“But I have writing on the other side and I don’t want to tear it out.”
“Vivien.” She glowered at her daughter. “You can tape it back in and feel safe in the fact that I have no desire to read your childhood diary entries. Come on. I’m feeling benevolent toward Jo Ellen. Do you want to ruin that?”
She huffed a breath, opened the notebook on the table, and tore out the page, handing it to Maggie. “Benevolent is good. I hope that lasts.”
Maggie gave a tight smile and took the paper, folding it neatly to slide it in her handbag.
Yes, she was breaking a promise, but right then, she didn’t care.
Nothing was like they remembered.Traffic was insane, with at least five million cars on the road. Parking was impossible, requiring Maggie to swear not once but twice trying to get in aspot. Publix was ten times the size it used to be, the sun was hotter than the second level of hell, and the recipe was written by a fourteen-year-old in chicken scratch not made for seventy-eight-year-old eyes.
But Maggie simply couldn’t recall feeling so…light.
Not since the last time she’d been in this very town with this very woman on a very similar shopping mission.
They were halfway through their grocery list—onions, celery, carrots, the good canned tomatoes—when they came to a stop in the spice aisle.
“Nutmeg,” Maggie read aloud, squinting at the paper, then the shelf. “Just a pinch.”
Jo Ellen turned a few bottles. “Do you see it?”
“I don’t know what I see,” Maggie said. “Why isn’t it alphabetical? Basil’s next to turmeric. That should be illegal.”
“Well, you write your congressman, Maggie. In the meantime, find the nutmeg.”
Maggie scanned the rows, then spotted a tiny glass jar wedged behind some coriander. “Wait—is that it?” She reached for it, knocking over a tower of garlic powder canisters. One hit the bottom shelf and rolled across the floor.
“Whoops.” Jo Ellen snorted. “Clean up on aisle six. Geriatric Spice Girls have caused a mess.”
“Speak for yourself,” Maggie whispered, laughing. “But if we are, I’m Posh Spice.”
“Nope. Scary Spice.”
Maggie swooped the nutmeg into the cart and glared at her friend. “Well, you’re not Baby Spice. More like…Seventy-something Spice?”
“I’ll take it, but how did that happen, Mags?” Jo went to throw an arm around Maggie, and when she did, she knocked half a dozen bottles of dried rosemary, making them jump back and squeal a little.
“We are not to be trusted in a grocery store!” Maggie exclaimed as they both giggled like they were twenty-year-old Tri-Delts again, sharing cheap wine and late-night Taco Bell.
Jo Ellen wiped her eyes as they did a cursory cleanup and guiltily pushed the cart away from the scene and into the next aisle for more destruction.
“Nutmeg,” Jo Ellen mused. “You know what that reminds me of? Remember that formal in ’67? When that guy—what was his name? Todd something—thought you wereSwissbecause you said you liked nutmeg?”
“Sweater Vest Todd!” Maggie hooted. “He thought ‘neutral’ meant ‘from a neutral country’!”
They both lost it again, and Jo Ellen had to hold onto the shelf to steady herself.
Maggie studied her friend, feeling breathless…then swamped with guilt. What if Roger could look down from…from wherever he was…and see them?
What would he say? How could she justify standing in Publix laughing like loons thirty years after she’d given him her word she would have nothing to do with anyone named Wylie?
She didn’t know. But she didn’t have to, and this felt…good. Roger would want her to feel good, wouldn’t he?
Jo Ellen’s smile softened. “I miss us.”
Maggie nodded, blinking a little too much as she let the doubt and unwelcome sensations spiral through her.
Should she be doing this? No. Could she stop? She had to.
