Page 67 of Never Your Valentine

Grant: I have strong positive feelings about soup

Annabelle: And I’m out of crackers. You know what to do

I bring three kinds of crackers to Annabelle’s. When I show her what I have, we agree that Ritz is the only acceptable cracker for soup. She lifts the lid and gives it a stir. The tangy scent of tomatoes mingles with the heartiness of carrots, potato, and onion. It smells like home.

“My mom makes soup like that.”

“Where do you think I got the recipe?”

“You’re kidding. That’s a family treasure.”

“June gave it to me, but I have your mom’s blessing. I’m going to call it Yooper soup, because who else would put chunks of bratwurst into vegetable soup?”

“Yooper Soup. Felix is going to kick himself for not thinking of that.”

Annabelle serves us each a large bowl and we squeeze around the edge of her kitchen table. Annabelle gives us each a craft beer from Upper Hand Brewery. She swears she bought it on a whim, but it pairs so well with the soup that it feels planned. The rest of the table is taken up with a label printer and oversized envelopes for her card business. We end up knee to knee. I don’t mind. I like having her close.

This kind of simple, hearty food is my favorite kind of winter dinner. I plow through my bowl and sip beer while Annabelle shows me sketches of new cards on her tablet. I try to guess the captions and fail every time.

I get a second bowl. “Thank you for cooking. This is so…neighborly of you.”

She holds up the box of crackers. “And neighborly of you, too.”

“Neighbors should take care of each other,” I say. “Like a buddy system for surviving February.”

“Very wise. You don’t abandon a buddy in the winter. People die.”

Crackers crumble in my fingers. “And when winter ends?”

“Then we stop doing this.” Annabelle holds a cracker to her lips as if hiding a smile. Her eyes cut to her bedroom door. “Or we don’t. We don’t have to decide now.”

“Good, because I like this,” I say. “The soup I mean. The soup, the crackers, the whole system.”

She nods slowly and touches the rim of her bowl. “You’re allowed to like things. You don’t have to push them away.”

I pull my bowl closer and circle it protectively with my arms.

“I’m serious.” She looks out the window at the blowing snow and then seems to decide something. “I know about your high school girlfriend and the football coach. I know how you were betrayed. I also know that it happened more than a decade ago and somehow it still hurts.”

I could ask who told her about Triss, but there’s no point. News travels in a small town, so of course it traveled to her. Annabelle only knows half the story because that’s all anyone knows, but even half of it is enough. That part doesn’t bother me. What bothers me is how wrong she is. She thinks I’m still carrying a grudge, but I buried that long ago. I’m actually grateful for Triss and what she did. Some people go their whole lives still believing in fairy tales. I got that out of my system early.

Annabelle puts her hand over mine. “You were young. Younger than you should have been to deal with that. Or not deal with it, which is ultimately what you decided on.”

I pull my hand away, pretending it’s to pick up my spoon, although my bowl is empty. “I’m not like you.”

“What do you mean?”

“You’re a good person and you deserve all the love the world has to give you. Me? Not so much.” I stand and gather the dishes. Annabelle doesn’t have a dishwasher so I run water in the sink and look for the dish soap.

“You don’t have to do that,” she says.

“You cooked,” I say. “I can hear my mom’s voice from here, scolding me if I don’t clean up.”

“You were raised right.”

“I was.” I check the water temperature. Not hot enough yet. I keep my back to her, consolidating dishes. “Nothing I did was my parents’ fault.”

“I don’t understand.”