Page 16 of Frosting and Flames

I repress the deep sigh that wants to escape. “You and Dad make up forty percent of our staff and—”

Her laugh cuts me off. She literally laughs at me.

“You just need to muscle through. We all have to make sacrifices sometimes.”

Sacrifices? She’s on a half a year vacation sailing through Italy right now.

“Besides,” she continues, “I said you could hire that high school girl on the weekends.”

I bristle at the way she says it. As if she did me a huge favor. “But that’s only for the counter. She can’t help with baking.”

“You’re worrying too much about this. It’ll be fine. Now I don’t want to talk about boring business stuff. I have to tell you about the most amazing cannolis I had yesterday.”

I roll my eyes as she rambles on, glad she can’t see me.

“They were stuffed with ricotta and honey—but this specific Sicilian ricotta made with sheep’s milk. We have to make it at the bakery.”

It takes me a second to switch gears. “You want us to sell cannolis?”

“Not any cannolis. These Sicilian ricotta ones. I was trying to ask the baker how to import the ricotta, but his English wasn’t very good—”

“Hold up,” I interrupt her. “You want to import the cheese from Italy? For this recipe we’ve never tried before? Do you even know the exact recipe?”

“From Sicily,” she clarifies, as if that makes a difference. “And we can figure it out. We’re bakers.”

My fingers move to my temple, massaging the beginnings of a headache away. My conversations with Mom usually end up like this. “How expensive will this be? Also, we’ve never sold cannolis before. We can’t guarantee people here will buy them.”

As usual, she dismisses my concerns. “You worry too much about the details. Baking is about creative expression.”

“But we’re also running a business. This sounds like it’ll cost more than we can reasonably charge.Ifpeople even want the product in the first place.”

She makes a sound I can only describe as a scoff. “Listen. I know you think you know everything because you took some business and marketing classes, but I’ve been working at the bakery longer than you’ve been alive. And I’m the owner. I make the decisions.”

I force a measured breath through my nose, my jaw tightening even as I do everything I can to keep my voice even. “You asked me to come back to Aurora to handle the finances for the bakery. Becauseyouwere having trouble after Grandma died. So that’s what I’m doing.”

Whimsical ideas like this are exactly why she was running it into the ground. If I hadn’t left Philadelphia to come here and turn things around, the bakery would have gone under in a few years, if not sooner.

“So that means you can figure out a way to make this work.”

I bite back the retort that springs to my lips. I can’t be her yes-man for every hare-brained scheme she comes up with. Who knows what it’ll be next week as she keeps traveling through Europe? Authentic German pretzels with imported Bavarian salt?

“Let’s talk more later,” she says before I can tell her we’re not doing this. “It’s almost dinner and they’re serving a butternut squash ravioli that’s to die for. Give my love to Hailey and Sydney.”

She hangs up before I even say bye.

Setting the phone down, I take a moment to collect my thoughts. As usual, nothing was truly resolved. She didn’t care about not putting the cookie donation in our online system. She didn’t care her daughters are overworked. And she didn’t care that the cannolis are an impossibility.

Why did I come back to Aurora to work here again?

I slump in the creaky desk chair, massaging my temples harder. I’d gotten a nice job after college in a marketing firm. Well, not nice, exactly. It’d been entry level and involved a lot of grunt work while I paid my dues. But if I’d stayed there the last two years instead of coming here, maybe I could have been promoted by now.

Instead… I glance down at my never ending to-do list. We have three custom orders to finish in the next two days on top of all our normal baking. I need to contact our supplier because part of our weekly delivery was missing this morning. And the Richardsons are insisting on a payment plan for a cake they’veordered, saying Mom said they could do that when we’ve never done that before.

Sydney opens the office door, leaning against the doorframe. “How’s Mom?”

Ah. And there’s half the reason I returned. The other half must be back from lunch break. They wouldn’t be able to handle all this without me.

“She wants to sell authentic Sicilian cannolis with imported sheep’s milk ricotta.”

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