Clobbered by Camembert

I downed the remainder of the scrumptious morsel and eyed the array that I had started preparing at six a.m. The jalapenos packed with mascarpone and seasoned with Cajun spices had nearly seared the roof of my mouth, but the ricotta-stuffed mushrooms had a good balance. All in all, the experiment was a success. I had at least ten winning choices for the taste testing.

As I collected cartons of cream to use in the desserts I planned to make, I paused. Did I smell smoke?

I tore out of the walk-in refrigerator. Flames not only licked upward from the saute pan on the stove, they spiraled from the twenty-five-pound bag of flour beside it.

“Fire!” I yelled to no one. I was alone in the shop. Lured by the ciabatta crostini, I had forgotten that I was frying shallots for one more dish. “Shoot, shoot, shoot.” I hadn’t patted the shallots dry enough. Water must have boiled a spit of oil out of the pan, which had then caught fire and nailed the flour bag.

“You dope, Charlotte.” I knew what danger lurked in a kitchen. That would teach me to multitask. Why did I always think I could do everything at once? Wonder Woman, I was not, though at the age of seven I had liked her costume so much that I had begged and pleaded to wear it for Halloween. What girl hadn’t?

I dumped the cartons of cream on the counter, swooped to the stove, grabbed a lid, and threw it onto the saute pan to douse the flame. Then I switched off the gas beneath the burner, snatched one of the oven mitts, and batted the bag of flour. I quenched the fire, but smoke coiled toward the ceiling, and the fire alarm began to bleat.

“Dang.” I chucked the oven mitt, hoisted one of the wicker stools nestled under the counter, placed it beneath the alarm, and climbed on.

“Sacre bleu,” a woman yelled from the front of the shop. Rebecca galloped into the kitchen. “Charlotte, I smell smoke.” She skidded on her heels. “What are you doing?”

“What does it look like?” I teetered on tiptoe, the hem of my pumpkin-colored sweater rising up my midriff, the heels of my loafers loose. “I’m trying to hit the red button.” I jabbed at the darned thing with my index finger but missed my target. The smoke alarm began to howl like a banshee.

“You can’t turn it off that way.” My young assistant covered her ears. “You have to remove the battery.”

Swell. Out of spite, I poked at the red button one more time before unclipping the alarm case, which came loose but remained fixed to the ceiling by its wires. I plucked at the battery, breaking a nail in the process—double swell—and removed the battery from its slot.

Just as the siren stopped blaring, I felt something give way beneath my feet. “Oh, no.” The seat of the wicker stool burst. I let rip with a yelp, lost my grip on the alarm, and careened heels-first through the seat’s hoop. The wicker and rubber matting on the floor cushioned my landing, but the undersides of my bare arms scraped the rim. I would have black-and-blue bruises, but at least I hadn’t broken my skin, or worse, my neck.

Rebecca rushed to help, her ponytail flapping behind her, her pencil skirt preventing her lanky legs from making long strides. “Are you all right? Are you hurt?”

“Only my ego.”

“What were you thinking? We have a ladder.”

“Do you see it nearby?” I said. “No, you do not. I didn’t have time. I had an emergency.”

“Impulsive,” she muttered.

“Proactive,” I countered.

“Okay, okay.” Rebecca offered a hand to help me out of my confinement.

Spurning her goodwill, I snuggled my feet into my loafers and, balancing both palms on the broken chair’s hoop, slipped one leg out, followed by the other. I brushed bits of wicker from my clothes and tugged the hem of my sweater over my chinos. After a stunned second, I burst into giggles.

Rebecca covered her mouth with the back of her hand and sniggered. When she regained control of herself, she said, “What kind of quiche are you making—let me rephrase that—were you making?”

“I wasn’t.” Each day at Fromagerie Bessette—what the locals liked to call The Cheese Shop—we made a different quiche to sell to our customers, but I had finished the dozen long before I had started in on the wedding menu. Every autumn, as the days grew shorter, my inner clock went cuckoo. For weeks, I had been waking before dawn. “I was testing out wedding appetizers.”

“Bien sur. But of course.”

I smiled. Ever since she had started working at the shop, Rebecca had been practicing her French. She loved the way my grandparents, who had owned the place before ceding it to my cousin and me, settled into their native tongue. To date, I think she had learned close to a hundred phrases.

“How is the menu coming?” she asked.

“Pretty well, except for one.” The shallots—now ruined—were intended to go into a radicchio marmalade that would garnish a filo dough turnover filled with breast of turkey and smoked Gouda.

I headed to the kitchen sink to freshen up.

“Why are there ice cream fixings on the counter?” Rebecca trailed me.

“I’m planning on trying out a few new desserts.” I wasn’t a caterer—I was a cheese shop owner—but when my best friend had asked me to come up with an eclectic menu for her wedding, I had promised I would do my best.

“Maybe you should have waited until you had more hands to help.”

I frowned. The last thing I wanted after a kitchen fiasco was sage advice from a twentysomething who was ten years younger than me. Wonder Woman wouldn’t take it, would she?

“I wasn’t expecting you,” I said as I rinsed my hands and patted them dry on a fluffy white and gold–striped towel. “It’s your day off, isn’t it? I thought you were spending it with your fiance and his parents. You were going on a tour of Amish country.”

“Speaking of desserts,” she said, ineptly changing subjects, “remind me to show you an all-cheese wedding cake that I saw on the Internet.”

I glanced over my shoulder. Was there trouble brewing in Romance Land? Was that why she had come to work? “Are you okay?”

“The cake was so cool-looking,” she went on, fluttering her fingers to describe the shape. “Wheels upon wheels of assorted cheeses. Cheddar, Smoked Gouda, Cashel Blue, and Ashgrove Double Gloucester, all topped with a wedding couple carved out of cheese.”

I raised an eyebrow and pursed my lips, my standard look when demanding an answer to a question.

“I’m fine,” she assured me. “Really.”

She didn’t seem to have been crying. Maybe I was making more of her sudden arrival at the shop than I ought. I turned back to the sun-shaped mirror over the sink and assessed the damage the shock and awe of a kitchen fire had done to my appearance. Thanks to nerves, my short feathery hair had gone as flat as a pancake. I tweaked it but to no avail. Giving up, I dabbed perspiration off my face with the tip of the towel and traipsed back to the main shop.

I fetched a container of Brie from the glass cheese case, set it on the wooden counter, and cut the cheese in half with a carving knife.

Rebecca scooted to my side and tapped the cheese counter with the tips of her hot pink fingernails. “Okay, truth? I don’t want to go on the tour. Ever.”

“Why?”

“Because I’m afraid I’ll run into Papa. He was so shut down the last time we saw each other.”

Her Amish father had been as cordial as a bale of straw. He had come to town to bring Rebecca her grandmother’s shawl. They had exchanged few words. Anger and disappointment could run deep for the elders of a clan when someone like Rebecca left the fold.

“Was I nuts not to go?” she asked.

“Sometimes you have to protect your heart.”

“That’s what I told my future in-laws. They seemed to understand. Do you think they understood?”

“I’m sure they did.”

“Let’s not talk about me anymore”—Rebecca clapped her hands—“I’m here. What can I do to help?”

I loved her no-pity-parties attitude. The day I took ownership of Fromagerie Bessette from my grandparents, I had hired Rebecca. She had helped me through all the renovations. Together we had decided where the wooden display barrels would stand and what jams and other accoutrements would sit on the many shelves around the