Free Handle With Care by Jodi Picoult Page B

the moms already blacklisted me because I missed the spring show for a medical conference. I’m trying to atone.”
    “So you whipped these up when? While you were stitching an epi
siotomy? After being on call for thirty-six hours?” Charlotte opened her pantry and rummaged through the shelves, finally grabbing a package of Chips Ahoy! and spilling them onto a serving platter. “Honestly, Piper, do you always have to be so damn perfect?”
    With a fork, she was attacking the edges of the cookies. “Whoa. Who peed in your Cheerios?”
    “Well, what do you expect? You waltz in here and tell me I look like crap, and then you make me feel completely inadequate—”
    “You’re a pastry chef, Charlotte. You could bake circles around—What on earth are you doing?”
    “Making them look homemade,” Charlotte said. “Because I’m not a pastry chef, not anymore. Not for a long time.”
    When I’d first met Charlotte, she had just been named the finest pastry chef in New Hampshire. I’d actually read about her in a magazine that lauded her ability to take unlikely ingredients and come up with the most remarkable confections. She used to never come empty-handed to my house—she’d bring cupcakes with spun-sugar icing, pies with berries that burst like fireworks, puddings that acted like balms. Her soufflés were as light as summer clouds; her chocolate fondant could wipe your mind clean of whatever obstacles had littered your day. She told me that, when she baked, she could feel herself coming back to center, that everything else fell away, and she remembered who she was supposed to be. I’d been jealous. I had a vocation—and I was a damn good doctor—but Charlotte had a calling. She dreamed of opening a patisserie, of writing her own bestselling cookbook. In fact, I never imagined she would find anything she loved more than baking, until you came along.
    I moved the platter away. “Charlotte. Are you okay?”
    “Let’s see. I was arrested last weekend; my daughter’s in a body cast; I don’t even have time to take a shower—yup, I’m just fantastic.” She turned to the doorway and the staircase upstairs. “Amelia! Let’s go!”
    “Emma’s gone selectively deaf, too,” I said. “I swear she ignores me on purpose. Yesterday, I asked her eight times to clear the kitchen counter—”
    “You know what,” Charlotte said wearily. “I really don’t care about the problems you’re having with your daughter.”
    No sooner had my jaw dropped—I had always been Charlotte’s confidante, not her punching bag—than she shook her head and apologized. “I’m sorry. I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I shouldn’t be taking this out on you.”
    “It’s okay,” I said.
    Just then the older girls clattered down the stairs and skidded past us in a flurry of whispers and giggles. I put my hand on Charlotte’s arm. “Just so you know,” I said firmly. “You’re the most devoted mother I’ve ever met. You’ve given up your whole life to take care of Willow.”
    She ducked her head and nodded before looking up at me. “Do you remember her first ultrasound?”
    I thought for a second, and then I grinned. “We saw her sucking her thumb. I didn’t even have to point it out to you and Sean; it was clear as day.”
    “Right,” your mother repeated. “Clear as day.”
    Charlotte
    March 2007
    What if it was someone’s fault?
    The idea was just the germ of a seed, carried in the hollow beneath my breastbone when we left the law offices. Even when I was lying awake next to Sean, I heard it as a drumbeat in my blood: what if, what if, what if. For five years now I had loved you, hovered over you, held you when you had a break. I had gotten exactly what I so desperately wished for: a beautiful baby. So how could I admit to anyone—much less myself—that you were not only the most wonderful thing that had ever happened to me…but also the most exhausting, the most overwhelming?
    I would listen to