5. JAMIE #2
"Seven or eight dollars for three, probably. Depends on ingredient costs and location. You charge more at a festival than you charge parked outside an office building on a Tuesday."
He nods slowly. "What's your target?"
"Office lunch crowds and evening markets to start.
Lunch crowds spend fast — they've got thirty minutes and they want something that's fast and interesting and Instagram-able, and the dessert taco hits all three.
Evening markets are slower, you get the browse-and-graze type, they'll try something weird because they're already in that mindset, and that's where the sliders do well because people will buy a round and share them. "
"You said Instagram-able."
"I did say Instagram-able."
"That's a marketing plan."
"I am aware."
He's quiet for a moment, and I can feel him turning it over, and then he says — dry, almost offhand — "You ever going to put an actual savory thing on this menu, or are you committed to the deception all the way down?"
I point at him. "That is the brand. The deception is the brand."
"You're going to explain your own joke to every customer."
"The packaging will explain it. That's what packaging is for."
"Mm." He drinks his coffee. "Sounds like a lot of packaging."
"Are you — " I look at him. "Are you workshopping my concept with me right now?"
He gives me nothing. Absolutely nothing, just that level blue gaze.
"You're right," I say, because he actually is, and I've been thinking about the packaging problem for six months and haven't solved it.
"The packaging is a cost problem. If it's complicated enough to need a pamphlet, it's too complicated.
" I sit back. "Okay. So the presentation has to do the explaining.
The taco has to look like a taco. The slider has to look like a slider.
By the time someone picks it up, they already know it's dessert from the board, but their hands are telling them savory and the first bite tells them sweet, and that gap is what sells it. "
"That's your pitch right there."
I open my mouth. Close it. He's right again, and the annoying thing about it is that he got there faster than I would have by talking out loud for another twenty minutes. That's your pitch right there. Five words and he handed me the clearest version of my own concept I've ever heard.
"I've been overthinking this," I say.
"Most good ideas get overthought."
"Is that — is that wisdom? Are you doing wisdom at me over breakfast?"
He stands and picks up his plate, and I swear to every baking deity that has ever watched over a Dutch oven that the corner of his mouth moves.
He tells me he's back to work the day after tomorrow while he's rinsing his plate at the sink, matter-of-fact, the way he says everything.
"What do you need?" he asks. He says it with his back to me, water running. "So you've got something to do while I'm gone."
My first instinct is oh, I'll be fine, I can figure it out. I catch the instinct and look at it. Turn it over. Put it down.
"I want to try some recipes," I tell him. "I've been working through your kitchen, which is — " I pause diplomatically.
"Sparse."
"I was going to say minimal."
"Same thing."
"I need ingredients. And I need some tools — my offset spatula is at the school, my piping tips are at the school, I don't have a kitchen scale, and your baking powder is from 2019."
He turns off the tap. Dries his hands on the dish towel that I have already learned he folds into thirds before hanging back up, every time, with a precision that I find deeply endearing even though I would never say so. "We'll go today."
"Jackson, that's — "
"We'll go today," he says again, turning to face me, and there's nothing in his voice that invites a counter-offer.
I should feel like he's steamrolling me. I sit there and wait for that feeling, the prickle of stubborn independence I've been wearing as armor since I was sixteen and decided I wasn't going to wait around for my mother to show up when she said she would.
The feeling doesn't come.
What comes instead is a smoothness. Like when dough that's been shaggy and resistant for five minutes of kneading suddenly goes supple under your palms and you know it's right — there's no fanfare, it just shifts, and you feel it in your hands.
I sit at Jackson's table in his t-shirt with his coffee and feel it shift.
I get up to go get dressed before I can think too hard about it.
Jackson is enormous in a grocery store.
I knew this abstractly — I have known since he got out of his truck in front of my dorm and the parking lot seemed to rearrange itself around him — but seeing him in a grocery store aisle is a different category of information.
He makes the cereal aisle look like a hallway. A man coming the other direction with a cart actually veers left before he's even registered why, some primal navigational instinct kicking in, the way water finds new channels around large rocks.
A child near the display of chips stops mid-reach and cranes his head all the way back, tracking upward, mouth open.
Jackson doesn't notice any of this. He's carrying the basket. He walks beside me and watches me work through the baking aisle with the patient attention of a man who has decided that this is what we're doing today and he's fully committed.
"Okay." I hold up two bars of chocolate, one in each hand. "This one is seventy-two percent cacao, single origin, from a company that actually pays their farmers. This one is also seventy-two percent, it says premium on the label, and it's four dollars cheaper."
He looks at the one in my right hand. "That one."
"Wrong." I put the cheaper one back. "The premium label is a marketing decision, not a quality indicator. This one" — I brandish the other — "has a snap you can hear across a room and a finish that doesn't coat your mouth with wax. You taste the difference."
"You asked my opinion."
"I asked which one you thought, and you were wrong, and now you know."