Wait, This Actually Works?
After laying the baby down in his new bed and putting him to sleep, I dragged a dining chair over, sat down, and spent a long while just looking at the finished crib—and at Luca sleeping inside it.
The sight of the child I was now responsible for, breathing soft and even in a bed I had made with my own hands, filled me with a quiet, unexpected pride. The sense of achievement that came from finishing something couldn't be dismissed either. The craftsmanship was good enough that I half-believed I could sell the piece for a serious price.
"…"
I knew it was ridiculous, but I couldn't help wondering whether the Manito App really had given me some kind of buff. Otherwise it meant I had genuine talent for woodworking. I'd always thought of myself as handy, but was I really the kind of person who could learn this fast? Or was this the sort of thing anyone could do, and most people simply never bothered because the whole process was too much of a hassle?
"…Could be."
The idea that most people just never tried—because it was annoying, or because it never even crossed their minds—felt far more plausible than the notion that my two hands had suddenly started performing miracles on everything they touched, the way the app described. I wouldn't have thought of building furniture myself if my situation hadn't forced me into it.
"Well…"
Whatever the reason, the corner of my mouth kept twitching upward. It was a little embarrassing, but right then I felt so good I wanted to brag to someone. It was a feeling I had never known before. I'd spent my whole life with nothing worth showing off, and yet this—no matter how I looked at it—had turned out well. And the baby smiling himself to sleep inside it was almost too cute.
"…"
After a moment's thought, I picked up a pencil and a notebook. My weekly pay had come in a few days ago, and I'd already received next week's wages in advance. Rent would go out at the end of the month, but foster care support was due soon, so I had a thin margin of breathing room.
Over the weekend I needed to plan the furniture the space required, sketch out drawings, and order the lumber to match. The reason I wanted furniture at all was the child. I had to organize the space we would live in together, and I needed storage for the steadily growing pile of clothes and household things. I also needed at least a bare minimum of furniture for when the caseworkers came to check whether the environment was suitable for a child.
That didn't mean I was planning anything grand. The apartment didn't even have a coat rack. Until now I'd just tossed outerwear over a dining chair. While I was at it, I decided, I would make a freestanding coat rack with space underneath for shoes and small boxes. And after that…
The place was so empty that checking room by room could go on forever, so I drew a floor plan of the apartment and started noting how each area could be used.
"Hmm…"
I'd never thought about it before, but looking at it now, the place really was small. One more room would have been nice. The single door-closed room was the real puzzle—how to use it.
I stepped into the dark, empty room and flipped on the light. Somehow the bare space felt colder than outside. I'd assembled the crib in here. Should I keep living with the baby in the living room and turn this room into a workshop-slash-storage, or use the room as an actual bedroom and work out in the living room?
"…"
I walked the apartment back and forth, picturing real daily life. In the end I decided we would live in the living room for the kitchen access, and the room would become a catch-all storage and workshop. Closing the door would keep half-finished work out of sight…
The workshop needed a sturdy work table. Shelves, too, for the tool set currently sprawled across the floor, the varnish, and all the other odds and ends. After roughly sketching the furniture for the workshop, I came back out to the living room.
The four-person table was already buried under baby supplies. Every new thing that came into the house ended up propped against the wall in a line. I let out a long breath and started sketching.
Even so, it was fun.
The weekend was genuinely busy. I made a list of the furniture we needed, browsed ready-made pieces online for design ideas, measured every corner of the apartment with a tape measure, and sketched to fit. Once I'd ordered the lumber, I hesitated a moment—then typed "baking tools" into the search bar.
"Oh…"
Page after page of fully stocked baking sets scrolled up. It was startling how many products appeared the moment that many people searched for something. These weren't professional kits, either—just hobby-level amateur sets. Still.
This was a kind of experiment. I had never baked a single thing in my life. So if something edible came out on the first try, I would have my answer: either I had some hidden talent for woodworking I never knew about, or the items bought with points really did come with a buff.
I closed the flood of search results, switched to the Editor's Pick tab, and searched again. I ordered a reasonably priced "Home Baking Basics Set" with points.
Payment has been completed.
* Items purchased with points are guaranteed the fastest available delivery service.
"Here. Keys. Don't lose them—I'll be a mess if you do. And I'm not setting foot near this neighborhood until next week."
…You're a Building 1 resident.
Was it overthinking to assume this guy was about to blow through a year's worth of savings in a single week somewhere completely pointless? Grateful I'd already collected the advance, I saw Tony off as he waddled away, huge rear end swinging.
The cold, empty hallway was deserted.
"All right, Luca."
I smiled once at the baby blinking and waving his arms and legs in the stroller, then pulled the cover down so the chill couldn't get in. I parked the stroller against the wall beside the door, out of the wind.
"Daddy's going to clean, so hang on a minute."
"Ungh…!"
He wasn't really understanding and answering, but the way he always answered when I said something was so endearing I couldn't help it.
Time to start. For the next five days, except when I went out on repair calls, I would be stuck in this office with Luca—so leaving it the way it was was not an option. That was exactly why I'd brought up cleaning and charged an extra hundred dollars for it. If I was going to do the work anyway, I might as well get paid.
I grabbed a box of new rubber gloves and cleaning supplies from the utility closet and switched into ruthless cleaning mode. I opened the windows to air out the spot where Tony and Andy had been planted for who knew how long, and made aggressive use of cleaning products that may well have been sitting in that closet the whole time. I swept and wiped dust fast and clean, emptied the trash, and disinfected everything I could reach.
After that I turned on the heater, left the windows open, printed out a few of the backlog repair invoices, and left with the stroller to get to work.
An hour later I came back to a management office that no longer smelled stale and was almost pleasant. Following Tony's advice, I sat down and took a break. I spent time playing with the baby—whose babbling had grown a lot in just a few days—then visited five or six units in the afternoon and headed home.
I'd taken it easy by my own standards, but I was sure I'd cleared three days' worth of a superintendent's work.
"If the job stayed like this, it would actually be a great place to work. Right, Luca?"
Grateful for an uneventful first day, I stepped off the elevator—and spotted the delivery box sitting in front of our door.
The baking set was here. Marveling again at the fast shipping, I carried it inside. I changed Luca's diaper first, played with him a little, put him down for the night, then washed up. By the time I came out it was seven o'clock. A perfect, unhurried hour for baking.
I checked and washed everything in the set, and while the tools dried I picked a cake from the recipes I'd been saving—one that didn't need proofing or resting time.
Bûche de Noël.
It was the Christmas season, which was why the recipe had caught my eye. Bûche de Noël—French for "Yule log"—was a cake shaped, as the name suggested, like a log of firewood. It was supposed to be one of the most popular Christmas cakes, but I'd never seen one before. Woodworking had its world, and baking, too, seemed deep and vast.
Even for the same cake there were countless methods. I pored over the flood of recipes and, the way I'd sketched furniture, sketched out a cake of my own. Instead of the usual chocolate biscuit sheet, I chose vanilla. Most people used chocolate buttercream, but to suit my taste I went with coffee buttercream.
I checked once more that Luca was sleeping soundly, then started on the base sheet. Maybe it was the thrill of baking a cake for the first time in my life, but I forgot how exhausted I'd been moments earlier and found myself humming.
I separated the yolks and whites into their own bowls. I whipped the whites into meringue and beat the yolks with sugar until pale and foamy.
Whisk, whisk, whisk…
The set I'd bought didn't include a hand mixer, so the meringue had to be done by hand. In blogs and YouTube videos, plenty of people seemed to struggle when they whipped by hand.
"This is easy?"
It wasn't the insane workout other people described in their reviews—forearms cramping before the whites stiffened. After clearing the first step without a hitch, I moved straight into the batter. Careful not to deflate the foam, I folded the whipped yolks into the meringue in stages. I sifted flour and starch over the mixture and combined them. Then I poured the batter onto a parchment-lined pan, spread it even, and slid it into the preheated oven.
"Oh…"
About seven minutes later I pulled out a golden biscuit sheet, and a sweet, nutty smell filled the whole apartment. The warm, sweet scent filling the house felt unfamiliar—and good.
I left the biscuit to cool and started whipping the heavy cream. The cream, too, came up without any real effort.
"Don't tell me I'm a baking genius?"
…That made no sense. Was I just good at whipping because I had strong arms? Even so, it felt off. No matter how many recipes I'd looked up in spare moments, no matter how many times I'd run the process in my head, I was moving through this cake with a confidence that surprised even me.
My mind was full of suspicion, but my hands calmly laid a baking sheet on the counter and moved to the next step. I carefully set the cooled biscuit on top of it and spread the whipped cream in an even layer. Then, the way you roll kimbap, I pulled the paper underneath and rolled the biscuit into a tight cylinder.
Thinking of kimbap brought back a college classmate. The first kimbap I'd ever eaten had been tuna-mayo rolls made by a friend studying abroad from Korea, and I still remembered how good they were. Every time we met he asked if I'd eaten, and once he found out I was half-Korean he spent weekends feeding me endless Korean food. Thanks to him my fading Korean came back a lot, and I started going to Koreatown—somewhere I'd never have gone alone. He'd gone back to Korea right after graduation. I wondered how he was doing.
…Maybe someday I should try Korean cooking, too.
With that thought I spread buttercream over the firmly rolled biscuit and realized, to my surprise, that the work was fun. Woodworking and baking—there was real pleasure in making something with your hands. I wondered if I'd been missing too much in life. Wouldn't it be nice if hobbies like this kept adding up, one by one? Someday, when Luca was older, I could teach him.
Thinking all that while my hands kept moving, I could see the end. I finished the cream so it looked like real bark, then used a peeler to shave dark chocolate into leaf-like flakes and piled them over the cake. A dusting of powdered sugar like snow, and the log cake—sweet leaves heaped on wood in a blanket of white—was finished.
…It was really finished.
"…?"
Why does this work?