“It’s an illustrated report. The kids pick some historical person they’re interested in. Then the parents or, you know, extended family”—he pointed to himself with both index fingers—“help them research. The kids produce the artwork and present it to the class as a kind of show-and-tell.”
“Sounds reasonable. Surely the teacher didn’t criticize her artwork.”
“No. But Kaya….” Cody sighed. “Let’s say she tampered with the text.”
Cody led the way through the hallway into a room with french doors that opened onto a deep lawn. The mellow oak floor and the deep orange walls, warmed further by the sunlight spilling in through a pair of bay windows, reminded Aaron strongly of pumpkin pie. He sniffed experimentally, expecting scents of cinnamon and nutmeg, but instead, the aromas were much stronger. Maybe… curry?
A man and a little girl were sitting on a brown corduroy sofa in front of a fieldstone fireplace, the girl’s feet barely clearing the deep cushions. She had the same brown skin, black hair, and liquid dark eyes as the man next to her, so Aaron made the leap that this must be Cody’s niece and brother-in-law. The man looked rather harried, and the little girl… drooped. She held a booklet, covered in green construction paper and bound with brass brads.
“Hey, Hiran. Kaya. This is Aaron Templeton, the guy I was telling you about. Aaron, my brother-in-law, Hiran Chaudhri, and my niece, Kaya Chaudhri-Brown.”
Hiran stood up and shook Aaron’s offered hand. “Pleased to meet you.”
“My pleasure entirely.”
“Aaron’s a historian.”
Kaya looked up from under her bangs. “I hate history.”
“Kaya!” Hiran’s tone was admonitory but tempered with an obvious kindness.
“It’s okay.” Aaron smiled down at the girl, who was wearing a Dinosaur State Park T-shirt that matched her pink high-tops. “It’s not everyone’s cup of tea.”
Cody dropped down on the sofa next to Kaya. “But you were so excited about it. I seem to remember reading about three hundred and seven internet pages about Amelia Earhart with you last week.”
“That was before,” Kaya said darkly.
Hiran’s pocket beeped, and he pulled out his cell phone. He winced at the screen, then glanced at his daughter, obviously torn between the message and the distressed little girl, who was glaring at her feet, kicking her high-tops together.
The phone rang, and Hiran clutched his hair. “I’m sorry. The entire team is about to melt down. I must—”
Cody shooed him toward the door. “No worries, BIL. We’ve got this.” He gestured to the sofa on the other side of his niece, and Aaron sat down gingerly as Hiran strode out of the room. “What changed your mind, munchkin?”
“I’m not a munchkin, Uncle Cody. They wear stupid shoes.” She punctuated her words with a double kick of the pink high-tops.
“Sorry, munchkin.”
“Uncle Cody!”
Aaron wondered what Cody was up to until he noticed that Kaya’s sadness had morphed into indignation. Ah. Redirection. Apparently Cody wasn’t afraid to take one for the team.
Cody leaned into the cushions and dropped an arm across the sofa back, behind Kaya. His fingers brushed Aaron’s shoulder, prompting an involuntary shiver.
He tapped the little booklet in Kaya’s lap. “Why don’t you tell us what the problem is? You wouldn’t let me see the final project at dinner the other night.”
“That’s because it wasn’t done.”
“Well, it’s done now. Can we see it?”
She clutched the booklet to her chest. “No. Ms. Jenkins said it was wrong.”
Aaron didn’t miss the flash of anger in Cody’s eyes—and he didn’t blame him. For a child Kaya’s age, just starting her long academic slog, discouragement from a teacher could be crushing. The same thing had happened to Aaron when he was in first grade. Those kinds of scars stayed with you. Although he had to admit that Kaya seemed like a kid who wasn’t afraid to speak her mind.
Aaron cleared his throat. “Kaya, Cody told you that I’m a historian, but I’m a librarian too. I love all kinds of books. Won’t you show me yours?”
She tilted her head and gazed up at him, her huge brown eyes narrowed with suspicion. “A liberrian? Really?”
“Mmm-hmmm.”
“Well. Okay, then.” She took a deep breath, her narrow shoulders rising and falling, then opened the report almost reverently. Aaron felt a spike of his own anger. Clearly she’d been proud of this. It mattered to her, but her teacher had shot her down.
The first page had “Amelia Earhart” written in the shaky block letters of someone still practicing penmanship. The second page had a crayon rendering of a figure in a 1930s flight helmet. Although it was representational as only children’s art could be, it was still recognizable as a female pilot.
“Amelia Earhart was born in Kansas. She liked basketball and cars. But her favorite thing was airplanes.” Kaya turned the page to another picture of Earhart standing next to a bright yellow plane. “She called her very first plane the Canary because it was yellow like a canary.”
“Really?” Aaron asked. “I didn’t know that.”
“Uh-huh.” She turned the next page, which featured a plane dangerously close to very choppy bright blue water. “She did lots of things first. She was the first girl to fly across the Atlantic Ocean by herself.” On the next page, the plane was aloft over a cornfield. “The first girl to fly across America by herself without stopping.” Another page, this time with Earhart standing next to a woman in a grass skirt. “The first person, boy or girl, to fly from Hawaii to the rest of America. Then she decided she would fly around the world.”
Aaron braced himself for what was coming next—the disappearance of Earhart and her copilot in the middle of the Pacific. But when she turned the page, the picture was of Earhart with a… kangaroo?
“And then she visited Australia.”
“Um….”
Cody caught Aaron’s gaze and shook his head. “What next?”
Kaya turned the page, revealing an obvious parade between tall buildings. “And when she got to New York, they gave her a parade.” But Kaya wasn’t done—there were still more pages to go. The next one showed Earhart—still in her flight helmet—next to a tree with exuberant green leaves and dozens of red dots. “Then she went to Bishop’s and picked apples with her family.”
The next page showed Earhart in a rocking chair surrounded by a crowd of smaller figures with skin tones ranging from Earhart’s peach to a brown slightly darker than Kaya’s, all wearing pink high-tops and their own flight helmets. “And she had seven daughters and seven times seven granddaughters, and they all flew planes too. The end.”
Cody tugged gently on the heavy braid that lay on Kaya’s shoulder. “That’s kind of a big family, don’t you think?”
“No.” Kaya closed the report and hugged it to her chest again. “History doesn’t have enough girls in it. It should have more.”
Aaron met Cody’s gaze over Kaya’s head and quirked an eyebrow. “You know, she’s got a point.”
CODY CONTROLLED his laughter because that wouldn’t help Kaya one bit. “You know, munchkin—”
“Uncle Cody.” The warning note in Kaya’s voice was unmistakable. Good.
“You know, kiddo, that’s not what really happened. Like we talked about when we were doing the research, Earhart’s plane went down in the Pacific, and they never found her. She never made it to Australia, let alone New York or Bishop’s.”
Kaya had her dad’s gorgeous brown skin and shiny black hair, but her determined chin and the expression on her face were 100 percent Eliza.
She sat back, nearly disappearing in the sofa cushions, her lower lip pushed out in a pout. “My ending was better.”
“I agree. But it wasn’t the assignment. Save the AU stuff for language arts.”
She looked up at him from under lowered brows. “What’s hey you?”
“Not ‘hey you’—AU. Altern
ate Universe. Stories about the same people, but where different things happen to them.”
“There are stories like that?”
“Sure. Lots of them.”
She nodded decisively, her black bangs flopping on her forehead. “Then that’s what I’m going to do when I grow up. I’m writing hey-you stories about all the stuff I don’t like and make them end better.”
“Careful, Kaya,” Cody said, sharing a glance with Aaron. “Politicians do that all the time. They call it ‘spin.’”
She pushed herself off the sofa. “I’m going to show Mommy and tell her about hey you.”
Cody grabbed one of her hands. “Mommy’s taking a nap right now, so think you could wait until she wakes up?”
“I suppose. This baby’s kicking her in the butt.”
Cody smothered his laugh. “Where did you hear that?”
She looked at him as if he were an idiot. “Mommy.”
“Naturally.”
Aaron’s eyebrows rose above his glasses. “Baby?”
“Eliza’s pregnant. Apparently it hasn’t improved her disposition.”
Kaya took a giant step to clear Cody’s feet. “Okay. I’ll go read it to Dexter.”
“Dexter?” Aaron’s half smile was almost more than Cody could resist.
“Cat. He’s a tough critic. She probably got a better response from her teacher.”
Hiran trudged back into the room, his normally smooth hair sticking out around his ears. “Sorry about that.” He scanned the room. “Where’s Kaya? She didn’t do an end run to get to her mom, did she? Eliza’s not feeling so great today.”
“So I gather. According to Kaya, the baby’s kicking her in the butt.”
Hiran rolled his eyes. “I wish I could say it was an exaggeration. You were gone for her first pregnancy, so you don’t remember, but she had morning-noon-and-night sickness for the first two trimesters, and it looks like the pattern is repeating. Your mom and dad are in Boston until tomorrow, visiting George, so I promised Eliza I’d keep Kaya occupied today, but….” He waved his phone. “The whole project team is imploding. I need to—” His phone rang again. “Sorry.” He disappeared back into the kitchen as he answered it.
Aaron turned, resting his knee on the sofa to face Cody. “Is your sister a stay-at-home mom?”
“No. She’s an architect in private practice. My parents are retired and I’m, you know, flexible, so between the three of us, we watch Kaya after school and on weekends when Hiran and Eliza are slammed.”
Cody shifted uneasily on the too-soft cushions. If he left on the backpacking trip, what would that mean to his family? If Hiran was right—and he should know, since he’d been here—then not having Cody on deck to help out could be a huge problem. It sounded like Hiran needed help at the office too, and if Cody wasn’t around to help with that either….
Today, though, he could totally step up to the plate.
Aaron had risen and was wandering around the room. “This is a great house.”
“Thanks.” He joined Aaron by the french doors. “I grew up here. It belonged to my mom and dad, but after Eliza and Hiran got married and I was off at college, they decided to downsize. By the time I got back from that sailing trip, Eliza had already planned and executed the renovation, so I moved into the attic apartment.”
“So you’re living in the house you grew up in.”
He grinned. “Guilty. But at least I’m not still living in my old room with Lord of the Rings posters on the walls and shelves full of Star Wars action figures.”
“No?”
“Nope. I’m living in the attic. With Lord of the Rings posters on the walls and shelves full of Star Wars action figures.”
“Uh….”
“Kidding. The action figures are in storage.”
Cody touched Aaron’s arm, gratified when Aaron didn’t flinch or pull away. “Look, I know I promised you a hike, but would you mind if we scaled it back a little and took Kaya with us? It’ll give Hiran and Eliza a break, which sounds like they really need.”
Aaron’s smile warmed Cody down to his toes. “No, I don’t mind.”
“Great! We’ll only be going about a mile and a half instead of what I’d planned, but the view is still spectacular, especially today. Clear, still a little cool, but it’ll warm up by this afternoon in time for a posthike ice cream stop.”
“Sounds like a plan.” Aaron’s brow knotted. “But is a six-year-old up for a three-mile hike?”
“Kaya? You bet. We’re taking a lunch with us, so we’ll have a break between going up and coming back down. Anyway, she’s a tough little cookie. She goes on runs with me all the time.”
He led Aaron into the kitchen where Hiran was stirring something on the stove—yellow curry sauce, by the mouthwatering aroma—while he talked in soothing tones into his phone.
He hung up and sighed. “I don’t suppose I could talk you into hiring on full-time, Cody? These latest baby developers need their hands held for everything.”
“Sorry. I’m not ready for that yet. But I can handle your immediate childcare issues. Aaron and I were planning on taking a long hike today, but we can change our plans. Head up to Sleeping Giant and take Kaya with us.”
“Really?” Hiran’s harried expression morphed into one of relief. “That would be outstanding. I could go in to the office and defuse the current project time bomb.”
“You bet. We’ve got your back.”
Aaron smiled. “Absolutely. I know what it’s like to be up against a deadline and have no visible means of support.”
“Thank you. I’ll get her ready to go.” Hiran’s phone beeped again, and Cody laughed, clapping him on the back.
“Leave it to me. I’ll talk her out of the pink high-tops and into her hiking boots before you can say ‘revisionist history.’”
Hiran grasped Cody’s shoulder in a firm grip. “You are a god among men, Cody Brown. I don’t know what we’d do without you.”
Cody would do anything for his family, any time, no questions asked. None of them ever took his effort for granted, which was nice and always gave him a warm fuzzy feeling. But the look on Aaron’s face right then, that combination of admiration and longing?
It made him feel like a freaking superhero.
Chapter SEVEN
AARON STARED out the window, fascinated, as Cody drove through the New Haven streets. “You know, I’d heard about the Yale Art Gallery, but it looks even weirder in person. I mean a rectilinear windowed box grafted onto stone block gothic? It’s like passive-aggressive conjoined twins with wildly different fashion sense.”
“Yeah. Don’t get Eliza started on that. She has feelings.” Cody glanced in the rearview mirror. “You okay back there, munchkin.”
“Uncle Cody.” Kaya looked up from her tablet to glare at him. “I told you.”
“Yeah, yeah. Not a munchkin.” He shot a mischievous glance at Aaron and mouthed munchkin. “You know,” Cody said as he navigated the nest of one-way streets, “you’re not the first person to run away to Connecticut.”
Aaron returned to his rubbernecking, chest tightening. “I didn’t run away.”
“Dude. We already know you weren’t running to something—at least not something concrete. Once you figured out which way was Connect-i-cut, you hopped on a plane and split.”
Aaron sighed, drumming his fingers on his thigh. “Fine. I was running away. But when I saw Wayne picking out rings after refusing to consider the possibility with me…. Well, this camel’s back wasn’t strong enough for that particular straw.”
“So you asked him to marry you and he turned you down?”
“No. I asked whether he’d ever thought about getting married, and he said never.”
Cody turned another corner. “You realize that’s not the same thing, right? Maybe he was waiting for you to pop the question so he could think about it?”
Aaron stopped drumming his fingers and gripped his knees instead. “How did we get on this subject?”<
br />
“We were talking about Connecticut as an escape hatch.”
“Okay. I’ll bite. Who else ran away to Connecticut?”
“Whalley, Goffe, and Dixwell.”
Aaron turned in his seat and caught a smirk lifting Cody’s lips. “Who?”
Cody scoffed. “And you call yourself a historian.”
“Cut me a break.” Aaron kept his tone tart, but the tension eased across his shoulders, as it always did under Cody’s light-heartedness. “I’ve been researching kangaroos for the last month.”
He waved one hand as if batting Aaron’s words away. “Excuses. If you’d spent five minutes on Connecticut research before you ran, you’d know that Whalley, Goffe, and Dixwell were three of the regicide judges who signed Charles I’s death warrant. When Charles II was crowned, England was suddenly a little too hot for them—as was Boston, where they first landed. They hid out here.” He jerked his thumb to the left, toward an obviously busy—and very oddly configured—intersection. “In fact, three major streets in New Haven are named for them. We put up freaking monuments to them. We Connecticaners”—he stuck his nose in the air, putting on a fake posh accent—“spit in the face of royal retribution. They—” Cody glanced in the back seat where Kaya was bobbing her head along to a song on her tablet. “Hmmm. Maybe we shouldn’t be talking about them in front of her.”
“We learned about them in kindygarden, Uncle Cody.”
“You did?” He glanced in the rearview mirror again. “What do you think about them?”
Aaron swiveled around in his seat in time to see Kaya scrunch up her face, obviously deep in thought. “I think it’s wrong to chop anyone’s head off. But I also think it’s wrong to change the rules after the game is already over.” She turned her attention back to her tablet.
“Tough little cookie,” Aaron murmured.
Cody chuckled. “Just wait until you meet my sister, and all will become crystal clear.”
A little nugget of warmth lodged at the base of Aaron’s throat, making it difficult to swallow. He wants me around long enough to meet his sister. He’s trusting me with his family. Unable to speak, he looked out the window again as Cody drove them out of town and into the wooded hills.
Mystic Man Page 6
