Five of Us at Christmas, But They Only Got Four Cookies novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: Four Cookies
A box of custom Christmas cookies arrives for the five of us, and Joanna finds four names, a bakery note calling her the help, and a second box with the children's mother on it; she takes her keys and dials the number on a wedding napkin.
The cookie box came on the last Friday of November, in a white courier carton with the bakery's name on the lid.
Three weeks earlier my husband had put down his fork at dinner and said, "I ordered the custom cookies this year. One with each of our names. The five of us."
I had thought about that sentence every day since.
I carried the carton into the kitchen, where the whole house was.
My mother-in-law sat at the table with two women from her church and a pot of tea.
My husband stood at the counter with his phone.
His daughter, thirteen, leaned in the doorway with her arms crossed.
His son, ten, knelt on the stool next to mine with his chin on the counter.
The boy's hair was bright red, the only red in a family of dark heads, and it stuck up in back where he'd slept on it.
"Open it, Jo," he said. "Open it, open it."
I untied the velvet ribbon and folded back the red-and-green tissue.
Four cookies lay in four paper cradles, each one iced with a name in white.
BRYCE. DOROTHEA. ZOEY. MILO.
Four names, plain as day.
Then I looked at the lid, at the foam, at the empty bottom of the carton, in case a fifth cradle had slid out.
"There are four," I said.
"They shorted us," Bryce said, still looking at his phone. "I'll call them Monday. It's a mix-up, Jo. Don't make it a thing."
"The order said five of us."
"Honey, they're cookies."
Dorothea poured her friend more tea. "You can have half of mine, dear," she said. "I never finish them anyway."
She did not look at the box. She was looking at Bryce.
Zoey had taken out her phone. When I turned toward her, she laid it face down on her arm.
I picked up my own phone and found the bakery's number on the lid.
"Jo," Bryce said. "Put it down."
I put it on speaker and set it on the counter between the cookies and the teapot.
A woman answered on the third ring, over the noise of a mixer.
"This is Joanna MacIntosh," I said. "My husband ordered a box for five people, and four cookies came. I'm calling about the fifth."
"MacIntosh, MacIntosh." Keys clicked. "Okay. November ninth. That's two boxes, hon."
"Two boxes?"
"The four-cookie box was for early delivery. There's a note on it from Mr. MacIntosh." She read it out slowly. "Four only. The fifth is just helping out this year."
Nobody in the kitchen moved.
Dorothea's friends stared into their cups.
"And the other box?" I said.
"The five-cookie box? That one holds until the eighteenth. Pickup only." The woman read me the names on it, one after another.
Bryce. Dorothea. Zoey. Milo.
The fifth was the name of the woman who had given birth to Zoey and Milo and had left them when Milo was five.
I hadn't heard anyone say it aloud in this house in five years.
"Thank you," I said, and ended the call.
"Jo." Bryce put his phone down at last. "It was a joke I made to the guy. You know how I talk."
"You told me five of us," I said. "At dinner. I was in the room."
"Because there are five of us in this house."
"Then why does she get a cookie, and I'm helping out?"
He didn't answer.
Dorothea set down her cup with a small click. "Joanna, dear," she said. "Let's not do this in front of company."
Her friends had suddenly found their purses.
I looked at my husband for the length of a long breath.
He looked at the counter.
"I'm going out," I said.
"Where?" Bryce said. "It's Black Friday. Everything's packed."
I took my coat from the hook in the hall and my keys from the dish beside it.
Milo slid off his stool and ran after me with his hands cupped.
He had broken his own cookie in two. The half he held out said LO.
"You can have my last two letters," he whispered. "So you're on one."
My throat closed.
I took it and kissed the top of his head, and I did not say anything, because if I had, I would have stayed.
Over his shoulder I saw Zoey in the kitchen doorway, watching me.
She didn't call me back.
I went out to my car and sat with both hands on the wheel and the half cookie in my lap.
Then I opened my wallet to find a tissue.
Behind my library card, folded small, was a paper napkin I had carried for five years.
A man had pressed it into my hand at my own wedding, by the coat check, and said only, "If they ever make you a guest, call this number."
It was creased soft now, but the ink still read clearly.
I had never called it.
I dialed it with my thumb shaking.
It rang once.
"Took you five years," a man said.
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