by Joan Kilby
“I’ve enjoyed meeting you very much, sir,” Randall said, rising.
“You don’t have to call me sir.”
“What should I call you, then?”
Max hesitated. He could hardly ask the boy to call him Dad; he already had a dad. “Max. Max will do just fine.”
Randall walked him to the door. “Say goodbye to your folks for me,” Max said, unwilling to share the final moments with his son with the Tiptons.
Randall stuck out his hand. Max took it, hesitated a second, then pulled the boy into a hug. The tightness in his chest seemed to expand until he found breathing difficult. “Take care.”
They separated awkwardly, and Randall stared fixedly at his polished shoes. “W-will I see you again?”
Max had told himself this would be a one-off deal. More to the point, that was what he’d told Kelly. But how could he say no to his kid? Randall needed…something from him, some spark in his existence. And Max…well, Max needed to know that his son was okay. On the surface it certainly appeared that way. The boy had no material wants, he had parents who loved him and encouraged his interests, but Max sensed an underlying loneliness. He knew what it was to be an only child. “Lonely” was the one thing Max had never wanted for his children. It was the reason he’d had so many, and the reason he wanted still more.
Randall needed siblings. Max could give them to him.
“Would you like to visit my home and meet Kelly and your half sisters?” The words were out almost before he knew he was speaking, but he didn’t regret them, not when he saw Randall’s eyes light up.
“Oh, boy! Could I? When? I’ll go ask Mom and Dad right now.”
His heart telling him he’d done the right thing, Max followed his son back inside the house.
“YOU WHAT!” Kelly stared at Max. She was still coming to grips with the fact that he’d gone to Wyoming against her wishes.
Max sighed through gritted teeth and took the position that offense was the best form of defense. “I invited Randall to spend his summer vacation with us. Is that so hard to understand?”
“What’s hard to understand is why you think I would agree,” Kelly said, pacing the bedroom. “I told you I don’t want anything to do with this kid.”
Seated on the edge of the bed, Max followed her with his gaze. “I know I should have asked you first, but if you’d seen that boy you would have done the same thing. He lives with an elderly father and a wheelchair-bound mother. They’re nice people and they’re doing their best, but Randall has few friends. He’s lonely. If he doesn’t come to us he’ll spend the summer in his room in front of the computer.”
“My heart is breaking.”
“Kelly, this sarcastic attitude isn’t like you. If you only met him—”
“I don’t want to meet him. What about me and the girls? Or don’t you care about us anymore?” She stopped in front of the closet and took out her jacket.
“Of course I care. What are you doing?”
She ignored his question. “Having secret children and illicit love affairs isn’t like the man I thought I married.” Shrugging into her jacket, she stopped in front of him. “I thought I knew you. Now I realize I don’t know you at all.”
“Don’t get sidetracked. We’re talking about Randall. Please, Kel, give yourself time to get used to the idea.”
“Are you serious? School gets out in a month. I’d need a lifetime to get used to this. Summer has always been family time.”
“Randall is family, Kelly, whether you like it or not.” He paused. “Where are you going?”
Kelly slipped her feet into a pair of loafers. “Gran’s house.”
“Can’t we talk about this?”
“I’m too angry and upset to talk. I’ll see you later. Maybe.”
CHAPTER FOUR
WHEN KELLY GOT TO GRAN’S house she was surprised to see both her sisters’ cars parked out front. She knocked once and let herself in the front door.
“Hello? Anybody home?” Lights burned in the living room to her left and she heard her sisters’ voices.
“Is that you, Kel?” Erin, her eldest sister, called. “We’re in here.”
Kelly dropped her purse on the hall table and went through to the living room of the big Victorian house where Kelly and her sisters had grown up after her parents were killed in a car crash. Her younger sister, Geena, held her sleeping baby across her lap, and Erin’s toddler was curled up in a portable cot Gran kept around for her great-grandchildren’s frequent visits.
“You guys having a party without me…?” Kelly began, then stopped short at the sight of Gran, seated in her rocker with one leg propped up on a stool and an ice pack over her ankle.
“What happened?” Kelly demanded, hurrying across the room to her grandmother’s side. “Are you all right, Gran?”
“Nothing serious. I just twisted my ankle while I was on my power walk this evening,” Gran said, adjusting the ice pack.
“The ankle’s badly swollen,” Erin elaborated, pushing back her long blond hair. “I came by to drop off some homemade strawberry jam and found her crawling on her hands and knees.”
“It’s nothing,” Gran insisted fretfully. “I’ll be fine.”
“I’m taking you to see Ben first thing in the morning,” Geena said, referring to her husband, a local G.P. One hand rested lightly on little Sonja’s rounded diaper-clad bottom. “I’d have brought him with me tonight, but he’s doing an emergency appendectomy.”
“You should have called me,” Kelly scolded her Gran. She lifted the ice pack and winced at the swollen mottled skin. “Hang on and I’ll get an Ace bandage from the first-aid kit in my car.”
When she got back inside, Erin was administering anti-inflammatory tablets to the resistant septuagenarian. Kelly pulled up a stool before Gran’s chair and expertly wrapped the elderly woman’s ankle in a neat herringbone pattern.
“You’re good, Kel,” Geena said, admiring her sister’s handiwork. “Where’d you learn to do that?”
“I take a refresher first-aid course every couple of years. With four kids you’ve got to be ready to handle anything.” The minicrisis of Gran’s ankle had pushed Max and Randall from her mind, but mentioning her children brought it all back in a rush.
Gran must have seen something in her face. “What’s wrong, Kelly?”
Kelly rose, walked a few paces and sank into an overstuffed chair. “Nothing.”
Geena, sitting opposite, brushed wispy auburn bangs off her face and looked Kelly over closely. “Yes, there is. Your eyes are swollen and red. You’ve been crying.”
“Tell us what’s the matter, Kel,” Erin said.
Kelly stared into the empty fireplace, not knowing where to start. Then she released a deep sigh. “Max and I had a fight.”
“Pass me my knitting, Geena, honey,” Gran said in a low voice.
“Did you argue about your work again?” Geena asked sympathetically as she handed Gran a tapestry bag stuffed with yarn and needles.
“No…” Although she’d learned about Max’s son two weeks ago, she hadn’t yet confided in her sisters or Gran, hoping the whole nightmare would blow over. Now she could use some moral support. “Max had an affair the summer after high school with a girl on a dude ranch,” she began, and went on to tell them the whole story.
“Oh, Kelly, sweetie,” Geena said when Kelly finally finished. She put a hand over her sister’s and squeezed. “This is dreadful. I can’t believe he didn’t tell you long ago.”
“I can’t believe this is Max we’re talking about,” Erin said, equally shocked. “You and he have been together since your junior prom.”
Gran knit quietly. So quietly Kelly had to ask, “Did you know about the baby, Gran?”
Gran’s soft brown eyes were thoughtful behind her oversize blue plastic glasses. Slowly, she shook her head. “No. And frankly, I’m surprised they managed to keep it quiet in a small place like Hainesville. At the time I did think it odd that Max and his parents
were making so many trips out of town. I knew you were serious about Max so I was worried he was in some kind of trouble. But he went off to college as expected and nothing seemed amiss.” She paused to count stitches, then turned her needles and started another row. “One thing I never doubted was that he loved you.”
“He should have trusted her, too—enough to tell her the truth,” Erin said.
“Well…he didn’t want to risk losing me.” Kelly caught herself defending him and hardened her voice. “And he was right to worry.”
She slumped her aching head into her propped-up hand. “He invited Randall—that’s his son’s name—to stay with us for the summer…without even asking me!”
“You two need to sit down, calmly and rationally, and work through your problems,” Gran said, glancing up from her knitting.
“How can she be calm when she’s hurting so badly?” Erin demanded. “I love Max like a brother, but I think he’s way off base for even suggesting a visit before clearing it with Kelly. It’s adding insult to injury.”
“He has put Kelly on the spot,” Gran agreed. “What’s the boy like?”
“I’ve only seen his photograph. He looks like a computer nerd. A nice nerd, mind you. Max feels sorry for him. He seems to think Randall won’t be happy unless he takes the boy into his life. Into our lives.”
“Perhaps if you give the child a chance, you’ll like him, too,” Gran suggested.
“I could never like a child of Max’s by another woman,” Kelly declared, propelled to her feet by the force of her emotions. “I know I’m not being politically correct or particularly nice, but that’s how I feel.”
She paced to the window, half hoping she would see Max’s car pull up outside. But the streetlight illuminated only the empty road and the broad limbs of the big maple that dominated Gran’s front yard.
Her headlong flight into the night brought home the depth of her and Max’s estrangement. Never before had she left the house in the middle of an argument. Always, she’d stayed to talk things through.
“Max has to meet her halfway,” Erin said suddenly, as if reading Kelly’s thoughts. “He has to make it up to her somehow.”
“That’s right,” Geena agreed, staunchly supportive.
“Max’ll never give in.” Kelly returned to her seat. “He’s so stubborn.”
“Kelly, you can be just as obstinate,” Gran pointed out, adding quietly, “sometimes more so.”
“Max is set on getting to know his son,” Kelly went on, ignoring that comment. “Randall’s become the most important thing in his life, more important than me and the girls.”
“I don’t believe that for a moment,” Gran said.
Deep down, Kelly didn’t, either, but she was mad enough and hurting enough to want to think so. “Now that he’s found Randall he’ll never let him out of his life.”
The clock on the mantel chimed the hour. Geena made a move to gather up her sleeping baby. “I hate to leave you like this, Kel, but it’s getting late. I have to take Sonja home and get some sleep before she wakes up again in four hours.”
“I’ve got to go, too,” Erin said, rising. “Nick was called out to a fire earlier and I told Miranda I’d only be half an hour. That was two hours ago.” Her husband, Nick, was fire chief, and Miranda was his teenage daughter by a previous marriage. “Gran, maybe you’d better come home with me.”
“I’ll stay with her,” Kelly said. “I don’t want to go home, anyway.”
“I’ll make do just fine with that walking stick I used after my heart attack,” Gran said. “You girls go home.”
“You’re going to need crutches even when you’re allowed to be on your feet,” Kelly said. “I’ll stay,” she repeated to Erin. “You and Geena can take off.”
Erin bent to pick Erik out of the cot. The sleepy toddler rubbed his eyes with his fists. “I don’t have to be at the bank tomorrow, so I’ll come back first thing in the morning to stay with Gran while you go to work.” Erin worked part-time at the Hainesville Bank as assistant manager.
“Tomorrow morning I volunteer at the seniors’ center,” Geena said. “I’ll organize an appointment with Ben and Erin can take Gran to the clinic. It’s settled,” Geena said when Gran started to protest again. “Kel, do you want help getting Gran ready for the night?”
“We’ll manage. And…thanks, you two, for listening.”
Geena and Erin enveloped her in a three-way hug. “Take care, Kel,” Geena told her.
“Everything will work out,” Erin added. “You’ll see.”
“I hope so. Meanwhile I’d better call Max and tell him I’m staying here tonight to take care of Gran,” Kelly said. “Tomorrow I’ll go back to pack some of my things. Gran needs me and this is a good opportunity for Max and I to have some time apart.”
After Erin and Geena left, Kelly got sheets out of the linen closet to make up the bed in her old room upstairs. When she’d done that she helped Gran to the bathroom and then into bed. “Promise you’ll call if you need me in the night? That you won’t try walking on that ankle?”
Gran nodded. “Just leave my bedside light on. I’m going to read awhile.”
Kelly paused in the doorway. “Am I wrong for not being more supportive of Max’s need to know his son?”
Gran pushed her glasses up on her nose. “My dear, you can’t help what you feel. Just don’t lose sight of the most important thing in all this.”
“What’s that?”
“You love Max, and Max loves you.”
TINA EYED THE BURNED TOAST and rubbery scrambled eggs Max set in front of her the next morning and stuck out her bottom lip. “Where’s Mommy?”
“Yeah, where’s Mom?” Beth added. “She’s supposed to drop me off at school early today. I’ve got softball practice.”
Kelly had only been gone one night, but already Max missed his wife. And it wasn’t because she cooked eggs better than he did, or because her absence caused awkward questions. In thirteen years they hadn’t spent a night apart, and he found he couldn’t sleep without her curled next to him. Even though she’d called to say she was taking care of her grandmother, Max couldn’t shake the feeling Kelly had used Ruth’s injury as an excuse to stay away.
“I told you already,” he said to Tina with diminishing patience.
“No, you didn’t,” Tina complained.
“You told me,” Tammy piped up.
Bleary-eyed, Max blinked at his identical twin daughters in their identical Bugs Bunny pajamas. He didn’t usually have trouble telling them apart, but this morning he felt as though he were seeing double. “She stayed at Gran’s last night.”
Tammy sipped at her orange juice. “Why?”
“Gran twisted her ankle and can’t walk. She needs someone to help her.”
“Mom’s not coming back, is she?” Robyn’s dark eyes, which reminded him so much of Kelly, were worried. She’d only picked at her breakfast.
“Of course she is,” he replied automatically, but her question unnerved him. His eldest daughter was highly intuitive, but surely she couldn’t know how deep the troubles lay between him and Kelly.
Then to his relief he heard the front door open and a moment later Kelly appeared, her small figure swirling into the kitchen with her usual energy.
“Good morning, girls,” she said, not looking at Max.
Beth brightened, Robyn started eating, and Tammy and Tina immediately began complaining that the other one wouldn’t wear the outfit she wanted to wear.
“Kelly…” Max began over the din.
“No one says you have to wear the same thing,” Kelly said, ignoring Max to enter the fray. “Tammy, you put on your pink dress, and Tina can wear her purple overalls.”
“But we like wearing the same clothes,” Tammy and Tina said together, and off they went in the kind of circular argument that drove Max crazy.
“Kelly…” he said again.
“Beth, did you remember to pack your softball mitt?” Kelly continued as
if he hadn’t spoken. She took a cup from the cupboard and casually poured herself coffee.
“Yup,” said Beth through a mouthful of toast and egg. She was naturally buoyant and oblivious to undercurrents; nothing stopped her from eating.
Max heard Kelly’s cup clink against the coffeepot and noticed her hands weren’t steady. She wasn’t as blasé as she was pretending; like him, she had dark circles under her eyes.
“How is Gran’s ankle?” Robyn asked.
“Pretty bad. I’ll be staying there for a while.”
“What?” Max exclaimed. “You said nothing of that last night.”
Kelly stirred cream into her cup and took a sip. When she glanced up, the sorrow and a grim determination on her face frightened him. “I have to, Max. She can’t walk on the foot. Geena and Erin will take turns looking after her during the day while I’m at work, but they both have babies and new husbands and have to be home at night.”
“You have a husband and four children. You have to be home at night, too.”
“Gran needs me.”
“For how long?” Max asked.
“Ben will give us a better idea after he examines her ankle, but it could be anywhere from four to six weeks, depending on how badly her ligaments are damaged. Come, girls. It’s time to brush your teeth. I’ve got to get you to school and go to work myself,” Kelly said.
Dragging their heels, the children went down the hall to their bedrooms and the bathroom.
Max grasped her slumping shoulders and turned her to face him. “You can’t seriously be planning to stay at Ruth’s that long. The children need you.”
“I’ll be here for the girls,” she said, twisting out of his hands to reach for her purse on the table. “I’ll just go to Gran’s to sleep.”
He moved with her, maintaining eye contact. “I need you.”
Pain clouded her gaze, but she remained silent.
