The Man Upstairs (You, Me & The Kids)

by Pamela Bauer

  She nodded, biting down on her upper lip. “They’re from my grandma. And they’re personal.”

  “I understand. You should treasure them. I don’t have any of my mother’s correspondence.”

  “My mom didn’t write them. My grandma did. Before I was born. I never knew her because she and my grandpa were killed in a riot in a third world country. They were missionaries trying to help people. My dad said they were in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

  “Unfortunately that happens. At least you know they were trying to do good things.”

  Sara nodded.

  “And you have a little piece of your grandmother in that box. It was thoughtful of your mother to save those letters for you.”

  She lowered her eyes. “She didn’t know I had them.”

  Dena frowned. “She didn’t give them to you?”

  She shook her head, again biting down on her upper lip. “I found them after she and my dad left for the convention. I needed pictures for a family tree project we were doing at school.” She paused, then stared out the window. “She had this locked drawer in her desk where she kept important stuff.”

  “And you opened it when she was gone?”

  She nodded. “I knew the key was under the ivy she keeps in the corner of her bedroom. I saw her put it there one time when she didn’t know I was watching her. I tried to call her in Florida to see if it was okay if I looked in that drawer for pictures, but she wasn’t in her hotel room.”

  There was such a sadness on her face, Dena put her arm around her. “Sara, I’m sure if she had taken your call she would have told you it was okay to open the drawer. You shouldn’t feel guilty about this.”

  The dark head drooped and she said in a broken voice, “But I shouldn’t have looked at her private things. Now everything’s all messed up.”

  “What’s messed up?” Dena asked gently.

  “I can’t tell you.” Her voice broke and she began to cry.

  “Oh, Sara, it can’t be that bad. Do you want to tell me about it?”

  The girl shook her head.

  “Are you sure?”

  “I c-can’t,” she said on a hiccup. “Because it’s a secret. No one else knows.”

  Dena couldn’t imagine what could be in the letters that could cause this child so much distress. It could have been any number of things that had caused a mother to write letters to her daughter while she was away at college. Some of them could seem pretty serious to a twelve-year-old, especially one who looked up at her mother as a role model.

  “Sometimes when secrets are shared, they’re a little easier to bear. It might help to tell me, Sara.”

  “I can’t,” she said on a pained note. “I just wish I’d never found those stupid letters.”

  Dena gently stroked her back in a comforting manner. “Are you sure you don’t want to tell me what’s in them?”

  “If I do, then you’ll know that…”

  “I’ll know what?”

  Just when she thought she wasn’t going to be able to talk Sara into telling her what was in the letters, the girl said in a whisper, “My mom did a bad thing.”

  Dena pulled her into her arms and rested her chin on her head, closing her eyes briefly before saying, “You know what? Mine did, too, and I’m okay. And you’re going to be fine, too. You’ve got to trust me on this, Sara.”

  “I don’t know why she did what she did.”

  “Me, neither,” Dena said softly, thinking of her own mother, not Sara’s.

  “My grandma was mad at her for it.”

  “So was mine,” she said, remembering how upset her own grandmother had been when she’d heard the news that Dena’s mother had left. Dena didn’t think that anything Patsy had done could compare to the sins of her mother.

  “I wish I’d never found those letters,” she repeated.

  Dena wished Patsy hadn’t saved them. They were, after all, written while Patsy was single and in college, a time in her life when she obviously hadn’t made the best choices. This little girl didn’t need to be reminded of that. Maybe if she had discovered them when she was a college student herself, she could have looked at them with a different perspective, but being so young and so vulnerable because of her mother’s death, they were only causing her pain.

  “You know what I think you should do with those letters?”

  “What?”

  “Throw them away.”

  “Really?”

  “They’re only making you unhappy, right?”

  “Well, yeah, but…”

  “If other people see them, will any good come out of it?”

  She shook her head.

  “I’ll tell you what. You think about it. Right now you need to get dressed so you can get some breakfast, and I need to get to work.”

  “Did I make you late?”

  “Yes, but that’s okay. I often work past quitting time, so being a little late one morning won’t matter,” she said truthfully, slipping her feet into a pair of Doc Martens.

  “You wear really cool socks,” Sara commented.

  Dena pulled up a pant leg to reveal more of the crossword puzzles on her socks. “You like these?” When the girl nodded she said, “I have a whole drawer full of different ones. You can help yourself to a pair if you like.”

  “You’ll let me?”

  Dena nodded and showed her which drawer contained the socks. Sara rummaged around, pulling out a black pair with pink lips on them. “These are cool. Were they a Valentine’s Day gift?”

  “No.” They were from Quinn. He’d come back from one of his road trips with them and showered her with kisses so that she wouldn’t be wearing more on her ankles than her mouth. They were special, and she was relieved when Sara put them back and settled on a pair with handbags all over them.

  BECAUSE DENA WAS THREE HOURS late getting to work, she stayed three hours past quitting time. “You’re too damn conscientious,” one of her co-workers said as he waved goodbye.

  She was. She simply couldn’t leave that evening when everyone was walking out the door.

  On the way home she stopped at the local Chinese restaurant and got one order of Kung Pau chicken to go. Instead of eating in the kitchen, she decided to take it upstairs to her room. When she arrived at the second-floor landing, Quinn was there.

  “Hi. What are you doing here?” she asked as she fumbled with her keys.

  He took the keys from her and opened her door. “Waiting for you.” He gestured for her to go in ahead of him.

  “I haven’t eaten dinner yet,” she said, wary of the look in his eyes. He was upset and she wasn’t sure she wanted to hear why.

  “I’ll just take a couple of minutes,” he told her, closing the door behind him. “I need to talk to you about Sara.”

  “Aren’t you going to sit down?” she asked when he remained standing.

  He didn’t answer, but paced back and forth. She’d never seen him in such a state.

  “Are you saying today didn’t go any better than yesterday?” she asked, setting the bag of Chinese food on the coffee table.

  “Better? No, we haven’t reached the better part yet,” he said on a bitter chuckle.

  Dena became more worried. “What went wrong?”

  “You mean besides her starting a fire in my bathroom trash can?”

  “What!” Dena’s mouth dropped open.

  He reached into his pocket and pulled out a partially charred stack of letters. Dena recognized them as the very same pile of letters that had been in Sara’s wooden jewelry box.

  “She tried to burn these in my trash can in the bathroom. She said you told her to get rid of them.” There was accusation in his eyes.

  “I didn’t say to burn them!”

  “But you did say to get rid of them, didn’t you?”

  “Yes. They’re letters from her grandmother to her mother that were written during Patsy’s college days, and they contained stuff that Sara found very disturbing.”

  “
With good reason. They are disturbing.” He glared at her. “You didn’t see any reason she should show these letters to me?”

  “No. Sara was upset enough to find out that her mother had done something bad in college. She didn’t need anyone to see them.”

  “Something bad?” He stared at her in disbelief. “Is that what you think Patsy did?” He shook his head. “I don’t believe this. You’re too much. I don’t know why I bothered to even come down here.” He started for the door.

  “Quinn, wait!” She tugged on his arm. “I don’t know what’s in those letters, because I didn’t read them.”

  He stopped then and turned to face her. “And Sara didn’t tell you what was in them?”

  “No! She didn’t want me to know. I assumed they contained details of her mother’s embarrassing moments in college. We all have them.”

  He chuckled but it was not a humorous sound. “They contained more than that.”

  “You read them?”

  He nodded soberly, then tossed the loose letters onto the table next to her Chinese food. He dropped down onto the love seat and rested his elbows on his knees, his hands holding his head. “I’ve read them and reread them and I still can’t believe what they say.”

  He lifted his head from his hands and glanced up at her. “I’m Sara’s father, Dena. When Doug married Patsy, she was pregnant with my child, not his.”

  Suddenly she understood the reason Sara was so upset with the secret she’d uncovered. It also explained Sara’s attitude toward Quinn. “That’s what’s in the letters?”

  He nodded. “Patsy’s mother thought I had a right to know. Obviously, Patsy didn’t agree.”

  “And Doug? Did he know?”

  He shrugged. “Who knows? I’d like to believe that if he had known, he would have told me.”

  “He did make you Sara’s godfather and the children’s legal guardian.”

  “Because we were best friends in college. The three of us. We all met our freshman year.” Again he laughed, but there was no humor in the sound. “What kind of friendship is that? She had one guy’s kid and married his best friend.”

  The kind that left Dena speechless. Finally she found her voice and asked quietly, “You never suspected?”

  “No. Why would I? Patsy and I fooled around a bit when we were in college…hell, she fooled around with a lot of guys in college. That was just Patsy. It drove Doug nuts. He’d loved her since the day he met her, but he didn’t tell her until they were juniors. Once she found out, he was the only man for her, and she made that perfectly clear to everyone. They ran off and got married six weeks later.”

  “Because she was pregnant.”

  “They didn’t say she was at the time. It wasn’t until later that he announced she was going to have a baby. I never paid any attention to due dates or any of that. When Sara was born she was a tiny thing, and Doug said she’d come early.” He shrugged. “There was no reason for me to suspect anything.”

  “And if you had?”

  “I would have done something. What, I don’t know, but something.” He shook his head in regret. “It would have been a mess because Doug was crazy about Patsy and she was crazy about him. He would have done anything for her. He even quit the hockey team so he could spend more time with her during her pregnancy.” He rubbed his eyes. “I just can’t believe they never told me.”

  Dena didn’t understand it, either, but she knew Quinn needed to try to make sense of their deception. “You’re not certain that Doug even knew the truth, but if he did, they probably thought they were doing what was best for Sara.”

  “Is that what you think?”

  “Why else would they keep such a secret? You said Doug was a good man. He had to have thought he was doing the right thing,” she contended.

  His chuckle was full of self-deprecation. “Or else he knew what kind of lifestyle I had and wanted to protect Patsy’s child from it.”

  She sighed. “You don’t know that. Patsy and Doug aren’t here to defend their actions, are they? Maybe it’s better not to drive yourself crazy with questions you might not ever be able to answer.” From the look on his face, she hadn’t convinced him.

  “I feel so cheated.” He stared straight ahead as he spoke. “I missed out on twelve years of my daughter’s life. Twelve years, Dena. That’s almost her entire childhood.”

  Dena didn’t know what to say. There were no words that would make him feel any less bewildered, any less angry. So she said nothing, but stood over him as he stared into blank space, trying to make sense out of what he’d learned.

  Finally he said, “I’m sorry I came barging in like that. I thought you knew what was in the letters.”

  “It’s all right,” she said, wrapping her arms around her chest so she wouldn’t be tempted to put them around him. “What will you do now?”

  “This changes everything. I’ll need to talk to the attorney in South Carolina. I’m not sending Kevin and Sara to live with Doug’s sister. I can’t.”

  She nodded in understanding.

  “It’s actually been something I’ve been considering for a while. The only reason I hesitated was because Sara was so unhappy here.”

  “How do you think she’ll react to that news?”

  He shrugged. “At this point I’m not sure of anything. All I know is that I’m going to do everything I can to try to build a father-daughter relationship between us.”

  “Have you told her this?”

  “Yeah, but I don’t think she wanted to hear it just yet.”

  Dena’s heart wrenched with sympathy for the girl and for Quinn. “It’s going to take time for her to get used to the idea.”

  “I know. I can hardly believe it myself. I can imagine how difficult it must be for her. It had to be a terrible shock to find those letters, and then before she had a chance to confront her mother about them, Patsy was killed in a plane crash.” He grimaced at the thought.

  “It certainly explains why Sara’s been so hostile toward you,” Dena pointed out.

  “I’m sure she’s feeling confused and angry. So am I.” He looked at her with torment in his eyes.

  Dena dropped down beside him and put her arms around him in a gesture that was purely one of comfort. “I’m sorry, Quinn. I wish there was something I could say or do to help.”

  He shook his head. “It’s just going to take more time for all of us to adjust. Even Kevin.”

  “I think Kevin and Sara are lucky to have you. And I also think that Doug and Patsy knew what they were doing when they made you the kids’ legal guardian.”

  He sighed. “I’m sure they never expected that I’d have to fulfill the obligation. Hell, I never thought I would. In the blink of an eye I became a single parent.”

  He searched her face, looking for what she wasn’t sure, but she knew he didn’t find it. He simply got up and said, “I’d better get back upstairs and check on the kids.” He picked up the scorched letters from the coffee table.

  As she walked him to the door, he said, “By the way, I don’t know what you did with Sara last night, but you made quite an impression.” He clasped her hand. “Thank you for being so kind to her.”

  “You don’t need to thank me. I remember what it was like to be twelve going on thirteen.”

  “Well, whatever you said to her, it helped. She asked me if you could come with us to South Carolina.”

  “Then you are planning a trip back?”

  “Yes. I need to see the lawyer and get this paternity issue straightened out. I think it’ll be good for the kids to go back to what is so familiar to them.” He paused at the door, then said again, “Sara asked if you could come along.”

  Dena felt as if a hand reached out and squeezed her heart. “I can’t leave my work.”

  “What about coming just for a weekend?”

  She wanted to tell him yes, but something held her back. “I can’t.”

  The tiny sparkle of hope that had been in his eyes disappeared. “That’s
too bad. Sara wanted you to be there.” Without another word, he dropped her hand and left.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  “THANKS FOR HAVING ME over for dinner,” Dena told her sister-in-law as they sat in two Adirondack chairs on the porch watching Ryan play basketball with Bethany and Jeremy. “Dinner was excellent.”

  “Why, thank you. I’m glad you could make it. It’s too bad your dad couldn’t come up for the weekend as planned,” Lisa said.

  “Yes, well, you know my dad and emergencies at the office,” Dena said without any bitterness. She was simply stating the truth.

  “We’ve invited him often and always something comes up and he can’t make it. We should probably load up the kids and drive down there.”

  Dena put a hand on her arm. “Don’t feel guilty that you haven’t. He hasn’t changed, Lisa. He still would rather be working than spending time with family.” Again there was no sourness in her tone.

  “Well, I’m glad we convinced you to get away from your work for at least one day. We don’t get to see enough of you,” she said with a gentle pat on her arm. “Is that because of work or because of Quinn?” she asked with a sly grin.

  Dena focused her attention on the glass of iced tea in her hand, tracing a pattern with her thumb on the condensation. “Work. Unfortunately, in that respect I am my father’s daughter. I’ve been putting in a lot of hours.”

  “How are things going between you and Quinn? I thought maybe you’d bring him to dinner today. Jeremy and Bethany talked about him for weeks after that camping trip you took. Ryan and I would like to get to know him better, too.”

  She looked down at the glass in her hand. There was no point in pretending that she and Quinn were still seeing each other. “That’s probably not going to happen, Lisa.”

  “You’re not together?”

  She swallowed the lump in her throat. “No.”

  “Oh, Dena, I’m sorry. I thought you looked a little uncomfortable every time Jeremy mentioned his name.”

  “It’s that obvious?”

  “Well, maybe not to the men in this family. You want to talk about it?”

  Dena shook her head. “Not really. It’s just not working.”