“What about Grandma’s bakery?” she asked suddenly.
And just like that, my good mood slipped.
I hadn’t been to my mother’s bakery in months. It wasn’t because I hated their cinnamon rolls—if anything, the pastries were still as good as they’d been when she first opened the place. But things had changed. Or more accurately, they’d clarified. All the little dynamics that had seemed “just how my family is” when I was a kid had become much harder to brush aside after I’d had a kid of my own.
I must have hesitated a second too long, because Maya frowned. “What? Why not? Grandma says they’re always short-staffed. And she always says ‘family helps family.’”
Ah, that phrase. I’d grown up with those words hanging in the air like wallpaper. Family helps family. It was what my mother said when she needed me to carry fifty-pound bags of flour at twelve years old while she yelled at me for being slow. It was what she said when she told me there “wasn’t money” to pay me, but there was money for a new espresso machine. It was what she said when I worked twelve-hour Saturdays in high school while my friends went to the lake.
Family helps family. Sure. Just not in both directions.
“I don’t know if that’s a good idea, sweetheart,” I said carefully. “Working in a bakery is hard. It’s not like making cupcakes at home.”
“I know,” she said quickly. “Grandma’s told me. And Aunt Jennifer, too. But I can handle it. I want to work. I want to earn my own money. That’s what you said, right?”
She tilted her head, eyes wide and hopeful. She’d inherited my mother’s stubbornness, but at least it was mixed with my tendency to overthink.
“I just…” I tried again. “Your grandma has her own way of doing things. She can be… intense.”
“Everybody says that about their grandma,” Maya said, shrugging. “She’s always nice to me.”
Of course she was. My mother loved an audience, especially a small, adoring one.
“Let me think about it,” I said finally.
But while I was still thinking, Maya was already doing. By the time I’d made myself coffee and sat down at the kitchen table with my laptop, she’d disappeared to her room. Ten minutes later, my phone buzzed with a text from my mother, short and missing punctuation like always: why are you keeping maya from working at the bakery?
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