When I got home from Vivian’s it was only a little after four, so I was surprised to hear my dad’s jovial voice coming from the kitchen. “That is not funny!” he declared, but he was laughing as he said it.
In response, I heard both Anastasia and Juliette fly into wild peals of laughter. The mood was light and cheerful. At first it made me smile—as it would anyone, because good moods are generally contagious—but the smile quickly faded as I realized I’d not heard any of them sound so natural since I arrived. They were enjoying themselves like a happy family would. It was obviously a familiar tone for them, too—playfully teasing each other and enjoying one another’s presence. It was like that now because I hadn’t been there. Juliette was right. I was ruining their family.
I stood frozen in the doorway, unable to walk into kitchen and make my presence known. I didn’t want to be the thorn in everyone’s side, didn’t want to be the mood crusher. I didn’t want to ruin this family. Anastasia aside, they weren’t bad people. They deserved to be happy. The second they realized I was home, all the playfulness would stop. That thick, heavy blanket of awkwardness would return and settle over us all again like the inevitable, inescapable fate that it was.
I decided not to go in. I didn’t have anywhere to go, but I figured I could at least do my homework on the front porch or something for a while and give them a little bit of a break from me. They obviously needed it.
Before I could make my escape, Jennifer came around the corner and spotted me. Her eyes flashed, and it took her a second too long to put a smile on her face. “Back from your friend’s house already?”
“Something came up.”
“Everything all right?”
“Yeah, it’s fine.”
She hesitated but didn’t ask anything else.
“I can leave again if you want me to.”
Jennifer flinched when my words registered. “What?”
I pointed a thumb over my shoulder at the front door. “If you want me to stay away for a while, give you guys some time, I can do my homework on the porch or something.”
She actually looked conflicted for a moment before shaking her head. “Why would you say something so ridiculous?”
She sighed when I raised an eyebrow at her, calling her out. “I’m sorry, Ella. It’s not you. I just hate to see Anastasia having such a hard time. She’s been a different girl since you got here.”
Jennifer sounded as if she was asking for my sympathy, but Ana was being a baby. Everyone in the house was struggling with this arrangement. Ana needed to suck it up just like the rest of us were doing. “I don’t try to antagonize her.”
Jennifer let out a breath and sat down on the bench by the front door. She surprised me when she patted the space next to her. Warily, I sat down beside her and waited for her to speak. “My ex was not a nice man. He was abusive to the girls and me. I met Rich when he was doing some pro-bono work in Boston for a battered women’s shelter where I was living with the girls—hiding, actually, from their father.”
This news was startling. All these years I’d never had a clue how my dad met Jennifer. The way my mother talked about her, I always figured she was his waitress at Hooters or something.
But the story did sound very much like my dad. He was always trying to be the hero, always saving someone. He was so smart and got the best grades at one of the top law schools in the country. He could have been an amazing, highly-paid corporate lawyer, but he always wanted to help people. He was a public defender before he got his job as a state-appointed district attorney. Hearing Jennifer’s story, I could finally see why they were together. He was her heroic knight in shining armor, and she was his beautiful damsel in distress.
Dad was a modern-day Hercules, and it only made his abandonment hurt that much more. I’d always wondered how such a hero, who spent so much time helping others, could be the villain of my story. How could a man like that just walk away, leaving Mama and me on our own?
“Rich swooped into our lives like a guardian angel,” Jennifer said, pulling me from my thoughts. “He saved us, and we all fell in love with him. Ana, especially, has really grown close to him. She’s always been daddy’s little girl. I think she’s afraid you’re going to take her dad away from her.”
“I don’t think she has to worry about that,” I muttered, pulling myself to my feet. I didn’t want to hear any more of this. It was salt in my wounds. He had chosen to play the hero and be the best dad in the whole world. He had just chosen to do it for someone else’s family. I had to swallow back a sick feeling in my stomach.
Jennifer rose with me and set a hand on my arm. “No, she doesn’t,” she agreed. “Rich has room in his heart for you both, but Ana doesn’t know that yet.”
I doubted it, too.
“I’m sorry she’s been mean to you, Ella, and we’re putting a stop to that, but could you at least try to be nice to her, or talk to her sometimes?”
That made me angry and I pulled myself out of her grip. “I may defend myself when she forces me to, but I’m never just mean to her.”
“You’re never friendly, either.” I froze, shocked by the directness. Jennifer’s face softened into something desperate. “I know she doesn’t deserve it, but one of you girls is going to have to be the bigger person and be kind first. I hate to admit it, but from what I’ve seen of you, you’re the stronger one in that respect.” She gave me a watery smile that was equally sad and proud, and possibly even a little jealous. “You’re just like your father that way.”
I had no idea what to say to that. I didn’t even know how I felt about it. Did I like being compared to my father, or complimented by Jennifer, even if the compliments were given with a grain of grudging salt?
I sat back down again. This entire conversation blindsided me and I needed a minute to recover. I think Jennifer could see that because she patted my shoulder and went to join her family after saying, “When you’re ready, everyone’s in the kitchen trying to decide our dinner plans. Special night tonight, so we’re celebrating. You’d better not wait too long if you’d like to have any say in the matter.”
My heart sank. After that conversation, and what happened with Cinder earlier, I didn’t think I had it in me to make it through another family dinner debacle like the last one. I was trying to figure out if the cramps excuse would work in this house when I reached the kitchen.
As expected, the girls’ faces both fell and the laughter stopped immediately. My dad looked surprised, but seeing me didn’t kill his mood. His voice stayed chipper, his eyes bright. “You’re home early.”
“So are you.”
“Court adjourned. I decided to take the rest of the day off to celebrate.”
“I take it your case ended well?”
My dad puffed out his chest, and his grin broke out into a wide smile. “We nailed the bastard.”
I managed a smile for him. It was small, but at least it was sincere. “I’m glad.”
My dad had been on this particular case since before my accident, and his team had struggled, thanks to my dad having to spend so much time in Boston with me. I was really relieved he’d won his case—and not just because he’d been prosecuting a man accused of kidnapping and killing three girls.
“So, sweetheart, we’re going to dinner to celebrate, and we’re having some trouble agreeing.”
“Providence!” Juliette insisted.
“No,” Anastasia groaned. I think it was the first time I’d ever agreed with her on anything. “We did sushi last time.”
“How about Italian?” Dad suggested.
“No!” Jennifer cried, horrified. “Nowhere with breadsticks and white cream sauce the day before a shoot! You will kill me!”
My dad’s snicker made me think he’d only suggested Jennifer’s biggest food weakness just to rile her up.
“I want Mexican,” Anastasia said. “We never get to eat Mexican.”
“That’s because there aren’t any decent Mexican places around here,” Juliette argued.
“Gloria’s,” Anastasia replied, as if everything was settled.
“I said around here. Gloria’s is in Culver City. It would take us two hours to get there this time of day.”
“Mexican does sound good,” Dad chimed in, rubbing his belly. He smiled at me in a conspiratorial kind of way. “Though no restaurant will ever compare to your mother’s cooking.”
My blood froze in my veins at the mention of Mama. Dad didn’t seem to notice that he’d given me a heart attack. He was smiling at Anastasia and Juliette. “Ella’s mom was the most amazing cook in the world. If there was one thing I missed after we split, it was Lucinda’s green chili enchiladas.”
He may as well have shoved a butcher knife into my heart. Actually, that probably would have hurt less and healed faster. I sucked in a painful breath right about the same time Anastasia laughed and said, “Oh, burn!”
“Dad!” Juliette hissed.
It took him a minute to understand. I watched him go back over the conversation in his head, and then all the blood drained from his face. “Oh, no! Honey, no! That came out wrong. Of course I missed you, too.”
That had to be a lie. He couldn’t have thought of me all those years, because even now, with me standing right here, I’d still been nothing but an afterthought. Juliette had had to spell it out for him.
I was about to run for my room—Dr. Parish’s rules be damned—but when I whirled around my eyes locked with Juliette’s and I couldn’t leave. Juliette wasn’t making any kind of mean face—if anything, she felt bad for me—but just seeing her made me remember what she’d said. I couldn’t run away.
After a deep breath, I turned back around and forced myself to speak. I couldn’t say it was all right or that I was fine, because anyone would have heard the lies in my voice, so I chose to completely change the subject. “Would you like me to make enchiladas for you?”
The Easter Bunny could have come down the chimney armed with machine guns and opened fire on the house, and everyone would have been less surprised. Dad tugged at his ear as if it were playing tricks on him. “What?”
“I used to really enjoy cooking,” I explained awkwardly. “Mama taught me how to make her enchiladas suizas when I was twelve. If you’d like to have them for dinner, I can make them.”
The entire family was still so shocked that I felt stupid for making the offer. My face heated up from embarrassment and I quickly tried to backtrack. “I mean, if you guys want to go out for dinner, it’s fine. Do whatever you want. We probably don’t have everything we need to make them, anyway. I’m going to go change.”
My retreat set my dad and Jennifer into motion again. “I can go to the store and pick up whatever you need,” Jennifer blurted the second I moved to leave. Her whole body was shaking, as if she were having a hard time containing her excitement. “Trader Joe’s is right down the hill.”
I glanced at my dad, waiting for him to make the decision. He bit his lip and hesitated a second, but then quietly asked, “You would really make your mother’s enchiladas for us?”
I nodded, but then looked down at my right hand and shrugged. “I mean, one of you would have to do most of the cooking—I won’t be able to do much chopping or anything—but I can walk you through it.”
My dad started to smile, then pulled back his emotions into a neutral mask. Maybe he was afraid to make a big deal out of this and have me change my mind. “I’d like that,” he said, swallowing really hard. “I’d really like that a lot.”
Twenty minutes later, my dad and I were standing in the kitchen wearing matching pink and white polka-dotted aprons. Dad had pulled all the different ingredients out of the grocery bags and spread them out on the countertop as if we were starring in our own show for the Food Network. He was holding up a soup spoon and a dessert spoon from the utensil drawer with a giant frown on his face when Jennifer held up her phone and said, “Smile!”
Dad stepped next to me, puffed out his apron-clad chest, and grinned proudly. I smiled too, but probably looked really nervous because this was the first picture we’d taken together in over nine years. I was surprised after Jennifer snapped the shot how badly I wanted a copy of it. I felt too shy to ask Jennifer to text it to me, though, and hoped she might do it without me saying anything.
The second we were done posing, my dad went right back to staring at his spoons. “How do you know which one of these is a teaspoon?”
I shot Jennifer a look and she laughed. “No. I’m afraid he’s not kidding.”
“The key to good enchiladas suizas,” I said, taking the spoons from my father and placing an onion and knife in his hands instead, “is getting the sauce just right. It’s a delicate balance of cream and kick, which is why I will be measuring the ingredients, and you will do the chopping. If I remember correctly, the only thing you ever cooked was Froot Loops.”
Dad resigned himself to his place at the chopping board and sighed. “Yes, but you have to admit I had that dish mastered.”
“He still does.” Juliette plopped onto a barstool and checked out the scene in the kitchen with no small amount of curiosity. She smirked at my dad. “He just has to hide the evidence from Mom. She doesn’t allow ‘sugar’ cereal in the house, so he stashed his Froot Loops and Lucky Charms in the cupboard above the dryer in the laundry room and only eats them when she’s gone.”
“What?” Dad gasped. “I do not! How did you know about that?”
Juliette and I met each other’s eyes and both burst out laughing. Jennifer kissed the pout on my father’s face. “We all know about that, honey,” she teased, joining Juliette and me in our laughing fits. Soon, Dad was laughing, too. He laughed so hard the tears running down his cheeks might have been from crying and not just the onion he was chopping.
The mood stayed light as we continued to cook, and eventually Juliette asked what she could do to help. She freaked at the idea of cooking the chicken or frying up the tortillas—apparently as wary of the stove as my dad—so I put her to work grating the cheese.
Jennifer sat at the counter the whole time, but refused to lift a finger—something about having too many cooks in the kitchen. She was clearly enjoying having someone else do the cooking for once, though she eyed the butter, heavy cream, and cheese with a trepidation that made me laugh.
Dinner turned out to be a success. The food was great and the atmosphere was the lightest it had ever been since I’d come to the Coleman house. Even Anastasia ate her dinner without slinging a single insult in my direction.
My father scraped the last bite of his plate, then leaned back in his chair and groaned. “Ellamara, you are amazing. I think those were even better than your mother’s.”
Something inside me warmed at the first genuine compliment I’d received from my dad. Still, I had to shake my head. “Not even close. But Abuela showed me the secret to her sopaipillas before she died, and those I did manage to cook better than Mama. Maybe this Christmas we could…” My voice trailed off as I was hit with a crippling pang of grief. I brought my napkin—an actual cloth one—up to my eyes and muttered an awkward apology.
“What’s wrong with her?” Anastasia muttered.
Juliette tried to deflect Anastasia’s question by asking, “What’s a sopaipilla?”
Dad jumped on the life raft Juliette threw him. “The way her mother used to make them, they were like deep-fried pumpkin doughnuts dipped in maple syrup. They were delicious. We used to have them for breakfast every Christmas morning with hot chocolate. Ella was always more excited about the sopaipillas than she was about her presents.”
“It was tradition,” I whispered, falling into a lifetime of memories. “Last year was the first Christmas I ever missed them.”
“Well, you’ll just have to eat twice as many this Christmas to make up for it,” Dad said.
My head snapped up and I felt ridiculous when my eyes pooled with tears. “Really? We could make them on Christmas? That would be okay?”
“Of course.”
“Yeah, that definitely sounds like a tradition I could get behind,” Juliette said. “Usually all we eat for breakfast on Christmas morning is whatever chocolate we find in our stockings.”
The mood was saved, but still seemed fragile somehow. It probably had something to do with the way Anastasia was glowering into her lap. We all noticed, and were trying our best to ignore her, hoping she wouldn’t explode.
Dad tried to move the conversation along. “Abuela really told you the secret?”
I grinned. “You have to use chancaca instead of regular brown sugar. It’s hard to find, but makes all the difference in the world. I never did tell Mama what it was. Abuela made me pinkie swear. It was our secret. Drove Mama crazy.”
Dad laughed, and I smiled, too. It was so surreal to be sitting here reminiscing with him about Mama. When she died, I felt as if I couldn’t talk about her because I had no one to talk about her with. There was no one else in my life that knew her. But Dad had been married to her for over eight years. It’d been so long that I hardly ever made the mental connection that he was the man from my childhood memories.
“Abuela…,” Juliette said, pulling me from my daydream. “That means grandma, right? She’s your mom’s mom?”
I nodded.
“Does she live in Boston?”
I released a heavy breath. “She died when I was fourteen. Granpapa died when I was eleven and Mama was an only child, so it was just the two of us after Abuela passed. I didn’t have any other family.”
“Yes, you did,” Anastasia snapped. “You had a dad.”
My dad had been reaching for his glass and missed, spilling wine all over the tablecloth. Anastasia was too busy glaring at me to notice. “You’re not an orphan, Ella.”
“I never said I was,” I mumbled.
The good mood was officially gone. There would be no salvaging it. The only question was exactly how bad was the coming train wreck going to be? You never knew with Anastasia.
“How come you never told us about her?” Anastasia asked Dad suddenly. “We didn’t even know she existed until the police called after her accident.”
I hadn’t known that. I looked up for some kind of confirmation of this. My dad wouldn’t meet my eyes, so I glanced at Juliette. Her grimace said all I needed to know. Anastasia was telling the truth. He never told them he had a daughter. I really had been nothing to him.
I didn’t realize I was crying until I sniffled, and suddenly everyone’s eyes were on me. “I knew about you,” Jennifer whispered quietly. “He used to tell me stories about you when we first started dating.”
“Did he tell you he was still married when you started dating?” I asked the question sincerely. Not because I wanted to hurt anyone’s feelings, and not because I wanted to throw their mistakes in their faces, but because I needed to know.
Jennifer must have seen the desperation in my face, because she shut her eyes and nodded. “Yes.”
“How come you never told us about her?” Anastasia demanded again. “If you loved her so much and have all these fun memories of her, you’d think you would have mentioned her every now and then, or kept a picture of her around here somewhere.”
My dad couldn’t come up with an answer to this, so Anastasia turned her anger on me. “Why didn’t you ever call or send him your school pictures or anything?”
“Ana,” Dad pleaded.
His plea didn’t matter. Not to Anastasia, and not to me. I didn’t need him to fight my battles for me. I was so sick and tired of Ana twisting the knife in a wound that was painful enough without her help. I sat up as straight as my body would allow, squared my shoulders, and looked her in the eyes.
“I sent pictures, drawings, cards, and letters telling him how much I loved him and missed him and begged him to visit me for years. He was the one who never wrote me back or called. For the first few years all I got was the random birthday card or Christmas card, but even those stopped coming after a while, so I gave up. There’s only so much rejection a girl can handle before her pride takes over.”
Anastasia glared at me, but didn’t have a snarky reply. It was my dad who broke the silence. “I’m so sorry, baby.”
His voice was barely audible. I pretended not to hear it and glanced at Jennifer. “May I please be excused?”
Tears spilled from Jennifer’s eyes and rolled down her pale cheeks when she nodded.
The last thing I heard before I escaped to my room was Juliette shouting, “Are you happy now, Ana? You ruined everything!” and then stomping upstairs.