A Mystery in Muslin
There was one cheese she refused to sell. It was an English cloth-bound cheddar. Mary kept it in the back of the storage fridge behind a massive half-wheel of Gruyère, so nobody would stumble across it accidentally. She could’ve told her employees that it wasn’t for customers, but then she’d have to explain why. The thought made her dizzy.
It arrived a week ago. But how? Mary was meticulous about her ordering, and when she checked her statement, it wasn’t on the bill. Maybe it was a freebie from her supplier. Maybe it was part of someone else’s order. Or was it a message? Who knows. Regardless, the cheese was here, and every time she caught a glimpse of its pale grey bandages, she thought about Tim.
Mary met Tim when she was in college. He was an expert monger at the store just down the block from her university. She’d go every afternoon between classes, spending just a few dollars on half a baguette smeared with chèvre and an obnoxious number of samples. But Tim didn’t mind. He’d even send her home with bags of trimmings and Parmigiano Reggiano rinds to nibble on for a late-night snack. By her last semester, he had offered her a paid apprenticeship.
The summer after graduation, with Tim’s encouragement, Mary backpacked through Europe, indulging in top-tier fromage from the most storied regions: Lombardy, Camembert, the Swiss Alps, Piemonte. And through it all, Tim stayed in constant contact, guiding her to bespoke creameries and little-known cheese shops across the continent.
But towards the end of the trip, somewhere between milking a goat and rejecting a marriage proposal from a Parisian trapeze artist, the pace of Tim’s correspondence slowed. She figured he was just giving her room to enjoy her adventures, but when he didn’t answer her for a week straight, she got worried. She called her parents, begging them to check in on the shop. They found no one there.
For months, she tried to find him, asking everyone in the area where he might’ve gone. But over time the mystery faded, and her own problems and concerns crept into the foreground. And there were many. But one thing still bothered her. It was the last message Tim sent her before he went silent: You must try the cloth-bound cheddar.
That was ten years ago.
Now, standing in her own cheese store, she tried to work the memory from her mind. Eddy and Dan had already left for the night, but Mary wasn’t ready to go home, so she paced the shop floor for another twenty minutes, stopping at a shelf to rearrange boxes of Nordic crackers and rosemary flatbreads. After that, she stacked some jars of fig preserve into a pyramid, then broke it down again, nervous that someone clumsy would topple it over. She wiped down the counter and rinsed off the cheese knives.
Then came the final step of her nightly ritual. Mary walked back to the storage fridge and made sure everything was closed and the temperature was properly set. She pressed the walk-in handle and heard it click. All was quiet except the hum of the cooling unit. Mary untied her apron and hung it on one of the hooks. She looked back at the fridge — what did a cloth-bound cheddar taste like?
She would finally know. Tomorrow.
Tune in next week for Part II