Chapter Sixteen
I DON’T USUALLY DREAD WAKING up and going to work. Even at my old corporate job, I was never the I-hate-Mondays, TGIF type. I like problem solving, and I’ve always been lucky enough to work in roles that challenged me.
But that’s not how I feel this morning. I want to sleep in, and be lazy, and daydream about making out with hot dudes, and drink some hot chocolate, and…honestly, what is actually wrong with me?
After hitting snooze twice, which is another thing I never do, I go and shower and try and get my head in the game. Boss Kate time, I have to keep reminding myself as I drink my boss coffee and eat my boss croissant and dress for the day ahead.
By the time I pull into Sparks Cidery, my mental transformation is nearly complete.
Nearly. Thankfully, Harrison is over in the tank room, and I head over to the office, and as soon as I enter, the switch is flipped.
Wendy, Daniel, Chef Melanie, and I all gather to go over our plan of attack for the week, and we’re all hopefully optimistic about the numbers going into the week.
They are receptive to my comments regarding the bitter&sweet SoupGate situation, and thankfully, they all seem to have cooled off over their last two days off anyway. We all go in peace in the knowledge that everyone can have their tiny soups, because ours is probably loads better.
We break off into our respective departments, and the day goes on like any other Wednesday, and I can almost forget that there’s an insanely attractive Australian man about a hundred meters away that I could probably go make out with right now if I wanted to, if I were way less responsible of a human being and much more reckless in my concern about workplace propriety.
I shake myself out of it. The first weekend of Wassail awaits.
THE REST OF WEDNESDAY AND Thursday are busy, but not overwhelming.
The Wednesday open mic night is decent enough for a weekday in late November, and the second weekend of Thursday karaoke is fair.
Not as busy as the opening night, but a respectable turnout, nonetheless.
Harrison did a great job hosting again, and his new best friend, Jeremy, and his date did a duet of Don’t Stop Believin’ that, despite the obvious cliché, was met with raucous applause.
We have since been told that there would be a third date.
Sparks Cidery karaoke night, the place for romance.
I continue to do a spectacular job of compartmentalization…
most of the time. As we had discussed, when I run into Harrison on-site, we keep our conversations largely focused on cider and cidery business nearly exclusively.
I am impressed by his commitment to the arrangement.
Externally, we are platonic colleagues who respect each other’s professional skill sets.
Internally, I am fighting a war on a barrage of intrusive thoughts.
For instance, when I went to visit the tank room to see how the bottling was going for the seasonal cranberry orange cider that is being released as a limited run exclusively for Wassail.
It smelled amazing in there, all tangy citrus and tart cranberry juice mixing with the apple as the end product was bottled and then labelled with their very cute little seasonal labels.
I caught myself watching Harrison perform various feats of manual labour for quite a while before I announced my presence and stopped being a weirdo.
But even as Harrison was explaining to me a minor challenge with the bottling process that morning and the workaround he and Charlie had come up with to fix it, something I should have been paying rapt attention to, I had to keep bringing myself back to the conversation from the many different directions my brain desperately wanted to go instead.
One was that in the warmth of the tank room, Harrison was wearing the Sparks Cidery T-shirt without his usual five additional layers, and it suited him just a little too well.
Our main brand colours are a dark forest green with the gold star-apple seed motif accent, and Harrison, all tanned with his gold hair and green eyes, looks like an actual poster boy for the cidery, and after seeing this, I truly believe he should obviously live here forever and only wear our green shirts for the rest of eternity and never consider living anywhere else, ever.
The other problem is that the reality of compartmentalization is much more difficult when Harrison is standing a foot away from my face and still looks and smells like Harrison, the date I recently made out with in a car, even while he’s there being Harrison, the tremendously competent employee performing very important work tasks.
I try to spend more time working in the office after that.
Still, we make it to the weekend as valued coworkers only. On Friday morning, I sip my coffee and wait for the other department heads to show up so we can have our morning huddle before the busy day begins. However, 10:00 a.m. comes and goes.
And then the texts start pouring in.
Wendy’s is discreet: she mentions not feeling well and not being able to leave her house for very long periods at a time.
Daniel’s describes a horrible bathroom situation in significantly more detail than I ever cared to know.
Chef Melanie calls me, sounding downbeat like I’ve never heard her before, saying there is no way that she can be in a kitchen today, physically, spiritually, emotionally, or hygienically.
Harrison walks in and delivers the death knell. Charlie is sick, too. A stomach bug of some kind—I promise you don’t want to know the details.
It can’t be a stomach bug, I say. How did everyone get sick but us and a handful of random employees? What happened yesterday? Did everyone eat something?
I mean, some snacks before the karaoke night, I suppose. The usual sweet potato fries, and I split a pizza with Charlie. Oh, there were also the goat cheese and fig cookies, but I’m allergic to walnuts, so I didn’t have any.
Cookies? I ask. I vaguely remember seeing a plate being passed around. Who brought them in? Maybe they didn’t have good kitchen hygiene or something.
I don’t think baked goods could have had this effect, says Harrison.
Hearing what Charlie’s going through…unless they had, like, raw chicken as an ingredient, that rules them out.
And Ryan’s actually a really amazing baker, so I think he’s off the hook.
Just not so amazing that he forgot that I’m deathly allergic to most nuts and is apparently trying to murder me.
Wait, wait, I say, pinching the bridge of my nose. The cookies were from bitter&sweet?
Oh yeah, he made hundreds of them for this weekend, said Harrison. They’re serving them as a treat at their tasting bar. Yesterday, he dropped off a big tray to Wendy at the tasting bar to share with the staff as a good luck gift going into the weekend.
His expression betrays nothing. Absolutely zero acknowledgment that this could be perhaps seen as an act of sabotage, and so now I feel like an absolute ass bringing it up.
You don’t think… I start, clear my throat, and then start again.
You don’t think it’s possible that he messed up the recipe?
I tiptoe around what I really want to ask.
I just think it’s odd that we are the only two that aren’t sick, with your hazelnut allergy and my being cooped up in the office yesterday sorting out our end-of-month P&L.
I think we have to consider that it might have been the cookies.
Harrison blanches and takes out his phone. I need to tell Ryan, then, before he poisons half the County. He walks away for a moment, speaking quickly, and I’m left standing there, fuming.
Yes, Harrison, please go check on Ryan. God forbid something happens to him. Never mind that ninety percent of my staff can’t leave the bathroom right now. Harrison comes back, and my face must betray my annoyance.
Er, Ryan’s chucking them all out, he says hesitantly. To be safe.
How great for Ryan, I say flatly.
He never would have done this on purpose, says Harrison, and now his own voice has an uncharacteristic edge to it. Apparently, he and Britt aren’t feeling well, either. It’s a good thing I called him, or hundreds of people may have gotten sick.
I barely manage to bite back the retort I desperately want to fire off.
At best, Harrison is naive, and at worst, he knows and just doesn’t care that his friends may have intentionally sabotaged us for this weekend.
I push back that last thought—everything I know about him screams that he just sees the best in everyone, even as they’re out there food-poisoning people.
But for right now, I need him as an employee, or this weekend is cancelled.
I am sorry that this happened, however it happened, I say. We’ll figure it out later. But right now, I think we just need to focus on how we’re going to get through the day. Let’s see who we can bring in.
Harrison pauses and looks like he wants to say more but settles on Sure thing.
By about 10:30, I realize that we have about half of the scheduled staff: people who either missed out on the cookies, don’t care for figs, or just weren’t there yesterday.
Barb is the only department head to come in, but even some of her staff had a cookie or two while passing through the tasting bar.
Can you manage the tasting bar today? You’ll only have Liz, I say to Harrison. It’s not ideal.
I think we can handle it. I can tell that after our last conversation, he is currently not a huge fan of Boss Kate and maybe not even normal Kate, but right now, I just appreciate his being task oriented.
I can help with the store, offers Barb. I don’t think I’d be much good in the restaurant or tasting bar, though.