Dreaming in Chocolate

by Susan Bishop Crispell

  “And it would be a waste of perfectly good magic to have it at your fingertips and not use it,” he said.

  Penelope cocked an eyebrow at him. “I didn’t peg you as the believing-in-true-love type. Much less the believing-in-magic type.”

  “Guess I’m just full of surprises, huh?”

  “You’re full of something,” she said. She ducked inside, letting the door shut between them.

  If Noah had believed in love or magic back when they were younger—even if he’d just pretended to for Penelope’s sake—they could have been a family. But he hadn’t. And Penelope’s interest in a do-over with Noah was right up there with getting frostbite on her fingers and scalding the taste buds off her tongue.

  7

  Her mom hadn’t mentioned her dad in an hour, but Penelope continued to watch her out of the corner of her eye. Every time Sabina laughed a little too loudly at something a customer said or teared up when someone asked her for a love potion and she had to set them straight about the limitations of the chocolates’ magic, Penelope knew the effects hadn’t worn off yet.

  And there was no way she could let Ella spend the night with her if she wasn’t lucid, a fact that sent Ella to the pantry to pout not five minutes after getting to the shop after school. She sat cross-legged on the floor with her back to Penelope. Her small shoulders tensed whenever anyone tried to talk to her. After the third attempt, Ella jumped up and ran into the kitchen to stare at the apothecary table as if it could magically change Penelope’s mind.

  “I know you think I’m a little loopy right now,” Sabina said, cutting squares of cellophane to wrap the caramels. The plastic crackled with each snip snip snip of the scissors. The top few on the pile trembled as she waved the scissors back and forth for emphasis, stirring up the air. “But I wouldn’t let anything happen to her.”

  Penelope sighed. “I know, Mama. But it’s not good for her to see you like this. Not when I’m not around to temper it. She doesn’t fully understand what’s happening and I don’t want her to be scared of what we do. I’m sorry.” She set a caramel on one of the squares, tucked the sides in to cover the sticky candy, and twisted the ends to seal it.

  “It’s coming back. Reality. The memories. Part of me knows your dad isn’t here. I feel it pressing in my head to get out but there’s a part of me that’s resisting still. That doesn’t want to believe it. But I know what’s real now. I just have to keep reminding myself of that until the magic dissipates. I didn’t mean to worry you.”

  “I know. And I know it might’ve just been an accident, but if it wasn’t—”

  Sabina’s shoulders went rigid. She stepped back, putting half a foot of space between them. “If I spelled myself on purpose, you mean?”

  “Yes, if you did it on purpose. I can understand why you might want to. I miss him too. But if you think you might do it again, can you give me a heads-up before you do?”

  Her mom plunked the scissors down on the counter. Her left eye twitched, causing her dark lashes to flutter. “It was an accident. But if I get it into my head that I want a few hours of happiness thinking the man I love is still with me, then, yes, I will tell you. And I might just stay home to keep you from looking at me like I’m crazy or damaged or both.”

  Penelope covered her mom’s shaking hand with her own. “Ella’s not the only one who gets scared when you’re like this, you know. I’m always worried it will be permanent or you won’t want to fight it off and we’ll lose you. Promise me you’ll be more careful.”

  Sabina brushed hair back from her face with her free hand, her bangle bracelets clinking out a soft melody. Then she let out a long, unsteady breath. “I will,” she said.

  “Thank you.” Penelope watched her mom for a moment, looking for a sign that she meant it, and finding none. “Can I ask you something?”

  Sabina nodded, her lips pressed together as if by not saying yes out loud she could take back her agreement if she didn’t like the question.

  “Why didn’t you ever date again after Daddy died?”

  She didn’t hesitate to answer this time. “Because he was the love of my life. There was no replacing him.”

  “So you don’t think you could have loved someone else?” Penelope asked.

  “I had you to love. That was enough.”

  Penelope prayed it would still be enough after Ella was gone. If she lost her mom to the chocolates for good, she wasn’t sure how she’d find the strength for her next breath, let alone the rest of her life.

  Noah’s words from earlier came rushing back to her. Marco. If he could make her mom happy, they had a chance of surviving this somewhat intact. “But what if there’s someone else out there who would love you and make you happy? Don’t you think he deserves a chance?”

  “I won’t say it is not a possibility, but when I fell in love with your dad, that was it for me. You’ll understand that when you find the one you’re supposed to love.”

  But Penelope knew all too well what being in love felt like. And if Noah was it for her, then she’d take her chances with loneliness.

  They resumed their cutting and wrapping, letting the sounds of the shop fill their silence. Two of their regulars sipped cocoa and cackled at jokes told too quietly to reach the counter from the wingback chairs in the far corner. They came in once a week, one with her dyed red hair that verged on orange and the other with a pure white braid down to the middle of her back. The older women always drank the same thing, and Penelope had stopped herself on half a dozen occasions from asking what they dreamed about. The customers who wanted to share did. All the others, she tried to respect their privacy.

  But it didn’t stop her wondering.

  She looked up when Ella raced out from the kitchen.

  “Look, Mama!” Ella called, all traces of her anger obliterated by the excited smile plastered on her round face. “I found a necklace in the table.”

  A quarter-sized pendant twisted back and forth on a long brass chain as Ella held her hand up. One side was navy blue with white pinprick dots scattered across the enamel in some sort of pattern. The other was a glass-fronted compass. The compass points—red on one end, white on the other—didn’t budge as the necklace spun.

  Penelope let the necklace dangle against her outstretched palm. The dots on the back, she realized, formed the constellation of the zodiac sign Pisces. Ella’s sign. “Very pretty. You found this in one of the drawers?”

  “Yeah. The one in the very middle. I’ve never found anything in that one before. What does the other side do?” Ella leaned around her hand to flip the compass over.

  The dial spun around twice before pointing the red end at Penelope. She jiggled her hand, but the dial stayed steady.

  “It’s how people used to tell direction. The piece in the middle that’s stuck, it’s supposed to point north, so the person using it can always find where they are and which way they need to go.”

  “I don’t think this one does that.”

  “No, this one is broken,” Penelope said.

  Ella shook her head and rolled her eyes as if to say you don’t know anything. “No, this one doesn’t show that. See, it came with a note. It’s supposed to help find love.” She waved a yellowed scrap of paper in the air between them. Then she traced the word “love” with her finger and asked Penelope to read the whole thing.

  Penelope examined the large, looping script that was too precise to be done by an eight-year-old. The paper was gritty and the words bled at the edges from old age. “When it is love you seek, keep this close to your heart and love will reveal itself,” she read.

  “So, it’ll show me who loves me?” Ella asked.

  “Maybe.”

  Why would the table give her this? She doesn’t need a necklace to tell her who loves her. But their conversation about River from that morning flashed in her mind.

  “And that spinny thing didn’t move or anything until I brought it out here to you,” Ella added when Penelope didn’t confirm that th
e note was real.

  “I guess that means I love you a whole lot then, huh?” Penelope asked. She dropped her hand and let the pendant rotate on the chain.

  “Yep. And it means that I love you too. Even if you won’t let me go to Grams’s tonight.”

  “If Grams is feeling better tomorrow, you can spend the whole day and night with her.”

  Closing a hand around the compass, Ella held it to her chest and took a deep breath, like she was making a wish on it. She bounced on her toes, her eyes wide with delight. “Maybe some hot chocolate would help her. I could make us all some.” She took off across the room without waiting for an okay. Her quick footsteps shook the ceramic mugs in the cabinet.

  “Make sure you use the plain powder,” Penelope said.

  “I know.”

  Penelope heard the eye roll, though she didn’t see it.

  When they were settled on the couch that backed up to the front wall of the pantry, Ella passed out their mugs with slow, measured steps and two hands wrapped around the bowl-shaped cups to keep the liquid from sloshing out. She had added a large dollop of the hand-whipped cream from the bowl and sprinkled them all with cinnamon powder.

  Sitting in the spot Penelope and her mom left between them, Ella carefully clinked her cup to both of theirs and laughed when she took a sip and purposely got whipped cream on her nose. “C’mon, drink up, slowpokes,” she said. “I put a surprise in the bottom.”

  “Is it a caramel?” Sabina asked, sniffing her hot chocolate.

  “You’ll just have to drink and see,” Ella said.

  Penelope and her mom smiled at each other over Ella’s head and did as they were told.

  8

  When Penelope walked into her living room, Noah was asleep on her couch, hair mussed just enough that she wanted to run her hands through it. Ella’s favorite blanket draped over his chest and stopped above his knees. His bare feet rested against the back cushion. She let her eyes drift to his mouth and wished that he was awake so he could smile his maddeningly sexy smile at her and erase all of her reasons for staying away from him with one desperate kiss.

  She sank to the floor and pulled her knees into her chest. She sat there, just watching the rhythmic rise and fall of his breaths, trying to determine when in the hell she’d fallen for him. Then she noticed Ella’s stuffed zebra tucked between his arm and his chest and questions like when and how went right out the window. The only one left was: What am I going to do about it?

  Pushing up onto her knees, she brushed her fingers over his temple and along his scratchy jaw. He smelled like spicy chocolate and promises of forever. She leaned in to kiss him, knowing exactly where it would lead.

  Penelope jerked awake as their lips touched.

  She dug her knuckles into her chest to combat the pressure that didn’t vanish with the dream. Her lips still tingled from the desire to kiss Noah. She pressed them together and stared at the ceiling.

  She’d known from the first sip of her hot chocolate that Ella’s surprise had been a spoonful of the spicy Corazón mix. By then, the magic was already in her system. She continued drinking it as much to make Ella happy as to prove to herself she wasn’t scared of what it would reveal to her. The sweet cream and cinnamon had masked the scent of the ancho, cayenne, and chipotle peppers that made the drink truly hot. It tasted just as she remembered it. A subtle heat that gathered on the back of her tongue as the smoothness of the chocolate burned away.

  When she closed her eyes again, she saw Noah. And something in her chest ached. She held her breath until her cheeks and lungs threatened to explode and the sensation finally passed. But she still saw him. Even when she opened her eyes to stare at the ceiling, he was there. The no-bullshitting, fast-car-driving dream boy who’d called her from a pay phone in the middle of a snowstorm just to tell her he was in love with her and the dangerous-smiled, zebra-cuddling dream man who looked at home asleep on her couch.

  No. She would not think about him like that. Noah and “home” did not belong in the same sentence.

  But if that was true, why had she dreamed about him a second time?

  9

  It took Penelope three days to fully shake the feeling that had settled over her after drinking the hot chocolate and dreaming of Noah. Ella had asked her every morning at breakfast if she’d dreamed about anything exciting, and each time Penelope told her “nothing exciting at all,” because the possibility of Noah being her true love was just the opposite.

  She’d lived happily without him for more than eight years. If they were supposed to be together—supposed to be in love with each other—wouldn’t it have happened long before now? The fact that he came back to town right as Ella’s life was getting cut short just proved to Penelope that their only connection was their daughter. And that made it easier to ignore the part of her that hoped she’d run into him again.

  The dream had also convinced her that canceling the festival—and removing the false hope it gave the town—was the right choice. So Penelope had told Henry the evening before that she wouldn’t be able to supply the hot chocolate for the festival this year. Then she hung up before he could ask for an explanation.

  When the shop door flew open with a blast of cold air, she took her time looking up from the pile of gift boxes she was assembling.

  Ruth Anne hustled to the front counter, her short legs working double time. The hat and gloves she peeled off slipped from her thick fingers to the floor in her haste. She didn’t notice. Not even when she slapped her empty hands on the wood in front of Penelope and wheezed out a breath. Her dyed reddish-purple hair stuck up at all angles, teased by static electricity and probably a healthy amount of stress.

  “You’re not serious about canceling the festival, are you?” she asked.

  Of course Ruth Anne already knew. She lived to be the bearer of news, good or bad. If she knew this, there would be no keeping it from the rest of the town for much longer. Now Penelope would either have to come clean and risk everyone trying to talk her out of it or derail Ruth Anne.

  Stalling, Penelope collected the knitwear from the floor.

  “Who told you that?” she asked when she returned to the counter, trying to keep her voice light, a little confused.

  “I went to see the mayor about the never-ending road work over on Coal Mill that has traffic backed up for a good thirty minutes every morning as people try to get into work. And while I was waiting for him, I overheard him talking to Margarete about how you’d told him the festival was off this year. I was sure I’d heard him wrong because I just knew you couldn’t be who he was talking about. Not after all the good the festival’s done for the people of Malarkey. I didn’t wait around for him to confirm it for me either, I just ran right over here to get it straight from the horse’s mouth. I even forgot to ask him about the road reopening. That’s how much of a hurry I was in.”

  “I’m sorry you rushed over here without talking to Henry. That traffic backs up right in front of your house, doesn’t it? That must be frustrating when you want to get out of the driveway.”

  “Oh, it is quite frustrating. Some days I’ve parked my car half in the road to try and secure a way out and people just swing around it and block me in. And then Henry had the nerve to send a police officer over to tell me the next time I blocked traffic they’d have to give me a citation. Can you believe that?”

  Mission accomplished. Now Penelope just had to keep Ruth Anne riled up long enough to get her out of the shop without realizing she’d left without a response about the festival. “That is awful. He should’ve come out himself and put up a ‘Do Not Block Driveway’ sign for you.”

  “Why didn’t I think of that? He owes me that much.” Ruth Anne clutched her hat in her fist and shook it at Penelope. “You’d think after a few months of this ridiculousness people would know I have places to go and people to see.”

  And the news about the festival’s cancelation to spread, Penelope thought.

  “You’ve got to have o
ne of the busiest social calendars of anyone in town,” Penelope said.

  Ruth Anne leaned forward, smiling at what she took as a compliment. “Not a day goes by that I’m not visiting one person or another for tea and a friendly chat or returning lost and found items to their rightful owners. I spend half my time running back and forth across town with every other person waving at me or hollering ‘Hey, Ruth Anne.’ I wonder what they’d do if I just let that traffic keep me shut up in my house for a day?”

  “I hope we won’t have to find out.” Penelope grabbed the top box from the pile she’d been working on. “Why don’t you take some of the dark chocolate toffee over to Henry to help sweeten him up a little? Maybe you’ll be able to talk some sense into him that way.”

  “Maybe you could give me some of the mood-enhancing chocolates instead to really sway him to my side.”

  “You don’t need to resort to that. I promise these will do the trick.”

  Penelope boxed up a half dozen rectangles of toffee, knowing Ruth Anne would eat one or two along with Henry. Then she rang up the sale and waved as Ruth Anne set off for the mayor’s office.

  “Wait a minute,” Ruth Anne said halfway to the door. She threw her hand with the chocolates into the air and whirled back around. “I almost forgot. You never said whether or not you’re not trying to put a stop to the festival. That would’ve been twice in one day I left a place without getting what I went in for.”

  Damn it. She was so close.

  “Yes, I told Henry I didn’t want to do the festival this year,” Penelope said.

  “Well, why on Earth would you do that?”