The Cleaner Wins

Kristen here, forty-three years old, and I clean offices for a living, which means I know exactly how much sugar the average person spills on a desk and never wipes up. Three months ago I kicked my boyfriend of nine years out, well, I kicked his stuff out, he gathered it himself in two trips and a borrowed truck. We never married, which made the whole thing legally simple and emotionally not.

So when my friend Natalia sent me a link to a gingerbread house contest at Northwoods Mall, I signed up mostly to spite my own Saturday.

"You're gonna choke," Natalia said in my car. She's thirty-eight, married twelve years, and lives for my disasters. "You burn toast, Kristen. You're entering a baking competition."

"It's not baking, it's construction. I clean things. I'm detail oriented. This is basically my skill set with frosting."

"With frosting. Sure."

The mall atrium was done up like December had thrown up in it, giant fake tree, garland on every rail, twelve folding tables lined up in rows, with little numbered cards. A crowd was already gathering, mostly parents with kids and a few serious-looking types with their own piping bags, which told me I was out of my league before I even sat down.

Then I saw him.

Across the atrium, at table three, there was a guy in a chef's coat arranging piping tips on a towel like he was laying out surgical tools. I knew his face from his profile picture, obviously, but pictures don't prepare you for how a guy stands. He stood like he owned the floor he was standing on. Pete, forty-four, chef, the man I'd been trading messages with for four months and never once met in person.

"Oh no," Natalia said, following my eyes. "Oh no, that's him, isn't it. That's the chef guy."

"That's him."

"Girl. Girl. You said he was cute. You did not say he looked like that."

"I sent you the picture."

"Pictures lie. That man is load bearing in person, and I hate that I just said that out loud."

We signed in at the folding table by the tree. The volunteer handed me a contestant badge and a number, seven, and pointed me to table seven, which was directly across the aisle from table three. Of course it was.

Pete was there with a partner, a big guy in a black apron who was already arguing about something.

"The base has to be level, Al. If the base isn't level, the whole thing leans by hour two."

"It's a table, Pete. Tables are level. That's the whole point of tables."

"Someone bumped this one."

"You're forty-four years old and you're mad at a folding table."

I set my bag down and tried not to look over there, and then I looked over there, and Pete looked up at exactly the same moment. He recognized me. I watched it happen, the little pause, the straightening up, and then he waved, this small almost embarrassed wave, and I waved back, and we held eye contact maybe two seconds too long to call it friendly and not long enough to call it anything else.

Natalia elbowed me. "Did you feel that? I felt that from here. I'm married and I felt that."

"Shut up."

"He's coming over. He's walking over here right now. Act normal. Fail at that."

He stopped at our table with his hands in his apron pockets. Up close he smelled like, I don't know, kitchen, in a good way, rosemary and soap. "Kristen. Wow. You're shorter than your profile said."

"You're taller than yours."

"Yeah, the camera adds ten pounds to my ego. This is weird, right? Four months of talking and it takes a mall cookie contest."

"It's not weird, it's efficient. I saved myself two bad dinners."

Al hollered something from table three that sounded like, "Stop flirting and level the base," and Pete laughed without turning around.

"That's Al," he said. "He's been my sous-chef six years and he's never once let me have a moment."

"Go have your moment over there," Natalia said. "She's fine. She's got me."

He went. Natalia watched him the whole way and then turned back to me with her hands folded like a jury foreman. "So. That's the situation."

"Stop."

"I'm just saying, if you don't win the knives, you could still win the night. That's all. That's me being supportive."

The contest started at noon. A woman with a clipboard read rules off a laminated sheet, two hours, everything structural must be gingerbread, royal icing allowed, fondant allowed, hot glue absolutely not, and she said that last one like she'd been burned before, figuratively and possibly literally. First prize was a full set of German knives and a two hundred dollar gift card. Natalia had entered too, technically, at table five, but her plan from the start had been to assemble a lopsided cabin, lose gracefully, and heckle me.

I'm not going to, I almost typed a lie there, I am going to say it: I was terrible. I opened my bag of icing bags and one had already split. My gingerbread walls came from a kit, which the woman at table two clearly noticed and clearly judged. My first piping line came out thick and lumpy, like something a hospital would use to seal a wound.

"Kristen," Natalia said, leaning over from her table. "What is that."

"It's a wall seam."

"It's a caterpillar. You've piped a caterpillar onto your house."

"I'm adjusting."

"You've been messaging that man for four months and you can't pipe a straight line. What do you two even talk about?"

"Food. Work. His restaurant. My building's ancient boiler."

"Boiler talk. That's the foundation of every great romance."

Across the aisle, Pete and Al were working in this quiet synchronized rhythm, and it was genuinely annoying to watch. Al did structure, walls, roof panels, a chimney, while Pete did detail work, and his hands moved the way you see on those competition shows, small, exact, no wasted motion. At one point he piped an entire row of tiny windows on a second story without stopping, and I realized I'd been staring long enough that Natalia had to clear her throat twice.

"He's doing it on purpose," I said.

"What, being good?"

"Being watchable. He knows I can see him."

"Okay, well, counter-program. Do something impressive at your table."

I looked down at my lopsided cottage, my caterpillar seams, my bag of coconut flakes I'd brought as snow and had already knocked half of onto the floor, which, fine, cleaning was my actual job, I swept it into a neat pile with the side of my hand without thinking, and Pete caught that, the sweeping, and grinned at me across the aisle like I'd done a trick.

"He saw that," Natalia said.

"He saw that."

"That's your in. Marry the man. He respects a clean floor."

The clipboard woman called the forty-five minute mark and the whole atrium got quieter, everyone hunching over their tables. My house was leaning. Pete's was becoming, there's no other word for it, a bakery storefront with awnings and a wreath on the door and a little dog made of icing sitting by the entrance, and Al was arguing with him about the dog.

"It doesn't need a dog, Pete."

"Every storefront needs a dog. It's welcoming."

"It costs us points in realism. Dogs aren't structural."

"The dog stays, Al."

I sat there with my crooked cabin and my split piping bag and my heart doing a rate that was less about competition than I cared to admit, and Natalia leaned over one more time.

"Hey. After this, you're gonna talk to him, right? Actually talk, in person, like a person?"

"That's the plan."

"Because if you don't, I'm gonna walk over there and give him your number off my phone, and I'll spell your name wrong just to make it awkward."

* * *

The last twenty minutes were a blur of coconut flakes and prayer. Somewhere in there, while I was wrestling a roof panel that wanted to be a slide, I heard footsteps stop at my table and looked up and it was Pete, holding a piping tip in one hand as a man holds a passport.

"Sorry to interrupt. Do you have a star tip, number thirty-two? Al packed ours and of course it's the one he forgot."

I dug through my bag, my hands doing that thing where they suddenly forgot how hands work. "I think I have a twenty-nine. Close enough?"

"Twenty-nine works." He took it, but he didn't leave. He leaned in a little, close enough that I could see the flour dust on his sleeve, and he said, quiet, under the mall noise, "I'm really glad you showed up. I was half-sure you'd talk yourself out of it."

My hands were shaking. Actually shaking, and I was holding a piping bag at the time, which meant my next seam looked like the first caterpillar's cousin. "I almost did," I said. "I sat in the car for ten minutes after I parked, rehearsing reasons to leave."

"What stopped you?"

"You texted me a photo of your whisk collection. Nobody walks away from that."

He laughed and squeezed my shoulder, quick, one squeeze, and went back to table three. Natalia made a sound beside me that I chose to interpret as encouragement.

"Your hands are trembling," she said.

"They're cold."

"It's seventy-two degrees in this atrium."

"Then they're trembling for unrelated reasons. Pipe your own cabin."

"I'm pacing myself. This is a marathon." She had, at that point, four gumdrops