I creamed sugar and butter together by hand on a beautiful summer day when I had a hankering for lemon poppy seed loaf. It took an hour since the butter was still a bit hard only to discover that I was out of eggs. I stared at the empty carton in disbelief.
One egg. I only needed one egg. For a second, I thought about running to the store, but it was over thirty minutes away, and I didn’t have a car that day.
My sister had borrowed it to take her kids to the lake. I sighed, wiped my hands on my apron, and leaned against the kitchen counter. The kitchen smelled like lemon zest and sugar, and the air outside buzzed with the sounds of summer—lawnmowers, birds chirping, kids laughing down the street.
“Maybe Mrs. Donnelly has an egg,” I muttered, glancing out the window toward her house. She was my neighbor, a widow in her seventies who still wore curlers in her hair and knew everyone’s business.
I hadn’t spoken to her much lately, mostly because of what happened last winter. See, during a particularly icy week, my dog Bruno had gotten loose and trampled her flower beds. She’d come out yelling, and I’d yelled back, and ever since then, we’d kept our distance.
She glared at me when I brought in groceries, and I avoided eye contact when I mowed the lawn. We were two stubborn people living twenty feet apart. But I really wanted that lemon loaf.
I walked over and knocked on her door with the kind of hope that’s too embarrassed to be loud. She took her time, of course, and when she finally opened the door, she looked at me like I was a vacuum salesman. “Hi, Mrs.
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