Cookie Indulgence

Frozen pucks of chocolate cookie dough lay heaped on the baking tray. The aluminum tray was 18” by 26” and lined with parchment paper. Addison counted out nine cookies and put the rest back in their bag, back in the box. She had examined the chart of how many cookies were baked off every day, as well as how many were thrown away. Experience taught her that on a Monday sales were slow at the small store. Unless it was a school holiday, people ate the sweets they had collected over the weekend. Addison wanted to bake off enough cookies so that after work impulse buyers would have temptation available, but not so many that she would have to throw any away on Tuesday. She put the tray on a lower level of the six-foot baking rack while laying out the other cookies. 

Walnut Chocolate Chip had to be on their own tray, due to allergies, and they should be the lowest on the rack. Addison put together four trays, twenty on each tray, of chocolate chip cookies: they were for packages and the bar. Molasses had been over baked on Saturday, so she reduced her usual number laid out six frozen ones. Organic Cranberry only needed four baked off, there were two left from Sunday. Cookie shrink, product waste in this case past its date, was Addison’s favorite. She looked forward to a regular breakfast snack to get her through till breaktime. That Monday none of the cookies were stale; there was no shrink.

“Oh Lordy,” said her neighbor, the cake decorator Dora.

“What?” said Addison. She had pulled out the tray of triple chocolate cookies. She poked them, but they were still too frozen to be pressed down.

“Did you hear what our boss did this time?”

“What?” Addison repeated.

Bagel Chips were still baking in the oven. The girl who was supposed to be shelving commercial, sliced bread out on the floor was, instead, on the production side of the department, leaning against the oven window. She was always cold, she repeated. It was so cold back in the bread area.

The bread girl said, “Are you talking about cleaning the bagel boiler?”

Addison pulled out a box of spritz cookies and laid them out on her table, on top of parchment paper. She squeezed raspberry jelly on top of twenty downturned cookies and squished another cooking on top for an oozing jelly sandwich. Next, she needed a buttercream bag. 

“No.” Dora turned to face them, a straight, frosting spatula in hand. “I’m talking about the dates. Dates, dates, dates. Everything has a date. If it doesn’t have a date then girl you better get that marker and date it.”

“She made us throw out all of the shredded cheddar in the cooler yesterday.”

“You weren’t working yesterday.”

“Lindin told me.”

The piercing alarm of the oven interrupted the conversation. The digital indicators for time and heat flashed. The bread girl opened the door, poked at a bagel chip, and said, “They’re not done.”

“When are they going to be done?” Addison asked. “I’ve got to get in there. It's almost nine o’clock and the cookie bar is empty.”

The bread girl shrugged, closed the door, and tapped in five minutes with overly long, glittering fingernails.

Addison grit her teeth. “Gertrude wants cookies out by nine.”

Dora casually swiped icing over a half-sheet cake while talking. “We shouldn’t be worried about what Gertrude wants. Even if she is the manager. She doesn’t know what this place needs. We were fine before she was here. Now all the rose cream buckets need new labels, the girls should have done that last night. Who was closing?” Dora dropped her spatula into the industrial mixing bowl and sauntered to the schedule to flip pages. “It was Lola. Does anyone know if Lola came in?”

“She called in,” said the bread slinger.

“Probably her cat was sick,” suggested Addison with a snicker.

“She doesn’t have a cat. I think her brother got out of rehab. She said she had to pick him up.”

“We all know what that means,” said Dora.

“Even if she came in she wouldn’t have decorated anything with roses,” Addison said. “She doesn’t do anything with roses at night, she says it takes too much time.” Addison picked up a yellow rose bag off of Dora’s table and grabbed the rainbow sprinkles. “Do you need this one?” She asked Dora.

Dora waved her hand for permission. “I don’t care if she uses them, she just has to change the labels so that when food safety comes through in the morning I don’t have to throw away all this icing. Pink icing is good for more than three days. Why do they want more shrink?”

Addison made a face, scrunching her nose. “But the container is kind of gross with all that pink crusted on the edges so you can’t even close it. And the natural dye starts to smell like boiled vegetables.”

Dora leaned on her table and put a hand on her hip. “Then put it in a new container, I don’t care. Just change the label! It’s fine.”

Bread Girl, swaggered over to the unbaked rack of cookies, looking them up and down. She said, “Any shrink today?”

“No,” said Addison. “It’s too bad I’m really hungry.”

Dora said, “That’s another thing we’re not allowed to do. No more eating expired products. Did you hear Naja got fired over it?”

“There aren’t any perks anymore for working in this department,” said the Bread Girl. “How about cannolis? Aren’t those from yesterday? They’ve got to be shrink by now.”

Dora said, “If you wanna get fired you go right ahead.”

“It’s a shame,” said Addison. “The food isn’t spoiled. It’s just not at its peak. It’s so wasteful. No one can eat any of it.”

“Well it’s their food,” interjected the Bread Girl. “They can do whatever they want with it.” She poked at a chocolate cookie with her ungloved fingernail. “These are ready to be pressed.”

Addison stared at the hand and looked at the two sizes of blue gloves on the table. Her table was covered with spritz cookies, some filled, some iced, none of them finished. Addison said, “I’m doing it after this.”

“I’ll help you.”

Addison looked at the other girl’s manicure. She did not want the help, but could not think of grounds for refusal.

Dora was standing at the printer with a sheet of edible paper in hand. She was typing in the number for a superhero image. Without looking up from the screen she said, “If you want to help back here you can relabel my rose cream.”

“I think my load is here. I see Pepperidge Farm.” Sliced Bread left the department.

“Thanks,” said Addison. “Do you need me to relabel the rose cream? I have to wait for those bagel chips to come out anyway.”

Dora said, “No I did it already. That girl just drives me crazy. She’s so lazy. She’s always trying to get out of her own work.”

Addison packaged the spritz cookies. She placed the tray of triple chocolate on her table again. They were the latest in decadent desserts. Wheat free, with a foundation of Cacao, sugar, cocoa butter and chocolate chunks. The entire bakery wondered at the marvel of chemistry that created these cookies. They were the most popular shrink item until the shrink policy resurfaced. Addison salivated thinking about the cookies, but she was too cheap to indulge.

The first time she baked them Addison did not press the cookies down, she did not know that was necessary. They came out of the oven in the same shape they went in. The boss shrank them all and cut them up for employee samples. The next time, Addison pressed them down too much until they were a misshapen mash on the tray. Corrected again, Addison learned to press lightly and evenly across the cookies, trying to maintain the perfect roundness but make sure the height was not babelesque for a cookie.

The oven alarm shrieked. Addison opened the airlock and hot air blasted her in the face. The oven was a ceiling tall monster that had the capacity of a small elevator. Addison was always aware of its ability to cook her while standing and alive.

“Are these done now?” said Addison.

Dora shrugged, so Addison pulled out the rack. She rolled her rack of cookies into the oven. She calculated nine minutes for the walnut, ten for the molasses, eleven for the chocolate chip, and twelve for the triple chocolate if they reached the correct internal temperature.

In the meantime, the manager had arrived. Gertrude put a cut glove on the table next to Dora. Dora was slicing a quarter sheet vanilla cake through its middle. The knife was as long as the cake and she was making smooth work of it. A bag of strawberry filling lay next to the cake stand in readiness.

“I wouldn’t want you to have to fill out an accident report,” said Gertrude, as she lay the woven cut-proof glove on the table.

Dora ignored her.

Gertrude looked down into the three-bay, stainless-steel sink. “Knives should always be washed immediately. Never left in the sink.”

“Sorry,” said Addison. “I thought it was just a paring knife. I was going to get to it now the cookies are in.”

“Those are sharp,” said Gertrude, “What if I didn’t see it and reached into the sink and grabbed it. It could cut my hand open.”

“Well,” said Addison. “They aren’t that sharp.” Addison had cut herself on everything in the department that should not have been able to inflict injury: the rim of a condensed milk can, box edges, paper, aluminum cake pans, broken plastic cupcake containers. Dora joked that she would cut herself on cheesecake if the chance arose. But, she had never cut herself on any of the knives.

Gertrude raised her eyebrows until her eyes were wide open and white-rimmed. Her smile expressed everything except pleasure. Her head tilted toward the sink.

Addison submitted to management and decided to wash all of the dishes while she was there. The oven alarm went off while she was elbow-high in bubbles. It went off four more times, every minute, until all the cookies were perfectly cooked and each tray had been removed separately. The triple chocolate cookies had to go in for an extra minute. Addison had stood in the oven doorway with a digital meat thermometer poked into a cookie on two separate occasions before it reached 180 degrees.

“Addison!” Dora’s voice rose in a crescendo. “Make it stop!”

“They’re done. I’m sorry.” Addison dragged the rack of cookies to the side of the oven. She put the sign, ‘HOT’ on the rack. Anyone who could not feel the heat coming off the rack needed their nerve endings checked. Addison said, “I’m going on break. I’ll put them out when I get back.”

As she grabbed her phone and a protein bar, Gertrude was telling Dora about the new way packaging and expired products would be disposed of.

Dora was nodding like a bobblehead. She said, “But that’s going to take so long, though.”

Gertrude said, “They’ve tested it at other stores. It doesn’t take longer than the current process.”

Addison set her phone alarm for fifteen minutes and enjoyed every one of those minutes browsing social media and eating. Her phone alarm rang and she went back to the bakery department. Gertrude was at the morning managers’ meeting. Dora was sticking balloons into a birthday cake. While tieing her apron, Addison examined the tower of cookies. The Molasses were nicely baked and looked chewy and moist. The triple chocolate cookies were perfectly round all except one.

Addison’s eyelids flew open. She said, “What happened to my cookie?"

"Jeez," said Dora. “You're so loud."

Addison tried again. She clenched her fists and tried to use her inside voice. She put a little plee in it. “Was the cookie broken by an oven mitt by accident? Wasn't it temping so someone had to check if it was done?" She was the only baker who checked the temperature of the cookies.

"No, I just needed something sweet," Dora put special emphasis on sweet, drawing out the ‘ee’s.

The broken cookie lay savaged on the tray, mutilated, with oozing chocolate chunks. In the past, they joined in snacking on blueberry pies or cream puffs that had passed their sell-by date. Addison had eaten her protein bar, but she was still hungry. The cookie would be delicious, she knew, since she had followed the instructions exactly. It couldn’t sell, and it would be a shame to throw half a cookie away.

“You want the other half?” asked Dora. “You should eat it before she comes back to warm her backside,” Dora lifted her chin to indicate the commercial bread area. “. . . Or that manager.” An eye roll attached to the word ‘manager.’

Addison pinched the cookie between thumb and index finger; it was soft and yielding. Better she eat it than that bread girl, the later was always snooping around looking for leftovers that she had not helped make. She could smell the melted chocolate. Still warm, it heated her fingers. The cookie was fresh-baked, not past its date, not expired. It was new. It would have sold. Dora had taken a fresh cookie for a snack, not something stale or expired. She had not bagged it, walked to the register, and paid. There was no receipt.

Addison swallowed the saliva that had built up in her mouth. She frowned deeply. Dora was not offering something she had brought from home or something she had bought to snack on. There was no receipt.

Addison asked, “Did you shrink it? Do you want me to shrink it for you?"

One of them had to weigh the product and register it as having been thrown out. Addison intuited that Dora had not done so. Last week, Addison would have eaten it with no regrets after going through the process of shrinking it, but Naja had been fired for eating shrink, and others too.

There was a pause before Dora said, “Yes."

Addison also ate food that was meant for the garbage. She licked her fingers clean of chocolate pudding. She taste-tested bagel chips. She did not stand on the moral high ground. She loved the products they made and had enjoyed them frequently. She could not use biblical language, ten commandments sins, in speaking of what happened to the cookie because then she would condemn herself.

By her question, Addison had agreed to pretend the cookie was naturally deficient: it had fallen onto the floor, it had been mauled by a glove when it was gooey, it exploded in the oven, it had suffered some unnecessary accident during the baking process, which it had, except that the accident had a Christian name. Addison did not immediately shrink the cookie. She did everything necessary for the other cookies before touching the triple chocolate cookies again.

Last on the tray, the severed cookie condemned Addison’s complicity in the carnage.

Why didn’t the decorator just buy the cookie? Addison understood. Dora had been resentful of management all morning. Department changes had so harangued Dora that the cake decorated lashed out. She self-soothed by indulging in sweets. She gave management the finger behind their back, by eating the department’s product. Gertrude’s input pushed Dora over the edge.

Addison moved the half cookie to a paper towel and placed it on Dora’s table next to the icing bags. Dora’s eyes flicked to it and then flicked back to the cake currently on the stand.

“It’s yours,” she said.

Addison picked up a whole triple chocolate cookie and put it on a paper towel on top of the scale printer. Addison found the purchase code for the cookie and printed it. The scanning gun, to register the item as shrink, was sitting next to the printer. Addison could not bring herself to use it. She did not want to lie and say the cookie was damaged. Dora, also, had a conscience. She could decide herself whether she was buying the cookie or stealing the cookie.

Addison stuck the printed label to a paper towel. She placed it on the decorator’s table next to the half-eaten cookie. "Here's your label," she said, "you can do what you need to with it."

Dora’s eyes were on her cake as she said thanks. The metal spatula glided over the icing, removing the ripples and bubbles, making it smooth.

Out of the department, Addison took her time putting the cookies in the display. She rearranged packages, turned labels, filled gaps. She spent as much time as possible out of the department. She did not want to know what Dora chose. She washed her hands of the innocent cookie.

When she returned, the label and the half-eaten chocolate cookie were gone.