On a morning like this one, however, other things drove me to the beating of the batter: a sense of reassurance for one, a reclaiming of the feeling I had control over something.
Measuring the flour calmed me somewhat (a different part of the brain apparently calculated ounces and grams, sifted out lumps). Then I married the wet and dry ingredients.
“I now pronounce you Doughnut Muffin batter...”
In flavor and texture, the resulting muffin would indeed taste like an “old-fashioned” doughnut. It wasn’t magic, just a culinary trick. (Most quick-bread batters called for a simple stirring of ingredients, but the dump-and-stir muffin failed to yield an optimal product. Creaming sugar into butter whipped air into the batter’s foundation, substantially improving its texture. In this batter, the technique would evoke the same airy tenderness as a classic cake doughnut.)
I filled the paper lined cups, opened the heavy oven door, then slid my pans home with the satisfied sigh of a weary body slipping into a warm bath.
I guess what I most appreciated about baking was its transformative qualities, and not simply because the end product was more than the sum of its parts. The entire process served as a much needed reminder of a simple but profound truth: the fundamentals of cooking never changed.
In a world where firebombs went off in your face and your lover held back on you, just knowing that stirring sugar into liquefied shortening would always give a different result than creaming it into softened butter was an honest-to-God comfort.
I still didn’t know how I was going to get the whole truth out of Mike, but I would find a way. In my view, family feuds were ticking time bombs. I’d already had one incendiary device go off in my face. I wasn’t about to let it happen again.
When I finally headed upstairs, I felt much calmer — less like a rube of an interrogator than a capable woman back in control. Entering the bedroom, however, my momentary illusion of calm was blown away by a brand-new storm.
The steady sound of beeping may have been weak, but its familiar meaning shot adrenaline through my body as effectively as a blaring ambulance siren.
My cell phone!
I rushed to the dresser and saw the blinking light. Someone had left me an urgent message.
Joy? Madame? Mike? Dante?
I played back the recording, and the frantic voice of my ex-husband assaulted my ear.
“Clare! Where the hell are you?”
I checked the time stamp on the message. Matt had phoned me during my lengthy talk with Rossi.
“I get off my plane at JFK, pass a newsstand, and what do I see? My mother on the front page of two tabloids! Why is she on a stretcher for God’s sake? And surrounded by firemen? What the hell happened? I can see you standing in the background! Why didn’t you call me, Clare? Now I can’t reach her! Or you! And my battery is dying. Will you please call me back when — ”
Click.
A robotic voice followed. “End of messages.”
Fourteen
Thirty minutes later, my hair still damp from a quick shower, I descended the back staircase to my coffeehouse. Grabbing a Village Blend apron off a pegboard in the pantry, I peered through the open archway into the main shop.
“Good morning,” I called to the lanky back of my assistant manager.
Tucker Burton turned around, tossed his floppy brown mop, and flashed a footlights-worthy grin. “Well, hello, sleepy head! How are you?”
I avoided a direct answer, which might have resulted in a primal scream. Instead I firmly tied my apron strings and pointed to our machine.
“How’s she running today?”
“Not bad.”
I didn’t reply. I didn’t have to. Tucker already knew what to do next. He turned back to pull me a test shot, so I could judge how bad “not bad” really was.
The machine itself was a beauty, reliably stable when it came to maintaining temperature and pressure. The espresso was what worried me. Like a gifted but temperamental child, my favorite elixir had easy days and difficult days; days of generous glory with lush, oozing crema, and days of stingy infamy with thin, diluted sourness.
The process of coaxing every bit of sweetly caramelized flavor from Matt’s superlatively sourced beans was truly a kind of java alchemy. Three solid months of flight time had to be logged by my trainee baristas before they could attempt even one perfect shot for a customer.
What my newbie baristas had to fully understand was the array of variables that could devolve the process; how their perfectly dosed and tamped pulls of sultry-sweet nectar, executed in the exact same manner, with the same equipment and coffee beans, could suddenly turn into acidy slipstreams of espresso hell. Only when the untried learned to get comfortable with confusion, friendly with frustration, would the one-true-God shot be within reach...
As Tucker worked on pulling my taste test, I peered over the blueberry marble counter. Our tables were half empty, a normal pattern for a late weekday morning. The occupied seats were recognizable regulars — NYU students with open text books, neighborhood freelancers with open laptops, and a few hospital workers on open cell phones.
Tucker’s morning backup, Esther Best (shortened from Bestovasky by her grandfather), appeared to be chatting with a small group of fans. (Yes, I said fans. Esther may have been one of my strongest latte artists, but her true renown as a local slam poetess had spread through at least two of the five boroughs. New customers, mostly aspiring “urban poets” and rappers, were showing up every day just to talk to her. Lucky for our bottom line they ordered coffee drinks from her, too.)
I finished scanning the room.
No sign of Matt yet.
After hearing his frantic message, I’d speed-dialed the man. All I got was voicemail (no surprise). So after my shower, I pulled on jeans and a Henley the color of toasted coconut and descended the stairs. I wasn’t scheduled for another hour, but Matt would be bursting in here any minute, and I theorized he’d be more likely to stay calm in a public place.
As the high morning sun broke through the low clouds, it made me feel calmer. The dazzling rays gleamed in the sparkling glass of our shop’s French doors. The restored wood-plank floor was all waxed and shiny; the twenty marble-topped tables stood reliably in place.
With new eyes, I gazed at the wrought-iron spiral staircase, soaring like a modern sculpture up to the second floor seating area where my tiny office waited with its shabby familiarity of battered desk and nonswiveling swivel chair.
Not even the relentlessly temperamental espresso-making process, the loudly squeaking back door, or our dangerously low supply of whole milk could shake my (guilty) feeling of thankfulness that it was Caffè Lucia and not my beloved Blend that had gone up in smoke.
“So, anyway, I didn’t know what my agent was thinking...”
I glanced back to Tucker, who had spoken again but not to me. He was in the middle of a conversation with Barry.
Like many of our regulars, Barry, a sweet doughboy of a guy with a receding hairline and soft brown eyes, was a free-lancer who worked from home and used the Blend as a way to mingle with humanity — or escape from it. Sometimes he brought his laptop, sometimes a paperback; other times, like today, he felt chatty and pulled up a barstool.
“Wait — you mean you don’t like the new job?” Barry asked between sips of his latte.
“Well, now I like the job. But when she told me about it, I said, ‘Honey, the stage is the thing for me — ’”