In the Details

by H. Claire Taylor

  “Hmm?” He looked up again, and smiled. “Um. Yes. A mocha latte. Large. And if you have like a strudel muffin of some kind, I’ll take that as well.” Without a thank you, Kumal went to work, and Jessica went to fetch him his coffee and the stalest strudel muffin she could find.

  “And when you shut the freezer, you kind of have to give it an extra tug to make sure it’s secure.”

  “I know,” said Dwayne Pogreska, the prep cook in training at It is Risen.

  Jessica paused after demonstrating. “I mean, I know you know how to shut a freezer, it’s just that this one’s refurbished and it’s got its own little quirk.”

  Dwayne, a stocky Croatian with forearms like thighs, nodded. “Yeah, they all do that.”

  Jessica wasn’t sure they all did. If they all did, it seemed like a drastic design flaw that someone somewhere would have fixed by now. “Okay, then.” She led him over to the ovens next. These were something she was admittedly quite proud of. When she’d been ordering all the appliances with Dr. Bell, they’d decided that one thing she couldn’t scrimp on, given that baking wasn’t something she was especially expert at, was top-of-the-line ovens. If Jessica wanted to reduce variance between her batches, the easiest way was to use equipment that was consistent each time, even if she was not. The ones they’d picked out were only used in five other bakeries around the world, and none of those were in the US. Bringing on Dwayne to get things started in the mornings was not only a thrilling prospect because it meant she could sleep two hours later and stroll in to grab some coffee and perform a baker’s dozen miracles on the finished goods, it meant she would finally get to show off these goddamn ovens to someone who could appreciate them fully.

  “So these,” she said gesturing at the sleek chrome finish and the black matte knobs, “are the ovens. They’re top-of-the-line and can only be found in five other bakeries around the world, none of which are in the United States.”

  Dwayne nodded once. “Yeah, I know.”

  A small squeak slipped from deep in Jessica’s throat. “Oh, you know? How do you know?”

  He shrugged unsatisfactorily. “Not sure. I just know about it. Do you remember how you know everything you know?”

  She swallowed down the acid rising from her stomach. “No, I guess not.” She paused. “Wait, you already know how to use these, or …?”

  “Yeah. I know. What I don’t know, I can figure out.”

  She glanced down at his hands, which looked like they’d been stung by a hive of bees only minutes before arriving for his training. The thought of those absolute clubs pawing experimentally at the delicate and sensitive knobs and buttons made her want to shout or call the cops or blow a rape whistle—anything to keep that horrible scenario from coming to pass.

  Anything, that is, except explain the panel to him after he’d already said he knew and would continue to say, “I know” with each new explanation.

  “Okay, um, if you have any questions about it once you start using it, text me, okay? Day or night, just text me and I will help you out immediately.”

  He nodded, but if he couldn’t stand to have something explained to him in a context that was created especially for explanation—training—there was little chance he would admit he didn’t know something later on.

  Mrs. Thomas sent him to me for a reason. He might really know his stuff. Maybe he’s a genius and can intuit … ovens? Goddamn, no, that isn’t a thing.

  “Last up before we go into the actual recipes,” she said, leading him over to the cleanest countertop in the kitchen, the one by the telephone where she kept the paperwork and logs and spent late nights working, attempting to balance the books. At least Sampson would take care of that now. She grabbed a blank form off the top of a small stack. “This is an inventory request form. When you run out of an ingredient or a spoon breaks or whatever and you need a new one, just mark it down on one of these and put it in that metal basket so I know to take a look. That way—”

  “Yeah, got it.”

  Jessica forced a smile. “You don’t want me to show you what to put in each field?”

  “Is each one labeled?” Dwayne asked.

  “Yes, but—”

  “Then I bet I can figure it out.”

  Jessica sighed. This was ridiculous. She glanced at the clock on the wall and said, “You sure? We still have a full two hours for your training, and baking prep won’t take that long. We might as well use the time now. I’m just thinking that if I were starting a new job, I’d be more confident starting out if I’d been, you know, trained how to do the stuff.”

  He bounced on his toes as he said, “Nah, I’m plenty confident. You have all the recipes written down somewhere, right?”

  Jessica nodded. It was one of the few things she’d taken the time to do right.

  “Great. Maybe you can just point me to them rather than showing me how to do all of it.”

  “I wasn’t going to show you how to do all of it, just point out where the ingredi—”

  “Yeah, see, I actually told this chick I’d meet her at the gym in twenty minutes, and I don’t want to disappoint her.”

  Jessica almost laughed. “Are you joking?”

  “Nope. So you mind if I just use your bathroom then head over there?”

  Twenty minutes? He told a chick he’d …

  Jessica glared at him, hardly able to believe what she was hearing.

  How? How was every single person Mrs. Thomas had sent her disagreeable? Was this how people behaved in politics?

  Am I PMSing?

  She remembered the date and realized that she probably was. Maybe that was all that was causing this annoyance. She took a deep breath and said, “Yeah, sure. Here, let me give you a key.” She reached in her pocket and pulled out the spare she’d made the day before. “You’ll need to be in by four thirty tomorrow morning. The recipes will be all laid out for you. Text me if you have any questions.”

  “Yeah, I know,” he said, taking the key. But before he hustled off, he said, “You mind making me a coffee to go?” and before she could respond, he ran off to the bakery’s bathroom to, likely, destroy it.

  She had no hard evidence that he was doing anything except taking a whiz; he just struck her as the type to use a private establishment’s restroom without paying for anything and then making it unusable for the next half hour. And all without feeling properly ashamed of himself.

  She fixed his coffee, put it in the to-go cup, and didn’t secure the lid completely.

  And she felt zero remorse for it. “See you tomorrow,” she said as he took the cup and hurried out.

  Only two other patrons besides Sampson and Kumal remained in the cafe, and Jessica was thankful for the break.

  For some strange reason, she wasn’t sure her customer service skills were firing on all cylinders.

  Destinee’s hand slid onto her shoulder. “Sure will be nice to have help, won’t it, baby?”

  Jessica stared though the window, wistfully wishing she could be there to see when Dwayne went for his first sip and the lid came right off.

  “Yeah,” she said. “It sure is.”

  Chapter Ten

  Jessica toweled off her hair, bone tired but excited. And anxious. The tiredness came from not taking a full day off work in almost three months, which was the same amount of time It is Risen had been open, coincidentally. The excitement came from it being her twenty-second birthday. And the anxiety came from it being her twenty-second birthday.

  The day she was born came with all kinds of strings attached, the worst of which was always the Jimmy Dean string. But then there was also the deep-seated fear she carried in a tiny box stashed away somewhere between her stomach and her lung that she would follow in her half-brother’s footsteps and not live to see thirty-four. No matter how many people told her it was unfounded, no matter how much she told herself it was unfounded and just a dumb holdover from childhood bullying, she couldn’t shake it. And every year, on July 7th, the lid to the tiny bo
x cracked open, and that fear seeped into her bloodstream.

  She tousled her hair to let it air dry while she slipped into her outfit for the night, which she’d carefully laid out on her bed. It was the nicest thing she owned (outside of the formal dress she’d bought for attending the NFL draft): boot-cut blue jeans with no holes or grease stains and a charcoal-gray boat-neck T-shirt with a sketched flock of white birds across the front. Maybe she needed to up her wardrobe.

  But what would be the point?

  From the living room, a commercial blared for medication to help with medication-related constipation.

  She would wear makeup tonight. She’d almost forgotten the stuff existed, because who had time for it when you hardly got five hours of sleep each night? If she had ten minutes to spare, it wasn’t going toward clogging her pores and drawing more attention to her tired eyes.

  The five hours of sleep was her new normal, only attainable now that she had Sampson, Kumal, and Dwayne. Sampson saved her long nights of bookkeeping, and Dwayne saved her early mornings of prep. Kumal saved her nothing but the insidious dread that she should be building an online presence for It is Risen but wasn’t, and that was gift enough.

  Of course, it came at a cost exceeding the actual wages she paid them, which, turned out, were even higher than she’d feared. But since Sampson handled all that, she could easily clear it from her mind, shove it aside and pretend it wasn’t an issue.

  And then there was the sheer frustration of working with the men. She’d almost grown used to it, which was a true testament to the power of routine to normalize even the most insufferable behavior. Like how Dwayne had put chocolate chips in the banana nut muffins twice, and when she called him on it the second time, he outright admitted he’d done it on purpose because the muffins were better that way.

  Well, no shit. Everything was better with chocolate. But that wasn’t the point.

  Then there was the photographer Kumal had brought in to take pictures of the bakery. She was fairly certain it was a close relative—a cousin if not a sibling—but it was never mentioned, and far be it from her to inquire and be branded a racist who thought all Indians looked the same.

  In her defense, they also shared a last name.

  This wouldn’t have been a problem if Aisha had seemed a professional. However, after an hour of setting muffins in odd locations to take drastically angled pictures of them with a cell phone rather than a real camera and harassing customers with her phone in their face, which Jessica was fairly sure would require a release or something to use, it had become quite obvious that Aisha Darinda was not a photographer by trade.

  And then there was Sampson … and all the snippy, judgmental emails that came with him, always acting put upon when she asked him to do things within his job description and patronizing her whenever she grew tired of his griping and offered to help. Thank whoever that he worked remotely. She thought of the email he’d sent her that afternoon, belittling her for asking if she needed to sign anything for him for the monthly bills that were coming up. She could have sworn she’d done it the first week he was on the job, but he insisted she wasn’t necessary and insinuated she was trying to insert herself into the process to feel important.

  She shuddered, thinking about how much she wanted to wring his neck and how unfortunate such a thing would be to the functioning of her business.

  She needed to put it out of her head. Tonight was a special night, and she deserved a few hours out with friends and family.

  And she deserved a drink. Now.

  Going out with more than one friend at a time was a muscle she had let atrophy. Sure, she was around people all day, but that wasn’t the same.

  “Want a beer?” she asked as she emerged from the bedroom and into the kitchen.

  Chris turned where he relaxed on the couch to cast a glance at her. “Yeah, I’ll have another.” Jessica squinted at the one he had in his hand, which he rested on the back of the couch. It was almost completely full. She didn’t know why that agitated her so much, but it did.

  Or maybe it wasn’t that. Maybe it was everything else in her life that left her in a constant state of mild agitation that flared up at random moments.

  Chris had been in town for the last two days, staying at her place. He’d requested a few days off so he could be there for her birthday, and it had been mostly nice. She did feel bad that she left him alone all day to go to work, and when he did come to visit her at the bakery, she wasn’t able to give him much attention. As far as she could tell, though, it didn’t bother him.

  She cracked open two beers and went to join him but didn’t sit down.

  “You just missed it,” he said. “Jimmy was on the news.”

  “God dammit. Of course he was.” He knew it was her birthday. “More denials about the accusers?”

  “Not so much denial as …” Chris cringed, and Jessica’s throat clenched. “One of the woman who was in his cult or whatever in Elbow, she’s sort of, um, dating him now.”

  “What?!”

  “Yeah, it’s super creepy. But she claims it was nothing more than a bible study and there weren’t just a bunch of girls there; there were boys too, and it’s just being blown out of proportion.”

  “But no men have come forward!”

  He shrugged. “Jimmy says it’s because they’re not naturally gold diggers.”

  “Oh, he’s one to talk. You know how much he used to hit up my mom for money?”

  Chris held up a hand to calm her. “I know. Trust me, I do. And I don’t buy a word of Jimmy’s nonsense.”

  She scowled at the TV, which had moved onto commercials. A male bodybuilder popped a handful of supplements before dragging a small aircraft down a landing strip by a long chain tied around his waist. “Why would she lie about it for him?”

  Chris shrugged. “No telling. People do strange things.”

  “He probably paid her.”

  “Maybe,” Chris said apprehensively, “but I don’t know if he’d have to. I’ve seen some weird stuff since moving to Philadelphia, Jess. The way women throw themselves at my teammates is creepy. Even the ugly dudes, the ones that look better with their helmet on, women are chasing after them with this crazed look in their eyes. Some folks want fame no matter what.”

  Jessica stared at him, blinking dumbly. She knew what he’d said made sense, but it was what he hadn’t said that hooked her attention. There was no way women threw themselves at all of Chris’s teammates, even the fugly ones, and skipped over the pretty quarterback. That wasn’t how this batshit crazy universe worked.

  “What do you do when they throw themselves at you?” she asked, struggling to keep the jealousy out of her voice.

  “Huh?” Not the question he was expecting, clearly.

  “What do you do,” she repeated slowly, “when they throw themselves at you?”

  He shook his head gently. “I tell them no thanks. What do you think I do?”

  The image of Chris holding a hand palm-out and politely saying “No thanks” to an oncoming stampede of women would have struck Jessica as humorous if she weren’t already so damn agitated.

  Fucking Jimmy. (And Sampson. And Kumal. And Dwayne.)

  “That asswipe planned on announcing his new relationship on my birthday,” Jessica said. She wagged a finger at Chris. “Make no mistake, he knows full well what day it is. He’s trying to ruin my birthday, and it’s not going to work!” She took a hard swig from the bottle and stomped back into the bathroom to dry her hair and paint her face.

  She managed to knock back most of her beer as she aimed the hairdryer in the general direction of her head and scowled at herself in the mirror. Why couldn’t people just do the right thing? Men were ruining her life. And here she was putting on make-up to look pretty for them. Why? What was the point?

  It was not the ideal state for putting on eye liner. Each dab of foundation and brush of blush, each attempt at a straight line on her eyelid and around her lips felt like an expectation tha
t she, with her minimal application skills, was unable to fulfill. She was attempting to be beautiful, and she was failing miserably. Once she finished with the mascara and paused to examine herself, she felt a strong sense of self-loathing well up in her.

  Makeup was supposed to be a trick she had in her back pocket in case she needed to look pretty for something. But now she’d played that ace up her sleeve, and it hadn’t been as helpful as she’d hoped. She still looked like Jessica—tired, plain, plain tired.

  By the time she left the bathroom after a half hour of primping, she wanted nothing more than for nobody to look at her.

  Chris turned and looked at her. “Whoa! You look amazing, Jess.”

  Liar.

  “Eh,” she grumbled.

  But he kept gaping lasciviously and sauntered over to her while she gathered up her strewn belongings to throw them into her purse.

  He wrapped his arms around her from behind, pressing up against her.

  She was annoyed by how nice it felt to be wanted, despite her unfortunate appearance. She didn’t deserve Chris, stupid, ugly thing that she was. Why did he bother pushing away the women throwing themselves at him? He should have taken them up on the offer. Instead, he was stuck with her, and what good was she? They couldn’t even have sex! Chris was probably the only guy in the league that was still a virgin, and it was all her fault.

  He nuzzled the top of her head, inhaling her deeply and groaning, “Mmm … you smell like fresh bread.”

  She stepped away quickly. “God dammit!” Bread? How in the nine circles of fuck did she still smell like bread? She’d shampooed her hair twice!

  “Whoa, what is it?” Chris said, stumbling back quickly.

  She rounded on him. “I smell like bread all the time! I can’t get rid of it, no matter how many times I shower. It’s like it’s in my freaking blood! When I sweat, I smell like yeast. That’s not what a woman wants to smell like, Chris! A woman doesn’t want to smell like yeast!”