You are looking for the old red Betty Crocker cookbook your mother gave you for your wedding shower, first wedding. You are looking for the brownie recipes. There are two: one “deluxe,” made with melted unsweetened chocolate, and one eponymous, made with cocoa. Which section are they in—breads, cakes, or cookies? You never remember.

You find the cookbook where you recently put it, the corner bookcase. You brought that bookcase to your new apartment and placed it in a dead space between the refrigerator and the hallway. It fit perfectly, but you never wanted another home for that bookcase. You never wanted a new apartment, either. 

You liked the bookcase best in the finished, walk-out basement of the house you and your second husband had bought together ten years earlier, the one in which you planned to blend your families, the one with enough space for everyone. You let yourself believe that space was the key to blending your families because you could do something about space. 

You created a fifth bedroom so that each of the four girls would have her own. You created a “media room” and a playroom. The “media room”—because it never became one—was to be where the kids would pile on couches for movies with friends, and later, make out with first boyfriends. 

The playroom did indeed become a playroom, so one thing, at least, went according to plan. You stocked it with books, games, dress–up clothes, DVDs, and art and craft supplies. You stuffed it with dolls and Barbies, and of course clothes, accessories, and furniture for both. Each year, new school supplies too—at the end of each summer, new pencil cases, three-ring binders, packs of markers—though the old ones worked just fine. All stored in the playroom, some of it filling the corner bookcase that stands in your new apartment.

To your apartment, you have also brought photos of your children. When you lived together, you covered a wall with framed photos of all four girls. A living, breathing river of photos of those girls, four–feet–high and eighteen–feet–long, filled frame–edge to frame–edge. The point of the wall was to say that everyone belongs, see? But it didn’t work that way. 

Belonging, it turns out, requires more than space, school supplies and photos. It requires a sense of safety, of being on the same team, something you as a couple could not create, at least not for everyone. One of his daughters opted out of the family almost immediately; the other barely opted in. Despite years of trying, the new family’s divided loyalties, insecurities and vulnerabilities kept roiling. One day, it was clear: there would be no blending.

So here you are, new apartment, Betty Crocker Cookbook in hand. You open it and find a printed-out recipe for knock-off Starbucks cranberry bliss bars, the kind you can only get between Thanksgiving and New Year’s. You introduced this recipe to the family years ago, and were surprised when the girls—from both sets—had called them a hit. Seeing it on paper now stops you cold. 

You catch your breath, but the tears are too slippery. The recipe blurs. Black print fades into a landscape of crinkled splats of past years’ batter and crusty traces of brushed-away powdered sugar. Trying to refocus, you realize—these cookies were the only thing his daughter ever let herself love about you. You give up on the brownies, and put the book away.