Sweet Girl

by Rachel Hollis

  The energy isn’t frenzied, unlike the restaurant kitchens I’m used to, but the handful of people working around me radiate with a kind of intense focus as they carry out the tiniest of movements over and over. In the far corner of the room¸ a young guy is using a long paddle to add dry ingredients into a mixer that’s at least twice as big as I am. When the muscles in his back move each time he lifts one of the giant bowls, it looks as if they’re going to pop through the chef coat he wears. I wonder if he needed those muscles to do this job, or if having the job gave him the muscles.

  Just next to him, tall metal rolling shelves are stacked with sheet upon sheet of baked goods. Even from a distance I can spot the scones, muffins, and chocolate croissants that compose Dolci’s morning offering. On the next rack over, dozens of cupcakes wait to be iced. I can’t see the color of the cake they’re made of, but I’d know the current menu in my sleep. I imagine I can make out the colors of black forest, raspberry red velvet, lemon ricotta, and a pumpkin spice with a cinnamon cream-cheese icing that shouldn’t be on anyone’s summer menu but is so popular that they serve it year round.

  Next to the baked goods an older man is drizzling what looks like melted dark chocolate over long rows of biscotti. If they’re the menu item I think they are, he’ll finish them with a dip in crushed, toasted hazelnuts.

  To my right is a tall bald man with biceps that are roughly the circumference of my head. He’s working on something that bubbles and steams from a saucepot in front of him. The hum of the kitchen is blocking out the sound of whatever he’s saying, but from here it looks like he’s professing his love to the sauce. The action is so totally incongruous with someone who looks more like a thug than a saucier that I can’t stop staring.

  “It’s a sonnet,” someone says behind me.

  I turn around, expecting to find Avis since I didn’t know any other women were in this kitchen. A beautiful petite woman stands in front of me wearing an oversize chef coat that barely covers her extremely pregnant stomach. Her long dark hair is braided over one shoulder, and I can’t tell if it’s the heat or the pregnancy that makes her shine, but her deep golden skin absolutely glows.

  “Excuse me?” I ask, confused.

  “Harris.” She smiles and nods her head in the direction of the saucier. “He recites Shakespeare’s sonnets to his recipes. It’s early in the day, so I’d guess he’s still at the beginning of the list. Sixteen or seventeen, maybe.”

  Her speech is slightly accented, but I can’t place where she might be from.

  “Papi,” she calls out to him.

  The giant’s lips stop moving instantly, and he turns in her direction with an indulgent smile.

  “Which one are you on now?” she asks.

  “But wherefore do not you a mightier way,” he says loudly above the din, “make war upon this bloody tyrant, Time? And fortify your self in your decay with means more blessed than my barren rhyme? Now stand you on the top of happy hours, and many maiden gardens yet unset with virtuous wish would bear you living flowers.” He finishes his recitation with a wink and turns back around to the stove.

  She smiles and reaches out a hand to me.

  “I’m Joey.”

  “Mackenzie Jennings,” I say, shaking her hand. “Everyone calls me Max.”

  I blame the introduction on nerves. I haven’t introduced myself with my full first name in years.

  “Come on. We’ll get you set up.” She starts to waddle towards the back of the kitchen, rubbing her lower back with one hand. I have no idea how someone can be this pregnant and work in this heat. It can’t be good for her.

  It makes me anxious.

  “When are you due?” I can’t stop myself from asking.

  Joey turns her head with another sweet smile.

  “Oh, a few weeks from now,” she says wistfully.

  At my horrified expression she continues, “I think she hoped if she just ignored my belly, it wouldn’t eventually pop and turn into a baby. Avis is excellent at ignoring things she doesn’t want to deal with. Frankly, I’m shocked she hired a replacement. We all thought I’d still be in here when I went into labor. Everyone was betting on what recipe I’d be making when my water broke. My money was on the syllabub.”

  Joey giggles at her own joke before leading me to a cabinet in the back of the kitchen. She reaches up on tiptoes to grab one of the freshly pressed white chef coats from the inside and hands it to me. I stare down at the stark white linen in my hand, mesmerized by the large cursive “D” embroidered in silky black thread on the front.

  I reverently trace my fingers back and forth over the lettering. My exchange with the jacket can’t take more than a few seconds, but there must be something telling about the deferential way I’m holding it. Because when I look up again, her smile has been replaced with a grimace.

  “Please, please tell me this isn’t the first time you’ve held a chef coat in your hands!” She starts rubbing her lower back faster in clear agitation.

  It goes against my nature, or probably anyone’s nature, to actively try to piss off a woman this pregnant. I don’t want to stress her out more with the truth, but she’d catch me in a lie easily. I reach down and fiddle with the bracelets on my left wrist before answering.

  “It is, but—”

  Joey’s head snaps to the left like a hunting dog narrowing in on a small bird.

  “I’m going to kill her,” she says vehemently. “This time I’m actually going to kill her!” Her right hand continues to rub her lower back aggressively, and she storms off as quickly as her belly will allow.

  When I catch up to her a few steps later, still clutching the coat in my hands, she’s mumbling to herself in Spanish. I’m shocked at the four-letter words streaming out of this petite cherubic-looking woman. I didn’t mean to upset her, and I do my best to break into her diatribe.

  “I haven’t worked in a kitchen before, but I’ve been a mixologist for the last few years.”

  Joey stops and glares at me.

  “A bartender!” she says with disgust.

  Her accent is more pronounced now, feisty and Latin in her anger. Before I can say another word, Harris, the overly muscled poem-reciting thug, steps up to us and places a hand on her back, rubbing in the exact spot she was just touching. I stare on stupidly as he uses his other hand to sweep the hair that’s escaped her braid off of her face. His large, rough hands look like they could do some serious damage in a bar fight, but he touches her with utter reverence. I notice the wedding band on his finger and then the smaller matching band on hers.

  Man, I did not see that coming.

  “Love, what’s wrong?” he asks, searching her face for the answer.

  At his question Joey leans into him and looks back at me, her eyes shiny with tears.

  “She’s a stage.” She looks up at him miserably. “She’s never even worked in a kitchen before! How am I supposed to train a stage in a few weeks?” She sniffs weakly.

  I’ve researched enough about chefs to understand the word she used now. A stage is someone who comes into a kitchen as an untrained intern and works from the bottom up. It takes months, sometimes years, to move into a better position, but it’s one of the only options if you haven’t been to culinary school. I don’t want her to cry, and I certainly don’t want to piss off the giant next to her, but given my years of experience with confrontation, I’m not about to let them stand four feet away and talk about me as if I’m not here.

  “Look,” I say with enough emphasis that they both turn my way. “I’ve never been in this kitchen before, but I’ve worked in and around Gander’s for the last three years. I haven’t been trained, but I do know the mechanics and I’m a fast learner.”

  “I don’t have the time to teach you,” Joey says miserably.

  At least she’s not as angry anymore. I go for broke.

  “You don’t have time not to.” I lift my chin defiantly. “You said it took her all nine months to grab me, and yes, I wasn’t exactly
well vetted. But I’m here now, and I’m smart and hardworking, and I’ve studied your menu like it’s the Bible.”

  She keeps looking back at me doubtfully while Harris, a quiet mountain at her side, rubs that spot on her back.

  I can’t get this close and not even get a real chance! In a flash I see myself as that little girl dreaming up a recipe for brookies with my mom, then as a bit older, doodling what the storefront of my bakery would look like. Then I am a teenager looking through the websites of culinary institutes and trying to decide which one I’d attend after I finished undergrad.

  They’re long-buried hopes, but they’re still just as strong. The dreams of your childhood aren’t easy to ignore or to leave behind. They’re the most powerful because you design them without boundaries or limits. It’s what makes growing up so hard, because even though life has shown you different, it’s hard to forget that there was a time when you believed anything was possible.

  I work hard at being stoic—aloof, even—when it comes to work, but I hope she can see that little girl in my eyes now instead of the woman I’ve become. The woman I’ve become wants to say something rude and walk out the door. But that little girl in the small apartment kitchen, who dreamed about this for so long, is the one who keeps me standing here now.

  “Please,” I say quietly, “just give me a chance. I promise I won’t let you down.”

  Joey breathes in slowly through her nose and out through her mouth. She could very well be having a contraction for all I know.

  “Fine. I’ll show you whatever I can in whatever time I have left—”

  “You have eighteen days,” Harris tells us both.

  She looks up at him beseechingly. “You know that’s not enough time, Papi. The doctor said I could go up to two weeks over before they’d have to induce, and I’m already cutting my hours in half as it is and—”

  “You have two and a half weeks, Josephine,” he tells her more firmly.

  “Don’t you dare use my full name. You are not my mother!”

  Joey attempts to stomp away, but Harris grabs her gently and frames her face with both his hands. It is such an intimate moment, especially against the heat and the chaos of the kitchen around them, that I have to look away. I can still hear him, though, speaking to her in that same gentle cadence he used to recite the poem earlier.

  “Love, you promised me. More than that, you promised yourself that you wouldn’t work past your due date. Your back hurts all the time, and it’s too hot in here. It’s not good for you or the baby. You promised, Joey.”

  I don’t know how she responds because I am staring intensely at the giant ovens lining the wall in the corner, but her voice finally pulls my gaze in their direction.

  “Max, there is no way this is possible. I’m not saying that to be rude; it’s just a fact. But this is Avis’s kitchen, and it’s her choice to make. I told her I would train a replacement and I will.” She lets out a long sigh. “You have eighteen days.”

  I can’t help but smile. I didn’t plan on this moment, and I never thought I’d actually try to accomplish this dream. But it’s right in front of me, and I’ll jump at the chance.

  “I’ll take it!” I say, already unbuttoning the coat to put it on.

  “This is Ram,” Joey says, gesturing to the ripped Latino kid I’d seen working the giant mixer earlier. He smiles back at us both, a cocky grin that says he expects female adoration wherever he goes. His apron is stained with several different batters, and large bowls filled with every imaginable concoction cover the high tables around him like stainless-steel sentinels.

  Joey continues, “Ram is short for—”

  “Just Ram,” he tells us both, using his fist to emphasize the word.

  Joey snorts and keeps on going. “Ram, elle es Max. Esta en entrenamiento.” She looks at me and continues in English. “Ram makes all our batters and mixes. From there he’ll hand them off to Tomás, who does the baking. I’ll take you over to meet him next,” she says, turning to go.

  Ram reaches a fist towards me for a bump, and after I awkwardly oblige the gesture, he turns back around to heft a bowl up and into the arms of the mixer. Between the metal, the mixture inside, and the way his muscles work to maneuver it, I’m guessing that each one of those bowls weighs forty or fifty pounds. No wonder he looks so buff.

  We tour the rest of the kitchen. Tomás takes batters from Ram and turns them into cakes, tart shells, piecrusts, and cookies. Harris is still whispering sweet nothings to a berry filling when we pass by him again. Joey tells me he makes all the sauces, fillings, glazes, and icings. I am suitably impressed. There are dozens and dozens of recipes on Dolci’s ever-changing menu. To continually create totally different flavor palettes with such variation and nuance must require extreme attention. Maybe reciting sonnets is a way to help him focus, sort of like white noise.

  Two older men take the finished products from Tomás and Harris and combine them to create the final confections. One of them is the man I’d noticed earlier with the biscotti, but now he is icing black-and-white cookies. Each person, it seems, has a specialized skill-set. For some it involves an incredible palate, while others might not know the difference between white or brown sugar, but they can ice a cake with the dexterity of a neurosurgeon. It is a hodgepodge of people, but each of them is an imperative cog in a well-oiled machine, and at its helm is an unusual old woman in a turban.

  Avis stands at a high table in the corner, hand-whipping a small batch of something and muttering to herself. As we pass by her, Joey doesn’t lower her voice. Even though we are a few feet away and audibly discussing her, I don’t think Avis notices. She is far too caught up in what she is doing.

  “Avis is working on new items for the room-service menu. We store all our pastries here, but there’s no guarantee that once they hit room-service prep, they’ll keep them properly chilled or fire them just right. She’s trying to create recipes that are idiot proof but still feel like Dolci originals.”

  “So she creates all the new recipes for the hotel?”

  “The desserts, breads, and pastries, yes. Then she also handles special orders for the events that come through here. She’s mostly self-sufficient, but there are days when she’ll want a babysitter.” Joey looks at her with equal parts adoration and annoyance.

  My eyes dart to Avis, who is hunched over her mixing bowl. I’m certain that she’ll bark at us now, but she still doesn’t acknowledge our presence. Joey turns and I follow.

  “So she comes up with the recipe, and then you—”

  “I take it from there. I test it in large batches, I teach it to each member of the team for quality control, I handle everyone’s hours, I deal with management.” She stops and looks at me seriously. “I run the kitchen, Max. She’s a genius, to be sure, but she’s also an artist. Artists are flighty, irresponsible, erratic. She needs someone who can manage her and this chaos.” She gestures to the kitchen around us. “She needs that person, or this all goes away. It’s not just her legacy either; there are ten people on staff here, and they need to be able to count on stability. That’s not something she can give them.”

  As if on cue Avis stands and throws her recipe—whisk, bowl, and contents—into the large industrial sink with a crash. The noise is deafening, but no one in the room reacts to it but me.

  “Damn it, Joey! I told you I wanted to stop using this chocolate. It’s too sweet! I can’t make anything with it!”

  Joey doesn’t even turn around. She just calmly calls over her shoulder, “Try the Valrhona instead—the one you used in the soufflé.”

  Avis stands in place, tapping an angry foot. When she speaks again she is slightly calmer.

  “The Caraibe?”

  “No, the Guanaja,” Joey calls back, her eyes never leaving my face. “It’s seventy percent cacao. It will balance out better for you.”

  Mollified by what Joey told her, Avis walks off to the back room.

  “She needs someone to manage her, and it’s
not an easy job. I’ve trained under her for the last five years. The team here is great and they’ll help you, but even still, I have no idea how you think you’ll accomplish all you need to in so little time.”

  I finger my bracelets under the edge of my left sleeve.

  “I’m tougher than I look,” I tell her seriously.

  “You’ll need to be,” she says as she walks off.

  When she stops short I nearly run into her back.

  “You’ll also need different shoes,” she says, eyeballing my Converse with disdain.

  “Absolutely.” I nod emphatically.

  “And the bracelets,” she continues.

  “What?” I ask in confusion.

  “The bracelets—you can’t wear them in here. They could get snagged on something, carry bacteria, heat up enough over the ovens to burn you. There are a ton of reasons, but the biggest is that the health department doesn’t make allowances for personal jewelry. A wedding ring? Yes. A hundred dangly bracelets?” She points at my wrist. “No way.”

  I feel something close to panic hit me then. I always wear my bracelets. Some of them are extremely important; the rest are, well, a way to camouflage the ones that matter. But I wear all of them constantly. I never take them off for any reason.

  “I need to—” I clear my throat. “One of them is for medical reasons.”

  Joey doesn’t even bat an eyelash.

  “OK, so one of them you can wear,” she says sternly. “The rest have to go. Same goes for the dramatic nail polish.”

  I look down at the deep black polish that Landon always teases me about. It is far easier to have bare nails than to take off the jewelry, but I’ll think about that later. Right now I need to secure this job, and I’d agree to almost anything she says at this point. I nod in agreement.

  “Yes, Chef,” she tells me pointedly.

  “Excuse me?” I ask, ever slow on the uptake, apparently.

  Joey does another one of those breaths in through her nose and out through her mouth.

  “The proper response in this kitchen,” she says slowly, though not unkindly, “is, ‘Yes, Chef.’”