Chapter Sixteen #2
Then they got into the story of Fia and Landry.
“It’s a ballad,” Bix said cheerfully.
“It is not,” said Fia.
“Yes, it is,” said Lila.
And it was fourteen-year-old Lila who started the story. In the middle, Sheena thought.
With her adopted parents dying, and Landry coming to find her.
She noticed that Fia’s eyes were full of tears.
“Landry and I were way too much alike,” Fia said. “Angry, passionate and using each other to escape.” She tossed Lila an apologetic
look. “We were in love. It was just we were fifteen. When it all started. When I got pregnant with Lila, I was sixteen. And
I knew that this was no place for a baby.”
Something twisted in Sheena’s gut. Because if she’d gotten pregnant at sixteen, it would’ve been an absolute nightmare. There
would’ve been no way she could bring a child into that house. With the kind of men who’d been around. She didn’t have to know
Fia’s entire situation or story to see the very real desperation and sadness in her face.
To understand it and empathize with it on a level that was physically painful.
“We didn’t tell anybody. I went away, and I gave her up for adoption.
” She stroked her baby’s head. “He was so angry at me. And we could never reconcile how differently we felt about it. But then . . . then Lila came back into our lives. And it forced us to deal with each other. It forced us to say all the things that needed to be said. We never stopped loving each other. Just like we never stopped loving Lila.”
Everybody was sniffling by the end of that story.
“Sorry,” Fia said. “I know.”
It was a story filled with sadness. Loss, but ultimately hope. And it made Sheena’s whole head itch.
Because it spoke of something that she herself couldn’t find in her to believe in normally. It was all a little bit too magical.
All a little bit too neat.
Except of course it wasn’t neat. Because Lila had lost the parents who had raised her from the time she was a baby, and Landry
and Fia had lost years together.
She’d always had a feeling that love, at its ultimate core, was a selfish thing.
But the way that Fia talked about it, about her feelings for Landry, and most of all about her love for Lila, turned something
upside down inside of her. And she wished desperately that she could put it right.
Because what Fia was talking about wasn’t weak. Not in the least. It wasn’t selfish. It wasn’t anything like what she would
have said.
She had just been thinking she didn’t fully get their connection, or understand it. But it was so much deeper, more intense,
than she had imagined, watching them as a married couple. Watching them parent.
They had been to hell together. And more importantly, they’d come back from it.
That was rare.
For some reason, Sheena had to believe that.
That mostly, you just had to sit in hell and make the most of it. Mostly, you didn’t get to just . . . make everything okay.
“So you haven’t made cookies before,” Bix said, changing the subject.
“No, Bix. Thanks for giving me up. I thought you were also the baking novice.”
“Yes,” Bix said. “But I have done this before. So it gives me a slight edge over you, and I’m enjoying that. Since mostly,
I’m as untamed as a bobcat.”
“She is,” said Alaina.
“I am very good at baking premade cookie dough.”
She didn’t think she was imagining that just saying premade cookie dough made Fia and Violet shudder.
“It’s easy,” said Fia. “All you have to do is follow the instructions.”
“I don’t like being told what to do,” Sheena said. “Not even by a cookbook.”
“Well, luckily for you, it’s not a cookbook. They are recipe cards written by my great-great-grandmother, and they are imbued
with authority.”
She was irritated, because her own self was arguing with her about how much she had been enjoying authority lately.
This was not an invitation to think about Denver and sex.
Even worse, though, it brought her back to thinking about reciprocity.
“Can I take some of these cookies with me?” she asked, as she did her best to measure and dump ingredients into the bowl.
It wasn’t hard. She just felt . . . weird about it. About this whole thing. About being folded into this hearth-and-home thing.
She was used to living with all women. That wasn’t it. She was used to unquestionably being the caregiver, and there was so
much caregiver energy in here right now, it was a lot.
Women who were soft, and capable, who were willing to teach her. To give something to her.
Pieces of their own wisdom. Pieces of their hearts.
It was a strange and powerful experience, and it made her think back to the days when sometimes women had been burned as witches.
Maybe because the sharing of feminine knowledge seemed a lot like witchcraft.
How to put simple ingredients together to make extraordinarily complex things.
How to survive the heartbreak of having to give up the child you loved but were ready for. And how to open your heart again
when love stood there and knocked.
How to leave everything behind and change your whole world with nothing but the hope of love as your guide.
The power of forgiveness. Of sacrifice. Of change.
Of standing firm, when it was needed.
Yes. It was a whole lot like witchcraft.
And Sheena felt alive with it.
Marked by it.
Changed by it, just a little bit. Though, probably when she left this room, heavy with friendship and the smell of baked goods,
she would just go back to being herself.
Because short of seeing her father’s lifeless body on the ground, very few singular experiences had changed her.
“You can take cookies to Denver,” Fia said, smiling.
“Who said I was doing that?”
Her instant response was to be combative.
Rather than honest. She winced. “I mean, I do want to take them to Denver. He took care of me last week when I was sick. Which was maybe the nicest thing anyone has ever done for me.” She was lying.
It was absolutely the nicest thing anyone had ever done for her, except all the other nice things that Denver had done for her over the years.
It’s out of guilt.
What did that matter? It had made a difference.
She didn’t know if she had ever made a difference to him.
No. She hadn’t. She had come here to pay him back. Monetarily.
And now suddenly she was realizing that Denver had transferred that caregiving to her, but she hadn’t done any of that for
him. He had even cooked bacon and eggs for her in her house.
“What is his favorite food?”
All the women looked at each other. “I don’t know,” Fia said.
“He usually kind of leads the charge on the cooking,” Bix said. “But I assume that barbecue is his favorite, because that’s
what he always makes.”
“He likes fruit dessert a lot,” Rue said. And of course, of all the women there, she had known Denver the longest. She had
been Justice’s best friend since they were children. “I remember one time he picked up an apple cake from the farm store,
and he basically hoarded all of it for himself.”
“Oh. Do you . . . ?”
But Fia was already moving, grabbing a recipe card out of the front of the little box that seemed to contain all of them.
“This is the recipe,” she said. “Washington apple cake. It’s packed full of them. We have a big bed of apples down in the
root cellar.”
“I’ll go with her,” said Bix.
“We’re making cookies,” she said.
“Well, now we’re going to make an apple cake too,” said Bix, dragging her out of the kitchen.
She followed her around the side of the house, and to the root cellar doors.
Bix opened them up, and the two of them went down the stairs into the cool darkness.
“This is crazy,” she said, looking at the floor-to-ceiling jars of jam, the bins of carrots, potatoes, apples.
“Fia is like the world’s tastiest hoarder,” Bix said. “I love it.”
Sheena picked up the big tub of apples, and the two of them went back up into the kitchen. Where they began the process of
peeling and chopping countless apples, since Fia decided that they would also make these cakes for the Christmas party, and
freeze them. Denver’s cake would be done in the traditional way, and they decided to add some cranberries to the ones for
the Christmas party, for color and cheer.
Sheena just followed directions, since she had no idea how to modify a recipe on the fly. She could barely follow one.
But by the time they were finished, she had produced a reasonable, and only slightly lopsided apple cake.
And that was when she got another idea.
“Bix,” she said. “You seem like the person to ask about this. I think I need a Christmas tree.”
“I am definitely the person to ask about that. Because I have a pickup truck and a general disregard for laws.”
“If we cut it on private land, it’s not illegal, is it?” she asked, even though she didn’t actually care because she was certain
she had cut many illegal Christmas trees in her time.
“Don’t know, don’t care,” Bix said cheerfully.
And Sheena knew for a fact she had asked the right person.
Which was how she and Bix found themselves hauling a massive tree into the back of her truck, sweating and swearing. And then
hauling it up the front steps of the farmhouse, and bringing it in.
“I think you’re supposed to leave these outside for a day or so to get all of the creepy crawlies off of it,” Bix said.
“I don’t have that kind of time,” said Sheena. “Anyway, I never did that.”
Of course the trees that she got were always small and sparse. Partly because she felt sorry for the trees. They didn’t have
a lot going for them. Not good health or aesthetics, and it wasn’t like anyone else was going to choose them to be a Christmas
tree. But also because they were light and easy for her to handle on her own.
She had never wanted to ask her sisters to help; she had always wanted the Christmas stuff to appear as if by magic.
But today, she had Bix to help with magic.
“It did just occur to me, though, that I’m going have to go home to get some of my Christmas things.”
“Do you want help?”
“No,” she said. “You can go and keep a lookout on the work they’re doing. Text me updates.”
Bix grinned. “I can do that.”
She drove out to her house, then, and rifled through all her Christmas stuff. Then, because she was feeling . . . cheerful?
Maybe that’s what this was—she grabbed her Elf on the Shelf.
She didn’t have near enough ornaments for Denver’s tree, and she stopped by John’s store on her way back, and purchased two
large plastic containers of shatterproof ornaments that had probably been sitting there for ten years.
She got the tree put in the stand, and began decorating.
By the time she was done, it was an adequate attempt at a winter wonderland. And she had apple cake on the table.
Because Denver had done so much for her.
She just wanted to make him feel even half as good.