with a fantastically amazing cupcake recipe. I still had chocolate on the brain, and I was thinking about Sophie coming home the next day and wondering what recipe she would make, when I remembered talking about s’mores. Chocolaty marshmallow perfection, Sophie had called them. Well, what if I put that chocolaty marshmallow perfection into a cupcake?
I stayed up into the wee hours of the morning mixing and baking, perfecting the recipe. When Mom came in late herself, I had her taste the latest batch. She smiled and said it was delicious. Then she said good night and headed to her room. I’ll admit I had hoped for a bit more encouragement. More excitement. More something. But she was tired, and I told myself it didn’t matter, I had a recipe to enter (even if it wasn’t the best chocolate jam tart recipe ever to be invented).
When I went to my room, I wrote the cupcake recipe on a card in my best handwriting, put it in an envelope, and stuck it in my desk drawer until I could get the mailing address from Sophie. Then I wrote in my passport book:
Maybe someday
I can live somewhere in England
and open a jam tart shop.
I wonder, would I long
to visit Willow then?
—IB
I fell into bed that night exhausted and slept late, which wasn’t like me. Usually the morning traffic on the road in front of our building woke me, but I slept through it.
When I finally did wake up, my first thought was that Sophie would be home soon. The happiness in that thought was quickly replaced with a sickening sadness when I had my second thought. I needed to tell Mom about Beatrice’s Brownies.
After I threw on my robe, I went to my window, slid it open, and put my cheek against the screen. The blue sky and warm air told me it was going to be hot. Down below, two ladies stood at the corner, one of them pointing at the cupcake sign. They walked up to the building and peeked inside the window.
I knew Mom, without the gumption gene, wouldn’t take the news about Beatrice’s well. But I also believed, as I watched those ladies, our cupcake shop could be something special. I just needed to figure out how to convince my mother of that.
I found Dad sitting at the kitchen table, his hands hugging a cup of coffee and the Sunday paper laid out in front of him. On the front page it read WILLOW WELCOMES BEATRICE’S BROWNIES and below it was a big picture of the sign I’d seen yesterday.
“Dad?” I asked.
He jumped a little, startled to hear my voice.
“Hey, good morning, punkin.”
I pointed at the paper. “Did Mom see that?”
He shook his head. “She’s in the bathroom. We need to tell her when she comes out. It’s important that she hear it from us.”
I sat down. “I saw them putting the sign up yesterday, on my way home from the library. I should have told her last night. But I just couldn’t.”
He nodded. “I know. It’s hard.” He took a drink of coffee. “At least it doesn’t open until Labor Day weekend. That buys us some time. I mean, hopefully she’ll see it’s not the end of the world. We’re just going to have to work a little harder, that’s all.”
I gave him a funny look. Was he talking about my mother?
We sat there, waiting. “You hungry?” he asked me.
I shook my head. Then the phone rang.
I jumped up and grabbed the phone in the kitchen.
“Hello?”
“Isabel, it’s Grandma. Did you hear the news?”
I sighed. “Yeah. Dad and I are here, waiting to tell Mom.”
“Tell me what?” I heard Mom’s voice from behind me.
“I’ll be right over,” Grandma said.
“Okay. Bye, Grandma.”
I hung up and walked back over to the table.
I looked at Dad. He looked at me. I think about then we were both wishing for a miracle. Like suddenly the president of the United States would declare brownies unfit to eat and brownie shops everywhere would be forced to close. Or a big rock band would swing through town, see our shop, and write a song about it. It’d shoot to number one and our shop would be famous. They’d put me in their music video. And insist I come on tour with them. And . . .
“Tell me what, Isabel?” Mom said again.
Dad walked over and put his arm around Mom. “Honey, I don’t know how to say this, so I’m just going to come right out with it. Beatrice’s Brownies is opening a store near here. It made the front page of the newspaper today.”
I watched as her cherry-pink cheeks turned the color of buttercream.
“Mom, it’s really not that big of a deal. I mean, okay, yeah, it’s Beatrice’s Brownies. But the excitement will wear off, and people will realize that a cute cupcake shop is way better than a stupid chain brownie store.”
Her shoulders slumped, and one hand reached up to her heart, as if her hand pressed there could keep it from beating too fast. “Beatrice’s Brownies? Here in Willow?”
Both Dad and I nodded. He handed her the newspaper. “It’s going to be all right, though, Caroline. I was telling Isabel, we just have to work a little harder.”
She stared at the picture in the paper. “Work a little harder? Are you kidding? We could work day and night for months and never come close to getting the kind of business they’re going to get. And once you have a box of scrumptious brownies, you think you’re going to stop and get a box of cupcakes, too? Of course you’re not. Which means we’re doomed. Doomed before we even had a chance.” She threw the paper on the table and stomped down the hall to her room.
After her door shut,
I asked Dad, “What do we do now?”
He got up and grabbed his clipboard off the kitchen counter. “I don’t know. I’ll be back later. I need some air.”
As he walked toward the door, I wanted to tell him to go in there and be a cheerleader. He was giving up too easily. He needed to give her his best rah-rah-rah! But my dad’s not like that. He’s never been like that. Give him a fraction to reduce or a project to work on, and he’s all over it. But words of encouragement? Not his thing. I thought about making him a list.
1. Use a soft, calm voice.
2. Smile, but not too much, or it looks fake.
3. General phrases like “Try not to worry” or “It’ll be okay” are good.
4. And specific words that will make her smile and feel good about herself and her cupcakes are even better. What those specific words might be, I don’t know, since I’m not good at that kind of thing.
I started to get up and go in there myself, and try to find the right words. But something told me she wouldn’t listen to me. Because I’d had my doubts. I had told her a Laundromat would be better than a cupcake shop. Easier than a cupcake shop. And knowing her, she’d probably remind me of that.
I sat there, staring at the picture on the front page, wishing it would disappear, so maybe, just once, Mom could be happy. And maybe, just once, all of us could be happy.
Right then, it seemed about as impossible as me flying across the world and seeing the Great Wall of China.
Chapter 11
hawaiian sky cupcakes
THE BLUE COCONUT BUTTERCREAM WILL MAKE YOU GO “WOW”
Grandma came over, all dressed up in an emerald green dress along with little white gloves and a white hat with a feather. She marched down the hall and told Mom she had five minutes to get ready because they were going out.
“I think the best thing to do today is get her out of here and get her mind off cupcakes for a while. Let her stew for too long, and she’ll be ready to give up for sure. Wouldn’t you agree, Izzy?”
I nodded. Grandma always seemed to have the right answer.