Chapter 6
A text message pinged onto Abigail’s phone, and she swiped up to read it, blinked hard, and read it again.
From Sid: Ingredients: 9 slices of bacon, 1/2 cup all-purpose flour, 1/2 cup sweetened cocoa powder, 2 tablespoons baking powder, 1 tablespoon salt, 1 cup unsalted butter, 2 cups granulated sugar, 4 large eggs, 3 teaspoon vanilla extract, 1 cup white chocolate chips, 2.5 cups caramel sauce.
From Mom: uh… darling?
Typing dots appeared and disappeared, appeared, disappeared, and then her phone rang.
“Hello gi—"
“Mom! Do you think that recipe sounds all right?”
Sid sounded upset, but the camera was still loading its picture, and she could hear a female voice in the background—a voice she didn’t recognize.
“Sidney,” the voice said, “it’s not that I think the recipe is bad!”
“DON’T CALL ME THAT! LITERALLY NO ONE EXCEPT MY MOM GETS TO CALL ME THAT!”
“Woah, sweetheart, that’s a lot of yelling!” Abigail said, trying to sound calm.
Sid’s tear-streaked face filled her screen, and all of her calmness melted away.
“Hey, there, sweet child, what’s going on!?”
A blurry figure in the background moved towards the camera and Sid yelled again.
“WILL YOU LEAVE ME ALONE! YOU’RE NOT MY MOM!”
“Please don’t yell at me…”
The woman had a British accent and things started to fall into place for Abigail.
“Sid, love, take a big breath for me, all right?”
Abigail coached her daughter through a few breaths and eventually the tears stopped rolling and she turned to the woman behind her and cleared her throat.
In a wobbly but calm voice, Sid said, “Erika, I need you to leave me alone right now so I can talk to my mom. I’m sorry I shouted. Can we talk about it later…”
The last part probably should have been a question, but it very much came out as a statement. Abigail silently crossed her fingers off camera and let out a sigh of relief when the woman agreed and turned to leave the room.
Sid leaned into the camera and her lip started to quiver again, “Mom, I hate her!”
“Sweetheart, I know it’s hard,” Abigail said, wondering exactly how she was going to balance herself out considering how much rage flowed through her just at the moment, “what happened?”
Her daughter took a deep breath and began relating a story that seemed to start three days ago. Abigail did her best to follow along, stopping Sid only to clarify some of the more confusing aspects.
“So, why is she the one looking after you?” Abigail finally asked, reeling that Liam would let the girls be minded by someone she had never met without asking her first.
Sid shrugged, “he’s trying to make us believe she’s not a bi—"
“Sid!”
“… a bit of a nightmare.”
“Better, reconsider ahead of time in the future,” Abigail said firmly.
Her daughter did at least look a little ashamed.
“And so I found this recipe online and wanted to make it,” Sid explained, “and she laughed at me.”
The anger welled up again and Abigail bit back a comment.
“Okay, do you think she was laughing at you or the recipe?”
“Same thing! Mom! Don’t defend her!”
“Well, it’s not quite the same thing hon,” Abigail said, “and this recipe does have some… alarming quantities… and ingredients.”
Sid glared down the phone, “what do you mean?”
“Well…” Abigail said, swiping over to her messages, “the bacon for one thing…”
“They’re supposed to! They’re caramelized bacon brownies!
“Okay, okay, just … go into the kitchen and grab the baking powder.”
With a long sigh, Sid did as she was asked. She propped the phone up on the kitchen counter and fetched the little jar out of the drawer.
“Now what?”
“Take your finger and lick it. Tap it very lightly on the top of the powder, and taste it.”
It was a risky strategy, but Abigail had learned a long time ago with Sid that she learned far more effectively when she was hands-on.
“Urrgha!!!” Sid exclaimed, sticking her tongue out and wincing, “MOM THAT WAS MEAN!”
“Sid, that was baking powder,” she replied, “now, how many brownies does this recipe say it makes?”
Still wincing, Sid glanced at the recipe on the other screen, “a six by six tray.”
Abigail shook her head. “Okay, whoever wrote this recipe is sabotaging you—there’s no way that much batter would fit in a six by six, and in a six by six amount of batter, I’d put maybe a quarter of a teaspoon.”
Sid was quietly glaring at the recipe, “but… wouldn’t it just be balanced out by the caramel sauce?”
Abigail shook her head, “No love, because there’s about five times as much caramel sauce than there is flour—the most this would make is maybe a very disgusting sauce.”
She watched to see if Sid would cry again, but much to her surprise, she did not.
“…can you help me fix it?”
“Sure, baby,” Abigail said.
Once they had worked out a recipe that might actually result in a weird fusion bacon brownie that was as good as Abigail imagined it could ever be—and she was still pretty sure it would be reasonably disgusting—she asked to speak to Erika.
Abigail took a deep breath as she waited for her ex-husband’s new girlfriend to come to the phone. She did feel like, just maybe, she was doing the wrong thing by going out of her way to talk to the woman without discussing it with Liam first but…
Well, if she was honest it was just too good of an opportunity to pass up.
A nervous-looking woman in her late thirties sat down at the counter where Sid had so recently been, with a half smile on her face that did nothing to convince Abigail that she was calm or collected. She was a little softer in real life than in the posed, professional headshots on her company’s website, and as far as Abigail could tell, she wasn’t wearing any makeup. At least the girls weren’t having to deal with a corporate mogul around the house, Abigail mused.
“Hi,” Abigail said, “Erika?”
“Yes, hello,” Erika replied, sounding very British and reserved.
“It’s good to finally meet you, though it happening on the same day as your first Sid-Meltdown probably wasn’t the most enjoyable way to kick it off.”
The nervous smile flickered. “Uh, well, yes about that… I really don’t know what—"
“Sometimes it’s something specific, sometimes it’s something only Sid can see,” Abigail explained, “and when it’s the latter, there are very few things that can turn the conversation around.”
Erika paused, her eyebrows furrowing. “Oh, right… I rather thought it was, well, me.”
Shaking her head, Abigail smiled, “possible, but unlikely. Did you yell at her, call her stupid, or say something derisive about her musical tastes?”
“Oh, no! Absolutely not!”
“Then it’s very unlikely that this is about you,” Abigail said, “I’m going to guess there has also been words between the girls today?”
Erika nodded, wide-eyed, “Yes! For the first time! That I’ve seen, anyway.”
“Yeah, my guess would be they’ve disagreed about something, and now Sid is overtly reacting to everything, and Hannah is practicing obsessively?”
“Oh gosh, you’re exactly right!” Erika said, laughing, “Well, I’m glad it was nothing I did… though I don’t think my attempts to mitigate it helped at all. I was rather worried I’d come in here and you’d be yelling at me for upsetting your child…”
“Like I said, she does get like this sometimes,” Abigail explained, “I can’t imagine how fun their teenage years are going to be.”
The two women laughed, and Abigail was pleased to see that Erika was interested in how to avoid and defuse situations like this in the future. She was doubly pleased to know that she had rather saved the day. Something about Super Mom flying in to remotely defuse a ticking tantrum bomb was very satisfying to her.
“Anyway, it’s good to finally speak to you—I think Liam was hesitant to take the initiative to get us together so soon after the divorce papers,” Erika said.
Annoyance at Liam prickled—too soon after the divorce papers for her to meet Erika but not too soon for her to be minding the girls without him there?
“Mmm,” Abigail said, “and he was probably worried we’d agree on too many things and gang up on him.”
She couldn’t help but smile as Erika beamed. “which is exactly what I think is going to happen. You seem very calm and logical. I can see myself agreeing with you a lot—and I’m not saying that just because I don’t want you to be mad at me for upsetting Sid.”
“Unfortunately, despite all the work we’ve done to try and help the girls understand the situation, they still see you as a bit of an interloper.”
There was a flicker of sadness on Erika’s face, but Abigail persisted.
“I think it’s important that they know neither you nor their father think you’re going to swoop in and try to replace me,” Abigail said; she held up a finger as she saw Erika about to speak, “which I know neither of you do—but they’re kids. All they see of divorce is their friends, parents, and TV families fighting and yelling. If you and Liam are serious about each other, I think it will be important for the girls to see us getting along.”
Vigorously nodding, Erika was smiling again.
“I agree,” she said, “I know what it’s like to be their age and have parents angry with each other—you tend to pick a side and stick with it regardless of evidence to the contrary.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah,” Erika agreed sadly. “I was convinced beyond all reason that my dad was the shining example of everything good. I never understood why my mum was so mean to him, shouting at him for anything and everything. So, when I saw him coming home late, drunk, and disheveled—I didn’t say anything. At sixteen, I even stumbled across him on a date! My friends and I had been to a concert and we were waiting for a taxi outside a fancy restaurant. I saw him through the window. He saw me, rushed out, told me it was a colleague who’d just got promoted, and I believed him! It was only a few years later when he ran off with a woman he’d met online that I realized that a dinner for two taking place that late, in such a fancy place, and for the woman to be wearing a three-thousand-pound dress exposing that much of her cleavage was unlikely.”
Abigail stared. She hadn’t expected this woman’s life story—and from the slightly nervous expression from Erika, she thought the British woman probably hadn’t intended to reveal quite so much. But something she had said resonated with Abigail.
“That’s true,” Abigail said, “kids do tend to arbitrarily pick a side and stick to it.”
Erika nodded, still looking a little embarrassed. “Yeah, it took a long time for Mum and me to get back on the same page after that. Hey, uh, I do actually have to go now. I have a friend waiting for me, but it was good to meet you! We should have a call with Liam to, you know, cement it.”
“Sure, yeah, sounds good,” Abigail said.
She meant it, but she was also still thinking about the assumptions she had been laboring under.