curtis dessertis.

I think for a long time that I thought "Dessert" was Curt's last name. Curt Dessert is what I called him, because that's what the desserts he made rang up as on our computer system at Vintner's. I called him Curtis Dessertis if I was feeling scientific.

Curt started working at Vintner's a couple of months after I did. He was our in-house pastry chef. He was a bit overweight and losing his hair though only in his late twenties, but he had this great boyish grin. And he made the best desserts, and was generous in letting the staff sample them. The desserts had french names that I could never spell and could barely pronounce, but I could taste them, and they were wonderful. Curt made me fall in love with creme brulee, and his cheesecake is still the best I have ever tasted. All the servers looked forward to brownie-cutting day with a passion, because there were always end pieces waiting to be gobbled up, and if there is anything servers ever did well at Vintner's, it was eat.

But Curt also had to make these creme horns. The pastry chef before him made them, and possibly the pastry chef before her. Who knows where those stupid creme horns came from, but Curt hated making them and they sold better than anything else he ever made. They were cheap, and people would walk in the door and order a dozen of them to go. I never understood it. Why would they want those creme horns, when the filling was far too rich, when they could have a big creamy slice of delicate cheesecake?

Curt had a crush on every girl that ever worked at Vintner's. No, I'm exaggerrating. Curt had a crush on every girl that ever worked at Vintner's while he was there. He was the kind of guy that would hit on you as a joke, secretly trying to test the waters. To say that he liked all the girls is misleading of his character. He was not a pervert. I like to think that Curt was just really good at finding the beauty in any girl, and he loved us all for our different beauties, however hidden or obvious they were. He liked girls for qualities they didn't know they had, and for the ones they were most proud of but thought that no one ever noticed.

I was decorating a plate with a colored syrups once to put a piece of cake on it. I never really got the knack for plate presentation, and Curt used to make fun of my vain attempts at syrup art. I got particularly frustrated that day, finally just taking all the colors and wildly squirting them around. I sighed, defeated, and said, "It looks like Jackson Pollock decorated this plate." Curt looked at the plate, looked at me, and said, "That's why I love you. No one but you would ever say something like that." Curt knew I had a boyfriend that I was pretty attached to, so he knew we were just friends.

Curt and I were two of longest-working employees I ever knew to work at Vintner's. People rarely last over six months, much less over a year. So we knew each other fairly well, and would tease and pick at each other a lot. And whenever I ran out of comebacks, I told him that we were out of creme horns. He would usually just flip me the bird at that point, which I took to mean that I had won.

In the last few months that Vintner's was open, I saw Curt less and less. When I did see him, he was in a foul mood. As great of a guy that Curt is, I knew to steer clear of his bad moods. Curt hated working there. He hated the way the place was managed, he hated the hours, he hated having to make creme horns all the time when his talent would allow so much more. He was rotting there.

So he left about a month before the restaurant closed anyway. For the last few weeks, we had another pastry chef named Sara Lee. She was good, but nowhere as good as Curt Dessert. Her pre-cut portions were smaller, her cheesecake wasn't nearly as creamy, and she didn't smile at you with that great boyish grin and tell you that you were gorgeous. But we never changed the computer menu, and we still rang them up as "Curt Dessert," which felt like lying all the time. But people never noticed that we never had tiramisu in a glass or triple layer chocolate mousse cake anymore. Fickle things, they just noticed that we never had creme horns.