The Jodi Picoult Collection #4 Read online

  This time, Sean phoned me. “Opening someone else’s mailbox is a felony, you know,” he said.

  “So arrest me,” I answered.

  That day, I left work—trailed by the rest of the staff, who had come to view our courtship as a spectator sport—and found my car completely wrapped in butcher paper. Painted in letters as tall as me was Sean’s message: I’M ON A DIET.

  Sure enough, I baked him poppy scones, and they were still in the mailbox the next day when I went to leave off ginger cookies. And the next day, with those two items untouched, I couldn’t even fit the strawberry tart. I carried it up to his house instead, and rang the doorbell. His blond hair was backlit; his white tee stretched across his chest. “How come you’re not eating what I made for you?” I asked.

  He gave me a lazy smile. “How come you won’t say it back?”

  “Can’t you tell?”

  Sean crossed his arms. “Tell what?”

  “That I love you?”

  He opened the screen door, grabbed me, and kissed me hard. “It’s about time,” he said, with a grin. “I’m freaking starving.”

  • • •

  You and I didn’t just cook waffles that morning. We made cinnamon bread and oatmeal cookies and blondies. I let you lick the spoon, the spatula, the bowl. Around eleven, Amelia loped into the kitchen, freshly showered. “What army’s coming for lunch?” she asked, but then she took a corn muffin, broke it open, and breathed in the steam. “Can I help?”

  We made a raspberry velvet cake and a plum tarte Tatin, apple turnovers and pinwheel cookies and macaroons. We baked until there was hardly anything left in my pantry, until I had forgotten what you’d said to me at the pond, until we had run out of brown sugar, until we did not notice your father being gone the whole day, until we could not eat another bite.

  “Now what?” Amelia asked, when every inch of counter space was covered with something we’d made.

  It had been so long that, once I started, I hadn’t been able to stop. And I suppose a part of me still functioned cooking for a restaurant crowd and not an individual family—much less one that was absent one member. “We could give it to our neighbors,” you suggested.

  “No way,” Amelia said. “Let them buy it.”

  “We’re not running a bakery,” I pointed out.

  “Why not? It could be like a vegetable stand, at the end of the driveway. Willow and me, we can make a big sign that says Sweets by Charlotte, and you can wrap everything in Saran Wrap . . .”

  “We could cover up a shoe box,” you said, “and put a slit in the top for the money, and charge ten dollars each.”

  “Ten dollars?” Amelia said. “Try a buck, peabrain.”

  “Mom! She called me peabrain . . .”

  I was imagining whitewashed walls, a glass display case, wrought-iron tables with marble tops. I was picturing rows of pistachio muffins in an industrial stove, meringues that melted in your mouth, the angel-wing ring of the cash register. “Syllabub,” I interrupted, and both you girls turned to me. “That’s what the name on the sign should be.”

  • • •

  That night, by the time Sean came home, I was fast asleep, and he was gone by the time I woke up, too. The only way I even knew he’d stopped in was a used mug sitting lonely in the bowl of the sink.

  My stomach knotted; I pretended it was hunger, not regret. In the kitchen I made a piece of toast and took out a crisp white coffee filter for the machine.

  When Sean and I were first married, he would make coffee for me every morning. He didn’t drink coffee himself, but he was up early for his shift and would program the Krups machine so that a fresh pot would be waiting by the time I got out of the shower. I would come downstairs to find a mug waiting, with two spoonfuls of sugar already inside. Sometimes, it would be sitting on a note: SEE YOU LATER or I MISS YOU ALREADY.

  This morning the kitchen was cold, the coffeemaker silent and empty.

  I measured out the water and the coffee grounds, pushed a button so that the liquid would stream into the carafe. I reached for a mug in the cabinet and then, on second thought, took the one Sean had used out of the sink. I rinsed it clean and poured myself a cup of coffee. It tasted too strong, bitter. I wondered if Sean’s lips had touched the mug in the same place as mine.

  I had always been suspicious of women who described the dissolution of their marriages as something that happened overnight. How could you not know? I’d thought. How could you miss all those signs? Well, let me tell you how: you were so busy putting out a fire directly in front of you that you were completely oblivious to the inferno raging at your back. I could not remember the last time Sean and I had laughed about something together. I could not remember the last time I’d gone and kissed him, just because. I had been so focused on protecting you that I’d left myself completely vulnerable.

  Sometimes you and Amelia played board games, and when you rolled the dice, they got stuck in a crease of the couch or rolled onto the floor. Do-over, you’d say, and it was that easy to get a second chance. That’s what I wanted now: a do-over. Except, if I was being honest with myself, I wouldn’t know where to start.

  I dumped the coffee into the sink and watched it swirl down the drain.

  I didn’t need caffeine. And I didn’t need someone to make me coffee in the morning, either. Leaving the kitchen, I grabbed a jacket (Sean’s, it smelled like him) and headed outside to get the newspaper.

  The green box that held the local paper was empty; Sean must have taken it on the way out to wherever he’d gone. Frustrated, I turned and noticed the wheelbarrow full of baked goods that we had set out yesterday at the end of the driveway.

  The wheelbarrow was empty, except for the shoe box Amelia had fashioned into an honor-system cash register, and the cardboard sign you’d painted with glitter to read SYLLABUB.

  I grabbed the shoe box and ran back to the house, into your bedroom. “Girls,” I said, “look!”

  You both rolled over, still cocooned in sleep. “God,” Amelia groaned, glancing at the clock.

  I sat down on your bed and opened the shoe box. “Where did you get all the money?” you asked, and that was enough to make Amelia sit up in bed.

  “What money?” she asked.

  “From the stuff we baked,” I said.

  “Give me that.” Amelia grabbed the box and started organizing the money into piles. There were bills and coins, in all denominations. “There’s like a hundred dollars here!”

  You crawled out of your bed and onto Amelia’s. “We’re rich,” you said, and you took a fistful of dollars and tossed them overhead.

  “What are we going to do with it?” Amelia asked.

  “I think we should buy a monkey,” you said.

  “Monkeys cost way more than a hundred dollars,” Amelia scoffed. “I think we should get a TV for our bedroom.”

  And I thought we should pay down the debt on our MasterCard, but I doubted you girls would agree.

  “We already have a TV downstairs,” you said.

  “Well, we don’t need a stupid monkey!”

  “Girls,” I interrupted. “There’s only one way to get what we all want. We bake enough to make more money.” I looked at each of you in turn. “Well? What are you waiting for?”

  You and Amelia rushed to the adjacent bathroom, and then I heard running water and the methodic scrub of your toothbrushes. I pulled up the sheets on your bed and tucked in the blankets. On Amelia’s bed, I did the same thing, but this time when I smoothed the quilt under the mattress, my fingers swept free dozens of candy wrappers, the plastic bag from a loaf of bread, crumbling packets of graham crackers. Teenagers, I thought, sweeping them all into the trash can.

  In the bathroom, I could hear you two arguing about who had left the cap off the toothpaste. I reached into the shoe box and tossed another handful of cash into the air, listening instead to the hail of silver coins, the song of possibility.

  Sean

  I probably shouldn’t have tak