by Beth K. Vogt
Stephen Ames deserved to see this—to have the sketch. She wasn’t a coward; she refused to tuck the paper back into its hiding place.
Haley exhaled when his phone went straight to voice mail. “This is Stephen Ames. I’m sorry I missed your call. Please leave a message and I will call you back.”
“Stephen.” She cleared her throat. “This is Haley . . . I found something I think you should see. I’ll be around this weekend, if you want to stop by.”
Maybe she should have said, And I won’t do anything crazy like think you’re Sam and try to kiss you. But she hoped that was implied. Now all she needed to do was wait and see if he called back.
She could always unpack more boxes—maybe something more lightweight, like clothes. Other than Sam’s winter coat and some of his shirts that she wore as makeshift maternity tops, everything else was still packed away. But her rationale that it’d be easier not to think about Sam if there were no reminders of him in the house was false. He never invaded her dreams, but he lingered just on the edge of her thoughts.
It was as if Sam watched her and she couldn’t fail him. She’d let him down once in such a terrible way—not that he knew that—and she needed to regain her footing as a reliable, capable military wife. Be strong. Be a good mom. How many times a day did she repeat the scripture in Proverbs about a wife doing her husband good all the days of her life? Sam was gone, but she still had a responsibility to make him proud.
She gathered Sam’s yearbooks from the garage. The brothers hadn’t gone to the same high school, so maybe these would satisfy Stephen’s curiosity. Stacking the books in her arms, she headed back to her bedroom, passing through the laundry room. For once she didn’t have to step around piles of dirty laundry. Nesting had its advantages. In her bedroom was the one memento she’d kept out when she packed the apartment for the move: a framed photo from their wedding day.
Sitting on the edge of the bed, she retrieved it from where it was half-hidden behind a stack of books—advice on what to expect before and after the baby was born, what to name a baby, how to take care of a baby.
Her fingers touched the image of Sam in a dark suit, white shirt, and muted gray and green tie that he’d borrowed from Chaz. She stood beside him on the courthouse steps, wearing the beaded white dress Claire had talked her into buying. She’d waved away her best friend’s insistence that she wear high heels, opting for a comfortable pair of sparkly white ballet flats. If she was saying “I do” to Sam Ames, she wasn’t going to worry about falling flat on her face. The two of them looked happy in the photograph. They were happy.
“Hello, Mrs. Ames.” Sam followed his whispered greeting by wrapping his strong arms around her waist and pulling her close, placing a lingering kiss against her neck. The man’s touch, the sound of his voice, was a heady combination that always ignited a slow spark of desire inside Haley.
“Hello, Mr. Ames.” She slipped her arms around his waist, closing her eyes as he continued to press warm kisses along the curve of her throat.
“Three weeks, Hal.”
“What?” His words weren’t the romantic endearment she’d anticipated.
“Three weeks until my next deployment. I’m so glad you said yes when I proposed—now it’s all about saying yes.” He pulled her toward the bedroom in his—their—apartment, past her suitcase containing her carefully chosen negligee, not stopping until the two of them tumbled onto the bed.
Did he have to mention the deployment now? On their wedding night? Couldn’t they forget about the army—and what his job demanded—for just one night? She had said yes because she loved him, not because he was deploying.
Should he have called again? Of course, Haley hadn’t returned any of the messages Stephen had left her the past two days. And it was a bit late now, since he was pulling up in front of her house. Again. He was beginning to memorize the mile markers along I-25 between Fort Collins and Colorado Springs. If this kept up, maybe he’d need to invest in audiobooks. Or satellite radio.
Haley had to be home. The garage stood open, and it looked as if she’d managed to un-organize the boxes he’d rearranged the last time he was there. Stephen still couldn’t believe that she’d called him—not after walking away from him. And not after . . . well, what happened before she’d abandoned him in the house. He had waited almost an hour for her to come back. Cleaned up the breakfast mess, storing the leftovers. And then realized that maybe the better part of valor was a retreat.
All the “I can do it myself” stubbornness had disappeared from Haley’s face in those few seconds when she’d almost kissed him. Her eyes had closed, hiding the bright blue, lashes skimming downward . . . her touch gentle when her fingers grazed his jaw. An unexpected warmth had kindled in his skin . . .
And he had no right to think about his brother’s widow that way—to imagine what it was like to kiss Haley.
Which was why he hadn’t figured out how to reengage with her until the phone message. He needed to make certain he settled his mind on why he was seeing Haley again: to reconnect with his brother. Nothing more. Not that showing up unannounced made things easier. He would take his cue from her—and that was the only plan he had.
Stephen rapped his knuckles against the door leading into the laundry room. “Hello?”
Nothing there except a small mound of white bath towels. Haley didn’t like doing laundry. He stepped over them and rapped on the door leading into the main house. “Haley? It’s me, Stephen.”
A quick look around showed that the living room and the kitchen were both empty—which left the bedrooms and bathrooms.
Great. Both his mother and his stepmother had drilled it into him that you did not bother a woman when she was in the bathroom or the bedroom. Maybe he needed to head to the Mustang and regroup.
A thud as something hit the ground stopped his exit. Was that a yelp? He double-timed it down the hallway, stumbling to a stop on the carpeting outside an open door. Haley was on her knees, wrestling with half of a baby crib.
Muttering.
Her hair was piled on top of her head in a messy ponytail and she narrowed her focus on the jumbled pieces of the collapsed baby crib. “You are an inanimate object and I’m smarter than you.” Haley ground out the words through clenched teeth. “Tools or no tools, I am going to put you together.”
Stephen swallowed his laughter. “Need some help?”
At the sound of his voice, she dropped a screwdriver into the pile of wood and metal. “Stephen!”
“Let me get that.” He stepped over the toolbox and the tools that were scattered over the carpeting. “What do we do next?”
Haley hesitated—but then he’d come ready to gauge her reactions to him.
“I hate to admit it, but it’s probably time to look at the directions.”
“So, you’re a no-following-the-rules kind of woman?” He pulled the directions out of the cardboard box that she’d propped against the wall.
“No following the directions. That’s different from not following the rules.” She released her hair from the elastic band so that it fell down past her shoulders, only to scrape it together again and capture it back on top of her head. “My brothers said reading directions is tantamount to cheating.”
“How many brothers do you have?” And why did his sister-in-law keep hair the amber color of honey in a scrambled mess on top of her head?
“Three—all older than me.” A laugh bubbled up from her throat. “David, Johnny, and Aaron. They were my heroes—and my favorite playmates.”
Stephen had to force himself to stay with the conversation. Had he ever heard Haley laugh? “No tea parties with the other girls in the neighborhood?”
“Why waste my time with that kind of girly stuff when I could climb trees and play football?”
“Full-on?”
“Is there any other way to play the game?” Haley tilted her chin up, running her finger across a faint scar. “I got my first touchdown and my first set of stitches on the same day. I was eight
.”
“Interesting.” Stephen mimicked her pose. “I earned a similar scar when Sam and I got lost during a family camping trip. Five stitches. Sam never did match it.”
“I only needed four.” She settled back on the floor, sitting cross-legged. “Did you guys like being identical twins?”
“When we were younger . . . yeah, we did.”
“Did you do the typical twin prank of switching classes on your teachers?”
“Of course. It was expected of us.” He moved to the window. Stared out into the small backyard. “At first, it was fun. But I’ll admit that hearing ‘Are you Sam or Stephen?’ got old.”
“So being a twin isn’t all fun and games?”
“No.” He focused on the faded wood fence. Some of the boards looked as though they were listing to the left. He needed to check that. “Sometimes it felt like I had the word and tacked on my name. Stephen and Sam. The twins. You get one with the other. A matched set. Why couldn’t people take the time to figure out who was who?”
A quick look over his shoulder showed that Haley watched him from where she sat on the floor. How much should he say? He was here to find out about Sam, not talk about himself.
“There was a part of me that was . . . relieved when Sam chose to stay with our mom when our dad got remarried. In high school, I was Stephen Ames—no and. When Sam was fourteen, he stopped talking to my dad, and when I chose to live with Dad and Gina, things got dicey between Sam and me. I stopped visiting as much. We stopped talking as much.” Stephen faced forward again, leaning against the windowsill. “I still thought we were sticking with our plan to go to college together. I know that was stupid. What was I thinking? When I was visiting him and Mom during spring break, Sam announced he was joining the army after high school graduation.”
“But you liked being on your own.”
“I didn’t say it made sense.” Stephen consulted the directions before beginning to lay out the pieces of the crib in order. “A college campus would be big enough for both of us, right? But we never had to figure that out.”
“Did you miss Sam?”
“More than I realized.” Stephen kept his eyes trained on the unconstructed crib. “Someone told me that when she was with me it felt like I was searching for something . . . or someone.”
“Sam?”
“I waited so long to try and fix things between my brother and me. Sure, I sent him a letter when I graduated from college—I even called him. Never heard back. I don’t know if he even got the letter. But I could have done more. Tried harder. I regret the years I lost with Sam, but not as much as I regret losing the chance to look my brother in the eye and tell him that I love him.” Stephen stood, wiping his hands on his jeans. “Looks like we’ll need a Phillips screwdriver as well as the straight-edge one you have there. I don’t see one in the toolbox.”
“Um . . . Sam had another set of tools.”
“Right. I think I saw it in the garage. A red box?”
“Yes.”
“Got it. Be right back.”
What was Haley supposed to say? She couldn’t even handle her own mixed-up, repressed emotions about Sam—and they’d been married only three years. And Sam was gone more than he was home. She certainly couldn’t help Stephen unravel so many years’ worth of choices and regrets. She’d have a better chance at figuring out how to assemble the baby crib.
Who was the unnamed “she” who encouraged Stephen to try to reconnect with Sam? A friend? A girlfriend? She crossed the hall to her bedroom, pulling a blue plastic box off the top shelf of her closet, a soft grunt escaping her lips. Heavier than she remembered. Of course, when she shoved it up there, she’d been only four months pregnant. Setting the clear plastic box on the bed, she removed the lid.
Inside was the flag that had covered Sam’s casket, folded into a triangle, the red and white stripes hidden beneath the blue field covered with white stars. She brushed shaking fingers across the white threads, remembering how a somber, white-gloved member of the honor guard presented her with the flag. How she’d clasped it to her chest, her heart hammering against it. Beneath the flag lay a shadow box displaying Sam’s medals. Underneath that was a laminated copy of his obituary Miriam had sent her, insisting she’d want it for their son one day. Haley had read it once—when she’d composed it. Chaz and Angie had sat with her, along with Finn and Claire, helping her distill Sam’s life into too few words. Each sentence, each paragraph typed, felt like a virtual shovel full of dirt on Sam’s grave. She was burying her husband with words that scorched his death into reality in her heart.
Tucked in the side of the box was a brown manila envelope—the coroner’s report detailing how Sam had died. She’d opened it when it arrived weeks after Sam’s death, but only to shove her engagement ring and wedding band along with Sam’s band in among the folded papers. She wasn’t ready to read the black and white reality of how Sam had been killed. She knew he’d been assisting a wounded soldier. Knew he’d been taken down by a sniper.
“Sam, you should have come home.” She weighed the packet of papers in her hands—so light, and yet it contained life-changing information. “I was waiting for you. We were waiting for you.”
Some things were too precious to let go of, even for just a little while. Tucking the medical report in her top dresser drawer, she stored Sam’s medals and the American flag back on the closet shelf. Then she piled Sam’s high school yearbooks back into the plastic box, placing the tree house diagram on top of everything and replacing the lid. It was a start.
As she carried the box into the living room, Stephen walked toward her. “Let me get that.”
“It’s not that heavy.”
“No arguments. You’re already carrying a load.” He stopped, the tips of his ears reddening and a matching red flushing along his cheekbones. “I apologize. That did not come out like I meant it to.”
Stephen Ames blushed? “Be careful. The last thing you want to do is upset a pregnant woman.”
“So I’ve heard.” He hefted the box into his arms. “Although when my stepmother was pregnant, she was reasonable most of the time.”
“You have a—”
“A half brother. He’s thirteen—a great kid.”
“I didn’t know.”
“I figured if Sam hadn’t told you about me, he also hadn’t mentioned Pete. As upset as he was about my dad remarrying, he was even more upset when he found out Dad and Gina were having a baby.”
They stood in the hallway, uncovering family details she should have known—if life had been normal. “You told him?”
“Yes—I thought he needed to know, that my mother needed to know. She locked herself in the bedroom and cried all evening. And Sam threatened to take me down if I ever mentioned it again. So I didn’t.”
Divorced parents. Going to one high school while his identical twin brother went to high school in another state. A stepmother and stepbrother he wanted nothing to do with. Just what part of any of this fit the word typical, which Sam had used to describe his family?
Haley eased past him. “I know there’s not a lot in the box, but I thought you could begin with this. Those are Sam’s yearbooks. When I was looking through them, I found something unexpected.”
Stephen placed the box on the coffee table and sat beside her. He didn’t rush her, just waited while she retrieved the drawing of the tree house. “Remember this?”
He scanned the front of the paper, then turned it over and read the scrawled list before flipping the page back over again. “Where did you find this?”
“Inside one of Sam’s yearbooks.”
“I can’t believe he kept this.”
“Which one of you is the artist?”
“I am—although I won’t claim the title artist. Sam was the mastermind, and I sketched out his ideas.” He traced the outline of the tree house. “As you can see by the erased and redrawn lines, it took a couple of tries before I got it right.”
“Finding that got me thi
nking.”
“What about?”
She stood and walked to the sliding glass doors in the kitchen that led to the backyard. “See that big old tree back there? Don’t you think it’d be perfect for a tree house?”
Stephen came to stand beside her, his steps easygoing. Slow. Sam would have jumped up from the couch and been out of the house and halfway to the tree by now. “Hmm. It’s substantial—a strong base. But . . . doesn’t that tree look kinda funny to you?”
“What do you mean?”
“Look at those upper branches—they’re grayish brown and don’t have any leaves on them.”
“Well, of course they don’t. It’s March. In Colorado.”
“I get that. But look at the base of the tree—there’s new growth down there. Why aren’t there at least leaf buds on the branches?”
“I didn’t know you were a tree guy.”
“Arborist.”
“Excuse me. Arborist.” She continued to analyze the tree. “I think it’s perfect. I’ll re-create the tree house for Sam’s son—for our son. I’ve got the plans and at least a basic list of what supplies I’ll need.”
“When are you due again?”
“April fifth. Why?”
“Shouldn’t we concentrate on putting the crib together—and put a tree house on the back burner?”
“I didn’t say I was going to start today, Rogers.”
“What did you call me?”
“Nobody ever called you by your middle name before?”
“Just the typical ‘Stephen Rogers Ames’ when my mom meant business.”
“Well then, Rogers, let’s get back to the crib. You can keep the original sketch. I made a copy—” She motioned to where she’d anchored a piece of paper to the side of her fridge with a COLORADO magnet. “—for handy reference.”
“Sounds like a plan. I’ll take this other stuff with me and look through it.” His smile disarmed her. “Haley, thank you for giving me the tree house sketch. It means a lot.”
She pressed her hand to her throat, quelling the swift choking sharpness. It was a simple childhood sketch. “I thought it would.”
