Chapter Text
Part 1
“Yeah, sure, Tater, anytime,” Jack said. “Not like I’m going anywhere, eh? Yeah, okay, tonight at seven. I’ll be there.”
The fact was, Jack really wasn’t up for a game of Zoom Pictionary, but he had an A. He had to stay involved with the team, even though he was pretty sure this season was over. If he didn’t, he’d have Marty and Thirdy to answer to.
And if Marty actually retired, there was talk that they’d give Jack a C, too, instead of being one of three A’s. He’d tried to nip it, gone to Thirdy and apologized that anyone had said it, even if it wasn’t Jack, and found out that Thirdy was the one who started it in the first place.
“We all know you’re the face of the franchise, man, and not just because you’re pretty,” Thirdy said. “I’ll wear the A ’til I retire, as long as the team wants me to, but we both know that’s not going to be too many more years. Making you captain is just recognizing reality. The young guys look up to you, us old farts respect you … of course you’re the leader.”
Maybe Marty wouldn’t retire after the truncated season, Jack thought. Maybe he’d stay one more year, try to end on a high note instead of in this weird limbo.
Jack could only hope.
He turned back to his laptop and unmuted it, but the video he’d been watching on the best ways to cook chicken breast had given way to something else.
The voice that came from the laptop speakers had a warm drawl, and the hands on the screen were weaving something, making a basket pattern over a … pie, definitely a cherry pie. The dark red of the cherries offered a good contrast to the pale pie dough, and the cherry juice that stuck to the back of the strips as the man folded them back made it easy to see what he was doing.
“Now, a lot of folks are afraid of doing a lattice top because it looks complicated,” the man said. He had just laid a new strip of dough horizontally across the pie, and he was taking the strips that were folded down – every other one of the vertical strips – and flipping them over the new horizontal strip. “It’s really easy once you know how.”
Then he folded down the other vertical strips – the ones that were under the last horizontal one – and added another horizontal strip before folding them back.
Jack knew he should turn the video off. There was no way he was ever going to make a pie. He hardly ever ate desserts anyway, and never fruit pie. There was the fat in pie crust, all the sugar – it wasn’t worth it. He had one piece of tarte au sucre when he went home for Christmas, if he went home for Christmas, and that was that.
But the man’s hands – strong, square hands with neat nails and no rings – kept moving and he kept talking as the pattern took shape.
“This is a real simple pattern, of course,” he was saying. “You can do it all sorts of ways. I like a braided edge, but that takes a bit of practice.”
The pie was finished, and the hands slid it into what looked like an old oven. The picture cut to a young guy – well, Jack would have assumed that from the voice – holding up a pie identical to the one that had just gone into the oven. His eyes were warm and brown, his hair was the color of the now-golden pie crust, and his smile was wide.
“This is the way it looks when it’s done,” he said. “See, don’t you think it looks like I put a lot of effort in? And if your first few attempts come out a little wonky, that’s okay. Everything takes practice, and besides, the people you want to impress will just know how hard you’re willing to work.
“If you try it, I’d love to see how it turns out,” the man continues. “Go ahead and send a picture. And of course, if you made it this far, please hit the like button and think about subscribing.”
Jack scrolled down and hit the thumbs up button before looking further.
The video had been posted by OMG! Check Please two years ago and had been watched over 100,000 times.
The account had about 10,000 subscribers, and there were plenty of comments, some complimentary, some with practical questions. Jack read through the first couple of pages before checking his cupboards.
He had flour, salt and a bag of apples. The spice rack that Maman had insisted on when he moved in had cinnamon – something that was included in most of the apple pie recipes he found in a quick Google search. But he didn’t have any real butter or shortening, which apparently he would need.
Jack pulled his chicken breasts out to thaw and placed an order for butter and shortening to be picked up curbside. More apples, too, he decided. He put the chicken breasts back in the freezer and added frozen chicken tenders and frozen broccoli to his grocery order.
An hour later, he grabbed a clean mask off the hook by the door, pulled a cap down above his eyes, and headed to the market.
At least this was giving him a reason to get out, start his car and try something new, all in one day. One day in a string of days that were starting to all feel the same. If he watched and listened to OMG! Check Please another two (or three) times while he waited, well, that was just preparing himself.
How hard could this be?
Part 2
Four hours later, Jack and his kitchen were both covered with flour. The pie, such as it was, was in the oven. Jack had a trash bin filled with apple peels, which took a surprising amount of the apple flesh with them, and apple cores. There was also a complete recipe’s worth of pie dough, which had gone all gray and crumbly somewhere around the third or fourth time Jack had tried to roll it out.
By that time, Jack had watched OMG! Check Please’s tutorials on making and rolling out pie dough. He made it look so easy.
Sure, when it came to making the pie dough, he used a tool that Jack had never seen before, something like four or five curved blades attached to a handle, that he called a pastry blender. But he said you could also blend your butter and shortening – the fats that made pie crust so unhealthy – into the flour and salt mixture with your hands, and demonstrated that. So Jack had washed his hands for the maybe twenty-fifth time that day and dove in.
It felt good. The butter and shortening were still cold, and the texture of the flour was velvety. But Jack wasn’t sure when to stop, because it never did look exactly like it did in the video. Then he drizzled ice water over the mixture, just the way OMG! Check Please did, but it didn’t seem like it could possibly be wet enough, so he added an extra tablespoon.
He gathered the dough into two balls to wrap in plastic and refrigerate the way he was instructed and turned his attention to the apples, which were another problem entirely.
Once they were peeled, sliced and mixed with a some sugar, flour, a touch of lemon juice and cinnamon and nutmeg, his hands were aching. It was time to roll the dough out, somethng else OMG! Check Please made look easy.
But the dough stuck to the plastic wrap, and then to the counter. Jack tried putting flour under it, but then it stuck to the rolling pin he had never, ever used before. He tried flouring that, too, but the dough just kept sticking to everything, and the more he tried to fix it by patching holes and pushing the edges of torn places back together, the worse it got.
He finally gave up. He searched for other tutorials, but all of them said to do it more or less the same way – at least, the ones that didn’t say to use a food processor. Like he had a food processor.
So he went back to OMG! Check Please’s video, and tried to follow the directions exactly.
He still didn’t think the dough turned out the way it was supposed to, but it wasn’t as gloppy as it had been the first time. It was more crumbly than the first time he had made it, but it did roll flat. Until he tried to roll it around the pin to pick it up and put it in the pie plate, a last minute purchase from the grocery store along with the rolling pin. Then it kind of fell apart.
Jack grimaced and moved the rolling pin with its tattered crust over the pie plate and dropped it in, then did his best to arrange the dough to cover the dish with his fingers, tearing off extra bits of dough that hung over the side and using them to patch the bottom.
He poured the sliced apples in, then eyed the second disk of dough. He still had to weave the lattice top, which was the point of this whole exercise.
Jack cursed himself for starting this and rolled the dough.
To his surprise, the second disk rolled more evenly and stuck less than the first. He had to ransack his desk to find a ruler to cut even strips. OMG! Check Please had said this was easy, but Jack didn’t really trust his judgment anymore.
The lattice came together more easily than he would have expected given the struggle he went through for everything else. Sure, it was uneven in the end, and he clearly had to mend a few (most of) the strips because they broke when he tried to transfer them from the work surface to the pie, and the edge was a mess, but it was a pie.
And it was in the oven, and Jack had a half-hour to clean up and get the flour out of his hair before Pictionary with the team. Great.
Part 3
Jack was clean if a bit damp when he settled in front of his laptop screen at the breakfast bar, brushing the hair that was too long and starting to curl off his forehead.
“You working out again?” Tater said when Jack’s face popped into the box. “You just shower? I know you don’t have girl there.”
“Haha,” Jack said. “No, I just wanted a shower.”
“What, Jack’s turning into a clean freak?” Thirdy piped in. “He always was Mr. Clean anyway.”
“Yeah, what’s the use of having young, single teammates if you can’t live vicariously through their exploits?” Marty groused, half chuckling at the same time. “The only deets I get from you is how many shots you took into that net you have set up in your garage.”
Jack shrugged.
“Maybe I just like keeping my personal life, you know, personal,” Jack said.
“I spend too much time with you on roadies,” Tater said, shaking his head sadly. “We know you, Zimmboni. What’s that saying? You see what you get?”
“What you see is what you get,” Marty said.
More and more boxes appeared until there were 15 people on the call, almost everyone who was still in the area. Jack wasn’t sure about how this whole Pictionary thing would work, but he was glad the team had Tater to play social director. That was one thing he didn’t have to worry about.
“Okay, everyone here?” Tater said. “This is how we do it –”
“Don’t we just get a word and draw it?” Poots piped in.
“Yes, Little Poots,” Tater said. “We get word and draw. But we draw on our computer screen so everyone can see.”
Draw on the screen with a mouse? Ugh.
“Teammates take turns drawing,” Tater said. “Teammates guess, and if they get it before time is up, their team gets the point. No dirty pictures, though.”
“What are the teams?” Jack asked, just as his oven timer beeped.
“Christ, Jack, mute yourself,” Snowy said.
“I was talking,” Jack said. “Be right back.”
He got up to take the pie out of the oven. It still didn’t look like the one OMG! Check Please made – the lattice weave was open on one side and pushed together at the other, and the edge was crumbled and brown. He set it on the worktop behind him to cool.
Silence greeted him when he sat down in front of the laptop again.
“Jack,” Marty asked gently. “What’s that?”
“A pie?” Jack said, feeling his cheeks warm for reasons he didn’t quite understand.
“We said no girls there,” Tater said, sounding confused.
“No?” Jack said. “I made it.”
“You made a whole pie?” Marty said. “For yourself?”
“Yes?” Jack said, aware that fourteen sets of eyes were trying to see around him to the pie on the counter, steam gently rising from the gaps in the lattice.
“It’s just that Jack, I can count on one hand the times you’ve gone off your nutrition plan in the last six years if it wasn’t a cheat day,” Thirdy said. “But you’re supposed to be home alone, and you made a whole pie. For yourself?”
“I have a freezer,” Jack said.
“You have GrubHub and Uber Eats too,” Thirdy said. “If you wanted pie, you could have ordered yourself a slice. You actually made a whole pie?”
“There was this video …” Jack started, then realized he couldn’t really explain why he’d been so taken by OMG! Check Please, just that the light, drawling voice and the strong hands and their sure, repetitive motions settled him in a way nothing else had for a few days, and he wanted to see if he could get the same feeling making a pie for himself.
“I just felt like doing something new,” he finally continued. “And I don’t think you can make just one slice of pie, eh?”
That drew chuckles from a few of his teammates. Tater pouted and said, “But I get no pie. You have to make another one, after.”
“If I get good enough at it, Tater, I will,” Jack said.
The game proceeded in fits and starts with way too many pictures that looked like dicks. Jack’s team won, but that might have had more to do with Thirdy not caring at all who won and Marty being called away to soothe one of his daughters who was having a hard time sleeping. Jack’s team actually concentrated under his watchful eye.
“Good game, guys,” Jack congratulated them at the end.
“What do we get for winning?” Tater asked. “Jack will make us all pie?”
“That’s probably more of a punishment,” Thirdy said.
“Haha.”
Jack left the meeting and looked at his pie. It had stopped steaming, and the crust had caved in just a little. Still, it might be cool enough to try a slice.
Before cutting into it, Jack picked up his phone and snapped a picture. OMG! Check Please did say he wanted photos, after all.