Sticky Fingers, Silent Wants

The sign-up sheet said ten days. I read it twice before I clicked yes. Ten days. August. A county park I'd never been to, for a festival I'd never heard of, frying dough for strangers.

I'm sixty-three. I've done audits for thirty-five years. A person gets desperate for anything that isn't a spreadsheet.

So here I am.

The parking lot is a field of gravel and heat shimmer. My car thermometer says ninety-four and it's lying to make itself feel better. I carry a folding chair and a bag with sunscreen and a second shirt, because I already know how this day goes. Everything in August goes one way: toward sticky.

At the volunteer tent a kid with a clipboard finds my name.

"Natalia? You're on fried dough. Stand four. You're with Barbara."

"I don't know a Barbara."

"She's from your firm, actually. Side gig. Everybody does side gigs." He waves a hand like that explains anything. "Concession row, past the lemonade guy. You'll hear the generator."

I will hear the generator. That is not in question.

Concession row is a lane of tents and trailers and propane smells. The generator is roaring behind the dough stand like it's personally offended. The stand itself is maybe eight feet wide. Counter. Fryer. Heat lamp. A bin of batter with a lid. A cash box. That is the entire operation.

Barbara is already there, tying an apron over shorts and a camp shirt. She's about my age. Gray hair cut short, reading glasses pushed up on her head. I know her name from the office directory and exactly nothing else. We have passed each other in hallways for years. We have never once had a conversation.

"Hi," she says. "You're the other accountant."

"I'm the other accountant."

"They put all the money people on food. I think it's a joke."

"It's definitely a joke."

She hands me an apron. It's already grease-spotted from whoever wore it yesterday. I put it on anyway. There's a small sink, a bottle of soap, and a roll of paper towels. Luxury.

"So," she says. "I did one shift yesterday before you got here. The dough is premixed, the batter's in the bin, you stretch a piece, drop it in the oil, it puffs, you flip it, it goes brown, you shake it, sugar, done. That's the entire job."

"Sounds simple."

"It's not." She says it flat, like a diagnosis. "It's simple on paper. It is never simple in real life. Ask me how I know."

"How do you know?"

"Three people burned. One person dropped a whole sheet of dough in at once and the oil came up like a wave. A child reached over the counter into the fryer and I aged ten years."

"Where were the parents?"

"Buying lemonade." She points down the row. "It's always the parents buying lemonade."

The first hour is bad. That's the honest word for it. Customers stack up four deep. The oil is slow to recover temperature every time you drop cold batter in. My first two come out pale. My third comes out dark on one side. Barbara doesn't say anything, which is worse than if she said something.

Then she leans over the counter between orders.

"Watch. Don't stretch it thin, stretch it wide. Thin dough browns before it puffs. You want a fat little rectangle. And put it in away from you, so if it spits, it spits the other way."

She does one. It comes up golden, puffed like a pillow, and she flips it with a single motion of two forks. Shake. Sugar. Hand it over. Two dollars.

"Where'd you learn that?"

"Yesterday. The shift lead showed me and then left." She shrugs. "Trial by fire. Literal."

I try it her way. Wide, not thin. It puffs. It goes gold. I flip it and only burn one fingertip.

"There," she says. "You're employable."

The afternoon settles into a rhythm, and here's the part I didn't expect. The stand is too small for two people to work without a system. She does batter and fryer, I do sugar and register. When the line is long, she hands me pieces straight off the drain rack and I sugar them and bag them and take money, all without looking up. When the line is empty, we stand shoulder to shoulder at the counter and say nothing, because there's nothing to say, and that's fine too.

Except.

Under the heat lamp, the drain rack holds the finished pieces for about thirty seconds before bagging. We both reach for them. All shift, our hands go to the same pieces at the same time. The first few times I pull back and mumble sorry. By hour three we're doing this little dance where one of us reaches and the other's hand is already there, and we just sort of... trade. Her fingers are cool. Mine must be too. It's ninety-four degrees and we both have cold hands, which tells you something about circulation at our age.

At some point I notice I'm aware of where her hands are at all times. Which is ridiculous. But there it is.

"Break," she says at four. "Ten minutes. There's no relief, so one of us watches the till."

"I'll sit."

"Take my chair, mine's the good one. The other one has a bad leg."

Her chair has a cushion. I sit in the shade of the tent flap and drink half a bottle of warm water. She stands at the counter eating a soft pretzel from the neighboring stand with great concentration.

"Day one of ten," she says.

"Day one of ten."

"We're going to be so sick of dough."

"I'm already sick of dough."

"You're not. You ate half the misshapen ones."

I had, actually. The ugly ones can't be sold, so they get divided between staff. I've been eating my mistakes all afternoon like it's a perk. "It seemed wasteful not to."

"It's not wasteful. It's the job." She finishes the pretzel and brushes salt off her fingers. "So. Thirty-five years of ledgers and this is what retirement adjacent looks like."

"Who told you thirty-five years?"

"It's in your directory bio. I read the directory bios. It's a hobby." She says it without embarrassment. "You've been at Hollis and Marsh the whole time?"

"Since I was twenty-eight. You?"

"Since thirty. Before that I did a firm in Baltimore that collapsed, which was honestly the most exciting thing to ever happen to me professionally."

"Really."

"There was a federal investigation. Not of me. But I got to be interviewed. I wore my good blazer." She smiles a little. "It was the highlight of a decade."

We're the same kind of bored, I think. That's a dangerous thing to find out on day one.

The evening rush comes and goes. Families, teenagers in packs, a man who wants to argue that lemonade should be included with the dough, which makes no sense and which Barbara handles with a level of patience I would not have managed. The sun drops behind the tree line and the heat lamp turns from a nuisance into a small orange sun of its own. The generator drones. My feet hurt. My apron could stand up on its own by now.

Around eight the line dies for good. The shift lead comes by with a clipboard, tells us the closing checklist, and leaves again. Batter bin covered. Fryer off but not drained, that's a morning job. Count the drawer. Sign the sheet.

We count the drawer standing hip to hip in the narrow space, because there's no other way to stand. She calls the bills, I stack them. Ones, fives, tens. Our elbows bump on every stack. Neither of us adjusts away.

"Two hundred forty, even," she says. "Write it down, I'll sign."

I write. She signs. Her handwriting is small and neat, accountant's handwriting, no surprise there.

"Well," she says, pulling her apron off. "Day one. Survived."

"Survived."

She looks at the fryer, then at me. "Same time tomorrow?"

"Same time tomorrow."

I pack up my chair and walk back across the dark gravel lot to my car. The air has cooled all the way down to eighty-five. My shirt is finished. My arms smell like oil and sugar.

In the car I sit a minute before starting the engine.

It's nothing, I tell myself. Two people working a tight space for ten hours develop habits. Hands brush. That's physics, not anything.

I start the engine. The dashboard glow makes my hands look orange, fryer orange.

Ten more days, I think. Nine, technically, after tonight.

I put the car in reverse and go home to shower, and I do not think about cool fingers on a drain rack the entire drive. Almost the entire drive.

Day two. Tuesday. The car thermometer says ninety-four again, like the weather also does audits and found last year's numbers acceptable.

I arrive at eight. Barbara's already there. Her chair is in position, cushion squared away. The batter bin is uncovered and the fryer is warming. She's wearing a different shirt but the same reading glasses on a chain.

"You get here early too," I say.

"I get here early because there's no bathroom line at eight."

"That's the real reason anyone arrives anywhere early."

The morning is slow. Slow enough that I learn things. She takes her coffee black. She does the crossword in pen. She has a system for stacking the dough pieces on the drain rack that she does not explain and I do not question.

At eleven the crowd shows up all at once, like someone opened a gate. Which someone did, actually. The main stage lets out.

We get in the rhythm. She drops, I flip, I bag, she takes money. It works. It works suspiciously well for two people who've spoken maybe forty sentences total in their lives.

Then the complaint happens.

A woman comes up holding a dough piece like it's evidence. Red face, sun hat, the whole presentation.

"This is raw in the middle," she says. Loud. Loud enough that three people in line turn around. "Raw. My son could've gotten sick. Do you people even check these?"

Barbara opens her mouth but the woman keeps going, and the line behind her grows, and there's a phenomenon I learn quickly which is that an angry customer at a festival draws an audience the way a fire does.

"Ma'am," Barbara starts.

"I want a refund. And I want to speak to whoever runs this stand."

The space behind our counter is maybe four feet wide. With the fryer on one side and the counter on the other, there is exactly one place for two people to stand when the pressure is on, and that is together. The woman leans in over the counter. Barbara leans back. I step in behind her because there's nowhere else to go, and suddenly my front is against her back and neither of us can move.

She's warm. Not sunburn warm. Body warm, through the shirt, through the apron. Her hip is against mine and I can feel her breathing.

"I can refund it," Barbara says, steady as a ledger. "And I'm sorry. We do check them, but we've been slammed since the stage let out."

"Slammed is no excuse!"

"No," Barbara agrees. "It's not."

The woman takes her money and stalks off, and the line, having gotten its show, orders with unusual politeness. The surge passes. But I stay where I am a beat too long. Barbara doesn't step away either. Then some internal clock goes off in both of us and we separate as if it were nothing, as if her hip had not been pressed against me for a full ninety seconds.

"Sorry," I say. "There was nowhere to..."

"I know. Tight quarters."

"Tight quarters."

We don't look at each other for a while after that. The fryer bubbles. I flip dough and think about hip warmth, which is not a thought a sixty-three year old woman expects to have on a Tuesday.

The afternoon slows to nothing. Two o'clock, three o'clock. The heat sits on the tent like a lid. A man buys one lemonade and tips us a dollar, which is the entire excitement of a forty-minute stretch.

"Break," Barbara says at three. "Split it. You go, I'll watch."

"Split it, then. Ten each."

She takes over the till and I walk a slow lap past the pretzel stand and the quilt vendor and a man selling knives with an enormous speaker setup. Then I come back and she goes, and I count the cash box for no reason, just to have a number to think about.