Eat Cake by Jeanne Ray

Author:Jeanne Ray
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Sagas, General, Family Life, Fiction
ISBN: 9780307816351
Publisher: Crown
Published: 2012-02-08T05:00:00+00:00

“Really,” Florence said on the phone later that night. “I’ve been thinking about it.”

“I don’t know anything about business.”

“Don’t worry about business right now. If you get into so much money that you have to start worrying about business, then you can hire someone to do the books for you.”

“So what do I do, put a sign up in my yard that says ‘Cakes Sold Here’?”

“You’re going to have to start thinking, Ruth. You spend all your time putting out fires. That’s a different way of going at life. Now you have to make something happen. You have to start a fire.”

“With a cake?”

“Listen, there are a lot of highbrow restaurants in this town. Make up a dozen of your best cakes and give them to the owners as gifts. If they don’t like them, they don’t call you back.”

“And what if they do call me back?”

“Then we go on to the next phase.”

“Which is?”

Florence sighed. “Stop getting ahead of me. What’s the worst you’ll be out? A hundred dollars for ingredients if you make something really fancy. Probably not even that. I bet you’ve already got just about everything you need in the house. It’s not like I’m telling you to go out and spend money on pans.”

I thought about some candied orange peel I’d ordered from a specialty store in Luxembourg a few months ago. I hadn’t been exactly sure what to do with it, I only knew that sooner or later it would be exactly what I needed. “I don’t know,” I said. I felt that old familiar queasiness, like I was going to have to play the piano in front of people.

“Somebody is going to have to save your family,” Florence said in a serious voice. “Maybe your father is right. Maybe it’s just going to have to be you.”

It was impossible not to take Florence seriously. I think it had something to do with her height. “Can you save a family with cake?”

“That cake you sent home with me today, the scarlet empress? That’s a cake that can save people. That’s a cake that could lift up the country on its shoulders and redeem it.”

After I hung up the phone I sat and stared at it for a long time. Maybe it would ring again and it would be Florence or a telemarketer or anybody who would give me more advice. Sam came into the kitchen with a copy of Classic Yachting in his hand. Since we had our talk he didn’t try to hide them anymore. “Who was that?”

“Florence,” I said, not looking up.

“Tell her she doesn’t need to drive all the way over here to see Guy. I can take him to the hospital.”

“It wasn’t about Dad.” I could hear the weight in my voice but I had no idea how to get rid of it. Suddenly it felt as though the responsibility for everything was about to move onto my shoulders. I would go from worrying about Sam finding a job to actually having to find a job myself.

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