LILA
Present time
I wake before the alarm and watch the thin blue at the window grow. The apartment’s too still. I slide out of bed and move through the kitchen in socked feet, careful around every creak. The box from last night sits where I left it, tucked deep in a cabinet behind a stack of sheet pans. I close the door, then open Marco’s and kneel so my mouth’s close to his ear.
“Holiday plan, Captain,” I whisper. “Grandma’s. Cinnamon rolls on demand.”
His eyes open slow and sweet. “Today?”
“Today.”
We keep the light soft and the pace quick. He eats a banana because I’ve put chocolate chips in his pancake. The two are a team, I say. I keep my tone bright while I fold clothes into his backpack, the one with sharks. The rest stays behind, lights, samples, anything that says where we’ve been. I don’t let myself look for the ruined toy.
In the bedroom, I swap our phones to low power mode and throw chargers into the tote. The bakery sign on the app saysClosed for Maintenance, then I text Ren a list.
Feed the starter, hold the pastry orders, keep the register drawer empty after noon.
He replies with a thumbs-up and a tiny panettone.
Maya pings with three hearts and aCall me if you need a kitchen-sink lawyer.
I send a kiss and a line that readsLaterand leave it at that.
We step into the hall with our bags. Outside, the stoop is crusted with last night’s snow, and the city feels muffled and half-watched, the way it gets on a winter morning before cars wake up.
The car service arrives on the dot. The driver greets us, packs the bags into the trunk, and takes his place behind the wheel. He turns on the radio, a New York call-in where hosts argue about last night’s game and callers complain about overnight BQE lane closures. Marco hums along, counting plows and garbage trucks through the window. I count blocks, then stops, then the seconds it takes for each light to change. None of it helps.
At the station, we blend with a hundred coats. I keep our tickets on my phone and the paper backups in my pocket. The board flips. The platform erupts into a buzz. We stand near a pillar so the cameras catch faces, not backs, if anyone pulls footage. A woman in a down coat offers Marco a candy cane. He accepts like a diplomat and tells her we’re going to see Grandma. She says that’s the best job he’ll ever have.
On the regional line north, we take two seats by the window. The city shrugs off its low buildings and gives way to warehouses, then brown marsh, then the flat white of fields. I watch our reflections every few minutes. A conductor with a dry voice clips our ticket. A man across the aisle eats a sandwich that smells like hard salami and stares at his phone. A girl with silver hair dozes against a backpack. Marco draws a snowman army in my notebook and asks if they’ll be cold. I tell him they’re on shifts and get cocoa breaks.
The skyline fades to a smear and then nothing, and a familiar ache opens under my ribs. Wrenleigh sits north and west and always feels farther than that. I grew up counting days until I could leave its cracked sidewalks and gossip loop. The winters crawl into your bones. The wind never learns your name. You learn it first. I was a girl who folded napkins at my mother’s counter and read old magazines until the images wore thin. I dreamed of photographs that would put me in rooms with chandeliers and people who saidPleaseinto microphones. The hunger to go was louder than the cold, and that’s why I left when the first door opened.
The train rocks. Marco asks how many cookies Grandma has already made. I tell him two dozen, maybe three, and his grin could power the carriage lights.
Marco falls asleep with his head on my thigh, hat askew. I adjust the scarf on his chest and let my hand settle there. The car’s warm, and the window throws a pale reflection of my face. The woman in it looks like she knows exactly what she is doing. She has a buzz of fear under her skin that keeps time with the rails.
We change to a smaller line, then a county bus that smells like damp coats and coffee. The driver wears a blaze-orange beanie and calls every passenger “Boss”. An older man in a Carharttjacket sits across from me and nods once. That is the handshake of this part of the state.
Marco opens his notebook, and a kid in a puffer jacket leans over to look. He shows Marco how to build a taller snowman. "Real shovels make the best snow,” he says, and they fall into a chat. Their chatter fills the aisle, light and unguarded.
Wrenleigh’s station is small. The platform heater rattles. The wooden bench is painted red. An older woman in Sorel boots crushes a cigarette under her heel and calls me honey like we never lost sight. The air smells like woodsmoke and frost, the exact mix that lived in my hair all through high school. I pull my scarf up and Marco’s hat down. He takes a breath that fogs the glass doors and says, “It smells like toast.” He is not wrong.
We walk the block to the bakery, dragging a rolling bag and a tote that holds half our life. The sign on the front window still readsHart’sin gold paint, a little chipped at the H. The bell chimes, and the room hits me—cinnamon, sugar, rising dough, the coffee grinder’s hum. The display case glows. My mother is behind the counter in her apron, sleeves pushed to her elbows, cheeks pink from the oven. She looks up, and the lines at her eyes become a different kind of line entirely.
“Look at you,” she says, already around the counter.
Marco breaks into a run. “Nonna!”
He hits her like a small storm, and she absorbs him, hands firm on his shoulders, kisses pressed to his hat and his forehead and then the place between his eyes. She smells like nutmeg and vanilla and the brand of hand cream she sends me to buy when I am in the city. She touches my face like it belongs to her andsays, “Too thin,” and then laughs because she always says it and we both know I’m fine.
“I like your hat,” she tells Marco.
“It has a pom-pom,” he reports.
“I see that.” She tugs it. “I’ve got hot chocolate. But you’ve got to tell me three things you saw on the train first.”
He launches into a list, which buys me a second to breathe and look around. The menu board has been rewritten by a busy hand. The scone basket wears a tea towel my aunt embroidered in 1989. Two old boys in the corner fold over a local paper and look at us over the top without pretending otherwise. Someone has left a knitted scarf on a chair back to claim it. The heat makes the window fog a little at the corners. I could draw a heart there and watch it fade.
