Page 8 of Recipe for Rivals
Nova knew my name. Not really a surprise, since she’d had to describe me enough to get approval from Gigi. Or maybe Mrs. Jefferson had given me away at the market. Either way, something about it sent a flush of heat through me. But I needed to keep a strong wall between us. No recently divorced mother, no matter how hot she was, wanted a random stranger hitting on her.
I dropped my eyes to my burger and took another huge bite. Nothing was sure to signal I wasn’t interested more than eating like a sloppy pig.
She took the message and walked away. When I looked up and caught her daughter watching me from the counter, I winked.
Gigi frowned at me. A blush spread over the girl’s little cheeks, and she spun to face the counter. Apparently I had a knack for driving the women in their family away.
Maybe I needed to take a break from Gigi’s lunches for a while.
CHAPTER THREE
NOVA
The first dayof school arrived, and I was woefully unprepared to drop my kids off at a strange new place. We’d been in Arcadia Creek for over a week. They should have started days ago, but getting them registered took longer than it should have, no thanks to my irresponsibility in somehow leaving Alice’s birth certificate behind in New York and Carter’s snail pace in sending it to me. The extra few days did nothing to soothe my nervousness at leaving them with all new people and new rules and no one familiar to turn to if something went wrong.
The kids sat in our empty living room, bundling up in sweatshirts, scarves, and jackets to make the trek down the street to the elementary school. I stood at the kitchen counter in sweats and an oversized Neon Trees shirt that was more than a decade old, trying not to fret.
“PB&Js?” I asked, laying out the bread and spreading peanut butter over two slices.
“I want ham and cheese,” Ben said.
My smile twitched. “Then I’ll need to go back to the store.Can you eat a PB&J today and I’ll make sure we have what we need for ham and cheese tomorrow?”
He looked disappointed. “Can’t we take ham from the diner? Aunt Gigi has a lot.”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Boundaries. That’s not our kitchen or our food. Gigi has to pay for all of it, and she makes her money back when people buy meals. It wouldn’t be right.” I picked up the jar of strawberry jam and tried to open the lid, but it wasn’t budging.
“But she made me a ham and cheese yesterday.”
I moved to the sink and ran the lid under hot water. “Which was nice of her, but we can’t use the diner as our personal grocery store.”
“If shewantsus to, I don’t understand why we can’t,” Ben muttered before bending his neck to fasten the buttons on his jacket.
The jam lid still wasn’t budging. I hit it lightly on the counter a few times and tried again.
“I like PB&J,” Alice said, her head popping out of her sweatshirt. Her blonde hair was staticky, strands sticking out every which way.
“How do you feel about just PB?” I asked, straining against the lid with no movement. Would my children consider me unhinged if I chucked the jar on the floor just to watch it break open? Probably. Better set it down gently on the counter.
“Justpeanut butter?” Ben asked, affronted as if I had requested he disassemble his LEGO X-Wing and throw away all the black bricks.
“It’s all we have.” I gave the jam jar one last solid effort before returning it to the fridge in utter defeat. It needed to be out of my sight. I wasn’t a weak person, but looking at the jar hurt my feelings in a weird way, like the strawberry jam inside had meant to be unreachable. “I can’t get the jam open.”
Ben sighed. “Fine.”
My entire body slumped. It was unfair that I was half a country away, justified in my frustration with Carter—especially after it took himthree daysto send me Alice’s birth certificate—and still wishing with the smallest part of me he was around to open the jar of jam. The man wasn’t home much to open jars in the first place, which was why it felt so unfair to wish he was here. No, not him. Just his arms.
It’d been over a year since he’d come home from work and asked for the divorce, then promptly moved out. We’d signed the papers quickly, moved through the divorce proceedings while I was still trying to figure out what was going on. Even then, I knew I’d have to leave the apartment to him when it was all finalized—it was rent controlled and had been passed down to him from his grandmother.
Me? I couldn’t afford to stay in the city. I used most of the settlement money to buy a car and get myself and the kids to Texas, where Aunt Gigi offered to take us in until I figured out what I wanted to do.
Carter would’ve paid for half of the kids’ private school if we’d stayed, but that meant me coming up with the other half and I didn’t even have a job. It was never going to happen.
Now here I was in an apartment that smelled faintly of diner food, screwing up my kids’ lunches on a stressful day, and I couldn’t even open one stupid fetching jar of strawberry jam.