Muffin to Hide Chapter 2
What kind of muffin are you going to make?” Terry asked.
“I don’t know, that’s what we need to work out. We need to create something truly special. He’ll take some of the other varieties, too; he always explores your range, but we need something that is… new, different, and special.” Erin looked at Vic. “What do you think?”
Vic nodded, pursing her lips. “We should probably look over what he has liked at other restaurants and bakeries. Get a feel for what he likes or dislikes. Some people like a lot of rich sauces or rare ingredients, and some really like simplicity and making sure you have a solid grasp of the basics.”
“Good,” Erin nodded. “That will give us a good place to start. I’ve heard he also has allergies, so we’ll need to get a list of what he can’t eat. We want to have lots of options available to him. It wouldn’t do to have a specialty bakery where he can’t eat anything.”
“It must be hard for him to be a food critic if he has multiple allergies. It can be really hard for some people to find anything they can safely eat.”
Vic had learned all about how complicated it could be working with Erin at Auntie Clem’s Bakery. People who needed to eat a gluten-free diet due to celiac disease often had other food allergies as well, and Vic knew of a few customers who came to Auntie Clem’s—some from quite a distance—because they knew that Erin would work with them to find or create something they would be able to eat.
The Fosters were among their favorite customers in town. The oldest child had celiac disease and was very sensitive to any traces of gluten, and they were still trying to sort out all of the sensitivities of the youngest Foster child, Allan, to figure out what he could eat without digestive distress.
“I guess it would give him a chance to test out the service level of the restaurant, too,” Erin suggested. “He can get a feeling for how they treat people with allergies or special needs, whether they have the right protocols in place to protect people who have allergies. Or else if they are sloppy and act like they don’t want to deal with a customer who is particularly demanding.”
Vic nodded. “I’ll do some internet research and start pulling together a dossier. We’ll get it all pinned down so we have plenty of safe choices for him.”
Terry nodded at the two women and headed back to the living room as the commercial break ended and his game started up again.
“He shore likes his football,” Vic drawled, drawing the word out.
“Is that what he’s watching? I wasn’t even paying any attention.”
Vic laughed. “Growing up with so many boys, there was no escaping the almighty pigskin in the Jackson family. And I was right in there with the rest of them. My poor ma!”
Vic was transgender and had grown up as one of the brothers in the Jackson family before running away at seventeen to live as Victoria instead of James. Even knowing Vic as well as she did, Erin had a hard time remembering that the pretty young blond had once been a rough-and-tumble, shotgun-toting farm boy in the Jackson clan, one of the notorious organized crime organizations in the area. Vic had certainly transformed her life in the short time she had been living in Bald Eagle Falls.
“Did you want to go check the score?” Erin offered.
“I’m fine!” Vic assured her. “I’ll watch the highlights with Willie later.”
Erin nodded and glanced across the backyard toward the loft apartment over her garage, where she assumed Willie was sleeping or doing computer work. Willie still had his own house but hadn’t been there much lately. Since he had started chelation protocol to reverse heavy metal poisoning, he had been in Vic’s apartment most of the time, too tired and ornery to see to his own meals and other needs. Willie had always been totally independent, and none of them had expected the chelation to affect him as much as it had.
The doctors had suggested he would be dealing with “flu-like symptoms.” But Erin felt like it was more like going through chemotherapy. He was constantly exhausted and nauseated, along with a whole host of other symptoms, not the least of which was “irritability.” Vic was a saint for putting up with his whining, demands, and moodiness.
“How is he doing?”
“Well, William Andrews ain’t the best patient in the world. But he does try my patience.”
Erin chuckled. “I’m sure he does.”
Vic looked at the clock on the wall. “He should be good for a while yet. Let’s spend a few more minutes on the muffins and Mr. Montgomery before he wakes up from his nap.”
“Have they said how long it will be before Willie is done with the chelation and can return to normal?”
“They just say he’s progressing, still clearing heavy metals from his system, and sooner or later…” Vic sighed and held her hands up in a gesture of surrender. “Sometime…”
Erin grunted. Wasn’t that the way it always worked? The doctors had a prescribed protocol, but how long it would take and what the side effects would be were far less predictable than they would have liked.
“So this Montgomery,” Vic insisted on turning the conversation back to the critic, “I’ve seen the guy on TV. He’s tough. You sure you want him coming to Auntie Clem’s?”
“Well, it isn’t like I can tell him not to! I didn’t arrange for him to come and can’t exactly turn customers away. If I told him I wasn’t interested in a review, he’d just give me a bad one.”
“You have the right to decide who to serve.”
“And he has the right to say whatever he wants to in his show.”
Vic grunted and nodded. “Do we at least know when he’s coming?”
“We know Montgomery’s Muffin Mania has already started, though they’re not revealing where he has been or where he is going next. I have the dates that he has reserved a room at the B&B, but I’m sure he doesn’t plan to be here more than one night, so he must not be sure exactly when he will arrive.”
“So we need to be prepared that whole time.”
Erin nodded. “And it’s not so bad. We can make a special muffin several days in a row and just not roll it out until he gets there. I want it to be a surprise, for him to be the first person to try it out. If we make a batch each day and those just go into the freezer if he doesn’t show up, that’s fine. Then when he comes, we roll them out and he gets to tell the world what he thinks of them.”
Even though Erin said it casually, breezily, her stomach tightened at the thought of it. What if Montgomery didn’t like them? What if he really didn’t like them and gave them one of his trademark horrible reviews and everybody thought that Auntie Clem’s Bakery was sub-par?
“Everybody here knows Auntie Clem’s is a great bakery,” Vic assured Erin, reading her expression. “They love your baking. If moody Montgomery doesn’t like the baking, that won’t change.”
Erin knew that was true. Her customers already knew her product. But it would cut down on the number of people out of town who made the trip to see what she had to offer. If Montgomery gave her a rave review, the traffic from the surrounding areas would increase. Maybe by quite a bit.
“We’ll get a good review,” Erin declared, making a positive statement like all of those build-your-success books said to. She didn’t know if she believed in all of the positive-affirmations-lead-to-success stuff. But it couldn’t hurt. “He’ll give us a great review, and it will be great for the business.”