My phone rings immediately.
“What do you mean you can’t make it?” Eliza’s voice carries a now-familiar note of irritation.
“I tried to bake cookies. They’re inedible. I have nothing to contribute to a cookie exchange.”
“So help me bake mine, and I’ll share.”
I glance around my kitchen, where evidently a flour bomb exploded. “I don’t think I’m qualified to help anyone bake anything.”
“Reed Saint Nicholas, get your ass over here. I’m making shortbread, and I need someone to knead the dough.”
The line goes dead before I can argue—again—that my middle name is not Saint.
Paolo raises his brows as Kash pats me on the back. “This is promising,” Kash says. “I think she likes you.”
I shake my head, scraping cookie detritus into my trashcan. “Her sisters invited me, and she’s beholden.”
“Beholden?” Vick arches a dark brow. “She invited you to her house, man.”
Paolo holds up a finger. “Commanded you to go.”
“Best not keep her waiting.” Kash shoves me toward the door, and Paolo tosses my car keys. “We’ll lock up here.”
Eliza opens her door wearing an apron covered in embroidered farm animals. Flour streaks her cheek, and her dark hair is twisted up with a pencil.
“You came,” she says, stepping aside to let me in.
“You commanded me to.”
“I invited you.” She smiles. “Okay, it was a command.” Eliza leads me toward the kitchen, which smells of vanilla and butter and everything my kitchen failed to achieve. “Hit me with your best ideas to assembly line this.”
Her kitchen is nothing like mine. Mismatched mixing bowls crowd the counter next to containers of ingredients that don’t match anything else. A stand mixer that probably dates from the Carter administration whirs in the corner. Mason jars full of flour and sugar sit next to a ceramic cookie jar shaped like a pig.
“This is my grandmother’s recipe.” She hands me an apron that reads ‘Kiss the Cook’ in faded letters. “Esther says so, anyway. I don’t think any of us met her.”
I tie the apron strings, hyperaware of the irony of the message across my chest. “What happened to your grandmother?”
“Mom burned those bridges before I was born.” Eliza pulls a chunk of golden dough from her refrigerator. “So we’re doing animal shapes, and I think we need twenty-four pointy ears for cats, pink noses for all of them, and I’m not sure how many brown ears for the cows and dogs.”
I glance at the few already-shaped cookies lined on parchment paper on the counter. “You made those by hand?” I watch as she transfers the completed cookies to a baking sheet.
“Yeah, and now my fingers are cramped.” She hands me a lump of cold dough. “Your job is to work with the orange food coloring and then make me twenty-four tiny triangles. Got it?”
I resist the urge to ask her if they should be isosceles and start poking the dough with my finger. “I can follow directions.”
“Good.” She grips my bicep and then squeezes it before moving to a bowl of cocoa powder. Heat radiates along my arm where her hand made contact with my sweater.
“Where do you want me?” I ask, then immediately wish I’d phrased that differently.
Eliza’s eyes meet mine for a split second before she looks away. “Counter’s fine. Just get it nice and even.”
For the next hour, we work in a comfortable rhythm as Frank Sinatra croons from an old record player in her living room. I pinch dough into triangles, not caring that my skin dyes orange from the gel.
“These are supposed to be frogs,” Eliza says, holding up a lump of green dough she stained with matcha powder.
“They look like Christmas trees to me.”
“Reed, they have four legs.”
