Starting Over, One Cake at a Time by Bullock-Prado Gesine

Author:Bullock-Prado, Gesine [Gesine Bullock-Prado]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780749009458
Publisher: Allison & Busby
Published: 2011-06-11T16:00:00+00:00

The Monster on the Wall

9 a.m.

KALIKA, OUR AFTERNOON BARISTA, sticks her head in the kitchen. ‘There’s someone named Amy here to pick up a cake?’

‘What cake? What kind of cake? Where’s the order? I don’t know anything about a cake for Amy.’

The behemoth wall calendar is nailed just above the phone and the punch clock. There are hundreds of order slips plastered all around, just barely clinging to the calendar with scraps of tape. Each date only has a few inches of real estate, so we have to stick orders on top of each other, creating ominous fans of accountability. As the week wears on, the stacks get progressively sinister until we hit Saturday and the buggers swarm that coveted two-inch square marking Saturday’s space. On holidays, we dump the ‘tape and pray’ scheme altogether and break out a three-ring binder to wrangle all the orders.

But today’s an average Tuesday and we’re in the hands of the monster on the wall. And it appears that, as it will once in a while, a scrap of paper with young Sammy’s birthday cake order – the one Amy is now here to pick up – has unglued itself from its brothers and sisters and gone into hiding in the radiator or is stuck to the underbelly of the workstation. Or maybe someone completely forgot to put the order up, and that likely villain is yours truly. It’s been unanimously agreed that I shouldn’t be allowed to answer the phone, not only because I’m in possession of barely rudimentary phone etiquette (‘Hurry up and just tell me what you want! Chocolate or vanilla, it’s not that hard!’), but also because I can’t bring myself to post an order once I’ve taken it. I leave it in the little booklet instead of posting it on the calendar, forgetting it the second I’ve hung up the phone and hear the oven buzzer screaming in the background or realise the whipped cream is just about to spin itself into butter. Or sometimes I’m sure I’ll remember. And I do, in a fashion. Like the time I arrived at a wedding with the five-tiered colossus a day early. Or the fifty-pound baby shower cake, complete with pregnant belly and breasts. I got the flavour right but the event wrong. It was supposed to be for an eighty-ninth birthday celebration. So I spent a very frazzled ten minutes performing an emergency C-section and double mastectomy on poor Great Aunt Tula’s strawberry dream cake.

‘Kalika, go ask them exactly what the order was and if it could be under another name. Ask if someone named Jenny could have called it in. I’ve got a cake for Jenny.’

And we wait and pray. Please, please, please be under another name. Or at least be really nice and understanding and have the time to come back in the afternoon, by which time I will have busted out the cake of Sammy’s dreams.

But this is only an occasional drama. I mostly get it right. And when I’m getting it right, I’m in a giddy trance.

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