Stay Sweet(46)

And then, suddenly, I was cold. I closed my coat and watched Wayne bound onto the bus, giving the driver a chummy clap on the shoulder as he passed.

We walked home. Tiggy had to lead me because I’d forgotten the way. She kept saying it would get easier, but never easy. On some level, I knew it. My brothers have been gone a year already. Tiggy’s brother nearly two. But this time, it’s different.

This is my love.

The realness, the rawness of the emotion have Amelia shaking like a leaf. She looks up from the page. Would Molly have wanted this? Some stranger, in her bedroom, reading what would turn out to be the most painful experience of her life?

No. Absolutely not. No girl would.

Except . . . what if Molly wrote the recipes inside? There is a good chance of this. The timing is right.

Amelia carefully thumbs through the entire diary, gently, scanning each page. Not reading, but allowing her gaze to land lightly here and there, a word, a number, something recorded in a way that resembles a recipe or a list of ingredients. If she finds something, she’ll pull out the relevant pages, show Grady only what he needs to see and maintain Molly’s privacy.

When she reaches the end, she goes back through once more, just to be sure.

But no, there’s nothing.

And yet she can’t bring herself to put the diary back under Molly’s bed.





CHAPTER TWENTY


GRADY AND AMELIA SPEND THE rest of the day digging through Molly’s office. The fan he’s bought doesn’t provide relief so much as a disappointingly warm wind, but she is grateful that Grady locks it so it blows primarily in her direction.

At the end of first shift, Cate texts Amelia and lets her know that she and a few of the other girls are heading to the lake, and does Amelia want to come with?

Ugh. I should stay and keep looking. But hopefully I can meet you guys there in a bit! Amelia knows it’s a stretch. It’s not as if they seem any closer to finding anything. But she is trying to remain hopeful.

She readies herself for a bit of pushback from Cate. Maybe a guilt trip that Cate had to work the whole shift without her, or a bit of teasing.

But Cate doesn’t even respond.

Amelia has been attacking the oldest files, Grady the newest.

Grady moves with assembly-line speed, setting aside anything he thinks might be helpful for his business plan, sending everything else through his brand-new shredder, which he picked up with the fan at Walmart.

Amelia winces every time the shredder’s blades whirl. This takes care of any lingering remorse she might feel about slipping Molly’s diary inside her tote bag.

But Grady is making better time with the job, that’s for sure. Amelia’s pace is far slower, in part because her boxes contain more mementos and ephemera, especially the ones from the late 1940s and early 1950s, when Molly was just starting out. She’s tempted to read everything. And Amelia can’t determine what, if anything, she should shred. An ad in the Sand Lake Ledger from 1947? A certificate of recognition from the Sand Lake Chamber of Commerce?

And what about all the photos? Of summer picnics at the farmhouse, of the girls at the county fair, and what seems like an annual tradition of the stand girls posing in front of Meade Creamery, their scooping arms flexed, exactly like they had the first year in business. Why did that end? she wonders, and examines the faces in each one, looking to spot town residents, noticing how hairstyles changed, in curls one summer, up another, then cut into bobs. Eventually, she sets them aside in a separate, neat pile. Grady might throw them away eventually, or shred them, but she’s not going to be the one to do that.

While she tries to lose herself in the work, her thoughts drift back to Molly’s first diary entry. Her goodbye kiss with Wayne. Even though Amelia doesn’t think she ever actually heard Molly’s voice, she can imagine it now, somewhere faintly inside her, urging him to promise to come back to her, with no idea that it would be the last time she ever laid eyes on him.

Amelia’s eyes begin to tear, her throat tighten. A tear rolls down her cheek.

It is so tragically romantic.

“Whoa,” Grady says, his blue eyes intent on her. “You okay?”

“Ugh. It’s so dusty in here,” she complains, dabbing at her eyes with her sleeve and shifting the direction of the fan, and only then does she peek over at Grady to see if he’s bought her performance. Only he’s not watching her anymore.

Grady’s got a bundle of papers in his lap.

And from his stunned blinking, Amelia assumes they are something.

“What did you find?” she asks, crawling toward him.

He glances up, startled. And as Amelia nears, he seems to want to hide whatever’s in his hands.

“Grady?”

“These are letters my mom sent to Molly.”

Amelia sucks in a breath. “Whoa. I bet she’ll get such a kick out of seeing them. You should send them to her!” Grady lowers his head and rubs the back of his neck, which makes Amelia feel suddenly unsure. “I mean, maybe wait until she’s home from New Zealand. I don’t know how much international postage costs. Probably a lot.”

He wets his lips. “These are from my real mom,” he explains. “She died when I was six. My dad married Quinn a year or so later. That’s who raised me, basically.”

Avoiding her eyes, he passes over a stack of envelopes held together by an old rubber band. They’re addressed to Molly Meade. The return address is from a Diana Denton-Meade.