AllFreeNovel
Share Us
I laugh. “I’m still here.”
“I know,” Kylie giggles. “But like…Iknowyou. And I don’t know him.”
Kylie chatters happily while we make the cookie dough, but I only hear half of what she says. It drifts to David and the time he had with her before he was taken away far too soon. If she has any idea how much of him is in there, she would realize she had known him all along. But maybe, like I told Michelle, it’s not a bad thing that Kylie doesn’t remember him the way I do. It makes me sad because it’s where she came from. But Kylie is well-adjusted, happy, without the burden of grief. The memories shedoeshave of him are good. She’s not crippled by her memories, and that’s a good thing.
We roll the cookie dough into balls and press them flat with a fork. Kylie enjoys herself, creating different patterns on the cookies. When we finally put them in the oven, we both wash our hands.
“Come,” I say and she follows me to my room.
When I take an album from the shelf, it’s worn from flipping through it so often.
“Why don’t you have any of these on your phone?” Kylie asks.
I laugh. “Everything is online these days, but these are the photos I used to have around, the photos I like to hold in my hands. It just makes it a little more real, don’t you think?”
Kylie gives me a funny look. I know having a photo album is a little outdated, but it’s exactly as I said—I like holding the photos in my hand.
When I flip open the cover, my heart both constricts and expands. I feel like this every time I look at them.
We see photos of David and me, laughing together. We are very young in the first photos, taken just after we met. As we page, we grow older and more in love.
“Look! That’s me, right?” Kylie points at a photo where I’m in a hospital bed, holding a little pink baby. David looks down lovingly.
“That’s you,” I say with a smile. “You were the smallest little thing. And look at you now—larger than life.”
Kylie snorts at that.
“I mean, you have a big personality, sweetheart,” I say. “Just like your dad.”
“What else do I do that is like him?” She asks.
I sit back on the bed. She never tires of these stories, no matter how many times I tell her. “Let me see. You’re very inquisitive, always wanting to learn something new. You like being outside in the sunshine, and you always see the good in other people.”
“And I’m really creative, right?” Kylie asks. That hasn’t come up before. Her art is something she’s only recently dived into.
“You are, but daddy wasn’t into art. You get that part from me.”
Kylie shakes her head. “You never do art.”
“Not anymore. I used to.”
Kylie thinks about it for a second.
“You should do it again. We can do it together. Can we? Say yes, Mom, it will be fun.”
I nod. “I think that would be fun. We can try.”
The oven buzzer goes off and Kylie jumps up, the moment of nostalgia and reminiscence over. I close the album and put it back on my shelf. Sometimes, I wonder if I should take the photos out again and put them up around the house.
“Careful,” I say when I get to the kitchen and Kylie opens the oven. “Let me do that.”
I don oven mitts and take the cookies out of the oven, placing them on the stovetop.
“They’re hot. We’ll have to wait for them to cool down before we have them with some milk.”
Kylie pouts, but she knows how it works—this isn’t the first time we’ve baked cookies together.
While we wait for the cookies to cool down, I tell her to unpack her bag from Jenna’s house. I like her to be neat and tidy. Kylie is a bit messy, but as long as she keeps things relatively in order, we can figure it out.
