The First Love Cookie Club (25 page)

Sarah’s pulse was pounding so hard she could feel it throbbing at her temples. She fisted her hands. She did not want to hear this.

Crystal completely dissolved. Tentatively, Sarah reached out and put a hand on the woman’s shoulder shaking hard with her sobs. “Shh, shh.”

For the longest time there was nothing but the sound of Crystal’s sorrow rolling off the walls. Then she sat up, scrubbing her face with the tissue. “I was so stupid. I’d left his crib near the window so he could look outside. I never dreamed he’d push out the screen and try to go across the thoroughfare to the park.”

In her mind’s eye Sarah could just see the little black-haired boy in the blue striped bunny shirt toddling toward his beloved swings, oblivious to the danger. She fisted her hand over her heart. This should never, ever happen to any mother.

“The paramedics did CPR and they got a pulse. They rushed him to the hospital, but his head injuries were too severe. He was put on a ventilator. They couldn’t stop his brain from swelling. For three days I sat and watched my baby struggle to live and then they told me he was brain dead.” Crystal’s face was a mask of pure horror. “They asked me if I would donate his organs so another baby could live. The vultures. They wanted to pick my baby’s bones clean.”

Poor Crystal had been nineteen, all alone, no family support, watching her child die. Sympathy swamped Sarah.

The wave of grief washed over Crystal again, but she was so wrung out of tears all she could do was rock and shake. “But. … but then I realized I couldn’t let another mother suffer like I was suffering if I could help her. So I signed the papers and they took him off life support and they cut him up. My sweet little baby boy. Don’t you see? That’s why I couldn’t get attached to Jazzy. I couldn’t love her the way I loved Shiloh or it would destroy me. Especially after she got sick. I could not go through that again. I could not do it.” Crystal wailed a long, keening note of pure sorrow.

Sarah came unglued. She was crying too and hugging Crystal and telling her it was going to be okay. That Jazzy was okay now that Crystal was here to make amends.

And as painful as it was for her, Sarah knew exactly what she had to do next.

The day before Christmas Eve, Travis met Sarah at the lawyer’s office to sign all the papers on the sale of the cottage. They were cordial. He thanked her and accepted the check. She thanked him. They made arrangements about the rent.

“Jazzy’s looking forward to making cookies with you tomorrow night,” he said.

“I asked Jenny and she said it’s fine to use the kitchen at the Merry Cherub if that’s okay with you.” Her face revealed no emotions. She was calm and detached as usual.

When he was a boy, his mother used to read him a story about an young Eskimo—yes, he knew the term was no longer politically correct, but the book was from another era—who got stranded on an ice floe. It broke off from the main chunk of ice where his family had been fishing and carried the boy out to sea. He still remembered the stark picture in the book with the stunned boy near his own age, floating away from everything he loved into the frosty blue waters, alone and isolated. Ithad made him feel cold and sad all the way to his bones.

As he looked at Sarah now, he felt the same way he’d felt when his mother had read him the story of the boy lost in the Arctic. Except Sarah was the Eskimo on the ice floe, floating away, a giant chasm of icy ocean stretching between them. Her arms were folded over her chest, her eyes narrowed, but her face expressionless as she pulled inside herself, drifted farther and farther away from him, and no matter how much he wanted her, he could never reach her.

Good. Good. Let her go. It would be easier this way. Saying good-bye.

So why the lonely ache building inside him, layer upon layer like brick mortar? Dammit, he couldn’t let her go without at least trying to scale that wall. She might have cut her hair, but Rapunzel had climbed back into her ivory tower.

He put out his hand, touched her arm, and felt her flinch. She might hide it in her face, but her body reacted. “Sarah,” he said hopefully. “Would you like to grab a cup of coffee?”

She shook her head. “I don’t think that would be a very good idea.”

“I still think we should talk about what happened between us in the hunter’s cabin. Leave Crystal and Jazzy out of it for a moment and let’s just talk about how we feel and if there’s a way—“

“Feelings change,” Sarah said. “You can’t rely on them to stay the same. That’s why you should never make decisions based on emotions.”

“It sounds logical, but it’s a really difficult thing to do. How do you simply turn off your feelings?”

“It’s not that I turn them off,” she said, “it’s just that I accept them as transient. They will change. Joy becomes sorrow. Love becomes hate. Anxiety becomes peace. Feelings are always bouncing back and forth.”

Had he imagined it? The love they’d shared in the cabin? Not just the physical love, but the emotional bonding. It had happened. He knew it. How could she so successfully turn it away?

“I want you to know I’m not closing the door on us. Just because Crystal is back doesn’t mean you and I can’t have some kind of relationship.”

In that moment, he saw it, the flicker of longing in her eyes. It disappeared in a flash, but he’d seen it. She was afraid. That’s what this was all about. The love she was feeling was so big she had no idea how to wrap her mind and heart around it.

Well, he had the patience of Job. He could wait her out.

After all, he was her destiny. She’d once told him so herself.

Raylene was wiping down the bar at the Horny Toad when Earl came through the door. He had a look on his face like a mule had gut-kicked him. His color was ashen, his eyes full of pain.

“Honey,” she said, coming around the bar toward him. Heart attack? she feared, and felt her own pulse rate speed up. “What’s wrong?”

Earl stared past her like she wasn’t there and glared at the only two customers in the bar at two in the afternoon. “Get on out of here you barflies!” He ran at them like he was chasing off cur dogs. “Go on, git. Shoo.”

“Earl?” Raylene was getting a real bad feeling about this. She’d never seen her husband act this way. Fear clenched her gut. “Earlie?”

“Shiiiittt, Earl,” drawled one of the drunks. “What’s eating you?”

Earl picked up a barstool. “You want me to smash this over your head, Micky? Do you?”

Micky held up both arms in a gesture of surrender and scooted back from the bar.

“Hit the road. You too, Snake,” Earl growled.

“I ain’t finished my beer,” Snake mumbled.

Earl smashed the stool over the bar. Everyone jumped and stared as the stool shattered. Earl wielded the broken bar stool leg at Snake like it was a Louisville Slugger. “I said get out of my bar.”

Snake looked impressed and hightailed it out the door right behind Micky.

Earl turned around, the broken leg still cocked over his shoulder like he was about to take a swing and hit something hard.

Raylene gulped and took a step back. She’d never seen her easygoing husband do anything like this. Ever. “Earl?”

His eyes were haunted, empty, like a zombie. “Is it true, Ray?”

Raylene saw that his hands were trembling and so were her own. In that minute, she knew that he’d found out. Probably that damn Crystal had gone blabbing. “Earl, let’s sit down—“

“Is it true? Did you sell your own child?”

“It wasn’t like that,” she whispered, feeling her marriage slipping away from her. In all honesty, this was why she’d never told him. Her terror of losing the only man she’d ever really loved.

The last bit of light vanished from her husband’s eyes. His shoulders sagged and he finally dropped the broken bar stool leg. “You did it.”

Raylene wrung her hands. “It sounds so bad when you say it like that.”

“Did you or did you not accept money for a child you had with Lance Dugan?”

She crossed her arms, uncrossed them, crossed them again. Distress ate a hole through her. “The money was from his family. They didn’t want their upper-crust son married to trailer trash like me. They had our Vegas wedding annulled.”

“And they kept the baby you had with him and paid you a quarter of a million dollars to keep your mouth shut and go away.”

Numbly, she nodded.

“That’s called selling your baby, Raylene.” Earl shook his head.

“I did it all for you, for us.”

“You fucked Lance Dugan for me?”

“I was drunk, in Vegas. I didn’t love Lance. We got married by Elvis, it wasn’t a real marriage. Besides, you’d broken up with me.”

“Because you ran off to become a Dallas Cowboys cheerleader.”

“It was a good opportunity.”

“Yeah, for you to marry Lance Dugan in Vegas, get pregnant by him, then turn around and sell the man his own damn baby.”

“I did not sell the baby.” Raylene sank her hands on her hips. “His family just paid me to go away.”

“And you came back home to Twilight, never once told me you’d had a child with this man. In fact, you lied and claimed you made the quarter of a million dollars modeling in New York City.”

Raylene hung her head. “I wanted you to have your dream of owning a bar. How was I to know that six months later, they’d find oil on your grand-daddy’s land and the Pringles would end up richer than God?”

“You’re blaming this on me? I don’t want this damn bar anymore. It’s tainted with blood money. Goddammit, I’ll burn it to the ground.”

“Don’t be stupid, Earl.”

“Why not? You’ve played me for a fool one time too many.” Earl shook his head violently. “I knew when you became a Dallas Cowboys cheerleader that it would ruin us. I’ve put up with a lot from you Raylene, because I’ve loved you since I was six years old. But there’s only so much a man can take. This here’s a deal breaker.” He threw his arms up in the air.

“Earl …” She stretched out her hand to him, but he stepped back, palms raised.

“Don’t touch me, Ray.”

“Please—“

“If you’d just told me, we could have worked this out. That’s why I feel so betrayed. It’s because you’ve lied and hidden this from me. I’m supposed to be the one person who knows everything about you and now I find out I know nothing.”

“You say that now, but what would you really have done if I’d come back to Twilight pregnant with Lance’s baby?”

Earl plowed a work-roughened hand through his hair. How different he was from blue-blood Lance who’d been born with a platinum spoon in his mouth. “I would have been hurt, yeah. Andpissed off, but back then, I loved you more than life itself. I would have done anything to keep you.”

“And now?” she asked, alarmed to hear the quiver in her voice.

His eyes darkened. “Now? I don’t even know who you are anymore.”

And with that, the first boy she’d ever kissed, the first man she’d ever made love to, her husband of thirty-five years, turned and walked out on her.

“I thought you liked my daddy,” Jazzy said to Sarah on Christmas Eve.

Sarah paused, wiped her hands on the corner of her apron. “I do. Very much.”

“Then how come you’re moving back to New York?”

Tread carefully.
“Your mother came home.”

Jazzy said nothing for the longest time. She just kept spooning kismet dough onto the cookie sheet. The air smelled warmly of cinnamon and vanilla and fragile expectations. “I don’t really remember her much,” Jazzy whispered.

Those softly spoken words yanked at Sarah’s heartstrings. “Give it time. You’ll remember her and get to know her all over again.”

Jazzy met her eyes. “I like you better.”

“She’s your mom.”

“She ran out on me and daddy just when we needed her most.” The child’s illness had made her wise beyond her tender years, but even so, Sarah realized she must have heard an adult speak those words. Maybe her Aunt Raylene?

This moment was nothing more than an echo of the future. A future where Sarah didn’t belong. Had she ever really belonged anywhere? Yes, she’d belonged with Gram. But Gram was gone.

“She came back though,” Sarah reminded her.

Tears glistened in Jazzy’s eyes and it tore Sarah to pieces. She swallowed, put down the cookie sheet, squatted, and opened up her arms. Jazzy tumbled into them, the tears flowing down her cheeks. Sarah blinked hard, desperate to control her own tears. Breaking down in front of Jazzy would do neither of them any good. Later, when she was alone in bed, she’d sob her heart out over everything she could never have.

How could she have fallen in love with this child so swiftly? How could it hurt so badly to let her go when Jazzy hadn’t ever been hers in the first place?

She’d tried so hard to hold back her feelings. Struggled to stay neutral. Fought to detach from emotional commitment. How had she ended up so wretchedly involved with this girl and her father? What was she going to do without them in her life? How had they come to mean so very much to her in such a short time? It felt impossible. The enormity of her love. She kissed the top of Jazzy’s head and squeezed her tightly.

“Don’t leave,” Jazzy begged. “Please don’t go.”

Sarah’s emotions stabbed at her, a thicket of thorns, treacherous to navigate, impossible to deny—love, sorrow, regret, emptiness, and aching loneliness, always the loneliness.

“It’s okay,” she whispered, cupping her palm to the back of Jazzy’s head. “It will be fine.”

“It won’t,” Jazzy said viciously.

“It feels like that now,” she said, trying to convince herself as much as Jazzy. “But time will pass and you’ll soon forget all about me.”

“I won’t,” Jazzy insisted stubbornly. “I’ll never forget you. Not ever.”

How had it gotten to this? She and Travis had thought they’d been so careful to avoid confusing or hurting Jazzy with their relationship. They’d failed. Quite miserably. Sarah had no idea what to say to her to make it all better.

“Do you want me to tell you the legend of the kismet cookie again? The way my Gram told me?”

Jazzy sniffled, wiped at her eyes, and nodded.

Just as Sarah was finishing up the story, Jenny Cantrell popped into the kitchen. “Hey, it smells great in here. What are you making?”

“Kismet cookies,” Jazzy said proudly. “If you put them under your pillow on Christmas Eve, you’ll dream of your true love.” She held a cookie out to Jenny. “Want one?”

“Since I already married my true love, I’ll just eat the cookie instead of sleep with it,” Jenny said, and took a big bite.

“Sarah,” Jazzy said, “can I be excused a minute, I hafta go to the bathroom.”

“Sure.” Sarah smiled as Jazzy skipped from the kitchen.

“She’s an adorable kid,” Jenny said. “I’m just so happy she’s finally getting well. The whole town’s been so worried about her.”

A knock sounded at the back door and Jenny opened it to reveal Travis and Crystal standing on the back stoop. “Come in, come in,” she invited.

Sarah told herself not to meet Travis’s eyes but she couldn’t help herself. She glanced over, saw him standing in the glow of the back porch light, and bam! Their gazes welded.

“Is Jazzy ready to go?” Crystal asked.

“She’s in the bathroom,” Sarah mumbled. “Let me just pack up some cookies for her.” She got out a Ziploc bag and stuffed it full of kismet cookies.

Travis stepped across the threshold. Reached for the cookies. His fingers brushed against hers and she could tell it was no accident. “Thank you,” he murmured. “For doing this for her.”

“You’re welcome.”

Sarah stood there being oh so polite, squashing her emotions, when what she wanted to do was the exact opposite. She wanted to kiss him and tell him that she’d made a mistake, to choose her, love her, but of course she did not. She was trapped between wanting to follow her heart’s desire and doing the right thing. Nine years ago, she’d followed her heart and ended up bruised. Now she was not following it and she was equally as battered. No matter what she did, it seemed like Sarah was destined to lose.

Jazzy came back to the kitchen, said good-bye, and then they were gone, leaving Sarah wondering just how long it was going to take her to get over Travis this time.

That night, Sarah fell asleep in the empty queen-sized bed, her heart an anchor in her chest. She curled on her side, brought her knees to her stomach, and hugged herself tight. How many times had she lain alone and isolated, secretly aching for that special someone to spend her life with? And just when she thought she’d found him, his ex-wife had blown back into town to reclaim her family.