Chapter 3 One Pavilion, Two Egos

The first planning meeting of the Gingerbrook Harvest Festival Pie Pavilion was held on a Tuesday in the back room of the town library, because Bernadette believed that meetings should be held somewhere cold enough to discourage lingering, and because the library had a long table, a projector from 1998, and a coffee urn that produced a liquid Tilda could only describe as aggressive. Tilda arrived four minutes early, which was three minutes too early to have avoided Bernadette's smile. Cyrus arrived six minutes early, which was six minutes too early to have avoided anything, and had already set out a printed agenda. "It's color-coded," Tilda said, sitting down across from him. "It's efficient." "It's aggressive." "It's a Thursday." "It's Tuesday. You wrote Thursday." Cyrus looked at the agenda. His ears went faintly pink, which was the first human thing Tilda had ever seen him do, and she filed it away with a small, mean satisfaction. "It's a draft," he said. Bernadette swept in, took the chair at the head of the table, and taped a large sheet of butcher paper to the wall. On it she had drawn, with the enthusiasm of a woman who had once taken a night class in management, a diagram of the pie pavilion, its two counters, its single wood-fired oven, and, at the center, a large circle labeled SIGNATURE BAKE. "You two," Bernadette said, "are going to make one thing. One thing that the whole town eats and the judges taste and the newspaper photographs. One thing that carries both of your names. Everything else in this tent, you can divide however you like. The bread, the pies, the coffee, the plates. But the signature, you make together, or we don't have a signature, and without a signature we don't have a bake-off, and without a bake-off the festival board will replace the tent with a petting zoo, which I have threatened before and will threaten again." "A petting zoo," Cyrus said, "would be less chaotic." "A petting zoo," Tilda said, "would smell better than your lamination station." The meeting proceeded, in the way that all meetings between people who did not like each other proceed, which is to say that it was six percent planning and ninety-four percent negotiation over who was winning. They divided the tent. Cyrus took the pastry counter and the ovens and the supply chain. Tilda took the bread table and the front of the house and the volunteers, of whom there were eleven and of whom four were her regulars and one of whom, Tuppence Bramwell, was her seventeen-year-old apprentice and had already texted her twelve times demanding to be allowed to work the register. "And the signage," Bernadette said. "Both names. Equal size." "Equal size," Cyrus agreed. "Equal size," Tilda agreed, at exactly the same moment, and then they glared at each other for having agreed. The real fight started at the question of the signature bake. Tilda wanted a harvest loaf. Something with currants and rye and a crust you had to earn. She had her mother's recipe, written in pencil on the back of an old order slip, and she had made it for twenty years, and she knew, in the way that a person knows the shape of her own hands in the dark, that no one in the county could make it better. Cyrus wanted a laminated tart. He had a design in his head, all butter and filigree, a thing that would photograph like a painting, and he had the technique to make it real, and he knew that no one in the county could make it at all. "I'm not serving a tart to a harvest festival," Tilda said. "People want bread at a harvest festival. They want to feel like the earth gave them something." "They want to feel like it was worth the drive," Cyrus said. "We're competing with three towns. We need a thing they haven't seen." "We need a thing they'll remember at home. Nobody remembers a tart. Do you know what people remember?" "Tell me." "They remember a slice of bread with butter on it, at the right moment, in the cold, with the lanterns coming on. That's what they remember. You don't need filigree to be unforgettable. You need to be warm at the exact moment someone is cold." Cyrus was quiet for a moment. It was, Tilda noticed, a different kind of quiet than his usual quiet, which was the quiet of a man composing his next argument. This was the quiet of a man who had been handed something and was turning it over. "That's a good line," he said finally, grudgingly. "It's also not a recipe." "You're right," Tilda said. "Fine. We'll do it your way." Cyrus blinked. "We will?" "No. I just wanted to watch your face." She stood and gathered her coat. "We'll do both. We'll make the loaf, and we'll put your tart technique into it. A twisted pastry, currants, rye, a laminated crust. Something between the two. Something neither of us would make alone." Bernadette, from the head of the table, stopped writing and looked up. Tilda could have sworn the woman's eyes were wet, but Bernadette had once cried at a zoning meeting, so it did not mean much. "That," Bernadette said, "is the first sentence either of you has said that sounded like a signature." They left the library into a cooling evening, and for the length of the sidewalk they walked the same direction, because Saffron Street was the only street worth walking home on. They did not speak. Pretzel appeared at the corner, having been, Tilda suspected, somewhere illegal, and fell in beside them. At the door of Butter & Crumb, Cyrus stopped. "I don't like you," he said, conversationally, as though confirming a fact of geography. "Good," Tilda said. "We understand each other." "I do have one condition." "Of course you do." "The first test batch," Cyrus said, "is at your place. My oven is calibrated for pastry. It will fight the rye. Yours knows bread." Tilda stared at him. He had just, in the plainest possible terms, admitted that her oven was better at something. She waited for the catch. The catch did not come. The man simply stood there in the blue evening with his collar up and his hands in his pockets and his face giving away nothing but the fact that he had spent all evening, and probably all year, paying attention to her. "Six in the morning," she said. "Bring your own flour. I don't share." "Six," he said, and then, "I brought you something." He produced, from his coat pocket, a small white paper bag. Tilda opened it. Inside was a single croissant, still faintly warm, twisted into an unusual shape. Not one of his window croissants. A rejected one. A crooked one, made, if she was not mistaken, from the end of the day's dough, the way bakers made a thing for themselves. He had fed the dog from his pocket that morning, and now he had made her a crooked croissant, and both acts had the same signature, which was the signature of a man who did kind things where no one could see them. "What is this for?" she asked. "Research," he said. "You should know what you're up against." And he walked away across Saffron Street, and Pretzel trotted after him for half the distance and then trotted back, allegiances divided, tail going the whole time. Tilda stood in the dark of her doorway holding a crooked croissant, and she thought, with a kind of horror, that she had just agreed to make a signature bake with the most infuriating man in Gingerbrook, and that she was not, in fact, entirely sorry. ---