The cafeteria at Sulgrave Heath was not really within Caroline's domain. Formally, of course, the director, Mrs. Hawkins, reported to the Head. Cafeteria and kitchens of any scope, however, are really more like Roman client kingdoms than subordinate units in an organization reporting up the chain of command. As Caroline well knew, only within the very recently discovered space of middle class suburban life could anyone personally command a kitchen worth cooking in. At any workplace, a good manager hired a good senior chef and stayed out of the way. A vague possibility of intervention and termination if things went terribly awry kept most Head - Cook relations stable, productive and distant, the way most Heads and Cooks liked it. There were, Caroline knew, schools that hired food service companies to manage their cafeteria. She did not trouble to take the time to consider whatever failures of personality or organization could have prompted such an outcome.
Accordingly, when Beverly told her that Mrs. Hawkins was on Line 1, she picked up the phone and spoke in her most dulcet tones. "Sylvia, Hi, thanks for speaking to me. I know how busy you are."
"900 odd mouths to feed in an hour, Caroline." said Mrs. Hawkins, drily.
Caroline resisted the urge to ask, "not a boring plain vanilla in the lot of us?" and said "well, I won't keep you long. I'm just calling to let you know I'll be swinging by today. I need to ask Laurence a favor and I think he'll be more likely to grant it if he's been fed and watered."
"Caroline, you know you're always welcome." said Mrs. Hawkins pleasantly.
"Well thanks for that, Sylvia. But I just need to buttonhole Laurence and lunch seemed the best time." Caroline replied cordially.
"No problem. You'll find him making crazy science at the student activity table by the check in line." Mrs. Hawkins.
"What?" Caroline asked, confused.
"I'll let him explain it to you." Mrs. Hawkins said in a bemused voice. "I should thank you, though. My bakery staff were over the moon with his interviews," she laughed.
"Interviews?" Caroline's voice squeaked a little.
"Don't worry," said Mrs. Hawkins. "It was brilliant. Well, if that's all, I have a fire to put out."
"What?" Caroline's voice raised in alarm."
"Cook's joke, Caroline. Everything's fine," Mrs. Hawkins reassured her and hung up.
Caroline hung up the phone and drew in a steadying breath. There was no one more terrifying for an administrator to talk to than a good cook.
xxxXx
There was a bit of a stir when she graced the entrance to the dining hall, but not much. They were adolescents and they were hungry. The students stood patiently in two lines before a desk where a kitchen worker sat watching them swipe their id cards, occasionally intervening to help a student who had lost or demagnetized a card. It was incredibly noisy. Caroline hoped Sylvia paid the desk workers hazard zone bonuses. Against the entrance way walls stretched two tables where students sat beneath various signs that had been temporarily posted. "Biology project." "Sociology project." "Psychology project." Laurence sat beneath the biology project sign, handing out surveys and pencils. As Caroline looked around she realized Angus and Sam were distributing paper plates with small pieces of bread. Students sampled the bread, filled out the survey, returned to the line, swiped in and disappeared into the cafeteria. Other students engaged the sociology and psychology project with equal bonhomie and good behavior.
"Mum," Laurence said in surprise when he saw her. "What are you doing here?"
"Hullo, Laurence," Caroline smiled, "I'm looking for you? What's going on here?"
"I'm collecting data for my bio project." he explained. "No!" Laurence shouted in alarm when Angus offered Caroline a plate. "You'll skew the sample. I already have you in the surveys from home. Do you mind?" he asked in a calmer voice.
"No. No." Caroline placated him. "I'm all about good data sets." After a moment collecting her thoughts she asked, "Laurence, how did you get Mrs. Hawkins to agree to this?"
"Well I asked her, didn't I." said Laurence, very patiently, as though she were a particularly dense child. He sighed. "Mr. Edwards said that I needed a bigger sample size if I wanted to make any conclusions about the different levains. So I thought this would be the best place to grab people. So I asked Mrs. Hawkins and she said it'd be fine but she wanted to do all the projects at once or she'd but putting up tables for us all term. So I asked the different department heads what projects they were running and if anyone needed data collection and Sociology and Psych did so we're manning the tables together. It's brilliant, really," he observed. "People don't mind waiting in line so much now there's something to do."
"I can see." Caroline observed. "And the data collection is going well?"
"Great. My spreadsheets are crammed." He grinned. There was a pause as he waited for her to remember what she came for.
"Right." she said. "Well, I actually came to ask a favor..."
xxxXx
"Kate, darling, we're home! Where are you?" Caroline called from the front door.
"In here." Kate called from the lounge. "Beached like Leviathan on the sofa like I am every sodding afternoon at 4:00pm," she added in a much quieter voice.
Caroline came into the lounge and reached down to kiss her. "How was your day?" she asked softly. "I miss you at school. Coming home to you is the best part of my day."
Kate rolled her eyes. "I just sit here like elf on the shelf and wait you two to turn up. Beyond words how boring it is."
"Feel up for a drive?" Caroline asked. "Would that cheer you up?"
"Am I so obviously in need of cheering up?" Kate asked a bit testily.
"Yep." said Caroline with a laugh. "You are a portrait of bad mood; a tableau vivant of snappy sad sack; a walking exemplar of ..."
"I'm sitting, not walking." Kate interrupted, smiling. "Let me welcome you home properly. She pulled Caroline to her and gave her a welcome home kiss that cheered them both up. "You want to go out now?" Kate asked. "Aren't you tired?"
"No, not really. Laurence needs something for his bread and I thought we could all go out for dinner when were done."
xxxXx
Kate and Laurence stood behind a shopping cart in the tiling aisle at the B&Q, contemplating ceramic tiles. Caroline had gone in search of the perfect pruning shears.
"I'm sure this is a math problem," said Kate. "We figure out the area of each side you want to enclose, then figure out how many tiles we need."
"I measured the inside of the oven. If I take the top rack out it should fit fine." said Laurence.
"How will you hold the tiles together?" Kate asked.
"Well, I read up on it." Most people put tiles on cement board, but we need it to be pretty fire proof." They both laughed imagining Caroline's reaction if she came home to find Laurence's DIY clay baking oven insert on fire inside her beloved oven.
"To be fair…." noted Kate.
"I know," sighed Laurence. You wouldn't be thrilled either. "Lets find a guy and see if they carry the board that I need."
"'Can I help you?' said no store employee ever," Kate complained.
"Are you ok?" Laurence asked, suddenly concerned.
"It's just pregnant lady woes," said Kate, not wanting to embarrass him.
"I thought walking was good for those things." Laurence said in as neutral a voice as he could manage.
"You sound like my doctor." said Kate with a sigh. "You sound like Caroline." she continued. "Wait a second, she said in a somewhat more focused and somewhat more irritated voice. "Has Caroline cooked something up? Has she put you up to something?" she demanded.
Poor Laurence suddenly found the floor the most interesting spot in the world. He blushed fiercely and Kate couldn't help but laugh at the resemblance between mother and son.
"What?" Kate asked. "I promise you I'm not mad. I just want to know what the mastermind's master plan is." Laurence grinned at this.
"She wants me to help you with an exercise and hydration regime," he said and started to laugh.
"Where did this come from?" Kate demanded.
"Um, apparently, you've declined her offers of Baby Bounce exercise DVDs and the doctor's worried about you retaining water." Laurence agreed with Kate about the pregnant lady exercise DVDs and hoped to limit their discussion of edema to the bare minimum.
"Then why are we buying clay oven kit?" she asked, a bit confused.
"That was the deal. I said I'd get you started on weights and water if she let me build an oven insert. We'll stop at Performax for weights before dinner." he admitted sheepishly. Kate thought about this for a moment.
"I admire that Laurence. I truly admire your acumen. Ok. Let's find someone to help us with the cement board. Will you need a tile cutter?" she asked, as they strolled down the aisle.
xxxXx
To Laurence's mind, the weights were ridiculous: pink and lavender. The lavenders weighed in at a kilo. They were the heavy ones. He sighed and picked them up, one in each hand. "So, I read around on the web a bit. And at this stage of the game you really just want to elevate heart rate. Curls, raises, lunges and squats should do it."
Kate nodded, attempting to look serious and attentive, a smile teasing the corners of her mouth.
"If you want," Laurence paused, "I can ask Coach for advice on a more comprehensive regime." Caroline, sitting at the kitchen counter swallowed a snort.
"Won't be necessary, Laurence. We're doing this simply to appease your mother and the doctor," said Kate sternly.
"Might be good for the baby, too," Laurence ventured.
"Well there's that." Caroline muttered.
"Ok, Dr. Elliot," Kate said sharply, you've just won a free trip to McKenzie's Magic Workout Hour. Hand her the weights Laurence." Laurence handed his mother the lavender colored weights.
"Kate, really," Caroline objected.
"Nope, I think I really need your loving support here, Caroline." Kate said firmly.
"You'll need to be standing to do these, Mum," Laurence said a little sadly.
"It's the hormones," Caroline confided in a stage whisper to Laurence as she took off her glasses and got up from the stool. They make you nuts. Dear god these are heavy."
"Um, maybe we should start with one each. Give me those, Ma. Kate, hand me one of the pink ones. Mum - for you. Ok. What you're trying to do when you do curls..." Inwardly he sighed. He soldiered on, explaining each exercise. The burst of giggles that his demonstration of the lunge engendered almost finished him. But he bit his lip, thought of his ceramic oven insert and the possibilities it offered for crust and crumb and pushed through the psychic pain.
After about 10 minutes, Kate's phone suddenly began to beep and vibrate on the kitchen counter.
"Thank god," Caroline murmured, stopping. Kate, embarrassed to find herself a bit out of breath, looked up from the phone in confusion.
Laurence had stuck his head into the fridge and was returning with several bottles of spring water when she said, "there's no call or text."
"It's your workout program app," he explained, offering her a bottle of water. "Mum, you should take one of these too. I've set the app to buzz every 10 minutes. You'll need to start it at the beginning of every workout."
"Obviously," said Caroline.
"Caroline," admonished Kate in a warning voice.
"Why 10 minutes?" she asked.
"Well," you're trying to hydrate and you're pretty late stage so you don't want to overdue it or even work up much of a sweat. So I figured if you stopped every 10 minutes, drank some water, and cooled down a bit, the work out app wouldn't undermine the hydration app."
"The hydration app." Kate asked, her voice rising.
"I swear I knew nothing about this." Caroline said.
"Yeah. That's going to buzz every hour. It will also text you and send you an email and an automatic phone call." he explained. "When you get the message, you drink 8 ounces of water and snooze the app."
"I couldn't just remember to drink a glass of water every hour?" Kate asked, somewhat offended.
"Well," Laurence said with the casual brutality of adolescence, "you haven't been, have you. Or you wouldn't have all the water retention issues." He blushed and looked at the floor for a moment. Caroline laughed again.
"Drink your water, Caroline," Kate said breathing slowly. "We have two more sets."
Laurence knew he had no notion what changes the baby would bring to his life. But frankly, he couldn't wait for her to be born.
