“Course, she will,” he exclaimed, swiping frosting on her nose. “Mommy loves ginger, cinnamon, and chocolate, so ginger cinnamon cookies with chocolate frosting will be like Christmas come early.”
“Hmm, maybe. I don’t know.” She was so adorable with her chocolate nose all scrunched up in thought. “Mommy likes new stuff now, maybe she won’t.”
“Likes new stuff?” Rhodes said over my stiffening shoulders. “What do you mean?”
“New stuff,” she repeated like it was obvious. “Like now she likes playing with me, and reading me stories, and dancing with me—even though she’s really, really bad.”
It’ll always be your own kin that cuts you the deepest.
“She didn’t like that stuff before,” Lily said so matter-of-factly, it broke my heart. “So what if she doesn’t like cinnamon and ginger anymore either?”
In fact, I hated cinnamon and ginger. Having both together would be like having a spice shop throw up in my mouth, but damned if I wouldn’t scarf down every single one of those cookies like they were magic stay-young-and-beautiful-forever pills.
“She... uh... Mommy...” Even then, my stomach did a little flip at Rhodes’s cute panicked expression. “Mommy is... different now,” he confessed. “But it wasn’t that she didn’t like doing those things with you, baby girl, she just didn’t know how to be silly and relaxed and have fun.” Rhodes stopped icing and took her hand. “See, Lily, some parents don’t let their kids be kids. They don’t let them play, read fairy tales, or dance badly, so when they get older, they don’t know how to do that stuff with their kids because they’ve never done it before.”
“Is that what happened to Mommy?”
“Yes,” Rhodes said clearly.
I wished I could deny a word of that, or even voice a word to defend my parents, but Rhodes was spot-on. Actually, he was putting it nicely.
“But how come she can play with me now?”
He paused, considering that. “Because of Halmeoni.”
I frowned.What?
“Your grandmom only got to be Mommy’s mom for twenty-eight years, and in that whole time, they never got to have any fun together.”
“Really?” Lily whispered. “That’s so sad.”
Something broken and screaming in me went very, very quiet.
“It is sad. It’s even more sad because they’ll never get the chance to have fun together again.”
Lily’s mouth trembled—her little frosted nose wrinkling.
“But she doesn’t want it to be that way with you and her,” he said. “For as long as she’s your mommy, she wants to have lots of fun with you.” Rhodes wiped her cheek, catching a tear. “So, what do you say? Should we keep making the best frosted cinnamon ginger cookies ever?”
“Yeah.”
“Yeah?!” he cried, tickling her.
Bursting into giggles, she belted out, “Yeah!”
“All right!”
They high-fived—tears abated as the two of them went back to working on their little cheer-Mommy-up surprise.
I stepped out of the gloom, clearing my throat. “Hey, guys. What’s going on in here?”
“Mommy, no!” Lily dropped her spatula, dropping over the cookies to cover them. “Don’t look. You’re ruining the surprise.”
“A surprise? I am?” I clapped my hands over my eyes. “Oh no, I can’t ruin the surprise!” I ran into the fridge and bounced off. Spinning around, I ran the other way and bonked into the pantry.
If Lily wasn’t already on the countertop, she would’ve fallen on it laughing.
“That’s right. No peeking,” Rhodes said. “We’re going to hide these, because you don’t get to see them until after dinner.”
