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It clangs on the linoleum tile, the hollow metal making a sound that finally cuts through her horrific singing and the music and the mixer and my own inappropriate thoughts.
She jumps and turns.
And then she screams.
Three
-Lola-
My nerves areat an all-time high today with opening day.
Last night, despite how exhausted I was from cleaning the grimy apartment I could finally move into last minute and moving all of my things from Sam’s to the new apartment above the bakery, I could not sleep.
Everything that could go wrong flashed every time I closed my eyes.
What if everyone hates what I’m selling?
What if no one shows up?
What iftoo manypeople show up?
What if I make someone sick?
And then it moved to a more generalized anxiety about my life.
What if Sam can’t handle it all?
What if there’s more that Dad hasn’t been telling us?
What if Lilah finds out everything we’ve been shielding her from all these years?
What if someone tells the press?
Then there was the outright strangeness of being somewhere new keeping me awake. Every creak, every blow of wind coming off the ocean, every shout outside from a tourist down on the boardwalk—it all had me on edge.
Suffice to say, I’m exhausted this morning, having only caught two hours or so of sleep by the time the sun came up.
But I would not let one little sleepless night ruin the first day I start to live my life forme.
The first day of New Lola.
The day I’ve been building up to for years and years, whether or not I realized it.
Libby’s started in the cookbook I found in a pile of my mom’s things my dad hid after she passed away.
The memories were too painful, he’d said. He lost the love of his life when my mom died, and with her went all sensibility and structure from the lives of my sister and me.
It turns out there was so much that Mom had hidden.
So many secrets.
So many promises.
But while my dad might not be the most honest, the most reliable, or the most fatherly, it can’t be said that he didn’t love my mom. He loved her more than anything on earth. An obsession, even. But do you know what happens when someone with an addictive personality loses his addiction?
It transfers to something else.
That’s what happened when his only tether to normalcy, the only tether keeping him from going too far, snapped.
