Chapter 12
NOELLE
While Cade, Cody, and Wyatt worked on the bathroom and Lily slept in her room, I didn’t know what to do with myself.
I checked on Lily for the tenth time, and she didn’t stir at all. She felt a little warm to touch, and I prayed she didn’t break into a fever. The last thing I wanted to deal with was sickness.
I didn’t know the first thing about caring for an ill newborn.
Her sound sleep reassured me that all was mostly well, so I paced in the kitchen. My stomach felt a little queasy, and my energy low, but I couldn’t settle. So I scrubbed the fridge, winced when something crashed in the bathroom, and considered organizing the canned food.
Before motherhood, I would have been the woman in the room who was swinging the hammers. Animal poop? Not a problem. I might have worked as a clinical trials coordinator, but that didn’t negate my desire to be in the action in other parts of my life.
But . . . everything had changed.
Lily needed me first, and I still hadn’t grown into that responsibility yet. Yes, I wanted to be there for her. Yes, I wanted to keep her safe. But I missed the other part of me, too. The part that could jump into anything I wanted. Yet, that part of me was absorbed by this new one.
At moments like this, when known ground slipped rapidly away beneath me, I sought stability in the only way I could.
Memories.
Grandma hummed in the back of my mind as I grabbed her favorite chair—I couldn’t believe it was still here—and dragged it to the small cupboard above her fridge. Up there, the good cookbooks awaited. Not the ones family members sent her as an impersonal gift, nor the articles she clipped.
The real recipes.
The ones scrawled on napkins, written in haste, and tainted by time and aging ink.
The edges had curled from steam, or were freckled with coffee or chocolate sauce.
She kept them in a little purse at the top of the fridge.
Regret that I hadn’t come after she died—Dad refused to bring us, and we were still teenagers—wound through me. I could have visited Grandpa . . .
Blindly, I groped for the purse as if it were the only thing that would keep me together. Provide a focus. A tether to who I used to be, amidst the swirl of who I had to be. My fingers swept dust, then cobwebs, and then . . .
. . . a zipper.
I pulled a dusty old thing free from the far corner, standing precariously on my tiptoes before I grasped it. When I withdrew my hand and looked at the treasure, my throat hitched.
The purse was here.
Breathless and giddy with relief and excitement, I unfurled the zipper.
Another shudder, then a muted curse word, issued from the bathroom on the other side of the wall, but I barely registered it.
I slid the chair to the table, dumped the purse contents, and let my fingertips lovingly rove the pages.
In the words and directions, I found that stable ground I sought. Grandma’s words, scripted so carefully. The angled letters were narrow and difficult to read, but somehow comforting. Through the recipes, Grandma had come back to life, and my eyes blurred seeing her again.
Wyatt thumped through the kitchen with buckets holding the demolition wreckage, mumbling apologies, but I kept my back to him as I pored over the recipes, seeking one in particular.
I could almost remember the ingredients. The dry grit of flour, the sound of salt pouring into metallic spoons.
There.
Grandma’s rolls.
Not biscuits, nor sourdough. Her yummy dinner rolls, slightly underbaked, and bouncy with perfection. The right blend of firm and chewy with light and fluffy. She’d long perfected the art, the time, the recipe. I lifted the aged paper.
Of all her recipes, this had to be the most tattered, loved, wonderful. Memories of standing at her side, slinging food into her cracked porcelain bowl, gave me something to stand on that was entirely Noelle.
That Noelle.
“Grandma . . . please help. I don’t know what I’m doing. I don’t know if I can raise a little girl and mourn my sister. I’m in the middle of nowhere Wyoming, with a man I don’t really know, raising Lily because Naomi is gone. Please. Please help me find solid ground.”