Dialect Coach & the Welder

Robin Price was thirty-four years old, a self-employed welder with a bad shoulder, a good truck, and a strict personal policy about not murdering anybody in hotel hallways, and that policy was being tested hard at three in the morning on a Saturday.

The ground floor of the hotel had been taken over completely by a comic convention, which meant the lobby smelled like energy drinks and body paint, and there was a man dressed as a green lantern standing on a luggage cart at eleven at night for reasons nobody would explain to her. Robin had a contract with the convention, a small one but a real one, to do repairs on the metal sculptures out front, the big copper heron and the steel sunburst and that weird abstract thing nobody liked, and the contract said after-hours access, and after-hours access meant the service elevator, and the service elevator was blocked.

Not broken. Blocked. There were four costume trunks stacked in front of it like a monument to somebody's bad manners, each one taller than her rolling toolbox, and taped to the top trunk was a note in loopy handwriting that said BACK IN TEN and had been there, she was fairly sure, since Tuesday.

She stood there with her gear cart and stared at the note for a while. Her gear cart had a bad wheel, so it made a rhythmic squeak every time she adjusted her grip, squeak, squeak, squeak, like the hotel itself was complaining on her behalf. Six months she'd been in this town. Six months of building a quiet little life, a garage apartment, a regular client list, zero drama, and then the theater troupe had rolled in with their costume racks and their dialect coach and ruined everything.

Because she knew whose trunks those were. Everybody in this hotel knew whose trunks those were.

"Back in ten," she said to the note. "Sure. And my heron is load rated for a thousand pounds."

The note did not answer, which was typical.

Here was the thing, and Robin would have died before saying it out loud, but here was the thing. The trunks weren't even the real problem. The real problem was that she and the dialect coach had developed what she could only call a turf war, except turf wars usually involved gangs or prisons, and theirs involved a service elevator and a man who said words like "imperious" without irony. His name was Saul. He was thirty-seven, he coached the touring troupe's actors on accents, and he had, within forty-eight hours of arriving, informed her that her "midwestern flatness" was "an acoustic crime." She had informed him that his voice sounded like a wedding DJ who'd read one book. It had escalated from there. It had been escalating for two weeks.

There had been a truce, though. An unwritten one, worked out in the hallway outside the freight door around week one, after they'd both shown up at three a.m. with full carts and neither had wanted to be the one who blinked. One week on, one week off, midnight to six. She had this week. He knew she had this week. Which meant the trunks weren't just rude, they were a move, a chess move made with steamer trunks, and Robin respected it and hated it in equal measure.

She got her phone out to text the hotel manager, Deb, who was a saint but also asleep, and then she noticed something better. Or worse. Better and worse.

The ballroom doors at the end of the hallway were cracked open about four inches, and there was light coming through, warm yellow light at three in the morning, and nobody, absolutely nobody, was supposed to be in the ballroom at three in the morning, because the ballroom was where the Great Lakes Pie Classic had set up its judging tables, and the pies were already in, already displayed, sitting under glass like museum pieces until eight a.m. Saturday. Robin knew this because the convention map had a big arrow on it that said PIE and she had a weakness she wasn't proud of.

She parked her cart by the ice machine, which was a decision she'd regret later, and padded down the hall in her boots, quiet as a woman in steel toes could manage, which was not very.

The gap in the doors showed her the whole picture at once, and it was a beautiful picture. There was a man in shirtsleeves crouched on the ballroom floor next to the display pedestal, and on the pedestal was a pie, or the remains of a pie, and the man was holding a piece of crust in his fingers the way other men held a wounded bird. Behind him, the fire escape door stood open to the night air, still swinging a little on its hinge. A stuffed pheasant perched on the judging table nearby, staring at him with its dead glass eye, the official Pie Classic bird, apparently, and even the bird looked like it was deciding whether to report him.

Robin pushed the door open with one boot.

"Well, well," she said, and Saul Levitt did not jump, because Saul never jumped, but he did freeze in a way she found deeply satisfying, one knee down on the ballroom carpet, crust in hand, mouth open.

"This is not what it looks like," he said.

"It looks like you broke into the pie contest at three in the morning through a fire escape."

"Yes, all right, it is exactly what it looks like."

She came in and let the door close behind her, arms crossed, taking her time about it. Up close the situation was worse than she'd thought, because it wasn't just a broken pie, it was a crime scene. There were crumbs in a radius of maybe four feet. The tin had rolled under the judging table. Somewhere in the wreckage there had been a lattice crust, because there were strips of it scattered around like shrapnel, and Saul was assembling a piece of it in his palms with the concentration of a surgeon.

"What happened to yours?" she asked, because she couldn't help it, because her mouth had never once in her life waited for her brain.

"A Deadpool elbowed the pedestal." He said it flat, like reading a weather report. "A man dressed as a mercenary, in a hotel, at a family convention, swung his elbow during a photo and took out the finest peach-rhubarb this county has ever produced. I spent eleven hours on that crust. Eleven. It had layers you could read a newspaper through."

"Who's reading a newspaper through a crust?"

"Julia Child would have," he said, with dignity, and stood up, brushing crumbs off his trousers. He was taller than her by a few inches, dark-haired, with one of those faces that looked like it was always about to make a joke and then talked itself out of it. Right now there was no joke in it. Right now he looked like he was standing in the wreckage of his own village.

She should have walked out. That was the correct move, the smart move, the move her six months of quiet drama-free living demanded. She had a contract to think about, and a reputation, and she was standing in a ballroom at three a.m. with a man she'd publicly called a wedding DJ, next to evidence of a felony at worst and a rules violation at best.

Instead she looked at the open fire escape door, and then at him, and did the math out loud.

"You used my week," she said. "The trunks in front of the service elevator. That was today. That was a move. And then you came in through the fire escape instead of waiting for the truce, because you didn't want to be caught wheeling pie equipment at three a.m., which means you knew, you knew you were doing something shady."

"The trunks were a scheduling accident," Saul said.

"Your scheduling accident had a handwritten note."

"A very efficient accident."

"Uh-huh." She crouched down next to the mess before she could stop herself, because the crust fragments really were something, thin and layered and golden, and she'd eaten a lot of gas station pie in her thirty-four years and this was not that. She picked up a strip and it didn't even crumble wrong. It was, annoyingly, perfect. "Okay, this is good crust. This is obnoxiously good crust."

"Thank you," he said, and then, suspiciously, "why are you crouching near my crime scene?"

"Because," Robin said, and here is where she should have stopped, and did not stop, "I know a guy. Well, I know a kitchen. The hotel kitchen. The night cook, Fiona, owes me, because I fixed the leg on her prep table last month and also I fixed the leg on her ex-boyfriend's motorcycle, which is a longer story. And a convection oven at three a.m. is sitting there doing nothing."

Saul turned to look at her fully for the first time, holding his sad crust fragment, and his eyebrows went up in a way that made her immediately want to take it all back.

"You're proposing," he said slowly, "that we break into a second room."

"I'm proposing we fix your pie before eight a.m., because I've got a contract with this convention and if the Pie Classic gets canceled over sabotage I lose my good client, so as far as I'm concerned this is self-interest." She stood up and wiped her hands on her jeans. "Peach and rhubarb. How much do you have on hand?"

"Enough for one more, in my room, in a cooler." He was already pulling out his phone, scrolling, some kind of recipe open on it, because of course he had the recipe open on his phone at all times. "But the filling has to macerate and the dough has to rest and it's past three already, so we'd have maybe five hours, and rhubarb doesn't forgive."

"Neither do I," said Robin, "so we'll get along fine," and she was already walking toward the fire escape door, and the truly humiliating part, the part she'd think about later with her face in a pillow, was that she was kind of excited.

Fiona, it turned out, had left a note on the kitchen door that said "IF YOU ARE DEB, THE ICE MACHINE IS FIXED, STOP ASKING," which was not exactly an invitation but was close enough for two people standing in a hallway at three in the morning with contraband crust fragments in their pockets.

Robin knocked anyway, three times, then texted her, then waited with her hands in her pockets while Saul paced the length of the hallway like a large anxious bird. He had gone back to his room first, coming down with a canvas cooler and a rolling suitcase that squeaked worse than her cart, and she'd decided not to ask what was in the suitcase because the answer was clearly "pie equipment."

"She's not answering," Robin said.

"She's the night cook. She's cooking. That's the whole problem with night cooks."

"She's probably on break. She takes her break at three, she told me, because the night crowd is dead and she can smoke in peace by the loading dock." Robin pulled out her phone again and typed with one thumb. "Fiona. It's the welder. I need the big kitchen, it's an emergency, it's a pie emergency, don't ask. Okay sent."

"That is not a message that inspires confidence."

"It's a message that gets results," Robin said, and forty seconds later her phone buzzed and she turned the screen toward him. "Okay, she says yes, she says the loading dock door code is 4417, and she says, and I quote, if Deb finds out I was never here."

"That woman is a hero," Saul said, with feeling.

The hotel kitchen was enormous and cold and smelled like industrial dish soap, and the convection ovens along the back wall were the biggest things Robin had ever seen outside of an aircraft hangar. She whistled. Saul was already unpacking the cooler with the focus of a man defusing, no, not that, with the focus of a surgeon, laying out peaches and rhubarb and a bag of flour and a small tin of something that he held like a holy relic.

"Cardamom," he said.

"That's a lot of cardamom."

"It is the correct amount of cardamom."

"How much is the correct amount?"

"Half a teaspoon," he said, "and if you say 'that looks like more than half a teaspoon' I'm going to need you to leave."

"It looks like more than half a teaspoon."

"Out."

But he was almost smiling when he said it, and she caught it, and that was a problem, because she'd spent six months building a life with zero people in it who smiled at her like that, like she was a worthy opponent at minimum, and here was this ridiculous man with his eleven-hour crust and his relic tin and his rolling suitcase full of pie equipment, and she was already rolling up her sleeves.

He handed her a second apron from the suitcase, because of course he had spare aprons, navy blue, and she tied it over her flannel and tried not to think about how domestic this all looked.

"All right," she said. "Teach me, chef. I can weld, I can bend metal, I once fixed a scissor lift with a coat hanger and stubbornness. How different can dough be?"

He turned around slowly, holding a rolling pin.

"Different," he said.

It was different. It was maddeningly different, because metal did what you told it and dough had a mind of its own about everything, and Robin learned this the hard way when her first attempt at the crust came out of the mixing bowl looking like something a cat had coughed up.

"You're overworking it," Saul said, from his station, where his own dough had come together into one smooth beautiful disc like it had been ordered from a catalog. "You're treating it like you'd treat a weld. You can't manhandle it. It's not a bead, it's a negotiation."

"Everything's a negotiation if you're stubborn enough."

"That is not a phrase that has ever applied to pâte brisée."

"My dough, my philosophy." She squinted at hers. It had gone from cat-cough to slightly less sad cat-cough, which she counted as progress. "Also, real question, why butter? Why not lard? Everybody's granddad used lard and everybody's granddad won ribbons."

Saul put down his rolling pin and faced her with the expression of a professor who had waited his whole life for this question.

"Butter gives you flavor," he said. "Lard gives you structure. Lard makes shatter, and shatter is fine for a carnival, and I am not a carnival. I use butter and a whisper of shortening, and I chill it twice, and I have never lost a crust round in the six years I've competed."

"You lost last year."