All the Little Pieces. Jilliane Hoffman

looked the same as she’d left it on Saturday, but was somehow totally different. Not today it’s not, Charity. Life might never be usual ever again. On the other side of the wall she could hear the bakers laughing and kidding around with each other. She envied the simplicity of their conversation.

      A graduate of the College of Journalism at UF, owning a cupcake bakery was the last thing in the world Faith Saunders would ever have imagined herself doing. She might have fond memories of helping Grandma Milly bake cookies at Christmas, but stirring the batter, pouring in the chips and testing the dough was about the extent of what her grandma ever let her do. Hence, she was lacking some serious culinary skills after Grandma Milly left for, as she called it, ‘the big dog park in the sky’ – reunited for eternity with the dozens of Boston terriers she’d raised over her eighty years. Faith certainly hadn’t learned anything in the kitchen from her mother, Aileen, who couldn’t boil water and hadn’t inherited her own mother’s fondness for baking; cracking open a roll of Nestlé Toll House was asking too much. It was Faith’s dad who’d taught Faith the basics so she could survive and snag herself a husband. Patrick ‘Sully’ Sullivan was a closet cook. By the time Faith graduated high school she could grill meat, roast potatoes, and make pasta. As for dessert, Sully was off-the-boat Irish – he finished off his meals with a Jameson twelve-year-old – so Faith had never had any experience in baking confections. Dessert usually meant peeling the lid off a pint of Ben & Jerry’s or defrosting a Sara Lee cheesecake.

      Jarrod had thought she was still drunk the morning after that ladies’ night out when she told him about her and Vivian’s plans to abandon a stalled writing career and a fledgling accounting practice to become bakers. It’d taken her a few weeks and continuous tries with various recipes in the kitchen to convince him she was serious. But when he came around to the idea, he’d embraced it. He was the one who’d actually found the former Payless shoe store property in a strip mall in Coral Springs. And he had been able to negotiate a good chunk of the build-out into the lease, which made the project less financially daunting.

      Initially, the plan upon graduation had been to take her journalism degree and become the next Edna Buchanan at some hotshot publication, then use all the fascinating stories she’d reported on as inspiration for the crime fiction novels she was going to write from her and Jarrod’s hip Manhattan apartment, as he worked his way up the ladder of some fancy New York law firm. But as Steinbeck once noted, the best-laid plans often went astray, awry or up in smoke: the hotshot publications weren’t hiring and Jarrod had decided to go with the Public Defender’s Office in Miami. Time was gone and New York was out. Faith had waited tables at night and managed a kiosk at the Aventura mall that first year out of school, sending out résumé after résumé, feeling beyond dejected when the phone didn’t ring. When the managing editor of the monthly South Florida magazine, Gold Coast, offered her a part-time position as a features writer she’d jumped on it, happy to finally be working in her field and hoping to build her résumé so when the market rebounded and the hotshot publications opened their online doors she’d get to do what she thought she’d always wanted to be doing: investigative reporting.

      And then she got pregnant.

      It had now been eight years since Pomp and Circumstance had ushered her out of Gainesville and into the real world. She’d missed her midterms at UF because of the DUI, and for months after that it was impossible for her to concentrate on anything. It had taken her an extra year to graduate and cost her a small fortune when she lost her Bright Futures scholarship and had to take out student loans to finish up. Of course, she’d ended up meeting Jarrod that extra year, so some amazing good did come out of God-awful horrible. In between researching and writing compelling articles for Gold Coast that questioned whether the South Florida art scene was suffering from a dearth of true artists, she’d managed to fire off a few chapters of a manuscript that was currently residing in the bottom of a desk drawer. But that’s all she had accomplished of the original plan: a few chapters. She’d had a baby, yes, and that was definitely an achievement, but the fantastic ideas for a fantastic thriller had never come to her; a visit to the office from race-car driver Hélio Castroneves was about the most exciting thing that ever happened at the magazine. After Maggie was born, Jarrod had suggested she stay home at least for a couple of years. So she did, and tried to kick off a freelance writing career by penning articles about motherhood for Parenting and Baby Talk and Family Fun. That’s when she’d first realized her experiences with child-rearing were altogether different than the average mom’s.

      As she closed the PO file, Vivian burst into the office. Burst, because Viv could not do anything quietly. She wore lots of makeup, jingly jewelry, oversized purses, flashy clothes, and sky-high heels that you could hear coming a mile away. And even though she’d moved to Miami from Hoboken when she was six, she had a thicker accent than a star on the Real Housewives of New Jersey. Vivian smiled at Faith and continued her conversation with Albert the baker through the office wall. ‘Fruitcake! That’s what she wants!’ She sat on the edge of Faith’s desk, pointed at the wall, and made a spinning ‘He’s crazy!’ motion with her finger.

      ‘No one’s gonna eat that!’ the wall yelled back.

      ‘So make one that someone will! We’re gonna give her what she wants; it’s her frigging wedding! Enough; we’ll talk later, Al.’ Vivian flipped her long, thick, black hair off a shoulder and said to Faith in a voice that was low for Vivian: ‘Just bake the cake, right? If I wanted an argument, I’d go home and talk to my husband. I think you’re gonna have to help him with the fruitcake, hon. You can make something tasty – put enough rum in it, nobody will give a shit what flavor it is.’

      Faith smiled. ‘I’ll talk to Al. When’s it for?’

      ‘December eighteenth. Cupcake tree with fruitcake cupcakes for two hundred and fifty. It’s a Christmas-themed wedding, so you have lots of time to help him come up with something. Soooo … I was at the bank with the weekend deposits for the past hour and it was a friggin’ zoo! Like everyone picked today to go to the bank. They had a flood with all this rain and all the ugly bank furniture is stacked in a corner. It made me think, ya know, for all the money Bank of America’s got, you’d think they’d pick nicer furniture, right? Not Costco shit that peels when it gets wet. So how you doing?’

      Faith sat back from the computer screen and rubbed her eyes. ‘I finished the purchase orders and the ad copy. I’m gonna take on payroll next.’

      Vivian frowned. ‘I’ll do payroll; I hope you didn’t rush back here for that. You look like shit, honey. No offense,’ she said, as she reached over and examined Faith’s ponytail with a long, red fingernail. ‘What’s with the hair? You didn’t want to do it today?’ Vivian was always perfectly dressed, coiffed, manicured, and made-up. Always. Even when she went into labor, she looked hot on the delivery table.

      ‘Do I look that bad?’

      Vivian nodded. ‘Yes. Well, you looked tired, is what you look. Those circles … I can fix them if you want.’

      ‘You’re too kind.’

      ‘Please,’ Vivian replied with a dismissive wave of her hand. ‘So what the hell happened at Charity’s yesterday? That’s why you’re stressed, I bet. And why does your sister have your phone and purse? What is she sorry for? Huh? Don’t spare details.’

      ‘Long story.’

      ‘I got time. When did you get back?’

      ‘Last night.’

      ‘Last night? You drove up to Charity’s and back in one day? What’s that about? Oh boy, this is gonna be good,’ she said, getting up and grabbing her coffee off her desk. She rushed back and settled a butt cheek on Faith’s calendar. ‘What did Charity do now? No – what did Nick do? Why’d you leave early? What is she sorry for?’

      ‘That’s ice, you know,’ Faith said, nodding at the cup.

      ‘I know,’ Vivian replied, sipping it. ‘So what happened?’

      ‘We had a fight when she let him talk to her like she was a nobody,’ Faith replied