Americanos, Apple Pies, And Art Thieves

I watched as Sammy’s face contorted into a grimace, her lips stretching into an exaggerated frown and her eyes squinching up like she was trying not to cry. She stuck out her tongue and smacked her lips a couple of times.

“No,” she said, shaking her head vigorously as she put down the cookie in her hand.

“That bad?”

She took a big gulp of water from her bottle and swished it around before swallowing it and answering me. “Yes.”

I picked up another one of the cookies from the plate. “Really? When I tried them, I didn’t think—” I paused to take a bite then grabbed a napkin to spit the dry crumbs out.

Sammy handed me my water.

It took a couple of swish-and-swallows, but I managed to get the awful taste out of my mouth. “They did not taste like that when I tried them fresh out of the oven.”

“I would hope not.”

“Okay, so, no on the spicy pumpkin flaxseed branola cookies.” I dumped the plate into the trash on top of the not-quite-as-awful pumpkin-filled spice scones. At least those hadn’t felt like I was eating sand.

“With a name like that, did you really think they sounded good?”

I shrugged. “They sounded healthy.”

“So no.”

“They weren’t bad when they were still warm.”

“But they weren’t good either.” Sammy’s big blue eyes looked at me, daring me to say that the cookies had tasted great hot.

“They didn’t taste like I was licking dirt.”

“Close enough. What’s next?”

We were in the back room of Antonia’s Italian Café, the coffee shop in Cape Bay, Massachusetts, that my family had owned for three generations now. Sammy and I had cleared the desk of everything that usually covered it (the computer, several stacks of paper, two boxes of napkins, a vacuum-sealed bag of Sumatran coffee beans, and one suspiciously furry-looking cupcake wrapper of unknown age), spread out an assortment of fall—and pumpkin—themed potential menu items, and embarked on a taste test that so far had ended up with decidedly mixed results.

Along with the spicy pumpkin flaxseed branola cookies and the pumpkin-filled spice scones, the cinnamon cupcakes with pumpkin filling and the pumpkin shortbread cookies had been failures. They, at least, had avoided the trash can.

Sammy and I had declared them edible but not menu-worthy and set them aside to be taken home to our eat-anything boyfriends. Well, to my eat-anything boyfriend and to Sammy’s eat-anything nonboyfriend. She still wouldn’t admit that she and Ryan were dating, even though they spent almost every evening together and made googly eyes at each other every time they were in the same room.

We’d had a few successes in our testing too, fortunately. Sammy ate her whole slice of pumpkin bread and then went back for another. The apple-cinnamon muffins made with locally grown apples and fair-trade cinnamon were to die for. And the pumpkin spice panettone was utterly mouthwatering. All we had to do now was settle on the recipe for the all-important pumpkin spice latte.

Compared to the rest of the world, we were behind in adding pumpkin-spice-everything to our menu for the fall. It was my first year running the café, and it hadn’t even crossed my mind until Sammy brought it up a few days after I’d gotten home from my Italian vacation.

She’d been digging through one of the boxes in our latest supply shipment when she looked at me sitting over at the desk doing the books.

“When’s the pumpkin spice syrup coming in?” she’d asked. “I thought for sure it would have come in while you were gone, but it hasn’t yet. It’s not backordered, is it?”

I froze at the computer and hoped Sammy wouldn’t notice that I hadn’t answered her.

No such luck. “Fran?”

“Um.”

I turned around slowly. “Um… I forgot?”

“Oh, my gosh, you’re joking, right?” Her big blue eyes looked at me desperately.

“Um…”

She collapsed half into the box. “You’re kidding me. You forgot the pumpkin spice syrup? People have been asking for pumpkin spice lattes for weeks now, and I just keep telling them it will be here any day!”

“Why didn’t you tell me?” I asked, my voice getting a little high.

“I thought you knew!” Her voice got even higher.

“I had no idea!”

“Have you placed our next order yet? Can you add the pumpkin spice syrup on there?”

“I placed it yesterday afternoon. It’s already shipped.”

“You’re killing me, Fran. Killing me!”

That conversation had led directly to our taste test. Sammy reminded me that we typically added not just pumpkin spice lattes to our menu but also an assortment of fall-themed baked goods. I ordered the pumpkin spice syrup and spent several hours online looking up the recipes we’d just taste-tested as well as a few more that had been rejected before they made it out of my kitchen.

Now there was just one thing left to sample.

“I actually have a couple of different pumpkin spice latte recipes for us to try,” I said tentatively. I hadn’t told her that I was looking at different recipes, but when I came across the first one online, I felt like I had to give it a chance. And one of the recipes was unbelievably delicious. But I needed Sammy’s opinion.

“Really?” she asked.

I nodded quickly. “Let me run out front and make them, and then you can try them.”

“Okay.”

I hopped up out of my chair, grabbed a container from the refrigerator, and hurried out front to make the drinks. A few minutes later, I was back in the storage room, drinks in hand. I put them all down on the table in front of Sammy.

“Which one should I try first?” she asked, looking at each of the three cups in turn.

“This one.” I pointed to the one on the far left.

She picked it up and sipped it. “Tastes like a pumpkin spice latte.”

I nodded. It was made with our usual recipe—pumpkin spice syrup bought from our distributor and mixed into a latte—so her reaction was what I expected.

“Next one?”

I nodded again.

Sammy tasted it. “Ooh, that’s good!” She took another sip. “What’s different?”

“I made the syrup myself.”

“It’s tasty. I like it.” She looked suspiciously at the third cup without letting go of the second. “What’s different about that one?”

“Try it.”

She gave me a skeptical look. “Is this the weird one? The spicy branola latte? Or the punkinnamon cappuccino?”

“Punkinnamon?” I asked.

“Punkinnamon,” she repeated. “Like branola. Except pumpkin and cinnamon.”

“Oh!” I laughed. “Is that a thing, or did you just make it up?”

“Just made it up.” She smiled her patented brilliant Sammy smile at me. “It sounds real though, doesn’t it?”

“Yeah, actually.” I laughed again.

Sammy took another sip from the second cup. She didn’t look interested in trying number three.

“So, are you going to try the last one?” I asked.

She wrinkled her nose. “Do I have to?”

“But?” she asked, squinting in my direction.

“But if you don’t try it, I might have to put it on the menu anyway and tell everybody that it’s Sammy’s secret recipe.”

Now she glared. “Okay, I’ll try it.” She put down the second cup. “But is it weird? Should I be prepared to rinse my mouth out?” She glanced around the table for her water bottle. “I don’t want that branola lingering longer than it has to.”

“It’s not weird,” I said. “It’s just another pumpkin spice recipe. And I don’t think you could mix branola into a drink anyway. It’s too… gritty.”

Sammy made a face and moved her mouth like she was reliving the unpleasant taste of the failed cookies.

“Just try it. I promise it’s not awful—”

Sammy picked up the third cup and brought it to her lips.

“—I hope.” I said it late enough that she already had the cup tipped back and the coffee spilling into her mouth. I had tasted the drink right before I brought it to her, so I knew it was good. In my opinion anyway. There was always a chance that Sammy could completely disagree.

For a second, I was afraid she was going to spit the latte at me, just reflexively at my suggestion that I wasn’t one hundred percent sure of its deliciousness. Fortunately, she didn’t. Instead, her eyes got even wider than usual. She swallowed and immediately took another sip.

“That’s amazing,” she said after swallowing.

I couldn’t help but break into a grin. The third one was the one I’d put real effort into—probably more than I really should have. But once I got started tweaking the recipe, I couldn’t stop myself until it was perfect. And it was perfect.

“What—?” Sammy started.

“Completely from scratch,” I said, anticipating her question. “And with real pumpkin.”

“Seriously? It has pumpkin in it?” She took another sip.

I nodded. I was beaming. “Most of the time, a pumpkin spice latte is just the spices you use in pumpkin pie. Well, it’s that or syrup flavored like that. But I found this recipe that called for actual pumpkin. And then I found one for the pumpkin pie spice blend. So I realized I could just make it completely from scratch. You just mix the spices and toast them a little and then add the pumpkin and—” I realized I was chattering and probably going into far more detail than Sammy needed or wanted. “And I may have gotten a little carried away.”

“You should get carried away more often. This is really great.” She swallowed down some more.

“So, do you think people would mind if we switched over to this?”

“Are you kidding?” she asked, emptying the cup. I’d only filled it partway, but still—she’d taken it down in record time. “I think people would mind if they found out we kept serving them the regular stuff when we could have been giving them this.”

I could barely contain myself, I was so excited. I’d spent so much time tweaking the spice blend and getting the proportions just right that I would have been incredibly disappointed if she didn’t like it or if she thought it wasn’t any better than the syrup we bought. The feeling more than made up for the cookies that hadn’t tasted good.

“So when can we start selling this stuff?”

I surveyed the table. There wasn’t enough there to sell—it would be gone as soon as we put it out.

“Tomorrow?” she asked hopefully.

I cringed. Sammy’s giggle told me that my reaction didn’t surprise her.

“Let me guess,” she said. “It’s not that you can’t cook it all tonight, it’s that you don’t want to have to have it here first thing in the morning.”

She wasn’t wrong. It would take a few hours of hard work in the kitchen, but I could have plenty of each new menu item ready for the morning. Staying up late enough to prepare everything wasn’t the problem. Getting up in time to bring it in was. I was not a morning person. Especially not café-early morning. I could stay up half the night without trying, but being at the café when it opened was painful, especially this time of year when the sun didn’t come up until well after we’d opened. I let Sammy be in charge of opening up each day, and I handled closing. “You know me too well.”

“You’re just a little predictable sometimes is all.”

As much as I would have enjoyed lingering and just chatting with Sammy, I knew we had to get back to work. “I should have enough of the pumpkin spice mix to get us through the day if you want to go ahead and switch to that one,” I said, standing up from the table.

“Yes!”

I had to laugh at her enthusiasm. I was glad that she liked the new recipe so much though. “Okay, well, let’s get this stuff cleaned up, and I can show you and the girls how to make it.”

“Hey, do you want to take the leftovers and give them out as free samples of the new menu items?”

“That’s a really good idea. Create demand from our customers. I like it.”

I hadn’t made much of each recipe, so we worked on cutting up the muffins, bread, and panettone into bite-sized pieces, stabbed them with toothpicks, then arranged them onto plates. I carried them out into the front of the café and explained what they were to Becky and Amanda while Sammy worked on getting the desk set back up

“Have you ever heard of an artist named Cliffton? Louie or Lewis? L-O-U-I-S,” Sammy asked when I came back into the stock room.

“It’s Louie. The French pronunciation. Why?”

“Just curious.” She arranged some papers in a stack and put them on the desk. “Is he famous?”

I thought for a moment. “Yeah, pretty famous. I mean, he’s art-world famous. Not like Monet or Picasso or anybody like that, but some of his work’s in the Museum of Modern Art back in New York. They probably have some at the Institute of Contemporary Art up in Boston too. I think one of his pieces went for a couple million at one of the auction houses last year.”

“Wow. He’s a painter?”

“Mm-hmm.” I fiddled with the placement of the computer monitor on the desk.

“What kind of painter?”

I looked up at Sammy curiously. “Why are you so interested in Louis Cliffton?”

She shrugged. “I just heard his name and was wondering about him. What kind of art he does and all. I figured you would know.” She went back to moving things around on the desk.

I stared at her. There was something she wasn’t telling me. I knew she was a pretty good artist, but I didn’t think it was anything she’d considered seriously. I tried to think of what I knew about Cliffton, but I couldn’t come up with much. My old public relations firm back in New York had been in the running to represent him a few years earlier. I’d had his résumé memorized at the time, but now I couldn’t even remember where he’d gone to school. “He’s an abstract expressionist.”

“That’s like Jackson Pollock, right?”

“Yes.” I watched Sammy’s face in case it gave anything away. Maybe Sammy was thinking about going to art school? I didn’t think abstract expressionism was her style, but maybe he was doing a residency at a school she was looking at.

“Why are you looking at me like that?” she asked.

“I was just trying to figure out why you’re so interested in him.”

“So interested?” She laughed. “I just asked a couple of questions!”

I thought for a second about whether I should really say the next thing I wanted to. Ultimately, it wouldn’t hurt anything if I was wrong, and if I was right, at least it would be out in the open. “Sammy, are you thinking about going to art school?”

“What?” She laughed again. “No! Why would you think that?”

“I don’t know. I guess it just seemed weird that you would pull Cliffton’s name out of nowhere and ask me about him.”

“Well, I didn’t exactly pull it out of nowhere. He’s having a show in Cape Bay.”