Excerpt: Sounded Good on Paper

The Cupcake Mobile

Angry Vegan Woman was waiting for me at the Cupcake Mobile when I biked up to work that afternoon. I could tell she was angry because she always is. She has too few vices, and her weakness is our vegan cupcakes. She won’t let her kids have them, but she sneaks up to the mobile when they’re in school and gets one every Wednesday, right before her vegan support group meeting.
“Do you have them?” she said, before I could even get the door open. Her hair, blondish and thin, hung in a protein deprived tuft down her back. Her eyes looked a little wild. I needed to move fast.
“Of course I do,” I said with more assurance than I actually felt. Sometimes Lacy didn’t bring enough of the vegan carrot cupcakes, but I had warned her about Wednesdays being heavy. I slipped into the tiny trailer and peeked into the frig. Good, the vegan shelf was full.
“How many do you want today?” I asked, opening up the window and noticing some of my other regular customers lining up in a ragged queue behind her. She looked harassed.
“My support group is meeting later today,” she said. “We’re having a birthday party for the facilitator so I need at least a dozen.”
“You’ve got it,” I said, realizing that this was going to clean our supply out. No biggie. There were lots of trendy vegetarians in this area but very few vegans. It was a hard lifestyle to maintain, in my humble opinion. The rest of our cupcakes were completely fine for the ovolactovegetarians. Of course, the people who had suddenly formed gluten intolerance or were blaming their kids’s learning disabilities on gluten were also hard to please. Luckily we had gluten free chocolate delights. The kids who were allergic to chocolate and gluten were just going to miss out.
“Do you have any extra copies of the ingredient list?” she asked, looking worried. “I want to hand them out to the group with each cake so they don’t get…um…you know….antsy.”
“Are you allowed to use words like that?” I said. “You know, ants are animals too. It smacks of exploitation.”
She peered at me. I grinned to let her know I was joking.
“Oh, was that one of your quips?” she said, slowly.
“Uh, yeah, sorry about that,” I said. “I’m kind of distracted today.” Yeah, my husband wants my permission to impregnate his co-worker. I really should have gone back to bed. I shook myself a little and tried to look a little focused. I didn’t need to really do too much focusing on cupcake duty but still one had to try to avoid looking like one was doped up on anything stronger than powdered sugar.
Vegan Woman snorted a little, dropped a nickel in the quip jar and gave me a sour look. “Well, at least you’re trying.” She didn’t really have much of a sense of humor about her animal product free diet. I guess this was understandable since I’m sure everyone she met in Texas tried to talk her out of it.
I handed over her cupcakes, wrapped carefully in a box made of recycled post consumer fiber (whatever the hell that is) and ran her credit card. (Platinum. Well of course she’s rich if she lives out here near the lake. And she doesn’t spend much money on food, except for cupcakes of course.)
“See you next week,” I said cheerfully.
“Is that a tip jar?” asked the next customer, after he ordered a Citrus Volcano. He wasn’t a regular, but he did look like he belonged here. He’d left the door of his Lexus open and was wearing an extremely nice suit paired with very expensive cowboy boots. He was probably a lawyer.
I started to explain, but he interrupted.
“Cause you know, I’m sure you’re working hard and all, but I don’t really like this practice of putting a tip jar up everywhere just so we all have to pay more money for everything we buy. I don’t tip, you know. I just don’t feel like it’s justified. Cabdrivers and waiters are bad enough, but now I have to tip the person who makes my sandwich or I feel like a guilty sumbitch.”
“Well, that’s o.k.” I started.
“No, really I know it’s not ok,” he said. “Here you are making minimum wage sitting in this hot lousy trailer all day, but on the other hand you know it’s not skilled work is it? You’re not actually baking the cupcakes in there are you? Cause I don’t see how you have room.”
“Uh, no, I don’t bake the cupcakes here. They’re delivered.”
“And do you tip the delivery boy…um or girl as the case may be…”
“Nope, we work for the same company,” I said. The company was a sole proprietorship owned by Lacy Lovelace and the delivery girl was my daughter, but I didn’t really want to go into that with him.
“So why should I tip you when you’re sitting here just handing out cupcakes and sitting all day? You’re not even delivering them to the trailer!’
“It’s not a tip jar,” I finally said.
“What?”
“It’s a quip jar.” I said. “I tell a joke when you buy a cupcake, and if it makes you smile you have to put in what you think it’s worth.”
He peered at the nickel Vegan Woman had left.
“You’re not doing very well today, then, are you?”
“Hey, I just started my shift,” I said.
“So what happens if I don’t think your joke is funny?” he said.
“Well, you don’t have to pay,” I said. “But you really have to not like the joke. Because if you just hold in the laugh so you don’t have to tip, that’s terrible karma. And instead of being able to sweep around town in your nice Lexus buying fancy cupcakes and sharing opinions with folks like me, you might spend your next life sweeping dust off a desert street in Arizona, with a Folger’s coffee can beside you as your tip jar…” I shrugged. “I wouldn’t wish that on you.”
“Was that a quip?” he asked.
I handed him his Citrus Volcano. “If you have to ask, then it probably doesn’t qualify.”
He shrugged, took a huge bite of his cupcake, and crumpled five bucks into the quip jar.
“I’m only doing this because you’re cute,” he said after he swallowed. “And you’ve got great cupcakes.”
I laughed, but could feel myself blushing. Good heavens, was this rich cowboy lawyer flirting with me?
“But you’ve got to work on your material,” he said, striding back to his Lexus, munching on his cupcake determinedly. I tried not to dwell on how nice he looked walking away. The man didn’t eat all that many cupcakes, or he worked them off in some extremely, efficient, driven way. His suit was what they called athletic cut. I knew because Marshall used to wear that style up until a few years ago when he’d hurt his back lifting weights and given up on much more than walking to and from his car for exercise.