A Completely Yellow Car
What do I do?
Butter mellow yellow, lemon yellow, cream yellow, mustard yellow…
I knew more yellows now than I ever had before—incomparably more. Ever since I’d gotten the Golden Hand, I’d thrown myself into pottery, sewing, baking, and every other kind of creative work, so of course I had.
But the car Reni had chosen was a pure, absolute yellow—the kind that refused any modifier in front of the word at all.
“……”
I brightened my phone screen and stared again at the car painted in that yellow.
Ah. If I absolutely had to stick a qualifier on it, forsythia would do.
While I stood there speechless before a color like a cluster of bright yellow forsythia blossoms, Reni kneaded my arm and called to me.
“Daddy…”
Why was he kneading my arm?
“Daddy, do you hate yellow?”
“N-no? Um, no, I don’t hate it, it’s just…”
Watching my face carefully, Reni added in a quiet little voice, “Then white is okay too.”
Looking a bit dejected, he let go of my hand and fidgeted. Oh no.
“We’ll go with yellow for sure. Daddy likes the yellow broom-broom too.”
Reni’s face lit up as if someone had flipped on every light in the room. He planted a little smacking kiss on my cheek, then ran off to Luca and started playing again.
“……”
Why did I feel like I’d just been scammed…
After I’d put the kids to bed, I stood before the island counter with a grimly determined expression. The brand-new baking tools I’d bought today still felt awkward in my hands, but I tried not to dwell on it and fixed my eyes on the recipe.
“……”
It was a recipe I’d written myself. Why did it look so unfamiliar?
“…Hup!”
I quietly pumped myself up, rolled up my sleeves, and cracked eggs into a bowl, mixing them with sugar. Next came the milk, the butter, the lemon zest…
So far, so easy. Well, of course—anyone could do this much, right?
I sifted in the cake flour, mixed…
Whipping the batter with a soft slap-slap-slap, I felt a fair amount of relief. Despite the anxious, wavering look in my eyes, my body remembered the next moves and followed the recipe as smoothly as water flowing downhill.
The snap of my wrist while whipping, the instinct for when the double boiler had hit just the right temperature, knowing to divide the ingredients and mix them in stages instead of dumping everything in at once, lining the pan with a baking sheet, buttering it, pouring the batter and then tapping the pan to knock out the air—things a first-time baker would have had to carefully memorize one by one, I was doing as naturally as breathing.
Even dividing the freshly baked cake sheet into three perfectly even layers went cleanly.
When I tried to pipe cream between the sheets with a piping bag, though, my control of the pressure slipped just a little. The cream didn’t distribute evenly, and the cake tilted.
Sweating inwardly, I lifted the sheet back off, spread the cream out evenly, and set the second sheet in place. After another clumsy round of cream-spreading, I added the next sheet, then began turning the cake board and coating the whole thing in whipped cream.
Spreading cream smooth and even, without a single lump or thick spot anywhere, was anything but easy…
“Ah. I ruined it.”
I set down the long spatula with a blank look on my face. Getting the whipped cream to a proper thickness already took skill, but the bigger problem right now was that I’d completely forgotten to add food coloring to the blueberry cream.
When I baked while leaning on a craftsman’s mastery, I never made mistakes like this even when I was half zoned out. And if I went somewhere else and still made slip-ups like forgetting something midway through… that would be a real problem.
Just in case, I cut a piece of the cake and took a bite, half-afraid the flavor would be a complete disaster too.
“…Phew.”
At least the taste of the cake wasn’t that bad.
“D-Daddy! Uung-ah!”
Slap!
“Luca, you can’t hit Daddy like that! You’ll startle him while he’s sleeping!”
“Yeah.”
Slap!
“Lucaaa…!”
I sat bolt upright before the kids could truly start fighting.
“Daddy’s up.”
Truth was, the mistakes from baking a cake for the first time last night had shaken me so badly that I’d gotten up at dawn, made another cake, and only then dozed off for a bit.
“Time to make it again.”
“Uung?”
Still half-asleep, I muttered to myself with my head down. Reni rested his head against my knee and looked up at me.
“Yeah. Daddy’s going to make you cake this morning.”
“Cake!”
Reni sat up at once and bounced his knees in pure joy.
“Kyaaak!”
Luca, not knowing what was going on but thrilled that his big brother was happy, joined right in.
I moved both boys from the bed to the dining chairs and wiped their faces and hands with a damp towel. Daddy’s brain wasn’t fully online yet, so we were doing the express version. After a quick wash of my own, I set out the breakfast I’d prepared ahead of time.
For Reni, finely diced banana and strawberries, a boiled egg, and a cup of milk. For Luca, baby food in a sippy cup—strangely enough, he would hurl utensils but never the sippy cup.
While the kids ate, I put on something that was not quite a show but not not a show either. If Reni felt I wasn’t paying attention to him during a meal, he got sad; if Luca felt the same, he got furious.
“Okay. Daddy’s going to make the cake you’ll have for dessert now. Watch carefully while you eat, all right?”
“Yes!”
“Yeah.”
The cake layers that had cooled thoroughly while I napped, I cut into three tiers, filled the spaces with cream, and coated everything in whipped cream all over again.
“…Hmm.”
My hands were a little better than last night, at least. Of course they were—how many cakes had I baked by now…
“Daddy, the cake is black.”
Reni’s voice held a faint note of panic.
“I made it a dark color on purpose. Now I’m going to put golden stars and a sun on top.”
“Wow!”
I popped white chocolate out of star-shaped molds, then took chocolate from hemisphere molds, briefly touched the edges to a hot plate to melt them, and joined them into single spheres. After dusting them with gold powder, I set about decorating the cake. Reni watched with sparkling eyes and said,
“Daddy, the sun is hollow inside. Can’t we put something in?”
“…That’s actually a really good idea.”
Outside the hours spent looking after the kids, I spent the next few days memorizing recipes cold and practicing without pause. Originally I’d been scheduled to deliver desserts to James early Friday morning, but this week I asked for his understanding, moved the delivery up a day, and knocked that out as well.
And then—dawn on the day of the shoot.
Having prepared until there was nothing left to prepare, I got up early, drank a cup of coffee, and waited for Cassandra. Before long, looking every inch the perfect manager even at that hour, she knocked on our door.
“Welcome. Have you had breakfast?”
“I stopped by a café on the way. Here—take this.”
It was a box of the dishes I’d thrown for today’s shoot. I set it on the island table, took the pieces out one by one, and held them up to the light.
“……”
Not bad.
I’d made both designs—the one Evan and Kelly had already signed off on, and the new one I’d come up with this time—and both looked solid. I finished my inspection with that dry little internal verdict, and Cassandra spoke with a sly smile.
“Don’t they look fantastic? Honestly, I started wondering whether these were really made by the same person who said he ‘doesn’t know art.’”
“…Please don’t tease me. Ah—if you don’t mind, would you like some cake?”
Cassandra didn’t refuse. I pulled out one of the cake boxes that had piled up in the fridge over the past few days and cut her a generous slice.
“Wait, why are there so many cakes?”
“I was practicing ahead of time… In case I make mistakes somewhere unfamiliar.”
“Good grief, Jun. You’re really impossible.”
“If you’re all right with it, take a few trays home when you leave later.”
Cassandra nodded.
“Charlie’s going to be so excited he’ll practically take off flying. I’ll have to share some with the neighbors too. Are the kids still asleep?”
“Yes. They’ll be worn out from waiting all day, so I was thinking we might as well wake them at the studio.”
We could always change them into their shoot clothes in the car. Cassandra nodded, then suddenly studied me with a frank stare.
“Jun, it looks like you’ve lost a little weight these past few days. You’re not sick, are you?”
“Huh? Ah… No. Must be the nerves.”
In truth it wasn’t so much nerves about the shoot as it was days of being wound tight, straining for every baking session to go off without a single mistake.
“If you’re not sick, then that’s actually perfect. You’ll photograph well!”
“Um… yeah.”
Having already polished off her slice of cake, Cassandra stood and started carefully packing the dishes back into the box.
“Shall we get ready and head out, then? Skin care and makeup will take a while once we’re there… You packed separate clothes for the shoot, right?”
“I packed clothes, but—we’re getting skin care too?”
“Yes. I told Kelly you’re not the type to fuss over that sort of thing, and that with childcare you don’t have the time anyway, so she said she’d speak to the makeup team for the shoot.”
I pictured James sitting there from dawn with a pale mask pack on his face for a shoot of his own.
“No, is that really necessary…”
“Vanessa even brought her personal makeup team, so don’t you dare say ‘that far’! Besides, Jun, your face is going to play a huge role in selling this recipe book right alongside Vanessa. Kelly seemed thoroughly fired up about it too.”
“……”
I didn’t exactly agree, but for a moment I wondered whether I should have been fretting over my appearance these past few days instead of the cakes.
…No. Still not. And wasn’t I only supposed to be showing my side and back profile anyway?
When I mentioned that part to Cassandra, she flicked a glance at my face and said, “If the photos turn out well, I think it might be good to show your face. I wouldn’t have said that before—but we’ve decided to go all-in now, haven’t we?”
“That’s true. But the kids still won’t show their faces, right? That won’t be a problem?”
“Of course not. Babies are adorable enough with just the backs of their heads. And anyway, the star of this shoot is you, Jun.”
“Okay.”
I packed the kids’ meals, toys, clothes, and all the other odds and ends, then came downstairs to a cool wash of dawn air. In just a few more weeks it would start getting properly cold. The car was scheduled for delivery next week—I’d bought it at exactly the right time.
Cassandra must have been thinking the same thing, because she brought up the car.
“Speaking of which, what color did you pick for the car?”
“I ordered yellow.”
“Huh? Wait—why? No, I don’t mean anything by it, it’s just unexpected that you chose yellow, Jun. I figured you’d go for white or silver.”
“Reni said he’d like it if the broom-broom was yellow like starlight…”
Cassandra laughed cheerfully. I shrugged.
“The upside is that color is relatively unpopular, so I can pick it up Monday morning next week.”
In other words, even if I ran a little late collecting Reni, I’d be able to go get him in my own car.
“That’s great. And when I was looking at this model, I saw the yellow in person—it’s actually pretty. Just a bold color I didn’t expect.”
If even Cassandra called it bold, just how eye-catching was it going to be? Panic prickled through me, but she clapped my shoulder and went on.
“Honestly, we forget because of your personality, but you’re only in your mid-twenties, Jun. Who cares if it’s yellow—what about rainbow?”
“That’s not comforting.”
I loaded the stroller into the trunk, wrapped the kids in blankets, carried them downstairs, and buckled them into their seats. Neither boy woke; they slept on, soft and even.
“All right—let’s go!”
Cassandra punched the address of the shoot studio Kelly had sent into the navigation. Heading out to work at the hour when everyone else was commuting felt strangely new after so long.
Dawn air turned into morning air. We watched the city begin to wake and bustle, and arrived at the studio at a leisurely pace. And then—
“…Ah.”
Blazing lights, enormous cameras, and staff rushing in every direction.
Only then did I feel it in my bones: the “work” I was about to do today was a kind of work I had never done once in my entire life.