The Rival Baker Shared My Oven, So the Whole Town Watched Us Pretend to Hate Each Other novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: Butter, Inconsistent

Lotte's tower leans, Soren steadies it, the Dairyland Kringle Cup is announced, and the repairman says Babi told him there was no hurry.

The woman in the trench coat bought one of everything and told me her name before the register had finished printing.

"Pauline Hoyt. Midwest Table magazine. I'm the head judge for the Dairyland Kringle Cup."

"The what?"

"You'll hear at noon," said Pauline Hoyt, and she ate a corner of my pecan kringle standing up, with her eyes closed.

She opened them again and jotted a note in her notebook.

I could not read it upside down, and I thought about it for four hours.

At noon the whole town packed Main Street for the Founders' Display.

Two towers of kringles stood on card tables on either side of the Feud Line.

Each held one hundred and twenty, stacked in rings.

The Vinter's tower was perfect.

It rose in a clean, tight spiral.

Mine was leaning.

I had stacked it on no sleep, and in the hard noon light it tilted toward the Vinter's side by a good ten degrees.

"Oh no," said somebody behind me.

"It's the Tower of Pisa," said somebody else, delighted.

A little girl in the front row pointed and said, "It's going to hit him."

It was.

I watched the top four rings begin to slide, and I did what any adult would do, which was nothing, with my whole body.

A hand came out of the crowd and flattened itself against the base of my tower.

It was a big, floury hand, and it belonged to Soren Vinter, who had crossed the Feud Line without anyone seeing him do it.

The tower stopped moving.

The crowd gasped.

"Take your hand off my tower," I said, very low.

"If I take it off, it falls."

"Then let it fall."

"It's a hundred and twenty kringles, Zeman. People worked on those."

"I worked on those."

"Then you should not have built a ramp," he said, and he pushed the tower upright with the calm of a man leveling a shelf.

He walked back across the stripe.

Three hundred people said "ooooh."

Pauline Hoyt, standing on the little stage with a microphone, wrote another word in her notebook.

Then she introduced herself to the town, and what she said made me forget my tower.

"The Dairyland Kringle Cup," said Pauline Hoyt, "will be held at the State Fair on Saturday, August eighth."

"Every bakery in Wisconsin may enter one new-flavor kringle. Judging is blind."

"The winning kringle goes into one hundred and forty Dairyland Grocers stores for a year."

"The bakery also receives twenty-five thousand dollars."

The crowd made a sound.

I stood on my side of the stripe with my hands going cold.

For six years I had been a name on a schedule in a hotel kitchen.

I had made other people's desserts for other people's menus, and I had never once put my own name on anything that was mine.

Across the stripe, Soren Vinter had stopped writing on his index card.

His pencil hung in the air.

He was looking at Pauline Hoyt.

I caught his eye.

For one second we understood each other perfectly.

Then he looked away, and I looked away, and the cheering went on.

At two o'clock the Feud Tour bus pulled up.

It was a long white coach with a banner reading KETTLE LANDING FEUD TOURS.

Forty tourists in sun hats climbed out, holding phones.

The guide stepped down in a Kringle Days polo and addressed them in the voice of a man who has done it nine hundred times.

"On this spot in 1984," he said, "Vlasta Zeman threw a pecan kringle in Aksel Vinter's face."

"He threw a cherry one back. The yellow line was painted the next morning, and the families have not spoken since."

"Today, the bakers' grandchildren continue the tradition."

He swung an arm at me, and then at Soren.

"Ladies and gentlemen, the Doorway Duel!"

I had forgotten the Doorway Duel.

Each baker stands in their own shop door, and one insult goes across the street.

My grandmother had made it into an art form.

Soren went first.

He stood in his doorway with his arms folded, and I watched him think.

The tourists lifted their phones.

"Zeman's butter," he said, "is inconsistent."

Nobody laughed.

A man in the back row whispered, "That's it?"

"It's inconsistent at the edges," Soren added, honestly. "It's a very good butter."

The guide put his hand over his eyes.

I took one slow step out of my door into the sun.

"Vinter's Bakery smells like a hardware store that learned to bake," I said.

"That is accurate," said Soren.

The tourists roared.

"His idea of a flavor is a spreadsheet," I went on, warming up.

"I keep a very good spreadsheet."

"He alphabetizes his nutmeg!"

"It's so I can find the nutmeg."

I was laughing so hard I had to put a hand on the door frame.

The guide was crying, in the happy way.

A woman in the front said, "Oh, I like him. He's the sad one."

"I am not sad," said Soren, with great dignity. "I am correct."

By the time the tourists climbed back on the bus, they had bought forty kringles from my side and forty more from his.

I stood in my doorway, aching in every muscle, and for the first time since I came home, I felt like the shop was mine.

Then a white van pulled up at the curb, and the repairman climbed out with a clipboard against his chest.

"Miss Zeman," he said, "I've been feeling bad all day."

"About what?"

He held out the clipboard with an apologetic face.

"I ordered your control board in May," he said. "Your grandmother told me to mark it 'no hurry.' She underlined it twice."

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