Unexpected Family

by Molly O'Keefe

  Happy, she thought, feeling as if she were suddenly drowning. Suddenly without air or chance of air.

  She wasn’t even sure if she could be happy again. Failure had done that to her. Her own mistakes suffocated her.

  “You know, I’m here if you ever feel like telling me the truth.” Mia put her ball cap over her head and pulled her ponytail out the back. “See you later.”

  Lucy nodded and listened to her sister’s footsteps walk out the mudroom. In the silence of the dining room she pulled her cell phone from her pocket and cradled it in her hands like a secret.

  She pushed two buttons, leveled her heart rate, found the center of herself and pushed aside everything else.

  “It’s about damn time,” Meisha said when she answered.

  “That’s not how accountants talk.” She closed her eyes. “Tell me.”

  “Twenty thousand dollars. That’s the penalty for backing out of the contract.”

  Twenty grand. “Is that all?” she gasped, trying to force her lungs to work. “I thought they’d want a kidney. My firstborn.”

  “Very funny,” Meisha said. “But you have options. You can declare bankruptcy.”

  “And then what?”

  “And then…you have no debt, but you also have no credit. You’ll need a cosigner for any loan.”

  “What are my other options?” she asked, her eyes still closed.

  “You can sell your condo. The market is shit, but…you might get enough to clear out the debt, or at least take out a good chunk of it.”

  “We’ll sell the condo,” she said, making the decision in a heartbeat. Declaring bankruptcy seemed like an awful big shadow over the rest of her life.

  “Your mother—”

  “I’ll figure out what to tell my mom.” Another lie. More lies. One after the other.

  “Lucy—”

  “She’d just worry. And I don’t need her worry on top of mine. I’ll call my real estate agent.”

  “All right. Keep me posted.”

  Lucy opened her eyes only to look right into Walter’s watery baby blues. Watery baby blues full of reproach.

  Her blood turned to sludge in her veins.

  She stood, the chair screeching over the stone of the floor.

  “You’re selling your mother’s home?” he asked.

  “It’s my condo.”

  “Where she lives.”

  “You don’t judge me.”

  He looked at her for a long time, his face immutable. He was made of freaking stone and her failures were like knives in her skin the longer she looked at him.

  “Don’t say a word to her,” she spat.

  He shook his head and quietly left. Limping toward the back patio and the cushioned deck chair he sometimes sat in.

  Once he was gone, she stood there and shook.

  * * *

  WEDNESDAY NIGHT, AFTER getting Casey his thirtieth drink of water and making sure he went pee before finally turning off his light, Jeremiah stopped in front of Ben’s room.

  The light was shining out from under the door, a thin sliver that wasn’t much of a welcome. It was nine o’clock and he had school in the morning, and then his gardening punishment with Lucy and the boy needed his sleep.

  Jeremiah hung his head, bracing himself to be the bad guy one more time today. After the dinner battle and the shower battle and the cleaning-up-his-room battle. Now, the going-to-bed battle.

  “Hey, Ben,” he whispered, knocking on the door as he pushed it open. Ben’s room was bare, his dresser and bed the only things in it. Jeremiah remembered the walls had been covered in SpongeBob SquarePants pictures and dozens of hand-drawn superhero action shots. But at some point, Ben had taken everything down.

  When was that? he wondered. How do I keep missing these things?

  Ben lay in the pool of light from the lamp clipped onto his bed frame. He was reading and very studiously ignoring Jeremiah.

  “It’s pretty late, buddy.”

  Ben turned a page.

  “You’re going to Lucy’s tomorrow after school, remember?”

  Silence.

  Jeremiah took a breath and turned to stare at the bare walls sloping down to the floor. A window dormer had been cut out and the night sky was full of stars. All of them as far away as the boy in the bed.

  “You can talk to me,” he whispered, his throat burning. “I know…maybe it doesn’t feel that way all the time, but…you can talk to me about how you feel.”

  He heard the quiet rustle of another page turning and then, not that he expected much different, more silence.

  “Turn off your light in five minutes,” he said, stepping out of the room without looking at Ben.

  Please, Lucy Alatore, please be the help we need.

  * * *

  THERE WAS A FIRE in Walter’s room. No, he thought, sweaty and disoriented. His stomach roiling with every breath. The fire was under his skin. He looked down at his body, naked and glowing on the bed. Christ. Was this hell?

  Had to be. He’d plumbed the breadth and depth of awful on earth, there’d been no horrible stone unturned in his life and this—the burning body—was new.

  He’d died. Thank God. Thank God the torture of trying to stop drinking was over. He took a breath, another. Too shallow. Not enough air.

  “Walter.” He turned, trying to find that voice. Searching the shadows for the devil come to escort him to his just rewards.

  There. By the window. Tall and thin, grim and unforgiving. His ex-wife.

  “You,” he breathed.

  “I told you, you would burn,” she sang. “This is what you get for coveting another man’s wife.”

  “And what do you get?” he panted. “For what you did to that family. To our son.”

  “You. You were my punishment.”

  “Good.” He laughed at the thought. They’d deserved each other for a time there, he and his ex-wife. They were each other’s just rewards—he just felt so damn awful his son, Sandra and the girls got wrapped up in their war.

  “You think you will win her like this?” Vicki hissed. “You think your son will forgive you for the way you turned your back? You think those girls are going to think better of you because you lie in your bed shaking and vomiting and sweating like some pig?”

  “Go away,” he breathed.

  “Never.” He could smell roses. “You aren’t half the man A.J. was.”

  He sighed, the knowledge a stone in his gut, a weight in his heart. “I know.”

  “You’ll never have more than me. You’ll never get anything better than the mess you made—”

  Anger fed the fire under his skin and he pulsed with fury. “Shut up. I’m done with you.”

  She laughed and he screamed, opened his mouth and spilled fire over her, until his lips cracked and his skin crackled. With a strength that surprised him, a speed he would never believed he possessed, he lunged up and toward her, grabbing her wrist. Real in the fever. Odd.

  “Walter,” she said, her hand cool against his bare chest. The fire under his skin hissed at the contact. Like rain on a campfire. “You’re hurting me.”

  “Good,” he said, holding on to that wrist. “You won’t win.”

  “I won’t?”

  “No. I can fight. I will fight.”

  A cool hand touched his forehead. And the fire fled the area. He pressed the hand in his grip to his chest, over his heart and the fire darted away, scared of the power.

  Suddenly exhausted he laid down. His eyes closing. He tried to hold on to that hand, to keep his grip on her, on everything, but it was impossible. He was being sucked down, down, down.

  And just before sleep claimed him, he smelled roses again. And cumin.

  Sandra.

  * * *

  THURSDAY AFTERNOON LUCY had it all planned out. She waited for Ben in the back garden. Her mom would answer the door, calm him down because he’d probably be nervous. Give him something to eat because he’d probably be hungry. And then she would lead him
out to the garden where Lucy would put him to work staking the vegetable plants.

  Over the past few days she’d developed this theory, and the more time she spent with it, the more she believed in it. She would just ask him about his mother. She would talk to him, open him up. And like popping a blister, all that grief would pour out and then…he could heal.

  He was clearly dying for someone to just listen. She could be that person. Hell, she’d be great at being that person.

  So caught up in her daydream and potential plans of going to school to become a child psychologist, she didn’t hear her mother coming down the rickety steps to the garden until she cleared her throat right behind her. Lucy jumped a mile, pulling out a strawberry plant as she did.

  “Crap,” she muttered, and tossed the plant to the side of the aisle. Mom stood beside Ben, who had his eyes narrowed and his arms crossed over his chest. He was throwing around a glower to rival his uncle’s.

  “Here he is,” Sandra said, her eyes wide, sending Lucy the secret message that perhaps the plan was not starting with success. Mom wore a beautiful silver cuff around her wrist and it took Lucy a second to recognize it as something she’d made for her mother last year. She so rarely wore it. Not bad, she thought, as if the work were someone else’s.

  “Have you had something to eat?” Lucy asked.

  “I’m not hungry,” Ben muttered, dropping his arms to reveal the video game graphic on the front of his T-shirt.

  Sandra shrugged and mouthed “good luck” before walking back up the staircase.

  “You ready to work?”

  “Gardening?” He sneered. His dark hair flopped over his eyes, making him older and younger at the same time. All the sweetness of his youth, going sour at the edges. The poor kid.

  “You’d rather move rocks? Make license plates?”

  He stared at her, her attempt at humor flying right past him.

  “You’re going to help me stake the vegetable plants.”

  “That’s stupid.”

  She blinked at him, stunned by this sudden aggression. “I thought you wanted to be here!”

  He pursed his lips and shrugged like some put-upon child pop star and she wanted to tell him he looked ridiculous. But instead, she took a deep breath.

  “I think gardening is better than what your uncle had in mind.”

  Ben muttered something under his breath that would no doubt get him in huge trouble with his uncle so Lucy choose to ignore it, largely because she had no idea how to handle a nine-year-old swearing under his breath at her.

  It hadn’t even been ten minutes and this whole thing was already slipping out of her hands.

  “Here,” she said. “Let me show you what I want you to do.”

  She bent down to pick up the trellis things and the round green wire things she’d found in the back shed that she remembered from when she was a kid.

  “These plants are peas and they’re—”

  “Those aren’t peas.”

  She looked up at him and then down at the plants. “What are you talking about?”

  “They’re not peas.”

  “How do you know?”

  Ben licked his lips, the facade crumbling a little. “My mom… We used to have a garden. Those are going to be flowers.”

  “Flowers.” Which meant she’d probably pulled out most of the peas. Great. Total fail. “Well, good thing I have such an expert with me.” She smiled, big and bright, and Ben’s face boarded right back up. Eyes narrowed, lips drawn in a downward curve.

  Remember, she told herself, this is about getting him to talk. Not about punishing him. “Was it your mom’s garden?”

  He blinked and she held her breath, waiting for the up swell in music, the small leak that would become a geyser of pain.

  “I’m not doing this shit,” he muttered, and sat down on the ground.

  “Ben…” She sighed.

  “Tell my uncle, I don’t care.”

  Right. Tell Jeremiah that Ben wouldn’t do the first thing she asked him to do? Not a chance.

  “Look, I’m not a bad guy—”

  He shrugged and she stiffened, offended by that shrug. As if that shrug spoke a whole new demeaning language all its own.

  “You’re the one that ruined that car!” she cried, and somehow, in some way, she knew she was handing him all the power, but what the hell was she supposed to do? Bodily lift him up and force him to work? Wasn’t that illegal?

  “Fine,” she said. “But you’re sitting there. The whole time. And you’re coming back tomorrow.”

  He shook his head at her. “You’re crazy.”

  “Yeah, well, you’re not the picture of mental health, kid.”

  He scowled at her and she started to push the trellises into the earth around the flowers, winding the vines up and over the structures.

  “That’s a pumpkin,” Ben muttered.

  “Good,” she snapped, and kept on working.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  “YOU DON’T HAVE TO COME with me,” Jeremiah muttered to Casey as the boy hopped up the steps toward the Rocky M’s front door.

  “What if Sandra has banana bread again?” Casey asked.

  There was no arguing with a five-year-old’s stomach. He’d learned that the hard way. But Jeremiah still wished the kid would just wait in the car with Aaron so he could pick up Ben and conduct his behavior interview with Lucy in relative privacy.

  He put his hand up to knock on the heavy front door but before he made contact the door swung open and Ben poured out of the house like it was on fire.

  “Hey,” he cried as the kid stomped past. “What happened?”

  “It was great. Can’t wait to go back,” Ben said, and then kept on toward the car. Jeremiah shared a stunned look with Casey, who only shrugged as if to say, What are you going to do?

  A five-year-old with all the wisdom of the ages.

  “Hey, Jeremiah,” Lucy said, leaning against the door like a teenage girl waiting for her date to pick her up, and he felt something smooth and sweet slip into his bloodstream. That old desire to flirt, to lean back and charm this woman’s secrets from her hands, to share a few of his with her—the harmless ones. The fun ones.

  It was a powerful drug. Back in the early days of his rodeo career, he got ribbed all the time for nearly missing his call times because he’d be chatting up the girl at the snack bar.

  But that was a million years ago and he stifled that smooth, sweet inclination.

  “Hey, Lucy, how did it go today?” He put one foot on the first step of the porch and tipped his hat back. Casey copied him, his little boot on the step next to his.

  “Good.” She nodded. “Just fine.”

  He’d been expecting a little more. “Was he polite?”

  “No.” She laughed but when he turned toward the truck, she stopped him. “Stop. I…didn’t expect him to be polite. But he was fine.”

  “What did he do?”

  “Sulked mostly.”

  “Did he do what you asked him to do?”

  She winced.

  “I knew this was a bad idea. We can forget it. Just—”

  “No, Jeremiah.” She touched his arm, the contact burning through his shirt and his disappointment. “Let’s not give up. Not yet.”

  “Did he…did he say anything? At all?”

  In the movies the kid would open up to the pretty stranger, pour out some of his grief. Maybe develop a crush that would pull him out of the pit of despair he seemed to live in. Jeremiah had no reason to believe anymore that life was anything like a movie, but he could still hope.

  “No, Jeremiah,” she murmured, her eyes liquid with sympathy, “he didn’t say anything. But it was the first day.”

  Behind Lucy, Sandra appeared, flushed and smiling. “Well, hello, boys,” she said, and Jeremiah tipped his hat, stupidly pleased when Casey did the same.

  “Howdy, Sandra,” Jeremiah said.

  Casey took the three steps up to the door. “Excuse me, Sandra
?” he asked, and she smiled down at him. Here comes the banana bread, thought Jeremiah, not un-tickled that his nephew seemed to have Jeremiah’s way with women. There should be something of him in these boys he was raising.

  “What are you having for dinner?” Casey asked.

  “Brisket, corn on the cob, beans and a salad.”

  “That sounds real good. We’re having peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches.” Casey poured the orphan routine on thick.

  “Casey,” Jeremiah groaned. “That’s not true.”

  Well, not totally. There was something in the freezer he could pull out.

  “That’s no way to feed a growing boy like you.” Sandra winked at Jeremiah over Casey’s head. “Would you like to stay for dinner?”

  “Yes!” Casey cried just as Jeremiah said, “No.”

  Casey whirled and frowned at him as if he’d lost his mind. “Brisket, Uncle J. Bris-ket.”

  “Three growing boys,” Jeremiah said to Sandra and the gape-faced Lucy. “They’re like locusts, honestly, they’d eat the cupboards if you let them… .”

  “Excellent,” Sandra said. “We’ve got a fridge full of leftovers no one is eating around here. Go tell your brothers that they need to come in and shuck some corn.”

  Casey jumped off the porch with a wild whoop and ran off to the truck to share the news. They were going to eat well tonight. But Jeremiah didn’t like feeling like an interloper, didn’t like spreading the burden of feeding three bottomless pits onto an unsuspecting Sandra.

  “Wow,” Lucy said, looking at Jeremiah with twinkling eyes. “The kid is a smooth talker. I wonder where he gets that from.”

  “You don’t have to do this,” Jeremiah said, ignoring Lucy. “He made us seem much worse off than we are.”

  “I’m sure he did,” Sandra said. “But we would still love to have you. This house could use three growing boys in it for a night.”

  “What about Walter?” Lucy asked.

  “What about him?” Sandra asked, her face falling into stern lines. She twisted the wide silver cuff on her wrist, as if turning a key in a lock.

  “Well.” Lucy laughed. “I’m pretty sure he won’t like having three growing boys here.”

  “Then he can stay in his room,” Sandra snapped in a voice Jeremiah had never heard from the woman before. Sandra left and Lucy stared after her mother with a wrinkle set deep between her eyes.