Unexpected Family

by Molly O'Keefe

  Once out of the car, she knocked on the door to the house and waited. A long time. She cupped her hands around her eyes and peered through the glass, trying to see signs of life.

  Suddenly, there was thump that shook the door. Wary, she stepped back and a small face covered in what looked like grape jelly appeared in the window. A little boy with brown curly hair. His blue eyes not unlike Jeremiah’s.

  “It’s a girl!” the boy yelled over his shoulder, the sound muffled by the door. Someone over the boy’s shoulder must have said something because he nodded and turned back to face her.

  “Do we know you?” he asked.

  “I’m your neighbor.”

  “No, you’re not. Mia is our neighbor.”

  “I’m Mia’s sister.”

  The boy seemed to process that and he turned to yell something over his shoulder.

  “What’s your name?” he asked when he turned back around.

  “Lucy.”

  His face split in a wide grape-jelly smile and Lucy felt herself smile in return. Heartbreaker.

  “My friend Willow has a dog named Lucy,” he yelled through the glass.

  “That’s great, buddy, is your uncle here?”

  “No.”

  She blinked. “Are you here by yourself?”

  The door thumped again and the little boy vanished only to be replaced by a slightly older boy. Under his dark hair, dark eyes narrowed in an attempt to be threatening. It was oddly effective. Troublemaker.

  “I’m going to need to see some ID,” the boy said, and she laughed before she realized he was serious. She pulled her driver’s license out and pressed it up to the glass.

  The boy studied it and then looked back up at her with his simultaneously young and old eyes. “You here to rob us? ’Cause there’s nothing here to rob. Not even a video game or computer.”

  She shook her head.

  “You going to kidnap us?”

  “What? No!”

  “Because you don’t want to kidnap Casey,” the boy said. “He wets the bed.”

  “I do not!” a little voice yelled, and the boy jostled and grinned down at Casey, who hit him.

  “I’m not kidnapping anyone.”

  “That’s the sort of thing a kidnapper would say.”

  Perhaps it was the lack of sleep, but she had no comeback. This boy totally had the better of her. Instead, she held up the keys. “I’m here to give Reese his car back.”

  The boy looked down, presumably at his brother, and she had to admit this was the strangest, yet most thorough, interrogation she’d ever been a part of.

  There was another thump and the older boy vanished seconds before the door opened.

  The two boys stood barefoot in the doorway and somehow the sight of those small pink toes on the edge of the welcome mat brutally reminded her of their situation. Orphans.

  “Where’s your uncle?”

  “He’s picking up Aaron from hockey practice,” Casey said, and the older boy punched him in the arm.

  “You’re not supposed to say that sort of stuff, remember? We’re supposed to say he’s in the shower.”

  “Sorry.” Casey’s lower lip started to shake. “I forgot. There are so many rules now.”

  “I’m Lucy,” she said quickly, holding out her hand to the little boy, who grabbed it and shook using his whole body.

  “I’m Casey. I’m five.”

  “Wow,” she said, putting on a show of being impressed. “Big boy.” She turned to the older boy, who still watched her with suspicion. Which she supposed was a good thing in this situation, but it made the boy look disturbingly old. “Who are you?”

  “Ben.” He crossed his arms over his chest, effectively ending that discussion.

  “Well, it’s nice to meet you guys. Is Reese here?”

  Casey shot his brother a panicked guilty look but Ben just jerked his thumb over his shoulder.

  Lucy stepped past the boys into the living room, which no longer looked like the love scene between a Laundromat and a sporting goods store. Reese was still there, a quilt-covered blob on the couch. But he wasn’t just covered by a quilt anymore.

  Balanced all over his body were toys, glasses and plates. Stuffed animals. A hockey puck.

  He looked like an altar.

  She glanced, wide-eyed, at the boys. Casey at least had the good sense to look guilty.

  “It’s a game we’re playing,” he said.

  “It’s a pretty strange game. Some of those glasses look heavy.”

  “It’s none of your business,” Ben said.

  Reese shifted and a full glass of water that had been balancing on him fell to the ground, spilling water everywhere. A stuffed bear followed and so did a storybook and half a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich.

  “Uh-oh,” Casey muttered, running forward to clean it up.

  Lucy stepped forward to help. She grabbed what looked like a dirty towel from the coffee table, but Ben snatched it out of her hands.

  “You don’t use that,” he said, handing the green towel over to Casey, who quickly shoved it under the couch.

  Ooooookay. “How about you go grab another towel from somewhere.”

  “I’ll get it,” Casey said, darting off into the kitchen. Lucy cleaned up what had fallen off Reese and eyed what was still stacked on top of him.

  Careful not to look at Ben, who radiated tension like a nuclear reactor, she picked up a glass plate and replaced it with a throw pillow and on top of that she stacked the stuffed bear and a bunch of Lego pieces.

  “See,” she whispered, “you have to put your big things on the bottom so that there’s better balance. And things made out of glass don’t stack as well.” She grabbed a coffee mug from off Reese’s feet and replaced it with three race cars she stacked one on top of the other.

  She glanced over her shoulder to see Ben watching her, his neck all red. His body held so taut she thought he might snap right in front of her eyes, as if all the pressure inside of him were pulling him to pieces.

  It seemed natural to hug him; it seemed, in fact, like that was exactly what he needed—she would be a heartless monster not to hug him—but when she reached out he jerked back so hard he bumped into the coffee table.

  The juice cups and coffee mugs shimmied and toppled. A glass plate broke on the floor.

  “What the hell?” Reese yelled, and sat up, knocking all the toys and pillows off.

  Casey ran back around the corner and, seeing the mess and his brother’s furious expression, burst into tears.

  “Now, look what you did!” Ben shouted. “You made Casey cry!”

  “Oh, my God, please stop yelling,” Reese muttered.

  So, of course, that was the moment Jeremiah walked in.

  * * *

  JEREMIAH HAD COME TO EXPECT a certain amount of disaster when he walked back into the house from picking up Aaron every other Saturday morning. He wasn’t a father but even he understood leaving a nine-year-old in charge of a five-year-old for an hour wasn’t the best idea. Or maybe it was okay for other kids…but for Ben it was like an engraved invitation to trouble.

  Not that the kid needed much of an invitation.

  But he and a few of the other parents carpooled to hockey practice and he couldn’t take Ben and Casey because there just wasn’t any room in the truck. And he couldn’t beg off because he’d done enough of that. Yeah, things were hard here, but it was time to handle it and stop taking every handout that came his way.

  So every other week he walked in the front door wondering what it was going to be this time. Shaving the dog? Casey tied up in the closet? The kitchen the scene of a breakfast cereal war?

  The last thing he expected was Lucy on her knees in front of Reese with Casey—holding every kitchen towel they owned—crying in the corner.

  Ben, with his arms over his chest, glaring daggers at Jeremiah was, however, totally expected.

  “What’s going on?” Jeremiah asked, throwing his keys on the ledge by the door. />
  Aaron bumped into him from behind with his hockey bag. “Take all of that stuff into the laundry room, Aaron,” he said. “I’m tired of washing clothes that have been sitting in that bag all week. It’s gross.”

  Aaron nodded and stepped toward the laundry room in the back but stopped when he saw Lucy. Jeremiah had to admit, she looked just as gorgeous as she did last night, even without the feathers and boots and moonlight.

  “Hey.” Lucy lifted her hand in a little wave.

  “Hey.” Aaron’s voice broke over the word and he got so red the tips of his ears lit on fire. He vanished down the hall to the laundry room.

  “I came by to do a car exchange, but Reese wasn’t up yet.”

  The lump on the couch groaned and pulled the quilt up over his head.

  “Still isn’t.” Jeremiah sighed and rubbed his hands over his face. “Casey, buddy, could you stop crying?”

  Like a faucet was turned off, the whimpering stopped.

  “Are you mad?” Casey whispered.

  “Of course not,” Lucy answered for him.

  “Yes, he is,” Ben said, always ready for a fight, and Jeremiah sighed again—bone-weary of these fights he never won no matter what he did.

  “Come on, Casey and Ben,” Lucy said, “let’s get this stuff cleaned up.”

  “You don’t have to do that,” Jeremiah said, stepping forward to take one of the towels in Casey’s hand.

  She smiled at him, sympathetic and perhaps a little pitying, which was exactly the opposite of the way he wanted her to look at him and it pissed him off. He wanted her to look at him the way she had last night. He wanted that little bubble of time to be unbroken, unsullied by reality, so he could think about it alone in his cold bed. But having her here, in the unflinching light of day, robbed him of the fantasy.

  “I’ll just take you home.” He was way gruffer than he intended and he saw Casey look over at him full of anxiety.

  God, I just cannot get this shit right.

  “Don’t worry about it,” Lucy said, picking up toys and stacking them on the coffee table.

  “You don’t have to clean this up.” He stepped forward, taking the toys from her, trying to get her to stand. Trying actually to get her out of here, but she was stubbornly reluctant.

  “It’s almost done, isn’t it, Casey?” She winked at Casey, who’d thrown all the kitchen towels over the lake of water next to the couch. Great, just great. Now, I’ll have to dry all of them. But Casey beamed at her and it was the last damn straw.

  “I said stop!”

  Everyone halted and turned to stare at him. Casey’s lower lip started to tremble. The front door slammed shut and he figured that was Ben running out to the barn, which is what he did every time Jeremiah yelled.

  “Okay.” Lucy stood and dropped the car keys on the coffee table. “Don’t worry about the ride, I’ll just call Mia and wait for her outside.” She gave Casey a big grin and the little boy stared after her with his broken heart in his eyes.

  “See you,” Lucy said without making any eye contact, and Jeremiah knew, he totally understood, that he was the biggest asshole in the world. Yelling at kids and a woman who were just trying to help.

  The front door shut and in the silence Casey’s big five-year-old eyes damned him.

  “Hey.” Aaron came back in the room reeking of that deodorant all the preteen boys wear, convinced the smell made them irresistible to girls. “Where’s Lucy?”

  “Jeremiah scared her away,” Casey said.

  “Uncle J.” Aaron sighed and then walked into the kitchen for something to eat.

  “I was a jerk, wasn’t I?” he asked Casey, who nodded.

  “I should apologize, shouldn’t I?” Casey nodded again.

  Swearing under his breath, he grabbed Reese’s keys from the coffee table and headed outside to apologize to Lucy.

  * * *

  MIA WASN’T PICKING UP her phone. Probably because she and Jack were having wild monkey sex while Lucy stood here getting barked at by a man she’d almost had sex with just a few short hours ago.

  She snapped shut her cell phone and looked up at the sky wishing there was some kind of prayer for teleportation. Mom hadn’t shared that one with her.

  “Lucy?”

  She spun at the sound of Jeremiah’s voice. He stepped down the steps to the asphalt and she opened her phone and quickly pressed Redial.

  “Look, Jeremiah, I get it, things are tough for you, but frankly, my life is no picnic right now. So, why don’t you just go deal with your mess and I’ll deal with mine?”

  He ignored her, stopping a foot from her. “I’m sorry, Lucy.”

  Mia’s voice mail came on and she snapped the phone shut.

  “Your sister’s not around?”

  “No.”

  His smile was a variation on his million-dollar grin, more devastating because it was tarnished at the corners. “I can take you home.”

  Past caring about his feelings, she looked him right in the eye and didn’t bother mincing words. “I think you have bigger problems to deal with.”

  She watched him bristle, his blue eyes dark.

  “Where’s Ben?” she asked.

  “Probably in the barn.”

  “He do that a lot? Run away?”

  “Enough that I know he’s in the barn.”

  “Are you—?”

  “I’m giving him and me a chance to cool down,” he interrupted. “I appreciate your concern, but I’ve been doing this for a year, Lucy. You met these boys five minutes ago.” He held up Reese’s keys. “Take Reese’s car. He’ll come and get it when he gets off the couch.”

  There was more she wanted to say. Plenty more. But what was the point, really? She grabbed the keys. “Thanks.”

  “See you.”

  “Yeah,” she snapped, remembering the way the touch of his hands turned her inside out, the way he kissed her like she was the best thing he’d tasted in years. She felt duped by that man in the moonlight last night. “See you.”

  She got back in Reese’s car and peeled out of the driveway, leaving Jeremiah Stone in her dust.

  Good riddance, she thought.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  JEREMIAH WAITED UNTIL he could no longer see the dust plume behind Lucy’s car.

  Not your finest showing, Stone. Not at all.

  If his sister were alive she’d take him by his ear and give him a good shaking. But the truth was, he’d suffered through months of women with the best intentions coming through this house with their casseroles and sympathy and he’d watched the boys run roughshod all over them. Using that well-meaning sympathy to their advantage.

  Eating pie for dinner, sleeping all together in Aaron’s room, playing video games for hours at a time, not doing their homework. The last babysitter he’d hired had let Casey walk around with Annie’s favorite green towel, like it was a baby blanket. And Ben… Christ, that kid’s temper had grown out of control the past few months. He was like a lit bomb and Jeremiah never knew when he was going to go off.

  It’s not that he didn’t think the boys needed sympathy, but they also needed rules. He needed rules. He needed some boundaries and Ben needed to know that he couldn’t just run off to the barn every time he felt like Jeremiah was being unfair.

  Jeremiah mentally braced himself and headed into the barn. Usually Ben sat in the empty stall at the back, burying himself in the clean hay. But he wasn’t there.

  “Ben?” he yelled, and then listened for a rustle or a creaking board. Nothing. He climbed up into the hayloft and only found the cats snoozing in the sunlight.

  The nine-year-old wasn’t in the arena, or feeding any of the horses in the paddocks.

  He tried; he really did, not to jump to the worst possible conclusion. But the worst possible conclusion was the kind of thing that happened to this family time and time again. And he couldn’t stop himself from imagining him running off along the fence line toward the creek and the high pastures and all kinds of trouble. H
is heart, feeding on worry and anger, pounded in his neck as he stomped toward the house.

  He threw open the front door and stepped into the living room where Reese was finally sitting up, his head in his hands. Aaron and Casey were eating peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches and watching ESPN.

  “We got a problem,” he said.

  “Could you not yell?” Reese groaned.

  “Ben’s run off.”

  “What else is new?” Aaron asked, not taking his eyes off the TV and the baseball highlights.

  “He’s not in the barn.”

  Aaron glanced over. Annie’s eyes were in Aaron’s man-boy face, and it brought Jeremiah up short every damn time he looked at the kid. Aaron put down the sandwich and stood. “Casey and I will take the ATV,” he said.

  “I’ll saddle Rider and check out the creek.”

  “What can I do?” Reese asked.

  “Stay here in case he comes back.”

  “Oh, thank God,” he muttered, and flopped backward on the couch.

  “It will be okay, Uncle J.,” Aaron said as he and Casey put on their boots. “He always comes back.”

  Grateful for the help and the optimism, Jeremiah clapped his hand on the eleven-year-old’s shoulder, wishing things weren’t they way they were. Wishing these boys could just be boys, and he could just be an uncle and that every situation didn’t have the capacity for disaster.

  * * *

  LUCY DROVE UP to the small house she grew up in. She was happy to see the red climbing roses her mother had cultivated through the years still creating a green canopy over the south end of the house. It wasn’t warm enough for blooms yet, but every summer the scent of those flowers filled the air that came in through the window of her old bedroom.

  Rose was the scent of her childhood. Of a warm, safe home. It was the scent of her family all together. In Los Angeles Sandra grew roses in pots on the balcony of their condo. But they weren’t the same. The scent had to combat exhaust and smog and Mr. Lezinsky’s cabbage rolls. And they didn’t bloom with the same wildness, the same gorgeous display of excess, as they did here.

  Sort of like Mom, she thought.

  Lucy stopped the car in front of the yellow house with white shutters and a bright red front door. For the hundredth time this morning, she called her sister.