Sisterchicks in Sombreros (10 page)

Joanne and I were given poncho-style aprons along with floppy chef’s hats and instructed to take our place at number eight behind the table. We were the last two to get into position. Two round cakes awaited us on individual cake stands. The double-layer cakes already were covered with a light chocolate glaze. I formulated a plan. A nice basket-weave border around the cake’s sides would be elaborate and impressive. If time was short, perhaps I could just make an inverted scallop trim around the top.

As I was planning, a slender, lively blonde stepped up to the microphone. “Welcome, everybody. I’m Lillie, your cruise director. Is this a great way to start the day? Chocolate cake for everyone! As you can see, our teams are ready to go. Each team will have four minutes to decorate his or her cake.”

“Four minutes!” I squawked along with some of the others.

“To give the teams a little help, we’ve asked our fabulous onboard pastry chefs to serve as pastry coaches.”

Spontaneous applause burst from the gathering crowd as a row of eight official cruise chefs marched over to the tables and faced each of us with their hands behind their white chef’s coats. Their hats looked more impressive than ours, and their serious expressions made me think either this would be a lot of fun but they were trying to play along as stoics, or they were repressing their aggravation over being taken from their kitchens.

One of the female spectators burst out, “We love your éclairs!” Her friends all laughed and clapped. I noticed a bemused expression on our chef’s face, whose embroidered name on his jacket was Francois.

“First, each team must select a captain.”

Joanne turned to me. “I think that’s you, Captain Melanie.”

The cruise director didn’t allow time for discussion. She jumped right in. “Okay, captains, stand behind your first mates. First mates, hands behind your backs. Captains, slip your arms through the opening in your first mate’s arms and reach for the tube of frosting, which, by the way, is chocolate. Chocolate frosting and chocolate cake. Does that sound good to anyone?”

An approving cheer rose around us.

Clearly we were going to be part of a humorous production, as I provided the hands to do the decorating but was dependent on Joanne’s eyes and her directions to know where to apply the frosting.

“Your personal chefs will demonstrate how to decorate your cakes on the cakes in front of them. First mates, with only your words, you are to direct your captains. Captains? Ready? Begin!”

With no preparation time, I took the frosting tube in my hand and tried to see around Joanne’s floppy hat. It was pointless.

“Mel, he’s starting on the top and making the frosting kind of go back and forth in little zigzags all around the edge.”

Okay, I know how to do that
.

I fumbled to find the base of the cake stand and to connect with a point of reference. My thumb mashed into the cake’s side.

“That’s okay,” Joanne coached. “Keep going. Put the tube on the edge. That’s good. Now start making those zigzags.”

I went nice and slow, but Joanne spewed commands. “He’s done with his trim. Don’t worry about finishing ours. You can come back and do the trim at the end, if there’s time. Now, with your left hand, pick up the plastic gizmo on the table and hold it steady. He’s using his to make a rose.”

I’d done roses before with the same sort of tool and thought I might be able to do this part with some ease. It was getting hard to hear Joanne’s directions over the yelling from the other teams and the cheering from the enthusiastic audience.

“Okay, that’s good enough,” Joanne said with a lot of laughing. “It almost looks like a rose. He’s going on, so put the rose in the center. No, more to the right. I mean the left. Right, the left. No over.”

“Right or left?” I yelled in her ear.

“Doesn’t matter. Just put it on the cake. He’s doing the base now. Make a long line with a space followed by a circle and then a space and another line.”

“I don’t understand. What kind of line and what kind of circle?”

“It looks like about an inch for the line. Start with a dot and then break and do a dash, then a dot and another dash. Got it?”

“One more minute to go,” cruise director Lillie announced.
“And it looks like one of our chefs is calling out for help here in the final sixty seconds. Francois at station eight is decorating the base of his cake with the Morse code for SOS.”

Everyone laughed, and I realized what Joanne had been trying to describe as a dot-dash sequence. I gripped the cake stand with my left hand, turning it toward Joanne while quickly applying the pattern with my right.

“Thirty seconds,” Lillie called out.

“He’s writing a word on top of the cake,” Joanne said. “Move your hand away from me. That’s it. Start right there. Now write something.”

“Write what?”

“Ten, nine, eight …”

“Anything! Hurry!”

With a loop of my hand, I made a capital
J
.

“Three, two …”

I followed the
J
with an
O
, and completed it just as the cruise director called out “One! Time’s up! Frosting tubes down. Let’s see what kind of confectionary delights our teams have created here. Captains, you may join your first mates by coming out from behind them.”

Stepping next to Joanne, I got a good look at our joint creation.

“That’s pathetic!” I moaned.

“No, it’s not,” Joanne protested. “Well, except maybe for the rose. And you didn’t finish the top border. But you spelled my name right.”

Energetic Lillie held up the cake created by team one. The design on the chef’s cake was several perfectly straight lines across the top. The contestant’s duplicate looked like a mutilated tic-tac-toe game board.

The laughter continued around the tables. Team five’s cake was dubbed the “moon cake” because of all the places the captain had inserted the tip of the frosting tube while trying to find a place to start.

“Look at all those craters!” Lillie said.

The team next to us had spent most of the time cracking up and yelling at each other and laughing some more. Their fun was reflected in their cake, which turned out to be a squiggly-giggly mess, and nothing at all like their chef’s elegantly decorated cake.

“Oh, my!” Lillie exclaimed when she stepped over to us with the microphone. “Look at this work of art! It actually resembles the chef’s cake. I think we may have a winning team here. What are your names?”

She held the microphone in front of me. “Melanie,” I said. My voice seemed to explode in a booming echo.

“Joanne,” my sister said as the mike was held up to her. “That’s my name on the cake. Jo.”

“Look at that!” Lillie held up our cake and made a smooth half-turn so all the spectators could see the
Jo
. “What do you say? Do we have a winner here?”

The applause that rose around us was embarrassing but great fun. I couldn’t remember the last time anyone had
clapped for me for any reason. Tight little tear bubbles filled my eyes.

“Your prize—” Lillie turned to all the other contestants before adding—“is that each of you gets to try the first bite of the cake you decorated.”

An approving murmur arose, but then Lillie added, “However, we have one stipulation. The captains now must stand to the front, and the first mates are to step behind. That’s right. You first mates now become the hands that cut the first slice and feed it to your captains. And captains, may I remind you, it’s not a good idea to bite the hand that feeds you.”

The spectators seemed to be especially tickled by this turn-about and cheered on their favorite teams. With my hands behind my back, I felt Joanne literally breathing down my neck as she inserted her arms through my open arm loops and asked, “Which side is the knife on? I didn’t see it.”

“It’s on the left. It’s a butter knife, and it’s sitting close to the edge of the table with the blade facing the cake.”

She immediately made contact with the butter knife. As I continued to direct, Joanne inserted the knife just under the mushed-up rose. A wave of laughter came rushing over us. I stretched to see across to the second table where one of the first mates had foregone the knife and was feeding her beloved captain a fistful of cake.

“Don’t get any ideas,” I told Joanne, turning and speaking loudly over my shoulder.

“What are they doing? Having a food fight?”

“Just about. You have the first incision just right, Nurse Joanne. Move the knife over just a squinch, make another cut, and you’ll have it.”

“Actually, I won’t have it,” Joanne teased. “You’ll have it! But not all over your face, I promise. I’ll be nice.”

I thought of how many truces my sister and I had agreed upon using that simple phrase, “I’ll be nice.” The good thing was that whenever we said it, we meant it, and we managed to be kind to each other, even if the sweet spell only lasted for an hour.

Taking her time, Joanne offered her precisely cut slice of cake, which I bent forward to nibble. The cake was delicious, and I suddenly thought I wouldn’t mind having this cake and frosting all over my mouth and chin.

Someone in the crowd called out, “Go ahead! Dive in, team eight! You’re the last one.”

I didn’t need to dive in. My sister brought the cake up to my face, and with a playful smash, she plastered me.

The crowd was pleased, Joanne laughed, and I felt unexpectedly young and cheery

“You’re not mad?” Joanne looked me in the eye as the chef handed me a towel.

“No, the cake is scrumptious. Here, try some.”

Before Joanne saw it coming, I pinched a handful and delivered a sizable chunk to her face. She cracked up, and I remembered, for the first time in a long time, the mischievous glee of being “almost twins.”

“Thank you, ladies,” Lillie the cruise director called out in a singsong voice. “You’ve all been great sports. I think all of them are winners, don’t you?”

The spectators showed their agreement with Lillie by applauding.

“As our special gift for each of you, we’d like you to take your cake with you. Your chef will provide a pastry box for your creation—or what’s left of it, as in the case of team number five.”

“
Pour vous
.” Francois handed us a square, pink box. “Congratulations.”

“Thank you,” I said. “Your cake is beautiful.”

“
Merci
.”

“What are we going to do with a whole cake?” I asked Joanne as we headed up the stairs to our room to collect our luggage.

“Almost a whole cake,” she corrected me. “This is just a really wild suggestion, but why don’t we eat it?”

“Now?”

“No, on the road. It will be a treat.”

“It’ll be a puddle of melted cocoa by noon,” I protested.

“We can’t give it to anyone,” Joanne said. “Not after
some
of us stuck our fingers in it.”

I grinned. “I couldn’t resist.”

Joanne stopped midway up the wide flight of stairs and impulsively wrapped her arms around me. With a big, smacky kiss on the side of my head, she said, “You know what? I can’t
resist you. I love you, Mel. Did I ever tell you that? You are the coolest sister ever.”

Startled by her outburst, I jokingly said, “I think you were around those Sisterchicks a little too long. Their crazy antics are wearing off on you.”

“Crazy or not, I’ve decided there’s nothing wrong with loving somebody and telling them so,” Joanne said stubbornly. “I’ve lived too long without openly expressing what’s in my heart.”

She grinned at me.

I smiled back. “I love you, too, Joanne.”

My declaration was no less true than hers, but it certainly didn’t carry the zing her announcement had.

As we cleared our final paperwork with Sven and disembarked, I thought about the contrast in Joanne’s vibrant declaration and my sincere echo. She had changed. With her freshness and openness, she was the one who was irresistible.

As Joanne and I stepped down the gangway that led to the dock and tourist area we had seen from our suite that morning, I noticed a crew member dressed up with a wide sombrero and wearing a serape. He was waving to each of the travelers as they disembarked and inviting them to have their photos taken by the ship’s photographer.

I took several steps toward him in the wide cemented area, thinking Joanne and I should at least pose, even if we weren’t going to be around that evening to pick up the print.

A pregnant woman in zebra-print capris and impractical
spike-heel sandals hurried past me, trying to catch up with her runaway toddler. She was yelling at him in a language I didn’t recognize. Her voice suddenly elevated into a shriek, and I turned just in time to see the willful child run to the edge of the concrete dock and topple into the water far below.

My startled cry was drowned by the mother’s terrified scream. She ran toward the narrow channel of water that separated the huge ship from the dock, wailing like I had never heard before. The heel on her shoe broke in her dash, and she stumbled. An older woman standing a few inches away caught the pregnant woman before she could fall. It was clear she intended to leap into the water to save her child.

Before anyone could fully comprehend what was happening, a second splash let us know a rescuer had gone into the water only seconds after the toddler fell in.

My heart pounded, and I turned to grab Joanne and to say I couldn’t believe all this was happening.

But all I saw was my sister’s abandoned luggage.