Stale Croissants and Sharp Claws

The croissants collapsed. All forty of them, right there in the proofing box, sometime between four in the morning when they looked perfect and six when I opened the door and found a tray full of sad flat things that looked like they had given up on life. I still don't know what happened. Maybe the yeast was old. Maybe the kitchen was too warm. Maybe the universe just decided that Tuesday belonged to me personally and it was going to make that clear. It was supposed to be my day off, too. I had come in at four to cover a call-out.

I stood there for a good minute staring at them. Then my boss, Marla, walked in, looked at the trays, looked at me, and told me that maybe I wasn't as good as I thought I was. Her actual word was mediocre. She said it the way you'd read a weather report. I had worked at that bakery for four years, and in that moment I understood that I would never get anything from it except a paycheck and a bad back.

So when a message came through later that morning about an interview at the Silver Pine Resort, up the mountain, I said yes. Not because I wanted the job. I wanted it a little, I'll admit that, mostly because I wanted to be anywhere that wasn't that bakery. But the real reason I drove thirty minutes up a snowy highway on my day off was that Marla had a cousin who worked at the resort, and I knew the cousin would mention it, and I wanted the possibility of Marla hearing that her mediocre pastry chef was being courted by the fanciest place in the county. Spite is not a noble fuel but it burns hot and it burns long and it got me into my car with a portfolio of photographs and a box of the six croissants that had survived the collapse.

The drive up was the kind of thing tourists pay for. Snow on the pines, the sun doing its flat winter thing, the road climbing in long switchbacks. Summit Ridge sits at about nine thousand feet and everything up there smells faintly of cold and pine, though that morning it mostly smelled like the old coffee I'd brought in a thermos. I had been to the resort once before, years ago, for a friend's wedding, and I remembered it being the kind of place where the doorman had better posture than I ever would.

I parked, checked my reflection, decided it was hopeless, and went in.

* * *

The kitchen at the Silver Pine was the first thing that genuinely hurt my feelings. It was enormous. Stainless steel that somebody actually polished, stone countertops, a rack of copper pans hanging over the center island that I would have sold a car for. Somebody was baking bread somewhere deeper in the building because the whole space carried that warm yeast smell under the cleaner smell, and I stood in the doorway for a second just breathing it in like a weirdo.

He was already there. The manager. Dexter Barclay, the email had said. He came around the island to meet me and my first honest thought was that something about him was wrong, and my second honest thought was that I could not immediately say what.

He looked like a man in his thirties, tall, dark hair, well dressed in a way that suggested he held views about fabrics. He moved strangely, was the thing. Not badly. The opposite of badly. He crossed the kitchen in a way that made no noise at all and covered the distance with fewer steps than it should have taken, like his body had negotiated a different deal with physics than mine had. Then he stuck out his hand and I saw the fingers and the nails were not quite nails. They were thick and dark and curved and the tips of them clicked faintly against each other when his hand moved. Claws. Actual claws, neat and clean and apparently maintained, extending a handshake like it was the most normal thing in the world.

His eyes finished the job. When he looked at me directly the pupils were vertical slits, dark against a warm gold-brown iris, and they did not widen or narrow the way human pupils do. They narrowed further when the light hit them and it was the most unnervingly animal thing I had ever seen on a person wearing a collared shirt.

I shook his hand. His grip was dry and careful, like he was conscious of what his fingers could do and was moderating it for my benefit.

"You must be Justine," he said. "You found the place alright. Some people get turned around at the second switchback."

"Marla's cousin gave directions," I said, because apparently my mouth had decided spite was going to do the talking all day.

Something moved across his face at the name. Amusement, maybe. He gestured at the kitchen around us with one clawed hand and the gesture was strangely graceful, a sweep rather than a point.

"I'll be honest with you," he said. "We've burned through three pastry people in two years. The last one cried in the walk-in. The one before that quit by text. So I have lowered the bar to a point where it lies on the floor. If you can produce an edible croissant without weeping, you're in contention."

"Mine collapsed this morning," I said. "All forty of them. So we might be at an impasse."

He laughed at that, a short dry sound, and tilted his head at me in a way that no human tilts their head. It went further than a neck should allow and he held it there, considering me, and I realized I wasn't afraid of him exactly. I was unsettled, deeply, but under the unsettled was something more like the feeling of watching a big animal decide whether you were interesting. I did not love the fact that I found it flattering.

I asked him about it. I would like to claim I was smooth about it but what I actually did was stare at his hand for four full seconds and then say "so, the, uh, the claws" and wave vaguely at my own fingers, which were regular fingers. He looked down at them with the weary air of a man who has had this conversation a hundred times.

"Shifter," he said. "Feline, if you're unfamiliar with the categories. Yes, it's legal, yes I'm on the town registry, yes the health inspector knows. She's more worried about the dishwasher than about me. Any other questions?"

I had plenty. Whether his ears moved under his hair. Whether the slitted eyes worked better in the dark. Whether he had ever, in five years of running a resort kitchen, bitten anyone. I asked none of them because I was thirty-four years old and had learned that curiosity is a thing you ration.

Instead he did something I didn't expect. He walked to the big window that looked out over the snowy pines and the distant chairlift, and he said the interview would not be a conversation about my experience, because he'd read the portfolio and the photographs told him what he needed. He said the interview would be a test, and that he'd set it up that morning, and that if I was willing we could do it right now.

I should have asked what kind of test. Any sensible person would have asked. I looked at his slitted eyes and his neat claws and the copper pans on the rack and I said yes before my brain caught up with my mouth.

He smiled then, and the smile showed teeth that were too sharp to be teeth, and it occurred to me a moment too late that a cat who has gotten a mouse to agree to something is not generally thinking about the mouse's schedule.

He cleared a space on the stone countertop without telling me what the test was. I watched him move around the kitchen and it was hard not to keep watching. He had a way of placing his hands that a person with regular nails never develops, fingers splayed a little wider, the claws held up and away from every surface like a man walking through his own house in socks he doesn't want to scuff. He pulled down three plain white plates and set them in a row. Then he went to a covered tray near the walk-in and came back with three pastries under a folded cloth, each one transferred to a plate with a small spatula and a surgeon's patience.

"Here is the test," he said, and he turned the cloth so it hung over the far counter and I understood the pastries were meant to be anonymous. Three pastries. I was to eat a bite of each and tell him what was wrong with them. Not what was right. What was wrong. He would watch my face while I did it, and my face, he said, would tell him more than my resume had.

I would like to explain my thinking at that moment, or at least I would if I could reconstruct it, but mostly what I remember is the flare of something petty and hot in my chest. Marla had called me mediocre six hours ago in a kitchen smelling like burnt sugar and failure, and here was a man with claws offering me a stage. I sat down on the stool he pushed out with his foot. He set the first plate in front of me and stood back with his arms crossed, and I noticed he did not pick up a fork. He was going to watch me eat with those eyes and there was nothing to do about it except eat.

The first pastry was a Danish. The laminate was decent, the almond filling was under-baked in the center, and there was too much citrus in the glaze, the kind of error you make when you zest by memory instead of by weight. I said all of that. His expression did not change. The second was a pain au chocolat, and this one annoyed me more because it was close. Good bake, good honeycomb when I tore it, but the chocolate was a cheap couverture with too much sugar and not enough of anything else, and it had been assembled warm, which meant the batons had half melted into streaks instead of staying in their rows. I told him that too. I was getting into it now, jabbing my finger at the torn cross-section, and I caught myself talking faster, four years of morning shifts and unappreciated lamination coming out of me in a flood.

The third one stopped me.

It was a croissant. My croissant. I knew it the way you know your own handwriting, from the slightly ragged scoring on top where my blade had caught, from the particular dark blonde of the bake, from the little tear on the side where it had deflated at some point in its miserable life. One of the six survivors from my box, which I had handed to the receptionist at the front desk not twenty minutes ago. He had taken one of my surviving croissants out of my own box, and put it on a plate and waited to see what I would do about it.

I looked up at him. He was watching me with an attention that had a physical weight to it, chin lowered, slitted pupils fixed, and the tip of his tail, and I had not even registered until that second that there was a tail, moved once behind him like a metronome being checked.

"That's mine," I said.

"It is. Now tell me what's wrong with it."

I picked it up and broke it open and made myself look at it honestly, which is harder than it sounds when the thing in your hands is your own disaster. The crumb was dense. The layers had fused in two places. It had collapsed in the proofing box like all its brothers and this one had simply been too stupid to die. I told him the crumb was dense. I told him the layers had fused where the dough had gotten too warm between folds, probably twice, probably because I was rushing the second fold to get the batch in before the morning rush. I told him the bake was actually fine, which was the worst part, that I had taken ruined dough and baked it into something that looked almost acceptable, and that almost acceptable was exactly the kind of lie I hated in a pastry case.

He was quiet for a moment. Then he picked up the fused edge himself, turned it, examined the lamination the way I had, and nodded slowly.

"Diagnosis is correct," he said. "All