Free How to Eat a Cupcake by Meg Donohue

like that, or even when I felt she was paying a little too much attention to Julia—which was, of course, her job, but you try explaining that to a strong-willed child and see if heads don’t roll—I’d do a little girl-walks-into-doorjamb slapstick number I’d picked up from television or, better, launch into one of the many impersonations I’d been perfecting. Luciadahhhling , I’d rasp in one long word like Lolly, little girls need ballet. How on earth do you expect Annie to find her core ? If comedy failed to lift the cloud from my mother’s head, I’d ask her to bake me something sweet, and we’d sit cross-legged on the kitchen tiles together, licking the bowls and spoons clean.
    My mother rarely spoke of her family. I figured that if she didn’t want to talk about them, there must have been a good reason. Through bits and pieces, I gathered that my grandmother was a rigid, fervently religious woman who ran her household like an army base; rules were obeyed, or you were swiftly discharged. I couldn’t imagine treating the bonds of blood so lightly, but then again when you had only one family member, even the slightest tiff felt reckless. My mother seemed so nervous the few times I asked her about my father that I eventually stopped trying. These are conversations we will have when you’re an adult, mi monita bonita, she’d say, wiping her hands on her apron. My pretty little monkey. I began to envision a trove of vital information I would be allowed to open when I turned eighteen, like a bride unpacking the trousseau that would lend beauty and grace to her new life. I never considered that my mother might die before we had our “adult” talk, taking large chunks of critical information along with her.
    This was what a little music did to me: it sent me slipping down a dark, slick tunnel to the past. And then as soon as I hit bottom, before I could uncover any answers, I’d be catapulted back to the present.
    â€œS o,” I said to Jake Logan, eyeing him over my burrito. “What have you been up to all these years?”
    â€œTime for me to dust off my résumé? Let’s see. After college I spent some years in New York doing the finance thing, but eventually I just couldn’t take it anymore. I had an embarrassingly boring quarter-life crisis. You know, the kind that usually leads to law school or business school.”
    â€œBut that’s not where yours led you?”
    â€œNah. Grad school would have just been laying the tracks for the midlife crisis train. Instead, I moved back to San Francisco and spent a lot of time surfing, trying to straighten myself out.”
    â€œSo . . . that’s what you do?” I asked. “You’re Surf Guy?” I’ll admit it was tough to keep the sarcasm from eking into my voice. I’d been struggling to pay rent on my studio apartment, walking dogs during the few hours of the day that I wasn’t baking my heart out for minimum wage, while this guy had been surfing? I realized with a thud of disappointment that we had absolutely nothing in common.
    Jake laughed. “In all honesty? Yeah, I surf. A lot. But doing that for hours at a time, being out there on the ocean and looking back at the land gave me a lot of perspective. I ended up deciding to open a surf camp for underprivileged kids. I’m still working out the logistics, but I bought some land down in Costa Rica. We’ll provide scholarships and get some kids out of the concrete jungle and into nature. I figure if it helps me to be out in the water, it will probably help them, too.”
    I took a deep breath. “Oh my God,” I said. “You’re one of them.”
    â€œThem?”
    â€œYou know. Those people. You’re one of those people out there in the world, doing good things.”
    Like stage actors with impeccable timing, Jake’s dimples arrived on the scene. “Does it make