Page 2 of Forever Full Circle
The girls traded glances, then took off at a sprint, their arms windmilling. Bailey’s shriek carried up the path, “Ice cream for breakfast!”
Chantelle countered, “Nerf war in the back garden!”
Emily shook her head, smiling. But an ideahadtaken root. She remembered first reading the journal, how she’d cross-referenced the names with property records and census lists, and it had hit her: the inn was just past a hundred twenty-five years old. She could make something of that. Not just any old party, but anevent.
“What about a birthday party for the inn?” she asked. Charlotte burbled, as if sensing the uptick in her mother’s heartbeat.
“Yeah!” Chantelle said. “Can we have, like, a gigantic cake?”
Just inside the kitchen in the upstairs family suite at the inn, Emily set down the diaper bag and took out her phone. There was a text from Daniel, timestamped an hour ago.
Hey, beautiful. How’s the beach?
Emily typed.I'm so sorry, the ringer was off. Charlotte was napping. It was great. We're back for lunch. Join us?She added a smiley face.
He responded within minutes.Training the new guy today. No dice for now.
Emily imagined her husband in the back office at his Sunset Harbor woodshop, Roy standing over his shoulder, both Daniel and her father explaining blueprints to Jesse, their new apprentice. He was a sweet kid, but a definite newbie to the custom woodworking profession. Soon, though, the idea was that he could take over basic tasks at the shop to free Daniel up a bit.
Another text arrived:Miss you lots, though. All my girls.
She smiled, one hand on Charlotte’s back, feeling the soft rise and fall. The baby had fallen asleep again. The heat had taken it out of her, apparently.
The girls tumbled into the kitchen from their beeline to Chantelle’s room. Emily almost asked where the pail of crabs had gone, but just secretly hoped they had been left on the back porch.
“What’s for lunch?” Chantelle asked.
Emily pointed to the kitchen sink, and Bailey and Chantelle dutifully went to wash their hands. “Sandwiches and carrot sticks. Bailey, you like turkey?”
Bailey nodded. “Can we have pudding after?”
Chantelle grinned. “I told her you made banana pudding.”
“If you eat your sandwiches, sure,” Emily agreed.
Inside the kitchen, sunlight struck the counter in oblong streaks, falling across the breakfast bowls that Emily hadn’tcleared before leaving for the beach. She shooed Bailey and Chantelle toward the table as Charlotte stirred again. The girls sat, limbs still sandy, debating whose crab had been the more “mutant” specimen.
Charlotte began to squirm in Emily’s arms, twisting her whole torso in the direction of the open fridge.
“Oh, you’re starving too, huh?” Emily murmured. She kissed the soft patch behind Charlotte’s ear—the only place guaranteed to smell clean, no matter how many times the baby had smeared banana across her face that day—then set her into the high chair. It was a newer model, all white composite and wipeable cushions, but the safety buckle had begun to fray at one corner; she added that to the mental to-do list.
She handed Charlotte a cold ring teether and watched as her daughter mashed it, fist to mouth, eyes never leaving Emily for more than a few seconds. It was moments like this—two kids, one baby, the start of summer, an inn to run, and the joy of being so needed—that she felt most alive, if a little ground down.
“So, we do have turkey. But we could do turkeyorPB&J,” she called to the table.
“PB&J but with the crusts off, please,” Bailey said. “And extra jam if possible. Like, a lot. Please.”
“Same for me, but with honey on the peanut butter, and can I have carrot sticks and not the baby ones, but the big ones, cut into, like, sticks, not circles?” Chantelle said, then immediately: “Can we do the party?”
Emily sliced bread and let the last question linger, feigning deliberation while she admired the girls’ ability to slide so smoothly from detailed lunch orders to remembering Emily’s idea from the walk up. “You like the idea of a birthday party for the inn?”
Chantelle grinned, her gap-tooth smile still unfamiliar to Emily, who sometimes half-expected her daughter’s lost babyteeth to reappear overnight. “You said it. But you didn’t say yes about the big cake.”
Emily lined up the sandwiches, moving with her usual kitchen efficiency. “It’s a big occasion. And I think we can make it fun for everyone, not just the history nerds.”
Bailey shrugged. "History is fine, but cake is better."
“That’s so true. We can have a big, big cake.” Emily plated the sandwiches as the girls cheered, added a pile of carrot sticks—cut just so—and set everything on the table, then poured the girls each a glass of lemonade from the pitcher at the back of the fridge. The lemonade was store-bought, not fresh, and had the artificial tang of something concocted in a lab, but both girls drank it in giant gulps, as if they’d spent the morning in the Sahara (and walked back) rather than a semi-shaded cove a quarter mile away.
