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And that’s the story of how I died of embarrassment in my mom’s kitchen.
* * *
A few nights later, as Ifinallygot everything in my living room and kitchen stored away neatly, I had the quiet realization that I wanted to be a better version of myself. Usually I had this realization around New Year’s, and usually it resulted in a gym membership that I regretted by February and had totally forgotten about by March. But for once, despite the advice of both Dr. Stephen FlorrisandDr. Miles Carruthers, this one wasn’t about eating right and exercising. This one was about the other stuff. The bigger stuff. I wanted to get my shit together.
I sat at the kitchen counter and made a list.
Return Peachblossom. Like actually do it this time.
Buy ingredients for cookies for Cookies with Santa.
Practice tap dancing with Mom so she crushes this recital.
Apologize to Cass.
Take Cass to Mon Ami.
I stared at five for a long time. I wanted to make things right with Cass. I wanted to make up for the way I’d treated him when we were teenagers, and every movie I’d ever seen had promised me that the way to do that was by making a big romantic gesture, like giving the guy his ideal date, even if it was at a subpar Christmas Valley restaurant that wouldn’t have known actual French cuisine if it hit it in the face.
Ruth the chicken regarded me from her new home on top of the refrigerator, and I couldn’t help smiling. We’d been dumb kids back then, but we’d been in love. We’d meant that part. And sure, it probably never would have worked out even if I hadn’t lied to him about college, and there wasn’t a single thing I would change about the path my life had taken—not when I had Ada and Em because of it—but I was sorry I’d hurt him. I was sorry I hadn’t been mature enough to trust him with the truth.
Mon Ami. I was definitely taking Cass to Mon Ami, and not necessarily because I wanted to start something with him again—I did, but that was beside the point—but because I wanted to close an ugly chapter of our lives so that we could, if webothwanted, start over. Maybe as friends, if we could finally unpack all our baggage from twenty years ago. Given that we’d unpacked all those boxes of odds ‘n’ ends while wasted on Kahlua, it seemed like we had a good shot. Or maybe as something more.
I’d been in love with Cassidy Sullivan when I was seventeen, and thinking of him now gave me bubbles in my bloodstream—the metaphorical, effervescent kind, not the real, immediately fatal kind—and it would have been so easy to fall in love with him again. The idea of loving Cassidy Sullivan felt like coming back to a house I’d once lived in. The wallpaper was new, the garden was different, and who the hell had thought it was a great idea to add a double garage and paint itthatcolor? But even though things were a bit different here and there, the foundations hadn’t changed.
I picked up my phone and called him.
“Fran?” He sounded half asleep, and I realized with a guilty start that it was almost midnight.
“Hey,” I said. “Sorry if I woke you.”
“Nah.” The word was strained, like he was stretching. “It’s okay. What’s up?”
“Dinner,” I blurted. “Not now, obviously. But on Friday. At Mon Ami.”
Silence, and then, “Was there a question in that, or did you just throw a bunch of words at me and hope I’d figure it out?”
“The second thing,” I said. “Cass, would you like to come to dinner with me on Friday at Mon Ami?”
“What?” He sounded confused, which I supposed was a step up from openly hostile. “Why?”
“Because you want to go,” I said, sounding more confident than I felt, “and because I want to take you. No strings or anything. We could just...see how it goes.”
“Huh.”
I made a face at Ruth the chicken and tried to keep my tone light. “Well, don’t soundtooexcited or anything.”
He laughed, like I’d hoped he would. “Yeah, okay. Why the hell not?”
“Awesome,” I said. “It’s a da—it’s a no strings dinner at Mon Ami!”
He laughed again. “See you on Friday, Fran. Goodnight.”
“Goodnight, Cass.” I ended the call with a stupid grin on my face, and those bubbles bursting in my bloodstream all over again.
* * *
By the next day, I still hadn’t made any progress on the rest of my list, but Mom, being Mom and knowing the human disaster that I was—and perhaps to atone for having inflicted me on the world in the first place—turned up in the afternoon with grocery bags full of ingredients for cookies.
