“Excellent work!” Ms. Riedel said with a hint of surprise in her voice, handing her the chocolate bar.
It was the first time Jillian had raised her hand all year and one of the few occasions when she had spoken in class.
Jack had never said a word to Jillian, nor had she ever said as much as hi to him. Chad thought her name was Nancy.
“And now that you’ve all worked up a good appetite, it’s time to eat,” Ms. Riedel said.
Let the fun begin, Jack thought.
Students sprung from their seats. Like a swarm of locusts descending on a Kansas wheat field, they devoured Jack’s brownies until only half a piece and a streak of cinnamon icing remained. Jillian went last, filling a cup with punch and taking the last brownie, which she ate at her desk.
Success! Jack thought, a satisfied grin covering his face as he pictured himself cutting the ribbon during the opening of his first pastry shop.
“Dude, those were incredible,” Chad said, picking at the crumbs on his T-shirt.
Jeremy Crawford, the class president, gave Jack a high five. Frieda Johnston returned to the table and moaned, “The brownies are gone!” Ms. Riedel asked for the recipe. But amongst the praise, Jack heard more than a few mentions of a dessert other than his own.
“Did you try that strange chocolate thingy? One word … wow!”
“That was soooo good!”
“Best … cookie … ever! Best … treat … ever!” Amy Eppington said. Jack suspected she wasn’t talking about the sugar cookies purchased at the local Food Mart.
It drove him insane.
Crush canceled!
When the final bell rang, Jack casually approached the plate of rugelach. Only Ms. Riedel and Jillian were left in the room.
This was not a hard story problem for Jack to solve. He knew in an instant the rugelach belonged to the quiet girl with the desk near the storage closet. Yes, the rugelach smelled fantastic, but the true test was how it tasted.
Jack picked up the final piece, a small lopsided crescent, the outcast of the batch, sitting like a quiet classmate who just wants to be left alone. He popped it into his mouth and chewed, quickly at first, then slowly, as the blend of chocolate and cream cheese tingled his taste buds.
Jillian looked up just as a frown formed on Jack’s face. A look of disgust followed, like he had been served rotten cabbage. She jerked her head back down.
Jack collected his plate and left without saying a word.
He had never tasted anything so delicious. Never.
Chapter 4
Back home, Jillian placed the chocolate-streaked plate in the sink next to the wooden spoon, still spackled with batter from last night.
“So how was the party?” Grandma Rita asked. “I bet our rugelach was a big hit!”
Jillian ignored her grandmother and went straight to her room, tiptoeing by her father who was asleep on the couch. Mr. Mermelstein worked two jobs to support them, one during the day and the other at night. Jillian rarely got the chance to spend time with him except for Sunday mornings when they played Scrabble. This was mostly how Jillian saw him—exhausted and snoring like a low-flying jet.
She lay on her bed and replayed the events of her day. First, the positives: She had answered the math problem and received a chocolate bar. She had heard some of her classmates talk about her rugelach like it was a gift beamed down from heaven. For a brief moment, she had felt … happy.
But when Jillian closed her eyes, none of those things mattered. All she saw was the twisted expression on Jack’s long, thin face. She hugged the raccoon hand puppet her mother had given her on her third birthday. Like the wooden spoon, it only recently had come out of storage.
He’s the boy who made the butterscotch basil brownies shaped like a Star of David, she thought. He would know what rugelach should taste like. And he absolutely hated it.
In that instant, Jillian missed her mother stroking her long black hair and telling her that everything would be okay. As she started to remember, a tidal wave of memories washed over her. Some were of the happiest moments of her life. Trips to Silver Creek Lake, where she, her mother, and her father built sand fortresses and ate rainbow-colored snow cones until the sun sank low. The three of them riding bicycles through cool pine forests on a fall morning. The sound of giggles as they ate pretzel sticks during games of gin rummy and Uno.
These memories always gave Jillian the strength to move forward. On her best days, she knew in her heart that there would be good times again. There would be light. And she hoped that someday there would even be laughter. But it hadn’t been easy to think that way today.
I made the rugelach just how you showed me. What went wrong?
Jillian thought back to her first baking lesson soon after her seventh birthday. She loved being in the kitchen of her mother’s new pastry shop, especially at five o’clock on a Saturday morning, long before customers trickled in. It was just the two of them, shelves full of ingredients, and endless possibilities. After her mother had completed the day’s pastries, she looked at Jillian.
“So, Jilly, what should we make together on this fine Seattle morning?”
“We?”
“Yes, we.”
“Rugelach! Chocolate rugelach! Pleeaaaase!”
“A superb suggestion, my dear.”
Under her mother’s direction, Jillian spooned cream cheese and butter into a ceramic mixing bowl to make the dough. Next, they added sugar, salt, vanilla extract, and finally the flour. Together, they held the tiger maple spoon and blended the ingredients until they were smooth.
“Now the chocolate, right? Lots of it!” Jillian pleaded. “It’s what makes your rugelach the best—better than what I ate at the deli and ten times yummier than what you get at the grocery store.”
“Ah, Jilly, cooking is not a contest,” her mother said, cupping her daughter’s chin with floured fingers. “It is a prayer whispered humbly as the sun rises. When no one else is looking. When the rest of the world sleeps.”
“Yes, but hurry. I’m getting hungry!”
“Patience, Jilly. There will always be time for chocolate. Lots of it. Today, tomorrow, for as long as you’re my girl.”
Jillian dried her tears with her sleeve. Her mother had been wrong. There wouldn’t be more time. Shortly after Jillian’s tenth birthday, her mother became ill. She recalled those days in a blur of snapshots: her parents talking behind closed doors, months of treatments, rows of pill bottles, a white-coated worker setting up a hospital bed in the living room, a late-night visit from the rabbi, Grandma Rita’s swollen eyes hidden behind dark sunglasses during the funeral.
Jillian forced herself to remember more. Returning home from the cemetery, she had walked into the kitchen. It felt ghostly. She saw her mother opening cupboards. Kneading dough for a challah. Reciting the Sabbath prayers. She smelled a hint of jasmine flowers, which her mother wore in her hair, and heard Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons playing. It was the section called “Spring,” her mother’s favorite season. A time of renewal … of hope …
In the weeks that followed, those images faded, replaced by the harsh reality of more family troubles. Jillian learned the pastry shop had left them in severe debt. Her mother’s dream of owning a little place to bake and sell her cookies, pies, tarts, and tortes from family recipes was a gamble, especially in Seattle, a city with coffee shops and cafés on every corner. But her parents had done it, anyway.
“Oh, honey, if you don’t have a dream to keep you going, you’re just sleepwalking through life,” her mother had told Jillian the day Joan of Hearts Pastry Shop opened.
Friends and patrons packed the store on its first day. A fiddler and mandolinist played bluegrass in the corner as streams of people flowed in and out. A local food reporter came to interview Jillian’s mother. Afterward, she proudly displayed the framed article next to the cash register. The headline read, Joan Mermelstein Brings Baked Heaven to the Heart of Seattle.
“Someday this shop will
be yours, Jillian,” her mother had said. “We’re off to a great start.”
Despite her mother’s hard work and the shop’s loyal customers, bills mounted. Her father lost his job at an advertising firm while caring for her mother. They owed the bank thousands of dollars. Soon after her death, hard decisions had to be made.
“We have to sell all the pastry shop equipment—the mixers, ovens, coolers,” her father had said. “Even then, we won’t have enough money to stay here. Grandma Rita said we could move in with her in Ohio until we can get back on our feet. I’m so sorry.”
At Sieberling School, Jillian decided to keep to herself. She did not want to share her past with strangers. And in her new city, everyone was a stranger.
“Let’s give a warm welcome to your new classmate, Jillian Mermelstein,” Ms. Riedel had said on her first day. Jillian walked directly to the back row, looking down to avoid the pairs of eyes watching her.
Jillian was pulled back from her memories when Grandma Rita gently knocked on the door.
“Do you want to talk?”
“Not really.”
Grandma Rita came in anyway. Sitting on the edge of the bed she asked, “So?”
“So what?”
“So, did your friends eat all the rugelach?”
“Grandma, I don’t have any friends here. And, yes, everyone loved it except for this one boy.”
“There’s always one in every bunch, isn’t there? I bet he wouldn’t know a good rugelach if it knocked him on the head. So your day wasn’t all bad?”
Jillian pulled the chocolate bar out of her backpack.
“No, not all bad. I won this.”
“How?”
“By solving a math problem about percentages.”
“That’s my girl.” Grandma Rita took the bar and broke it in half. “What do you say? Fifty percent for you and fifty percent for me?”
“Deal,” Jillian said, taking a bite and letting the sweetness roll around her tongue.
Chapter 5
Jack paced in the kitchen, chugging a glass of milk to wash away the taste of Jillian’s chocolate rugelach. It would haunt him for days.
My butterscotch basil brownies were epic. I tested the recipe. My presentation was perfect. The results spectacular. But the rugelach was better. A hundred times better.
The more Jack sulked around the kitchen, the worse he felt—his Foodie Olympics ruined. He wasn’t just troubled by the rugelach. It seemed as if someone had thrown a rusty spatula into the well-oiled gears of his lifelong plans.
How am I going to be the world’s greatest pastry chef if I’m not even the best in Ms. Riedel’s sixth-grade class?
Jack knew his rugelach. He had gorged on different flavors at family parties: pumpkin spice, cherry, blueberry, apricot, coconut, and banana. What he had sampled earlier that day, though, made all other attempts taste like carpet glue.
In need of an ego boost, he texted Chad:
Chad didn’t reply. Jack felt his frustration rising again.
Jack put down his phone when a thought crossed his mind.
Wait a minute! Jillian brought them to school, but did she bake them? What if her mother made them for her? Or she bought them at that gourmet pastry shop in Wooster? There’s no evidence that she made them! Boom, that’s the answer! I’m still the king!
Jack felt better until his brother entered the kitchen. Tall with muscular arms, Bruce wore mauve and aquamarine checkered slacks, a fuchsia polo shirt, and an orange visor. A golf bag crammed with clubs capped with knitted covers hung over his shoulder. As a member of the high school golf team, Bruce obsessed about how to hit the middle of the fairway on a windy day, or what grip to use when striking a ball off the lip of a sand trap. During the winter he practiced for hours at the indoor driving range next to Speedy Wash.
Golf was one of Bruce’s two passions. The other was making Jack’s life miserable.
“Hey, it’s Baron Von Bundt Cake home from school,” Bruce said, messing up Jack’s hair.
Jack had grown used to Bruce’s corny nicknames. The Pillsbury Dough Dork ranked at the bottom along with Betty Crocked and Batter for Brains.
“By the way, the kitchen reeked last night,” Bruce continued. “What sewage were you throwing together for that holiday party? Haven’t you learned yet that this baking thing of yours is a waste of time?”
Jack stopped himself from blurting out, And chasing a little white ball around a cow pasture isn’t? He knew better than to confront his brother. After all, Bruce was taller, stronger, and had clubs handy.
Bruce opened the refrigerator door and took out the same thing he ate every day after school: two slices of bologna on white bread slathered with mayonnaise. Jack shook his head. He wondered what kind of cosmic joke paired him with an older brother who had such picky eating habits and bad taste in clothing.
Their parents still told the story of Bruce’s early eating experiences. Years ago as a baby, he spit out his first spoonful of creamed spinach. He scrunched up his face and yowled, looking nothing like the cherub-faced infant on the baby food jar. Mashed peas produced even more volcanic results. He spewed the vegetable onto the white wall in front of him, forming a piece of modern art referred to by his parents as a work from Bruce’s “green period.”
Even at sixteen, Bruce threw fits if the creamed corn on his plate made the slightest contact with his baked beans, or if a tuna casserole dared to ooze into the domain of a buttered roll.
“No touching! Foods must not touch!” Bruce always insisted.
So when Mrs. Fineman played “here comes the choo-choo” and gave Jack his first taste of solid food—a dollop of strained beets—she covered her ears and prepared for a similar eruption.
Instead, Jack closed his eyes in ecstasy as his taste buds danced the hora. A smile spread across his face.
At that moment, six-month-old Jack said his first word: “Yum!” He opened his mouth so wide that a steam locomotive pulling several beet-filled boxcars could have easily rocketed past his toothless gums.
This first spoonful of root vegetable marked the beginning of Jack’s love of food. He gobbled up everything: mangos, okra, cabbage, papayas, kale, yams, cucumbers, artichoke hearts, and Swiss chard.
This annoyed Bruce to no end.
“If Jack can eat it, so can you,” their parents said.
“He doesn’t know any better,” Bruce argued. “He’ll grow out of it.”
But Jack didn’t.
Instead of gulping down a bite, Jack rolled it around in his mouth, judging its texture and flavor before sending it southward to his stomach.
When Jack was nine months old, his parents noticed he seemed to have developed a rating system for the meals they prepared:
Whoop of Joy:
Wide Grin:
Shrug:
Big Frown:
Food Splattered on Floor:
On his first birthday, Jack received a small Boston cream pie of his very own. He grasped a mixture of chocolate icing, vanilla custard, and moist cake in his right hand. Sniffing the mushy mess, he shoved it into his mouth, smearing most of it across his face.
That’s when Jack added two words to his expanding vocabulary: “MORE! NOW!”
Handful after handful disappeared until not a speck remained. Jack howled with delight.
“I guess that would rate a ten,” Mrs. Fineman said, pulling the plate out of Jack’s clutches.
Jack banged his fists on the table. “MORE! NOW!” he repeated.
By the age of three, Jack was using his Little Chef Baker’s Oven, heated by a single light bulb, to make multilayered iced tarts for his parents.
“Did you try this?” Mr. Fineman asked. “It is really good!”
“I know,” Mrs. Fineman replied. “No doubt about it, he has genuine baking talent, like my grandmother, Bubbe Leah. But …”
“You’re worried he’ll end up like her, right?” Mr. Fineman said.
“Yes. I don’t want that to happen.”
“We’ll have to see how it all plays out. For now, just take another bite and enjoy.”
“Mmm … definitely five stars!”
Once Bruce had finished his bologna sandwich, he turned his attention back to Jack.
“You didn’t answer me. What was that sickening smell in the kitchen last night?”
“My own recipe for butterscotch basil brownies.”
“It can never be just chocolate or vanilla with you. Why do you always mess it up with something weird, like basil?”
“There is more to life than chocolate and vanilla.”
“You’re right. There’s strawberry, too!”
“I give up.”
Chapter 6
Jillian waited at the kitchen table for her father to return home from the late shift at the auto parts warehouse. Since moving to Ardmore, he spent his nights packing exhaust pipes and pistons in boxes to be shipped to mechanics around the world. During the afternoons, he hunched over legal documents in an office cubicle checking for poor grammar and misspellings.
Before her sat a Scrabble board, two wooden racks, a velvet bag filled with letter tiles, a scorecard, and a pencil. Every five minutes, she watched for the headlights of her father’s Chevy Cavalier pulling into the driveway. She looked forward all week to this Sunday morning ritual—a game of Scrabble on his only day off.
Jillian squeezed her father’s thin frame when he arrived, lunch pail tucked under his arm. His dark eyebrows were lightly frosted with snow and his tired eyes begged for some needed rest.
“How’s my little wordsmith today?” he asked, kissing her forehead.
“Fine. I’m feeling lucky this morning.”
“Jills, Scrabble isn’t about luck. It’s about making the best out of the letters you’re given.”
Jillian knew this was partially true. If you studied hard, you could make a major score out of what looked like an impossible mishmash of tiles. From The Official Scrabble Players Dictionary, she memorized all the Q words that didn’t need a U, such as qadi, qiblas, and qindarka. She wrote out lists of odd three-letter words like nim, rya, and yag, and jotted down eight-letter words from aardvark to zymogene that would be worth fifty bonus points when all tiles were played at once. And she could recite all the acceptable Scrabble two-letter words, including ef, gi, pe, xi, and her favorite, oy, which her father said a lot lately.
$150,000 Rugelach Page 2