Read The Cake Therapist for Free Online Page B

her sister. Olive ignored the slight. “Our mama needs . . .” Olive fished in the basket for the list, written on the back of a torn envelope.
    Miss Goldberg rolled her eyes. “We cannot put any more items on Mrs. Habig’s account,” she stage-whispered, but there were no other shoppers in the store to hear. “I thought I explained that to her last week.”
    Olive plunked the coin purse down and passed the list across to Miss Goldberg’s reluctant grasp. “We can pay for it all,” Olive said staunchly.
    Miss Goldberg sniffed as she removed a lined note card from the accounts box, then rang up the sale. Olive stopped to look at the costume jewelry in carnival glass colors, but Miss Goldberg glared and Edie nudged her away.
    The girls crossed Jefferson and walked toward the library, saving the best for last, Edie thought.
    Olive looked longingly at Oster’s bakery window and could almost taste the cream horns and cherry coffee cake with that crunchy topping, but there was no money for that.
    As they walked on, they muttered to each other—“Oh no.” Old Jimmy McCray limped toward them, but Mama said they mustn’t call him Jimmy, just Mr. McCray. Papa said he came back from the Great War and was “never the same,” but Edie was not quite sure what that meant because Papa came back all right and then married Mama.
    Jimmy McCray couldn’t even see straight, thought Olive, with one eye looking up and the other looking down, and that raised purple scar down the side of his face.
    “You ’fraid of me?” He asked the same question of every child he saw on the street, in the dime store, at mass.
    “No, Mr. McCray, we’re not afraid of you,” Olive said yet again, but hurried by him, shielding Edie, just the same.
    They escaped into the library, where it was dim and cool, smelling of dust and old paper. The low children’s bookshelves were near the front, while the adult section was up a few steps in the back of the long, narrow building. Edie skipped over to the fairy tales and sat cross-legged on the floor while she looked for a book. Olive, impatient already, walked around to see whether anyone they knew was here.
    Miss Phillips, the librarian, wished they would look through her new display of Newbery Award winners—books that no child had yet checked out. You’d think with times still so hard, parents would take advantage of things that were free, she mused. But many children had to help out at home, she reminded herself, as the ragman and his young son passed by the window in their horse-drawn cart.
Even the horse looks down on its luck today,
she thought.
    Just this morning as she brought the milk bottles in from the back porch, she saw a young man jump on top of a coal car as the train slowed to the station on Market Street. He knocked over as much coal as he could onto the grassy verge of the track, then jumped down again, gathered it all into in a burlap bag, and ran off.
    She pictured the coal bin in her cellar at home, three-fourths full, and the way the flames lit up her father’s craggy face when he opened the metal furnace door to shovel in another load. How she took her comfortable life for granted sometimes . . .
    Olive was too old, but Edie might like this one—Miss Phillips took
Downright Dencey
from her display. Hard times in Nantucket. Plucky little Quaker girl with a father away on a whaling ship, and a mother who finds it hard to cope. Dencey befriends the town outcast, Samuel Jetsam. Good story. Wonderful writing.
    Olive checked out yet another Nancy Drew—
The Secret Staircase
, which she probably would not finish, thought Miss Phillips. Olive just can’t concentrate. It must get her into trouble at school.
    It began to rain.
    “Why don’t you girls stay in here for a while, till it lets up?” suggested Miss Phillips. “Olive, would you help me put these books away? Edie, you can get started on your new book.”
    Edie plopped down like a rag doll behind the bookshelves