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That made me feel worse. I didn’t want to be treated the same way Johnny treated everyone else. I wanted to be…special.

“Later,” Carlos called after me, though I’d moved away without saying goodbye. “Don’t let it get to you, Emm!”

But I was. My coffee tasted bitter without the extra sugar and cream I normally added but had forgotten. My muffin, when I looked into the brown paper bag, had crumbled into bits. And I was late for work.

“All I said was hi,” I grumbled under my breath.

I thought about it all day long as I sat at my computer, entering data into spreadsheets, answering calls and emails. Putting out fires. Probably starting a few, too; I was too distracted to notice.

I’d ended up in banking by accident. I’d gone to Lebanon Valley College in my hometown so I could live at home and walk to school if I had to. Annville’s a tiny town bordered to the north and south with farms but blending east and west into the towns next to it. I was limited in my job choices within walking distance of my parents’ house. Pizza shop, gas station, movie theater…bank. The bank had the best hours, pay and benefits, and I didn’t have to rely on my parents to give me a ride. I’d worked there all throughout college and then after when my inability to drive limited me even more severely.

After a few years I’d advanced to bank manager. I liked my work. I liked numbers. I liked my new job, working for the Pennsylvania State Employee’s Credit Union, even better.

But not today.

Today I counted the minutes until I could go home and check the mail to see if my DVD of
Night of a Hundred Moons
had arrived. Unfortunately, the mailbox was empty yet again. My stomach sank like the
Lusitania.
I actually checked twice, as though a package could possibly be hiding in the shallow box somewhere out of sight. Then, disappointed, I let myself into my dark and chilly house.

I didn’t even have any calls on my answering machine, not that I ever had many. Most people who wanted to get in touch with me rang my cell if they tried at home and didn’t reach me. Apparently, today I wasn’t even popular enough for that.

I took a long, hot shower, head bent to let the steaming water pound down on my shoulders and back. Tension had twisted my muscles. I needed strong hands to unkink the knots. Sadly, unless I wanted to pay for it, I was out of luck. My skinned knees stung as I ran a razor over them.

So of course I was thinking about Johnny again.

What the hell was his problem? Okay, so I understood that it might be annoying to have random strangers compliment him on his cock. Even if he wasn’t ashamed of his art movie past, it
had
ended more than thirty years ago. I could respect him not wanting to live on the bragging rights of work he’d done so long ago, or off a body that had now aged. I could respect him not wanting to be worshipped for his looks. What I couldn’t get behind was him blowing me off like he’d never made me tea just the way I like it and offered me cookies. That was douchebaggery of the highest degree, and I didn’t want to believe he was a big bag of dicks. I was too much in crush for that.

Johnny could have no idea of the late-night movie marathon Jen and I’d had. He couldn’t know of the fugues and the dreams. And no matter how anyone else had ever behaved to him, I hadn’t. No matter what I’d thought or what had gone on in my subconscious, I hadn’t acted on it. I hated that he’d lumped me in with loony fans who stalked him in the Mocha. Hey, I hadn’t moved into my house to get closer to him, for fuck’s sake. We were neighbors.

My stomach rumbled at the memory of the cookies. What had he said? Homemade’s better? And wouldn’t it be neighborly of me to offer him some?

In a few minutes I had an array of baking materials spread on my kitchen island. I’d bought this house in part because of the kitchen, which the former owners had refurbished and updated—not in colors I liked or top-of-the-line appliances, but they’d added this island that doubled as workspace and eating area. I didn’t have a kitchen table.

I had all the ingredients. I even had mixing bowls and measuring cups. What I didn’t have was a recipe. Not a good one. Not the best one. I had pieces of it stored away in my Swiss-cheese brain, but I’d never actually baked my grandma’s chocolate chip cookies on my own.

My phone was already to my ear, my mom on autodial, when I realized I hadn’t spoken to her in about three days. Three. I couldn’t remember ever not speaking to my mom for more than two days or so in a row. If I didn’t call her, she called and left me messages until I called back.

She’d answered before I could contemplate this too much. “Hello?”

“Mom, it’s me. Emm,” I felt suddenly compelled to say, as though she had more than one daughter.

“Emmaline. Hi. What’s going on?”

She hadn’t asked me what was wrong. That was both a relief and a concern. “I need grandma’s chocolate chip cookie recipe.”

“You’re baking?”

“Well…yeah.” I laughed. “Why else would I need it?”

“I haven’t made cookies in forever,” my mom said.

I paused in shaking the bag of flour into the tin I hadn’t been using before. “Really? How come?”

“Well…your dad and I have been trying to cut back on sweets. Get ourselves in shape.”

“Oh.” I didn’t think anything of that. My mom put my dad on a diet a couple times a year and often vowed to do the same for herself, but both of them liked to eat and not exercise, a family trait I’d unfortunately inherited. “How’s that going?”

“Oh, you know your dad. He says he’s sticking with it, but I know he’s sneaking burgers and fries.”

“Maybe if you made him cookies once in a while he wouldn’t,” I offered, and we both giggled, knowing there was no way my dad would replace burgers and fries with cookies, no matter how good they were.

“I found it.” My mom sounded triumphant. “I stuck the paper in the back of that cookbook Aunt Min got for me a few Christmases ago.”

“Which one, the low-fat baking one?”

“Yes.”

“Mom, why would you put a chocolate chip cookie recipe in that cookbook?”

“Because,” my mom said as though I were a fool for even asking, “I knew I wouldn’t look for it there.”

We both laughed again. Nostalgia swept me. I’d spent so many evenings baking cookies with my mom, or rolling out crust for fruit pies and potpies. My mom was an excellent cook and had taught me well, but I hardly ever cooked for myself. I missed that. I missed her.

“Emm? You’re not getting a cold, are you? Or, God forbid, the flu? You should take that…what’s that stuff called, your cousin told me about it. Oscillating something. Like a fan.”

She meant oscillium. “I’m okay. What’s first?”

She didn’t follow up with that, and I paused again. My mom
never
just let something go. If she even had a hint that there might be something wrong with me, she shook it to death like a puppy with a stray sock.

“You have all the ingredients?”

“Yep.”

“Shortening?” My mom sounded suspicious. “Eggs?”

“Yes, Mother.”

“Because, Emmaline, you know you can’t make cookies without eggs.”

As once I’d tried. “You’ll never let me forget that, will you?”

“Never,” my mom said. I heard the smile in her voice. I heard the love.

I sniffled but put my hand over the mouthpiece of the phone so she wouldn’t hear. I didn’t want my mom to worry about me. Then again, I didn’t want her to not worry about me, either.

She walked me through the measuring and mixing as she kept me up-to-date with family gossip and stories about our neighbors. Her neighbors now, no longer mine. She told me about running into old school friends I hadn’t even spoken to in years aside from the casual Connex wall post.

“You spend more time with my old friends than I do,” I told her as I finished scooping the last blob of dough onto a baking stone and slid it into my embarrassingly clean oven. I licked the spoon.

“You’ll get salmonella,” my mother warned.

“How did you know?”

“I know you, Emmaline. I’m your mother. Oh, I have to go! My show’s about to come on. Bye, Emm. Love you.”

She hung up before I could even ask her what show she meant. The fact I had no idea proved all the more how much had changed since I’d left home. And that was a good thing, I reminded myself as I disconnected the call and set the timer on the oven. The last few months between my decision to take the job in Harrisburg and move out on my own and the day I’d moved had been horrible.

Most mothers and daughters I knew had weathered their share of arguments. Daughters had to grow away from their moms. To go to school. Move out. Become women. I’d become a woman under my mom’s watchful, too-protective eye, and had chafed at it even as I knew I had no choice. When my doctor had declared me seizure-free for more than a year and thus able to drive, instead of getting better, my mom’s concerns had grown worse. I didn’t blame her for them. I understood why she was so nervous. I’d been effectively disabled by the injury to my brain, and there was no cure. Only treatment. Only fingers crossed and prayers said. Only hope.

Even so, it had been unbearable living at home for those few months after I accepted the new job and before I was able to settle on and move into my house. She’d hovered, scolded and worried me nearly to madness. We’d fought harder and longer than we ever had during my adolescence. There’d been more than one night when I went to bed fuming and woke still angry, and I’m sure she felt the same way. She was afraid to let me go, and I was afraid of never being able to stand on my own. Now, here in the house I could only afford because of all the years I’d lived rent-free when my friends had been paying out to landlords, I wanted to call my mom back and tell her how sorry I was for being so snotty every time she’d worried about me.

Instead, I licked cookie dough straight off the spoon and dared salmonella to find me. It tasted extra good for being licked in defiance of everything my mom had ever told me, and because I knew I really shouldn’t eat cookie dough when my pants were already a little too snug. I was a rebel with a spoon.

By the time the cookies finished baking my kitchen smelled gorgeous and my stomach felt a little queasy. I sipped at some ginger ale and laid the cookies out on a pretty plate I’d picked up at the Salvation Army for a dime. It had roses on it and gold around the rim, and I could’ve sold it on eBay for a hundred times what I’d bought it for. It was another example of my thrift-store theory. I’d gone in looking specifically for house-wares to stock my new house and found an entire box of mismatched but complementary plates for ten cents apiece.

I had plenty of plates. I could give this one up. On the other hand, it was pretty enough that anyone who got a plateful of cookies on it might feel compelled to make sure he returned it to me.

I could be so sneaky sometimes.

Chapter 08

“H
i—” The rest of my sentence cut off as Johnny’s door opened and didn’t reveal Johnny.

The older woman stared at me for a long moment, a sour look on her face. When at last she spoke, it was with a shake of her head. “You here for him, I guess.”

“Um, Johnny Dellasandro?”

“That’s who lives here, ain’t?” Her thick Pennsylvania Dutch accent sounded out of place here in the “big city,” though I’d heard it plenty back home. “You’d better come in.”

I stepped over the threshold and wiped my boots carefully on the mat, not wanting to drip dirty snow water on his beautiful floors again. I held my chin and the plate of cookies high. I’d covered them with some festive red plastic wrap I’d bought reduced after Christmas.

The woman looked at them, then at me. “You made these for him?”

“I did. Is he here?”

“He likes chocolate chip cookies.” She smiled then, and it transformed her from grumpy gnome into beaming fairy godmother. “Come on back the hall,
wunst.
He’s upstairs doing something arty. I’ll get him for you.”

“Thanks.” My stomach in knots, I followed her to the kitchen.

She opened what in my house was a closet, but here turned out to be a set of back stairs, and hollered up them. “Johnny!”

Her voice echoed, but nobody answered. She looked at me, still standing in my buttoned-up coat, plate of cookies in my hands. She shrugged.

“Johnny Dellasandro!”

No answer. She sighed and heaved herself onto the bottom stair, which jutted out at a forty-five-degree angle from the staircase. She put her hand on the door frame and leaned out of sight, then screamed his name so loudly I took a step back.

“That’ll get him,” she said with a nod and a grin, and dusted her hands as though she’d just finished a particularly difficult task. “When he’s working it’s like his ears get filled with cotton.”

“I don’t want to disturb him.” He’d already made a practice of giving me the stink eye. If I took him away from his art, I could only imagine the reaction I’d get.

She flapped her hands. “Pshaw. He’s been working all day long. He needs a break. And some cookies from a pretty girl.”

I smiled. “I don’t want to interrupt, that’s all.”

We both turned at the thud of footsteps on the stairs. I saw his feet first, bare toes. My own toes curled. Then the hem of a pair of faded jeans, hem ragged. Then Johnny stepped onto the last step and paused in the doorway. He looked perplexed.