Turning Up the Heat

by Diane Muldrow

  “Oh, we’ll figure things out.” Molly said.

  “Well, have you figured out how much you’d charge your customers?” asked Mom.

  “Oh, well, um, we haven’t really talked about thaf yet,” replied Molly.

  “Most importantly, girls, what are you really selling? Tell me what your business is about,” said Dad.

  “Well,” said Amanda, “we would cook food for people who are too busy to cook.”

  “So, what does that mean?” asked Dad. “How much food would you cook? Is it for one meal? More than one meal?”

  “Oh, it would have to be for more than one meal,” said Molly. “We’d do like what we did for the McElroys and for Mom. Like a whole bunch of meals.”

  “But how many meals exactly?” asked Dad. “You need to decide, because that’s what your business would be about. That’s what you’d put in your ad. You need to say, ‘We’ll cook five nights’ worth of dinners and deliver it to you,’ or whatever.”

  “It would have to be five days, I guess,” said Amanda. “So that people know that they don’t have to cook dinner for one whole workweek.”

  Matthew rolled his eyes. “Can I please be excuuuuu-used?” he asked. “This is so boring!”

  Mom nodded, and Matthew got up from the table.

  “How would you deliver the food?” asked Dad.

  “You girls cannot cook every day” said Mom, “especially once school starts. You have cooking classes and piano lessons. Plus you’re starting middle school soon! You’ll have to get adjusted to that. And there will be after-school activities you want to do there, I hope.”

  Molly and Amanda looked at each other.

  “Plus,” said Dad, “where would you do the cooking? Our house? Or would you take turns at the other girls’ houses? That’s something we need to talk about. Maybe your mom and I don’t want a cooking business going on here all the time.”

  “It could be disruptive, girls,” Mom said gently. “And you’d also need to think about where you would store the food. There wouldn’t be room to store it in our refrigerator. You’d need to keep it separate, anyway, so we wouldn’t use it by mistake. I think it’s great that you have your cooking club,” Mom continued with a big smile, “and that you’re helping me out so much. But I think you should just leave it at that for a while.”

  Molly’s head was starting to spin. She felt a huge lump growing in her throat. Don’t cry now! she told herself. She was mad at Mom and Dad, but deep down, she also knew they were right. We haven’t thought this outat all, she admitted to herself.

  She sneaked a look at Amanda. Amanda didn’t look upset. But she did look a little dizzy.

  Dad pushed his chair back from the table. “I’m sorry, girls, but we’ll have to talk about this at another time, he said. ”After you’ve thought out your idea more.

  Mom smiled sympathetically at the girls. The twins tried to smiled back.

  “Your dad’s right.” said Mom. “Well, I need to starting packing for my trip now. You’ll help Dad do the dishes, won’t you?”

  “So, how did it go with your dad?” Molly asked Shawn the next day.

  The twins and Shawn had met up at a bench facing the Prospect Park lake to walk over to Peichi’s together.

  “Well, he asked me a lot of questions,” replied Shawn. “And I didn’t know how to answer them!”

  “Our parents asked us a million questions, too,” said Amanda. “Hey, what’s that?” She pointed to something very tiny and black. It was beginning to cross the road that ran through the park.

  “It’s a big bug!” cried Molly.

  “Aw, it’s a baby turtle!” cried Shawn.

  “How cute!” said Molly, leaning over it. “Don’t cross the road, little turtle, or you’ll get squashed.”

  Amanda picked up the turtle. It was so small that it fit in the palm of her hand. “Poor little thing, he’s all mixed up. Are you scared? Don’t worry, I’ll put you back near the water. Your mom’s looking for you.” She looked around. “I wonder where he came from?” she asked.

  Shawn pointed to a tree limb that jutted out of the water right by the edge of the lake. “The turtles live over there, she said. ”Dad and I saw them come out of the water one day and sun themselves on that big branch. There were about fifteen of them! Let’s set him there. Can I carry him now?”

  “So we did our good deed of the day,” said Amanda, as she told Peichi and Natasha about the tiny turtle.

  “That little turtle was lucky” said Peichi. “Hey, I have something to show you.”

  The friends had just gotten to Peichi’s and were in her room. Peichi opened her closet door and brought out the dress her mom had bought for Peichi to wear in an upcoming family wedding. It was pale pink silk, long, and sleeveless.

  “Oooh, you’re going to look so good in it! cried Amanda. “Model it for us!”

  “Okay!” said Peichi. She was unzipping the plastic garment bag when Mrs. Cheng called from her office, “Peichi, leave that dress in the bag, please! I don’t want you to wrinkle it before the wedding!” Mrs. Cheng worked at home. Her office was down the hall from Peichi’s room.

  “Okay, Mom!” called Peichi. She turned to her friends. “My mom hears everything!” she said in a loud whisper. “How does she do that?”

  “Oh, well, let’s go outside,” Molly suggested. Peichi hung up the dress and closed the closet door, and the girls went outside to the pool.

  “I talked to my mom and dad about the business,” said Peichi, as she poured soda into tall glasses full of ice. “It didn’t go so well! They asked me all kinds of questions! They said I was just learning how to cook! They said I have too much going on, like flute lessons and stuff! And then they said, ‘Not right now.’ Then I got kind of upset, and they said they’d think about it.”

  “Do you know what my dad said?” asked Shawn. “He said,‘If you start working now, you’ll be working the rest of your life.’ I was like, ‘So? What’s wrong with that?’ And then he laughed at me and said I’d figure it out someday!”

  The twins nodded.

  “This sounds familiar,” Molly remarked, glancing at Amanda. “It didn’t go so well at our house, either.”

  “Gee, I guess I’m the only one whose parents actually liked the idea,” said Natasha.

  “Get outta here!” exclaimed Shawn.

  “Your parents? cried Peichi and the twins. They couldn’t help laughing, and Natasha laughed, too.

  “Yeah, believe it or not!” replied Natasha. “My dad said it would be a really good experience for me. Even my mom thought it sounded like fun. But they both said my schoolwork had to come first.”

  Molly folded her arms across her chest and looked at her friends. “You know,” she said, “my dad brought up a lot of stuff that we never really thought about. I mean, you have to admit, we didn’t talk about how we’d run the cooking service, like where we’d keep the food—”

  “What we’d cook—” Amanda broke in.

  “All that kind of stuff,” continued Molly. “Plus we don’t have any—what it called? Capital.”

  “Hey! My dad used that word, too,” said Peichi with a giggle.

  “So did mine!” said Shawn.

  “So did mine,” said Natasha. “But guess what! I couldn’t wait to tell you. My dad offered us the money—I mean the capital—to get started!”

  “Really?” cried the girls all at once.

  “Really,” replied Natasha. “So, if we really want to do this, we can.”

  “That’s so cool!” cried Molly.

  Natasha tucked her hair behind her ears and cleared her throat. “The thing is,” Natasha went on, “we’d have to pay him back. We could pay him back a little at a time. He said that’s how it works in the real world. If you want a bank to loan you money, you have to pay it back. He’d be, like, our bank.”

  “Okay, that sounds fair,” said Shawn, nodding her head.

  “We could do that,” added Peichi.

  “Plu
s he said he won’t charge us interest,” added Natasha.

  “What’s interest?” asked the twins.

  “It’s a fee you have to pay for borrowing money,” Natasha explained. “My dad told me that whenever you take out a loan, like, for a house or a car, the bank charges you interest. But my dad isn’t going to do that!

  “That’s really great,” said Amanda. “But we still have a lot to work out.”

  “Well, we have a refrigerator in our garage,” said Peichi, pointing her carrot stick at the garage door. “There’s not much in it. We keep sodas in there, and the turkey at Thanksgiving, stuff like that. We could store the food there, at least sometimes. But I’d have to ask to make sure. Sometimes it’s full.”

  Shawn shrugged. “Don’t look at me,” she said. “I’m the only one here who lives in an apartment Dad and I don’t have room to store extra food.”

  Natasha excitedly waved a potato chip in the air. Maybe we could buy our own refrigerator! I’ll bet we could keep it in my basement!

  Everyone laughed really hard at the idea of the friends shopping for a refrigerator together.

  “But Natasha’s right” said Shawn. “That way, we’d never have to deal with asking our parents, ‘May we please store our food in your fridge?’ Our stuff would never be in the way. It would free us up.”

  Everyone nodded.

  Amanda snapped a pretzel stick in half. “Fridges are expensive,” she pointed out.

  “We don’t have to buy a new one, silly,” said Molly. “We’d buy a used one at a tag sale.”

  “Or from a newspaper ad,” Peichi added.

  “Whoa!” said Shawn. “We don’t have to worry about that right now! We’d only have to do that if business was really good!

  “That’s true”, said Peichi. “We have a lot of other things to worry about before we get to that point!”

  “And Amanda and I came up with a cool name for the business. Dish!” Molly said.

  “That’s a great name!” Shawn said. “I love it!

  The rest of the girls agreed, too.

  “So what do we do now?” asked Amanda.

  “We go back to our parents and say, Guess what! We have capital,and we’re not being charged interest” said Peichi with a laugh. “They’re gonna be so surprised! Come on, let’s jump in the pool!

  “You got sunburned here,” Amanda told Molly later that day as they looked through a magazine together in their room. She gently poked Molly’s upper arm.

  “Ow,” said Molly. “I guess I forgot the sunscreen there...so, what do you think of Dish, the business? Are you into it? I can’t really tell what you’re thinking.”

  Amanda looked thoughtful. “It could be fun,” she replied. “We’d all be together, making money. I—I’ m into it. I guess.”

  “Then the question is, can we get Mom and Dad to let us try it,” said Molly.

  “I think that’s what we have to say,” said Amanda, nodding. “We’ll ask if we can just try it! And if it doesn’t work out, no big deal.”

  “Capital? You got capital from Mr. Ross?” asked Dad that night as the Moores lingered in the garden after dinner. He slapped at a mosquito.

  “Uh-huh. And Mr. Ross isn’t going to charge us any—”

  “Interest,” Amanda broke in.

  “Right, interest,” continued Molly, as she threw Amanda a grateful look. “And we all talked about the business today at Peichi’s, and we came up with some good ideas on how to run it.”

  “Like, what we would cook”, said Amanda. “We decided that if someone calls and wants a weeks worth of meals, we’ll just tell them what we’re cooking that week. We won’t really take requests. That would get too complicated. and we wouldn’t be able to shop in advance.”

  “Really, we just want to give it a try.” said Molly. “Can’t we just try it and see if we can even do it?”

  Mom nodded her head thoughtfully. She looked at Dad, and Dad nodded. The twins knew this was a good sign.

  “We’ll think about it,” said Dad. “Sorry, girls, that’s the best we can do for now.”

  “We’ll let you know soon,” said Mom.

  But I want to know now, thought Molly.

  The twins knew to let the matter be for now, even though Mom was flying to San Diego in the morning.

  “Oh! The suspense is killing me!” Molly told Amanda as they went upstairs. They didn’t really feel like staying with Mom and Dad in the garden after their talk.

  Amanda flipped on the light in their room. “At least we’ll still have our cooking club, and who knows—maybe Mom and Dad will say yes!”

  Molly dived on to her bed, and hugged Mumbles, her old teddy bear. “What if everyone else is allowed to do the business except us?” she groaned. “That would be horrible!”

  “Don’t worry, Molls”, said Amanda coolly, as she lifted a clean pair of pj’s out of a drawer. “That’ll never happen.”

  chapter 12

  “Good-bye, girls,” said Mom early the next morning, clutching the twins close. “Bye. Matthew.” She kissed Matthew, who made a face.

  Outside, the taxi driver honked. “I’m coming!” Mom called out the door, waving. “Where’s my purse? Be good for Dad, okay? I’ve put my hotel phone number here on the fridge—”

  “We know, Mom, you showed us three hundred times,” said Matthew.

  “Bye. Mom!” chorused the twins.

  Molly went into the kitchen and sleepily poured cereal into a bowl. The phone rang.

  “Hi, Amanda?”

  “Hi. Peichi, it’s Molly. You’re up early!”

  “Oh, hi, Molly! So are you! Guess what! My parents are going to let me try the business! At least for the summer. But they said if it gets to be too much with school in the fall, I have to quit! But isn’t it great? Did you talk to your parents yet? What did they say?”

  Molly explained to Peichi what had happened when she and Amanda spoke to their parents last night. Still no news.

  “Well, as they say: ‘no news is good news,’” Peichi said as she hung up the phone.

  As soon as Molly put down the receiver, the phone rang again.

  “I’ll get it this time,” Amanda said grabbing the phone.

  “Hello? Hi, Shawn ... not much. Mom left this morning. What’s up with you?...Oh, really? Your dad is letting you do the business? Wow. Peichi’s allowed, too...Well, we still don’t know yet!

  “Matthew! Come on in! It’s time for lunch,” Amanda called out the door later that day. Matthew was skating up and down the hill.

  “It’s about time!” he called back. “What are we having?”

  “Just come on in and find out.”

  As the twins and Matthew ate peanut butter-and-honey sandwiches, the phone rang. As usual, Amanda was the first to grab it.

  “Hello? No, Mrs. Moore isn’t here right now...yes, this is her daughter Amanda...right, we cooked for the McElroys after they had their fire...Mmm-hmm ...I think that would be okay, but I’ll have to talk it over with my friends. Can I call you back?” She wrote down a phone number. “Okay. Thank you. Bye.”

  Amanda hung up the phone and looked at Molly, her eyes wide.

  “Who was that?” asked Molly and Matthew at the same time.

  “Someone named Mrs. Freeman. She’s a friend of Mrs. McElroy who told her about our cooking. Mrs. Freeman asked if we would cook a bunch of dinners for her family. She has to go take care of her sick mother in another state. And she offered to pay us a lot of money!

  “Wow,” said Molly. “It’s like our business is happening without us even trying!”

  “Don’t you think we should check with Mom and Dad first?”, Amanda said. “I mean, they haven’t really given us permission to start our business yet.”

  “Then this is our perfect opportunity!” Molly said. “If we do a good job, we can prove to them that we can do the business.”

  Amanda twirled a piece of her hair around her finger. “I don’t know, Molly. We’ll need a place to cook, plus
we’ll need a parent to help us deliver the food. We just can’t carry it all on our bikes!”

  Molly sighed. “You’re right.” She picked up the phone and dialed Dad.

  After Molly explained what was going on, their dad agreed to let them cook. He said they could take it on a “case-by-case basis.”

  Molly and Amanda were psyched!

  “Let’s call the others,” said Amanda.

  Molly and Amanda called Peichi and Shawn and arranged to cook the next weekend. They left a message on Natasha’s family’s answering machine.

  Later that day, as the twins, Peichi, and Shawn hung out at Peichi’s pool, they talked about all the dishes they would cook.

  “Peslo’s always easy,” Shawn pointed out.

  “And we can use the basil from my mom’s garden,” Peichi pointed out.

  “But we still need money to buy ingredients for the rest of the food,” Amanda said. “Since we don’t have our capital yet!”

  “I haven’t spent the money that your mom paid us,” said Peichi as she floated in the water. “Believe it or not!”

  Neither had anyone else.

  “Is Natasha coming over today?” asked Molly. “She never called us back.”

  “She didn’t call me back, either,” said Peichi.

  Amanda rolled her eyes. Typical, she thought.

  A few days later, it was time to cook for Mrs. Freeman. The girls decided to meet early in the morning at the Moore’s and go to Choice Foods together. Peichi and Shawn showed up on time.

  “Is Natasha here yet?” asked Peichi.

  “No,” said Molly. “We left her a message that we were going shopping, but we still haven’t heard from her.”

  The girls waited around for a while, then called her house. There was no answer.

  “Let’s just go,” said Amanda. She sounded annoyed. “Maybe she’ll call while we’re out, or just meet us at the store.”

  There was no message from Natasha when the girls returned from the store, loaded down with bags. “Is she coming or not?” Amanda said, looking at the phone. “We need her. There’s a ton of work to do.” She looked at the food they’d just bought. It was all over the kitchen, and as she always did, she thought, How are we going tocook all this food? The girls were going to make pesto, a Jell-O mold, cucumber-and-dill soup, chocolate chip cookies, a pasta salad, a three-bean salad, a mustard sauce for baking chicken breasts, a vegetable lasagna...