“She’s cute,” Matt reached out and petted her silky ears. “I saw her in one of your videos.” Matt spent the better part of an afternoon a couple weeks prior watching some of Sawyer’s videos on You Tube. It had been… enlightening. On camera, Sawyer was utterly charming, with his infectious smile and enthusiasm when he talked about food and cultures. Matt could see how he’d make a popular substitute teacher. “I liked the one where you made chile con carne, in New Mexico.”
Sawyer closed his eyes. “With the really spicy-”
“Yeah,” Matt laughed. “That red chile sauce looked great.”
“Hot as fuck. They don’t joke about the heat over there. I think my video on the Hatch chiles was better. Did a big ole chile relleno, if I remember right.” Matt had watched that one as well, but didn’t mention seeing it. Sawyer’s big hands, so delicate when chopping up the cheese and battering the peppers, quick and sure.
Matt had been mesmerized. “I’ll have to check it out later.”
He glanced down the other side of the RV as Sawyer grinned and continued the tour. “Bedroom and bathroom,” he said, stepping to the left and pointing to the other end of the trailer. Matt could see a door that led to the bathroom, and a small writing desk across from a queen-sized bed, neatly made and covered in pillows. “And then my kitchen.” Sawyer held his hands out in front of his stove, pride in his voice.
“This is amazing.” Matt looked down at what he could only describe as a gourmet mini kitchen. One side had a three-burner gas stove next to a small sink and counter, a magnetic knife rack against the wall above a magnetic spice rack. The other side had a large butcher block counter and stools. Shelves above a miniature fridge held nested mixing bowls and measuring cups. “You know, I saw some pictures of this on your blog, but in person, it’s even more impressive.” Peering closer, Matt saw cabinets filled with high quality ingredients, exposed shelves holding cast iron cookware, and several baking pans. “Did you have to custom order all of this?”
“Some of it. Most of these have gas ovens anyway, but I upgraded mine.”
“It’s unique.” From end to end, Matt guessed the trailer was about thirty feet, with no wasted space, and yet, it didn’t feel crowded. Matt wouldn’t even guess how much all of this must have cost, along with that big truck outside. There was a story behind all of this. “I do appreciate you letting me help you tonight. It all just slipped my mind.”
“I think you’ve helped me enough this year to earn me doing this for the both of us.” Sawyer smiled at him, warmth in his eyes. “But I’ll admit that having company tonight while I work on this is very much appreciated.”
Sawyer pulled out a tablet and scrolled through until he found what he was looking for, setting it up against the counter where he could read a recipe. “When I talked to Deanna, I tossed around the idea of some fall flavors, since it’s October and all. A little change of pace from plain old vanilla and chocolate, you know? This is what I was thinking.” Sawyer leaned against the counter, talking with his hands as he described the cupcakes. “First, caramel apple, with a vanilla cake and an apple compote center, with caramel buttercream frosting and maybe a caramel drizzle. We can also do Black Forest cupcakes. They’re my favorite,” Sawyer admitted. “Dark, dark rich chocolate cake with a black cherry compote filling with cream cheese buttercream and chocolate shavings and cherry on top.” With a mischievous smirk, he added, “We can just do those two, but I just so happened to have all the ingredients for a pumpkin cheesecake cupcake. It would be a moist pumpkin cake with cheesecake filling, and pumpkin pie spiced buttercream and graham cracker sprinkles on top.” Matt’s eyes widened and Sawyer stopped. “What’s wrong?” Sawyer asked. “No good?”
“Dude.” Matt stared at him, incredulous. “Those sound amazing. Are you sure you want to go through all that trouble? This is a middle school bake sale, for fuck’s sake.”
But Sawyer just smiled back at him, this brilliant light in his blue eyes as he spoke. “Matt, this is what I love to do. Honestly, I’ve just been waiting for an excuse to make these.”
Matt still wasn’t convinced. “You’re sure?” he asked one more time.
Sawyer opened a few cabinets and started bringing down ingredients. When he stretched up, his hoodie rode up, and Matt spotted the edges of a lower back tattoo. He’d seen more of it on one of Sawyer’s videos, one where Sawyer was running on the side of some mountain in Colorado.
The day that Matt discovered he had a thing for back tattoos.
“Trust me, this is going to be fun.” Sawyer looked over at Matt, lingering a moment too long for Matt’s comfort. “We’re going to cheat a little with the fillings, but they’ll still be delicious. Have a seat.” Sawyer pointed Matt to the butcher-block table across from the stove. After he sat down, Sawyer started handing him cans of pumpkin, apple, and cherry fillings along with a can opener. “Get those open and then I’m going to set you up to make all the buttercream.” Again, Matt’s face must have shown shock because Sawyer walked up close to him, resting a hand on Matt’s cheek, patting it softly. “You’ll be great.”
His skin burned where Sawyer touched him; not because the act itself was sexual in nature, quite the opposite. It was a soft, friendly gesture, but it had been a long time since anyone had stepped close to Matt like that, right in his space, controlling the situation. For someone as in control of his life as Matt was, this touch set every nerve on fire.
He could think about that later. Now it was cupcake time.
Matt opened the cans as directed, then watched as Sawyer plugged in his large stand mixer and pulled out canisters of flour and sugar and other ingredients, along with two of the beer bottles, opening them and offering one to Matt. “You said you lived here your entire life. What was that like?” Sawyer took a sip, then reaching up onto the shelves and pulling down several large stainless steel mixing bowls.
“Well, almost my entire life. I spent four years in Austin at the university,” Matt said, opening the cans. He set them aside, waiting for more instructions, watching as Sawyer opened a cabinet and handed Matt several boxes of powdered sugar and some vanilla extract. “All this?”
Sawyer added a small container of milk and several sticks of butter to his pile of things on the table. “Well, for now. We’ll see how it goes.” He smiled brightly at Matt. “Start opening these. You’ll need the mixer as soon as I’m done over here. So, keep going with your story. You came back here when you graduated. What was that about?” Sawyer asked, measuring out his dry ingredients and then wet ingredients, breaking eggs into the bowl and mixing everything together into something that resembled vanilla batter.
Matt had been watching Sawyer throw this all together, but that question pulled him back to reality. He took a deep breath, putting thinking back to that day; the one that changed his life forever. “Right before I turned twenty, they diagnosed my grandmother with cancer.”
“Oh shit,” Sawyer said, stopping the mixer to look at him. “I’m so sorry.”
“Yeah,” Matt nodded. “It was bad. We thought we might lose her for a while. Anyway, Sabrina was still in high school and they needed help with the ranch and getting her to appointments and just…” Matt shrugged. “I took a semester off and when I got back, I changed my major.”
“From what to what?”
“Aerospace engineering to education.”
Sawyer had been separating cupcake liners and inserting them into the pan, but now he looked up. “Wait, what? Why did you do that?”
Matt reached for the second cupcake pan and helped, inserting more liners. “I needed something where I could get a job right away-”
Sawyer’s eyes narrowed, turning to face Matt. “And engineering wouldn’t do that?”
“You see many jobs for aerospace engineers in Estella?”
“Matt.” Sawyer put one hand on his hip. “You’re literally right down the road from Houston.”
“And,” Matt continued, speaking slowly, “I needed to be clos
e to them. Down the street kind of close.” It was hard to explain now how it felt, nineteen years old and worried about losing the woman who raised him, who had given up everything to take care of them. “It was the right decision.”
Sawyer whistled low. “You gave up a lot, Matt,”
“Yeah.” Matt nodded. “But it’s what family does.”
“Some families, I guess.” Sawyer reached up and turned on a small speaker, some indie rock playing quiet in the background as they worked. Pulling out a small scoop, he quickly filled the two cupcake pans with vanilla batter and put them in the oven, setting his timer. “Your turn to use the mixer while I clean up over here and get started on batter number two.” Sawyer moved the tablet over to where Matt could read the buttercream recipe: add butter, add sugar, add a little milk. “I made some caramel earlier so it would be cool for you to use it,” he added, setting a small bowl in front of Matt.
“That’s it?” Matt looked up from the tablet. “Just mix this up?”
“Crazy, right?” Sawyer helped Matt get started on creaming the butter and adding the sugar a little at a time.
Matt smirked as it all seemed to come together at the end, light and fluffy. “I did it,” he said proudly, sliding a finger along the edge of the bowl, tasting it. Sawyer watched him lick the tip of his finger and chuckled. “What? It’s good!”
“I hope it is. I mean, I’m not surprised that you can follow a recipe. It’s all that engineering background.” Sawyer handed Matt a piping bag and a spoon. “So why aerospace? Did you want to be an astronaut or something?”
Matt shook his head. “No, not really. I mean, that would be cool, but that wasn’t what interested me. I liked robotics when I was a kid. I remember seeing those Mars rovers and I wanted to be a part of that.” Building machines that would live and work on another planet.
“And now you’re in grad school, right? Do you ever think about going back and trying to get into robotics now? Change it over to something that’ll get you back into that field?”
“It’s too late. The people who get into those programs have master’s degrees in aerospace engineering and years of experience by my age. They work at Boston Dynamics or Bluefin. JPL. Places like that.” Looking over at Sawyer, Matt took a breath. “But I took what life gave me and made an alternative plan, and now I’ve got a goal that I think is worth working towards.”
“They said you want to be the superintendent.”
“I do. I think it is a reasonable goal, and one that would let me leap into a bigger district, a bigger city one day when I’m done here.” He hesitated, then added, “Maybe move to Austin and help shape education policy at the state level.” That idea began poking at him since his graduate classes began. He hadn’t mentioned it to anyone else. “I think I’d be good at that.”
“Wow.” Sawyer seemed surprised. “But… what about teaching?”
“What about it?”
“I thought you liked it. You’ve got the knack,” Sawyer said.
Matt shrugged. “It was never in plan, not forever.”
Sawyer looked like he wanted to ask more but didn’t. Instead, he reached for a big spoon and helped Matt scoop the frosting into a piping bag, then picked the mixer back up and set it up at his counter. He began working on chocolate batter. “What was it like, growing up on the ranch? Sounds like a great place to be a kid, outside with all the animals and all that land.”
“We weren’t on the ranch all the time.” Sawyer had navigated them into some personal territory, and Matt treaded carefully. “My grandparents raised my sister Sabrina and me, I guess that’s not a secret. When we were little, my mom lived with us too.” Sawyer’s eyebrows went up, but he didn’t speak, waiting for Matt to continue. “One time she took off to get a job in California.” He shrugged. “She never came back for any longer than a couple days to visit.”
“Not even when your grandma got sick?” Matt shook his head. “Fuck,” Sawyer murmured. “That sucks, man.”
“I can’t say that it surprised any of us. Truth is,” Matt began, then paused, not sure how to explain what it felt like; or rather, why he didn’t think about it anymore. “I don’t remember the day she left, because she left us a lot, coming and going whenever she got a new job or met a new guy. But I do remember the day when I realized she wouldn’t ever be coming back.” Matt watched Sawyer scoop apple pie filling into another piping bag. “Anyway, we had a house in town when Sabrina and I were kids. My grandpa would go to the ranch a couple times a week and then we’d all go on the weekends and stay there. There was an old house there, the one my grandma grew up in. Then after Sabrina graduated, they built a nicer house on the land, and that’s where they live now.”
“What a great legacy.” Sawyer leaned back and smiled, as if the thought made him happy. “You don’t want to take over, go live on the land when your grandpa retires?”
Matt shook his head. “That’s my sister. Sabrina loves the land, and she has this calling. She’s the one who’s going to take over.”
A timer went off, and Sawyer pulled the first batch of cupcakes out of the oven, arranging them on a pan and setting them in the mini-fridge to cool. He lined the pans with new cupcake liners and began scooping his chocolate batter into them. Soon those were in the oven. Matt got up and washed his bowls, gathered his ingredients together and with Sawyer’s help, started on his chocolate buttercream.
Once the first batch of vanilla cupcakes cooled, Sawyer piped some of the apple pie filling into the cupcakes. After giving Matt a quick tutorial on how to frost the cupcakes, they began a little assembly line. “So,” Sawyer began, resuming their earlier conversation, “you said you had a plan, a timeline. What is it?” He looked up, eyes widening. “Tell me you don’t have a spreadsheet. You’re not that person. Are you? Are you that person?”
Matt pretended like he didn’t hear that (because he did have a spreadsheet, thank you very much) but smiled anyway as he started piping vanilla frosting on his cupcakes, pleased with how professional they looked. “Maybe. The quick version is that I want to finish my Master’s in Educational Leadership, then work my way up in administration, first at a school for four years and then at the district level for another four to five years. I should make superintendent somewhere by forty.”
“That’s… specific.” Sawyer’s face was hard to read. He took the mixer back and began the batter for the last batch of cupcakes.
“Yeah.” Matt looked over at Sawyer. “I’m right on schedule, too.” Something about his plans bothered Sawyer, but Matt didn’t understand how or why he felt so defensive about it. “Okay, enough about me. What are you doing here in this little podunk Texas town?” he asked, turning the tables on Sawyer.
“Um,” Sawyer hesitated, measuring flour and sugar. “Well, you know about the restaurant. It wasn’t working anymore, so we sold, for a very good price, mind you. I took the money and bought this.” Sawyer’s hand waved around his trailer. “Then I picked up the truck and started traveling. Just wanted to get out of Oregon and see the rest of the west.”
“What wasn’t working?”
A moment passed before Sawyer answered. “My partner and I. I guess it wasn’t what he thought it was going to be, running the restaurant. It was a lot of pressure and he just didn’t… well, I couldn’t do it alone, so we sold.”
“And then you just left?” Matt looked incredulous. “That’s crazy. I can’t imagine what it’s like to just pick up and leave whenever you’re done with a place.” Sawyer looked up when Matt said this. “I didn’t mean that in any sort of way. It’s just… it looks like fun, traveling and cooking and camping out.” But Matt couldn’t do that, it wasn’t in him to leave his family.
At least not right now. Matt glanced over at the stove again. “How do you film yourself?”
Sawyer opened a low cabinet and pulled out some camera equipment, stands and cords all bundled up together. “This camera records me from above. This one here,” Sawyer held up an expensive look
ing camera, “this gets perched on a tripod and records me from the side. This thing clips over here, I have some extra lighting, a microphone, and voila.”
“It’s very cool.”
Sawyer flushed an adorable pink. “Thank you.”
Soon the chocolate cupcakes were done, and Sawyer put the pumpkin ones into the oven. Matt helped shift the vanilla cupcakes onto the table, making room for the chocolate ones that were cooling in the fridge. They’d figured out a rhythm to get this done, the two of them moving around the small kitchen with an unexpected familiarity, and Matt surprised himself with how much of the baking process he picked up. “You talk to your family? What do they think about all this?” he asked as they began filling and frosting the chocolate cupcakes.
“They’re busy people.” There was a tightness in Sawyer’s voice that Matt didn’t recognize, so he didn’t press the topic.
Finally, the pumpkin cupcakes were done and cooling, and together they worked on the final decorations. “You mean caramel is just sugar and water?” Matt watched Sawyer, spooning little wisps of the sticky strands over the vanilla cupcakes as he added cherries and graham cracker bits to the chocolate and pumpkin cupcakes. “It’s like magic.”
“Almost.” Sawyer looked satisfied as he looked over Matt’s work. “You’re doing a superb job.”
It was almost ten when they finished packing the cupcakes into boxes. “I can’t believe we made these. They’re too pretty to eat.” Matt stared at the large cardboard boxes, several dozen packed and ready to go. “I don’t care what you said, I know you spent your own money on this.”
Sawyer shrugged. “Deanna gave me a little seed money for ingredients. Besides, it’s all for a good cause, right?”
“On behalf of the Hays Middle School Math Club, thank you.” Sawyer handed Matt a piece of leftover chocolate cupcake. He took a bite, groaning in pleasure. “I can’t believe we made these.”
“We did.” Sawyer grinned and ate some broken bits of cake. “You were a great baking assistant, Matt. If this whole ‘education slash superintendent slash Texas education policy director’ thing doesn’t work out, you could walk into any bakery and be confident in your skills.”
Life, Love, and Other Inequalities Page 5