“I know, I know,” says my mom, her voice tight and wet. She swipes at her eyes. “I just — it started like this, with Paige, and then she left. And then she left.”
I feel myself teetering on that same edge, the divide of my loyalty to her and my loyalty to Paige. Paige, who still hasn’t called or texted since our fight, a short time that still might be the longest silence between us we’ve ever had.
“She went to college,” I say carefully.
My mom lowers her chin and looks at me with red-rimmed eyes. I don’t know what to say.
“So, where were you?”
There’s no point in lying to her. “I was at Girl Cheesing. Jack’s grandma was in the hospital, and I just wanted to — to help out, is all.”
My mom is quiet for a moment. “Is she all right?”
“Yeah, she’s gonna be.” I prop my feet up on the coffee table, mirroring hers — mine socked, hers slippered. I can smell now that it’s hot chocolate in her mug, the kind we used to make with cinnamon and maple syrup.
She offers me a sip, and it’s like raising a white flag. I take it, and the taste of it is so comforting and familiar, it somehow makes me ache for my mom even though she’s sitting right here.
“I’ve been talking with your dad all day. And — and you’re right. I’ve been…” She smiles this grim smile. “I shouldn’t have pushed you into this. It was my business, not yours, and — I hate that you’ve been dragged into it like this, Pep. I really didn’t mean for it to escalate the way it did.”
“Yeah. About that.” I’m testing my luck here, maybe, but I have to know. “What exactly did Jack’s dad do to piss you off so much?”
To my surprise, my mom lets out a sharp laugh. “I should have known he’d tell you. Him or one of those kids of his.”
I shake my head. “They didn’t. I mean — I just figured, after that scene at Jack’s place.”
My mom eases into the couch, mulling it over for a moment like she might not tell me. “Well — aside from dumping me over the phone,” she says, “he’s not exactly innocent in this whole copycat thing.”
“So you did copy their grilled cheese.”
My mom doesn’t even seem one inch sorry about it. In fact, there’s a ghost of a smirk on her face. “How did you like those Kitchen Sink Macaroons?”
I furrow my brows at her.
“Those were all my doing,” she says. “As was ‘The Ron,’ which was one of their bestselling sandwiches. And a few of their other desserts that were mysteriously pulled off the menu when Sam figured out I was back in the city.”
“You didn’t know?”
“Oh, I knew.” Her gaze cuts to the side for a moment, like she’s half here and half somewhere else. “You know I never finished college, but what you don’t know is I had a good reason. I was going to open my own place. A café.”
She’s right. This is the first I’m ever hearing of it. It always sort of seemed like my parents didn’t have lives before Paige and I were born, so it never even occurred to me to ask.
“I’d always worked in cafés and restaurants growing up. But I spent the summer after my sophomore year in New York for a class and fell in love with the city, and decided that was where I wanted to start a place of my own.”
She smiles to herself, and I can see some reflection of the girl she must have been at twenty — stubborn and hopeful, a more concentrated version of the woman she is now.
“So I took a summer job at Girl Cheesing, to get in the swing of big-city small business. And even before I went back to Nashville, I started branding my own vision — the menu, the logo, the color schemes. I stayed in touch with people when the semester started back up again. Once I had some investors, I quit school and headed back to New York to find a space to rent.”
Something in my stomach drops, like I know where this is going before I can even form a picture of it in my mind. I can feel the ache of it before anything else.
“By then, Sam had already broken up with me. I decided to be civil, swing by and say hello. Well, imagine my surprise — Sam had taken over the deli from his mother and was hawking my Kitchen Sink Macaroons. Added my sandwiches to the menu. Even switched the Girl Cheesing branding to the same color purple I wanted for my own place.”
“He didn’t.”
She laughs. “Oh, he sure did.” The laugh tapers, her voice lowering. “The macaroons were such a hit that the entire city was talking about them, back then. And it sounds — ridiculous. But my stuff put Girl Cheesing back on the map so quickly that the biggest investor I had caught wind that a place was already doing what I wanted to do, and he backed out. Then so did the other two.”
I know the story ultimately has a happy end, because I am that story — but it doesn’t make me feel any less indignant, or any less upset about what must have happened next. “And you didn’t try again? Or even try to open a place in Nashville?”
She shakes her head. “I banked everything on the idea of New York. I didn’t have any money left. I started waiting tables again, thinking I’d go back to school, or try again … life happened a little faster than I thought it would.”
It’s strange, how quickly the path that led us here rearranges itself, now that I can see it through her eyes. All this time I thought we were in New York because my mom was looking for a fresh start. Only now am I starting to understand that she didn’t come here to find something — she came here to take it back. The dream she had before I even existed.
A dream that’s starting to take some form in me now, that I never knew we shared.
“It’s stupid. But being back here … seeing those stupid macaroons again, and seeing Sam…”
An immediate horror grips my chest. “You don’t — you and Jack’s dad aren’t—”
“No.” She looks genuinely repulsed at the idea. “Not on his life or mine.”
Good, I almost say. But I’m still not entirely sure where my mom stands on the Jack front right now.
She takes a sip of her hot chocolate then stares into her mug.
“I know your sister thinks this whole divorce was my fault, but you should know — it was a long time coming. That’s why your dad and I have had it a little easier than most with the transition. We were always better friends than we were ever going to be husband and wife.”
I can tell she’s telling me this because she doesn’t want me to think she ran off to New York for an old flame, but that part doesn’t matter to me. It’s just nice to hear for its own sake. It hurts — it probably always will, to some degree — but it helps too. Even if they weren’t in love, I never made up that we were a team.
“And that whole café thing — I didn’t know it at twenty, but I was better off for it in the end. What I was imagining would never have taken off the way Big League did. We built that together. You, me, your dad, Paige. Made something better than I could have ever made on my own.” She lets out a contented sigh and says the thing I didn’t realize I needed to hear most: “Even if it never got any bigger than that first little restaurant in Nashville, it was perfect, just the way it was.”
I steal her hot chocolate and take another sip, thinking of that old home away from home — the milkshakes we invented that are still on the menu. The drawings Paige and I made that are still framed on the walls. The beating heart that still pulses in all the Big League Burgers that have opened since. It may be bigger than we ever thought it would be, but I hope, at least, people walk in and feel the way they do at that first restaurant. Like they’re walking into something made with love.
“But after we got here, walking past the deli and seeing he was still selling some of my old stuff, pawning it off as his own — I don’t know.” She takes a moment to choose her words, like she is still not quite certain of the feeling behind them. “That feeling just came back. That anger.”