Not that I could ever ask him.

Maybe you should put it on the menu, I typed.

Nothing.

I swallowed. Right. What was I doing, feeling sorry for Chef? Imagining we’d forged an intimate connection over green bean casserole. I was an idiot. The man was God. I flopped back on my pillow. Turned out the light.

My phone screen glowed softly, like a message from heaven. We could have used you tonight, March. I hope your mother is well. Happy Thanksgiving.

Simple words. They filled me, satisfied me like bread. I had purpose. I was appreciated. Valued.

Smiling, I typed, Happy Thanksgiving, Chef. I fell asleep holding the phone like a talisman that would take me back to my real life.

The next day, I had to put my phone on airplane mode for the flight to New York. So I missed the call from Meg.

It wasn’t until I was on the ground in LaGuardia that I saw her text: Mom back in hospital. Call me.

CHAPTER 6

Meg

Icould take care of this. I took a deep breath of cold air and knocked on Hannah Mullett’s door.

I was good at taking care of things. Helping people with their problems. That used to be my job, helping people who needed money, making the numbers work so they could get a loan, buy a car, start a business, everything in black and white. Now . . . Well. I didn’t see the solutions so clearly now. I shivered in the yellow porch light.

The moon shone over the skeletons of trees. Through the bare branches, against the twilight sky, I could see the pitched shadow of the old mule barn—our barn. The Mulletts’ trailer sat on Laurence land, near the edge of our property. Our mother did most of the farmwork herself. But even before Miss Hannah’s retirement—she had been the science teacher at Caswell Middle School—she crossed the fields to help our mother make and pack the cheese. After all, you couldn’t raise a family on a teacher’s pay, John always said. Not in North Carolina.

The door cracked and then swung wide.

“Meg.” Miss Hannah smiled in welcome. Beneath her cap of charcoal hair, her face was smooth and ageless. “It’s good to see you, honey. How’s your momma?”

I opened my mouth. My throat closed. To my horror, I couldn’t speak.

“Come in out of the cold.” She took my arm, drawing me across the threshold. “I’ll get us some coffee.”

I smelled like the barn. There was goat slobber on my jeans and the Lord only knew what on my sneakers. “I’m all dirty,” I said. “I can’t . . . I’m fine. I don’t need anything. Thanks.”

She gave me a look, like I was still in her seventh-grade science class. “You just set,” she said, and sat me down at her scrubbed wooden table while she bustled around the narrow galley kitchen.

And, oh, it felt so very good to be mothered. To sit as she laid out mugs and spoons, sugar and cream. Real cream, in a ceramic pitcher shaped like a cow. A hand-pieced quilt hung on one wall along with pictures of her kids: James, all serious in his naval uniform, and Daphne in her cap and gown, beaming at her Howard graduation. I remembered when they used to play in the barn with Amy.