2. Jessica #2
"Mom." I put both hands flat on the table. My eyes were wet. My mouth was full. “Those are still the best thing I have ever had in my mouth. I am going to end up the size of a house if this keeps up, and I will happily take it."
Mom laughed — the warm, full kind that lifted her whole face. She looked across the kitchen at Dad and gave him the look — the one that said you see what I deal with. Dad's paper didn't move, but the corners were shaking.
"Always so dramatic, Jessica Lee."
“That’s me. Drama with a capital D.” And there it was.
Mid-roll, mid-groan of cinnamon-induced euphoria.
The accent. The full thing. Round and unhurried, falling out of me like a door I'd been holding shut had swung wide open.
The girl from Copper Creek had climbed back into my mouth without permission.
Mom's hand paused on the counter. Her back was to me, but I could see her shoulders shift — the tiny movement of a woman whose eyes had just filled and who wasn't going to turn around and show it. Dad lifted his paper a fraction higher.
Neither of them said a word. They just let me sit there sounding like their daughter again while the cinnamon roll melted on my tongue and I felt like a person instead of a performance for the first time in a very long time.
Main Street was shorter than I remembered. Or I was faster. Or ten years in a city measured in avenues had permanently distorted my sense of scale.
Dorothy Sullivan clocked me from across the street.
She was standing outside the pharmacy with her glasses perched on her nose, and she delivered a look over them that communicated everything.
I gave her my biggest smile and a wave that absolutely refused to acknowledge any of it. "Hi, Ms. Dorothy!"
Her glasses didn't move. Her mouth didn't move. But something flickered in her eyes — the smallest crack in the granite — and I caught it and filed it away.
Tom Morrison stopped me outside the hardware store. "Jessica Williams." He looked me up and down. "Heard you were back."
I nodded, smiled. ”Good to see you, Tom."
"New York treat you right?"
"It sure did."
He grunted. The grunt said figures and also never trusted that city and also welcome home, girl. "And now you're running the county's events calendar. Your Mom mentioned it. Twice." His mouth twitched. "Before breakfast."
"That sounds like Mom."
"You still steal pecans?"
My jaw dropped with an amused scoff. "I was thirteen years old! I have matured, Tom."
"Mmhm." He shook my hand — the walnut-cracking grip, same as it ever was. "Good to have you back, Jessica." And he walked into the store like the conversation had been a transaction, and the receipt was filed.
Three more people hugged me before I reached the end of the block. Copper Creek had decided I'd come home and was processing this at its own pace — warmth, suspicion, and an absolute refusal to be rushed about it.
I spotted the Tate & Hollis shingle halfway down the block and walked in on impulse.
I didn't know Callie well — we'd met properly for the first time at Sunday dinner two nights ago — but something about the woman with the reading glasses and the quiet voice and the calm, unhurried eyes in the center of the Blackwood tornado had made me want to come back for more.
Callie was behind her desk with her reading glasses on, a legal brief open in front of her, and an expression on her face that suggested the brief had personally offended her.
"Jessica." Her whole face lifted. "Please tell me you're here to rescue me."
"I was just saying hi. But you look like a woman in need of rescuing."
"I have been staring at this same brief for two hours.
" She pulled her glasses off and pressed her fingers into her eyes.
"Two hours. The words have stopped making sense.
I read the same paragraph four times, and I'm still not sure what it says.
I think it might be in Latin." She pushed back from the desk.
"I need tea.Hot. Scalding even. Dottie's.
Come with me. Please. If I stay in this office one more minute, I am going to staple something to something that does not need stapling. "
I arched a brow. "You drink hot tea?"
"I drink hot tea."
"We'll address that later. Let's go."
She grabbed her jacket off the back of her chair, and we were out the door and onto the sidewalk.
We clicked. Immediately. The way some women do — no warming up, no circling, no polite small talk that neither party cares about.
By the time we'd made it half a block, Callie was shaking her head and laughing.
"I need to tell you what you've done to my daughter."
"What did I do?"
"Those red shoes, Jessica. She’s obsessed.
She hasn’t stopped talking about them since Sunday night.
She told Clay at breakfast yesterday that your red shoes are better than Dorothy's ruby slippers.
Clay said Dorothy's slippers were magic and could take you home, and Maisie looked at him and said, 'Jessica's shoes are shinier, Daddy.
And Jessica doesn't need magic because she's already home. '"
My hand went to my chest. "She didn't say that."
"She said that. And then she told Clay she wants red shoes for her birthday. And she wants them to be tall like Jessica's. She is six. She wants heels. Clay looked at me across the table like a man watching his entire future flash before his eyes."
I was laughing so hard I had to grab Callie's arm to stay upright. "I will buy that child whatever shoes she wants. I will buy her ten pairs. Tell Clay I'm sorry, and also I'm not sorry at all."
"Oh, you're not sorry. You walked into that kitchen and ruined her for pink cowboy boots in one evening. That is a powerful gift and a terrible responsibility."
We were still laughing when we reached Dottie's.
The smell hit me the second I walked in — bacon grease and strong coffee and forty years of conversations that had started with "don't tell anyone, but" and ended up as public record by lunchtime.
The warmth of it wrapped around me like arms. I hadn't even sat down yet and my shoulders were already dropping.
I looked at Callie. She was smiling at me — warm, easy, the smile of a woman who understood what coming home felt like because she'd done it herself.
This. This was what I didn't know I'd been missing.