“My goodness,” Mom breathes a moment later, glancing at me in astonishment. “What in heaven’s name are those? They make me feel sort of…buzzy.” Mom picks up the note and reads it aloud again. “For courage.” She glances at me, and then together we stare at the glass jar of sprinkles in bewilderment.
“Any idea where they came from?” I ask a little nervously.
Mom narrows her eyes. “I wonder…” she murmurs.
I look at her expectantly. Mr. Butters looks at each of us in turn and wags his tail stub uncertainly.
“Sometimes the women in our family get a little…help…to make their visions come true,” Mom explains. “Help you can’t quite explain. The day I met your father, I wasn’t supposed to be working at the diner. I didn’t have a shift scheduled. But I got a call from my manager, asking me to cover for a colleague who couldn’t come in for the breakfast shift. When I got to work, everyone was surprised to see me. I found out that my manager had not made that call. No one at the diner had. But they were shorthanded that morning and grateful for the help, so I stayed on for the shift, and that’s when I met your father.” Her mouth curves into a soft smile at the memory.
“When I saw him for the first time, sitting there stirring cream into his coffee, I knew instantly who he was, and I knew I was staring at my future.” She stops, a little choked up. “We never did figure out who made that call, but it changed my life. It helped my vision come true. And then later, when we startedtalking seriously about opening the store, I received a letter in the mail one day. No return address. It just showed up on our doorstep. The only thing inside was a handwritten recipe for fudge.” She nods to a framed piece of yellowed and butter-spotted paper on the wall beside the door. It’s been there for as long as I can remember.
“Our family fudge recipe?” I ask in surprise.
She smiles in a conspiratorial way. “Someone’s fudge recipe,” she admits. “But wherever it came from, it’s the best fudge I’ve ever had in my life. We’ve been using that recipe for forty years now.” She glances at the framed letter and back to the jar of sprinkles. “I wonder if it is the same for you. I wonder if those sprinkles are going to help you somehow.”
“Are you saying you think these sprinkles are…magical?” I stare at her, astonished.
She shrugs. “Stranger things have happened, Emmie. What if they are? What if they can give you courage to pursue what feels to you like an impossible vision?”
I am tempted to dismiss her speculation as ridiculous, but then I remember the utter astonishment I felt at watching Henry Summers walk into our family fudge shop. Maybe it’s not so strange after all. Maybe I should expand my understanding of what could be possible. Maybe these little gold sprinkles will somehow give me courage to do what seems impossible. My own version of Gus’s courage sprinkles but infused with a touch of magic. Wouldn’t that be amazing?
The bell on the front door jingles, and Mom heads out front to greet our first customers of the day. Still feeling a little tingly, I set the glass container carefully on a shelf and square my shoulders. Somehow, I do feel more courageous. The impossible feels possible in a way I can’t explain. Maybe it’s the sprinkles. I canstill taste the delicate flavor on my tongue. I think of the sprinkles and imagine them atop a Rainier cherry truffle, and my mouth waters. Tonight I’m going to try my hand at a new chocolate idea and see what happens.
Buoyed by a newfound sense of anticipation, I head into the front of the shop to help Mom out, a spring in my step. Whatever the cause of this sudden burst of courage, I’m excited to see where it leads me.
* * *
“Henry went tocollege at a place called Exeter,” Dani tells me, giving the stool where she is perched a little twirl with her foot. “And his mom’s name is Edith.”
It’s early morning a few days after our tea with Henry. It’s still an hour before the shop opens, and Dani is fresh off a night shift and keeping me company. She’s brought me a hometown honey latte from Byrdie’s and is currently amusing herself googling Henry and relaying all the tidbits of information she finds while I finish up my last batch of fudge. It’s been three days and Henry hasn’t reached out. I’m beginning to get the sinking feeling he isn’t really interested. I must have misread his politeness as something more. It’s very disappointing, and I’m not sure what to do about it.
On a positive note, I’ve been working on my new Rainier cherry and vanilla buttercream truffle recipe every night after Gus is tucked into bed, and I’m finally satisfied with the results. I’m yawning my head off from the series of late nights, but happy. Creating a new chocolate flavor is a painstaking process of experimentation and repetition, trial and error. Taste testing, tweaking, trying it again. But the results are finally as delicious as I imagined them to be.
“His last girlfriend was a television producer. See, he likes blondes.” Dani holds the phone out to show me a photo from some charity gala. Henry has his arm wrapped around the waist of a curvy woman with a severe blond bob. She looks cool and professional. I swipe at my newly trimmed bangs, feeling intimidated.
“Even if he does like blondes, he hasn’t called,” I mutter distractedly as I stir a batch of rocky road fudge with a huge wooden paddle. I have to keep a close eye on the temperature of the copper kettle. No more scorched batches for me. I watch as the temperature reading on the thermometer climbs higher, stirring steadily. The constant stirring makes the fudge creamier. The mouthwatering aroma of melted chocolate and butter and cream wafts from the kettle. Making fudge doesn’t take a huge amount of creativity, just concentration and some strong biceps.
“His birthday is March fifteenth,” Dani says. “He’s thirty-seven years old.”
“You would make an excellent stalker if you weren’t an officer of the law,” I observe wryly.
Dani smirks at me. “Who says I can’t be both?” She breezily goes back to her Google search results about Henry.
At exactly 235 degrees, I snatch the kettle off the burner and carefully pour the liquid fudge onto the thick counter-height marble slab table in the middle of our kitchen.
“That smells good,” Mom says, coming through the kitchen door with Mr. Butters. She shakes the raindrops off her jacket and peels it off her slim form, then helps Mr. Butters out of his yellow doggy rain slicker. He has a matching yellow hat, but he hates it and has managed to scrape it off his blocky head so many times that Mom has given up on it. He squeezes out of the rain slicker like a sausage popping out of a cellophane wrapper andtrots off to his doggy bed in the storefront with a visible air of relief.
Dani and I exchange a look. “Your mom needs a hobby,” she mutters, and I nod in agreement. Dressing a dog can’t be the highlight of a satisfying life. It just can’t. Mom needs something more to nurture.
“Everything go okay at drop-off?” I ask, grunting a little at the weight of the kettle as I set it in the sink. “Gus was saying his stomach hurt again this morning.”
I came in early today to make fudge, so Dot picked up Mom and Gus. Mom stopped driving a few years ago due to her condition, so Dot often drops Gus off for me and gives Mom a ride to the store if I have to come in early. Gus has been reluctant about school this year, often saying his stomach hurts and coming up with increasingly far-fetched disaster scenarios that might befall him at school. I’m pretty sure it’s anxiety, but I’m not quite sure how to help him.
“What if an asteroid hits our school during lunch? What if a black hole opens up in the middle of the gym?” he asked me this morning as he picked at his oatmeal. I shook some of his favorite colorful sprinkles into his oatmeal for courage, and that seemed to help a little.
“He was quiet, but he seemed to be feeling better.” Mom peers over my shoulder at the large rectangular frame of narrow stainless steel bars sitting on the marble slab. The fudge is pooling within the frame of the bars, cooling slowly on the marble. The bars fit together to contain the liquid fudge as it cools, like a picture frame. I check the temperature again. It needs to cool more before it’s ready to be worked.
“Any news from Henry?” Mom asks hopefully. I shake my head. Mom looks disappointed. I am too. I thought he mightdrop by or at least text. So far, nothing. I keep thinking of our conversation, replaying it over and over. Aside from wondering if I misread his interest, the part that keeps sticking out to me is his comment about my chocolate making.
