Chapter 4
FOUR
[Love is]…I don’t know how to explain that, so I won’t.
From the group text of the Stern Sisters:
AGGIE : Paging Eleanor Anne Sterns. How’d the date go?
MILLIE : The engineer, right? Sounds boring.
AGGIE : It’s always the quiet ones, Mills.
BETSY : I had a date, too.
AGGIE : And?
BETSY : He had red hair.
AGGIE : ???
BETSY : It made him look… squirrelly.
MILLIE : Flying or ground?
AGGIE : What?
MILLIE : Flying squirrel or ground squirrel?
AGGIE : How are you related to me?
BETSY : He had beady eyes too.
AGGIE : So, you’re just judging them on appearance now? That’s so…
BETSY : Unevolved? Yes, ma’am. Call me a cavewoman. He also told me he wasn’t feeling it between us about ten minutes into the date. At least he paid for my dinner before he left.
MILLIE : Aw, Bets, I’m so sorry. I hope he chokes on a nut.
BETSY : Thank you for your loyalty.
AGGIE : Ellie! How’d it go?
BETSY : Maybe not answering is a good sign?
An hour and a half later, I plopped the tray of (slightly) burnt brownies in the middle of the kitchen table.
Stress baking was a time-honored tradition.
When my grandma died, I spent hours making dozens and dozens of her favorite cookies.
The first time I got stood up for a date, I baked an apple pie.
The day I found out I was pregnant with Oliver—twenty-one, unmarried with a boyfriend who didn’t know what the word job meant, and sharing an apartment with four other roommates—I made a German chocolate cake.
Sunny said it was a coping mechanism. I thought it was a way to take all those big, scary feelings and make them a little sweet. It can’t be all bad if I can eat cake, right? Whatever it was, it usually managed to take my mind off the problem in front of me. Most of the time, anyway.
Gilbert Dalton was going to be a real big problem.
So, by the time Chris brought Oliver home, it was no surprise to anyone I was making brownies…or that Chris had already heard about Gilbert Dalton’s arrival. I’m sure Cammie had broken a nail sending that text out.
I’d begun whipping up the brownies about five minutes after Gilbert Dalton left the premises, promising to be back on Monday.
I frowned down at the pan. These were my special triple-chocolate brownies made with milk, semi-sweet, and white chocolate chips. I could make them with my eyes shut. Yet they still got burned because my mind was not calmed, it was not coping; it was worried.
Thanks, Gilbert Dalton. You ruined my brownies.
A tug on my sleeve shifted my attention. Oliver stood in front of me, his hands on his hips. His face was scrunched in concern. My heart squeezed, as it did every time I looked at my son. I’d made a lot of mistakes in my life, but Oliver was not one of them. “You look mad, Mommy.”
I plopped on a chair at the kitchen table. “I’m okay, honey.”
He shook his head slowly. “Nah-ah. I know ’cause it’s bedtime and you made brownies, and you look mad like the time I woked up early and made myself breakfast.”
Ah, yes, I remember that well. When I’d gotten up with the alarm, I’d found five-year-old Oliver standing on a chair he’d dragged to the counter and mixing an entire five-pound bag of flour—or rather the one pound that made it in the bowl, the other four were all over him and the floor—and a dozen eggs, shells included.
Oliver, his face and hair decorated with flour, had explained he’d wanted to make muffins as a surprise for me. Oh, he’d surprised me alright.
Huffing a laugh, I pulled him onto my lap and breathed in all the yumminess that was a freshly bathed little boy. “Okay, maybe I’m a little…unhappy.”
He pressed a hand to my cheek and stared into my eyes. “You should be more happy then.”
If only it were that easy. “You’re right, kiddo. How’d you get so smart?”
“Uncle Chris says it’s ’cause he’s my uncle and I have his genes.”
Sounded like my brother. “Of course he did.”
“’Cept I don’t have any of his jeans. They’d be way too big for me.”
Laughing, I hugged him. “I love you.”
He grinned and not-so-subtlely eyed the pan of brownies. “Could I have a brownie, please?”
“Since you asked so nicely.”
He climbed on a chair as I cut him a square. “Mommy, who was that man you and Uncle Chris were talking about?”
“You heard that?” I maybe had given Chris an earful the second he’d arrived with Oliver. “He’s Ollie’s grandson.”
And a home invader. And a possible stalker. And a brownie burner.
He blinked up at me, his expression serious. Oliver came in two modes: serious and slightly less serious.
Also, too smart for his own good.
“Why was he here?”
To make my life difficult. And burn my brownies. Have I mentioned that? “He came because part of our house is his house, too.”
His brow furrowed. “It is?”
I knew that look. It preceded five hundred and thirty-six rapid-fire questions. Time to change the subject. “You know what? How about you take this brownie into the living room, and you can watch TV before bed?”
His eyes lit up. “For one hour?”
“Twenty minutes.”
“Forty-five.”
Hiding a smile, I sighed. “You drive a hard bargain. Thirty minutes. Final offer.”
He held out his hand and I shook on it. “Done.”
My brother came around the corner and held out his fist. “Give me one, O-Man.”
Without breaking his stride, Oliver bumped his little one on my brother’s massive one. Oliver would grow up one day and be big and tall, I was sure of it. His dad had been over six feet and I was no slouch, but for now, he looked tiny next to my brother and still the perfect size to cuddle with.
“I’ll take one of those.” Chris sat down at the table and started to cut himself a brownie roughly the size of New Jersey. Then again, Chris was roughly the size of the state of Texas.
Of the five Sterns children, he was the only son and the only one older than me, by five years.
He’d recently announced his retirement from the NFL and had taken to a life of leisure.
He planned to head to medical school in a year or so—nothing like being an overachiever.
First, he wanted to enjoy married life, and I didn’t blame him.
For all his quick smiles and golden retriever energy, he’d worked non-stop since high school, even before that.
Football was hard on a body. More than once, I’d caught him wincing when he moved a certain way.
I smacked his hand away. “You do not get half the pan. Let me cut them.”
Mae, Chris’s wife, rounded the corner into the kitchen, returning from her ninety-seventh bathroom break in the hour since they’d arrived. “Brownies,” she breathed in awe. “You made these just for me, right?”
She grabbed the knife from me and cut an even bigger piece than Chris had. With her hand on her very pregnant stomach, she practically inhaled half of it in one bite. “So good,” she half moaned. “So, so good.”
Chris scowled. “Hey, how come you get a big piece, and I don’t?”
“Maybe because she’s going to give birth to your nineteen-pound baby in a couple of months and she needs all the sustenance she can get.
” I patted Mae’s stomach. Which wasn’t something I thought Mae would ever allow.
Soft wasn’t her personality, exactly. She was a natural-born Mama Bear and kind of intimidating, at least to me.
As the head librarian at the Two Harts Public Library, she put all that energy to work.
But she’d definitely become a bit of a softie in her third trimester.
She would never admit to it, but I saw her tear up over an article about the plight of pink dolphins in the Amazon a couple of weeks ago and she’d become obsessed with videos of unlikely animal friends.
Which she texted to us several times a day.
“I need to keep my strength up,” Mae said around a mouthful of brownies.
Chris hooked an arm around Mae and gently pulled her to perch on his lap, a dopey, besotted grin in place.
“So,” Mae said once she’d settled and inhaled the rest of her brownie, “Ollie has a grandson. Who would have thought?”
I plopped down at an empty seat. “Yeah, Gilbert freaking Dalton.”
Chris shrugged. “Frankie said he seemed like a decent guy.”
I glared. “It’s been less than two hours, how have you already talked to Frankie?”
A phone buzzed on the table. Mae held it up. “It’s Ali. Should I answer it?”
“Yes,” I said. “If you don’t, who knows what she’ll do.”
Ali Goodnight had been Mae’s best friend since elementary school and, as of two years ago, she was also the mayor of Two Harts.
It had surprised us all how well she’d fit into the role.
Ali was known for her… strong sense of justice that usually presented itself through an array of revenge pranks.
Since I’d moved here, Mae and Ali and I had become close.
They were the kind of friends I imagine would help me bury the body. If the situation ever arose. It hadn’t.
Yet.
“You’re on speaker,” Mae said.
“Ollie has a grandson? That can’t be. The man never stepped foot out of Two Harts unless he was forced to. You should demand a blood test, or something,” Ali said as a way of greeting.
“He has a lot of Ollie’s grumpy energy,” I muttered.
“Well, we don’t know this guy,” Ali said. “We need to check him out.”
Chris groaned. “Please, no. Because when you say check him out, you mean dressing like a ninja, doing some light stalking, and maybe digging through his garbage, too.”
“Oh, I hadn’t thought about digging through his trash,” Ali said, sounding excited. “That’s a great idea. I’ll call down to the motel and see if they can save it for me.”
“Please don’t,” I said.
“No undercover missions,” Mae said, going for a second brownie.
I dropped my forehead to the table. “Ollie, what the heck were you thinking?”
Three years ago, when I moved to Two Harts, a small Texas town west of Houston, I hadn’t had much to my name except for a three-year-old, a twenty-year-old car, a thousand-dollar loan from Chris, and about five hundred bad decisions weighing me down.
I’d been on my way to my parents’ home in Oklahoma when I’d made the decision to stop off in Two Harts to meet the girl who’d stolen my brother’s heart.
Except instead of leaving, I got a job at Sit-n-Eat, the café in town owned by a curmudgeonly man with wild eyebrows named Oleander “Ollie” Holder who, like the café, was small, rough around the edges, and completely set in his ways.
My interview had gone something like this:
Ollie: You been a waitress before?
Me: Sure.
Ollie: You start tomorrow.
It took months for Ollie to say more than five words to me in one go.
But he’d given me a job without batting an eye, even though I’d brought my preschooler to the interview.
He hadn’t said a word when Oliver trailed along with me to work every day for two weeks because I didn’t have the money for daycare and didn’t know a soul who could watch him.
Oliver latched onto Ollie almost immediately, first delighted they almost had the same name, and then fascinated with the man himself. It felt like a sign. Somehow, someway, Oliver and I were meant to be in Two Harts.
Ollie had offered me two rooms to rent in his house, one for me and one for Oliver.
The rent was dirt cheap, so pathetically low I knew he wasn’t doing it for money.
I tried to thank him, but that was only received with a harassed, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.
It’s not a favor. I need the extra cash. ”
But I knew. There’d been something about Ollie that drove me to make him proud and I found myself working harder than I ever had. It had felt…good and right.
For the first time, maybe in my entire life, I’d found my place.
Then six months ago, I found Ollie slumped over in a booth at the Sit-n-Eat.
It was a Monday morning and like always, he’d arrived before me.
As was his custom, he’d sat down with the first cup of coffee of the day and a newspaper before the café officially opened at 6a.m. A heart attack, I’d been told.
It had been quick; he hadn’t suffered. But my heart ached with sadness because he’d been all alone at the end.
We buried him four days later.
I’d stayed on at the house, paying rent to the estate and taking over the utilities until the attorney had worked everything out.
I was grateful for that. Besides the grief of losing Ollie, the constant anxiety of not knowing what the future held hung over my head constantly.
Ollie had been the source of both my job and home.
So, I kept going. I opened and closed the café each day.
Under Ollie’s sink-or-swim tutelage, I’d learned to keep the books and pay the bills and order supplies and everything else.
I did that, too, even though I hated the business-y side of things.
But I loved the café and this town and these people, and I wanted Oliver to grow up here.
Ollie’s house was the only home he remembered.
For the first twenty-two years of my life, my dream had been to be an actress.
I hadn’t been a great student. If I was interested in the subject matter, I learned everything I could.
But if I wasn’t interested, I spent a lot of time woolgathering, as Grandy called it.
After I had Oliver, my dreams changed and, looking back, giving up the fanciful dream of a teenager and replacing it with a son I adored and a job I loved was the best decision I could have made.
Moving into Ollie’s house hadn’t been smooth sailing at first for any of us.
Ollie had lived alone for most of his life and getting used to a woman and a child all at once hadn’t been easy for him, or me.
But sometimes things work out in the most unlikely of ways.
Ollie helped us out and I think in a lot of ways, we helped Ollie out.
Not just with cleaning and fixing the things we could and making the house more livable.
But in even more important ways like companionship and the feeling of knowing someone was looking out for you.
I’d be the first to admit that Ollie’s house was a hundred years old, and it showed.
The hot water didn’t work sometimes. The wooden floor was warped and a little soft in some places.
Something had fallen on the roof—Ollie had never told me what—and it had been boarded up with plywood.
I lived in fear it would fall down and fatally wound me during a storm.
But this house could be something, I could see it. It just needed a little TLC and elbow grease and duct tape and prayers and money to get it into shape. I had so many ideas, things I wanted to do and paint and change.
All I wanted was to make a home for Oliver, keep the café going, maybe one day fix my broken man picker. I wanted simple. I wanted contentment. I wanted peace. That was the dream now.
Gilbert Dalton was threatening that dream.
Chris patted my shoulder. “It’s gonna work out.”
I lifted my head. “No, it has to work out.”