11. Lily
Lily
The next evening, my kitchen smelled like a Hallmark movie had exploded—vanilla, cinnamon, and enough pumpkin spice to make June weep with joy.
We were supposedly making cookies for tomorrow’s fundraiser, but really, I was trying not to think about yesterday’s almost-moment in the flower shop, when Mario and I had been one thunderclap away from. .. something.
I was wearing my favorite worn jeans and a cream sweater that had somehow become permanently flecked with paint and garden soil; tonight I’d tied on a plaid apron that still had a faint smear of last week’s berry jam across the pocket.
Olivia had on her unicorn pajamas—pink, slightly too small, and smeared with evidence of earlier frosting experiments—and she balanced on the stepstool like a tiny, glittery general.
“Mom, you’re murdering that dough,” Olivia observed from her perch. She had flour in her hair, frosting on her nose, and the kind of manic energy that only came from sneaking chocolate chips when she thought I wasn’t looking.
“I’m kneading it.”
“You’re taking out your emotional frustrations on innocent baking ingredients. Grandma’s movies say that’s called displacement.”
“Where did you?—”
“June’s Facebook group discussed it. They think you have major unresolved romantic tension.”
Mario, who’d been meticulously arranging chocolate chips on a cookie with the concentration of someone defusing a bomb, made a sound that might have been a laugh or possibly him choking.
He’d come over in the clothes he always seemed perfectly comfortable in: faded jeans, a faded navy Henley with the top button undone, and a damp charcoal work jacket slung over one shoulder.
Even damp, he looked like he belonged in this house—and maybe in my head—far more than any manual ever entitled him to.
“June’s Facebook group needs to mind their own business,” I muttered, attacking the dough with renewed vigor.
“That’s what Mario said! Except he used an Italian word that Grandma says I’m not allowed to repeat.”
“I said that quietly,” Mario protested, rolling a chocolate chip into the precise center of a cookie.
“I have exceptional hearing. It’s a gift.” Olivia grabbed another handful of chocolate chips. “Like how I heard Mom on the phone with Aunt Sarah last night saying Mario looked really good in his wet shirt yesterday.”
The dough slipped out of my hands and hit the counter with a thwack. “OLIVIA ROSE.”
“What? You did! You said, and I quote, ‘Sarah, you should have seen him carrying those planters, his shirt was all wet from the rain and?—’”
“How about we talk about something else?” I interrupted, my face burning hotter than the preheated oven. “Like homework. Or chores. Or taking a vow of silence.”
“Boring.” She turned to Mario with the focus of a tiny prosecutor. “Mr. Mario, do you know about my dad?”
The kitchen went still. Even the stand mixer seemed to hold its breath.
Mario’s eyes found mine across the island, a question in them. I gave a tiny nod, because apparently, tonight was the night for emotional excavation via baked goods.
“Tell him the funny part, Mom!” Olivia bounced on her toes, sending flour puffing into the air.
“There’s a funny part?” Mario asked carefully.
“Oh, yes!” Olivia was gleeful now. “My dad was allergic to responsibilities! Tell him, Mom!”
She delivered it like a punchline, complete with jazz hands, and despite everything—despite the pain of that history, despite my current emotional chaos—I laughed.
“That’s what I tell people,” I admitted, rolling a ball of dough between my palms. “When they ask why he’s not around. ‘Oh, Daniel? Terrible allergy to responsibilities. Made him break out in hives and disappear to Seattle.’”
“Seattle specifically?” Mario was fighting a smile.
“That’s where he fled. Apparently, the Pacific Northwest is better for his condition.”
“The condition of being a coward,” Olivia added helpfully, now drawing a face on her cookie with frosting. “That’s what Grandma calls it after her wine book club.”
“Olivia, what have we discussed about repeating things you overhear?”
“Only do it when it’s funny or important. This is both.”
She looked at Mario with those devastating eyes. “He left when I was a baby. But it’s okay because Mom says we’re better off without someone who couldn’t handle how awesome we are.”
My heart squeezed. I’d worked so hard to frame Daniel’s abandonment in a way that wouldn’t scar her, wouldn’t make her feel unwanted or not enough.
“That’s right, baby. We’re totally awesome.”
“The most awesome,” she agreed. “Though it would be nice to have someone around who can reach the high shelves. Mom has to stand on a chair, and last week she fell off and said a word that made June gasp.”
“I caught my balance!”
“You knocked over an entire display of soup cans. The store manager was very concerned.”
Mario moved around the island, coming to stand near us. Up close, you could see his sleeves were rolled to the elbow—not so much for show as for practicality—and the faint scent of rain still clung to him like a memory. “I can reach the high shelves,” he offered quietly.
“I KNOW!” Olivia practically vibrated with excitement. “You’re very tall! And you fix things! And you don’t seem allergic to anything except shellfish!”
“How do you know about?—”
“Mom looked it up before you came for dinner last week. She has a whole list of your dietary restrictions on her phone.”
“I wanted to be prepared!” I protested, mortified. The list was ridiculous—lasagna crossed off and then circled back on, because Grandma’s lasagna was always the great diplomatic meal. Tonight I’d promised to make it if Mario ever brought his appetite to our table.
“She also has a list of your favorite foods. Lasagna’s at the top, which is lucky because Grandma makes excellent?—”
“OKAY.” I clamped my floury hand over her mouth. “That’s enough sharing for tonight.”
Olivia licked my palm—actually licked it—and I yanked my hand back with a shriek.
“Gross!”
“Effective,” she countered, then turned back to Mario. “Anyway, my dad’s name was Daniel, and he was very handsome but very useless. Like a decorative throw pillow.”
“Where do you get these analogies?” I asked, wiping my palm on my apron.
“Grandma. She has opinions.” Olivia picked up a cookie cutter, examining it critically. “He came to see me twice. Once when I was three, but I don’t remember. And once last year, but he spent the whole time on his phone, so that doesn’t really count.”
The casual way she dismissed him—her own father—made my chest ache.
“I wasn’t married to him,” I found myself telling Mario, needing him to understand the whole picture. “My mother still considers this her greatest failure as a Catholic parent. She has a whole novena she does about it.”
“Nine days of prayer for your immortal soul?”
“Nine days of prayer that I’ll find a nice Catholic husband to make an honest woman of me.” I shaped another cookie with perhaps more force than necessary. “Daniel and I dated for three years. He was charming, funny, everything he was supposed to be. When I got pregnant...”
I paused, remembering those early days. The joy, the fear, the desperate hope that we could make it work.
“He proposed,” I continued. “Bought a ring and everything. Said we’d be a family. Then the reality set in. Morning sickness. Doctor’s appointments. The actual responsibility of it all.”
“He started disappearing,” Olivia chimed in, now creating what appeared to be a cookie crime scene with red frosting. “Like a magic trick, but sad.”
“First, he missed the appointment where we heard the heartbeat. He had a work thing. Then he missed the ultrasound where we found out we were having a girl. Car trouble.”
“His car was fine,” Olivia added. “He just didn’t want to come.”
“By the time she was born, he was already half gone. Showed up two hours late to the delivery room with a latte. A LATTE. I’d been in labor for sixteen hours, and he needed caffeine to ‘deal with the stress.’”
Mario’s jaw clenched. “Please tell me you threw it at him.”
“She threw ice chips!” Olivia announced proudly. “The nurses gave her a standing ovation. Well, she was lying down, but they clapped a lot.”
“It wasn’t my finest moment.”
“It was totally your finest moment,” Olivia disagreed. “You were growing a human and still had good aim. That’s multitasking.”
I pulled her in for a one-armed hug, this remarkable child who’d somehow emerged from such a mess with her spirit intact.
“He hung around for six months,” I continued, needing to finish the story now that I’d started. “Each visit shorter than the last. Then one morning, I woke up to a text. Just a text. ‘I’m not cut out for this. I’m sorry. Take care.’”
“Fifty-three characters,” Olivia said solemnly. “Mom counted.”
“You counted?” Mario’s voice was soft.
“I was looking for meaning in the meaningless. Surely ending a family deserved more than fifty-three characters.”
“What a stronzo,” Mario muttered.
“What’s that mean?” Olivia asked immediately.
“Nothing you need to know until you’re thirty.”
“I’ll ask June. She’s teaching herself Italian from YouTube.”
“Of course she is,” we said in unison, then looked at each other in surprise.
“You’re synchronizing,” Olivia observed. “Grandma says that’s a sign of compatibility. Like how you both make the exact same face when June shows up with her polls.”
Before I could respond, she barreled on: “Anyway, Daniel lives in Seattle now with someone named Brittany who does yoga and doesn’t believe in vaccines. Mom found her Instagram.”
“You stalked his new girlfriend?” Mario asked, and I couldn’t tell if he was amused or concerned.
“It was a moment of weakness. And wine. And June.”
“June helped you stalk?”
“June provided technical support and emotional validation. She’s very gifted at both.”
Mario laughed—not the polite chuckle he gave customers at the shop, but a real, genuine laugh that transformed his whole face. I’d done that. Made him laugh like that.
“For what it’s worth,” he said, still smiling, “Daniel’s an idiot. Any man who walks away from this”—he gestured at our chaos, the flour-covered disaster zone, Olivia’s crime scene cookie—“doesn’t deserve it.”
“Even the chaos?”
“Especially the chaos.”
Olivia looked between us with laser focus. “Are you having a moment? Because this feels like a moment, and I should probably document it for?—”
The oven timer shrieked, making us all jump.
“Saved by the bell,” I muttered, grabbing oven mitts. The mitts were patched, and a little singed from too many casseroles, but they were mine; they proved I was the kind of person who could make dinner for three and a fundraiser for a hundred and still remember to add cinnamon.
But as I pulled out the cookies—slightly lopsided, enthusiastically decorated, perfectly imperfect—I caught Mario helping Olivia clean up her workspace, teaching her Italian words for kitchen items. He pointed to a wooden spoon and said, “ cucchiaio ,” then mimed stirring with exaggerated seriousness.
Olivia repeated it with the solemnity of a small scholar.
My heart did something stupid and hopeful in my chest.
“Mario,” Olivia said suddenly, “are you allergic to responsibilities?”
He paused, considered. “No, piccola . I used to be allergic to standing still. But I’m getting better at it.”
“Good. Because Mom needs someone who won’t run away when things get hard. And I need someone who can reach the top shelf without causing a soup can avalanche.”
“Olivia—”
“What? I’m being practical. My Christmas list is very ambitious this year, and it requires adult assembly.” She turned to Mario. “Can you read instructions in multiple languages?”
“Yes?”
“Perfect. You’re hired.”
“For Christmas assembly?”
“For everything,” she said simply, then went back to her cookies like she hadn’t just offered him a permanent position in our lives.
Mario’s eyes found mine over her head, and something passed between us—a promise, maybe, or just the acknowledgment that this had become something neither of us planned.
For a beat, the kitchen felt like the only place in the world that mattered: the warm light, the mess, the imperfect chairs pulled close.
“Hey,” Olivia said suddenly, “the toilet’s making that weird noise again. It sounds like a ghost with digestive issues.”
“That’s very specific,” Mario said.
“I’m a specific person. Can you fix it?”
He looked at me, a question in his eyes. Not about the toilet—about all of it. About staying for toilet repairs and Christmas assembly and reaching high shelves and being here for the chaos and the cookies and the complicated, messy, beautiful life we’d built.
“The toolkit’s under the bathroom sink,” I said softly. The sink was in the tiny hall bathroom, where I kept an emergency roll of tape, a stray hair clip, and a tangle of Christmas lights from last year.
“Come on!” Olivia grabbed his hand, already pulling him toward the hallway. “I’ll tell you my theory about why it only makes the noise during emotional moments. I think our plumbing is psychic.”
As their voices faded down the hall—Olivia chattering about paranormal plumbing, Mario teaching her how to say “wrench” in Italian, chiave —I stood in my destroyed kitchen, surrounded by evidence of our evening.
There were flour handprints on the cabinets, sprinkles scattered like confetti, and cookies that looked like they’d been decorated by caffeinated squirrels.
My phone buzzed. June.
Sources report significant bonding over baked goods. Relationship status update?
I looked at the cookie Mario had decorated with Olivia—a pumpkin that somehow looked like a race car—and typed back.
Status: Complicated. Beautiful. Terrifying. Perfect.
June’s response was immediate.
That’s not a Facebook relationship option.
It should be.
I wrote back, then put my phone away and headed down the hall to see if my fake boyfriend and very real daughter needed help with our possibly psychic toilet.
This wasn’t the life I’d planned. It was so much better.
And scarier.
But mostly better.