The Fire Hall Bake-Off

I almost dropped the cupcake tray twice on the way from the parking lot, and both times it was because I was too busy squinting through the windshield trying to figure out if that was Jon's truck already parked by the bay doors. It was. Of course it was. The man shows up forty-five minutes early to everything except carving my paddle, which he has now been "almost done with" since April.

Let me back up. My name is Lauren Vance, I'm thirty-six, and I've been dating Jon Gunn for two years as of last month. He's forty-seven, he's a climbing guide, and he's also a volunteer firefighter at the Maple Ridge Fire Hall, which is how we ended up here on a Saturday in early autumn with me hauling two dozen red velvet cupcakes into a building that smelled like burnt sugar and diesel. Not my idea. Well, okay, the cupcakes were my idea. The whole bake-off was Carlton Laurent's idea, and Carlton has been the fire chief for ten years and has organized this thing for five, so at this point it's basically law.

Here's why I was actually there, though. Back in the spring, Jon promised to hand-carve me a canoe paddle. A real one, out of a piece of cherry he had sitting in his garage. He said it would take six weeks. It has been five months. Every time I bring it up he gets this face, this guilty sheepdog face, and changes the subject to climbing gear. So when the bake-off flyer went up at the clinic where I work, I saw my opening. Meena saw me looking at it and said, oh no, and I said, oh yes.

The deal was simple. Jon and I both enter. Whoever places higher wins, and the loser owes the winner one favor, no arguing. I told him the favor would be finishing the paddle. He told me he had it in the bag. We shook on it like it was a land deal.

Anyway. Cupcakes. Parking lot. Jon's truck. I shouldered the door open with my hip and there he was across the meeting room, leaning against the coffee table in his firefighter T-shirt, the navy one with the hall logo on the chest, talking to Carlton with his hands like he always does. He spotted me over Carlton's shoulder and his whole face did the thing.

"Look what the cat dragged in!" he called out. "You brought ammo or dessert?"

"Both," I said, holding the tray up like a trophy. "Stand back, these are loaded."

Carlton laughed his big chief laugh. He's fifty-eight, built like a barn, and he takes this bake-off more seriously than some chiefs take actual fires. "Vance! Good, good. Table four. You're in the cakes and cupcakes category, assuming those are cupcakes and not some kind of trick."

"They're red velvet, Carlton. No tricks!"

"Last year Leila entered what she called brownies and it was fudge and we had a whole situation," he said gravely, as one who has seen things. "Table four."

Jon wandered over while I was setting the tray down. He looks like what he is, a guy who's spent twenty-six years on rock, forearms like rope, gray coming in at the temples that he pretends he doesn't know about. He picked up a cupcake and examined it as if checking a carabiner.

"Store-bought frosting?" he asked.

"Excuse me. That is Swiss meringue, made from scratch, at six this morning."

"With whose stand mixer?"

"Yours. Which is in my apartment. Which makes it mine by common law of baking."

"That's not a thing," he said, but he was grinning, and he stole a pinch of frosting off one of them, and I slapped his hand and he stole another pinch anyway.

The meeting room had that fire hall smell, coffee and floor wax and a little bit of yesterday's spaghetti dinner. Long folding tables had been dragged into rows, and they were filling up fast. Leila was there, obviously, and a couple of the guys from B shift, and Meena, bless her, had claimed a judge's seat at the front table with a legal pad, like she was about to take minutes. She caught my eye and gave me a thumbs up and then mouthed something I think was "destroy him."

The stakes, by the way, were official. Carlton got up front around ten and banged on a coffee can with a spoon until everyone shut up. There were three categories: cakes and cupcakes, pies, and cookies and bars. Blind judging, meaning no names on the entries, just numbers. First place in each category got a twenty-five dollar gift certificate to the hardware store in town, and the overall winner got bragging rights for a year, which Carlton announced with the kind of gravity usually reserved for medals.

"Also we're raising money for the new rescue saw," he added. "So buy your own baked goods back, people. That's how this works."

Jon leaned over while Carlton was going through the sign-up sheet. His shoulder was warm against mine and he smelled like coffee.

"Hey. Real talk," he whispered. "I've got this in the bag."

I turned my head very slowly to look at him. "I'm sorry, what?"

"My entry. Category three. You'll see."

"Jon. You have literally never baked anything in your life. You burn grilled cheese."

"Not true. I burned grilled cheese once, in 2019, and I've grown."

"What is it? What are you entering?"

"Can't tell you. Baker's confidentiality."

"That's not a thing either."

"Two for two today," he said, and popped the rest of my stolen cupcake in his mouth.

Here's the part where I admit something. I was worried. Not about losing the bake-off, exactly. About the paddle, yes, but also about the fact that Jon had been weirdly smug about this for two weeks and smug Jon usually means he's actually got something. The last time he was this smug was the surprise trip to Seneca Rocks, which, fine, that one worked out.

Meena came over during the entry drop-off window, which was chaos, trays and casserole dishes everywhere, somebody's pie lid flying off in the breeze from the big bay fans. She's forty-two, has been a vet tech for twelve years, and is the only person I know who can eat six desserts and still critique them fairly.

"Number twenty-six," she whispered, checking her clipboard. "That's yours. Jon's is twenty-eight."

"What's his?"

"I'm a judge, Lauren. Boundaries." Then she looked both ways and leaned in. "It's in a cast iron skillet. That's all I'm saying."

A skillet. He brought something in a skillet. I turned around and Jon was across the room helping Carlton straighten the judge's table, being helpful, being big and useful, radiating confidence. He caught me watching and wiggled his eyebrows. I gave him the finger behind the coffee urn where Carlton couldn't see, and he laughed so hard he had to fake a coughing fit.

"You two are disgusting," Leila told me in passing. She had a lemon meringue pie and the eyes of a competitor. "Married people shouldn't be allowed to compete against each other. It's unseemly."

"We're not married," I said.

"Well, hurry up about it, then," she said, and swept off to the pie table before I could figure out how to respond to that. Two years in and the whole fire hall has opinions about our timeline. Jon's mother included. His mother has asked me twice, at two separate holidays, whether I'd "want the big wedding or the barn one," as if those are the only options and as if that is a normal thing to ask someone over ham.

The truth is I think about it more than I let on. Not the wedding part, okay, yes, the wedding part, but mostly just the fact that he's it for me, which is a terrifying thing to realize at a bake-off. He drove me up a crag two years ago and I came down with a whole person and now he's everywhere in my life, in my mixer, in my frosting, in my five-months-late paddle.

Carlton banged the coffee can again. "Entries close in ten minutes. Judges will begin at eleven. And somebody find out whose fork is in the potato salad, this is a bake-off, not a picnic."

Jon came back and stood next to me, hands in his pockets, watching the tables fill up with sugared ambition.

"Nervous?" he asked.

"Terrified," I said honestly. "What's in the skillet, Jon."

"Baker's confidentiality."

"I will hide your climbing shoes."

"All three pairs? You don't even know where they all are."

"I'll find them. I found your spare car keys in the fridge, I can find shoes."

He laughed at that, the real laugh, head back, and a couple of the guys from B shift looked over, and I felt that warm stupid feeling again. Ten-forty. Twenty minutes until judging. I looked at my cupcakes, all twenty-four of them sitting in neat rows, and I looked at the covered skillet sitting smugly at the end of table six, and I thought, whatever is under there, I hope it's flammable.

"You're glaring at my entry," Jon observed.

"I'm strategizing."

"You're glaring."

"So what's the plan if you win, anyway?" I asked. "What's your big favor? Because if you say 'climbing trip' I swear I'll enter every bake-off in the county for the rest of my life."

"Can't tell you that either."

"You can't just say 'favor of my choosing' and leave it hanging, that's psychological warfare."

"That's the point," he said, and kissed the top of my head like he hadn't just declared war, and went off to help Carlton set up the judge's water pitchers, whistling.

Whistling! I turned to my cupcakes and did a final inspection. Frosting peaks, all good. Sprinkles, distributed. I smoothed my apron and told myself I had nothing to worry about from a man who burns grilled cheese.

I want it noted that I believed that right up until eleven sharp, when Carlton was busy with his bell and I lifted one corner of the skillet cover for a peek, and my stomach went quiet.

Under the cover was an apple pie. Of course it was. A rustic, lopsided, golden brown apple pie, sitting there in the black iron like it had posed for a magazine. There were little leaf shapes cut into the crust. Little leaves! He cut leaves into the crust! The man who burned grilled cheese in 2019 had learned decorative pastry in five months and told nobody.

"You made leaves," I said when he wandered back over.

"Rustic leaves," he said. "They're called vent holes, but you can style them."

"You can style them?"

"I can style them."

"Where did you learn crust styling, Jon? What else are you hiding? Do you speak French? Is there a wife in Schenectady?"

"Just the one wife-shaped person here, and she's yelling at me about pie," he said, and stole a sprinkle off my table.

Meena appeared at that exact moment with her clipboard, the way a referee appears when the fight is getting ugly. "I can hear you both from the coffee urn," she said. "And I want it known that if either of you badgers a judge, you're disqualified and I eat your entries myself."

"You'd eat them anyway," I said.

"True, but there'd be no joy in it," she said. "Keep it clean, you two. Carlton's already jittery about the potato salad fork. Don't give him a reason to cancel the whole thing and go back to the raffle calendar."

"The raffle calendar years were dark," Jon agreed solemnly.

"They were so dark," Meena said. "My aunt won a calendar and it was all photos of trucks. She doesn't have a truck. She doesn't even drive."

Judging started at eleven sharp, which apparently means eleven twenty-five in fire hall time. Carlton had a little brass bell, which he rang way too hard, and then the three judges filed down the tables. Meena, obviously. Carlton, because he organized it. And Pastor Abby from the Methodist church, who I did not know was judging and who I now realized had seen me argue with Jon, which was going to be awkward in the church-adjacent sense.

They started at table one and worked up. Leila's lemon meringue got a long pause from all three judges, which I did not love. Pastor Abby said something and Carlton nodded in that slow chief way he has, like he's assessing a structure fire. Leila looked insufferable. Last year she entered brownies that were literally fudge, and when she got caught she argued that fudge is a state of mind. She got away with it, too! She got third place for it!

Table by table they came closer. The room did that thing rooms do, where everyone pretends not to watch and watches anyway. I reorganized my sprinkles four times. Jon leaned against the wall with his arms crossed like a man with no stakes in anything, and I wanted to throw a cupcake at him.

Then they were at table six.

The skillet. Carlton lifted the cover off Jon's pie and made a sound I can only describe as a chief sound. "Now that," he said, loud enough for the whole hall, "is what I call a bake-off entry." He leaned down and looked at it from the side, like checking a tire. "Cast iron. That's the old way. My grandmother baked in cast iron."

"Here we go," Meena muttered to me. "Grandmother lore. Every year with the grandmother lore."

"My grandmother's apple pie won the county fair three years running," Carlton announced.

"Did it, Chief?" Pastor Abby asked, who clearly was used to this.

"Nineteen seventy-two through seventy-four," he said. "Blue ribbon all three years." Then he took a bite and closed his eyes, and I felt actual dread. He chewed for a long time. The hall held its breath. "Cinnamon's got a backbone on it," he said finally. "Who made this?"

Jon raised a hand. "Number twenty-eight."

"Gunn. I didn't know you baked."

"I'm a man of hidden depths, Chief."

"He's a man of hidden YouTube tutorials," I said, and Meena snorted into her water pitcher.

Then, finally, they came to me. Number twenty-six. Twenty-four red velvet cupcakes in neat rows with