Page 2 of Holly Jolly Cake Fight
He reached back and took her little hand. “You sure you’ll be okay without me, Vivvy? Two weeks is a long time.”
“Sure it’s only two weeks and not forever?” she said with all the considerable sass a six-year-old raised by her French grandmother possessed. “That thing might eat you.”
He grinned and jabbed a thumb toward the metal monster. “That guy? He’s on a Styrofoam diet.” Hopefully it wasn’t really Styrofoam, though. It was spewing gunk all over the North Georgia wilderness.
Vivvy didn’t look convinced, but how many second-graders wouldn’t be terrified in front of that loud, foul-smelling beast?
A frazzled-looking young woman ran up to the car. Pauline, in the driver’s seat, rolled down the window, and the woman said, “Sorry, ma’am, park’s closed until the end of the month.”
“Oui,I saw zee signs,” Pauline said, thickening up her French accent, the one she’d been careful to maintain in the fifteen years since she’d moved to America.“Mon filsis here for your leetle show.”
She knew full well how to say ‘my son’ in English, but Pauline was always in character.
The woman pulled out her phone, scanned something, and looked past Pauline to Laurin. Her jaw dropped slightly when she spotted him. She recovered quickly and shot him a smile that wasn’t quite appropriate in front of his mother and daughter, too much eyebrow action, but his life was mostly playing both mom and dad to Vivvy these days, so it was nice to be appreciated. A moment later, the woman looked at her phone again and grimaced.
“Laurin Lavigne,” Pauline told her. “I am sure he is on zee list?”
Another wide eye. “Oh, uhh, yes. Sh-he is on it. Can you take him to . . . crud . . . Gate 7, I guess.”
Laurin hoped she wasn’t suddenly acting weird because his mom had driven him here. They only lived an hour away, and it was just the three of them — him, Pauline, and Vivvy — against the world, so it was easy to forget this looked like there was something wrong with him.
Nope, he was just a washed-up professional athlete raising a kid with his mom, who was also his business partner at a struggling bakery. Nothing weird or lame here.
He leaned across his mom to stick his hand out the window to show he wasn’t antisocial or anything. “Hey, I’m Laurin.”
“You don’t look like a Laurin,” the girl rushed out, her face flushing an even brighter pink than the canvas sneakers she wore. “I mean, umm, I’m Jordyn-With-a-Y.”
He shook her hand firmly. “Great to meet you, Jordyn-With-a-Y,” which made her flush even more brightly. “Do you mind if the little lady and I walk to Gate 7? She’s never seen anything like this.” Laurin hadn’t, either, but he was no stranger to television cameras.
The back window rolled down. “I’m Vivvy,” the miniature brunette said as she, too, stuck her hand out the window. “Are you gonna make my papa a star again?”
Jordyn laughed and shook the tiny hand. “I’ll do my best, but only if you stick close to him on your walk, okay? There’s some dangerous stuff here.”
Vivvy scrambled like a monkey up onto Laurin’s shoulders the moment she was released from her booster seat and immediately started grilling Laurin about everything they walked past. She pointed out a lot of common things she saw every time they went camping — hiking trails, squirrels, fire pits — but there was plenty to learn, too.
“That’s a camera dolly,” Laurin said of the video equipment she pointed at, although he couldn’t imagine they were going to get much use out of it in the woods. “It’s a wheeled cart, see, so they can move the camera around steadily.”
“That’s a camera? It’s huge!”
“Yes, it is,” Laurin said as soberly as he could. “Once upon a time, we didn’t have camera phones, so we had to use giganticboxes to take pictures. All those squirrels you see? They live in the camera, drawing the pictures. They’re on lunch break right now.”
“Papa!” Vivvy squealed loudly. “Squirrels can’t draw!”
They were approaching the backside of a cabin labeled ‘Gate 4’, where a woman stood on a patio. She jerked her head up at Vivvy’s squeal and scrubbed something into the railing.
“Not as well as chipmunks,” Laurin admitted as the woman strolled out to greet them. “That’s why the squirrels are stuck in reality TV.”
The woman looked very much like a grandma in her pressed slacks, sparkly Christmas sweater, and perfectly rolled white curls, but her makeup was theatrically heavy. He was sure it was for the camera, as when she got a little closer, he realized who she was. “Why, Grandma Belle!” he called with a wave. “You’re the last person I expected to see out here. I read online that you’d retired.”
She gave the most darling little curtsy. “You can’t ever retire from the things you love, can you?”
“No, ma’am.”
Vivvy gaped at her. “You made my tea cakes.”
“Did I?” Belle said with a quirk in her brow.
Vivvy nodded so boisterously Laurin felt her shake on his shoulders. Thankfully, Belle didn’t deny it. For Vivvy’s fourth birthday party, Laurin and Pauline had replicated the petite desserts Belle made for the Fairy Tale season. It was more glamorous for Vivvy to think the cakes had come from the TV and not her own family’s bakery.
