The Rival Baker Shared My Oven, So the Whole Town Watched Us Pretend to Hate Each Other novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Feud Line
The mayor reads Babi's letter on Kringle Days opening night, Lotte hits Soren with a kringle in front of the town, and at 3 a.m. she walks into a condemned room to find him standing at her oven.
The mayor read my grandmother's letter into a microphone, and three hundred people on Main Street applauded a lie.
It was opening night of Kringle Days, and I had been back in Kettle Landing for exactly four hours.
I stood on a plywood stage outside Zeman's Bakery in my second-best apron, smiling.
"Dear neighbors," the mayor read. "My hip is mending and the Arizona sun is lovely."
"My granddaughter Lotte is home to bake the Founders' Display for Zeman's, and she will not let you down."
"The shop is in perfect order. The deck oven is good as new."
"Don't worry about a thing. Love, Vlasta Zeman."
The crowd said "aww" in one big breath.
The deck oven was a black steel box that had not turned on since March.
A repairman had told me so at noon, kindly.
I owed this town one hundred and twenty kringles by noon tomorrow, and I owned nothing to bake them in.
Down the middle of Main Street ran a yellow stripe, painted fresh every June.
Everybody called it the Feud Line.
My family's side was the east sidewalk, with the Zeman's banners.
The Vinter's Bakery side was the west sidewalk, and it had better folding chairs.
I had left that stripe at eighteen and not stood on it in eleven years, and it still felt like my front step.
"And now," said the mayor, "the Toss!"
Three hundred people started to chant.
By tradition, each shop throws one day-old kringle across the Feud Line, and whoever gets hit has to eat it.
My grandmother had hit Aksel Vinter in the shoulder every opening night for as long as I'd been alive.
A kid in a Zeman's apron put a pecan kringle in my hands.
It was stiff as a roof shingle.
Across the stripe, a man stepped out of the Vinter's crowd to meet me.
Soren Vinter was thirty-one, six-foot-two and built like somebody who carried flour sacks for fun.
He wore a white apron without one single stain, and he had a pencil behind his ear.
He was the grandson of the man my grandmother had not spoken to since 1984.
He looked at me, and then he looked up at my shop.
"Welcome home, Zeman," he said, in a flat voice that carried to the back row. "Your sign's crooked."
I turned around.
The sign was crooked.
It had been crooked since the wind took it in April, and I had not had the nerve to say so.
The crowd made a delighted noise.
I thought about my dead oven.
I thought about my grandmother, who had told me two weeks ago, "Everything is waiting for you, honey."
I thought about a letter that told three hundred people a thing that was not true.
I drew back my arm and threw the kringle.
It hit Soren Vinter square in the chest and burst.
Pecans went everywhere, down his apron and onto the road and into the open mouth of a child in the front row.
The crowd lost its mind.
A girl with copper hair in two buns stood on a folding chair on the Vinter's side, filming and screaming with joy.
Soren looked down at the mess on his shirt.
He picked off one piece of pecan and ate it.
"Dry," he said.
The loudest cheer of the night went up, and I smiled at him with every tooth I owned.
Under the cheering, he said very quietly, "Your oven's out, isn't it?"
I stopped smiling.
"How would you know that?"
"Your back windows have been dark since noon," he said. "And you walk like someone with a problem."
Then he turned and went back across the stripe.
I found a quiet spot in the alley behind the shop and called my grandmother.
She picked up on the first ring.
"Lottie! Was it wonderful? Did you hit him?"
"Babi, the deck oven is dead. The man said it's the board. It's not coming until October."
"Oh, honey, that's nothing."
Somewhere behind her a bell went ding-ding, like a little trolley.
"Babi, is that a bell?"
"That's the cactus wren," said my grandmother, without a pause. "Now don't you worry, don't you worry, don't you worry. You have the Back Room."
"The Back Room is condemned. You told me that when I was six."
"Did I? It's very much not. It's the room behind the flour closet."
"There's a key under the third brick by the alley door."
"And Aksel's boy is a very reasonable young man. Just knock first."
"Babi, what do you mean, knock..."
"My pills!" said my grandmother, and the line went dead.
I stood in the alley for a long time.
Then I checked the wall.
The third brick from the steel door came loose in my hand.
A key lay in the hollow behind it, bright as a coin, with no dust on it at all.
Someone had been using it.
At three in the morning, with the street swept clean of pecans, I let myself into a room I had been told was condemned.
It was warm.
A brick oven the size of a garden shed took up the whole back wall, and its black iron door glowed orange at the seams.
A bare bulb hung over a steel table.
A tall man in a white apron stood at it with his back to me, folding dough.
He did not turn around.
"Shift change is at four," said Soren Vinter. "You're an hour early, Zeman, and you're standing in my oven."
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