The Great Peach Experiment 1, Erin Downing [books to read romance .TXT] 📗

each Peach was even more lackluster than the day before. When their first customer ordered a slice of apple crumb pie, Freddy unenthusiastically plopped a thick slab of the pie onto her plate and took the customer’s money without his usual bright smile. Moments after ambling away, the woman returned to the counter with a disgusted look on her face. “This is terrible!” she said, tossing the pie onto the service counter. “Awful!” the woman repeated. “Taste it.”

Freddy shook his head. He held up his hands and said, “I’m pied out. I refuse.”

So Lucy cut a bite-sized chunk out of the apple pie and popped it in her mouth. She spit it right back out. “Ew! Salt!” she wailed. Someone had obviously used salt instead of sugar in the apple pie filling, and it tasted absolutely horrible. Lucy secretly wondered if the salt topping had been an accident, or if—maybe—the ingredient switcheroo had been some form of sabotage by one of her brothers.

By the third day of the art fair, business had slowed to a trickle. It was nearing one hundred degrees outside (which meant it was hotter inside the food truck, and even the fridge was struggling to keep cool), so the Peaches closed up shop early and returned to the campground. The four of them settled in around the picnic table at their campsite, sweating and mushy and miserable.

“So tomorrow it’s on to Indianapolis,” Dad said, scanning Herb’s map. Herb had taken the map out of his mouse house after he’d freed his pals at Happy Campground.

Dad’s finger traced their path across the map. “We’re all set to sell pies at the Indianapolis Motor Show, then we’ll head back this way for our grand finale: the big Food Truck Festival in Delaware, Ohio.”

“Wait a sec,” Lucy said, looking at the map over her dad’s shoulder. She pointed and drew a line across the page with her finger. “We’re going from Columbus to Indianapolis and then basically back to just outside Columbus again? Isn’t that a little weird?”

“That’s how the permits and schedule worked out,” Dad snapped, apparently unconcerned about the fact that they were about to spend five hot, extra hours driving in their enormous truck. “The schedule got a little messed up with our extra days in Michigan, and besides, it’s not that far out of the way.”

Dad pulled off his hat, revealing a bright red mark encircling his forehead. “I’ve got to warn you,” he said with a deep sigh. “It’s going to be a hot couple of days in Indy. I checked the forecast this morning, and it looks like it’s going to be at least ninety-five, with eighty percent humidity.”

Lucy could see that Herb was trying to hold back tears. Her brother had never done well in heat when he didn’t have some sort of water to cool off in, and the poor kid was bored stiff. He had no one to play with, now that his mice had moved on to greener pastures, and he never got to help with any of the baking. He spent his days playing with a LEGO set (building the same three things over and over again) or drawing with chalk outside the food truck. He’d also started working his way through Freddy’s math workbooks for fun.

There was more than a week to go before the Ohio Food Truck Festival started, and Lucy wasn’t sure any one of them would make it that long.

“So, tonight,” Dad said in a weary voice, “we have a lot to do. Herb, you’ll come to the store with me so you can cool off in the freezer aisle while we get some more supplies. Lucy, you can start making crusts for the motor show. Freddy, I need you to clean out the truck, and then—”

“What about swimming?” Herb asked, interrupting. “I didn’t get to go in the water at all yesterday, and—”

Dad cut him off before he could finish. It was almost as if he hadn’t heard Herb at all. Like he’d zoned out and disappeared—just the way he had, over and over again, after Mom died. “Lucy, I’m also going to need you to take another couple loads to the Laundromat, and then if you could get dinner started while—”

“No,” Lucy said. The heat had obviously melted the last remnants of her patience, and she suddenly felt something inside her snap. “I’m not doing any of that. It’s hot, I’m tired, Herb wants to go swimming, and there’s no reason we need to do any of these chores right this second. What’s the rush?”

“Lucy,” Dad said, his voice equally snappy, “must I remind you that this is a family experiment? The whole point of this summer was for us to build something new together, and work hard to succeed.” He huffed out a breath and ran a shaking, sweaty hand through his hair. “I refuse to fail at the Food Truck Festival. Failing isn’t an option. And as I’ve told you kids time and again, we can’t succeed if we’re not all doing our part.” He slapped his hat on the table. “If you don’t like the way something’s working, Lucy, perhaps it’s worth taking a closer look at your approach to the process. You can propose a solution and we’ll analyze it, then—”

“No!” Lucy growled. “This is your experiment, your adventure, and you’re the parent so it’s your job to fix it if something’s not working. I can’t do everything. You want to pretend that this food truck is going to fix us and make everything go back to the way it used to be? Well, I hate to break it to you, but it’s not!”

Dad opened his mouth, but no words came out. Freddy and Herb were staring at their sister like she’d suddenly grown an extra ear, right in the middle of her forehead.

Lucy heaved a sigh, and all the words she’d been holding back for far too long spilled out of her. “Nothing has been the same