Page 4 of Cooking Up My Comeback
“You considering applying anywhere else?” Jessica asks softly.
“I applied to a pizza place that uses frozen crusts and a chain seafood restaurant that serves shrimp in plastic martini glasses. Living the culinary dream.”
Hazel leans closer. “You ever consider opening your own place instead of settling for someone else’s broken dreams?”
I laugh, and it comes out sharper than intended. “I have three kids and about fourteen hundred dollars in my checking account, Hazel. What would I open it with? Hope and a prayer?”
“You have more than that,” Michelle says quietly. “You have skills that most people spend years trying to develop. You run a kitchen as though you were born to it.”
The compliments feel warm and terrifying at the same time. “I don’t even know where to start with something that big.”
“You already started,” Hazel says, leaning forward. “When you didn’t quit despite every reason to walk away. When you raised those kids while keeping that place running.”
The room goes quiet except for the distant sound ofwaves through Hazel’s open windows. I stare at the wine in my glass and feel the weight of their belief pressing against my chest as a challenge I’m not sure I’m ready to accept.
“It’s a nice dream,” I whisper, because admitting I want it feels like handing it the power to break my heart all over again.
“Then chase it,” Jessica says softly.
After book club, when I get home, the kids are asleep, and I pass a pile of clothes Mason has grown out of that I set aside last week. Luckily, I have some of Crew’s old clothes in the attic that I’ve been saving for exactly this purpose.
The attic remains hot and dusty, filled with boxes labeled in my own handwriting from different eras of my life. As I’m searching for the 5T boys’ clothes, I spot a box I haven’t opened in years, labeled simplyGrandma’s Kitchen.
Inside, wrapped in an old dish towel that still smells faintly of vanilla, sits a battered metal recipe tin—cream-colored with slightly rusted edges and flowers painted around the rim. My grandmother’s handwriting loops across each card in blue ink that’s faded but still legible.
Crab cakes with Old Bay and love. Gumbo thattakes all day and feeds a crowd. Lemon pie that made people propose marriage.
I sit on the attic steps and flip through them. The cards are stained and soft from decades of use, some splattered with evidence of successful experiments, others marked with little notes in the margins:Add more pepperorKids love this oneorPerfect for Sunday dinner.
They smell of old spices and warm kitchens and safety I haven’t felt in years. Grandma Pearl died right before everything fell apart with Chad—before the pregnancy grew heavy, before he grew distant, before that woman appeared in his life with suspicious timing that he swore meant nothing. After the divorce, when Mason was barely walking, I moved here with the kids to start over in the house that had always meant love.
I spent childhood summers here with Grandma Pearl, learning that cooking wasn’t simply about feeding people—it was about creating something that mattered, something that brought folks together around a table and made them feel as though they belonged somewhere.
And suddenly I’m crying. Quiet tears for everything I’ve lost and everything I’m too scared to reach for. But also for the possibility that maybe my dream didn’t die when my world fell apart with a baby on my hip and two other children to protect.
Maybe it’s simply been waiting up here in the attic,wrapped in dish towels and memories, for me to remember how to dream it again.
I don’t know if I’m brave enough to try.
TWO
BRETT
The building creaks like it’s trying to warn me off, but I’ve never been good at taking hints. I stand in the middle of what used to be a restaurant, boots planted on floorboards that sag under decades of neglect. My coffee’s gone cold, but I barely notice because this place—this broken, stubborn mess of a place—has potential written in every warped board and cracked window.
Paint curls off the window trim, and mice celebrate in the ceiling. I’m choosing not to investigate just yet.
But underneath all the decay, there’s a foundation worth saving. The kind that makes me run my palm over the scarred bar counter and think about structural integrity instead of whatever nonsense had me considering Sunday morning coffee earlier.
Jack and I had a good thing going for years.Vacation rental properties scattered along the coast—Charleston, Wilmington, and a handful of gems here around Emerald Isle and Twin Waves. We’d buy the run-down beach houses that everyone else walked away from, fix them up, and rent them to families who wanted that authentic coastal experience without the authentic coastal plumbing disasters.
But eighteen months ago, Jack had this pull toward Twin Waves that went deeper than property values. His daughter, Caroline, was struggling, and he took her back to Twin Waves to spend more time with her grandparents. It sounded like a good opportunity for growth, so I followed.
When he decided to start the campground and settle down here permanently, I stayed to help him transition our shared properties. I planned to stay a year, maybe two, before heading back to managing our Charleston investments. They practically run themselves anyway, steady income that lets me take on projects like this building that probably need more stubbornness than sense.
Then I made the mistake of eating breakfast at the Seaside Spoon three mornings a week and learned more than I wanted to about Mrs. Samuel’s window preferences and Bernice’s four decades in restaurant kitchens.
And I noticed things I shouldn’t have noticed. Like how some people handle every crisis with competencethat makes you forget why you stopped believing things could work out.
