Chapter 3
Harper
There is a particular smell that a bakery makes in its first two weeks of operation, and it is not the smell it'll have in a year.
In a year a bakery smells like itself — like the specific things its baker makes, in the proportions she makes them, with the particular hand she has on her cinnamon.
In the first two weeks a bakery smells like trying .
It smells like every recipe being tested.
It smells like the lavender shortbread the baker is pretty sure about and the rye loaf she is not sure about at all, all stacked up in the same kitchen on the same morning, plus the under-note of fresh paint from where she touched up the trim on Tuesday because she could not stand looking at the gray patch one more day.
My bakery smelled like trying. My bakery smelled like a woman with eleven days till her grand opening and a head full of every dessert she had ever loved and a heart full of please , please , please , let this work .
I had named her Kneaded .
I had named her in the U-Haul. I had named her somewhere outside Knoxville, after I'd named the U-Haul Buttercup and the Big Gulp Veronica.
Kneaded. It was a pun and it was a prayer at the same time, which is how I like my puns.
I had a sign coming. Briar's husband Silas, who I had now met three times and who was about six and a half feet of quiet leather and good manners, had told me he'd put me in touch with a man in the next county who hand-painted signs the old way, and that man had sent me a pencil sketch of a curved oval with Kneaded in cursive across it and a tiny wheat sheaf on either side, and I had cried at my parents' kitchen table looking at it and texted him back YES PLEASE THAT'S IT in all caps.
The sign was coming Tuesday. The grand opening was the Saturday after. I had nine days to nail down a menu.
Which is how, on the Monday morning of grand-opening week, I came to be hosting what I had decided to call, mostly inside my own head, the Clover Ridge Tasting Committee.
They came in shifts. I had not asked any of them to come — I had mentioned, the previous Thursday at supper at Briar's house, that I was overwhelmed by menu decisions, and that I had eaten so many of my own pastries that week that I could no longer taste them objectively, and that I needed honest mouths that were not related to me by blood.
Briar had nodded. Nadia had nodded. Wren, the tall brunette with the kind eyes who had brought me soup the week before, had nodded.
Elara, the quieter blonde who had set up my books, had nodded.
By Sunday night I had a text chain going with the four of them titled KNEADED RECON and a schedule for Monday and Tuesday in which one of them showed up every two hours from eight a.m. to six p.m. with their honest mouths and their honest opinions.
Briar arrived first at eight on Monday morning with a thermos of coffee from her own kitchen and a baby on her hip.
"Lark needed to come," she said apologetically, setting the baby down on the floor of my front-of-house where I had set up a little play corner with a basket of soft toys for exactly this contingency.
"Gemma's got a thing this morning. I told her I'd bring her by.
She loves cinnamon rolls, in case that's on the docket. "
"It's on the docket."
"Then she's gonna love you."
Lark was, by my best guess, somewhere between one and two — a sturdy little blonde with cheeks like apples and the focused, suspicious face of a toddler who has just been deposited in a new place by a non-mother.
She regarded me for about ten seconds. I crouched down to her level.
I produced, from my apron pocket, a small finger of cinnamon roll dough I had been carrying around for this exact reason.
"Hi, sugar," I said. "I'm Harper. You want a taste?"
Lark took the dough. Lark put the dough in her mouth. Lark made a face that suggested a religious conversion was taking place in real time, and then she sat down on the floor with the basket of toys and got to work, and Briar laughed and said, "You're in."
I'd done a sampler of twelve things. Six sweets, six savories. I'd labeled each one with a little card and Briar went down the line.
"Lavender shortbread," she said, biting in.
She closed her eyes. She made a small sound, low in her throat, the kind of sound a woman makes when she's been served exactly the right thing.
"Harper. Harper Kincaid. I'm going to need a dozen of these every Friday for the shop.
Lavender — where did you get the lavender? "
"There's a farm outside Asheville that ships."
"There's a farm outside Clover Ridge that grows it. Mrs. Hatcher. She'll cut you a deal. I'll text you her number."
"Yes please."
"What's this one."
"Honey-thyme biscuit."
"Stop it." She bit in. "Stop it. Stop it. Stop. Harper."
"You like the honey-thyme biscuit?"
"Briar McCutcheon does not like the honey-thyme biscuit," she said. "Briar McCutcheon would marry the honey-thyme biscuit if Silas would allow it. Lark, " she called, "come try this one."
Lark came to try it. Lark approved. Lark and her honey-thyme biscuit went back to the toy corner.
Briar worked her way through the rest of the dozen, taking notes on the back of an envelope in handwriting I could not read, drinking her coffee, weighing in on every flavor with the precision of a woman who had been running a small business for two years and knew, intimately, what her customers wanted on a Saturday morning.
By the time she left at nine-thirty I had four definite menu items and a list of three more to refine.
I had also, more importantly, drunk a cup of someone else's coffee that someone else had made for me, and that had been such a small unexpected kindness that I had teared up over it in the bathroom after she'd left.
Nadia came at ten.
Nadia had a clipboard. Nadia had, in fact, been wearing a clipboard like a piece of jewelry every time I'd seen her, and on Monday morning her clipboard had a six-page plan for the Saturday grand opening that included a setup timeline, a tear-down timeline, a list of which Iron Thorn brothers had been assigned to which tasks, a chart of where I should place the pastry case, a sketch of three possible balloon arrangements, and a contingency plan in case it rained.
"You're scaring me," I said.
"Good," Nadia said. "You should be scared. You've never done a grand opening. I have done forty-six grand openings in five different cities, and the only thing that separates a good one from a disaster is paranoia. May I taste the brown sugar scone."
"Be my guest."
She ate the brown sugar scone with the same focus she had brought to the clipboard. She wrote something on her clipboard. She ate the cardamom snickerdoodle. She wrote something on her clipboard. She got to the lavender shortbread and stopped writing.
"This is the one," she said.
"Briar said the same thing."
"Briar's right. This is your hero pastry.
This is the one you put on the photograph for the menu board.
This is the one that gets the centerpiece position in the case on Saturday morning.
People walk by your window, this is the cookie that pulls them in.
" She tapped the cookie with her pen. "I'm going to take a tray of these home tonight to Roman, by the way. For research purposes."
"For research purposes."
"Strictly."
She stayed an hour and worked through the savories.
She suggested I add a fourth savory item for the opening — people get tired of sweet, Harper, you have to give them an option that says lunch — and we settled on a small ham-and-cheddar biscuit with chive butter that I had thought of in the U-Haul and not been brave enough to put on the test menu, and she made me make a batch right then while she watched, and when she ate one she said, " That's your lunch item. Done. Add it."
Wren came at one.
Wren was a high school art teacher, I had learned, and married to a brother in the club named Maverick, and she carried herself with the quiet steady wattage of a woman who had walked through several fires and come out interested in the people on the other side.
She brought me a print-quality photograph of my own front window that she had taken on her phone two days before — for the social media, she said, I do not Instagram for a living but I have eyes, — and she ate my cinnamon roll, the big square frosted one, and she said, very quietly, "Harper, these are the best cinnamon rolls I have ever had in my life. "
"Stop."
"I am not exaggerating. I had a cinnamon roll at a place in Portland that had a ninety-minute line on Saturdays and I am telling you, with my whole chest, that yours is better."
"Wren."
"I am going to need to come buy these every weekend for the rest of my life and I want you to be prepared for that, financially."
I started crying.
She didn't say anything about it. She just slid off her stool, came around the counter, and hugged me. She hugged me for about ten seconds, and then she let me go, and she said, "Okay. What's next."
Elara came at three.
Elara was the quietest of the four and the youngest, I thought, maybe twenty-eight or twenty-nine, with the kind of librarian beauty that snuck up on you.
She was an accountant in her day job. She was a knitter on the weekends.
She was married to a brother named Axel who, I had heard, had been the most closed-off man in the club until she had walked into a bookstore three years ago and ended that.
She brought me a binder. She brought me an actual binder.