The First Love Cookie Club

by Lori Wilde

“And they kept the baby you had with him and paid you a quarter of a million dollars to keep your mouth shut and go away.”

  Numbly, she nodded.

  “That’s called selling your baby, Raylene.” Earl shook his head.

  “I did it all for you, for us.”

  “You fucked Lance Dugan for me?”

  “I was drunk, in Vegas. I didn’t love Lance. We got married by Elvis, it wasn’t a real marriage. Besides, you’d broken up with me.”

  “Because you ran off to become a Dallas Cowboys cheerleader.”

  “It was a good opportunity.”

  “Yeah, for you to marry Lance Dugan in Vegas, get pregnant by him, then turn around and sell the man his own damn baby.”

  “I did not sell the baby.” Raylene sank her hands on her hips. “His family just paid me to go away.”

  “And you came back home to Twilight, never once told me you’d had a child with this man. In fact, you lied and claimed you made the quarter of a million dollars modeling in New York City.”

  Raylene hung her head. “I wanted you to have your dream of owning a bar. How was I to know that six months later, they’d find oil on your grand-daddy’s land and the Pringles would end up richer than God?”

  “You’re blaming this on me? I don’t want this damn bar anymore. It’s tainted with blood money. Goddammit, I’ll burn it to the ground.”

  “Don’t be stupid, Earl.”

  “Why not? You’ve played me for a fool one time too many.” Earl shook his head violently. “I knew when you became a Dallas Cowboys cheerleader that it would ruin us. I’ve put up with a lot from you Raylene, because I’ve loved you since I was six years old. But there’s only so much a man can take. This here’s a deal breaker.” He threw his arms up in the air.

  “Earl …” She stretched out her hand to him, but he stepped back, palms raised.

  “Don’t touch me, Ray.”

  “Please—“

  “If you’d just told me, we could have worked this out. That’s why I feel so betrayed. It’s because you’ve lied and hidden this from me. I’m supposed to be the one person who knows everything about you and now I find out I know nothing.”

  “You say that now, but what would you really have done if I’d come back to Twilight pregnant with Lance’s baby?”

  Earl plowed a work-roughened hand through his hair. How different he was from blue-blood Lance who’d been born with a platinum spoon in his mouth. “I would have been hurt, yeah. Andpissed off, but back then, I loved you more than life itself. I would have done anything to keep you.”

  “And now?” she asked, alarmed to hear the quiver in her voice.

  His eyes darkened. “Now? I don’t even know who you are anymore.”

  And with that, the first boy she’d ever kissed, the first man she’d ever made love to, her husband of thirty-five years, turned and walked out on her.

  “I thought you liked my daddy,” Jazzy said to Sarah on Christmas Eve.

  Sarah paused, wiped her hands on the corner of her apron. “I do. Very much.”

  “Then how come you’re moving back to New York?”

  Tread carefully. “Your mother came home.”

  Jazzy said nothing for the longest time. She just kept spooning kismet dough onto the cookie sheet. The air smelled warmly of cinnamon and vanilla and fragile expectations. “I don’t really remember her much,” Jazzy whispered.

  Those softly spoken words yanked at Sarah’s heartstrings. “Give it time. You’ll remember her and get to know her all over again.”

  Jazzy met her eyes. “I like you better.”

  “She’s your mom.”

  “She ran out on me and daddy just when we needed her most.” The child’s illness had made her wise beyond her tender years, but even so, Sarah realized she must have heard an adult speak those words. Maybe her Aunt Raylene?

  This moment was nothing more than an echo of the future. A future where Sarah didn’t belong. Had she ever really belonged anywhere? Yes, she’d belonged with Gram. But Gram was gone.

  “She came back though,” Sarah reminded her.

  Tears glistened in Jazzy’s eyes and it tore Sarah to pieces. She swallowed, put down the cookie sheet, squatted, and opened up her arms. Jazzy tumbled into them, the tears flowing down her cheeks. Sarah blinked hard, desperate to control her own tears. Breaking down in front of Jazzy would do neither of them any good. Later, when she was alone in bed, she’d sob her heart out over everything she could never have.

  How could she have fallen in love with this child so swiftly? How could it hurt so badly to let her go when Jazzy hadn’t ever been hers in the first place?

  She’d tried so hard to hold back her feelings. Struggled to stay neutral. Fought to detach from emotional commitment. How had she ended up so wretchedly involved with this girl and her father? What was she going to do without them in her life? How had they come to mean so very much to her in such a short time? It felt impossible. The enormity of her love. She kissed the top of Jazzy’s head and squeezed her tightly.

  “Don’t leave,” Jazzy begged. “Please don’t go.”

  Sarah’s emotions stabbed at her, a thicket of thorns, treacherous to navigate, impossible to deny—love, sorrow, regret, emptiness, and aching loneliness, always the loneliness.

  “It’s okay,” she whispered, cupping her palm to the back of Jazzy’s head. “It will be fine.”

  “It won’t,” Jazzy said viciously.

  “It feels like that now,” she said, trying to convince herself as much as Jazzy. “But time will pass and you’ll soon forget all about me.”

  “I won’t,” Jazzy insisted stubbornly. “I’ll never forget you. Not ever.”

  How had it gotten to this? She and Travis had thought they’d been so careful to avoid confusing or hurting Jazzy with their relationship. They’d failed. Quite miserably. Sarah had no idea what to say to her to make it all better.

  “Do you want me to tell you the legend of the kismet cookie again? The way my Gram told me?”

  Jazzy sniffled, wiped at her eyes, and nodded.

  Just as Sarah was finishing up the story, Jenny Cantrell popped into the kitchen. “Hey, it smells great in here. What are you making?”

  “Kismet cookies,” Jazzy said proudly. “If you put them under your pillow on Christmas Eve, you’ll dream of your true love.” She held a cookie out to Jenny. “Want one?”

  “Since I already married my true love, I’ll just eat the cookie instead of sleep with it,” Jenny said, and took a big bite.

  “Sarah,” Jazzy said, “can I be excused a minute, I hafta go to the bathroom.”

  “Sure.” Sarah smiled as Jazzy skipped from the kitchen.

  “She’s an adorable kid,” Jenny said. “I’m just so happy she’s finally getting well. The whole town’s been so worried about her.”

  A knock sounded at the back door and Jenny opened it to reveal Travis and Crystal standing on the back stoop. “Come in, come in,” she invited.

  Sarah told herself not to meet Travis’s eyes but she couldn’t help herself. She glanced over, saw him standing in the glow of the back porch light, and bam! Their gazes welded.

  “Is Jazzy ready to go?” Crystal asked.

  “She’s in the bathroom,” Sarah mumbled. “Let me just pack up some cookies for her.” She got out a Ziploc bag and stuffed it full of kismet cookies.

  Travis stepped across the threshold. Reached for the cookies. His fingers brushed against hers and she could tell it was no accident. “Thank you,” he murmured. “For doing this for her.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  Sarah stood there being oh so polite, squashing her emotions, when what she wanted to do was the exact opposite. She wanted to kiss him and tell him that she’d made a mistake, to choose her, love her, but of course she did not. She was trapped between wanting to follow her heart’s desire and doing the right thing. Nine years ago, she’d followed her heart and ended up bruised. Now she was not following it and sh
e was equally as battered. No matter what she did, it seemed like Sarah was destined to lose.

  Jazzy came back to the kitchen, said good-bye, and then they were gone, leaving Sarah wondering just how long it was going to take her to get over Travis this time.

  That night, Sarah fell asleep in the empty queen-sized bed, her heart an anchor in her chest. She curled on her side, brought her knees to her stomach, and hugged herself tight. How many times had she lain alone and isolated, secretly aching for that special someone to spend her life with? And just when she thought she’d found him, his ex-wife had blown back into town to reclaim her family.

  It wasn’t fair.

  She didn’t want to cry. She was tired of crying. Tired of wishing and hoping and praying for thingsthat could never be. She should just be happy for what she had, a writing career that was back on track, an agent who was her best friend, enough money to make life very comfortable, and her health. Those were worthy things many people did not have. It was greedy to expect more.

  After much tossing and turning, she finally fell asleep, and on the night before Christmas, Sarah dreamed the dream again. The one she hadn’t dreamed since her fifteenth Christmas. The foolish, sentimental dream that had caused her so much trouble.

  The kismet cookie dream where she was marrying Travis.

  Sarah jerked awake at the point in the dream where he kissed her. She lay breathing hard, her body covered in perspiration. She threw back the covers, swung her feet over the edge of the bed, and dropped her head in her hands. Why oh why had she had that stupid dream? She’d been in Twilight for almost three weeks and she hadn’t dreamed of Travis once. Until tonight. Until Christmas Eve.

  She glanced at the bedside clock. One a.m. Ugh. She reached for her pillow, intending on plumping it up, but when she pulled it to her chest, a trail of cookie crumbs fell over her sleep shirt.

  Kismet cookies. Underneath her pillow, and she hadn’t put them there.

  But who could have done so? At once she knew the answer.

  Jazzy.

  When the little girl made the excuse of going to the bathroom she must have slipped up to Sarah’s room and tucked the cookies under her pillow.

  Jazzy had wanted her to dream of her one true love. Why? Because she hoped it was her daddy? Or because she wanted to find a lover for Sarah so her daddy and mommy could get back together?

  In that moment, Sarah knew how to end her book. She threw back the covers, grabbed her computer, and began to write. Tears rolled down her cheeks; fat, salty tears that hit the laptop with a steady plop, plop, plop. How come the only place she could emote was on the page? Why couldn’t she express herself in person, in speech, with the heartfelt words that bubbled from her fingertips, through the keyboard, and onto the page?

  This then was her fate, spending Christmas alone, interpreting everything from afar, never belonging, never fitting in. Before Travis, she’d readily accepted her fate. Never really fought it or thought too much about it. She’d been happy enough. Or so she believed.

  But now she knew better. After knowing Jazzy and Travis and coming back to Twilight, she realized how much she’d been missing, how much she’d lost. How much she’d been holding herself back.

  By keeping herself isolated from others, she’d been trying to create clarity in her life. An inner knowing. She’d thought distance would give her a sense of peace born of detachment. But her mistake had been in identifying with her observation of her experiences, rather than the experiences themselves.

  You couldn’t dissect love and still feel it. Love was deep and vast and you couldn’t pull it apart, examine it, and still know it. You could only know it through experiencing it.

  It was a moment of pure insight.

  She couldn’t control who she loved. Love was messy and real and raw. The very things she’d always avoided. Except for the one Christmas Day nine years ago when the fifteen-year-old Sarah Collier had staked her claim on the man who was her destiny.

  Just down the road, in the cottage by the lake, Travis dreamed as fitfully as Sarah.

  Crystal was ensconced in the guest room; al-though she’d tried to use Christmas Eve as an excuse to slip into his bed, he’d firmly told her no. For his daughter’s sake, he was glad Crystal had returned, but he had no warm feelings left for her. She’d killed whatever attraction there had ever been between them when she’d abandoned their daughter. But she was trying to make an effort to reconnect with Jazzy, so he’d allowed her to stay in the house as long as she obeyed his ground rules and kept her hands to herself.

  After Crystal and Jazzy had gone to bed, he’d played Santa, stashing presents under the tree, filling stockings, taking two big bites out of the kismet cookies Jazzy had baked with Sarah and set out on a plate for Santa when she’d gotten home. When he thought of how kind it had been of Sarah to keep her date with his daughter, even after all that had come between them, he felt a deep sense of both gratitude and sadness.

  In his dream he was getting married again. He was standing at the altar dressed in a black tuxedo, waiting for his bride to come down the aisle on her father’s arm. His heart was pounding. Not withanxiety as it had been in real life when he’d married Crystal, but with thrilling excitement. He wanted this. More than he’d wanted anything other than Jazzy’s good health.

  Even though he was inside his body, he also felt as if he was outside himself, watching the dream unfold. It was like looking at a pristine scene inside a snow globe. A perfect Christmas Day, a perfect wedding. He was the groom. Jazzy was the flower girl in radiant good health.

  And down the aisle, on her father’s arm, walked the perfect bride. The love of Travis’s life.

  Sarah.

  Travis jerked awake, his body bathed in sweat, his covers tangled around his legs. He had his hand under his pillow and he had something soft and crumbly in his fingers. He pulled it out, blinked at it in the dark. A kismet cookie.

  Had Jazzy put it there? Did she want him to dream of Sarah?

  He sat up, dazed and confused. And then he heard a sound that chilled him to the bone and knew it was what had awakened him.

  The desperate wheezing gasps of his daughter in the throes of the worst asthma attack he’d ever heard.

  Sarah had just fallen asleep after finishing her book, when there was a knock at her bedroom door. She glanced at the clock. It was before dawn on Christmas morning.

  Groggily, she sat up. “Who is it?”

  “Sarah? It’s Raylene Pringle.”

  Raylene? What was she doing here at this time ofthe morning? Had something happened to Travis or Jazzy? Sarah tumbled out of bed and threw open the door.

  Raylene looked like hell. Her normally well-teased hair hung in strings around her face, her eyes were red-rimmed and puffy, her clothes were rumpled and stained.

  Alarmed, Sarah asked, “What is it?”

  “Jazzy. She’s in a bad way and it’s not just her asthma this time. Her heart’s involved. Congestive heart failure or something like that. They’ve got her on a ventilator. Honest to God, I think Dr. Adams is in over his head. He’s scrambling, Travis is freaking out, Crystal is a total mess, the gals from the cookie club are at the hospital chapel holding a prayer vigil. We need a calm head over there. Can you please come?”

  Before Raylene got the whole spiel out of her mouth, Sarah was already dressed and had her purse tucked under her arm. “Take me to Travis now.”

  “Dr. Adams, paging Dr. Adams,” came a voice over the intercom.

  Travis, who’d been pacing the hallway outside the ICU at Twilight General, swiveled his head looking for Jazzy’s doctor. Dr. Adams had been very worried that she’d had a severe reaction to the costly drug they’d been giving her. He’d left to go call a pediatric specialist in Fort Worth. Travis wondered if that’s who was paging him.

  He clenched his hands. He’d never felt so helpless in all his life. The ICU nurses had asked that only one parent at a time be in the room and Jazzyhad wanted Crystal to stay, so
even though it had practically killed him to leave her, he’d stepped outside.

  The pneumatic doors leading into the intensive care unit opened and the head nurse motioned to him. “Jazzy’s asking for you, and her mother asked me to give you this.” She handed him a piece of folded notebook paper.

  “Crystal isn’t with her?”

  The nurse shook her head. “She mumbled something about not being able to take it and headed down the fire stairs.”

  He unfolded the piece of paper and read the simple message scrawled there.

  I can’t handle this. I thought I could but I just can’t. Please forgive me.

  Fury whipped through him, quickly followed by sorrow. He wadded up the piece of paper, stuffed it in his pocket. How was he going to tell Jazzy that her mother had abandoned her yet again? Travis swallowed hard. Good. Fine. They’d never needed her anyway. Hunching his shoulders, Travis went back into Jazzy’s room.

  He stared at his daughter, her chest fluttering as she struggled to breathe. Her skin was the color of dumplings, her cheeks strikingly pink from the fever. Her delicate beauty broke his heart. He couldn’t lose her. He wouldn’t lose her. She was all he had.

  You have Sarah.

  No. No, he did not. He hadn’t forced Sarah’s hand. He’d agreed to give her some space. It was what she thought she wanted, but it wasn’t what she needed. When she had space, she withdrew.

  Travis smacked the palm of his hand hard against his forehead. God, he’d been such a fool to let Crystal back into his life.

  “Ass,” he muttered under his breath. He wanted to break something, smash it to smithereens—the expensive monitor mounted on the wall beside Jazzy’s bed, the cheap wooden chair a nurse had drawn up for him to sit in, the face of Dr. Adams, who looked so fucking helpless standing there in the doorway.

  It was all he could do not to grab the man by the lapel, shake him so hard his teeth rattled, and scream, Do something, dammit. Save my daughter. Fix her. Make her well, now.

  “Travis,” Dr. Adams murmured. “I am so, so sorry.”

  He knew then that in the pediatrician’s eyes, Jazzy wasn’t going to make it this time. Travis’s anger vanished and grief dropped him to his knees. He barely noticed Dr. Adams backing out of the room, closing the door, useless in the face of such helpless sorrow.