Page 44 of With Stars in Her Eyes
“Sam, you didn’t cook this, did you?” Jeannie said warily.
“Rude,” Sam said.
“But… did you?” Nic asked when he returned to the room. He gave Sam a sidelong glance as he put the bottle of champagne on the counter. “Because I could also whip us up some—”
“Fine. No. Abbott was procrastination-cooking again.”
“Thank god.” Jeannie patted Sam’s arm. “Kiddo, you are a woman of many, many talents. You have two Ivy League degrees. You own a successful business.”
“And you still won’t eat my cooking?” Sam glared.
“I just feel like in my seventy-two years on the planet I’ve already done my share of suffering.”
Nic and I snorted in unison as we began to set out dishes.
The four plates were heaped with food, and we all sat around the dining table. Nic found champagne flutes in the cabinet.
“Abbott still hasn’t turned in that big paper?” I asked.
Nic poured Coca-Cola into my glass, knowing that there was absolutely no way I could drink even nonalcoholic champagne without my head making me regret it. He filled the other flutes without comment. It was nice to be around people who didn’t make me feel weird about this.
“To Courtney making us all cry like babies with her incredible, wonderful, fantastic—”
I coughed.
“To new beginnings,” Jeannie said with an uncharacteristic note of gravity in her voice.
“Hear, hear.” Sam clinked glasses with each of us and then downed half her glass. “He’s finishing it now.Thisis tort reform tater tot hot dish from during the day today. He made too much.” Steam curled up from my plate.
This might be the best thing I had ever tasted, or maybe I was just hungry as fuck and potatoes in any form were basically my love language.
Nic took a bite of his own. “This is delicious, but why didn’t Abbott make tort reformtorte?”
Sam shook her head. “We were out of cocoa powder.”
Nic chuckled.
“He’s using studying as an excuse, but I think he’s boycotting leaving the house because he says this much snow on the ground months after Christmas is against his religion, and he didn’t want to run out to the store.”
Jeannie twirled the melted cheese around her fork. “I think I like this better than the Spaghetti Habeus Corputtanesca.”
“That pun was a little bit of a stretch though.” I grimaced.
“He could’ve done better.” Sam nodded. “My favorite is still the Amicus Brie-f Bites, but I’m a sucker for figs.”
I shoveled food into my face at a rate that would have been pretty alarming to anyone except the people currently seated in my dining room. Every now and then I would drift from the conversation, my gaze returning to my cello. I tugged on the new earring and wished I could tell Thea how much our conversation today had meant to me.
CHAPTER 14Thea
The misty dawn light threaded through the enormous, snow-covered branches, casting long shadows on the small, empty lot beside the old church building. March was supposed to be going out like a lamb but the frigid air was definitely roaring rather than demurely bleating. My phone’s frozen screen burned my cheek as I tucked it beneath my beanie with my head crooked to the side. I peered through my camera, changing the angles of the shadows and light until the shot was exactly what I wanted. Shooting with film, especially discontinued, specialty film like I was using today, meant being careful with every exposure. Usually my mind was quiet in moments like these, my entire focus on whatever was in my viewfinder. But there was no silence to be had today because my mother had been talking for the last twenty minutes straight despite my attempts at saying goodbye—thus, the reason why my phone position was threatening to put a crick in my neck.
We were both natural early risers, so when I was still in Huntsville, we used to meet for coffee in the mornings after I was out taking photos. She would update me on all the gossip from her local clubs and the organizations she chaired before I gave her a short update on my life, as long as I didn’t include any topics that made her uncomfortable. I had always thought my mother’s biggest issue was the loneliness she refused to acknowledge, but Marshall was right. Since he pointed it out, I noticed that conversations with my mom did always make me feel more shunted to the side compared to my married siblings.
It was one thing to be the chronically single too-much-too-soongirl like I had been before making my texting rules or the girl it was easy to leave whenever the person I was dating wanted “something bigger/better/whatever.” It was another to be forced to sleep on a pull-out couch in the living room on vacations when the couples and their kids had rooms. Which was the current plan for the family vacation in April as I had predicted to Courtney.
Oh, Thea won’t mindhad become a constant thing in making every family plan.
But Ididmind. Moving here was supposed to be about breaking patterns. And next week I would be on the couch because even though there was an extra room in the beach house that was supposed to be mine, they needed a space for one of my sister’s toddlers who was having a tough time sleeping and my sister“won’t be able to relax unless the two kids have separate bedrooms.”
