Chapter 10
CHAPTER TEN
The fog came in early, the way it did in June—a gray wall that sat offshore all afternoon and was halfway up the bluff by close. The Shack’s front windows had gone silver at the edges and the water was a sound instead of a view.
Joey ran the closing list in the order the list gave it.
Grill scraped. Surfaces wiped. Walk-in checked against the sheet, which took four minutes if nobody had been in it and eleven if Tyler had.
Towels bagged. Patio swept, by him, because the patio was on the list and the list did not care whose turn it was.
The study plan was in his apron pocket, folded in four.
School was in there, folded up with it—the sessions he was behind, the pages he had not opened, the finals coming whether he was ready or not. The stress started every time his hand found the pocket, and he could not make it stop.
He had built it the way you build anything.
Units broken into sessions, sessions broken into blocks, blocks assigned to the hours that were actually available rather than the hours a person wished were available.
Commute time both directions. A margin at the end of each week he had labeled EVENTS, because things happened. It was color-coded. It was sound.
Stella was at the corner table with her Nana’s recipe box in front of her and nothing else. No laptop. The lid was open and she was not going through it. That was not how a person went through a box.
He finished the list, checked the list against the room, and stopped at the end of her table with the clipboard.
“You’ve had that open for thirty-five minutes.”
“You counted?”
“I passed you four times.” He set the clipboard down and squared it with the table edge. “You haven’t touched a card. What’s going on?”
“I’ve touched one card.” She turned it around.
ANZAC BISCUITS, block capitals gone soft with handling.
“I went through the whole box with my mum on the phone. Every card. And this one’s been sitting wrong in my head ever since and I can’t work out why.
I keep thinking if I stare at it long enough she’ll explain herself. ”
Joey looked at the card. He knew the name off the specials board. He had written it in blue ink himself, in his own capitals, more mornings than he could put a number to.
“It’s on our board.”
“It’s on our board because I make it.” Stella turned the card back around. “This is Nana’s. My mum learned it off her and I learned it off my mum, and I have never once seen it written down. And now I’ve seen it written down and something’s off.”
“Off how?”
“I don’t know. That’s the part.”
Joey considered it. It was a document problem. Document problems were not mysterious. Then he said, “Don’t you have finals?”
She looked up at him. “Yes. Not today, though. Don’t you?”
“Yes,” he said. He said it the way you’d report the weather in a city you don’t live in. “I have a study plan. It’s color-coded by unit and it accounts for commute time.”
“Are you following it?”
Joey looked at the clipboard. He squared it against the table edge again, though it had not moved.
“The plan is sound,” he said.
He did not go and check the walk-in. The walk-in was next. He stood there instead, and then he said, “When a system fails, I bake.”
Stella looked up from the box. “You what?”
“Stress baking. It’s a documented technique. There’s a card in my binder. Section nine. Coping strategies with measurable outputs.”
“Naturally.”
“The oven’s still warm. And you have a document with a problem in it.” He picked the clipboard back up. “You can’t diagnose a recipe by looking at it. Recipes are instructions. Instructions want executing.”
“That’s evidence, Joey.”
“You can execute evidence if you wash your hands first.”
Which is how, after closing on a regular day, Joey ended up at the prep counter with a dead woman’s handwriting propped against the sugar bin.
The card was an index card, scorched brown along one edge.
The writing was small and upright and did not appear to have been in any doubt about itself.
He read it top to bottom twice, the way he read anything, and then he went to the shelf by the specials board and took down the menu binder and opened it to the laminated page.
Stella’s Anzacs. Standardized, portioned, service-validated.
He set the binder next to the card and looked between them, and he got very still.
“The syrup is doubled,” he said. “On the card. And there’s a step here that isn’t in the spec at all. Let the mix sit while the kettle goes.”
“That’s it. That’s the thing.” Stella came around the counter. “And look at the margin.”
He leaned in. The margin said, in the same small upright letters—Chewy. Never mind what Pop says.
“Who is Pop,” Joey said, “and what does he say?”
“He prefers crisp, apparently.”
Joey put the card and the binder side by side and gripped the counter.
There were three authorities. He arranged them in his head in order of standing and could not make them sit still.
The source card was original and therefore governed.
The service spec had been in operation for years and had never once generated a complaint.
And Stella’s mother’s method had produced the spec and contradicted the source, and stood two hands away from the woman who wrote the card.
“There’s no ruling,” he said.
“Joey, they’re biscuits.”
“There’s no ruling, Stella.”
“We could bake both.”
He lifted his head.
“A controlled comparison,” he said.
She got the apron out of her camera bag—worn cotton, washed thin, the ties soft—and put it on and tied it behind her back, and did not say anything about it.
Joey had never seen the apron before. It was not a Shack apron.
He decided not to ask, because there was no procedure that covered it and every version of the question he tried out in his head came back sounding like an inspection.
He turned on the oven.
They mixed the two batches side by side, the spec on the left and the card on the right.
The golden syrup was on the pantry shelf where it lived, between the honey and a second jar labeled CONTINGENCY HONEY.
The card’s instructions were a problem all their own.
Warm the syrup till it smells right. A generous spoonful of boiling water.
“Generous is not a unit,” Joey said, standing over the pot with a tablespoon in each hand. “Smells right is not a checkpoint.”
“It smells right.”
“It smells warm. Warm is not right. Warm is a temperature—” He stopped. He sniffed again. Something in it went past the warm and arrived somewhere else, and he took out the Post-it pen and wrote toast? and did not show her.
Something scraped at the patio door. Bella sat on the mat in the fog, damp to the elbows, personally wronged. Stella let her in, and Bella walked the length of the kitchen at the regulation distance from the food, took the stool nearest the oven, and supervised.
The first trays went in. CONTROL on the left, SOURCE on the right, labeled in blue ink because blue ink photographs better.
The front door rattled and opened. Anna stood in the doorway with her keys held up in explanation—forgot these—and took the room in without moving. The flour. The two trays. The cat on the stool. Her niece at the counter in an apron.
“Left side of the oven runs hot,” she said. “Watch the first tray.”
“Okay,” Stella said.
Anna stood there half a second longer than the sentence needed. Joey followed where she was looking and it was the apron, and he still did not ask. Then she said goodbye to the cat, specifically the cat, and pulled the door shut, and her car started outside and the sound of it died fast in the fog.
Stella touched the ties at the small of her back. “It was Nana’s,” she said, to the oven, not to him. “The apron. Mum sent it over.”
Joey did not say anything, and did not write it down. Some information you just kept.
The oven ticked. The fog sat right against the windows and the kitchen filled up slowly with oats and butter and warm syrup.
Somewhere in there the stress had gone quiet. Baking did that—the only thing that did—and the quiet in his head was a relief so complete he had not noticed it arriving.
“I haven’t opened it,” Joey said.
Stella was wiping the counter that did not need wiping. “The plan?”
“It’s in my apron. I take it out and I put it back.” He kept his back to her. “The plan is sound. I’ve checked it. There’s nothing wrong with the plan.”
Stella did not say anything for a moment. Then she said, “Okay,” and kept wiping.
The comparison, when it came out and had cooled enough to constitute data, was not close.
Joey ate one from each tray with a glass of water in between, to clear the palate. Then he did it again, because one trial is an anecdote. Then he stood with his hands flat on the counter.
The source document produced a superior outcome. It was not a close call and there was no honest way to write it up as one.
“Further trials?” Stella asked.
He had not said it out loud. He looked at her.
“You were about to.”
She picked up the card and read the margin again, and then she said, to the card more than to him, “I never really knew her. Phone calls. Birthday cards. And now her handwriting’s bossing me around a kitchen she never stood in.” She set it down where the flour couldn’t get it. “I like her.”
Joey looked at the card, and nodded once, and started the dishes.
The second batch went in. Stella ran the hot water and Bella supervised from the stool and the hill above town was gone now behind the glass.
Joey took the laminated page out of the binder and put it on the counter in front of him. It had been correct for a long time. It had been correct this morning. But now it wasn’t.
He got out the Post-it pen and wrote the amendment—syrup doubled, rest step, pending further trials—and stuck it to the plastic.
He did not make a new page. He did not laminate the Post-it.
He put the binder back on the shelf by the board, and the study plan stayed folded in his apron pocket, where it had been all day, and the oven ticked behind him, and his head stayed quiet.