Coffee, Cream Pies, And Crimes

“Smile, Fran!”

I looked up from watching my newest hire pull a shot of espresso to see Sammy Eriksen, my right-hand woman and probably the right half of my brain, holding her cell phone in my face. My first reaction was to make a face and pull back, which made Sammy make her own face.

“I can’t use that.” To her credit, Sammy didn’t look annoyed with me for ruining her video yet again. Then again, Sammy only looked truly irritated in the rarest of circumstances. She smiled. “We’ll try again.”

“Fran?”

I turned to the teenager standing next to me and looking confused. She was holding an espresso cup in one hand and a milk-steaming wand in the other. The wand hovered over the espresso cup. Was she about to steam the coffee?

“Oh, nope!” I took the espresso cup from her and handed her the milk jug instead.

She smiled as the pieces clicked together, and she began steaming the right component of the latte.

I had recently hired a handful of new employees. I had Sammy and other experienced workers help me find competent, responsible part-timers who wanted to work a few hours each week in the Italian café. My family had run it since my grandparents came to Massachusetts from Italy nearly seventy-five years before. I paid well and offered flexible hours, but competition for summer employees was fierce in a beach town like Cape Bay.

For the teenaged crowd, working in a coffee shop a couple blocks from the beach wasn’t one of the “cool” jobs they wanted to take. They tended to gravitate toward lifeguarding if their swimming skills were good enough or jobs directly on our small boardwalk if they weren’t. Meanwhile, the relatively older adults looking for a little supplemental income tended to think we were too close to the beach for their comfort.

Somehow, despite all that, I’d managed to hire four new people to take some of the burden off my small existing crew. Chloe Patel and Daria Shah were high school students who were friends of my existing student employees, Becky and Amanda. Jessica Harris was an elementary school teacher looking for a summer job to earn a little extra cash. And Donna Williams was a friend of my other employee, Rhonda. Like Rhonda, she was a mom of teenagers who was looking for an excuse to get out of the house and a way to earn some spending money. Between them and everyone who had been there before I’d even taken over, I felt like we had a strong team to get through the busy tourist season.

Now that we were staffed up, Sammy had decided that it was time to step up our social media presence. She was filming a series of videos, profiling each of us who worked in the café. Despite my objections, she started with me, filming what seemed to be enough footage for a full-length documentary. She’d recorded me baking, fixing drinks, opening the café, closing it, baking at home, chatting with customers, teaching the new employees, and smiling at the camera what felt like a million times.

“You know, when I agreed to this, I thought you were talking about thirty seconds or something.”

Out of the corner of my eye, I watched Chloe frothing the milk. She glanced over at me, and I nodded. She’d come in not knowing the difference between drip coffee and espresso or iced coffee and cold brew (although, to be fair, plenty of people who ordered them didn’t know the difference either), but she had come a long way in her short few days of work. Her progress was slow but steady, and I was happy with that. “Okay, you can pour it now.”

She looked nervous but put down the steaming wand. “Should I make a picture or something?”

“Don’t worry about that yet. Just pour it in for now.” Given how much her hand was shaking, I didn’t think she could pour steadily even if she was ready to take on latte art. Dainty designs poured into the foam of our drinks were a signature of Antonia’s Italian Café—named for my grandmother—but it wasn’t the end of the world if one drink didn’t have one. Besides, this one was for me anyway.

She nodded and bent over the espresso cup to pour in the milk. I stood beside her, watching, and gently touched her arm when there was enough. She stepped back and put the milk pitcher down, sighing as if the weight of the world was suddenly off her shoulders.

I picked up the latte and sipped it as she looked on with big eyes. I smiled. It was perfect.

“Look at me, guys!”

This time, I remembered what Sammy was doing and turned to her with a broad smile on my face.

“How’s she doing, Fran?”

I turned my smile back to Chloe. “She’s doing great! She’s a coffee star in the making!” A delicate blush crept up her tan cheeks. I looked back at Sammy in case she had any other questions.

“That’s perfect!” Sammy beamed at us. “Cut!” She tapped the phone and started fiddling with it.

I leaned over to Chloe. “I’m serious, you know. You’re doing great.”

The blush moved farther up her face. “Thanks.”

“Why don’t you go help Rhonda with the inventory?”

She nodded and went to join Rhonda in the back room.

I took another sip of my latte as Sammy came over to show me her phone. My dark hair on her screen was a little fuzzy from the humidity, and a few strands had slipped out of the chignon I usually kept it in while I was working. My cheeks were flushed from leaning over steaming cups of coffee, and I had a smudge of flour on my forehead.

“Are you sure you want to use this?”

“Yes, absolutely.” Sammy’s blond ponytail bobbed as she nodded enthusiastically.

“At least it’s just for social,” I said. “People will know what to expect when they come in if nothing else.”

Sammy giggled. “You look great! You don’t need hair and makeup for a—” She stopped so suddenly that I looked toward the door to see if a celebrity or something had come in, but there was no one there. “—For a social media video.”

“Are you okay?”

“Of course! Just lost my train of thought for a second! Now, let’s get some footage of you baking and talking about what you like about it.”

“I don’t know—we have customers—”

Sammy cut me off with a gesture around the empty café. It was one of the few times at this time of year that things were quiet. Normally, we spent the lull frantically cleaning up before the next wave of customers came in, but with the additional staff we’d hired, we’d kept up during the rush. I simultaneously wondered why we hadn’t hired more people sooner and wished we hadn’t done so yet so that I had an excuse not to film anything else. I suddenly understood how my clients in my previous life as a New York City celebrity publicist must have felt when I made demand after demand of them.

I had no choice but to give in. “Okay, fine. What do you want me to make?”

Sammy thought for a second. “Cupcakes.”

“Cupcakes?”

“Sure, why not? They’re good, you enjoy making them, and they sell like hotcakes as soon as we put them out.”

My lips twitched with a smile. “Or I could just make hotcakes?”

Sammy rolled her eyes and fought back a giggle. “What are hotcakes, anyway?”

“Pancakes.” I turned around and caught the eye of Jessica, the elementary school teacher. I gestured to her that Sammy and I were going back to the kitchen and for her to keep an eye on the front.

“We should sell pancakes!”

I looked at her out of the corner of my eye. “If you can talk somebody into opening with you and helping out while you stand over a hot grill all morning, you’re welcome to add it to the menu.” I was far from an early bird, so I relied on Sammy to open the café each morning. She liked leaving early in the afternoon and enjoyed her morning regulars, so she didn’t mind it.

“I just might do that!” She grinned at me.

We went into the kitchen behind the main part of the café, and I started gathering ingredients. “What kind?”

Sammy already had her phone up, recording me. “Whatever you feel like.”

“Let’s go with a classic vanilla to start. Then I don’t have to worry too much yet about the kind of filling and icing.”

“How do you decide that?”

“Today, it’s going to be whatever ingredients speak to me.”

Sammy proceeded to record the entire process of baking the cupcakes, asking nearly constant questions. It was the most bizarre baking experience I’d ever had, her phone in my face, her questioning my every move. Little did I know that it would only get weirder.