Chapter 163
Many Happy Days

It was August… already… The month just came along, as though out of the blue, and already it was edging along, until suddenly they found themselves with little more than a week before the Olsens were due to pack up and return to Arkansas. The adults all knew it, hadn't forgotten it. The kids were going along like they had forgotten, if they'd ever considered it at all, and their parents were all going around trying to find the right way and time to tell them. They couldn't think of a single day lately that hadn't seen one or more of them saying they were finally going to do it, only to reach the evening, bedtime, and then oops… still hadn't done it.

"This is going to come back to bite us, isn't it?" Charlie muttered to herself, standing at the mixer as she prepared another batch of cake batter.

"In my case, maybe literally," Maya sighed as she swept another batch of strawberries along with those she'd been chopping. Charlie gave her a look. "Noah, definitely." The idea, as… slightly harrowing as it could be, ended up making them both laugh. "We'll get some grumpy faces… and I might start wearing gloves for a bit… but they'll get past it eventually. Right? They'll see each other again…"

"They will," Charlie smiled. "Caitlin tries to look pissed off sometimes, but it just ends like…" she imitated her daughter's 'pissed off' face, and Maya snorted. "I think more often than not, she tries it, but David and I just find it cute, so we laugh, and then she starts to forget that she's supposed to be upset."

"That's good, at least," Maya agreed. "Elliott, if he's upset, he'll just go quiet, walk around like he doesn't know what to do with himself. Noah, he'll go and sit in a corner somewhere and pout a while, but then he just misses being around people, so he'll come back… Don't know what it'll look like when they're older, but right now at least it's kind of…"

"Manageable?" Charlie suggested, and Maya pointed at her. Yes, it worked.

"Let's just agree that we have a freebie about all that today, on account of… cake-a-palooza," Maya declared, looking around the kitchen.

The room had been taken over, enough that it was sort of spilling out beyond, enough that all five kids had been sent off for the day with the Hunters. Both Katy and Shawn had offered to help, but it had been agreed instead that the best way they could help was by keeping an eye on the Friar boys and Caitlin and Harry. Maya and Charlie had been doing cakes throughout the summer, yes, one here, two there, but today… Today, somehow, Maya had found herself booked solid, to the point that she'd allowed herself to get overbooked… she wasn't even sure how. It was a challenge, but she wasn't going to back down from it, no. That wasn't what she did. She was efficient, Charlie was efficient, and if that wasn't enough, well, Maya had her crew… her junior bakers.

Cara, Eliza, Ariel, Daphne, Stella, Phoebe… Her sisters, her young friends and, one way or another, students… They could not have gotten through this day without all of them. It was also thanks to them that Maya had felt confident enough to take on as many clients as she did. Weddings, birthdays, anniversaries, reunions, funerals, and everything in between and beyond. They did it all, and as much as a lot of the credit went to their bakers, and their intrepid delivery guys (intrepid delivery husbands, as Charlie had dubbed David and Lucas), there was also a lot of credit to give to neighbors up and down the lane.

Maya had both her own oven, refrigerator, and freezer at her disposal, and she had those in the little house, but even with that she could not keep up. But she had the Sandersons. She had the Oswalds. She had the McCulloughs, and the Dixons. Better said, they had her. They had her back. She'd never needed to ask. She'd run into one of them, mentioned all those orders, how she'd been unable to say no, and the solution was simple. If she needed to use anything of theirs, she absolutely could and should. From there, one had spoken to another, and the next, and now they had a system going. Their junior bakers turned into runners, taking this or that to or from one of the neighbors' houses. Phoebe had shown up with walkie talkies, because it just made sense to her for what they'd be attempting to do, and she had a point.

When the last cake was both completed and packed off for delivery, the tired bunch gathered around the kitchen table. They'd cleaned everything up before allowing themselves to actually stop; it wouldn't have felt right otherwise. The bonus at least was that, with everything done, when they sat, Maya and Charlie were about to bring out what they might call their gratitude cake and offer it to their six rockstar assistants.

"Wow…" Stella breathed, sounding the way she might if brought up before a piece of art she'd never seen before, something that set off her creative instincts. Maya grinned.

"That's what was hidden back there, wasn't it?" Daphne realized. Oh, yes, they had been so very sneaky about this. Sure, it had meant taking up much needed space, but when it came down to it, it mattered to Maya and Charlie that they have this to share with the girls.

"We weren't sure, after all the cakes we did today, if you'd all even…" Charlie started to explain, only to be cut off by Eliza.

"Can we eat all of it right now, please?" she asked, blue eyes like saucers.

"I think she's drooling," Cara whispered, making the others laugh even as Eliza just nodded, admitting freely how she wanted nothing more than to eat one, two, any number of slices of this thing.

"Who wants to do the honors?" Maya asked. Ariel raised her hand at once. "Precision slicer over here," Maya nodded in approval, presenting the girl with the knife as though laying her sword at her queen's feet.

This right here, as busy as they'd been all summer, filling orders, this… this felt like their great accomplishment. This was their cake, a Maya and Charlie original, and they'd put so much thought into it. They wanted to make it memorable, a signature piece. Now they had done it, and the slices were distributed, the moment of truth.

It was very easy for the whole cake to be consumed between the eight of them. Without even gobbling up, it really felt as though they'd blinked and it had disappeared, down to the last crumb. They had savored it, they had, but more than anything maybe, they'd just relaxed, and talked, and laughed, so the cake was gone and… they were all at ease.

"I wish we could do this all the time…" Stella spoke a thought aloud that the others around the table all seemed to agree on, nodding along.

"We couldn't have busy days like this all the time, we'd never make it," Maya told them even as she couldn't help but agree that this had been wonderful.

"Well, no, maybe not like this," Stella amended. "But…" she gestured around, trying to come up with the words. She didn't have to. They understood just fine. She wanted to get to stop at the end of any day feeling this way. Accomplished, proud. And maybe, just maybe, she was nervous at the thought of starting high school in a couple of weeks. Wouldn't it have been good if she was still in middle school, and then Maya could be her teacher? But she was starting the ninth grade now, in a brand-new school, and she was still just getting used to attending public school instead of having tutors at home. What if she couldn't cope with this new setting?

"We're going to make sure there's a baking club, remember?" Phoebe told her friend, her confidence as contagious as ever. "Either they have one and we join it or they don't have one and we make it, yeah?"

"Yeah," Stella smiled, agreeing.

"We'll be there," Ariel and Daphne both spoke at once, unintentionally so, and they laughed.

"So will I," Cara reminded her, beaming.

"So will I… eventually," Eliza added with a shrug, the youngest among them.

"Yeah, but until then, you get to be in baking club, too, if you want to… Original recipe," Maya joked, and it made her little sister laugh. Of all her siblings, by pure chance and timing, she would be the first to find herself heading into middle school as a student while Maya would be there as her teacher. Eliza would be starting the seventh grade on the day her big sister kicked off her teaching career.

"I'll be your favorite, right?" she joked back.

"Oh, easily," Maya promised. Cara gave a pitiful little pout at this. Even if she hadn't found herself ahead of schedule, grade wise, she would have just missed out going to middle school to be taught by Maya; it was really to both sisters' disappointment, but there was nothing to be done for it.

At the end of the day, with the junior bakers returned home, the kids back from the Hunter Hart house and eventually off to sleep, Maya, Lucas, Charlie, and David sat out on the porch. Sure, they'd all had a long day, but this was their routine with this summer, ending their nights this way. Caitlin and Harry were inside the big house and would be carried sleeping back to the little house once their parents decided to turn in for the night.

"We're going to have to tell them tomorrow," David told the others, and even though they sighed, they had to agree. They couldn't continue putting it off, not now. They had to tell the kids that this summer experiment of theirs was drawing to an end, and the Olsens would be bound for Arkansas before long. They'd lean into the good parts, sure. Caitlin would get to see her grandparents, and that'd be great. She'd missed them, hadn't she? The same would go for Elliott and Noah. Pappy Joe and Patty would be coming back from their travels, reintegrating their home… As for the rest, well, it was what it was. They'd see each other at Christmas at the very latest, but they'd do their best not to let it take that long.

"So, the big cake…" Lucas inquired, curious tone sounding also like a hungry one. Maya and Charlie both responded with an awkward grin. They hadn't managed to save any for him or David, had they?

"Oh, it was good, really good," Maya couldn't help telling him, and he presented her with his best and most potent pout. "We'll make another one, we will, okay?" Maya chuckled, turning to her aunt. Charlie nodded before tilting her head to rest at her husband's shoulder.

"Now?" David asked, teasing. They knew very well that, on a regular night, when they hadn't been baking up a storm all day, Maya and Charlie could have decided to just go ahead and set to work, baking a new gratitude cake right then and there. But that just would not have ended well, not with the kids to see to in the morning.

"Tomorrow," Charlie told him.

"First thing," Maya agreed.

They were not kidding. Before either the Friar boys or Caitlin could go off requesting to cross and go watch cartoons with their cousin or cousins, their parents were up. David stayed back at the little house, where he'd keep an eye on Caitlin and Harry, but Charlie crept on over and joined her niece and her husband (lovingly referred to as her nephew-in-law, weird as it sounded) to start making the gratitude cake all over again. They had made some progress by the time the quiet of the early morning kitchen was broken with the arrival of the three-year-old Olsen girl, coming in search of her Friar cousins. Soon, Harry was awake and in need of his mother, so Charlie went and sat aside with him while David offered his assistance with the baking.

"Maybe we should have waited to make this on the last day," Charlie hummed, after lunch, as the two couples and the kids got to enjoy the fruits of their labor.

"We can make another one," Maya told her aunt, and they shared a grin. Yes, that sounded like a great idea right there, one last hurrah before they went back to baking separately, with a screen to bring them together.

"The last day?" Elliott asked, curiously.

It wasn't as though they all froze, dropped their forks in shock, but they might as well have. They had no choice now, did they? Summer was coming to an end, whether they liked it or not. Lucas decided to go for it.

"So… here's the thing…"

TO BE CONTINUED

See you next week! - mooners