“Hannah, your mom’s here,” Stacy hollered.
Hannah came skipping from the other room, her shawl swaying about her with a book clutched to her chest. She jumped into my arms. “Mom!”
I caught her and hugged her tightly.
“Guess what?” she asked.
“What?”
“We went to the library, and I got a heart-healthy cookbook,” she told me, all proud.
Stacy and I exchanged a look over the top of her head. Once Grams had her heart attack, Hannah had taken the healthy food thing to the limit. She’d thought it would save my grandma, and now I was pretty sure she thought it would save me from leaving her as well. I wasn’t going anywhere, but tell that to a child who never knew her father and had just lost her idol. I was lucky she wasn’t throwing tantrums and refusing to step foot out of the house, but that wasn’t my little’s way. Nope. Not only was she too old for her years, but she was also too smart for her age as well. It wasn’t like she was reading college textbooks or anything, but she was well past the beginner books. It was the reason I was so grateful Stacy would continue to be her teacher at the new school.
“Is that right? Anything in it you want to make?” I asked.
Hannah frowned. “I have to talk to Cassidy about it.”
“Why is that?”
She lowered her voice to a whisper. “They have chocolate cake in here.”
She said it like it was a huge sin, and my heart tugged.
“Well, they do say chocolate is an anti-inflammatory,” I told her.
“What’s anti-inflammastory?”
I resisted the urge to smile because my daughter did not like to be the butt of anyone’s joke. “Not inflammastory, inflammatory. It means it reduces body parts that might be swollen.”
“But it’s chocolate,” she said because she’d placed it in her “not good” category in her head.
“Well, remember what Cassidy said the last time about balance. I’m sure it is because of that, but let’s go so we won’t be late, and you can ask her yourself.”
We gathered our things, hugged Stacy goodbye, and headed down the street to the clinic. Everything important to me in Grand Orchard was within walking distance of the house. There were strip malls on the far edge of town where the boundaries were being pushed and where the college kids could get their fix of all the fast-food chains, but I liked all the homegrown stores near the heart of the town.
I’d almost canceled our appointment at the clinic today because it was really a follow-up for Grams, but now I was glad I hadn’t, because I needed my daughter to hear from someone else that eating a few treats wasn’t going to put her in the hospital.
Cassidy greeted us in her office with a warm smile.
Her pregnant belly was sticking out from her slender frame even more than when I’d seen her weeks ago at Grams’ funeral. I vaguely remembered that stage of my own pregnancy. Where everything hurt as the baby pressed on every internal organ, but you were also full of bliss and expectation. Days away from being able to hold the baby and count its fingers and toes and kiss its cheeks and nose.
“You look good,” I said.
“I’m tired and never stop having to pee, but I’m doing good otherwise,” she said before tapping Hannah’s top hat. “How are you, lady?”
Hannah hugged her and then shoved the cookbook at her.
“This book says we can have cake. Is it true?”
Cassidy laughed, and Hannah frowned, causing Cassidy to straighten her lips as much as she possibly could. “You know it is. We’ve already talked about how eating sweets is okay in moderation.”
“But it has butter and sugar,” Hannah pressed, flipping open the book and setting it down on Cassidy’s desk with the chocolate cake recipe showing.
“Which are both allowed in moderation,” Cassidy said. “Let’s take a look at the recipe.”
We chatted with Cassidy for about twenty minutes and ended with several weeks’ worth of meal plans that included desserts. I was going to have to send her a whole basket of treats from Sweet Lips as a way of saying thank you for getting my obsessed girl eased into a milder plan.
As we stood, Cassidy grimaced, rubbing her back.
