The Apron Draw

It started with butter. The butter shelf in the walk-in, to be precise. There was a clean gap where the European stuff lived, right between the salted and the sad, and in its place sat a note on receipt paper. "Took last two blocks, sorry! Laura."

"Well, that's just great," Sian said to the walk-in, because the walk-in was the only one in the building who listened to her complaints without comment.

She had been on shortbread since seven that morning. Sian was twenty-five, pastry chef at Solstice, three years in, and she liked to think she had her section locked down tighter than anyone else's station in the place. The shortbread was for the holiday tasting menu, brown sugar, fleur de sel, the whole bit, and it required the good butter the way a bath required water.

So she used the backup butter. The backup butter was eighty-three percent fat and had a texture like candle ambition. Two trays went into the oven, and Sian stood there watching them spread out flat and go brown at the edges in a way that no amount of brown sugar could dress up as intentional. She pulled them out, set the tray down hard on the stainless counter, and said a word that would have gotten her mouth washed out in her grandmother's kitchen back in Salem.

"Problem?" Connor asked, drifting past with a hotel pan of braised short ribs. Connor was the sous chef, twenty-nine, tall, and constitutionally incapable of taking sides in anything.

"The new girl used my butter."

"It's the house butter."

"It's my butter. I placed the order. I budgeted it. And now my shortbread is a tray of regret."

Connor looked at the tray. "Those do look bad," he admitted. "But you should probably take it up with her, not me."

"I intend to."

Laura came in at ten, which was her usual time. New pastry cooks got the middle shift, that was just how Clint ran the schedule, and Sian had spent three weeks pretending this arrangement didn't bother her. Laura was twenty-seven, recently arrived from Boston, where she had cooked on a line for five years until she was twenty-six, and she had a way of moving through the kitchen quietly that Sian found deeply suspicious. Loud people you could read. Quiet people were always up to something.

"Hey," Laura said, tying on her apron. "How'd the shortbread go?"

"Wonderful question. Would you like to guess what happened to it?"

"Did it burn?"

"The butter happened to it. The good butter. Which you used. Which was mine."

Laura paused with her apron strings half tied. "Oh. Well, I did leave a note!"

"A note. A note is an apology, it's not permission."

"I could run to the store," Laura offered.

"On what? The backups are ordered for Friday. It's Wednesday."

"I'm sorry, Sian. I was doing laminated dough for the croissant special and I genuinely didn't think. Next time I'll ask."

Sian wanted to stay angry. It was one of her better moods and she was reluctant to give it up. But Laura had said sorry without any of the fake apology energy people usually brought, so Sian just grunted and pointed at the ruined tray. "Help me trim the salvageable ones. Then we're even."

They trimmed in silence for a while, which was better than talking.

The next morning, Thursday, Clint Rutherford called a staff meeting before service, which was how you knew something unnecessary was about to happen. Clint was forty-three, ex-Michelin, built like a man who owned three excellent knives and no hobbies, and he got a particular gleam in his eye every December that everyone had learned to dread.

"Alright, listen up," Clint said, standing on the step stool he used near the pass so he could see over the line. "It's that time of year. Solstice is six years old and we've never done a holiday event, and I intend to fix that."

"Oh no," Connor said, just loud enough.

"The Solstice Cookie Classic," Clint announced, with the confidence of a man who had already paid for a banner. "Staff cookie contest, bracket style. Three weeks from tonight, private dining room, invited press, local food bloggers, charity raffle, proceeds to the food bank. Winner gets a paid week off in January and a ticket to the Pacific Northwest Food Festival."

There was actual murmuring at that. A paid week off in January was the sort of thing people at Solstice had previously only encountered in dreams.

"Rules are simple. Two competitors per round, staff votes, guest votes, final judging by panel. And to generate some narrative interest," Clint continued, and here Sian felt a premonition settle over her like a bad apron, "I've decided the opening round pairs our two pastry people. Sian and Laura. Head to head."

"What?" Sian said. "We're both pastry. Why would we compete against each other when we could compete as a team?"

"Because a team isn't a story, Sian. A rivalry is a story. Two pastry chefs, one kitchen, one winner. The Oregonian will eat it up."

"But I've been here three years. She's been here three weeks."

"And yet you both make excellent cookies, I assume," Clint said, which was the kind of compliment that doubled as an insult if you thought about it too long. He clearly had thought about it not at all.

"You don't bake, do you," Laura said to Clint. It was not quite a question.

"I delegate baking," Clint said, with dignity, and moved on to announce that the fir tree in the private dining room had been decorated over the weekend and everyone should go admire it.

Everyone went and admired it. It was a fat tree strangled in white lights and about nine hundred ornaments, and Sian privately thought it looked like a craft store had exploded in a funeral home. She said none of this, because Clint loved that tree.

The problem with the contest revealed itself fast. There was one station in the pastry section, one, and it was Sian's station. Her marble slab, her convection oven priority, her pots of things labeled in her handwriting. By Saturday night, after service, Laura was at that station with a sheet of parchment and a bag of flour, working on something that smelled like molasses and ginger.

Sian had come back for her notebook. She stopped in the doorway of the pastry section and watched for a second before saying anything.

"Kitchen's closed," Sian said.

"I know. I asked Connor and he said after hours was fine."

"Well, Connor doesn't run pastry. I do. And I'd like to know what you're making in my kitchen after hours with my ingredients."

"It's gingerbread," Laura said. "Rustic, with rye flour and black pepper. It's for the contest. And it's the house's flour, and you know that."

"Right. And I also know that whatever technique you're developing back here at midnight, you're developing while watching how I work. Is that the plan? Study up on the veteran, take what you need?"

Laura set down her rolling pin. She wasn't a big person, but she stood the way people do when they've spent years on a line and aren't going to be moved. "I worked five years in kitchens before this one," she said. "I don't need to steal techniques from you. I've got plenty of my own, and half of them are better than the ones I've seen here, if you want the truth."

"Oh, do you!"

"Yes. And also, I don't want to work at midnight. I want to work at seven, like a normal person, but the station's spoken for until close, every day, so I come when it's free. If that's a problem, take it up with Clint."

"I will take it up with Clint."

She did. Monday morning she cornered him in his office, which was a converted storage closet with a picture of a pig on the wall, and laid out the whole thing.

"She's practicing unsupervised. Off hours. Using the station without oversight. She could be doing anything down there."

"She could be," Clint agreed. "She could also just be making gingerbread cookies. Which, I'll have you know, I sampled one on Saturday and it was very good, which is exactly the kind of buzz this event needs."

"You sampled her cookie."

"I sample everything. I'm the executive chef."

"But she's stealing my methods. Watching my prep. This is a competition now, Clint. You made it one."

"So share the station," Clint said. "One oven slot each, posted schedule, both of you on it. Honestly, Sian, a little collaboration might do you both good. You'd learn something."

"From her."

"She did a stage at a bakery in Copenhagen for six months. You could learn worse things than that."

Sian opened her mouth, found nothing in it, and closed it again. Then she went downstairs, tore a page off the order pad, and wrote out a schedule in her tidy pastry-chef handwriting. Station hours, six to ten for her, ten to two for Laura, four hours each, seven days a week, until the contest.

She taped it to the marble slab and walked away feeling like she had won something, which lasted until Wednesday, when Laura looked at the schedule, laughed once, and then pulled a chair over to the slab, sat down across from Sian, and started weighing rye flour three feet away from her.

"Four hours wasn't enough," Laura said. "So I'm trading. You can have my Friday prep shift on the croissants if I can sit here."

"That's not how schedules work."

"It's how this one works now!"

And the truly annoying thing, Sian thought, weighing her brown sugar and not looking up, was that it was a fair trade, and she knew it, and Laura knew she knew it. She wrote out the amended schedule anyway, because having it on paper made her feel like the adult in the room.

"You're going down, by the way," Sian said. "At the contest. Just so we're clear."

"Sure," Laura said, sifting flour into a bowl. "We'll see."

The schedule held for six days, which Sian considered a personal record for any arrangement involving another human being. Then, on the sixth night, a Sunday, it exploded.

Not literally. But close.

It was eleven days out from the contest, and Sian had stayed late finishing a batch of buttercream for a wedding cake order that had nothing to do with cookies. Laura's station time had ended at two that afternoon, but she'd come back at nine anyway, hair still damp from the shower at her apartment, and stood at the far end of the slab doing something quiet and methodical with peppermint candies and a rolling pin.

Neither of them talked much. That was the arrangement now. They worked in parallel like two people on adjacent treadmills at the gym, each aware of the other and pretending not to be.

The problem was the stand mixer. There was one, a big old Hobart that had been at Solstice since the place opened six years ago, and Sian had it loaded with a double batch of Swiss buttercream, running on medium while she tempered chocolate at the stove, four feet away.

"I need to get past you," Laura said.

"Give me a second, I'm at a critical stage with this chocolate."

"I'll just squeeze."

Sian heard it happen before she saw it. Laura's hip caught the mixer table, the bowl jumped in its lock, and a full paddle of room-temperature buttercream lifted out and arced through the air with a kind of lazy grace before landing across the front of Sian's apron, her wrist, and one cheek.

The kitchen went silent except for the mixer, still churning away with nothing left to churn.

"Oh no," Laura said. "Oh no, no, no."

Sian looked down at herself. There was buttercream on her collar. There was buttercream in her hair, a strand of it hanging past her ear like a white bead. She reached up and touched her cheek and her fingers came away smeared.

"That was my whole batch," Sian said. "That was two hours of whipping and three stages of cooling."

"I know. I know, I'm sorry, I was trying to get to the walk-in and you said..."

"I said give me a second."

"I know." Laura stood there with her hands half raised, like she wasn't sure whether to come closer or run. "You had butter on your face. You still do. You had, I mean, you have."

Sian scraped some of the buttercream off her apron with two fingers and, without thinking about it much, flicked it at Laura. It caught her on the shoulder of her chef coat.

Laura blinked. Then she picked up a handful from the slab where the rest of the batch had landed and threw it, and it caught Sian square in the chest.

So that was how it went. For about ninety seconds the pastry section of Solstice looked like a food fight in a movie, except sadder and stickier, two grown women in their twenties smearing Swiss buttercream at each other across a marble slab, until Laura slipped on a smear she herself had put on the floor and went down hard on one hip, laughing, actually laughing, on the tile.

"Okay," Sian said, breathing hard, hair full of sugar. "Okay. Truce."

"Truce," Laura said from the floor. "I think I hurt my hip."

"You'll live. My batch won't."

They cleaned up in a strange, wordless partnership, Sian hosing the slab while Laura mopped the floor, and by midnight the kitchen was mostly presentable again and the buttercream was a total loss. Sian pulled off her apron and dropped it in the laundry bin and stood there in her ruined shirt feeling the particular exhaustion of a person who has been awake for sixteen hours.

"I owe you a batch," Laura said. "I'll make the buttercream. I know how."

"You don't have to."

"I dropped a bowl of it on you. I think I have to."

Sian considered this. Outside, Portland was doing its December thing, rain coming down sideways in the alley behind the restaurant, the dumpster lid banging in the wind every so often.

"Do you want to just order food," Sian said. "I can't go home yet. If I go home now I'll lie in bed angry, and I'm already going to have to wash buttercream out of my hair in the morning."

"There's a Thai place on Division that's open till one," Laura said. "And there's a corner store next to it that sells beer."

"You're buying."

"I'm buying."

They ate on the steel prep table in the back, containers spread out, chopsticks from the bag, two cans of the cheapest lager the corner store had, which was some brand neither of them had heard of. Laura sat on one side in her coat, and Sian sat on the other, and it turned out that eating pad see ew at midnight off a steel table with a person you'd thrown buttercream at forty minutes earlier was a surprisingly good way to find out things about them.

"So Boston," Sian said. "How long were you on a line there?"

"Years. Since I was twenty-two, basically. Line cook, then prep lead. Then I burned out on savory and went to pastry and everyone thought I was having a crisis."

"Were you?"

"A little. I'd also ended a relationship a couple of years before that, which, you know. Three years with a guy I worked with. It ended badly and the kitchen got small." Laura pushed rice around in her container. "So I did the Copenhagen stage, came back, and then this job. What about you, you've been here three years?"

"Since I was twenty-two. Right out of school. I'm from Salem, which nobody ever guesses, they assume I'm from somewhere with better weather." Sian took a pull of her beer. "I had a brief fling with a barista when I was twenty-two. It was nothing. He had a cat I liked more than him."