The Waffle House on the Pier - Tilly Tennant Page 0,41

the younger two (maybe around five or six, who looked like a twin boy and girl to Sadie’s untrained eye) simply got swept up in their older siblings’ enthusiasm.

When she’d first taken the order, Sadie had worried that it was quite a big one and a lot for Gammy to remember – there were six of them after all – but she reasoned that it was nothing Gammy hadn’t done before, and in all honesty, if this business was going to continue trading then she was going to have to cope with this and much bigger orders. Sometimes, you just had to throw someone in and force them to swim, and April wouldn’t have appreciated Sadie’s doubts about her abilities, even if Sadie had been able or willing to articulate them.

But then one of the older boys at the table wrinkled his nose. He looked at his mother.

‘Can you smell something?’

The mother looked at Sadie, and Sadie could see that she’d quickly come to the same conclusion as she had.

‘Oh!’ Sadie exclaimed without meaning to. Immediately she smoothed the look of panic from her face. ‘Please excuse me, I need to…’

Without finishing her sentence she hurried to the kitchen to see her grandmother staring at the waffle iron as smoke poured out of it.

‘Gammy!’ Sadie cried, rushing to unlock the contraption. Inside was a black mess that had once been pristine batter, and then briefly transformed into a perfect waffle, before it had continued on its journey to complete incineration. It was now something that would even offend the bin.

‘Oh…’ April said, looking blankly at Sadie. ‘That’s been in too long. The setting must have been real high. I wonder how that happened…’

‘No idea,’ Sadie replied briskly, trying to scrape out the mess as quickly as she could and burning her hand in the process. She cried out, the pain all the worse for the fact that it was red-hot sugar sticking to her skin, but there was no time to worry about it now. She had to get this stinking mess out of the restaurant and get some windows open so the smell wouldn’t infect the entire building and put everyone off their food. And she had to get a replacement order on the go for the customers who were waiting. The burnt food wasn’t coming off the waffle iron though, and it was going to take time to clean – more time than she had. ‘Is there another…?’

Sadie’s gaze fell on an unused iron on a nearby counter top. She rushed over to get it and turned it on before going to fetch an already prepared jug of batter.

‘You’d better throw that mess away,’ April said, looking at the burnt offering in the other iron. ‘We can’t serve that.’

‘I’m going to. Gammy… do you think you’ll be OK to do some fresh ones? Only I really need to be at the counter…’

‘Of course!’ her grandmother said, looking a little bemused and a little irritated too. ‘Why else do you think I’m standing here? I don’t know why you came back here interfering anyway.’

Sadie offered a tight smile. ‘Thanks, Gammy. I’ll get back to the dining room, then. Call me if you need me.’

‘I won’t,’ April called after her as Sadie left her to it. Sadie’s stomach dropped and her hand throbbed where she’d burnt it, but she took a deep breath and started to make her way to the table she’d just left to apologise that their food was going to be delayed. She’d have to give it five minutes, she decided, and then she’d sneak back into the kitchen on pretence of needing something from there to check if everything was under control.

‘I’m so sorry…’ Sadie began as she got back to the family. ‘Your order will be out just as soon as we can get it remade.’

The father smiled and waved away the apology and none of them seemed particularly concerned or upset that they would have to wait for their food. They were obviously nice people, and Sadie felt she and April had got off lightly on this occasion. But next time they might not be so lucky.

Chapter Nine

April and Kenneth had always closed up at 4 p.m. They’d never seen the point in staying open later; they’d always felt it was around the time of day that most people turned their thoughts to the evening meal and didn’t want to fill up on sugary snacks. Waffles and pancakes, they’d said, were a sweet treat