Page 25 of The Gingerbread Cafe
‘Just grabbing snacks.’ Amber held up a fistful of Freddo chocolate bars. ‘You?’
She seemed a little caught out, but Gretel knew how it felt when you didn’t want to talk about something. She wouldn’t butt her nose in.
‘I need to grab some ingredients for my baking experiments. And you did warn me I needed to branch out and eat somethingthat wasn’t a doughnut.’ She held up a bag of carrots and gave a shy grin.
Gretel had never been inside Gordon the Grocer’s before, usually opting for the small shop near her old maisonette for her own shopping. Officially, she was meant to order stock and ingredients for the café from the big wholesale shop outside the village and save the receipts, but Lukas didn’t need to know quite how much she was wasting.
Amber craned her neck to look at the ingredients in Gretel’s basket. ‘I’m not sure vegetables count as one of your five a day if you turn them into carrot and ginger cake.’
‘I’m not!’ Gretel protested. Although it wasn’t the worst idea. ‘The carrots are just for me, but I’m trying to bake lebkuchen biscuits, a bit like Nell used to make. Lukas tried to show me on Christmas Day, and then …’ She felt her cheeks redden.
‘Oh yeah?’ Amber raised her eyebrows in a way that Gretel absolutely did not appreciate.
This was why it was better not to have actual friends. They had a tendency to be nosey and go around grabbing wrong ends of sticks.
‘You and that chef were doing some spicy baking? From the colour of your cheeks, I’m picturing it like the touchy-gropey scene in that movieGhost, but with dough instead of clay.’
‘Haven’t seen it,’ Gretel lied, keen to put a stop to any more chat about groping. ‘Anyway, it was the opposite of that. I burnt everything and he walked out in a strop.’ Amber didn’t need to know about the awkward bit where she almost planted a kiss on his face.
Gretel hurried to the counter and Amber followed.
‘Zekia!’ The jolly, rotund man behind the counter was greeting a lady who’d just walked in. ‘How’s it going?’
Gretel thought she’d seen the brightly dressed woman ambling up and down the street before, but like most people, Gretel didn’t know her.
‘Things are slow in the shop again,’ the lady replied, grabbing some fruit and a large bag of plantain chips. ‘Kingsley has sent me for supplies to keep his boredom at bay.’
The man behind the counter shrugged. ‘That’s the way it usually is outside of Christmas.’
Gretel tried to ignore the way Amber was trying to signal adid you hear that?at her with her eyebrows, as the grocer man was serving them.
When Gretel and Amber stepped out onto Green Tree Lane its cobbles were still wet from the rain they’d had that morning. The low January sun tried to dry the damp needles of the Christmas tree in the street’s centre. As the people in the shop had been saying, it was deathly quiet. And by all accounts, it would probably continue.
Seeing the café so empty since Christmas had been surprisingly frustrating, even though Gretel could have sworn she was a fan of peace and quiet. Maybe calm was lovely as a customer; but when you were paddling hard to keep things afloat,quietwas strangely terrifying. The money Nell had left to help get started was fast running out. At least if Gretel could get her head around this baking, she could stop spending a fortune on the upmarket gingerbread she’d taken to sneakily buying in, whilst she struggled to make a decent batch of anything. Not that there’d been anyone around to eat the stuff.
She also felt terrible that Amber kept coming in to help, yet there were rarely any customers to serve. No wonder she still wouldn’t accept payment. Then there was the small matter that Amber wouldn’t let her tell Lukas about her. She shook her head. Now wasn’t the time to wallow in all the things she was getting wrong.
‘So, you’re still thinking up ideas to get more customers?’ Amber asked, as they paced towards the tree as though it had an unspoken gravitational pull. ‘Sounds like you’re not the only one who needs them.’
Gretel sighed. It did sound worrying, although she could barely deal with her own issues right then. ‘Yes, I’m still thinking. Although I haven’t got any further thanbake better gingerbread. Not exactlyDragons’ Den, is it?’
‘Hasn’t Scary Lukas got any ideas? He’s meant to be jointly responsible, isn’t he?’
‘If he ever showed up.’ Since Christmas Day she’d seen more of planet Neptune than she had of Lukas. And she’d never seen that at all.
‘Well, stuff him,’ Amber concluded. ‘We can come up with something creative.’
They reached the tree and Gretel tickled her fingers along one of the branches, like she’d done since she was young. It made her feel grounded to know it was the very same tree her mother had once loved and helped decorate each Christmas after they’d decided to settle here. At least some things were fine just as they were.
‘I know you’ll go off on one if I suggest trying anything outside of your comfort zone.’ Amber waved her frog-faced chocolate wrapper at her. ‘So what are you already good at? What are your strengths?’
Gretel scratched her head. ‘Erm. Crafting? Making ornaments out of stained glass?’
‘Yes! Those little glass penguins are actually pretty cute. I’d love to know how you do all that stuff. Maybe you could … teach people? How about crafting sessions in the café to get people in? Sit and knit used to be all the rage. You could make it your own.’
‘Like sit and solder?’ Gretel imagined a group of locals cosying around over warm drinks and gingerbread, learninghow to use a soldering iron to create their own sparkling stained-glass decorations. The vision was a lovely one, apart from all thosepeople. Who was she to pretend she was good at being sociable or leading the flock? ‘No, it wouldn’t take off.’ There were surely easier ways to fill the café than putting herself quite soout there.
Amber narrowed her eyes. ‘Is this one of yourI’m not good with peoplehang-ups?’
