The Cupcake Queen

Table of Contents

 

 

Also by Heather Hepler

Scrambled Eggs at Midnight
(with Brad Barkley)
Dream Factory
(with Brad Barkley)
Jars of Glass
(with Brad Barkley)

DUTTON CHILDREN’S BOOKS
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Published by the Penguin Group

 

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This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 2009 by Heather Hepler

 

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Published in the United States by Dutton Children’s Books,
an imprint of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
345 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014
www.penguin.com/youngreaders

 

 

 

eISBN : 978-1-101-10904-5

For Harrison, with love

chapter one

T
he fact that I wasn’t sur prised when my mother handed me the sheet pan filled with pink frosted cupcakes is possibly more disturbing than the cupcakes themselves. They’re pink, I mean
pink.
Pink cupcake papers, pink cupcakes, pink frosting, pink sprinkles, and now pink rosebuds. It’s like someone drank a whole bottle of Pepto-Bismol and then threw up in six dozen clumps. I can’t even laugh about it with anyone, because anyone who would think this is as funny as I do is three hundred miles away. And maybe three hundred miles doesn’t seem like much, but when you still have two and a half years before you can drive—and that’s only if my mother let’s me have time off from decorating cupcakes to get my license—three hundred miles might as well be three million. All I know is I get to spend the next hour putting exactly fourteen miniature pink sugar rosebuds on each of six dozen cupcakes (that’s 1,008 rosebuds in case you’re counting, and I am) while everyone I know who might think this is as crazy as I do is three billion miles away doing exactly what I wish I were doing right now.
Anything other than this.

“How’s it going?” Gram asks, pushing through the swinging door into the kitchen. I shrug, something I’ve gotten really good at. She pulls open one of the big refrigerator doors and sticks most of her upper body inside. I can hear her talking, but the oven fans and whir of the mixer muffle her words.

“What did you say?” I ask when she closes the refrigerator.

“I said your beach cupcakes are a big hit.”

I nod and keep placing the tiny rosebuds on the cupcakes, slowly spinning the turntable as I go to make sure they’re even. I know my mother will check. Gram puts a tray of vanilla cupcakes on the counter beside me. She lifts one. “These are my favorite,” she says, holding up a blue-frosted cupcake with a tiny sailboat on top. “Of course the kids like the crabs—they have more icing.” She hums as she takes the tray of cupcakes through the door to the front of the bakery. I sigh and use my tweezers to pick up another rosebud and place it on a cupcake.

Cupcake.

Six months ago, if someone had said the word
cupcake
, it probably wouldn’t have even registered. I mean, sure, who doesn’t like them? But a whole bakery devoted just to cupcakes? I asked my mother that when she told me. “Nothing else?” She just laughed, like it was the funniest thing I’d said all day. I didn’t quite believe it until I saw the man putting the final touches on the lettering on the window: THE CUPCAKE QUEEN.

“Penny.” I jump at the sound of my name and accidentally jab the cupcake with the tweezers, leaving a hole. My mother sighs behind me. “You’re off in dreamland again,” she says. Not true. More like nightmareland. She whisks the mutilated cupcake off the turntable and drops it into the trash, replacing it with a fresh one. “Here,” she says, holding out her hand for the tweezers. I watch as she expertly places fourteen tiny rosebuds all over the top of the cupcake before trading it for another. “You just need to focus,” she says, completing three more in the time it would have taken me to do one. She hands the tweezers back to me.
Focus.
My mother is quite possibly the most focused person I know. I feel her focusing on my hands as I struggle to pick up another rosebud with my tweezers. It slips and I end up breaking it. The buzz of her cell phone saves me from another lecture on the importance of attention to details.

She listens for a while after saying hello. “Oh no, it’s okay. We’ll manage,” she says finally, looking at the clock above my head. “Just feel better.” She taps her free fingers against the counter. “Just let me know.” She flips her phone shut with a click. “Great,” she says, her voice flat.

Gram pushes back through the door with another empty tray. “Lizzie, those summer cupcakes are going like hotcakes.” Ever since we moved from Manhattan, population 1.6 million, to Hog’s Hollow, population 5,134, my mother has been Lizzie. In New York, people called her Elizabeth or Ms. Lane.

“That was Jeannie,” my mother says, holding up her cell phone. “She’s sick.” My mother sighs again. Probably her tenth sigh in the last hour. “There is no way I can do the setup by myself. I mean, there are the flowers and the china and the linens . . .”

“Don’t forget the cupcakes,” Gram says. I have to duck my head so that my mother doesn’t see me smile.

“Yes, Mother,” she says, “the cupcakes.”

That’s one thing I do like about Hog’s Hollow: my grandmother. She’s the only person I know who isn’t afraid of my mother. Even my father’s afraid of my mom.

“I just can’t do it all alone. Jeannie goes back to college in less than a week.” She stares at the phone, as if willing Jeannie to call again to say that she’s fine, she’ll be right in.

“Take Penny,” Gram says, pulling another sheet pan of cupcakes from the refrigerator.

“What?” we both say. My mother looks over at me in time to see me break another sugar rosebud.

“I don’t think she—” my mother begins.

“I don’t think I—” I say.

“You’ll be fine,” Gram says, pushing the door to the front open with her hip. She flashes me a grin before it swings shut, trapping me in the kitchen with my mother.

“You’ll be fine,” my mother tells me. I can’t tell whether she’s saying this to herself or me. After loading the van with cupcakes, extra sugar rosebuds, four huge bouquets of flowers in various shades of (yep, you guessed it) pink, a stack of white tablecloths, and several totes of rented plates and silverware and glasses, my mother got to work on me. First I had to endure
the scrutiny.
I should be used to it by now, but I never am. Let me paint the scene. Me: black jeans, black Chucks, black T-shirt. Mousy-brown hair pulled into a low ponytail. Burt’s Bees on my lips. Blue mascara on my eyelashes.
I know
, but I read in
Cosmo
that it’s supposed to make your eyes look more dramatic, and I can use all the help I can get. The problem is not so much me, but my mother. She’s a firm believer in looking pulled together at all times, and it seems I’m the opposite of that. Maybe I’m pulled apart. So, there I am, a vision in black with flour streaks on my jeans (and probably my face) and my mother is tilting her head at me, trying to see if I make the cut to go to the country club. And I see her thinking no, but then realizing that she has no choice. It’s either take me with her where she can keep an eye on me, or take Gram and leave me to run the bakery
alone.
And, then there’s another sigh. “Let’s see what I can do,” she says, walking to the back office, where she keeps her purse.

Fast-forward ten minutes and I’m sitting in the passenger seat of the van with what she could do all over me. New ponytail. Higher up, like a cheerleader’s. Clean T-shirt—white, not black. A scrub at my eyes dislodged the blue mascara and a swipe of lipstick at my mouth makes it look like I’ve been sucking on a cherry Popsicle all afternoon.

“Don’t rub at your lips,” my mother says, and I lower my hand into my lap. “This is a great opportunity for you.” She steers across the road and into the parking lot of the Hog’s Hollow Country Club. “There’ll be a lot of girls there your age.”

I stare at the side of her face, and she looks over at me. Seeing my expression, she laughs. “Penny,” she says, turning into a parking space at the side of the building marked DELIVERIES. “Don’t tell me you didn’t know.” She looks at me again and can tell I didn’t know. “Fourteen rosebuds, fourteen years.”