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

sensible and smart. Dad was a big-shot geology professor. Lucy was a verified genius and sometimes did homework for fun. Herb went to a special math class at the university, to give him an extra challenge, because second grade was so easy for him. Everything came easily to the rest of his family. It seemed like nothing important came easily to Freddy. He was a plum in a whole family of Peaches.

Freddy climbed out of bed and sat on his brother. Herb still didn’t stir. Freddy bounced on his brother’s bed a few times, bonked him on the head with a stuffed ostrich, and finally gave up. Herb was always grumpy when he got up too early, anyway.

“Did Dad say pie?” Freddy wondered aloud, yawning as he stumbled into the hall. He sniffed the air, smelled something yummy, and made his way toward the kitchen. “For breakfast?”

Sure enough, the wooden kitchen counter was full-to-bursting with pies. Small pies, large pies, single-serve pie pockets, crustless pies, crumble-top pies, and several burnt-to-a-crisp pies. Freddy rubbed his eyes again, certain they must be deceiving him.

“Dig in!” Dad instructed with a slightly crazed look about him. Freddy had only seen his dad look like this after spending a long night in his university lab with heaps and piles of research figures.

“Dad?” Freddy asked. “Did you bake all these pies? When?”

“I stayed up all night. Just like at work, when I’m on a roll, I don’t take breaks. We’ve no time to waste, Freddy-boy. The plan is for us to hit the road as soon as possible, so I wanted to start perfecting our recipe. We’ll stop to do more pie research along the way, of course, but a pie’s crust is its foundation. If the foundation is right, the pie will be all the better, and the mix of fat to flour is crucial for flakiness, and the ratio of…” He droned on and on, making less and less sense with each word he said. Dad usually went to bed at 10:26 on the dot (immediately after the local news weather forecast) and got up at exactly 6:00. He was not the kind of guy who stayed up all night baking pies.

Lucy shuffled into the kitchen, stopping short when she saw their dad’s collection of fresh-baked pies.

Freddy grabbed two forks and passed one to his sister. “It’s research for the Great Peach Experiment,” he explained, eagerly plunging his fork into the nearest pie. “Start eating. We’ve got a lot of tasting to do.”

While Lucy and Freddy sampled pie, Dad talked through the summer plan, which did indeed sound very different from their regular summer plan. For the past few years, Dad had spent long summer days at the university, helping to oversee a bunch of graduate students’ research projects. Lucy, Freddy, and Herb spent their summer breaks at the community center pool or roaming around the neighborhood, with Lucy in charge to help keep their lives somewhat organized.

For this summer adventure, Dad had written out a detailed route for their journey, along with a daily schedule of activities. It went as follows: They would spend the first weekend of summer break at home testing recipes, buying supplies, getting stuff packed for the trip, and painting and cleaning the food truck—which had sat in the driveway for the past few days, untouched. (The truck was apparently in “great working order and ready to roll,” according to their dad, who knew nothing about food trucks.)

After that, they would visit a bunch of different cities that Dad had picked out, stopping for a few days in each to sell pie. According to Dad’s schedule, every night would be dedicated to replenishing their supplies, rolling and baking crusts, and tidying up the food truck. Every morning they would finish making their pies for the day, drive to some special spot he had picked out in each city, and hang out in the food truck, selling slices of pie to strangers. There were no weekend days off in the schedule Dad had drawn up, and Freddy didn’t see a whole lot of room for fun. But he hoped that part of this adventure was a given, and Dad had simply forgotten to write the fun stuff down.

The whole Great Peach Experiment would last four weeks. “A month should give us just enough time to test out this food truck experiment and see if we’re any good at it. If we make some of our fun money back, well, then we’ll figure out how to use the leftover funds.”

Freddy and Lucy shared a look. The night before, the three Peach siblings had done a little research on food trucks together and discovered it was highly unlikely that they would make a fortune selling pies…but Freddy wasn’t about to burst his dad’s bubble. And even if making heaps of money during this experiment wasn’t likely, it also wasn’t impossible. So Freddy had every intention of helping his family do everything they needed to do to succeed—for Mom, obviously. But also to prove to Dad that spending time pursuing this wacky idea was worth it; that they were worth it.

Just then, Herb wandered into the kitchen, rubbing his eyes. His footie pajamas were too small—he’d had to cut off the feet to make them fit—but Herb refused to toss them. The youngest Peach never got rid of anything. He took one look at the counter full of pie, and then grabbed a spoon to help with the taste testing.

“If all goes well this summer, and we figure out how to make enough money on this crazy venture that we can call it a success,” Dad added wistfully, “maybe it’ll be time for me to consider whether there’s a different kind of life out there for me—for us?”

Freddy’s eyes went wide. Had Dad—in his own odd way—just suggested that if their food truck made enough money, he might consider leaving his job? That he might, finally, be able to spend more fun time