She opened the door holding her coffee.
"Oh — yeah," she said. "Honestly, you should buy a new one. That thing is ancient. It quit halfway through my cream and I had eleven people sitting in my dining room with no cake."
⸻
She took a sip.
"So thanks for that ruined night, I guess."
⸻
That was the moment I understood she'd done it on purpose, and that she didn't feel guilty about it at all.
⸻
So the next morning, I came up with the plan to teach her a nice lesson.
⸻
I started by taking the mixer to a small appliance repair shop downtown, the kind of place with a handwritten sign in the window and an owner named Mr. Delgado who'd been fixing vintage kitchen equipment for almost forty years.
⸻
"This is a 1989 K5-A," he told me, turning it over carefully on his workbench. "Solid motor housing, all-metal gears. They don't build them like this anymore. The motor's completely burned out, though. Someone ran it dry, no lubrication, probably overheated it running continuously without breaks."
⸻
"Can it be fixed?" I asked.
⸻
"It can," he said. "New motor, full rewire. It'll run you about two hundred and forty dollars, parts and labor. Worth it, honestly, for a machine like this. They're getting harder to find in this condition."
⸻
I paid the deposit and left it with him, then drove home and sat at my kitchen table with a notepad, working through exactly what I actually wanted out of the next few weeks.
⸻
I wasn't interested in screaming matches over the fence, or petty tricks, or anything that would make me feel worse about myself once the satisfaction wore off. I wanted something considerably more useful than revenge.
⸻
