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“Addie!” Mom called as I walked through the door. “Oh no. Oh dear. Here, have a pumpkin creme muffin and sit.”
I guessed my distress was clear on my face. Or maybe it was just clear to mothers.
I sat at the end of the counter, watching my mother bustle around and wishing I had the energy she always seemed to have. She put a latte and a muffin in front of me and then stood, her perfectly manicured plump little hands on the counter in front of my plate. For some reason, I found myself staring at her hands.
They’d done so much in her lifetime. They’d done so much for me. Those hands had held me when I was a baby, had carried my sisters and me as children. They’d made countless treats and wiped innumerable tears from our cheeks. They’d hugged and loved, and helped for as long as I had known this woman, and for some reason staring at my mother’s hands now brought tears to my eyes.
“Oh, Addie, what is it?”
I put one of my hands atop my mother’s and looked at the difference. I’d done nothing in my life. I’d thought I was building some kind of empire of independence, modeling the new self-made woman, showing my small-town family what I could do. But my hands were smooth and unlined, and they revealed the folly in my thinking. My hands hadn’t smoothed away tears or held babies. They hadn’t made cookies for school bake sales or tied shoes on the ends of pudgy little legs. They’d typed and processed spreadsheets and dialed for takeout.
“Mom,” I whispered, and it was a broken sob that came from my lips as I realized the extent of my own failures, gazed behind me at the ignored opportunities, the scattered dreams I’d ignored. “I’ve done everything wrong.”
Mom covered my hand with her other one, shaking her head with tears standing in her own eyes. “Oh, my Addie, no. No, you haven’t.” She stepped around the counter and pulled me into her arms, and I buried my face in her familiar smell. The Aqua Net of her bob, the gardenia perfume she sprayed into the air and then shimmied through, the flour and sugar and cinnamon that made up her days. My heart broke wide open and I cried.
For what felt like hours, I sobbed into my mother’s apron like a child, Muffin Tin patrons no doubt avoiding the scene and hoping it might be over soon. But Mom didn’t say a word, she just held me close and let me cry.
And when I’d simmered down to sniffles, wiping at my face and recovering myself as best I could, Mom looked at me and said, “Let’s figure out what’s next.”
For the rest of the day, I stayed at the Tin. Mom and I worked side by side, and we didn’t actively talk about what it was I was going to do next. Instead, we cobbled together ideas percolated alongside pots of hot coffee and pieced together in the quiet moments between oven timers dinging and customers paying for muffins. And when I helped Mom close down the shop at the end of the day, somehow I had something that felt like a plan.
“So you’ll stay through Halloween, and then go back to the city,” she said. “Not because you owe anything to anyone, but because you have unfinished business there.”
I nodded, testing her words in my soul and finding that they felt right. I would have left earlier, but I felt like I owed it to Daniel to see the haunted house through, and maybe I owed it to Michael to let him know my plans.
He might not care where I went or what I did, but since we were still looped into the house together, he needed to know the plan.
I texted Michael that I was staying with Mom, and I didn’t go back to the house that night, or again until Wednesday evening, the following week. I arrived to find Michael hanging the porch swing in the fading light.
“Hi,” I said, feeling like an intruder as I stood on the front walk of what was technically my house.
He stopped what he was doing and turned to face me, and in the shadowed eaves, I could see emotions cross his face one by one. Surprise. Happiness. Regret. Distance. “Hi,” he said. He stepped toward me and then seemed to think better of it, remaining on the porch at the top of the steps.
“How are you?” I asked, then nodded at the swing without waiting for an answer. “That looks great. You made that?”
He glanced at it as if seeing it for the first time. “I did, yeah.” He didn’t add what I knew was true:for you.
“So, listen,” I began, but Michael spread his hands in front of him as if to stop my words.
“No, no, Addie. I owe you an apology.”
Oh God, no. I didn’t want that. I didn’t want to stand here and listen to him tell me why we couldn’t be together, how things would never work. “No, it’s fine. I just needed to tell you that I’m leaving.”
“You’re—oh. You’re leaving.” When he said the words, they sounded flat. Empty.
“Yeah,” I said. “So I’ll stay for the haunted house, to help out. And then I’m headed back to New York.” My stomach twisted as I said the words out loud. But this was the plan. It was only feeling wrong because Michael was here, looking so sad.
“Okay,” he said, and I wished for him to beg me not to go, though I’d known he wouldn’t do that. He didn’t need me here, and I wasn’t part of his plan any more than he was part of mine. What we’d had was...wonderful. Magical. But that was only because it had been a fantasy.
“And with the house,” I began.
“I’ll just finish things up. Get it painted.”
“Right.” I felt uncomfortable, like I didn’t belong here at all. “And so you can finish up your six months, and then I’ll live here for three months after you move out. We can sell it after that.”
“You’re coming back?”
“I’ll have to, right?”
