Inked and Iced

The email came in on a Tuesday, right in the middle of my sourdough proof. Ethel Hart, our landlady, subject line: "IMPORTANT: building meeting Thursday." I read it standing at the bench with flour up both wrists, and by the time I got to the word "merger" I had to set down my phone so I didn't drop it in the dough.

I'm Dara Goldberg, thirty-four, pastry chef, and I've run Golden Crust out of the first floor of that building on Argyle Street for six years. I built that bakery. Every recipe, every shelf, every regular who comes in for the cardamom buns on a Saturday. And now Ethel wanted to "combine creative operations" with the tattoo parlor downstairs.

The tattoo parlor. Ink & Needle, run by a woman named Lexi Cartwright who I knew mostly through her music and her customers. The parlor sat right below my kitchen, and Lexi apparently believed that anyone within three floors wanted to hear whatever she was playing that day. Some days it was punk. Some days it was that twangy country stuff. Once, for a full week, it had been the same four songs on repeat, and I still can't hear any of them without wanting to throw a rolling pin down the stairs.

The morning after the email, the music was thumping away at nine sharp. I had a wedding cake order due Friday, three tiers, lemon and elderflower, and the bass was coming up through the floor like it had a personal grudge against my buttercream. I gave it an hour. I gave it ninety minutes. Then I wiped my hands, untied my apron, and went down the back stairs to the hallway between the two units.

The hallway smelled like ink and antiseptic, and I heard the buzz of a tattoo machine over the music. The door to the parlor stood half open, and there she was, Lexi, bent over somebody's forearm, black hair pinned up with a pencil, sleeves of tattoos running down both arms. She's thirty-one, three years younger than me, and she has one of those faces that always looks like she's about to laugh at a joke you haven't heard yet.

She looked up when I knocked on the doorframe.

"Hold that thought," she said to her customer, and flipped the volume down with her elbow. "Morning."

"Morning." I crossed my arms. "Could you turn the music down a bit? I've got a wedding cake going and the bass is shaking the ganache."

Lexi leaned back on her stool and grinned. "The ganache. Aye, God forbid the ganache gets shaken."

"I'm serious, Lexi. It's not just background noise up there. It comes through the floor like it's living rent free."

"It's nine in the morning. I've been open since eight and you've been thumping around up there since half seven. I hear your stand mixer, you know. Every morning. Like a helicopter taking off."

"My mixer is doing a job."

"So's my music." She capped her needle and set her machine down, giving the customer a wink. "Two minutes, hen." Then she turned back to me and swung the stool around. "Besides, you've got bigger things to worry about than my playlist. Have you read Ethel's email?"

"That's actually the other thing I wanted to talk about."

"I read it at seven this morning." She stood up and stretched, and I noticed for the first time she was nearly my height, maybe an inch shorter. "Merged operation. One creative space. Joint planning sessions. She wants us to design the layout together."

"Together," I said.

"Together. You and me, Dara. Sharing a floor plan, sharing a budget, sharing, and this is my favorite part, sharing a brand identity." She made little quote marks in the air. "Ethel wants to call it something like The Craft House. I'm not joking."

"That's a terrible name."

"It's a shocking name. I told her so and she told me to sleep on it." Lexi walked to the little kitchenette in the corner and put the kettle on. "Tea?"

"I don't want tea, I want my bakery."

"Nobody's taking your bakery." She got down two mugs anyway, which annoyed me more than if she'd ignored me. "Look, sit down for two minutes. The customer's getting tea too, since I'm a good host and you apparently came down here just to shout about bass."

"I didn't shout."

"You absolutely shouted a little." She handed a mug to her customer, a big man with a half finished dragon on his arm, and poured mine without asking what I took. Milk, no sugar, which was correct, which annoyed me.

I sat on the bench by the coat hooks because there was nowhere else. "So what's your read on it?" I asked, because I couldn't sit in silence.

"My read is Ethel's seventy-eight, both our leases are up in March, and she'd rather sort the building out now than leave a mess for her nephew to clean up later." Lexi sat back on her stool and turned the mug in her hands. "She's not killing either business. She's tying us together so neither of us can leave without the other."

"That's a hell of a way to run a building."

"It's a hell of a way to run anything, but it's Ethel, so." She shrugged. "Question is what we do about it."

"We tell her no!"

"And then what? She splits the building, we both lose our spots, and you're hunting for a kitchen in Glasgow with six weeks' notice. Good luck with commercial rents right now." She raised an eyebrow at me. "You've got a wedding cake due Friday. Where would you even bake it?"

I hated that she knew about the wedding cake. I hated it a lot. "How do you know about my cake?"

"The bride came in last week wanting a tattoo of a lemon. She mentioned it. Small building, Dara. Word travels about nine feet, floor to floor."

I drank my tea because I needed something to do with my hands. The customer in the chair snorted, and Lexi told him to mind his own dragon.

"Fine," I said. "Suppose we don't say no. Suppose we go along with it. What does that even look like? You've got needles and ink and blood stuff down here. I've got flour and ovens and health inspection paperwork upstairs. Nobody at the council is letting a tattoo parlor share air with a food business."

"That's the meeting, isn't it." Lexi set her mug down. "Ethel's doing her big announcement Thursday, seven o'clock, right here in the hallway because she refuses to pay for a room anywhere. She'll have her plans. She's had them for weeks, I'd bet money. She probably already knows how she wants it laid out and she's going to let us argue about it for an hour and then do what she likes."

"That sounds like Ethel."

"It does." She grinned at me again, that grin. "You know, for somebody who came down here to start a fight, you're very good at sitting still."

"I didn't come down to fight. I came down about the music."

"You came down about the music and stayed about the merger."

"Maybe I stayed because you made tea I didn't ask for."

"Maybe you stayed because you're curious and stubborn about admitting it." She picked her machine back up and nodded at her customer. "Right, hen, where were we. Dragon needs shading."

I stood, rinsed my mug in her little sink without being asked, which felt as though I had won a minor triumph. At the door I turned back.

"Lexi. Thursday. Whatever Ethel's planning, we should probably go in with a position. Not against each other."

Lexi looked up from the dragon. "Is that you proposing an alliance, Dara Goldberg?"

"It's me proposing we don't make fools of ourselves in front of our landlady."

"Same thing. Aye, alright. Come down at six and we'll figure out what we actually want before she tells us what we're getting." She paused, needle hovering. "And I'll keep the music down till Friday. Wedding cake truce."

I said thank you, which cost me something, and climbed the back stairs to my kitchen. The bass stayed off. The ganache set. And I spent the whole afternoon not thinking about Thursday, meaning I thought about almost nothing else.

* * *

Thursday came grey and drizzling, the way Glasgow does Thursday. At six I locked up the bakery and went down the stairs. Lexi had the parlor closed early, lights warm, and she'd put out three chairs and a plate of shortbread she'd bought from my own counter that morning, the thief.

Ethel Hart arrived at five past seven, small and sharp eyed in a green coat, carrying a folder thick enough to stop a door with. She looked at the two of us standing there and smiled like someone who had already won.

"Right," she said, dropping the folder on the counter. "Shall we begin?"

Ethel opened the folder before either of us sat down. She had printouts. Actual printouts, with highlighter on them, and one of them was a floor plan of the building that somebody had drawn with a ruler.

"Sit," she said. We sat. Lexi poured her a tea, milk no sugar, and Ethel took it like she'd ordered it. "Now. You've both had time to think. Good. Save your speeches. Here's what's happening."

She turned the floor plan around so we could read it upside down, which felt intentional.

"Ground floor stays Lexi's. First floor stays Dara's. The stairwell gets a proper door at the bottom, keypad, because I'm not having your customers wandering into each other's shops. And there's a shared back room, that storeroom neither of you uses, becoming a little counter. Coffee, pastries, a till."

"A counter," I said.

"A counter. The tattoo people queue for twenty minutes on a Saturday and buy nothing. The bakery customers walk past all that lovely ink and buy nothing. You're both idiots with money sitting on the floor between you. I'm just holding the shovel."

Lexi laughed before she could stop herself. Ethel gave her a look that said behave, and Lexi behaved.

"Nobody merges your businesses. You keep your names, your leases, your own books. You just cooperate or you both go looking for new premises in March and I take a smaller rent from a letting agency that doesn't chat." She closed the folder. "Questions."

I had about nine. I asked three. Lexi asked four, mostly about who paid for the till and whether the coffee counter meant her clients could bring lattes into the chair area, which Ethel said absolutely not, ink and milk do not mix. At half past eight Ethel stood, buttoned her green coat, and said she'd send the paperwork Monday.

At the door she stopped and looked back at us both.

"You two argued less than I expected. Disappointing. Fix that by next month." And she was gone into the drizzle.

Lexi and I stood in the hallway a moment, listening to the rain.

"So that's that," she said.

"That's that."

"Shortbread?" She nudged the plate toward me. I took a piece of my own shortbread off my own plate in her shop, and we didn't say anything else about it.

* * *

Friday was the cake, so Friday was a blur of lemon curd and swearing. The three tiers came together by two in the afternoon, lemon and elderflower, and the bride cried in the shop when she saw it, which was nice, and then her mother tried to renegotiate the delivery fee, which was less nice, and I held my price because my mother didn't raise an idiot. Money settled, cake delivered, done.

Which meant Saturday I woke up with nothing to panic about, and my body didn't know what to do with that. I opened the bakery anyway because the routine is the routine, and by eleven the counter was picked over and I found myself standing in the quiet kitchen with my hands twitching.

That's when I went looking for the tin.

My gran's sewing tin lived in a box in my flat for years, but some of her stuff had migrated to a drawer in the bakery back room because I kept meaning to sort it and never did. I dug through it and found what I was after. Her knitting patterns. A whole folder of them, some cut out of old magazines, some written in her own hand on the back of envelopes.

And there it was. The lace shawl. She'd made one for every woman in the family, and I'd watched her make mine when I was small, needles going like she was stirring something. The pattern was hers, written out in pencil, corrected twice, with a note in the margin that said "trust the yarn" which I have never understood and have never once managed to ignore.

I'm thirty-four, and I don't knit. Never learned. But I took the pattern upstairs anyway and read it like a recipe, because a recipe is a recipe, and I could see how it worked. Cast on. Repeat the lace