Bloodbath

Four days in as owner. Four settled drawers, four deposit slips, one Costco run, alot of urns of brewed coffee, even more drawn espresso shots......lots and lots of steamed milk. Lots and lots of steamed milk splattered everywhere.

I finished at the shop yesterday afternoon around 2pm, sat at the bar for a little while sending off an email and then went home to enjoy an hour or two of downtime before we drove up the road to have dinner with friends.

One of my employees was still at the shop, due to close at six and so I left her the number where I'd be since I knew I wouldn't get cell reception that far north. It was her first night closing the shop with the new credit machine and I wanted her to be able to get in touch if she had any questions about how to settle the slips at the end of night. Around quarter to seven, right before the southwestern eggrolls were plated up, I got a call.

"I don't want to sound like a wuss but..... I broke one of the espresso shot glasses and cut my hand and it..... it kind of won't stop bleeding. I've been trying to close up and count the money and sweep the kitchen but I don't want to get blood on everything...."

Yeah. Bad idea.
My first thought was....man, I'm glad I got that workman's comp policy lined up this week. I told her to hold her hand above her head for a while, which she probably already knew, and to go get stitches if she needed them and to not worry about settling the drawer or wrapping stuff up.

Then I started wrapping my head around the following morning. Sundays are kind of sweet in that we don't open till 9am... which allows for one extra hour of cherished sleep on that day. I started to realize that I'd be coming in at 6:30 am to finish the sweeping, take out the trash, mop, settle and then re-open the drawer. I thanked myself for opting to drink seltzer water and lemon instead of wine.

For the first time, maybe ever, I was the one who was gearing up to head home before 10pm last night. I was gathering Ella's many layers and lost socks and shuffling she and Bill out the door.

Until there's an oven at the shop, I've been brewing the chai and baking off the frozen, par-baked, kind of "shwag" baked goods at home. Ham and cheese croissants and spinach and feta croissants. Not all that bad but not entirely great either. It's what we've got till my new baker is on board.

Pulling up the driveway, I realized that, on top of waking up early to come in to the shop, I also had two trays of croissants to pull from the freezer, let proof through the night and bake before I came in.

In our mudroom we have a tall, upright freezer that holds all the meat from the farm. To make room for the boxes of croissants last week, I transferred all the meat from two shelves in the freezer onto the racks on the door. Coming in the door last night, I dropped the load of Ella's shit onto the kitchen floor and then dragged my exhausted ass out to the mudroom, wax paper lined baking sheets in hand, to load up the trays with baked goods that would need the night to proof.

I opened the freezer to find a whole door's worth of thawed packages of beef and pork, the bloody ooze having dripped out of the packages and then frozen in the goopy drip journey to the freezer floor... leaving chunks of bloody ice like a funky massacre all over the god-damn freezer.

My first reaction was the desire to shut the door and pretend that I hadn't seen a thing. Fight or flight? There was a warm bed upstairs that had been calling me for hours and now I had a Nightmare on Elm Street scene to tend to... and Bill's bitterness of having lost all that meat.

Ella took one look at my face as I walked back outside and followed me. I stood with one arm on the closed freezer and one arm on my hip, head down, bone-tired. She put her arms around me and made the world a better place for that minute and a half. Thanks Bean.

I loaded all the meat into a cooler with intentions of having a little beef and pork Christmas at the shop today... giving it away to all the meat eating customers I could find.... but it turns out (chef's advice) that we could pat it dry, repack and refreeze it. All has not been lost.

Surprisingly, my dreams weren't loaded with blood and gore but I will be getting a first aid kit for the shop and I will be eating a hell alot of tenderloin this week.