Chapter Text
“This is shit.” Rebecca dropped her rolling pin onto the counter in defeat. She was struggling to roll out her galette dough. It was too dry, and she couldn’t manage to roll it out into even a semblance of a circle. The process looked so simple when Ted demonstrated for her, but he was the expert.
“Shit how? I can’t see what ya got down there.” Ted was endlessly patient even in her frustration. Annoyingly patient sometimes, Rebecca might say if she wasn’t so happy to be baking with him even while he was living an ocean away.
The two of them were on FaceTime together as Ted taught Rebecca about the pitfalls of pastry dough. Rebecca’s phone was propped on a stack of books on the kitchen island. Beside that stack a cookbook was open to the page on pie crust, lightly stained with butter from the times she’d turned the page with dirty hands. Ted was right, her phone wasn’t angled to allow him to see the mess she’d made of her dough.
She picked up her phone to show him her progress, accidentally smearing flour on the screen as she tapped it to switch the camera to the back-facing one.
“Well. That ain’t right.” Ted did a poor job of disguising his laughter.
“I know that.”
“We can fix it.”
Rebecca took a deep, cleansing breath.
“Tell me how?”
+++++
That evening was their fourth in a series of communal baking-by-FaceTime sessions. In a fit of loneliness, or an effort to establish regular contact, or just plain nostalgia for biscuits with the boss, Ted had suggested they bake their way through a cookbook, one new recipe a week.
They were talking on the phone, which they did often right when Ted moved back to Kansas, but the calls had grown less frequent as their separate lives became ordinary. They were now friends who lived in different countries. He’d been making light of the new distance between them, but there was a hint of desperation in his invitation, a plea that he needed structure.
“Now that I’m not a long-distance dad anymore, I need someone else to talk to from behind a screen,” he joked.
It was the middle of autumn, and Ted had been back in Kansas for four months. Long enough for him to find a routine and ways to occupy his time; long enough for him to have overcome the initial adjustment period and then realize he was still longing for community. He was the coach of Henry’s quite competitive travel football team. He had reconnected with old friends and made some new ones: regulars at the coffee shop he frequented, parents of kids on Henry’s football team, his neighbor across the street, a divorced dad raising a teenage son, but he didn’t feel quite like he was back back. Most of his friends were also parents, which meant that it was difficult to set up standing invites to grab a beer, what with work and the kids’ unpredictable after-school schedules and the dreaded 6am alarm each morning. Being a father who didn’t live with his son set him apart; the freedom often felt like loss.
He was home, and he was glad, but it wasn’t the same as it used to be. He missed Richmond, his former home, his also-home, and was still figuring out his life in Kansas apart from Henry. All this Rebecca deduced from their phone conversations that often lasted well over an hour.
Though Rebecca hadn’t quit her job and moved back to the States, she was also adjusting to a return to her life.
That summer, she and Matthijs had tried to make a relationship work. They had no long-term expectations, just wanted to keep enjoying each other’s company, which worked best when she visited him in Amsterdam, away from her busy life. A couple of times he stayed with her when work brought him to London, but he didn’t belong in her house. She realized that while he was standing in her too-large kitchen, sleek and modern, so much space just for her. He never said anything, but she knew he didn’t like it. She preferred to go to Amsterdam anyway, when work stress became overwhelming and she needed a forty-eight-hour break to chase the high of secluding herself from the real world once again, just her and Matthijs and his daughter when she was lucky, whose English was several years less advanced than her actual age but sufficient to laugh and play and listen as Rebecca read to her.
As much as she loved the escape, it wasn’t practical on a regular basis. She missed personal phone calls. She occasionally responded to time-sensitive work emails hours late. She made a fool of herself in a meeting with Keeley and the finance team. They had just broken ground on new training facilities for the Richmond women’s team, and Rebecca was in charge of approving the interior floor plan and presenting the associated budget to finance. She’d just arrived back in London from Amsterdam that morning and wasn’t prepared for the meeting; she’d had to fumble for the proper numbers and backtracked more than once.
She didn’t make any major errors, but she made the project look disorganized, especially to Andrew, her least favorite member of the finance team who didn’t think a women’s side was worth so much time and money, but he never said it explicitly enough to reprimand him for it. He could recommend against future budget allocation to the board.
After the meeting, back in her office, Keeley gave her a reality check.
“Babe, I know you have a lot going on, but I can’t have you distracted.” Keeley was firm, and Rebecca hated to let her down. She wasn’t proud of her performance, and the disappointment in her voice hurt.
She’d broken things off with Matthijs soon afterwards, for herself and the club and the future women’s team. He understood, and could tell he’d been keeping her from something important. They said goodbye on good terms, with an open invitation for her to look for him again in the future.
Rebecca told the short version of all this to Ted. She held back from sharing too many details, but she felt she owed him an explanation for the emotional void she was looking to fill.
This new baking project required exactly the level of focus and mental energy that she was looking for: a few hours a week to try something new, both challenging (she’d hardly done any proper baking) and rewarding (sweet treats) on a small scale.
Even more than the other benefits, she valued the structured time to socialize. Years ago, while she was married, she spent a lot of time not wanting to exert visible effort to maintain her friendships. She was told that she was too needy, reveled too much in affection. Eventually she stopped reaching out to friends altogether, anxiety that read as coldness, aloofness.
But after years of hard work she was no longer frozen, and she understood that it was necessary for her to have cocktails with Keeley every Tuesday evening after their weekly progress meeting about their never-ending list of tasks to get the women’s team up and running, of Nora staying with her in London one weekend a month, of Sunday roast at the Higginses’ house with as many family members as could fit in the dining room.
She felt the loss of her biscuits with the boss ritual acutely; she missed the biscuits, yes, but just as important was the morning check-in with Ted. The six-hour time difference meant that Ted wouldn’t reply to a text or email until after she’d eaten lunch, though she did rather love the thrill of decoding his confused, barely-awake responses to the messages she’d sent while he was asleep.
Once Rebecca agreed to the plan to bake together once a week, she had to gather supplies. She had a stand mixer in storage that she’d gotten as a wedding present and never used, and Ted took care of the rest. The next day she came home from work to a delivery from a local cookware shop. Ted had sent measuring cups, a kitchen scale, a rolling pin, and all the proper pans, along with a favorite cookbook of his, which contained many American staples: chocolate chip cookies, brownies, cakes, and several sweet pies that she’d never eaten before.
“Are you going to teach me how to make biscuits?” she’d asked. She didn’t see a shortbread recipe.
“I don’t know.” He seemed to be considering it. “I wasn’t planning on it. Maybe farther down the road.”
“I thought you said they were easy to make.” He’d assured her several times early in his time at Richmond that they were a breeze to bake, so she’d taken the hint and stopped protesting at the effort he went through to bring them to her every day. “I need to start somewhere.”
“They are, but I’m here to broaden your horizons. Open up your world. Show you wide open spaces, like the Chicks say.”
“Right.” Whatever that meant.
The first few weeks of their experiment required troubleshooting as they discovered the perils of long-distance baking aided by technology. At first Ted set up his laptop on the deep counter in his new kitchen in the perfect spot for Rebecca to see his progress as he worked, but it was close to the sink, so his words were sometimes drowned out by a rush of water mid-sentence when he turned on the faucet to rinse his hands or wash a bowl. Wireless headphones became important to communication, allowing them to move freely and also speak directly into a microphone.
The plan was to bake through the entire cookbook, though not in order; it was separated into different types of desserts, like cookies and cakes, and Ted had a whole strategy geared towards exposing Rebecca to many different techniques at the beginning.
They worked both independently and together as they made their own version of the recipe they’d chosen for that week. They began with a brownie recipe, which Ted insisted was the most foolproof, then moved on to cookies and then cake. Sometimes they chatted away while assembling their ingredients, catching up on the last week, but other times Rebecca needed quiet to concentrate. Occasionally she would be so engrossed in the task at hand (measuring sugar, separating eggs) that she would forget Ted was still on FaceTime, but she was jolted back to reality when she heard him whispering the instructions to himself as he whisked together dry ingredients.
If Rebecca had questions about the consistency of her batter, or what a certain indicator meant (“Are these yolks pale and fluffy?”) Ted talked her through the process. It wasn’t the same as if Ted were in her kitchen himself, watching and making suggestions, but his encouragement was still effective via FaceTime. She’d never been on the receiving end of his coaching and having that boundless energy and intensity focused on her was heady.
Though she wasn’t going to be a contestant on Bake-Off anytime soon, most of her experiments came out nicely for a beginner, with minor issues like a cake that could do with more almond flavor, or the chocolate chip cookies that spread too much on the baking sheet and stuck together.
Because she baked herself an entire cake or two dozen cookies each Monday, Rebecca often brought her desserts to the club the next morning to share. Higgins even set a standing meeting for Tuesday mornings so he could have the first pick of anything she brought in before she offered it to the coaches, which she supposed was a new version of biscuits with the boss.
+++++
“Now, don’t be intimidated by pie crust,” Ted told her early that evening when they started assembling the dough in their respective kitchens. The thought had never occurred to her; she didn’t eat sweet pie often, but it had always been a frictionless experience in which she walked into a bakery and purchased one ready-made.
She’d thought Ted was being dramatic. She’d learned a lot in the last few weeks, like the importance of butter temperature (warm and soft for Ted’s favorite chocolate chip cookies, very cold for pie crust), and surely those lessons would be enough to carry her through that evening’s session.
She might not be intimidated now if Ted had stayed silent. After he told her that too much moisture in the crust could affect the texture, she’d tried to play it safe, but her dough was too dry and she couldn’t roll it out without it crumbling.
“It’s not supposed to look like this, is it?” she asked Ted, and he shook his head no, showing her his own dough, smoother and more uniform than hers. He had set up his laptop and workstation so she could see his progress clearly, and seemed to relish holding his perfectly formed crust up to the camera as if he were on a cooking show. After he sent her videos from some of his favorite YouTube chefs, she wondered if he had practiced a fake cooking show of his own, or was just used to the physical confines of FaceTime after three years as a long-distance dad.
To fix her dry crust, she added more ice water and tried to knead it together, and a little more. Then she’d added too much and her dough was too sticky, no matter how much flour she sprinkled onto the countertop.
“I’ve ruined it, haven’t I.” She looked at Ted’s tiny face on her phone in defeat.
“You can try again,” he said gently. “You should really try again.”
She took more butter out of the fridge and cut it carefully into small cubes, then worked it through the flour with her hands, trying to distribute it evenly in her cupped hands like she’d seen Ted do.
“This is nice,” she admitted once she was able to relax from the frustration of getting her first batch so wrong when she was trying so hard to be careful. She liked crushing the cold bits of butter between her thumb and forefinger, running her fingers through the soft flour until the butter was evenly incorporated.
“No other meditation like it.”
Her second pie crust looked much better than the first, even to her inexperienced eyes, though she still struggled to roll it out into an even circle.
“You’ll get better every time you try,” Ted told her.
“I know,” she sighed. He was right, even though at the moment her hands felt huge and clumsy and the crust kept sticking to the counter.
The main benefit of galettes, and the reason why Ted decided they would start there before moving on to pies, was that they didn’t need to be precisely shaped; shaggy edges and an uneven shape were part of the charm. Of course, Ted assured her of this while his galette was perfectly round and even, but Rebecca was heartened to see her clear improvement from her first try. She didn’t need to be good at everything right away, but she liked knowing that she might be good someday.
While Ted went about peeling and chopping apples for the filling of his galette, Rebecca mixed raspberries with sugar and cornflour. Then she poured the fruit mixture in the center of the dough and carefully folded the edges over to make a little package that wasn’t as neat as Ted’s, but still looked good.
When she took the galette out of the oven, the crust was golden brown and the raspberry juice was bubbling. A bit of juice had leaked out one corner; she hadn’t sealed all the edges tightly enough, but it still smelled incredible, and the bright red trail of juice was a nice color. While she waited for it to cool, she had to make do with eating the leftover raspberries as Ted told her about the cake he planned to bake for Henry’s football team’s end-of-season party.
She soon admitted that she was too impatient to wait and cut a piece of her galette before the filling had had the chance to set completely.
“How’d you do?” Ted asked, his face close to the camera as he tried to get a better look.
She held up her plate to be in view of her phone camera, which she’d needed to plug in while the galette was baking.
“That’s a beauty.” He nodded approvingly.
She took a bite to evaluate. The crust was a bit thick. She should have taken more time to roll it out, but it was pleasantly flaky, and the fruit was just tart enough. There was some sogginess in the middle from the fruit, but she was pleased with her first attempt. Ted’s own galette was a success too. He almost never praised his work aloud, but he hummed in approval and cut a second slice before he’d finished his first, so Rebecca knew he was happy.
“Sometimes my mom buys pie crust at the supermarket,” Ted said later as they were washing up. “She rolls it out herself, but it’s lots easier than starting from scratch. I’m not sure if they have it in England, actually, I never looked. Didn’t make much pie. Mostly biscuits.” He grinned at her.
“So I never have to do this from scratch again if I don’t want to?” Knowing that a tablespoon too much water could ruin her dough entirely was too much unnecessary stress.
“You don’t want the thrill of getting better at something that caused you nothing but grief?”
“Not that badly. I suppose. Maybe.” She thought more about it as she dried her mixing bowl and put it back in the cupboard.
She did want that thrill.
“Can we try again next week?”