EPILOGUE
“Flour, light brown sugar, peanut butter, regular butter, eggs. What am I missing?”
I don’t know why I ask the question out loud, because I am alone in the kitchen, so there is no one around to answer me.
I use my forearm to push my hair out of my face to reference the recipe card for the tenth time, growing more and more frustrated by my new shoulder-length cut.
It was time for a change, but I definitely miss having hair long enough that it all stays in an elastic when I need it to.
“Ah, granulated sugar and salt. That’s right,” I say as I read the ingredients that I missed and pull the marked canisters towards me to scoop their respective amounts to add to the batter.
The oven chimes that it has reached three hundred seventy-five degrees, just as the doorbell rings.
I pause my attempt to be Domestic Drew to see who has arrived first.
“Val, Ollie! So nice to see you both.” I pull the front door of our Christmas rental open wide.
“You too,” they respond in unison, and I step aside so that Ollie can bring in the cases of wine.
“Wow, this place is incredible,” Val says as she shrugs off her coat. “I love the chandeliers.”
I join her in admiring them. “Me too. This house was the only vacation rental in Richmond with enough bedrooms for all of us to stay together, so I shouldn’t complain, but it’s a little bit too fancy if you ask me.”
“Val, come check this out,” Ollie calls from the kitchen, as if on cue. “The wine closet is climate-controlled.”
“I’ll be right there,” she says, and gives me a cheeky eyeroll. I lead her back into the kitchen and stifle my amusement so that we can be supportive while Ollie geeks out over the amenities.
“Where’s Emerson?” Val asks as she grabs one of the Christmas aprons that I bought for the occasion and ties it around her waist.
“She’s out with the guys. They should be back any minute.”
“I call dibs on holding her first,” Ollie says. “I haven’t met her yet, so it’s only fair.”
The two of them go back and forth on who gets to hold my niece first, while I remind them that she is two years old and not a baby, and is in a phase where half of her personality is being independent, and the other half is being mischievous.
They agree to both offer her a fist bump and let her choose who to bump back first, which is a much better plan than the original, but still leaves the competitive aspect intact, which is what fueled their connection in the first place.
“How can we help?” they ask when I start to roll the dough into balls.
“Can you two unwrap some of the Hershey kisses? We are supposed to put them into the center of the cookie the second we pull them from the oven.”
“Ohh,” Ollie says approvingly as he takes in all the ingredients on the counter. “Are you making Birdie’s Peanut Butter Blossom cookies?”
“Trying to,” I say, and go through everything one more time, even though I have been meticulously careful this entire time to get it right.
One perk about the rental that I can get behind is that the owners keep the gourmet kitchen stocked with anything a person could need to cook or bake with, so I didn’t have to buy any ingredients for the cookies other than the Hershey kisses.
Everything was stocked in matching canisters for me to use as much as I needed.
Ollie steals the first two chocolate kisses that Val unwraps, and when Val blocks him from taking a third, he gives up and announces that he is going to grab the rest of their things from the car.
“How have things been going?” I ask, once we are alone.
“Really good. The therapy is helping. We should have listened to you and Cameron earlier on that one,” Val says. “And Connecticut is only a two-hour flight to Charlotte, so Ollie and I see each other at least three times a month.”
I smile. “That’s great.”
“How about you guys?” Before I can answer, the door bursts open with my family’s raucous laughter. They file inside with pink noses from the cold weather outside.
“We’re back!” Scott announces, taking off his beanie to hang it on the coat rack next to the door, and slides his hand through his hair to try and tame it.
“Where’s Emerson?” Val asks, as Cameron brings up the rear without my niece in sight.
“Ollie’s got her,” he says, and then maneuvers around the clump of people at the door to make his way into the kitchen with a smile that still makes me weak in the knees.
He goes in to give Val a quick hug in greeting, but when he sees the anger on her face that Ollie found a way to get to Emmie first, he quickly moves on to get to me, sliding his arms around my waist to pull me into him.
“Hey, babe,” he says, and leans down to plant a lingering kiss on my lips.
“Your face is freezing!” I complain and try to pull away, but he just leans in closer so that he can rub his cold cheeks across mine, tickling me with his stubble.
“It’s pretty cold out there,” he says, “but unfortunately, the sky is still clear, so I don’t think that we will have that white Christmas you were hoping for.”
I shrug. “Maybe next year. I’m just grateful that it at least feels like winter here. Monika said it was in the seventies when she flew out of LAX this morning.”
“When is she getting in?” He keeps his arms around me but leans over to check out the perfectly spaced rows of dough coated in sugar that are ready to be put into the oven.
“Within the hour,” I say, but blush when he narrows his eyes down at my cookie batter.
“Did you get all the ingredients? They look a little different than when my mom and I used to make them.”
“Yes,” I say confidently, and give him a little push to get him out of the kitchen. “I triple checked. Have a little faith in me.”
“I have all the faith in you,” he counters, but promptly ditches me as soon as my niece starts crying for him.
“I’m coming, Emmie. I’ll save you from your stinky Uncle Ollie, don’t worry.”
Scott and Gabe both press their lips together to stifle a laugh, and I call out to my brother-in-law. “Hey, Gabe, you’re a good baker. Come take a look at this batter real quick and tell me if you think it looks weird.”
He turns away from me to hide the multiple shopping bags that he returned home with from their trip into town and makes an excuse that he can’t help because he needs to wrap them right away.
“I say we bake them, and worst-case scenario, we can just throw them away and eat the kisses,” Val says, deflated from losing her bet with Ollie and being no match for Cameron, who is one of Emmie’s favorite people on earth.
“I second that plan,” Ollie says. He saunters back into the kitchen to steal another chocolate kiss, still gloating that he managed to outsmart Val.
“Hey, Drew,” Scott says, taking his very unwilling daughter out of Cameron’s arms. “Can you help me get Emmie changed into her Christmas dress?”
“Sure. Let me just get these cookies into the oven.”
“We’ve got it,” Ollie says, taking the third Christmas apron and tying it around his waist. He spins to show off the ruffles and bells.
“Oh, great. He’s never taking that apron off now,” Val mutters under her breath.
I chuckle as I set a timer on the microwave and ask them to keep an eye on it so that I can follow my brother upstairs.
True to form, Emmie spends the next fifteen minutes running away from us once we are in Scott and Gabe’s bedroom.
I wait patiently as Scott tries every trick in the parenting books that he has been pouring over ever since the opportunity to adopt her came up six months ago, and he had to switch from reading baby books to toddler books to prepare for her arrival.
She turned two years old earlier this month, but her speech is delayed, so she can say dada, Drew, and sometimes “Cam,” but the rest of her speech is largely babbling.
Although today she seems to have spontaneously picked up a new word, ice cream, and says it over and over until Scott finally gives in and agrees to let her have some after dinner, but only if she lets us get her into her dress first.
We help her in and out of her clothes one arm at a time, and I comment to Scott how well the vertical scar down the middle of her chest is fading from the heart surgery that she required shortly after birth.
She was still with her biological family back then, so we weren’t there to witness it ourselves, but the idea of her tiny body being operated on like that still sends a shiver down my spine every time I am reminded of it.
“We’ve been using vitamin E, but I don’t think it’ll ever fully go away.”
“It’s her battle scar,” I say, and then coo, “Huh, Emmie? You’re a tough little thing, aren’t you?”
“Ice cream,” she replies, and Scott lets out a resigned sigh.
I carry my niece back downstairs in her sparkly red-and-green dress, to find that Monika and Jalen have both arrived since we were upstairs, and that the first batch of cookies has been removed from the oven and are sitting on top of the stove.
I pass Emmie back to Scott and rejoin Val and Ollie to get the chocolate kisses placed before the dough fully sets up, but we all frown down at the cookies that, now baked, look more gritty than smooth.
“What happened to them?” I ask, but Ollie and Val are equally stumped.
“What’s wrong?” Cameron rests his chin on my head to peek at them.
“These don’t look right, but I followed the recipe to a T.”
Cameron sticks an unwrapped kiss into the center of one of the cookies and attempts to pick it up to eat it anyway, but the cookie crumbles into a million little pieces. He opens the utensil drawer and pulls out a spoon to scoop up the mess instead.
“Mmm,” he says, after he pops it into his mouth.
“Mmm good, or mmm bad?” I ask, keeping my fingers crossed that, even if they are ugly, they still taste good.