Man of His Word

by Cynthia Reese

  So she did. As Daniel led the way across the pasture, Marissa’s words tumbled out: how Taylor had invited her to go four-wheeling, and how cool that would have been because she’d never been on a four-wheeler before, and how Taylor had said she was going to show her the creek and the old mill house.

  “But then Mom made this awful stink about me and my stupid bleeding disorder and how if I got hurt— I hate her! She ruins everything!”

  If he hadn’t heard Taylor say the exact same thing about DeeDee, he might have been shocked. But Daniel recalled how, really, he’d said the same thing about his parents—he’d guess all middle school children said equally vehement things.

  “Everything?” he quizzed with a grin. “There’s nothing she gets right?”

  By now, they had crossed three-quarters of the back pasture and halfway up its gentle incline. Marissa stopped, as if Daniel’s half-jesting query was serious and she needed to think to get the true answer. She toed a tuft of grass with her flip-flop. A grasshopper leaped out and jounced off across the ankle-deep rye grass Daniel had planted earlier in the spring.

  “She’s not so bad,” Marissa admitted grudgingly. “It’s just—I want to be normal. And she gets all— I don’t know. Smothery.”

  “Well, what do you expect? I mean, smother does contain the word mother after all,” Daniel quipped. “I think it’s in their job description.”

  Marissa laughed. Some of the tension went out of her. She took in her surroundings. “That’s a cool tree,” she said.

  Daniel followed her gaze to the huge oak tree sprawled out on a rocky outcrop at the end of the pasture. “That? That’s not just any tree. That’s our thinking tree. It’s all the Monroe kids’ thinking tree.”

  “Yeah?”

  He had her attention now. Maybe it was because she was an only child, but he could sense that she liked the idea of being part of a big family.

  “Sure,” he told her. “When I’d get mad with Ma—or she’d get frustrated with me—she’d tell me to go hang out in our thinking tree for a while. It always helped.”

  “But Ma’s so great! She never gets mad!”

  Daniel laughed. “Maybe not with you, but I sure seemed to be good at pushing her buttons. I had a special talent for it when I was your age.”

  They walked on until the oak tree’s low gnarled branches were within reach. A welcome breeze fluttered through the leaves, and a startled bird flew off. Daniel held one of the smaller branches—still as big as his forearm—and gestured for Marissa to go first.

  He followed behind into the cool dimness the canopy of branches offered. Looking up, he saw that the rope ladder was still in good shape. Instantly, he was taken back to an age where a few minutes spent in this tree could put the world to rights.

  Back then, his problems had seemed huge—too many boring chores, his allowance gone to pay for a windshield smashed from one of his errant knuckleballs, not being allowed to go to Tim’s end-of-school spend-the-night camping trip because he’d messed up his English grade, a travel game lost because he’d walked in the winning run.

  Somehow, this big old tree had managed to put life in perspective, to shrink his problems down to size. Maybe it was because it was so solid and unchanging, and as a boy he couldn’t remember it not being here. Maybe Ma had been right and time alone had been the cure.

  Marissa hadn’t waited for an invitation. Already she was scrambling up the rope ladder—not very elegantly, Daniel noted from the ladder’s precipitous swaying.

  “Hey, don’t you know how to climb a rope ladder?” he asked.

  She stopped and stared down at him, her face coloring. “This is the first time I’ve ever tried.”

  “Good gracious. Kids need to climb—builds your strength, keeps your core strong. Too much screen time for you, kiddo.” Daniel shook his head. “Okay, go slower,” he advised, “and keep your arms in close. That will make it easier on you. And watch out for rope burns on your palms. If you don’t, you’ll wind up with a nice set of blisters tomorrow.”

  He waited for her to reach the platform his dad had helped him and his brothers build years ago before he followed her up. As he cleared the break in the railing at the head of the ladder, he heard her utter a short, derisive chuckle.

  “Seriously?” she asked him. She jabbed a thumb at a hand-painted no-girls-allowed sign hanging from a short length of rope on a limb.

  “Yeah, my sisters had the same response you did. They ignored it, so I guess you can, too. Chalk it up to us being the age where we thought all girls had cooties that were as contagious as chicken pox.” Daniel settled on the wide plank boards that formed the tree house’s floor and leaned against the trunk.

  He drew in a breath, felt his lungs—his whole being—expand to fill this private space. It felt as though he’d taken off a pair of too-tight shoes and was able at last to wriggle his toes.

  Oh, he or Rob or Andrew would check on the tree house every spring to be sure it was structurally safe with no rotting wood, but this was the first time in a long time Daniel had come up here just to sit.

  Not much had changed since the last time he’d come here as a boy. He could still see the green metal roof of the farmhouse glinting through the oak tree’s leaves, and the fields, with their neat rows that followed the contours of the earth, stretched out as far as the eye could see.

  “Wow, this is so neat!” Marissa whispered. “You can see for miles—I can see the horses way out on the edge of the pasture.”

  She didn’t seem nearly as upset as she had a few minutes earlier. Daniel was glad that the leafy branches were performing their usual magic on tweenage ruffled feathers.

  “You know how to ride?” he asked her idly as he let a ladybug crawl onto his finger.

  Marissa scowled. “My mom would have a duck if I asked.”

  What does this kid get to do? Kimberly might as well have her swaddled in bubble wrap. “We’ve got some really safe horses—old and gentle. My sister Maegan’s an equine therapist—she uses horses to do physical therapy with all sorts of kids. I’ll bet if Maegan and I talk to your mom, she might let you ride while you’re here. All of the Monroe kids ride, have since we’re old enough to sit up straight.”

  Marissa turned to face him. Her expression was filled with longing and hope that he could see she was trying to tamp down. “All the Monroe kids? You think she’d let me?”

  “Sure. Your mom wants to keep you safe, Marissa. I know it seems hard and unfair. But she does love you.”

  “It isn’t fair. Sometimes...”

  “What?” he prompted. The ladybug spread its scarlet wings and flew off his finger. “Sometimes what?”

  “If we just knew, you know? What was wrong with me? Maybe then the doctors could tell her what was safe for me, how to fix me. That’s why we came down here. My mom said if we could find my birth mom, maybe she has the same thing I do, and she could tell us how bad it was, how much we really have to worry.”

  Daniel’s stomach tightened. It was even harder to stonewall Marissa than it was Kimberly—harder because whenever he looked at Marissa, he remembered seeing those same eyes staring at him when they were a scant few minutes old.

  “What do the doctors say?” he asked as a way to move the subject away from Miriam.

  Marissa retrieved a fallen branch from the floor of the tree house and broke off the tip. She stripped it of its dried leaves, then tried to force it into a circle. “That they don’t know. That there’s something wrong. That I could die—but then again, maybe I won’t. It’s all ‘maybe this’ and ‘maybe that.’ They’re clueless. I mean, they’re great and all, but they don’t have a clue. Last time we were there, my main hem/onc literally sat down in front of me, stared at me for a minute, scratched his head and said, ‘Marissa, you’re a mystery.’”

  “That’s got to be frustrating.”

  “My mom... Wow!” The branch in Marissa’s hands reached the limits of its elasticity and snapped in two. The break was sudden a
nd jarring in the silence, and it startled another bird from its nest in noisy protest. “She blew her stack when we got out of that doctor’s office. I mean, she pays these huge bills for all these tests, and she sees them draw vial after vial of blood—we stopped counting after a hundred vials, but it’s gotta be getting close to two hundred—and she hates it that they can’t figure this out. She hates it for me, you know? And any time I have to have surgery or a procedure—even if it’s something really simple—I have to be put to sleep, and that really freaks her out.”

  “I’ll bet” was all Daniel could manage to say. His guilt magnified and it felt like tentacles were squeezing him.

  Marissa’s face brightened. “But we’re close! Mom told me when she got in from town that the hospital here is going to give her the medical files—you know, of when I was born. And that maybe they’ll have my birth mother’s name in them.”

  “What?” Daniel’s guilt evaporated into alarm. “They’re giving her the files?”

  “Yeah. Well, not right away. She said a judge has to give them permission, but that she has a lady helping her.”

  Twin feelings of anxiety and inexplicable relief curled through Daniel. Did it count as a betrayal to Miriam if her identity was revealed through some other source?

  Yes. I promised her to do everything I could to keep her safe—and something in that file might reveal who she is.

  Daniel shifted, then asked in what he hoped was a casual tone, “So...you happen to remember if your mom mentioned the judge’s name?”

  “Malloy?” Marissa frowned. She closed her eyes, pondered on it for a moment. “Yeah, that’s it. Judge Malloy. You know him?”

  Shoot. That old soft touch. He’d give Kimberly the moon if she asked. To Marissa, he replied, “I do. He was a good friend of my dad’s.”

  “You can talk to him?”

  “I don’t know.” Daniel felt himself squirming inside. Please don’t ask me to put a word in on your behalf. I can’t do that and keep my promise to Miriam.

  She kicked off her flip-flops and stretched out onto the boards along the far rail. “I guess...I guess you’re not supposed to talk to a judge, huh?”

  “What, you mean to ask him to decide one way or the other?” When she nodded, he sighed. “In this case, I don’t think I can ask him to open those files for your mom, Marissa.”

  She bit her bottom lip, twirled her strawberry hair around her finger—so like Miriam. “Yeah, it was a dumb idea. But fingers crossed, right?”

  “Fingers crossed,” he repeated, but didn’t add that, for Miriam’s sake, his fingers were crossed for the opposite result.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  KIMBERLY HAD WATCHED with a mix of relief and envy as Daniel and Marissa strolled across the pasture, their heads together in conversation. People had warned her that once Marissa hit those middle school years, she’d be harder to talk to—and Kimberly had known their warnings were true.

  How many times had parents sat across from her in a parent-teacher conference and agonized over the fact that all they could wring out of their kids were monosyllabic grunts?

  She knew Marissa chafed against all her rules—but they weren’t her rules alone. Marissa had heard the doctors warn her about injuries. She knew the drill.

  Feeling at loose ends, she wandered back into the house, where Ma was busy shelling yet another pan of butter beans.

  “Where’s another dishpan, and I’ll give that a whirl?” Kimberly offered. “I’m a city girl, but maybe you can teach me how to shell beans.”

  Ma chuckled. “You must be a city girl, to be offering to help with butter beans.” She stopped and rubbed the tip of her thumb. “Ah, but it makes my thumbnail ache. If it were just me, I’d settle for field peas instead—easier to shell than these blasted beans. But the boys like butter beans better. If they’re willing to pick them, then I’m willing to shell. If you’re really itching to help, look in the laundry room and you’ll find another metal dishpan on the shelf.”

  Kimberly did as she was told. The laundry room, off the kitchen, was more of a sewing/craft/all-purpose room, with neat, organized areas for different activities. She found the pan on the shelves above the freezer, beside a carton of quart canning jars and a huge old pressure cooker.

  As she was pulling out the pan, a piece of brightly colored cardboard fluttered out. She bent down to retrieve it.

  It was a baseball card—and not any baseball card, but one with a very young Daniel staring back at her. She flipped the card over, saw that he’d been the pitcher of a minor league team—and from the stats, a pretty good one at that.

  Kimberly stared at it. Daniel? A baseball player?

  “Kimberly? Need some help in there?” Ma called. “You mightn’t be able to find it in all my jumbled mess in there.”

  Guiltily Kimberly grabbed the pan. She started to stick the card back where she found it, then decided to take it with her as she returned to the kitchen.

  “I’m sorry,” she told Ma. “I got distracted. I found this.”

  “What on earth?” Ma took the card and sighed. “My land. No, that doesn’t belong in there. Looks as if Landon and Logan have been playing scavenger hunt again—this should have been safe in my photo album. Gracious, but doesn’t Daniel look young!”

  “Is that...real?” Kimberly settled into the chair alongside Ma and helped herself to a heap of butter beans. She worked at the bean, trying to figure out how Ma could zip through them so quickly.

  “Try flipping the bean over— That’s right, jab that thumbnail right along the back spine. You’ve got the hang of it now,” Ma encouraged.

  As Kimberly tackled another bean with a tad more confidence, Ma went back to her study of the baseball card. “Oh, yes, he really was a professional baseball player. A good one, too. They were just about to call him up to the majors when his dad died. I still remember...” Ma’s eyes grew wet and she set aside the card. It took her a few butter beans, their hulls thumping against the interior of the white plastic bucket, before she could continue in a husky voice, “Daniel was on the road when the accident happened. He drove in from... Gosh, I forget where, but I think it was somewhere in Maryland. I remember he drove all night to get here, and I was so scared I’d lose both him and his dad on the same day.”

  “But he...he made it?”

  Ma nodded. “I think that was what his dad was hanging on for. He wanted to talk to Daniel before... Well, before he died. After that, it wasn’t long at all, which, I guess, was a mercy. He was in some kind of awful pain, I tell you. Morphine didn’t even begin to touch it.”

  “And Daniel gave it up? His baseball career?” Kimberly marveled at that. She wondered how a man could turn his back on the promise of fame and fortune. “When he was so close to making it in major league baseball?”

  “I couldn’t talk him out of it. He was determined to stay close to home, watch out for me. Said he’d promised his dad to take care of us, and that he couldn’t do that if he were on the road. When he hung up his glove and bat, he hung it up. Swapped it for turnout gear and his dad’s ax, and that was that.”

  The rhythmic thump of empty butter-bean shells as they hit the bucket was the only sound for a long moment. Kimberly turned over Ma’s words in her mind as she shelled. Finally, she managed to say, “He takes his promises seriously, doesn’t he?”

  Ma’s mouth curved into a small bittersweet smile as she nodded. “Yes, he does. That was his father’s doing. He always set a store by integrity, my husband did. A man’s word is who he is and it’s all he’s got, he’d say. I can’t say I’m sorry to see Daniel take after his father, but...sometimes I think he takes it a little too much to heart. I wonder if his dad would have really wanted him to quit baseball. He never missed a game when Daniel was in high school, you know? And he saw a lot of his college games. Despite being chief and all that responsibility he had on his shoulders. He always made it a priority, said that he’d promised Daniel that he would be there.”

&nbs
p; “Sounds like Daniel got that from his dad, then, all his promise keeping.”

  “You can take it to the bank, Daniel’s word, that I’ll grant you.”

  The back door opened, and Kimberly heard Marissa’s breathless laughter at something Daniel was saying. No sign of her earlier truculent rebellion could be detected in the sounds coming from her daughter.

  Again that twin feeling of relief and envy coursed through Kimberly at Daniel’s ability to jolly Marissa out of her sour mood. She squashed down the envy and wrote it off as being a holdover from her long years as a single mom. She needed to let go. She should be grateful Daniel was giving her a hand, not envious at his ability to soothe Marissa.

  Marissa bounced into the kitchen and slid into the chair beside Kimberly. Without missing a beat, she started shelling beans—and more expertly than Kimberly. “Mom, you’re slow!”

  “I’m learning. I see you’ve had practice,” Kimberly observed.

  Daniel had followed Marissa in, and now he was bending over to brush his mother’s cheek with a kiss. “I see you’ve got everybody in on the act, Ma. I hope since I picked ’em, I don’t have to shell ’em.” His head swiveled toward Kimberly, and for a split second she thought he intended to give her a peck on the cheek, too.

  To her disappointment, he pulled back—maybe it had all been wishful thinking on her part. Instead, he dropped into the chair across from her. “Thumbs sore yet?” he asked, teasing.

  “Not yet, but I can see how they will be.”

  “Before we all got big enough to help, Ma had to do it practically by herself, and one summer she shelled so many that she lost a thumbnail.”

  “Eww!” Marissa wrinkled her nose. She tossed aside the butter bean she was shelling. “That’s it, I’m done. No butter bean’s worth that. Now, if it were Krispy Kreme doughnuts, that would be worth a thumbnail.”

  Ma laughed. “It was only part of my nail, but it did end my shelling days for a while. That’s when Daniel’s dad decided that, small fry or not, all the kids were big enough to grab a pan and shell.”