Chapter 13
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Stella was standing in the kitchen at Tyler’s with a piece of toast in her hand when she saw the text Margo had sent.
Put it on the board.
That was all of it. She read it twice and then a third time, looking for the rest, and there wasn’t any rest. Margo did not use punctuation the way other people did and she did not explain herself, but she also did not send four words at night about a biscuit.
Did I get it right, Stella had asked her yesterday, with flour to her elbows and the pink box on the counter between them.
It looks lovely, Margo had said.
And now this.
Stella put the toast down and typed three different replies and sent none of them, and then got her bag and went.
Joey read the text over her shoulder before she had the door all the way shut behind her. He did that. Nobody had ever been able to stop him doing that.
“Four words.”
“I know.”
“There’s no punctuation.” He said it like a diagnosis.
“I know, Joey.”
He came around the end of the counter with her and he was already up on the balls of his feet, which he did when a he got excited about something.
“The board has room. The board has had room since we took the gazpacho off since it wasn’t a special anymore.
Only regular menu.I have a note about it.
” He was walking backward now. “How many can you make in a morning?”
“I’ve made it once.”
“How many could you make?”
“No idea.” She stopped walking and he had to come back three steps.
“A number, Stella.”
Anna was at the grill with the cheese in its order and one hand up over the flat-top, counting. She pulled back at three and looked at the two of them and did not say anything.
“Margo texted me,” Stella said.
“Okay.”
“She said to put the shortbread on the board.”
Anna’s hand stopped on the way to the cheese.
“She said that?”
“She said exactly that.” Stella held the phone out so Anna could see.
“It’s four words. That’s the whole text.”
Joey, from about two feet behind her, said, “There’s no punctuation.”
Anna read it. She read four words for a length of time that suggested she was reading something longer, and then she handed the phone back and turned around to the grill and stood there for a second with her back to them.
Stella exchanged a quick glance with Joey. “If it’s okay with you,” Stella said. “It’s your kitchen. I know it’s your kitchen.”
“It’s not my kitchen.”
“Anna, it is completely your kitchen.”
“It’s the Shack’s kitchen and you work in it.” Anna turned around. Her eyes had gone bright and she made no attempt to do anything about it, but she was smiling. “Put it on the board.”
Joey was gone before she finished the sentence.
“I’ll need to know the yield,” he called, from somewhere near the wall. “And a name. It can’t go up without a name.”
“It has a name. It’s shortbread.”
“That’s a category.”
Stella looked at Anna. Anna waved her off toward the board with the spatula, and then turned back to the grill, and did not touch anything for a minute.
Joey had the specials board off the wall and flat on the counter before Stella had finished tying her apron.
“What is it called?” he asked. “Properly.”
“It’s called shortbread, Joey.” She got the apron strings tied on the second try.
He clicked the blue pen twice and did not write anything. “Everything on this board has a name. Stella’s Anzacs. Meg’s focaccia. Joey’s muffins, which I did not name.” He held the pen over the board. “What do I write?”
Stella thought about it longer than she meant to. Margo’s grandmother, in a kitchen nobody alive had stood in, measuring sugar in teacups and writing down comfort for other people. And Margo’s hand on the card underneath that, and the towel, and the trunk.
“Just shortbread,” she said. “Plain. Nothing in front of it.”
Joey looked at her for a second, and then wrote SHORTbrEAD in blue capitals across the corner of the board, and stepped back, and frowned.
“The spacing’s wrong.”
He wiped it and did it again.
“How much do we charge?” Joey asked, and everybody paused and looked at the shortbread.
The pricing took twenty-two minutes, which Joey mentioned because he timed it.
“Two dollars,” Anna said, from the grill.
“Two dollars is a cup of coffee.” Joey had a clipboard now. “This has butter in it.”
“Coffee has coffee in it.”
“Coffee is nine cents a cup and we charge two dollars, which is the only reason this restaurant exists.” He wrote something down. “Three dollars.”
Anna turned a sandwich over without looking at it. “Nobody’s paying three dollars for a cookie.”
“It is materially not a cookie. There’s no leavening.”
Stella sat on the prep counter with her heels against the cabinet and watched them go. Tyler came through twice and declined to have an opinion both times, on the grounds that he had once tried to price a photograph and had thought about it for six weeks.
“What did it cost to make?” Anna asked.
“That’s the correct question.” Joey turned to a clean page. “I don’t know. I know what a case of butter costs. I don’t know what one of those costs, because nobody’s ever made one of those before.” He wrote BUTTER at the top and underlined it twice. “This is going to take a minute.”
“We open in forty.”
“Then it’s going to take forty.”
They were still at it when the door chimed and the first customers came in, and they were still at it in the lull after the first rush, Joey with a page of numbers and Anna with her arms crossed and the tray of shortbread sitting under a dish towel. Waiting.
The board said SHORTbrEAD and nothing else. Joey had refused to write a price he could not defend.
Michael came in at eleven-forty for lunch.
He came in the way he always came in—on time, no announcement, straight to the wobbly stool that he had somehow decided was his—and he had his phone and two pens out and lined up beside the napkin before Anna got to him.
“Soup?” Anna asked. “There’s soup.”
“Soup’s fine.” He looked at the board. “What’s the shortbread?”
Nobody said anything for a second.
“It’s new,” Anna said.
“It’s not on the board with a price.”
“We’re aware,” Joey said.
Michael looked from the board to Joey’s page of numbers, upside down, and then at Anna, and something in his face changed a very small amount.
“You’re pricing it?”
“We’ve been pricing it for a very long time,” Anna said.
“It’s eleven-forty.”
“I’m aware of that too.”
Michael turned the page toward himself with one finger. He read it. He did not comment on it, which Stella understood, watching him, was a kindness.
“How many does the recipe make?”
Stella slid off the counter. “Sixteen. Eighteen if you cut them smaller, but they break.”
“Sixteen.” He wrote a small number in the corner of his own napkin. “What’s in it?”
“Butter, sugar, flour. That’s it.”
“How much butter?” he asked.
“Two blocks.” Joey shifted half a step closer to the napkin, watching the numbers get written.
“How long does it take?” He was writing nothing down yet.
“Twenty minutes to make. An hour in the oven and cooling.”
“Whose hour?”
Stella opened her eyes wider. Joey looked up.
“Mine,” Stella said. “And Joey’s.”
Michael wrote for about four seconds. Then he put the pen down beside the other pen, aligned, and said, “Four dollars.”
The kitchen went quiet.
“Four,” Anna said.
“Four. Three if you want the number to be friendly, but it should be four.” He picked up his water. “You’re not selling flour and butter. There’s nothing else like it in town and people will walk for it, and if you price it like a cookie they’ll treat it like a cookie.”
Anna had not moved. She looked at the place on the napkin where Michael had written the small number, and she stayed looking at it after he put the pen down.
“That’s what I said,” Joey said, with feeling.
“You said three,” Anna said.
“I was building to four.”
Anna looked at Michael for a moment longer. She had priced everything in this kitchen by standing in the room until the number came to her, and Stella had never seen it take less than a day.
“Well,” she said. “Look at you.”
“It’s math.”
“It’s showing off.”
“It’s math,” Michael said again, but he smiled a little and ate his soup.
Joey wrote $4 on the board in blue, spaced it correctly on the first attempt, and hung the board back on its nail with an air of enormous personal restraint.
The first one sold right away.
It was a man Stella had never seen before, in a windbreaker, who was already paying for a grilled cheese when he stopped and looked at the board and asked, “What’s the shortbread?”
“It’s shortbread,” Stella said.
“Homemade?”
“This morning.”
He bought one. He ate it standing at the counter, in three bites, looking out the window at the water, and then he bought two more to take with him and left without saying anything else about it, and Stella stood there holding twelve dollars and did not entirely know what to say.
A stranger had walked in off the street and chosen the thing she’d made with her own hands, and bought three of them. She put the twelve dollars in the register and got the count wrong and had to do it again.
By one o’clock they’d sold nine.
By one-forty Mrs. Feldstein had come back for a second and asked, in a tone that made it a formal inquiry, whether this was going to be a regular thing.
At two-ten Stella lifted the dish towel and there were two left, and she stood staring at the empty tray underneath.
“Sold out,” Joey said, from the doorway. He had his clipboard against his chest. “At two-eighteen we will be sold out. I’d like to note that the projection was four o’clock.”
“How far off were you?”
“Extremely.” He said it the way another person would say I have won something.
“I’ll need the recipe scaled. And a second sheet pan, and a decision about tomorrow, and I would like it on the record that an official takeout container does not exist for this item and I have thoughts about pink boxes. ”
“Joey, go away.”
“I’ll write them up.”
He went. Stella took a picture of the empty tray, and then one of the board with the four-dollar sign and the blue letters spaced right, and then she stood at the counter with her camera in her hand and let the room go on around her—Anna calling an order, the door chiming, the light coming off the water and up the wall, Michael long gone back to wherever Michael went.
The door chimed again at half past two, and it was Margo.
Tote over her arm, paint on the side of one hand. She came in the way she always came in and she stopped, four feet inside the door, and looked at the specials board.
SHORTbrEAD. $4. Blue ink, correctly spaced.
Stella watched her read it. Margo did not do anything dramatic. She looked at the board, and then past it at the empty tray on the counter with the dish towel folded next to it, and then she went to her stool and set her tote down and asked Anna for a coffee.
That was all.
She sat there and drank it and read the paper Bernie had left folded on the counter, and she did not say one word about the board, and once, when she thought nobody was looking, she looked up at it again.
Stella got that one. Through the viewfinder, from across the room, without deciding to.
She checked the frame afterward and it was blurred and badly composed and she kept it anyway.