by Emma Lord
“Yeah, well.” She leans forward and kisses me on the cheek, shy and quick. “I think we’ve had our fair share of those.”
Pepper
In the text I sent my mom this morning, I told her I’d be home by 3 p.m. so I make sure I’m in the elevator on my way back up by 2:55. I use the ride up to collect myself, dusting some of the flour off my shirt, trying to dim the smile that keeps creeping its way back on my face.
I’m expecting a fight, or at the very least some kind of passive-aggressive exchange. My mom didn’t tell me not to leave the apartment, but I can’t play dumb—even in my lacking experience with actually getting in trouble, I know skipping downtown is pretty high on the list of things I don’t want my teenage daughter doing when she’s suspended. Never mind that it’s pretty high on the list regardless.
But when I open the door, my mom isn’t angry. She isn’t even irritated. She’s sitting on the couch, clutching a mug of something and wearing a ratty old robe I haven’t seen since our Nashville days. She stares over at me with puffy, makeup-less eyes, looking so much younger in this state that for a moment I have to blink the image of Paige out of my eyes. She tries to look stern, gearing herself up for the scolding we both know I deserve, but then the tears start leaking out of her eyes, and whatever she’s going to say dissolves right out of her.
“What happened?”
She shakes her head, but the stream of tears thickens and the panic only coils tighter in my chest.
“I just—you left, and I…”
“I texted you.” I sit next to her, at a loss for what I should do. I’ve never really seen my mom cry before, at least not like this—not when I’m the only one around to do anything about it. “I came right back—”
“I know, I know,” says my mom, her voice tight and wet. She swipes at her eyes. “I just—it started like this, with Paige, and then she left. And then she left.”
I feel myself teetering on that same edge, the divide of my loyalty to her and my loyalty to Paige. Paige, who still hasn’t called or texted since our fight, a short time that still might be the longest silence between us we’ve ever had.
“She went to college,” I say carefully.
My mom lowers her chin and looks at me with red-rimmed eyes. I don’t know what to say.
“So, where were you?”
There’s no point in lying to her. “I was at Girl Cheesing. Jack’s grandma was in the hospital, and I just wanted to—to help out, is all.”
My mom is quiet for a moment. “Is she all right?”
“Yeah, she’s gonna be.” I prop my feet up on the coffee table, mirroring hers—mine socked, hers slippered. I can smell now that it’s hot chocolate in her mug, the kind we used to make with cinnamon and maple syrup.
She offers me a sip, and it’s like raising a white flag. I take it, and the taste of it is so comforting and familiar, it somehow makes me ache for my mom even though she’s sitting right here.
“I’ve been talking with your dad all day. And—and you’re right. I’ve been…” She smiles this grim smile. “I shouldn’t have pushed you into this. It was my business, not yours, and—I hate that you’ve been dragged into it like this, Pep. I really didn’t mean for it to escalate the way it did.”
“Yeah. About that.” I’m testing my luck here, maybe, but I have to know. “What exactly did Jack’s dad do to piss you off so much?”
To my surprise, my mom lets out a sharp laugh. “I should have known he’d tell you. Him or one of those kids of his.”
I shake my head. “They didn’t. I mean—I just figured, after that scene at Jack’s place.”
My mom eases into the couch, mulling it over for a moment like she might not tell me. “Well—aside from dumping me over the phone,” she says, “he’s not exactly innocent in this whole copycat thing.”
“So you did copy their grilled cheese.”
My mom doesn’t even seem one inch sorry about it. In fact, there’s a ghost of a smirk on her face. “How did you like those Kitchen Sink Macaroons?”
I furrow my brows at her.
“Those were all my doing,” she says. “As was ‘The Ron,’ which was one of their bestselling sandwiches. And a few of their other desserts that were mysteriously pulled off the menu when Sam figured out I was back in the city.”
“You didn’t know?”
“Oh, I knew.” Her gaze cuts to the side for a moment, like she’s half here and half somewhere else. “You know I never finished college, but what you don’t know is I had a good reason. I was going to open my own place. A café.”
She’s right. This is the first I’m ever hearing of it. It always sort of seemed like my parents didn’t have lives before Paige and I were born, so it never even occurred to me to ask.
“I’d always worked in cafés and restaurants growing up. But I spent the summer after my sophomore year in New York for a class and fell in love with the city, and decided that was where I wanted to start a place of my own.”
She smiles to herself, and I can see some reflection of the girl she must have been at twenty—stubborn and hopeful, a more concentrated version of the woman she is now.
“So I took a summer job at Girl Cheesing, to get in the swing of big-city small business. And even before I went back to Nashville, I started branding my own vision—the menu, the logo, the color schemes. I stayed in touch with people when the semester started back up again. Once I had some investors, I quit school and headed back to New York to find a space to rent.”
Something in my stomach drops, like I know where this is going before I can even form a picture of it in my mind. I can feel the ache of it before anything else.
“By then, Sam had already broken up with me. I decided to be civil, swing by and say hello. Well, imagine my surprise—Sam had taken over the deli from his mother and was hawking my Kitchen Sink Macaroons. Added my sandwiches to the menu. Even switched the Girl Cheesing branding to the same color purple I wanted for my own place.”
“He didn’t.”
She laughs. “Oh, he sure did.” The laugh tapers, her voice lowering. “The macaroons were such a hit that the entire city was talking about them, back then. And it sounds—ridiculous. But my stuff put Girl Cheesing back on the map so quickly that the biggest investor I had caught wind that a place was already doing what I wanted to do, and he backed out. Then so did the other two.”
I know the story ultimately has a happy end, because I am that story—but it doesn’t make me feel any less indignant, or any less upset about what must have happened next. “And you didn’t try again? Or even try to open a place in Nashville?”
She shakes her head. “I banked everything on the idea of New York. I didn’t have any money left. I started waiting tables again, thinking I’d go back to school, or try again … life happened a little faster than I thought it would.”
It’s strange, how quickly the path that led us here rearranges itself, now that I can see it through her eyes. All this time I thought we were in New York because my mom was looking for a fresh start. Only now am I starting to understand that she didn’t come here to find something—she came here to take it back. The dream she had before I even existed.
A dream that’s starting to take some form in me now, that I never knew we shared.
“It’s stupid. But being back here … seeing those stupid macaroons again, and seeing Sam…”
An immediate horror grips my chest. “You don’t—you and Jack’s dad aren’t—”
“No.” She looks genuinely repulsed at the idea. “Not on his life or mine.”
Good, I almost say. But I’m still not entirely sure where my mom stands on the Jack front right now.
She takes a sip of her hot chocolate then stares into her mug.
“I know your sister thinks this whole divorce was my fault, but you should know—it was a long time coming. That’s why your dad and I have had it a little easier than most with the transition. We were always better friends than we were ever goin
g to be husband and wife.”
I can tell she’s telling me this because she doesn’t want me to think she ran off to New York for an old flame, but that part doesn’t matter to me. It’s just nice to hear for its own sake. It hurts—it probably always will, to some degree—but it helps too. Even if they weren’t in love, I never made up that we were a team.
“And that whole café thing—I didn’t know it at twenty, but I was better off for it in the end. What I was imagining would never have taken off the way Big League did. We built that together. You, me, your dad, Paige. Made something better than I could have ever made on my own.” She lets out a contented sigh and says the thing I didn’t realize I needed to hear most: “Even if it never got any bigger than that first little restaurant in Nashville, it was perfect, just the way it was.”
I steal her hot chocolate and take another sip, thinking of that old home away from home—the milkshakes we invented that are still on the menu. The drawings Paige and I made that are still framed on the walls. The beating heart that still pulses in all the Big League Burgers that have opened since. It may be bigger than we ever thought it would be, but I hope, at least, people walk in and feel the way they do at that first restaurant. Like they’re walking into something made with love.
“But after we got here, walking past the deli and seeing he was still selling some of my old stuff, pawning it off as his own—I don’t know.” She takes a moment to choose her words, like she is still not quite certain of the feeling behind them. “That feeling just came back. That anger.”
I stare at our knees, leaning my shoulder into hers. She sighs.
“Do you ever feel like someone just took something from you?”
Yes, I want to say. Sometimes it feels like it’s been four years of this place taking and taking, and I’m all out of pieces to give—like I don’t even know the shape of myself anymore.
But I think I’m finding her. Some outline of what she is, or what she could be. Somewhere beyond this little block I’ve been hiding on, in a city where there are more outlines of me than I could ever fathom, a city I’m opening my eyes to now a little bit more every day.
I take my mom’s hand, and she squeezes it in hers.
“So—revenge via grilled cheese?”
“Not revenge, really. I just—he knocked me down to rock bottom once. I guess I wanted to knock him down a peg too. Make him see we were better off despite what he did. And when corporate started talking about adding grilled cheeses … well, I knew that would get at him the fastest.”
“And Grandma Belly,” I remind her.
To my surprise, my mom isn’t defensive or even rueful about that at all. Instead, she smiles. “You know, I was close with Grandma Belly once too. Only she was just Bella, then.” For a moment I can picture it—my mom every bit a part of Girl Cheesing as I was just hours ago, standing in the same spot at the register, feeling like a part of the same magic. “And truth be told, she used to buy that sourdough bread for the Grandma’s Special from a supplier downtown. I was the one who convinced her the deli should start making their own.”
Another bakery-related plot twist, and this one even weirder, considering I’m still digesting it.
Off my curious look, she says, “Bella figured out what Sam did a few months after he took over and called to apologize. Told me she gave him hell for it, and I was more than welcome to too.”
“That’s some kind of raincheck you took.”
“Give or take a decade,” she says wryly. “She said she told him to stop selling my stuff, but I’m guessing he just slipped some of it back in over the years, not counting on me coming back.” She shakes her head. “Anyway, it’s Sam I meant to piss off, and clearly I did. Just didn’t count on his kids going to bat too.”
“Or yours?” I ask, not without a healthy amount of sarcasm.
My sharpness only seems to soften her. “I never imagined it would play out like this. I really am sorry about that.”
Despite everything, I almost smile into the hot chocolate mug. “Yeah, well. It wasn’t all bad.”
“And if you really do want to open a place of your own, like you were saying—I hope nobody ever stands in your way.”
I think of Jack, and that unabashed way he’s always bragging about my desserts. Of that cupcake app he built. Of all the little ways he is a person at our age that his father clearly wasn’t. There will be plenty of things to worry about further down the road, but that, at least, isn’t one of them.
“I know things have been stressful, and you’ve been handling all of it like a champ.”
I press my lips together, already feeling the wobble in my voice before it comes out of me. “Not always.”
She wraps an arm around me and pulls me in, and we sit like that, curled into each other. She runs a hand through my hair, and I close my eyes, tempted to pretend we’re home home, in Nashville home, but for the first time, I am rooted here in a way I don’t remember being. As if I’m already where I’m supposed to be.
“Are you going to go run off to college and not answer my calls too?”
“No.” I burrow a little further into her warmth. “But, Mom?”
“Hmmm?”
“I think we need to take a bus and go to Philly.”
Mom looks at me quietly for a moment. I hold my breath, waiting for her answer like the whole world hinges on it.
“You don’t think an Uber will go that far?”
The relief is so immediate, it feels like it might liquefy my bones. She smiles at me, her eyes still wet, and nods. There is some kind of unspoken promise in it—we can fix this. We are bent, the four of us, but we’re not quite broken yet.
We spend the rest of the night baking, using the ingredients I have left over to make another batch of So Sorry Blondies—this one modified with extra peanut butter, Paige’s favorite. We turn on an old Taylor Swift album and eat the dough raw and catch up on each other’s lives. We talk about how she and my dad came up with Big League Burger in the first place, and weird dessert hybrids we want to try in the city, and fall asleep watching Waitress with fingers still sticky from chocolate and toffee.
And then, in the morning, we get on the bus to Philadelphia, a tin of So Sorry Blondies perched in my mom’s lap.
Epilogue
ONE YEAR LATER
Paige swats at Pooja’s hand before she can grab a waffle off of the massive tower she’s made. Pooja moans.
“Instagram first, eat later,” says Paige—words I’m hearing more and more often now that Paige actually comes home for breaks, and even some weekends too. Sure enough, she angles her lens at the stack, documenting the Where Are They Now? Waffles for our now-public baking blog.
“Sheesh,” says Pooja, “you’re even bossier than your sister.”
“I resent that,” I call from the couch, where a good portion of my limbs are tangled with Jack’s. He’s in full Thanksgiving break form today, in a pair of worn jeans and a faded flannel so soft that even if I weren’t so partial to his face and everything that comes with it, it’d be scientifically impossible not to glom onto him.
“Surprised you can hear anything at all, sucking face over there!” Pooja singsongs.
I raise my eyebrows at her. “What’s that saying about the pot and the kettle…”
“This pot only makes out with her boyfriend at parties and Instagrammable locations,” says Pooja—which is an out-and-out lie. I may not be anywhere near Stanford or the swim team captain who swept her off her mermaid fin, but if her Snapchats are any indication, her face is attached to his more often than not. At least they’re both putting their impressive lung capacities to good use. “You two, on the other hand, are in exhibitionist territory.”
Jack pulls maybe an inch away from me, just enough I can see the hint of a sheepish smile. “Lay off me, I haven’t seen her in like seven hours.”
I can’t see Paige’s eyes rolling so much as I can feel them. “You two are the grossest thing to ever happen to the in
ternet.”
“Speaking of, can we hurry this up?” says Ethan from the other couch, where he’s perched next to Stephen. They’ve been off-again, on-again ever since Ethan headed to Stanford with Pooja, and Stephen stayed in the city with Landon to get their startup off the ground—but now, it seems, they are decidedly on, if their aggressive proximity is any indication. “The Hub Seed article’s been live for like half an hour.”
Pooja heads to the waffle maker and eats the little cooked pieces that dribbled off on the counter. “We’re waiting on Paul.”
Right on cue, there’s a frantic series of knocks on the front door to the apartment, which can only belong to him.
“Sorry I’m late,” says Paul, out of breath as usual. “Forgot to pick up our Thanksgiving pies for tomorrow.”
“Dude,” says Ethan. “Pepper could have just brought them to you. She was on shift at the deli, like, all day.”
Paul stops dead in the doorway. “I’m an idiot.”
“An idiot with a spot saved over here,” says Paige, gesturing to the couch. “Peanut butter or lemon curd on your waffle?”
Paul goes the tomato shade of red he always does whenever Paige addresses him. They ended up at UPenn together, and she generously took him under her wing, telling him all the campus hot spots and which teachers to avoid and how to make some cocktail called the Pennsylvanian. Paul only recently graduated to speaking full sentences in front of her without stammering. We’re all very proud.
“Um—you decide. You’re the dessert whiz.”
“Pepper’s the dessert whiz.” Paige points a knife covered in Nutella at me. “What the heck did you put in that apple pie again?”
It’s more than a little conceited of me that I’m drooling at the thought of my own creation. “Mascarpone and almonds.”
Jack nods, beaming like a traffic light. “They’re completely sold out for the holiday. Mom and Pepper have been baking them round the clock.”
“Well, that explains why she comes home smelling like the inside of a Bath & Body Works candle every night,” says Paige.
