Chapter 49
As tired as she was, Cherry didn’t sleep much that night.
Tom was leaving Omaha.
Her marriage was over.
She’d thought that she’d already understood that—that she’d been living with it for a year.
But, really, she’d been living in a perfectly preserved diorama of her married life, with only one piece missing—the husband—and
it hadn’t seemed like he was gone for good.
For a year, if you’d walked into Cherry’s house, you might have thought that Tom had just stepped out.
Well, not anymore.
Tom was leaving, and he was taking everything he loved with him.
What was Cherry supposed to take?
From this house? From this marriage?
What was she supposed to do with all her memories? They were mostly happy. Was she supposed to block them out? (Block him out?) Recast them as sad-memories-waiting-to-happen? Like the scenes before things go to shit in a horror movie?
Tom had been Cherry’s whole life. She’d given him her whole heart. (Maybe she’d forced it on him, but he’d taken it.) Tom
and Cherry had been something whole, together. That was the goal, wasn’t it? That was the assignment? Wasn’t she supposed to love him this much?
Cherry got up early on Christmas Eve, determined to manage things better than she had on Thanksgiving. She wrote down a plan
of attack for everything she needed to make that day:
Sicilian meat pies called pastieri—Cherry made these for every holiday, they were her specialty.
Two kinds of cheese spread.
Two kinds of cookies.
Tom’s broken-glass Jell-O salad again.
Squash casserole again.
And a relish tray.
She should have enough time for everything. She should have enough baking sheets.
She set out the butter and cream cheese to soften. She made four different colors of Jell-O and stacked the dishes in the
fridge to cool.
She made the filling for the meat pies. It was her grandmother’s recipe. (Cherry doubled the garlic and the parsley.)
Her back hurt by lunchtime. Russ Sutton may be gone, but all those high-heeled dates were still with her. Cherry ate some
of the parsley-and-hamburger filling with crackers, and kept going.
She’d decided to make the pastieri gluten-free. The dough felt a little gummy in her hands, but she figured it was supposed
to be that way. The first two pans went into the oven, and Cherry went looking for the Christmas Jell-O mold. It was shaped
like a wreath. She couldn’t find it.
She made more pies. She took the first batch out to cool. She walked Stevie in a rush. Her lower back was killing her.
When she got back, she ate a meat pie off the cooling rack. It was hard as a rock. They were all hard as rocks. Fuck. Cherry
should have tested the dough—she didn’t have enough parsley to start over. Fuck. She dumped the whole rack into the trash.
It was already midafternoon, and Cherry hadn’t finished anything—she hadn’t even started the cookies.
Cherry and Tom always brought gingerbread cookies to Christmas.
Those were nonnegotiable. Also, Cherry had a new recipe she wanted to try, for rolled tuile cookies.
She wanted to bring something that she’d never made with Tom—something spectacular.
Tuiles weren’t complicated, but you had to be precise: You spread the batter in very thin circles, baked for just a few minutes,
then rolled the resulting wafers into a cigar shape while they were still hot. Cherry had an idea to pipe little red and green
flowers onto the cookies before she put them in the oven, so the design would bake in.
Piping the tiny flowers calmed her down a little. Working with her hands always did.
Stevie bumped into her legs, wanting attention. Cherry ignored her. Red flowers. Green dots. Maybe she should dip some of
the tuiles in chocolate after they cooled . . .
She got the first two pans into the oven—and immediately felt stressed again. The kitchen was a disaster. Cherry hadn’t cleaned
anything up or put anything away, and she’d gotten red cookie batter all over her hands and then all over everything else.
Cherry got messy whenever she went into the creative side of her brain. When she painted something, she used her fingers as
much as the brush. (Tom could paint the Sistine Chapel without getting anything on his clothes.) (Tom could probably paint
the Sistine Chapel.)
Cherry made messes while she worked, but then she couldn’t think inside of them. She should clear some space. She should clear her head.
She looked in the cupboard over the sink for the Jell-O wreath. Maybe she should get a ladder. Stevie was barking at something
outside. Cherry ignored her. Her back was killing her.
When the doorbell rang, Cherry thought about ignoring that, too. She walked into the foyer and peeked out the window . . .
It was Michelangelo himself. (It was Tom.)
Cherry pushed Stevie out of the way. She got cookie batter in the dog’s white fur. She got cookie batter on the doorknob.
She probably got it on her face when she pushed her bangs out of her eyes.
“Hey,” Tom said. “Sorry. You weren’t answering your texts.”
“Sorry,” Cherry said.
He hooked his thumb toward the driveway. “I just wanted to give you a heads-up that I’ll be in the garage.”
She rubbed her nose with the back of her wrist. “That’s fine.”
“Are you okay?”
“I’m fine. Just, you know—Christmas. Hey, do you know where the Jell-O wreath is? The mold?”
“Yeah, it’s in a box in the attic.”
“Cripes, I never would have looked there.”
“You want me to bring it down?”
“That’d be great, thanks.”
Tom brought the whole box down. “I thought you might need the cookie cutters, too.” He stopped in the doorway to the kitchen.
Cherry had just taken a pan of tuile cookies out of the oven, but she didn’t have anywhere to set it. She was using the sleeve
of her sweater as an oven mitt.
Tom dropped the box on the floor and grabbed a kitchen towel from the fridge handle. “Here.”
Cherry let him take the pan. “They’ve got to be rolled while they’re hot,” she said. She felt tearful.
“I’ve got it.” He glanced at the oven. “Are there more?”
“Yeah.”
“I’ve got these.” He moved a plant off the window ledge and set the pan down. “Should I use a dowel or something?”
She handed him a wooden spoon and set the second pan over the sink. She rolled the wafers into tubes. “Fuck, fuck, fuck.” They were so hot.
Stevie had picked up on the excitement and was pushing between Cherry’s legs. Cherry shoved the dog back with her thigh. “Not
now, Stevie.”
“I didn’t wash my hands,” Tom said.
“These cookies are going to burn off your fingerprints, I don’t think it matters.”
“Did you pipe these flowers?”
She nodded. “Yeah.”
“They look great.”
Cherry’s pan was already cooling off. A wafer cracked under her fingers. She exhaled heavily. “I shouldn’t have made so many
at once—I don’t know what I was thinking.”
“Sorry. I took you off your game.”
She stood up and arched her back. “I was already off my game.” She looked over at Tom. “How many did you get rolled?”
He held up a pan of perfect tuile cigars.
“Nobody likes you, Tom.”
He smiled.
“Maybe I should scrap this idea,” she said. “I’m so far behind already.”
“What do you have left to do?”
Cherry laughed. “What don’t I have left?” She looked at the list on the refrigerator. “The cheese balls are half done. The
Jell-O’s half done. I wasted all morning trying to make gluten-free pastieri, and they taste like hardtack . . .”
“Are you gluten-free?”
“Joy is. And Jeff. Or at least they were last week.”
“You’re not making gingerbread this year?”
“No. I am. I just haven’t really started.”
Tom set his pan of cookies on top of a dirty mixing bowl on the island. “I can help you whip through the rest of these butter
cookies. You already have the batter, and they’re so pretty.”
Cherry shook her head. “You don’t have to do that. It’s Christmas Eve.” What she meant was, You don’t have to do that. We’re not married anymore.
The corner of Tom’s mouth quirked up. “My Christmas Eve plans were to clean up the oil stain on the floor of the garage. My
dad’s driving me crazy.” He tipped his chin up, like he was pointing at her. “Let me help.”
Cherry looked in his eyes.
She shouldn’t say yes just because she missed him . . . because it had been torture all morning doing this without him. (Any given day without Tom was torture, but Christmas without Tom . . . Dante could never.)
Cherry was taking too long to answer. Tom looked away from her, like she’d already said no. Or maybe like he’d realized that
he shouldn’t have offered. He looked like he was about to apologize.
“Okay,” Cherry said. “Thank you. I’d love some help.”
Tom turned back to her, surprised. He smiled and looked away again. “Okay. Good.”
He shuffled out of his coat and hung it over a chair. He was wearing a T-shirt underneath. (Because Cherry was still holding
all his long sleeves hostage.) “You want me to clean off the island and give you some room?”
Cherry laughed out a breath, feeling tearful again. “Yeah. Thank you.”
He scooped all the dishes off the island and quickly wiped it down. Cherry moved the finished cookies to a cooling rack.
“There you go,” Tom said. “Clean slate.”
Cherry laid out fresh sheets of parchment paper and started spooning out the tuile batter. “How many wafers do you think I
should make at once?”
Tom hummed. “Eight per sheet if you don’t want to break any. Twelve if you want a challenge.”
“I already feel pretty challenged.”
He pointed at the red and green piping bags. “Is that just regular batter with food coloring?”
She nodded.
“Did you see that on Pinterest or something?”
“I saw somebody do it with chocolate . . .”
“You should do chocolate, too,” he said. “You could make tartan.”
“Why do my plans get more complicated as soon as you walk into the room?”
“You mean, why do your plans get more awesome?”
“I should let you do the piping,” Cherry said. “It’ll look cleaner.”
“Hush, you’re doing great.”
Stevie was trying to squeeze between Cherry’s hips and the island. “Stevie,” Cherry said. “Not now.”