Sure enough, Lily came out a minute later with a fresh cookie in hand. Grace just shook her head.
“Why won’t Lo-wetta let me ride her, Aunt Tessa?”
“Because she was a working donkey, not a riding donkey, before she retired and came to live with me.”
“What’s a working donkey?”
“A donkey with a job.”
“What’s Lo-wetta’s job?”
Under her breath to Grace, Tessa muttered, “Oh, Lord. I’d forgotten the endless questions four-year-olds ask. Louder, she answered Lily, “Her job is to stand around looking like a donkey.”
“That isn’t a job.”
“Could you stand around and look like a donkey?” Tessa challenged.
Lily considered this. She settled the matter internally, the way she settled most matters, by simply moving on. “I want another cookie.”
“You’ve had enough cookies,” Grace responded.
“Two more cookies.”
“No.”
“Two and I won’t ask for a brownie.”
“That isn’t how negotiation works,” Grace declared, biting back a smile.
“It is at preschool.”
Tessa laughed. “Grace, Girlfriend, quit while you’re still losing.”
She held her ground, though, and when she threatened to take away Lily’s second cookie, Lily ate it without any further complaint. Grace never failed to be amazed at how early and well children understood the basic principles of capitalism.
Tessa accepted a cup of coffee and sipped it beside the work table in the kitchen while Grace finished prepping the next morning’s bread dough. They talked about everything and nothing, the way folks in Cobbler Cove did when they were spending casual time together.
They covered the weather and the latest news . . . technically gossip . . . from around town, went over how their kids were. Then Grace got Tessa talking about Dillon. She didn’t have to make any more conversation for a while as Tessa gushed about her fiancé and how wonderful he was with her eleven-year-old daughter, Makayla.
At least Tessa was willing to talk with her about her new man. The other WoWS women went all quiet and careful these days when the topic of love and marriage come up around her. Grace was the only one of the WoWS ladies not to have found love with someone new since the fire that took their husbands’ lives going on five years ago, now.
Sometimes that seemed so far in the past she could hardly remember a time when it hadn’t happened. Other times it felt as if the fire had happened last week. Those were the times when her emotions felt raw and exposed and agonizingly painful. Granted, she experienced those awful moments less and less with time’s passage, but the episodes of agonizing grief weren’t gone entirely.
Maybe they never would disappear altogether.
She was okay with that. Grief was just the heart’s way of loving someone after they left this world. Thankfully, she’d come to embrace her memories of Liam and the lifetime they’d spent together. She felt luckier than the other widows because she and Liam had loved each other since the first grade.
Granted, their childish love hadn’t matured into a romantic relationship for many years, but they’d been inseparable almost as long as she could remember. She had so many memories of him that she never lacked for something to think about. Every square inch of Cobbler Cove had some memory of him attached to it.
Sometimes the entire town felt to Grace like a living memorial to him. He always felt close by her, here.
Grace made all the right sounds of approval and excitement as Tessa told her about Makayla being asked to fiddle at a big concert at the Founder’s Day celebration in Apple Pie Creek next month, and how she was going to open for a major country music star. She really was pleased for her honorary niece. Makayla was an insanely talented violinist who’d discovered fiddling recently and taken to it like a fish to water.
But the familiar, oft repeated act of kneading soft biscuit dough, cutting it into little balls, rolling each one in butter, and placing three balls into each compartment of the muffin tins soothed Grace into an almost trance-like state of contentment.
This kitchen prep table and the work table at the far end of the long room where she arranged flowers where her happy places. She smiled as she worked and enjoyed listening to Tessa tell her about new plan she and Charlotte had come up with to grow their wedding dress company fast enough to keep up with the orders for gowns starting to pour in.
From her position at the prep table facing the front of the store, with the swinging door between the kitchen and front room propped open by Mary’s brick, she could see anyone enter or leave the store from here.
