Sweet Girl

by Rachel Hollis

  “Understand?” She holds up the pan, which now contains one perfectly pressed tart ready for the oven. I’m supposed to prepare the other eleven circles, but I’m actually not that nervous since I spent all of last summer perfecting my fruit tart. I feel pretty confident.

  “Yes, Chef,” I answer, already starting to stamp out the circles in the rolled-out dough on the counter.

  She flashes me a quick smile, amused at my eager attitude, I’m sure.

  “Then I’ll leave you to it,” she says, sliding the pan closer to me. “You can finish off today’s quota, and then we’ll work on something else.”

  “OK, great. How many do you need?” I ask her, not taking my eyes off the dough in front of me for fear of making a mistake.

  “There’s a luncheon here at the hotel tomorrow, and this is the signature dessert. Why don’t you do four hundred just to be safe?”

  My head snaps up from my work and then back down to the tiny scallops on the individual tarts. “Four hundred?”

  Each one will take several minutes for me to fill. I had no idea they’d need so many. It’s not impossible, just tedious.

  “OK,” I say again, already trying to move my fingers as quickly as she did. The dough looks a little beat up because of my efforts, and I slow back down. I’m going to have to crawl before I can walk.

  Joey turns to leave, and I look quickly around the table to make sure there’s nothing else I need before she goes.

  “Oh, wait! Can you tell me where to find the rest of these?” I hold up the edge of the pan with buttery fingers.

  She almost manages not to smile when she says, “That’s the only one, I’m afraid.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Avis swears it’s the only one that works right, since she’s used it for a decade. It’s the only one we’ve got.”

  “But . . .” I stutter stupidly. “How am I supposed to bake off several hundred tart crusts with only one pan?”

  “I’m not sure, but figure it out quickly because Harris needs to start filling those at four so they have time to set.” She says this with a wink.

  I look back down at the dough miserably.

  Damn, this is going to suck.

  Several hours later I’ve amassed only a few dozen finished tart crusts, but I try not to focus on that. I just work my way through cutting one circle after another so that at least the dough is ready for the next round as soon as the pan comes out of the oven. I shouldn’t look, but I can’t help glancing at the clock every few minutes. The time just keeps slipping away bit by bit, and I can’t finish them any faster than I already am. It takes twenty minutes to bake them, and during that time there’s nothing to do but prep the dough. I’ll be done with that soon, and then I’ll have nothing to do but watch the oven like an idiot.

  “Come on, Mama, I’m going to show you how we pull recipes next,” Joey calls from behind me.

  I turn around to see her waddling over alongside Ram, who’s holding a stack of nearly a dozen pans. Tart pans.

  What the hell?

  “Ram will help Tomás finish these up,” she tells me with another wink.

  The pans clatter against the metal table, and Ram looks over what I’ve prepped so far. I stare back at Joey in utter annoyance.

  “Hazing? Are you serious?” Without the oppression of three hundred unfinished tarts weighing me down, it’s much easier to be sarcastic again.

  Joey and Ram both smile like little demons.

  “If we had the time, it would have been so much worse than this.” She laughs.

  I look to Ram, who’s nodding along in agreement.

  “At least you got a pan! When I started here they asked me to prep the tarts, only they didn’t give me a mold. It’s the closest I’ve ever come to crying in public!” he tells me with a grin.

  I mutter something inappropriate under my breath, which only serves to make Joey laugh harder. She signals me to follow her, and once I wash the butter off my hands at the back sink, we walk to the area of the kitchen that’s farthest from the ovens. It’s only marginally cooler here, but marginally makes a hell of a difference when you start sweating through your clothes nine minutes into a ten-hour day.

  Joey reaches to grab something from a rolling rack and lumbers over to me with it.

  “This,” she says as she lets a binder the size of a Mini Cooper fall to the table in front of me, “is the recipe book.”

  The binder is smudged and dirty, no doubt from its close proximity to a recipe in process at any given time. It’s just a simple three-ring option, the kind of thing you’d find in any office-supply store, but I gasp when I recognize what it is. This ordinary book is filled with all of Avis Phillips’s recipes. That’s got to be at least forty years’ worth of creations.

  Are the secrets to my favorite cakes in this thing? Does it have the directions to make the profiteroles she won the US Pastry Competition with? Are there ideas in here that I’ve never even dreamed of before? I reach out to touch it and have a brief flash of that moment in Indiana Jones when their faces melted off because they looked at something too powerful for them to understand. I mean, I get that this isn’t the Ark of the Covenant, but it sort of feels that way to me.

  When I hesitate to actually touch it, Joey reaches out, unaware of the level of reverence I’m swimming in, and opens it at random. She starts to flip through the pages as she speaks. I inch closer until I can see everything. Each recipe is in a clear sheet protector, but beyond that there’s no organization that I can determine. Some of them are written on notebook paper, some are typed, and some are so old they’re yellowed and warped.

  “All of her work is here. The handwriting on some of them is a little hard to read, but most of the recipes we work with at Dolci are new, so you’ll find them typed out,” she says, pointing out a lemon chiffon cake.

  I know from firsthand experience that that dessert is like a citrus-infused cloud; it’s so light and fluffy.

  “She just stores these here on a back shelf?” I ask, dumbfounded. “They’re not in a vault or something? What if someone steals them?”

  “Everyone who comes through here wonders the same thing.” She sighs. “Avis has her own way of doing things, and she’s too old to be swayed. Occasionally she looks up an older dish as a reference, and if she couldn’t find the binder, she’d have a meltdown.” She gives me a deadpan look. “We try to keep the Avis meltdowns to a minimum.”

  “OK,” I say, more than a little confused.

  “Also, she changes her recipes up so often that if someone did try to rip something off, they’d be outdated. Most of her competitors would hate to think of themselves as behind a trend. Plus there’s security here, and surveillance.” She gestures to a small camera in the corner of the room near the ceiling. “And the staff is small and incredibly loyal. So this is relatively safe.”

  I nod in agreement with her logic.

  “You’ve given this some thought.”

  Joey lets out a self-conscious laugh. “This damn book kept me up at night for weeks after we left the old restaurant. She put it on that shelf and said she wanted it left there, and I made myself sick worrying that someone would take it. I’ve given myself that speech about the surveillance cameras more times than I can count.”

  She rolls her eyes at the story, but I totally understand the notion. I’d be pretty sick over being responsible for something so valuable too.

  “Now, why don’t you start with this one?” She chooses something seemingly at random. “I think it’s best if we just throw you right into it, OK?”

  “OK,” I agree.

  I look down at the recipe for caramel-apple cupcakes with a cream-cheese filling. That is simple enough; I make cupcakes all the time.

  “So go ahead and just make a dozen. This one is written for”—she taps the recipe with her finger as she reads—“four times that. But it’s easy enough to divide out from there.”

  She raises her eyebrows in question, and I nod conf
idently. Joey heads back to the office with the promise that she’ll be back in an hour. I lean down to get a closer look at the ingredients so that I can start gathering them.

  I see words I know: eggs, water, milk. But then the words start to change into some kind of odd lingo, or they are written in symbols I can’t decipher or understand. CF, PF, 10X, 6X, and even a hashtag. I don’t know what any of it means. How do I—

  I roll my eyes when I understand what’s happening. Joey said they’d harass me more if they had time. I guess they decided they could make time. The thing is, though, I don’t want my time wasted. Joey is only here for a little while, and I need to learn as much as I can before she leaves if I have any chance of succeeding. I don’t want to spend the next two weeks playing stupid games with them. I need to do real work, not screw around with riddles. I remove the sheet protector holding the recipe and wonder how long they had to mess with it to make it appear so old. I go in search of the hazing committee.

  I find Joey in the small office working through a spreadsheet on the computer in front of her. She has two small fans coming at her from different directions, both of them aimed directly at her face, but she still looks miserably hot. Some of my annoyance fizzles out. Even if she has been screwing around, I’m not about to yell at a pregnant woman.

  “Hey,” I call to her, and she spins around in my direction.

  She looks at the recipe in my hand.

  “Is there an issue? Are we out of the nutmeg? I don’t always have it in stock this time of year, but I’m sure there’s some in—”

  “Seriously?” I ask with a sigh. “I get that this is probably entertaining for you guys, but I don’t think we have time to be messing around.”

  Joey’s brow furrows, and she manages to look truly confused.

  “I don’t understand,” she tells me.

  I take the two steps necessary to cross the small office and hold the recipe out for her inspection.

  “I don’t either,” I tell her, pointing at the symbols. “The joke’s on me; I get it. The recipe is written in code, and I don’t understand it. Can we skip the part where you all harass me further and just give me a real recipe so I can get to work?”

  “Written in code?” Joey asks, sounding totally perplexed.

  She pulls the page out of my hand and starts to look it over. I watch her face take on some kind of comprehension, but I don’t know what it is. Her eyes close slowly, and when she opens them again she doesn’t look up at me.

  “You don’t know how to read shorthand.”

  It isn’t a question. It’s a statement, but it sounds more like a death sentence.

  “What?” I nearly whisper, sensing something off in her tone. She isn’t joking or even angry anymore. She sounds utterly disappointed, which scares the crap out of me.

  “Baker’s shorthand. This means powdered sugar.” She points at the nonsensical words on the page, seemingly at random. “This is refined sugar, pastry flour, and this is the symbol for a pound of something.”

  I feel like a total moron. I had no idea there was such a thing as baker’s shorthand. I’d been baking most of my life, but it was at home, using our family recipes or those we’d found in a cookbook. There was a whole special language I’d have to learn. The realization is daunting but also totally exciting.

  “OK, sorry about that,” I tell her. “Do you have a summary of terms or something I can—”

  “I’m sorry, Max,” Joey says, putting the recipe on the desk and standing up slowly. “This isn’t going to work out.”

  I am so startled by the words that it takes me a moment to respond.

  “I might not know the language yet, but I know how to bake. I’ve been creating new recipes since I was—”

  “Max, you don’t get it,” she tells me sadly. “This isn’t about creating new recipes. I’m a sous-chef. I’m Avis’s second-in-command. I take her ideas and bring them to life. I teach them to the others on staff. I configure them for large quantities or check to see if there’s a more streamlined way to get the same result. There’s a science in that, and the most basic necessity of this job is the ability to understand what she started with and extrapolate from there.”

  “But if I just—” I try desperately.

  “No.” She says it without raising her voice, but I hear the finality just the same. “Half the time she doesn’t even remember what she wrote down, but she never forgets one of her flavor palettes. That’s why it’s so critical that you can read her recipes, because she only really pays attention long enough to write it down once.”

  I open my mouth, but she cuts me off by shaking her head.

  “This was already an impossibility, but I thought maybe we could figure it out. I didn’t factor in the shorthand. Even the kitchen assistants are familiar with it before they apply here. There’s just too much you don’t know, and I can’t risk it. Thanks for trying, though. It was really nice to meet you.”

  She sticks her hand out, and I am too stunned to do anything but shake it.

  As I grab my bag and walk slowly out of the kitchen, I am in a daze. I don’t look at anyone or notice if anyone looks at me. I make it all the way to the hallway next to the underground employee parking garage before I stop moving. It is early afternoon, a time of day between shifts, so no one is around. I let myself lean against the wall. My backpack falls from my loose fingers to the floor, and it seems like such a good idea that I follow it. I slide down the wall and let my forehead drop to my bent knees.

  How did I get here? How could I possibly have made it so close to this dream and then lost it all because I was too flipping stupid to keep my mouth shut until I figured out what was going on? If I’d taken thirty seconds to Google the shorthand, I would have realized what it was. It might have taken me longer, but I could have worked out that recipe. At the very least I could have been canned because I screwed up. Not even getting a chance to try was so much worse!

  I know better than to get my hopes up. I know how minimal the chances of happiness are. How could I let my guard down? Why did I think that for once it would actually work out in my favor?

  Disgusted with my line of thought, I close my eyes tightly and take several deep breaths. I will pull myself together. People go through way worse stuff than this. Hell, I’d been through way worse stuff than this. I open my eyes, and a hint of orange peeks out at me from my feet. The sight has me taking in a strangled breath. Excited about the new job, I’d gone out yesterday and bought Native Shoes in every color they had, since an online search informed me that they were the coolest nonslip shoes you could wear. They also sort of look like rubber Converse, so they seemed like the perfect choice. I’d worn the orange today in a dorky homage to Mario Batali, a fact that utterly ashames me now.

  The color blurs before me, and damn it, I hate myself in that instant.

  I didn’t cry when I ended up in the hospital in December. I didn’t cry when Grandma died last summer or Pop Pop the year before that. I haven’t cried since that night six years ago when my mother found me in bed, and the sight of these stupid orange shoes is going to push me over the edge!

  I swipe at my eyes angrily and choke on the sobs in my chest, refusing to let them out.

  I don’t even hear the group of guys until one of them speaks to me.

  “Jennings?”

  My head flies up in time to see Bennett effing Taylor walk down the hallway towards me with two other guys trailing behind him. They are all dressed in black jeans and black T-shirts. But unlike the other two, Taylor looks utterly shocked and totally concerned. About me.

  Great. This is just absolutely flipping perfect!

  I look away. I don’t have the energy to acknowledge him right now.

  “You guys finish getting that step-and-repeat signage set,” he tells the other two. “I’ll meet you there in a bit.”

  The guys walk past without another word while Taylor, who clearly can’t take a hint, sits down next to me. He acts like finding som
e chick he barely knows in tears in the garage hallway is the most normal thing in the world.

  When I don’t turn my head to look his way, he tries a more direct approach.

  “Are you OK?” he asks so gently that I almost start bawling again.

  Jeez, I’m a mess!

  “I don’t want to talk to you,” I finally croak.

  “OK,” he says slowly. “Is there someone I can call for you?”

  As if there were someone who I do want to talk to. As if I were going to lay this all out for my family or my few friends to pick through. Hey, you didn’t know it, but I had this stupid childhood dream that I’ve secretly been obsessed with all my life. Oh yeah, and I finally got the chance to realize it, only I wasn’t good enough to pull it off, and now I’m crying alone in a hallway.

  I laugh, though nothing about this is funny.

  Taylor must hear the irony in the sound.

  “OK.” He stretches his legs out in front of him and crosses them at the ankle in a deceptively casual manner. “So then talk to me. I’m right here.”

  I wipe my eyes again and my bracelets jangle.

  A fifteen-percent chance. The memory flits through my mind, and I bat it away. I know the chances of happiness. Why did I set myself up for this?

  “You said it yourself the other night,” Taylor tries again. “You don’t give a damn about my opinion, so why not just tell me what’s going on.”

  He nudges my shoulder with his own playfully.

  I don’t respond.

  “Look, I promise I’ll go back to being patronizing and antagonistic when I see you next. We’ll forget this ever happened. Just tell me what happened.”

  He is so easygoing about the whole thing, as if he is offering me a beer at a party instead of a chance to vent. But I can’t actually consider it. I don’t talk to anyone about anything. It’s just easier not to.

  “I lost my job,” I utterly shock myself by saying.

  “That sucks. I’m sorry,” he says gently.