I Hate, I Bake, and I Don’t Date! by Alina Jacobs
65
Beck
“Where the hell are you?”
“I’m at work, Liam,” I said irritably into the phone.
I was at work, but I was barely working. I kept hoping Tess would email me or call me. I kept staring at the empty desk outside of my door, the place where she was supposed to sit. Her friend Maeve wasn’t even at work today, and I couldn’t beg her to please have Tess call me.
I had my big gesture all planned. Belle had confirmed the payment this morning. I was going to pick up the cake in a little bit, and I was shopping online for flowers. And now my brother was interrupting me in my very important endeavor.
“You’re supposed to babysit,” Liam prodded.
“Yeah,” Mike added from the background.
“Aren’t the girls at work?” I asked them. “And you never told me anything about babysitting.”
“We are entitled to one day of babysitting a week,” Mike reminded me. “It’s almost the end of the week, and we scheduled all our dates for tonight. Use it or lose it!”
“I’m busy,” I growled.
“A deal is a deal,” my brother said stubbornly.
Fuck.
I quickly bought four dozen roses then packed my laptop and headed downstairs.
“I was just about to call you. Your cake is done,” Holly said, waving me over. A white box tied with a pink bow was sitting on the counter. “Do you want to see it?”
“Sorry,” I said, grabbing it. “I have to run.”
I could hearmy siblings as soon as I stepped off the elevator into the private lobby to my condo. I steeled myself. I had been hoping to carefully plan my big, grand apology to Tess. But it seemed I would be babysitting.
“Can we have a mashed potato bar?”
I set the cake in the freezer and my bag on the counter.
“Sure, I guess?”
“Tess said we were going to have a big mashed potato party,” Enola informed me.
“That’s fine,” I said absently. How hard could mashed potatoes be? They came out of a box, right?
“Kiki doesn’t like parsley,” Liam said, keys jingling as he headed to the front door. “So if you’re doing a mashed potato bar, watch out for cross contamination.”
“If you want to micromanage,” I said, “you can stay here and babysit.”
Walker had pulled up a video on the TV of the sixties song “Mashed Potato Time,” and the girls were giggling and dancing with him to it.
“No!” Liam said, jumping into the fray. “You have to put your back into it.”
I checked on the internet for how to make a mashed potato bar. It couldn’t be that intense—a little cheese, some sour cream, done.
Except the page that I pulled up listed thirty different toppings plus three different kinds of mashed potatoes, and they insisted that if you were making it for kids that you reuse the potato skins and sprinkle it with cheddar cheese and bacon and put them under the broiler and make them kid friendly, because that was where all the nutrients were, and you sucked as a parent if you didn’t feed your kids the potato skins. Also, one blogger included broccoli on her mashed potato bar, but it wasn’t raw; it was very carefully roasted. And speaking of roasting things, another food blogger served roast beef with hers because protein was important, and apparently, I should have started cooking the meat last night.
“What about pizza?” I offered helplessly.
“Mashed potatoes! Jeez, dude.” Mike scoffed. “Get with the program.”
“I want gravy on mine,” Carl said.
“I thought you had a date?”
“It’s not ‘til seven,” he said, swinging one of our sisters around as she shrieked.
Several loud knocks sounded on the door. I opened it to see Greg standing there, annoyed.
“Well, well, well,” Greg said. “If it isn’t the consequences of your own actions.”
“Here to gloat?”
“Hardly. I don’t stoop that low.” He adjusted his cuff link. “Make sure you serve salad with the mashed potato bar.”
“You can’t take advantage of the deal,” I argued as the two toddlers raced inside my condo.
Greg stared at me coldly. “How about the deal is I don’t destroy you after you tried to stab me in the back?”
Fuck.
Greg brushed past me, carrying the girls’ things.
I pinched the bridge of my nose. I still needed to pick up the keys for the condo from Belle and give it a once-over. Then I needed to arrange the cake, flowers, and painting for my grand gesture. But I had a whole pack of children in my condo now. Plus my brothers, who, despite all their big talk about dates and free evenings, had fully settled in with our sisters.
Annie appeared next to me.
“Grandma is here,” she said brightly.
“What the—”
“She’s buying a condo!”
“After everything she and her family did to us? Absolutely not!”
