Chapter 11
CHAPTER ELEVEN
By afternoon the marine layer had burned off to a white haze, and the light came through the front windows across the empty dining room. The sign was flipped. The chairs were up.
Stella came through the back door not long after close with Nana’s box under her arm and flour already on her shirt from carrying it against the apron.
Joey stopped mopping.
“It’s in,” she said. “The whole thing. Reeves read the first two pages standing at his desk and said it was either the best senior project this year or an elaborate excuse to hang around a restaurant.”
“Those aren’t mutually exclusive.”
“That’s what I told him.” She set the box on the prep counter and took out the card she had been circling since the night she went through the box with her mother. “So. We’re doing it. The pavlova.”
Joey leaned the mop against the wall, washed his hands, and dried them with the focus he usually saved for the coffee machine. “I’ve read about pavlova. Meringue base, cream, fruit. Structurally ambitious.”
“My mum taught me at Christmas.” Stella put the card down where they could both see it. Nana’s block capitals across the top, and under the title, in the small upright hand, a margin note, For celebrations only.
Joey read the note twice. “Is turning in a senior project a celebration?”
“I don’t know. Is it?”
He took the leather notebook out of his apron, wrote something, and put it back. “Ruled. Yes.”
The eggs came out of the walk-in, and the argument started at separation.
Joey wanted a three-bowl system with a quarantine bowl for possible yolk contamination.
The card wanted six whites and had no instructions about bowls.
They used the three-bowl system, because it was easier than discussing it, and Stella cracked and Joey inspected, and Bella watched the whole operation from the doorway, where she had been ruled—also in the notebook—outside the meringue zone.
The whisking was long. Stella’s arm gave out and Joey took over without comment, and the whites went from foam to soft hills to something that stood up on its own. The card said,
beat in the sugar till it stops squeaking.
“Until it what?”
“Stops squeaking.” Stella took a pinch of the meringue and rubbed it between finger and thumb, the way Fiona had taught her. “You can feel the sugar. Hear it, kind of. When it’s smooth, it’s done.”
Joey took his own pinch. He rubbed it. He went still. He rubbed it again, next to his ear this time.
“That’s a real test,” he said. “That’s a repeatable test.” He got the notebook back out.
They spread the meringue on parchment in a wide circle with built-up sides, the way the card said, and Stella shaped it with the back of a spoon while Joey adjusted the oven racks and preheated to the card’s number and stood watch at the dial.
It went in. The kitchen got quiet. Outside, the haze sat on the water and the walkers went past on the beach path with their towels and their dogs.
“Now what?” Joey asked
Stella turned the card over. She read the back. She put it face down on the counter and stood very still for a second.
“What?”
“There’s more on the back.”
He picked it up. The back said, in the same small hand,
Low and slow. When it’s done, oven OFF, door cracked, and WALK AWAY.
And underneath, in different ink,
Never on a damp day. Patience.—N
Joey looked at the card. Then at the windows, where the haze sat on the water, where it had sat all day.
“Is this a damp day?” he asked.
“It burned off.”
“It burned off to haze. Haze is suspended moisture.”
“It’s fine, Joey.”
It was not fine. The first sign was a bead of gold syrup weeping out of the base, and then the dome, which had risen white and proud past the lip of its parchment, sighed and went down in the middle while they stood at the oven window watching it happen.
Joey had cracked the door to confirm what he called doming behavior.
Whether it was the door or the damp, neither of them could prove it, and both of them had a position.
“You opened the oven.”
“I introduced a monitoring aperture.”
“You opened the oven.”
“The card provides no verification protocol. I improvised one.” He looked at the collapse through the glass, and his shoulders came down. “I improvised one on a damp day.”
They took it out. It sat on the counter, cracked to the parchment, weeping at the edges, the middle gone to chew and slump. It smelled wonderful. That was the insult of it.
Bea appeared with a key and no warning, and stopped two steps in with her eyes on the wreck.
“I left my sketchbook,” she said. “What is that?”
“Pavlova.”
“Is it supposed to—”
“No.”
Bea came over, took a stool, and settled in the way she settled in at the movies. “Historic,” she said.
“Get your sketchbook.”
“In a minute.” Bea leaned over the ruin, chin nearly on the counter. “Did it make a noise when it fell? Like a little sigh?”
“Goodbye, Bea.”
“Because I feel like it would’ve made a noise.”
Stella got the camera and photographed the ruin from three angles, straight down and level and close-up on the weeping edge.
“Evidence,” she said, and Bea said somebody should notify the embassy, and Joey asked whether Australia had an embassy or a consulate in Los Angeles, and wrote down the answer when Bea made one up.
They started again.
This time, nobody discussed the bowls. Stella cracked, Joey inspected, the whisk whisked, the sugar went in until the squeak was gone—Joey checked twice, by his ear, and ruled it smooth.
The circle went onto fresh parchment. The oven came back to the card’s number.
Stella slid it in and shut the door, and then she took the towel off her shoulder and hung it over the oven’s door handle, over the window.
“That’s obstruction,” Joey said.
“That’s the protocol. Walk away.”
Walking away took planning. They did the dishes and wiped the counters for a second time.
Bea found her sketchbook and stayed anyway, drawing the ruin of the first attempt before Joey was allowed to throw it out, because, she said, somebody in this family documents and somebody memorializes.
Bella was readmitted on the ruling that the meringue was now sealed inside an appliance.
Joey’s bag sat by the back door with the textbook in it, where it had been since he came in that morning.
The afternoon went long and gold through the front windows, and the haze finally let go of the water, and the oven ticked, and nobody looked at it.
When the timer went, Stella turned the oven off, cracked the door the width of the wooden spoon handle, and stepped back.
“Now?” Joey asked.
“Now we walk away. It cools in there. All the way.”
“How long?”
“Till it’s cool, Joey.”
He stood a moment with that. Then he walked to the far side of the dining room and sat at the window table, facing the ocean, where the oven wasn’t. He had once trashed an entire tray of muffins for what he called calibration drift, and that had gone easier.
The smell got out through the propped back door while they waited. It went out over the patio and down the path, warm sugar on damp salt air, and a woman coming along the beach path with a gray terrier slowed, and stopped, and stood at the edge of the patio with her hand up against the light.
Stella went out.
“I’m sorry,” the woman said. “What is that smell?”
“Pavlova.” Stella wiped her hands on the apron. “We’re closed, sorry.”
“I know. I know the hours.” The woman stayed where she was, at the rail, not coming any farther in.
The dog sat down on the path to wait. “My grandmother baked. The whole street knew what day it was.” She looked up past Stella at the eaves, at the roofline, at nothing in particular, until the dog got up again.
“That’s a shame, closed. Well. Good luck with it. ”
She clicked to the dog and went on up the path, and then the cream needed whipping, and Stella forgot her.
The shell, when the oven had gone cold and the towel came off and the door swung wide, was whole.
Pale, dry, high at the sides, crazed with fine cracks that held.
Joey lifted it to the counter on its parchment with both hands, elbows in, walking heel to toe.
They whipped the cream. They halved the strawberries from the walk-in.
Bea was given the job of arranging them and took it seriously for once in her life, and the three of them stood back and looked at it, and it looked like Christmas in the wrong hemisphere.
“For celebrations only,” Stella said.
“Logged and satisfied,” Joey said. “The project.”
They ate it off paper plates at the counter, no ceremony. The shell cracked when Stella cut it, loud in the quiet room, and gave, and the middle was soft the way it was supposed to be.
“Mum stands right next to me the whole time when we make this,” Stella said.
“Narrating. Every step.” She looked at her plate.
“This one worked anyway.” It had worked an ocean from the kitchen it came from, without anybody standing next to her, and Stella didn’t know if that was a sad thing or a proud one, so she had a second piece.
Bea reached over and tapped her fork against Stella’s, once, which at that counter counted as a toast.
“So what’s next,” Joey said. He had the box open. He had had the box open for some time.
“Next?”
“You have a box of instructions and a functioning oven.” He was going through the cards from the back. That was the wrong end. She let him. “This one. Almond croissants.”
“Joey, absolutely not.”
“It says laminated dough.” He turned the card around like a man producing evidence. “Lamination. That is my word. I have used that word professionally—”
“Do you know what laminated dough is?” Stella took the card from him and set it face down.
“Layers.”
“It’s butter, and you fold it and chill it and fold it and chill it and fold it, and it takes two days, and if the kitchen’s warm it just doesn’t work.” Stella took the card off him. “You’d cry.”
“I would document it.”
“You’d document it and then you’d cry.”
Bea spoke from the stool without looking up from the sketchbook.
“Didn’t Margo give you a card?”
Neither of them said anything. After four hours in that kitchen it was the first quiet either of them had managed.
“She handed it to you. Mom told me. In front of everybody, over the counter, and you took it in both hands like it was a baby.” Bea turned a page. “And then you came here and made biscuits, and then you made this twice. I’m only saying it’s been in your bag.”
Joey was already looking at Stella.
She wiped her hands and got it out of the front pocket since the morning Margo had handed it to her, the spidery hand of a woman two generations back from the woman who had handed it over.
“What’s on it?” Joey asked.
“Butter. Sugar. Flour.” Stella turned it over. The back was blank. “That’s the whole card.”
Joey looked at it for a while. Then he looked at the three paper plates and the empty parchment and the wreck of the first attempt in the bin, which Bea had memorialized.
“Mrs. Feldstein would eat four of those,” he said.
“She would.”
“Mr. Ruiz would take some home for his wife. He asks about the muffins every day and we do not have muffins every day.” Joey got the notebook out. “The tourists at the window would buy one each and photograph it.”
“You’re making a list.”
“I am making an observation with structure.”
Bea shut the sketchbook. “Make the shortbread,” she said, and went to find her shoes.
Stella stayed at the counter with the card. Three ingredients, no oven temperature, no warnings on the back about damp days or patience or walking away.
Start with this one, Margo had said. It’s forgiving.
She hadn’t known what that was worth at the time.