“Done!”
I am, to my own surprise, profoundly impressed.
I run a multinational corporation, and it doesn’t have half the efficiency of this tiny, two-woman operation. I am watching mastery. And I am an obstacle: a clumsy, useless, two-hundred-pound sack of wet clothes and good hair blundering around their orbit.
It takes me thirty minutes to move the entire pallet. When I finish, I lean against the wall of the dry storage room, breathing heavily, my entire body humming with a dull, unfamiliar ache.
I walk back into the prep area. I look at Tess for a second. Her passion is visible, and it feels like a breath of fresh air.
“How’s the bakery life?” Gwen asks from the other side of the room.
“So far so good,” I tell her, and she laughs.
“You see those?” Tess points to a mountain of aluminum sheet pans piled high next to the dish pit. They are black with baked-on, carbonized grease and sugar.
“Could you please scrub them?”
I am back at the sink for another hour.
Scrub. Rinse. Stack.
Scrub. Rinse. Stack.
The carbon is worse than the dough. It is a physical battle. I put my entire body into it, shoulders burning, forearms screaming. My hands are going to be a wreck. I know this with the grim certainty of a man watching a train approach and realizing he is tied to the tracks.
I do not care.
I am just… doing.
The sun is fully up now, streaming into the front of the shop. The OPEN sign glows. I can hear the front door jingling, the hiss of the espresso machine, the low, happy murmur of the first regular customers.
“Morning, Tess! The usual, love.”
“Mr. Henderson! How’s the hip? I saved you a cardamom twist. They’re still warm.”
The smell… it is almost painful. Cinnamon and browned butter, dark-roast coffee, caramelized sugar, yeast. My stomach, which has had nothing but a four a.m. espresso, lets out a low, pathetic groan.
I finish the last pan. It is as shiny as I can possibly get it. I stack it. For the first time, I feel a small, stupid spark of… pride.
And I realize, somewhere deep in my chest, that this feeling is nothing like money or deals or deals gone right. This is… earned.
I did the thing. I stand there, waiting for my next order, a ghost waiting for instructions. Tess is at the front counter, laughing with an elderly man, whom I assume is Mr. Henderson. I watch her chat and smile. It transforms her face, softening the hard lines into something bright and warm. I find myself staring.
Gwen is in the back, frantically shaping baguettes, hands a blur. Tess finishes with the customer and storms back, her face instantly resetting to its neutral, wartime expression.
“We’re behind on quiche prep,” she says, not to me, but to the room in general. She looks at Gwen, then at me, eyes narrowing in a frustrated calculation. She is short-staffed, and her useless billionaire intern is, apparently, her only option.
“Can you crack an egg?”
“I… yes. I think so,” I say.
“Good enough.” She grabs my arm, her grip surprisingly strong, her hand warm through my damp sleeve, and drags me to a clean prep station. She shoves a massive stainless-steel bowl in front of me. Then she slams down a flat of thirty eggs beside it.
“I need thirty eggs. For the quiche custard. In the bowl. Please make sure there’s not a single piece of shell in it, ok?”
“Got it,” I say, and a ridiculous surge of adrenaline shoots through me. This is a promotion. I have graduated from scrubbing to food prep.
I pick up the first egg. Tap it firmly on the side of the bowl, just as I’ve seen my private chef do. Crack. Split with my thumbs. Perfect. One.
