The Copper Valley Bro Code Series: Volume 1, page 60
Having yeast donuts back in Duh-Nuts means letting Bailey stand at the fryer, but she assures me she’s done far worse, which isn’t actually reassuring at all.
Possibly I’ve already forgotten my own teen years and gotten a little uptight since high school.
“I’m not supposed to buy anything,” Cooper says apologetically. “But I am supposed to talk you into a free sample of your banana pudding. And I might could be talked into buying a lot of it. Like, a lot. I mean, if it’s good enough. And if you promise not to tell my siblings. Or my Pop. He’s terrifying when he gets mad. Puts on his Blackbeard costume and shows up in the middle of the night in your bedroom pretending to be the Pirate of Sins Past and he just knows shit.”
Cooper affects a whole-body shiver.
“Dream on,” Bailey tells him from the kitchen doorway. “We know who you are.”
“You want an autograph?” he asks.
“Again, dream on. Annika, do I need to make him go away?”
“Go wash dishes,” I tell her.
“Not if it means you have to be alone with this guy.”
“Bailey.” Mama angles into the doorway too, hand on the frame, guiding herself. “Who’s there?”
“Cooper Rock, ma’am,” Cooper says. “Power slugger for the Fireballs. Acrobatic second baseman. Or you could just call me a god. I’m good with that.”
Mama smiles. “Ah, Cooper Rock. I should’ve known by the ego. How are the Fireballs this summer?”
“Full of heart, ma’am. Just like your daughter.”
“Did you just subtly call my sister a loser?” Bailey demands. “Because the Fireballs are bigger losers than they are…hearters.”
“Bailey.” I jerk my head toward the kitchen. “Can you please go find a masterpiece for us to make tomorrow?”
“One that will bring people from miles and miles around?” she asks.
“Yes.”
“Victory is the best revenge,” she says tartly, and she disappears back into the kitchen.
“Now. Cooper. What can we do for you?” I ask.
“Alright. You’ve convinced me. Sell me all your banana pudding?”
“No.”
“I’d pay you good for it.”
“No. I’m sorry your family is upset with us, but the people of Sarcasm deserve banana pudding too. Without going someplace where people call them assholes just for being from Sarcasm. Duh-Nuts isn’t hurting Crow’s Nest. So back off.”
He holds his hands up. “Dude. Mellow your yellow. First of three games against Boston tonight, and the team’s gonna need some comfort food when it’s over, you know?”
He says it so casually, like it’s no big deal that the Fireballs will get creamed, and that their injured pride will be assuaged by banana pudding, but I don’t buy it.
Cooper Rock has always been a winner.
He once challenged me to a game of rock, paper, scissors that went on for an hour because that’s how long it took for him to finally come out on top in a best of two hundred and seventeen contest. He hired a professional editor for his eighth-grade submission to the county DARE essay contest. He swapped Grady’s cannoli filling for garlic butter during the annual Pirate Festival’s baking contest one year, because he knew his pirate hat cookies couldn’t beat Grady’s cannoli cannons.
Cooper Rock does not like to lose.
At anything.
And the only thing he hates worse than losing is for his family to lose.
I fold my arms and indulge in the staring contest that he’s pretending we’re not having.
He doesn’t crack, which is unlike him, because he hated staring contests in high school, and would always say nah, that wasn’t a staring contest, you just forgot to blink rather than admit that he couldn’t win a staring contest.
This might take longer than I thought.
“Annika?” Mama says.
“Just a minute, Mama. We’re having a little contest right now.”
“I’ll be sure to say a nice eulogy and bury you both right here after you each die before blinking,” she says. “Since I assume you mean a staring contest and you’re not making out with Grady’s brother while I can’t see you.”
“All I want is for her to go apologize to my brother.” Cooper’s gaze doesn’t waver, and his eyes aren’t even getting shiny with the need to blink.
He probably practices this in the mirror, since I doubt he’d practice with anyone else who might beat him.
“I’m not apologizing when I didn’t do anything wrong,” I tell him.
“You hurt him.”
“He hurt me.”
“But you’re the bigger person of the two of you, so if you’re ever going to be friends again, you have to go to him.”
I want to growl, because I know he’s right, and I suddenly feel like my entire high school experience was a lie built on coddling Grady’s ego, even though I know that’s not true. He had a few insecurities, but who doesn’t? More often, he was fun and reliable and smart. And smiling. Always smiling.
Always bringing me baked goods, even though he knew Mama was the best baker in the world, because I just want to see the day that you finally think I’ve made something as good as her.
Always telling someone from Shipwreck to shove it whenever one of them called me an asshole.
Always grabbing me by the cheeks, saying, Annika, look at me, it’s okay if your papier-mâché Coliseum isn’t to scale, because you’ve already earned your A, and you’re missing out on the last good sledding of the season. What would you rather have, the A+, or the memories?
“I have responsibilities that are bigger than soothing someone’s ridiculous idea that he’s the more injured party here,” I say quietly.
“C’mon, Annika. I know you miss him too.”
“I don’t have time to miss him.”
Mama clucks her tongue.
Cooper smirks.
And the bells jingle on the door as a dude with a huge camera pushes inside. “Coffee. I need—whoa.” His sleepy eyes flare wide. “You’re Cooper Rock,” he says, and he lifts the camera and starts snapping pictures.
“What in the—hey! Hey! Get out.” I step out from behind the counter as the camera flashes and the guy starts firing questions.
“What are you doing here, Cooper? Is this where you always get donuts and coffee? Can you turn to the left so I can get those awesome donuts behind you? Why are you so far from Copper Valley? Is Darren Greene with you?”
“Out!” I order.
Cooper’s smile has vanished, and he’s doing his best to avoid the guy getting a picture of his face.
“Mama, call the sheriff,” I call over my shoulder.
“Solid gold,” the photographer is gushing. “Solid fucking gold.”
“That a baseball player would be in a bakery? Get out before I have to show you my combatives training. Shoo. Shoo.”
He backs off as Cooper finally dives behind the bakery counter.
“Jeez. Know where I’m not getting my coffee,” he grumbles. “You seen her? Honey Wellington? The heiress who bought the winery? Can’t miss that blond hair. She dating any—ow, ow, OW!”
“Oh, excuse me, I’m sorry, I guess my foot wasn’t watching where it was going.”
“Let go of my ear!”
“Quit trespassing in my bakery!”
“I could sue you for harassment.”
I toss him out the door and lock it behind him, standing there glaring until he moves on, but not until after he’s snapped so many pictures I have dots in my vision.
“What the hell was that?” I bark at Cooper.
He doesn’t answer.
But Bailey does.
“Oh em gee, Annika! We have paparazzi in town,” she squeals. “Sarcasm is going to be famous! And you’re going to be the cranky bakery lady with resting bitch face in the background, but we’ll be famous!”
“Who’s Honey Wellington?” I ask.
My head hurts. My heart hurts. My past hurts.
Swear it does. All of my memories. They hurt.
“She’s that heiress who bought Sarcasm Cellars,” Bailey answers. “You know? The one Liliana talked about all night—oh. Right. You passed out drunk in the charcoal face mask and missed that part. Anyway. Honey, the heiress, is in town now and apparently the paparazzi are here to chase her.”
I sigh and pull out my phone to send Liliana a warning text as all of the details about the winery and its owner come filtering back into my brain.
I also politely inquire if we’ll be seeing paparazzi every morning.
“Where did Cooper go?” I ask as I put my phone away.
“Out the kitchen door,” Bailey replies. “I squirted the back of his shirt with some of the whipped cream from the banana pudding though. He didn’t notice. It’ll get smashed all over his seat and stink up his car for weeks.”
“Bailey,” Mama and I sigh together.
She grins. “I only get to be a teenager once. Don’t ruin it for me. Also, I can’t wait to hear what happens when pictures of him in our bakery make their way to Shipwreck. Good thing I have our next brilliant idea. You ready for this? Pirate Unicorn Fingers. Like ladyfingers, but decorated like unicorn pirates with candy corn horns. And better tasting. Boom. And you’re welcome.”
I rub my temples again, and realize I’m smearing donut icing all over my face in the process.
Something has to change. I have enough on my plate with Mama and Bailey and the bakery, and even though I have everything color-coded in both my planner and on the calendars hanging on the walls in both the Duh-Nuts kitchen and also in the kitchen at Mama’s house, I’m running out of colors to keep my life straight.
I can’t keep up a passive-aggressive war of baked goods with Grady amidst paparazzi crawling through Sarcasm too.
At least, not for long.
Three more days, I tell myself.
In three more days, if I still feel horrible and can’t stop thinking about Grady, and if his family keeps stopping by, and if Mama and Bailey keep bringing him up, then I’ll find some way to meet him on his turf to talk.
Even if it’s just to agree that we’re both moving on politely with no more of this ridiculous bakery war stuff going on.
But maybe he’ll come to me again first.
Three more days.
Yeah. That sounds like an excellent plan.
And with that issue pushed back on my to-do list and highlighted on my calendar for not today, I go unlock the door again for Roger, who’s peering in now after the paparazzi guy headed down the street for the diner.
Another day, another new normal.
I’ve got this.
I think.
14
Grady
I’m in the middle of making sugar cookies Tuesday morning when my phone blows up.
Sixty million people all at once need me to know that Cooper’s in the gossip section.
Visiting Duh-Nuts.
I don’t care that it’s six AM. I pick up the phone and I call him.
“Don’t go being an asshole,” he says by way of greeting.
I squeeze my eyes shut and sigh. I have a mound of bad donut dough sitting on one corner of my worktable, because either I don’t have enough love in my life to perfect crème brûlée macaron donuts, or it was a bad idea.
Just like practically everything else I’ve done in the last week has been a bad idea.
“How’s Annika?” I ask Cooper.
“The better question is, who invited the paparazzi out to the boonies? There goes my privacy. Oh. Wait. You just pulled your head out of your ass. Huh. And there goes my speech. Want to hear it anyway?”
“No.”
“Bro. You know I don’t take bad pictures, but if I did, that one of me pointing to those galaxy donuts would be a bad picture. I made having one eyelid half-closed and my lips crooked look good, but you know if I’d done it on purpose to help the donuts, I would’ve been canoodling the pastries with my eyes.”
“I said I didn’t want to hear your speech,” I tell him.
“I know, I know. What was I doing in Duh-Nuts anyway? Am I right? So here’s the thing. I was gonna buy ’em out of banana pudding so Tillie Jean could analyze it and make sure hers was still better, no matter what that asshole from Sarcasm wrote in the Blue Lagoon County Gazette about the Duh-Nuts banana pudding taking Tillie Jean’s ribbon at the fair this fall.”
“Cooper. Shut up. How the fuck is Annika?”
“Your former best friend Annika who’s dealing with a shit-ton of shit in her life right now?”
Fuck.
Fuck.
The back door bangs open, and I’ve never been so aggravated to see Georgia walking in phone-first. “Gotta go. Time to work. Text me, you pain in the ass.”
I hang up, toss my phone back in my apron pocket, and spread my hands on the metal worktable, nodding to Georgia’s phone screen. “Let me guess. They made pirate ship cupcakes.”
It’s what she’s most likely to tell me, right?
Those Sarcasm assholes are at it again. Taunting us on social media.
Hell, I started it.
“You ever heard of Virginia Blue Magazine?” Georgia asks.
“Yeah. My Nana gets that.”
She smiles so big that my pirate hat sugar cookies get suspicious and shrink in fear. I silently promise the cookies I’ll treat them right and smother them in vanilla icing in mere minutes, and they seem to breathe a sigh of relief.
“They’re interested in lifestyle pieces about friendly rivalries,” Georgia announces. “Like, oh, say, a rivalry between two bakeries in towns that have hated each other forever?”
Before I can point out that friendly is the opposite of hated each other forever, the back door bangs open again and Tillie Jean marches in. “Grady. Grady. Look what I found in Nana’s Virginia Blue Magazine. Look.”
So this is what I’ve become.
The guy who would exploit an old friendship to get a little extra publicity for my bakery.
Which has been doing better and better every day since I upped my social media game to compete with Bailey.
It’s the extra attention. The extra pressure.
Because of having a bakery war.
Of course people are coming in more.
They want to help me win.
That’s what you do in Shipwreck.
Plus, I’m trying harder.
Because I can’t handle the fact that the woman I’ve put on a pedestal for the last fourteen years is back, and she doesn’t want me any more today than she did a decade ago.
Fuck.
Why would she?
I’ve been an ass and a half.
And my reward is my bottom line creeping further and further into the black while guilt keeps me from hitting the buy button on a four-pack of bubble waffle makers and a soft serve ice cream machine that would undoubtedly push me even further into the black, because it wasn’t my idea.
“Do you two have anything better to do at this hour of the day than barge in here with more plans for bakery wars?”
They look at each other.
Then back to me.
“No,” they say in unison.
I scrub a hand over my face and realize I haven’t shaved in over a week. Then I wonder if I’ve showered.
“Aw, you’re making my favorite pirate hat cookies. I love it.” Tillie Jean hooks an arm around my neck and goes up on tiptoe to kiss my cheek, then wrinkles her nose. “Ugh, that smell. You been sleeping with Sue again? You know what they say about sleeping with goats.”
I blink at her.
She grins. “It makes your package shrink.”
I shake her off. “You got these?” I ask Georgia with a nod to the cookies.
She heads to the sink. “Hmm, decorate cookies by myself, or stand next to a stinky master baker who’s been rolling in goat poop. What a hard decision. Where you going?”
I shake my head, because I don’t know. I just know that somewhere in the last two weeks, I’ve quit smooth-talking my pastries, and I’ve quit baking for the love of it.
And I need to get that back.
I need to make a profit because I’m good, not because I’m being an ass.
“You’re in charge today,” I tell her. “Don’t burn the place down.”
Or do.
Fuck.
This morning, I don’t care.
15
Annika
I don’t have bike ride around the lagoon on my planner, but I haven’t exercised since I got home. Mama’s with the mobility specialist at home for the next two hours. Bailey’s with her, and Roger’s stopping by to check on them later this afternoon.
If I don’t get away from the bakery, I’m going to start throwing things.
And I don’t know why.
Okay, fine, I know why.
But when it’s there are too many emotions that I’m not dealing with well, I don’t like to admit it, because which emotion do you start with?
The sadness?
The anger?
The disappointment?
The fear?
The crushing weight of expectations pressing harder and harder every day, because while Mama is re-learning her way around home, around the kitchen, and around the bakery, she’ll never be able to decorate intricate cookies or fry donuts, and I can’t fix that.
So I decide that the first emotion I’m going to deal with is the run away from it all emotion.
I close the shop early—which is fine, since we’re mostly sold out of everything today anyway—and head home. There’s a small storage shed at the corner of Mama’s small lot, which is where I find my old bicycle.
An hour and a trip to the hardware store later, she’s back in tip-top shape, though her purple sparkle paint job has dulled over the years. But her gears work and are greased up, the tires are replaced, and I have a shiny new helmet, so I hop on, tuck my phone into my pocket, and hit the state road that leads out of town and into the preserve between Sarcasm and Shipwreck.
There are other little towns dotting the mountains too, but none of them get involved in this stupid fight that’s been going on supposedly since the day “Thorny Rock, The Pirate” founded Shipwreck and his second cousin twice removed, Walter Bombeck, walked into whatever state department is responsible for naming towns and reported that his town was called, “Your mom,” to which the state guy supposedly replied, “Seriously?” and good ol’ Walter responded with, “No, that’s Sarcasm.”
