Sugar Lust

Chapter Twelve

As she walked home, tears burned the corners of her eyes. Emmeline knew how badly she had failed to fix things with Dorothy. But they quickly dried up and turned into anger. By the time she reached the bottom of the hill that Dorothy's house was planted on, Emmeline was in a full-fledged stomp. She couldn't believe she had actually gone out of her way to make up with that woman, but part of her couldn't help but be grateful. Emmeline could now officially go on for the rest of her life knowing for sure she did everything she could do to fix their relationship, and the sliver of guilt which had been residing in her heart, the nagging suspicion that maybe she should have reacted differently or treated the situation differently, was gone. That, in itself, was a gift.

I just have to explain to Nicholas I pretty much officially cut his connection off to his family. She groaned. The only thing she could decide was to wait until her anger calmed down before she could tell him.

It took a week.

Nicholas snuck across the train tracks a little after seven pm to eat as he usually tried to do. He couldn't always come home; it depended on how busy the station was. A snowstorm had closed down many of the tracks, and trains were delayed. No one was going out tonight if they didn't have to, and many who worked in Toronto, commuting back and forth by train, were staying in the city.

The storm was scheduled to last for forty-eight hours, according to the unreliable weatherman, but despite the inconsistent accuracy of his forecasts, most people weren't interested in taking chances. That meant no one had been in the station for four hours. Many of the trains had even been canceled, making things abnormally quiet. Emmeline didn't miss the loud whooshing sounds they made, frequently waking Millie up, or the loud whistles that announced their presence as they came into the station.

With only a few days before Christmas, and everything shut down due to the heavy flakes falling, Emmeline's temper had subsided, and she decided to decorate for Christmas. It was Millie's first one, after all. A few days earlier, she had taken Millie to see Santa at the grocery store, where they gave out free photos of the kids. Emmeline ended up with an adorable picture of Millie on Santa's knee with her tongue sticking out, which now proudly sat on one of the tables in the second-class car. Afterwards, she went to the dollar store and picked up a set of lights to make their train car feel festive. There was no room for a tree, no money either, so that wasn't even an option, but that didn't mean there wasn't room for some twinkly lights to brighten the place up.

At first, she thought she would string the lights up along the windows, spreading them out, but at the last second, she changed her mind and pulled out some scotch tape. She folded the lights in half, found the middle, and taped it to the wall of the train near the ceiling. From there, she wove the lights back and forth until she made a design of a tree out of them.

She stood back from her handiwork and examined it. This might be a poor man's Charlie Brown tree, but it was a tree, and it fit in the cramped space. And she felt satisfied that her daughter would have a tree for her first Christmas.

"What do you think, kid?" she asked Millie.

Millie clapped her hands. She had just learned to clap and was doing it non-stop, in between sucking on her middle three fingers. In this case, however, Emmeline thought of it as approval.

The door opened, and a gust of wind and several snowball sized-flakes blew in along with a shivering man. White flakes crusted Nicholas's hair, and little piles rested on the shoulders of his black winter coat from the short walk over.

"I was hoping you'd come back for a while," Emmeline said. Immediately Millie raised her arms for her father to pick her up. She babbled happily and pulled at his hair, trying to figure out what the funny cold stuff was that covered him.

"There's my little Angel Face," he said, and zoobered her cheek. Millie threw her head back out in a fit of giggles. They were two peas in a pod, those two. "The station is dead. I thought maybe I'd come home for something hot to eat."

"You're in luck. It's gourmet spaghetti." Emmeline was still learning how to cook, but she was really starting to love it, something that surprised her more than anyone. Tonight's meal consisted of spaghetti noodles covered in tomato soup. Pretty basic stuff, but it was cheap, and Millie loved to play with the long strings of noodles. She didn't exactly eat them—she was starting on solid food with her two brand-new front teeth—but they did make an excellent toy. Emmeline longed to try some different things out. If only she had the money for all the ingredients in the dishes she wanted to try from the cookbooks she was pouring over these days.

"Perfect," he said.

Tonight, she decided, she would tell Nicholas about the fiasco with his mother, although she hated to break the peacefulness that the falling snow had brought.

"Before you start eating, I have a confusions I have to make—a confession, I mean." As she broke into the story, her hands were shaking. She just hoped that he would understand she was really trying to make things better. Her words tripped over themselves and were scattered, as if they were trying to all come out at once, not making sense the way she had rehearsed in her head.

about how his mother was doing, and what she said. He laughed when he heard that Millie didn't want to do anything but play on the floor, but she could see his heart was breaking. She didn't know until this moment how deep his wounds ran. His separation from his family was more painful for him than she had even imagined.

He was quiet, and didn't touch his dinner afterward. Finally, he got up from the table and left, not even saying goodbye.

"Crap," she said as the door shut behind him with a bang.

"Blulaaaabrap," Millie answered back. Emmeline looked at her sideways.