Where Do You Want Me

By seven o’clock on the first of May, Camille had been awake for four hours and had made more pastry than she had ever made in one morning.

She and Arlo had started at half past three. There were two hundred and forty croissants, a hundred and twenty pains au chocolat and ninety-six kouign-amann, which was every one the deck oven could turn out between half past four and seven. There were twenty brioche loaves and six trays of maple shortbread. Arlo had carried the first racks out to the porch at ten to seven and come back looking shaken.

“Chef, go and look at the drive.”

“I haven’t time to look at the drive.”

“Go and look at it anyway.”

She went as far as the screen door. The bakery window was at the end of the kitchen porch, a wide old sash with a shelf under it and a blackboard beside it. A line of people began at the foot of the porch steps and ran along the gravel, past the staff lot and the lilacs, all the way down to the road. She could see cars parked on the verge in both directions. There were dogs and pushchairs, and a man in cycling shorts who must have been very cold.

“That’s the sign,” Arlo said. “You put ‘First Saturday’ on the sign at the road and they’ve been looking at it for two weeks.”

“That’s six months without a croissant,” Camille said. She felt it under her ribs, a hot fierce pride she did not often let herself have. “Go and do your eggs. I’ve got nine rooms wanting breakfast and you’re standing here admiring my line.”

The cards were in a shoebox on the shelf. Winnie had had five hundred printed in Vergennes, on heavy cream stock, and Camille had written every word on them. You drove all this way. Stay the night. Under that were the spring rate, a hundred and ninety-five dollars with breakfast, and Winnie’s direct line. On the back it said Dinner for all comers, Saturday, May 29. Memorial Day weekend: 22 rooms, for the first time since 2024.

Josie Farnham stood at the till with her hair in a ponytail and her hands clasped. She was seventeen, a junior at the high school in Vergennes, and this was her second summer.

“A card in every bag,” Camille told her. “Every one, even if they say they live next door. If they ask, the rooms are real and the number is Winnie’s own desk.”

“What if they ask something I don’t know?”

“Then you say Mrs. Ostrander knows, and you point at the front door.”

She pushed the sash up at seven exactly. The first customer was a woman from Charlotte who had been first in line every opening day since 2023, and she bought a dozen croissants and cried a little, as she did every year.

For the first hour it went as it always went, only faster. Camille carried trays out and empties in. She baked off the second round of kouign-amann and turned them out of their rings while the caramel was still dangerous. Through the door she could hear Josie’s voice saying “four seventy-five” and “six dollars” and “there’s a card in the bag.”

At two minutes to eight she came out with a tray of pains au chocolat and saw the cottage door open.

She put the tray on the rack and stood where she was, behind the porch post, with her hands in a side towel.

Her mother came down the flagstones with the folding stool. Tilly walked beside her in the purple coat and the yellow jacket, carrying the mayonnaise jar against her chest. Camille had watched her pick this week’s green off the windowsill last night. It had taken eleven minutes, because the piece had to be nearly the same size as the first.

He was waiting on the lawn beside the little white boat. He had on the navy jacket her daughter had approved, buckled, sixty feet from any water. He said something. Tilly set the jar down on the grass, took off the lid and dropped the glass in. Then she held the jar up to him, and Camille did not need to hear it to know what was said. That was two.

She should have gone back in then. She had an oven full of brioche and a line to the road.

She stayed, because of what happened next. Tilly walked round to the side of the boat and looked up at the sail. She looked for some time. Then she pointed, with her whole arm, at the long pole that ran from the mast up to the sail’s top corner, and said something short.

He looked where she pointed. He said something back. Tilly shook her head hard enough to move her curls, and pointed again.

Then Gideon Hallett, who owned the grass and the boat and the porch Camille was standing on, went down on both knees in the wet. He untied something at the mast. He did not fix it himself. He held the line out, and Tilly took it in both hands and hauled, and he kept one finger on the pole to steady it while she did. When she let go, the sail hung flat. Even from the porch Camille could see the difference. He sat back on his heels and nodded at it. Tilly folded her arms over her life jacket.

Lucille, on her stool, turned her head and looked straight up the lawn at the porch. Camille stepped back behind the post like a girl caught at a keyhole.

She took the brioche out. She did not think about a grown man’s knees on the grass. She thought about it steadily for the next half hour.

At half past eight Josie put her head round the screen door. Her face was pink.

“Chef, I’m sorry. It’s stopped.”

“What’s stopped?”

“The line. Everybody wants to ask about the card. They want to know if dogs can stay, and if there’s a crib, and what’s for dinner on the twenty-ninth. A lady asked me about a wedding. And the card machine keeps thinking, and I can’t bag and talk and do change. I’ve been on the same man for four minutes.”

Camille went out. It was true. The people at the front were cheerful enough, but the line behind them had the look of one that had not moved in a while. Down by the lilacs somebody was looking at a watch. She had two racks of hot pastry going soft in the morning air and a girl of seventeen close to tears.

She had caused this herself. She had wanted to sell a bed with a croissant, and it had not occurred to her that people would want to talk about the bed.

She could not take the till. She had sixty kouign-amann still in their rings and nobody else on earth to turn them out. Arlo was plating eggs. Winnie was at the front desk, where the telephone was.

She was still working out what to do when she heard boots on the porch steps.

He had taken the life jacket off. The knees of his jeans were soaked dark, and there was a grass stain on one cuff of his grey sweater. He looked at the line and at Josie, and then he looked at Camille. He did not say what he thought the trouble was. He did not suggest anything.

“Where do you want me?” he said.

It was her window, and he had just asked her for orders in front of sixty people. She found that she had them ready.

“Cash box. You take the money and you answer the questions. Josie bags and calls the total, and she doesn’t have to say one other word. Croissants are four seventy-five, pain au chocolat five fifty, kouign-amann six, shortbread three for the bag, loaves twelve. A card goes in every bag. You don’t promise anybody a north wing room. Those go on Winnie’s waiting list.”

“Dogs?”

“Two rooms on the ground floor take dogs. Winnie knows which.”

“Cribs?”

“There are three in the attic.”

“What’s for dinner on the twenty-ninth?”

“I haven’t written it yet. Tell them there’ll be lamb.”

“Lamb.” He washed his hands at the porch sink, the full twenty seconds, without being told. Then he took the stool beside Josie, pulled the cash box toward him and looked out of the window at the next person in line.

“Good morning. I’m sorry about the wait. What can we get you?”

Camille went back to her caramel. But the kitchen door was propped open for the trays, and she could hear every word.

She had expected him to be competent at it. He was competent at everything; that had never been the difficulty. She had not expected him to be so easy with them. Jamie had been easy with children and with the staff, people he saw every day. He had gone quiet around the guests. She understood now that he had been afraid one of them would know his face. This man made change for a fifty without looking at his hands and asked a couple with a spaniel how far they had come.

“Burlington? Forty minutes. And you’ll drive forty back with those going cold on the seat.” She heard the smile in it. “There’s a card in the bag. For what it costs you in petrol and a decent dinner in town, you could eat here and wake up to these warm. The spaniel’s welcome. Mrs. Ostrander has two rooms downstairs for dogs, through that door, the lady with the braid.”

“Is the roof fixed?” a man asked. He was local, from his voice. “I heard the place was closing.”

“The roof’s being fixed. If you stand back from the porch you can see the copper going on. Nobody’s decided anything about closing. Come and have dinner on the twenty-ninth, and you can tell me whether we should.”

He did not say who he was. He said “we,” she noticed, and he said “Chef Bouchard” every time someone asked who made the pastry. Twice he was asked something he did not know. Both times he leaned back toward the kitchen door and said, “Chef, is there nut in the shortbread?” and “Chef, will the loaves freeze?” He waited for her answer and passed it on exactly.

The line moved. She came out with a tray at five to nine and it was shorter by half. Josie was bagging with both hands and smiling. Four people were standing in the lobby doorway, waiting for Winnie.

Tilly was on the top porch step with the jar between her feet. Lucille had put the stool beside her.

“The lesson stopped early,” Tilly said, before Camille could ask. “He asked me if he could go, because your line was stuck. I said yes. We’d done the hawk knot six times and the stick was fixed.”

“The stick?”

“The sprit. He tied it too loose. The sail had a big wrinkle from this corner to that corner, and last week it didn’t. I told him.” Tilly looked toward the window. “He said he’d been tying them for years and nobody ever caught it so fast. Mémé says he did it on purpose.”

“I said he might have,” Lucille said. She was watching the back of the grey sweater. “I didn’t say it was a bad thing if he did.”

“Does it count, if he left early?” Camille asked her daughter. It was not a thing she had planned to ask.

Tilly considered. “He was on time. And he asked.” She put her hand on the lid of the jar. “It counts. I’m counting how many people are in the line now. There were forty-four, and now there’s nineteen.”

The last kouign-amann went at twenty to ten, to the man in the cycling shorts, who had been round the point and come back for a second one. Gideon held it out through the window in its paper.

“That’s the last of anything,” he said. “You’ve cleaned us out.”

Camille reached past him and turned the blackboard round to the side that said SOLD OUT, COME BACK TOMORROW. The sash came down. Josie sat on an upturned crate and laughed with relief, and Camille told her to go and get eggs from Arlo and sit down while she ate them.

The cold pantry was off the back of the pastry kitchen, a narrow room with slate shelves that had been keeping butter cool since 1894. She kept the chocolate in there, and the table butter for the dining room, and on window days she counted the till in it because it had a door that shut and a shelf at the right height. She carried the cash box in. He followed with the card slips, and it was only when the door swung to behind him that she remembered how small the room was.

“You don’t need to stay for this,” she said.

“I took the money. I’d like to know I didn’t lose any of it.”

That was fair. She opened the box and began to count the notes into piles, twenties and tens and fives, squaring each pile with the side of her hand. He stood at her shoulder and added the card slips in his head, and gave her a figure, and she wrote it down. The cold came up off the slate. He was the only warm thing in the room and he was eight inches away.

She counted the coin. She did the sum on the back of an order sheet, and then she did it again.

“Well?” he said.

“Two thousand three hundred and ten dollars.”

“What was your best, before today?”

“Two thousand and ninety. A Saturday last August, with every room full and a regatta at the point.” She looked at the figure. Her handwriting was not quite steady. “This is the first of May, in the mud, with nine rooms. I’ve never had a morning like it.”

“You built that line. All I did was take the money.”

“The line stopped, and you got it moving again.”

“I counted change. A seventeen-year-old could do it, and she did, as soon as nobody was asking her about cribs.” He paused. “You were right about the card. I’d have printed a rate on it and left it there. I wouldn’t have thought to write ‘You drove all this way.’ Winnie had four of them at her desk before nine.”

“Four names. Two rooms in the main house for the holiday and two for the waiting list.”

“Out of one morning.”

“I have seven more before the weekend.” She put the notes into the bank bag. Her head was already at Thursday, because that was a safer place for it to be. “And I’m taking six boxes to Burlington on Thursday, to the cafés, for the wholesale.”

“May I drive you?”

“I have a car.”

“I know you have. I have to stand up in front of a board and tell them what a croissant sells for to a man who’s going to sell it again. I’d like to have watched it done, and I’d carry the boxes.”

“You wouldn’t speak.”

“I wouldn’t say a word.”

“Half past nine, then, at the kitchen porch.” She zipped the bag. Then she turned round to put it on the shelf behind her, and it was the wrong moment, because he had stepped the same way to let her by.

They stopped. There was nowhere for either of them to go. Her shoulder was against the slate and his hand had come up to the shelf beside her head, to keep from knocking into her. He smelled of butter and cold grass. There was sugar on his cuff. She could see the pulse in his throat above the collar of the sweater, and it was going as fast as hers.

He had not touched her. She was aware of that as clearly as if he had. For six summers she had remembered his hands. They were a few inches from her now and he was keeping them carefully to himself.

She should have said “Mr. Hallett.” It would have done the work. She looked at his mouth instead, and that was her doing and nobody else’s.

“Camille,” he said.

He said it the old way. Everyone at the inn called her Ca-meel, flat and friendly, and she had long ago stopped hearing it. Her mother said it as it was meant to be said, soft at the end, with hardly any l in it at all. In the summer of 2021 he had listened to Lucille say it once, on the telephone at the front desk, and he had gone away and practised. He had said it that way in the room over the boathouse, very low, with his mouth against her hair. He had not used it once since the day he drove up in the black car.

It went through her like heat through sugar. Her hand had come up off the bank bag. It was an inch from the front of his sweater, and she did not know which of them was going to close the inch.

The pantry door banged back against the wall.

“Butter,” Arlo announced. “Table six wants more butter, table two wants more butter, the whole dining room’s gone mad for butter—” He stopped. He looked at the owner of Hallett Hotels, and at his chef, and at the eight inches of cold air between them that had just become three feet. “I can come back.”

“The table butter’s on the second shelf,” Camille said. Her voice came out very nearly normal. “Take two crocks. Mr. Hallett was checking my arithmetic.”

“Two thousand three hundred and ten,” Gideon said. He had his hands in his pockets. “It was correct.”

“Twenty-three ten?” Arlo forgot whatever he had been thinking. “Chef. That’s a record. That’s got to be a record.”

“It is. Take the butter.”

Arlo took two crocks and went, whistling, and left the door wide open behind him. The kitchen came in with its noise and its light, the dish machine and the radio and Josie laughing at something.

Gideon looked at her for one moment longer. He did not apologise, and she was glad, because there had been nothing in it to apologise for and both of them knew whose hand had moved.

“Half past nine on Thursday,” he said, and went out through the kitchen to the porch.

Camille stayed where she was. She put the bank bag on the shelf, the right way up. She straightened the piles of order sheets, which had not needed straightening. Her face was hot and the slate was cold, and she laid the inside of her wrist against it until the scar on her forearm stopped prickling.

That had been close, and it would have been stupid. He was on his second Saturday of eight. She had a piece of paper with his signature on it and a daughter keeping count in a jar, and a rule she had kept for twenty-two years. Arlo had come in at exactly the right time, and she told herself firmly that she was relieved.

She stood in the cold among the butter and the chocolate for another full minute, and she knew that she was lying.
***