The Rival Baker Shared My Oven, So the Whole Town Watched Us Pretend to Hate Each Other novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: The Chalk Line

Lotte draws a crooked chalk line across the Founders' Oven floor and the pair bake side by side, trading grudging fixes, until a stranger with a notebook asks to speak to both of them.

"It's my grandmother's oven," I said.

"It's a shared oven," said Soren. "Your grandmother's half starts at four."

He nodded at the wall beside the steel door.

A laminated card hung there on a nail, yellow with age.

HOUSE RULES, it said at the top, in two columns of tidy handwriting.

VINTER, 12 TO 4. ZEMAN, 4 TO 8. NO EXCEPTIONS. SHIFT CHANGE IS AT FOUR.

At the bottom, two sets of initials had been pressed so hard they dented the plastic.

"Who wrote this?" I said.

"Our grandparents. Forty years ago."

"They hate each other."

"They do," he agreed, folding a lump of dough in thirds. "That's why they wrote it down."

I looked at the oven again.

It was a monster of old red brick with an iron mouth, and the heat came off it in waves that dried my eyes.

My great-grandfather had helped build it.

Nobody in my family had ever once said so, and I was suddenly furious about it.

"Vinter, I have one hundred and twenty kringles due by noon."

"I know. I have the same."

"Then you know why I can't wait an hour."

"I know why you should have called," he said. "There is a phone number on the card."

There was not a phone number on the card.

He saw me check, and he went on kneading with the calm of a man who had won.

"The floor holds sixty kringles at a time," he said. "Thirty-five minutes at four hundred and ten."

"My first sixty went in at three. Your first sixty could go in at four."

"And the cold corner?"

"It's cold."

"Then why can't I..."

"Because the rules say four," said Soren Vinter, and he put a pencil behind his ear.

I took off my jacket.

I had a rolling cart in the alley with a hundred and twenty shaped rings under damp cloths.

My dough had been resting since yesterday, and dough does not read laminated cards.

"I'm going to draw a line," I said.

"With what?"

I found a stub of chalk on the ledge by the oven door, among forty years of other chalk.

His sixty rings already sat in neat rows on the left side of the oven floor.

I walked up and drew a line down the stone.

It was crooked.

"Right half is mine," I said.

"That's the cold half."

"Then I'll bring it up to temperature with my personality."

He stared at me.

For one second I thought the corner of his mouth moved.

"Thirty-five minutes," he said, flat as a table. "You'll get pale bottoms."

"I'll get a swap at minute seventeen."

"There is no swap in the rules."

"The rules were written by two people who don't speak, and one of them put a little heart on the Z."

He looked at the card.

He looked at it a long time.

"It's a loop," he said. "That's a loop."

"It's a very round loop."

Then he pulled an index card out of his apron, wrote on it in pencil and stuck it to the iron door with a magnet.

I read it upside down while I loaded my trays.

ZEMAN. COLD CORNER. SWAP T+17. DO NOT TOUCH RACK THREE.

"You wrote me a card," I said.

"You were going to do it anyway. I'd rather it was on paper."

We worked.

He scaled his butter to the gram and checked his dough with a little probe every ten minutes.

My butter sweated in the heat, so I carried my slab out to the alley to roll it in the night air.

When I came back in, Soren was standing very still, looking at my dough.

"What?" I said.

"Your layers are even."

"Of course they're even. I was a pastry chef at the Lakeshore."

"Were you?"

"Until May." I laid the first ring into the cold corner. "They replaced the pastry kitchen with a freezer truck."

"That's a crime."

"Thank you."

"I meant the truck," he said, and I think that was a joke.

At minute seventeen he was already beside the oven with a long wooden peel.

He swapped my trays into the hot spot without a word, rotated his own and slid the iron door shut again with a hip.

My trays came out at the end with bottoms the color of a good violin.

I stared at them.

He stared at them.

"Don't say it," I said.

"I'm not going to say it."

I broke one open to look at the crumb.

It shattered into a hundred thin sheets, and the pecan filling inside was dark and sweet and a little smoky.

"Is this your filling?" I said, with a spoon already in my mouth.

"That's my filling."

"It needs salt."

"It has salt."

"It needs more."

"It has the correct amount of salt," said Soren Vinter.

Then he tasted it again with a frown and quietly added a pinch.

We both pretended that had not happened.

At seven-fifty the sun was in the alley, and two bakeries' worth of trays were cooling on every flat surface in the Back Room.

I had my whole Display.

I had my first honest laugh in a month waiting in my throat, and I did not let it out.

"Same time tomorrow," I said, wiping my hands.

"Three o'clock is not your time."

"Then three-oh-one."

"Zeman."

"Vinter."

I took my cart into the alley and pushed it through the side door of my own shop.

The bell over the front door was already ringing.

I had not even turned the sign to OPEN.

A woman stood at my counter in a trench coat, with a good leather notebook and a smile that was a little too interested.

"One of everything, please," she said. "And I'd like to speak with both of you."

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