Cupcake Queens

by Darlene Everly

  The right thing to do for the business, for Mom’s legacy, was to focus on work anyway.

  “Yeah. The right…” I sniffed and swiped at the tears running down my cheeks. “I did the right thing.”

  And it felt like the worst.

  Theresa

  “Damn it, what?” I yelled into the phone, but the call was done.

  “Ceecee. Ceecee pick up,” I said as I called her back, but it cut off. Dialing again just sent it straight to voicemail.

  “She blocked me. Why? What the hell was that?” I yelled, turning to Deacon who sat across the table from me with his cards squished in his large hands like he squeezed them to death while I was getting my heart shredded.

  “I don’t know, Theresa, but are you okay?” He looked like he wasn’t okay for me, which was good because I didn’t know what to feel.

  “How am I supposed to be okay or not when I don’t even know what just happened?” I threw my phone onto the cushion of the couch.

  It bounced off but managed to land on the ottoman anyway.

  “See? I almost broke my stupid,” I picked up my cards and threw them too, sending them fluttering around the room, “phone.”

  “Theresa.” Deacon shook his head and put his cards down.

  “No, don’t try and make me feel better, Deek. She just broke up with me. She…”

  And it happened. No matter how confused I was, or how much I hated doing it, my body caught up to what was going on before my brain fully did, and I started to cry.

  “Deacon. I tried. After Sam and everything that happened, I didn’t want to, but I tried.” I crumpled onto the table, putting my head in my arms.

  “Just because you had a fight, doesn’t mean it isn’t worth it to keep trying,” he said, putting one of those huge hands on mine.

  “No, Deek. We didn’t have a fight.” I lifted my head from my arms. Even in the warmth of the room, the air hitting my soaked cheeks sent a chill down my body. “She broke up with me. It’s over. It didn’t matter how hard I tried. She said I tried to save her, and she could do it herself.”

  “Stop it. This isn’t about something you did wrong or something you didn’t do. This sounds like it was about her.” He shook his head, his mouth setting into a thin line.

  “Deacon, it doesn’t matter if I try or not. It doesn’t matter if the bad things that happen are my fault or not. I end up by myself and all alone.”

  He squeezed my hand hard, his mouth turning down. His face looked close to what I assumed it must have when he was on the football field.

  I sat up straight and tried to pull my hand away, but his grip was too tight.

  “You are not alone. And I never want to hear you say that again,” he said, his voice low and almost growling.

  “Geez. What happened to Deacon of the Too Pure?” I grumbled, but the tears stopped.

  “There. That’s better.” He smiled and let go of my hand, giving it a little pat.

  “Seriously, you’re kind of scary when you want to be.”

  “Well, I can’t be sunshine and rainbows when I need to flatten people for my team.”

  Huh. That actually made so much sense it shocked me the rest of the way out of the crying part of the pity party.

  I took a deep breath and slumped in my chair, rubbing my face and swiping my hair out of the tracks of tears on my cheeks.

  “Fine, I get it. I have you and the others. But, damn it, I wanted her too.”

  Not all of the pity party was over.

  “You know that she’s just in a messed-up situation. I mean, she really is about to lose everything.” He shook his head, his face back to the soft, sweet look of one of my best friends.

  “The bakery,” I said, feeling the hurt for her over the struggle of her business.

  “Her apartment.”

  “She had to fire Marcus.”

  “And she already lost her mom,” Deacon said, nodding.

  “But then why is she pushing me away because I’m trying to help, to take some of the burden?” I yelled, throwing my hands up.

  “Let me ask you something.” He put his hands flat on the table like he was bracing himself. I braced myself in turn, crossing my arms over my chest.

  “If you get a building like you want to, if you find the perfect one and get her to move in and all the rest, but you start to struggle under the weight of the task and fail to make it work, would you accept your mom swooping in to help?”

  “That’s not…I…” I turned to the side and looked out the window, the grip of my fingers on my arms slowly loosening until my hands dropped into my lap.

  “Oh, no,” I said, laying my forehead down on the table.

  “Right,” Deacon said, leaning back.

  “Where does that leave me?” I asked, lifting my head from the table just enough to make eye contact.

  “I would say, keep looking. Let her figure herself out.”

  Sitting up the rest of the way, I opened my mouth to argue. That didn’t make sense.

  “Theresa, wait, I wasn’t done,” he said with a smile and a hand raised in the air like he was a little kid at school who had the answer.

  “Okay, I’m going to listen to all of it and not interrupt.” I nodded at him and tried to do as I promised.

  “Well,” he said, pausing to lean a little forward like he was about to impart the secret of the universe and getting me close to laughing even under the circumstances, “You need to keep going. You need to find a place, start working on it, do what you can, and wait. While you do all of that, she will be stuck in that same crappy situation and thinking. No one is there with her. All she has is time to think and to second guess.”

  “Nightmare.”

  “Yes. And then you set up a situation where she goes to see a new space for the bakery—let’s say she goes with Marcus or with Campbell. And then you tell her you’ve been doing this and that you want her back.” He leaned back, very happy with himself with a grin on his face.

  “Deacon you’re a genius,” I said, shaking my head.

  “I know.”

  But what if…what if she didn’t want to try again? What if I didn’t?

  Looking down at my own hands, the callouses on them, I decided that even if she and I didn’t end up together, it was still a good thing to help her with the business. In the way that only I could.

  “Okay,” I said.

  Ceecee

  My hands didn’t want to stop shaking.

  The only time I felt like I was really functioning anymore was when I was baking. But I didn’t have any foot traffic, and the orders weren’t enough to keep me busy all day.

  So, I was back in my pajamas, laying in my broken-down bed, staring at the desk and the pile of paperwork on it after delivering what little I needed to on a Wednesday.

  I was late on three bills.

  Even though I had the money to do it, the energy to tackle them remained deep inside my body, hidden behind the shaking of my hands.

  Marcus was out of town, taking the chance for a vacation while he waited to start working at his new job. Plus, he still needed to finish trying all of their options and reading through the pile of material they sent him about beer.

  Not even Marcus was around to distract me from the ever-shrinking walls.

  It wasn’t like I had a television to zone out to.

  Even if I did, I wouldn’t have been able to afford any service for it. Cable was way too expensive, and I didn’t have internet other than my phone. That was the cheapest plan, and I was afraid I would run out of data.

  That stupid phone was the only thing that brought in any money from the orders.

  Sure, I could do it all myself.

  Wasn’t that what I told Theresa?

  I was an idiot.

  Maybe I could have done it all myself if there was any capital to pay for advertising, but I was barely keeping myself afloat well enough to start putting some money away. I wasn’t paying anything but the minimum on the debts.
>
  All the lights in the bakery were off. Just like they had been for a week unless I was in the kitchen working.

  The heat was down to fifty degrees, and I wore layers all the time to keep warm.

  But I was surviving, even if it was only barely.

  I needed to use the bathroom.

  For some reason though, the thought of getting up and walking there made me want to just roll over and try to go to sleep.

  It was a lot of work.

  No one cared if I exerted the effort. Most people didn’t care whether I worked at all. So why couldn’t I just lay in bed all day?

  My bladder told me that it cared and wasn’t going to let me sleep no matter what I tried to tell it.

  Finally, I threw my blankets off, wrapped my robe tighter against the chill that flooded me the second I stood up, put my feet into my slippers, and shuffled my way to the bathroom.

  After I was done, I went to flush, and all the water disappeared just like it was supposed to. But the tank didn’t fill again.

  “Damn it. Come on,” I muttered, looking for the same thing that had happened before, but there was no water on the floor and the fix Theresa did seemed to be fine.

  “What in the hell?” I straightened up and tried the sink.

  But no water came out there either.

  I rubbed my hands over my face and spent ten minutes swearing while I put on something that more closely resembled clothing.

  The perfect person to call was Theresa. This was exactly what she said might happen. Something with the water.

  But there was zero chance I was going to call her.

  Nope. That ship was long out to sea, and I was the one who gave it the wind to get there.

  The neighbors gave me contact info for a few contractors back when Mom was alive.

  Maybe one of them could help me.

  Only one of them picked up. He agreed to come out, saying he had time to look at it real quick.

  I had no idea what looking at it 'real quick’ would do for me, but it was the only chance I had.

  He took an hour.

  That wasn’t quick, real or otherwise, but I didn’t complain.

  “Cold in here,” he said, walking back out to the front of the shop.

  “Because of the construction I close down early,” I said, which was only partially a lie.

  “Yeah, it seems like a lot is happening here. And I hate to tell you this, but more work needs to be done.” He shrugged and shook his head before he went on. “I think your whole plumbing system needs to be replaced. I suspect none of the units are separated properly which didn’t help this old set up. I find it more often than you think. Parts of a system are updated, others aren’t. And the whole time none of them are separated or done properly.”

  “The whole…” I couldn’t finish the sentence. There weren’t words for how bad this was. There weren’t words that would allow me to tell this perfect stranger that he just killed me.

  “Ceecee?” Mr. McCarthy came in the front door with his face white and his jowls shaking.

  “Yes?” I asked while I silently begged the contractor not to say anything.

  “I just got a call from upstairs that there’s no water,” Mr. McCarthy paced across the front of the store, apparently not noticing that the heater was so low or that the cases were empty.

  “Well, I was just telling her it’s because the entire plumbing system in this old building needs to be replaced.” The contractor turned to look at Mr. McCarthy, who stopped pacing and looked the contractor up and down.

  “Did you hire a handyman?” Mr. McCarthy asked, looking at me.

  “First of all, I am a licensed and bonded contractor, not a random handyman. And second, I’m just here to give her a quote,” he said, nodding his head once.

  My heart hammered in my chest, and I wrapped my shaking hands together, holding them against my chest.

  “Ceecee,” Mr. McCarthy said, turning to look at me again, “We need to talk.”

  Theresa

  “Do you realize how close this is to Joe’s?” I asked, leaning forward in the car, straining against the seatbelt, trying to see further up the street.

  “Sit back,” Mom said, shaking her head.

  I did what she asked, but it was hard to contain how excited I was.

  “And we don’t know if it has parking…what exactly the square footage is…anything?” I asked for the tenth time since she told me about a building one of our clients told her about.

  “No. I know as much as you do—the address and that one of our clients thinks I could do something with it. What that means, I have no idea.”

  We turned a corner and I realized we were one block over from Joe’s. If I had a path in a straight line, it would have taken me maximum five minutes to walk there.

  Mom looked at the address on her phone’s GPS and pulled over, parking on the street in front of what looked like a weird set up for a house.

  I got out of the car and stared up at the building.

  “Four stories?” I asked looking at the dormers in the top with large enough windows for there to be rooms up there.

  “Actually,” she said, pointing to one side of the building where the hill dipped to reveal a door in the foundation, “I think it’s five.”

  “Holy crap.” I started toward the place, trying to figure out what it was once upon a time.

  It was old. Some of the ornate gingerbread details in the gables and around the windows and doors made it clear that it was more than just a dilapidated building.

  This was an old girl who was still standing stronger than some newer buildings we had toured. Even if she had been neglected.

  I liked her. In my mind I could see what she would look like after some proper love. The gingerbread gave me a detail to build off of. It might be extra work, more than might, it was. But repairing that and finding more in a salvage yard or having some made would give her a grand touch.

  “Wow,” I said, and Mom nodded.

  “You know, if you cleared out this front yard, there should be room for a couple dozen parking spots,” she said, looking down the fence and across to the other, probably doing better measurements in her head than most people did with a measuring tape.

  “I wonder if it has alley access and a backyard, too.” I headed around to the back with Mom at my heels. The exposed portion of the foundation—the whole side with the door and a few windows—looked sound at first glance.

  The backyard wasn’t nearly as big as the front, but it existed. There was even a small strip of gravel carved out of the yard like it was used for parking with a garage at one end. While the garage was intact, it listed slightly to the right. Most likely it didn’t have the proper framing and support along the walls.

  Not a big deal to fix so far.

  “We should look in that garage. There’s no door,” Mom said, not waiting to see if I would follow her. She knew I would.

  I expected to see a lot of things inside the building after being wide open to whoever for however long, but I did not expect to see a the pile of lumber that reached up to the rafters.

  “That’s dimensional. That’s usable,” I said. Mom nodded, her mouth open.

  “How much is this place going for?” I asked.

  She turned to give me a pointed look with her mouth pinched.

  “Let’s just look at the whole property first, shall we?” She turned around and headed to the main building.

  “Am I going to have to shimmy in through a cracked window?” I asked as we came to the basement.

  “No, they gave me the key.” She shook her head at me and unlocked the door which looked like a cheap metal one from decades ago.

  Inside the basement, we both took out our flashlights and turned them on.

  “Holy crap.” I wandered through the large open basement, supported by thick posts at all the right places.

  Toward the back there was a laundry room, a bathroom, and the stairs heading up.

 
I didn’t wait for Mom. I just went up the stairs to the main floor.

  I knew by the time we were done that not only was there space for a bakery, a pool hall, and apartments, but there was also room for two other things—one of which would work as space for me as I slowly redid it all.

  “Do you really think it’s livable right now?” I asked, leaning against the world’s ugliest goldenrod stove.

  “Yeah, it’s nicer than the place I brought you home to when you were born. You need to do a lot of work, and prioritize the spaces that will bring in the most money first. But replace all the appliances, do a thorough scrub, and you can for sure move in while you do the work.”

  “And you really want to invest in this idea? Even though this is a long-term investment, not quick flip?”

  “Theresa, I think that if you do this, slowly, overtime, while you do a flip a year for me, this will be well worth the investment. Especially since I know there will be very little vacancy between you and all your friends. And since I know that you’re putting all your money on the line, too.”

  I looked around me at the apartment in the attic. It was only partially finished into an incredibly outdated one bedroom, but if I finished it all, and did a ton of updates, there could be three bedrooms.

  Three bedrooms, two bathrooms, with an incredible view over the rooftops of most of the buildings nearby…in the very top apartment.

  Somewhere along the way, I went from avoiding all stairs if I could, to wanting this place, no matter how many stairs it took me to get up here.

  Yes. I was investing all of my money in this.

  And it was perfect.

  “Let’s go sign the papers,” I said.

  Ceecee

  The contractor was gone. Watching his back go through the door, I wanted to snatch him back and beg him not to leave me alone with Mr. McCarthy.

  But I didn’t do any of that. Instead, I just stood there wringing my hands together against my chest and trying not to burst into tears.

  “Did you know there is a health code that says any place that serves food must have water?” Mr. McCarthy asked a few moments after the contractor was gone.