by Annie Jones
“Ill-conceived? Win a pet? Polly, that doesn’t sound like you.”
“Because it’s not me.” Black hair barely contained by a headband, Polly stood up from behind the oversize TV cart.
“There’s—” Sam looked from one to the other “—there’s two of you?”
Polly came and stood beside her carbon copy. “Sam Goodacre, meet my sister, Esther Bennett. Essie, meet Sam.”
“You’re…”
“Identical,” they both said at the same time.
“But only one of us has a reason to ask you what on earth you think I would have to apologize to you for.” Polly crossed her arms and met his gaze in that spitfire-with-a-cause way of hers.
Immediately he knew he’d never consider them identical again. Amusement met the sense of contentment Polly seemed to always awaken in him. How could he have ever thought this stiff-backed, slick-haired, neatly contained woman was his Polly? His Polly! The thought threw him off-balance for a second.
That was long enough for Polly to swoop across the room and have him by the shirtsleeve. She was all fire and feistiness as she opened her mouth and said, “Now, listen to me, Sam Goodacre, I—”
“I like it when you grab my shirtsleeve,” he murmured.
“W-well, you’re not going to like what I—” she glanced down at the place where her hand held the soft blue fabric of his shirt “—have to say.”
“Never mind me.” Polly’s twin all but disappeared behind the TV as she called out, “I’ll keep on working to get this sound synced up and running.”
“Maybe I won’t like it, but I’m so glad you’re talking to me that right now I’m happy to hear you out.”
She blinked her big eyes as if she couldn’t quite remember what she intended to say. Then she shook her head, pressed her lips together and gave his sleeve a shake. “That’s a sweet thing to say, but I’m not talking to you as a friend right now. Well, not as just a friend. I have to tell you this.”
He shifted his feet as if bracing himself for some big news when really he just wanted to move a little closer to her. “Yeah, I know. You don’t think much more of my promising the girls a dog than your sister does.”
“Actually, I don’t really know what to think about getting the girls a dog, but I do have something to tell you about what they have done to live up to your demands.”
“Demands?” He stepped back at that.
She stepped forward after him. “Sam, I think the girls have been running the oldest game in the identicals’ playbook. The old switcheroo.”
“The old… Polly, are you saying Caroline, Juliette and Hayley have been trading places?”
“Trading places is just one part of it. Sam, I haven’t confirmed it with Mrs. Williams and Mrs. Bradley yet because I wanted to talk to you about it first, but I think Caroline may have done some of Hayley’s and Juliette’s work while Juliette did the square dance in Caroline’s place.”
He pulled his arm away, freeing his sleeve, trying to laugh off the notion. “How could you say that? Polly, you weren’t even there.”
“That’s one reason I can say it.” She went over and shut the door, the accepted signal that a parent and teacher were talking and to wait until they were done to come inside. “When I watched the replay of it on Essie’s phone—”
“You sent your sister to spy on my kids?”
“No! No, Sam, she went down while I was setting up here. I asked her to record it because I wanted to see the performance. Because—”
He tried to make sense of it all and in doing so could only come to two conclusions. Either he was all wrong about the way he’d handled the girls or—
An image flashed on the screen behind Polly.
“You think you know better than me what’s right for my kids,” he said, his jaw tight.
“No, Sam, I never said that.”
“You don’t have to say it. I’m looking at the proof of it right now.” He pointed to the image of Caroline in front of a drawing of a dog that Sam recognized instantly as Donut. “Why would you let her draw a picture of a dog she could never have, then choose it to show at Parents’ Night?”
“I don’t tell the kids what to draw or write about, Sam. The project was to write a poem, story or do a piece of art with the topic ‘I Can,’ and that’s what Caroline drew.”
“Donut, Polly? ‘I can have Donut as my dog’?” His gut twisted, not from anger but a kind of helpless emptiness that he hadn’t felt in a long time. He had worked every day since Marie had gotten sick to keep the girls from dwelling on how fragile relationships could be, how quickly someone we love could be lost and now— “Why would you do that to a little girl who had already had so much sadness in life, Polly?”
“No, you have to hear the audio that goes with it.”
“I think I’ve heard enough.” He turned to leave, his head so clouded with a whirlwind of thoughts that he didn’t trust what he might say if he stayed. “I have to get going.”
“So that’s how you’re going to handle this?” Polly hurried to place herself between Sam and the door. “Like you do everything. Sam’s way. Just charge straight ahead, no looking back, no time to stop and consider if you’re headed in the right direction?”
“Step aside, Polly.” He did not meet her gaze this time. “The girls are in the gym. I need to get them and meet with their other teachers.”
“I know loss is painful. Even for people of faith it’s hard to understand how a loving God would take away someone we love, especially when we still need them so much. But plunging blindly forward isn’t the way to get past that. Some things take time.”
“Don’t lecture me. Don’t you lecture me, Polly Bennett.” She wouldn’t let him go, wouldn’t let him do what he thought was best—keep moving. Sam felt hurt and embarrassed at that hurting. He was angry, but not sure why he was angry. His head throbbed and his heart ached, and when Polly wouldn’t get out of his way physically, he did the only thing he knew how to do. Plowed right over her, verbally. “You’ve come running home to a place mostly made up in your imagination to keep from dealing with the fact that life never measured up to your expectations. You accuse me of running from the past. Well, you’ve run to the past and what has that gotten you?”
His harsh words worked, too. Polly stepped back and let him go.
He couldn’t just let it go at that, though. “I do not think my girls would do that, and even if they did, don’t you think I’d know it?”
“Yes, I do think you would if you weren’t so fixated on them being the best and always having to come out on top of whatever they tackle.” Polly’s words rushed out and her voice went a notch higher with the power of her emotional connection to what she wanted to express. “A family should support each other, not compete, not try to have to win approval of their parent with every endeavor.”
“Whoa, I never said they had to be the best at anything.” He held up his hand to stop her right there. “I know you think Caroline is doing all this to make me happy, Polly, but the rest of this… I don’t think that’s about me at all.”
Esther Bennett popped up from behind the cart, her eyes wide and her mouth open. After she got Polly’s attention, she folded her arms and tipped her head to one side.
Sam didn’t have to be the father of multiples to recognize the silent communication between the two. And suddenly a few other things became clear to him.
“Polly, this is my family. I know yours had problems and you wish things had been different but you can’t fix your past here.” He spread his arms wide to indicate the classroom and, in a larger sense, all of the town she had come to in search of a new life. “You have to come to terms with it and move on, find something better, make it better. That’s how you heal.”
“Have you done th
at, Sam? Come to terms with losing Marie?” Polly never took her eyes from his despite her sister’s looming presence and the muffled voices from the hallway outside. “You’ve moved on, you’ve tried and tried and tried to find something better, but has any of that made your life better?”
Sam honestly could not answer that, so instead he crossed to the door and opened it, saying quietly, “I told you my rules, Polly. I never lied to you or pretended to be anything or anyone but who I am. I wish you had honored that.”
“I did honor it, Sam,” she called after him. “I honored it by being your friend and telling the truth when nobody else would. You can’t keep running forever. At some point you need to slow down and take a good hard look at what’s going on around you. Maybe then you’d see that I am on your side.”
Polly’s words stayed with Sam the rest of the evening. So much so that he found himself arguing against them when he should have been paying attention to the tour of Juliette’s and Hayley’s classrooms. Neither of those teachers even hinted at anything amiss with the girls’ work, though. That proved Sam was in the right here, right?
Sam was still wrestling with all of it when he and the girls got home. Max leaned back in his chair at the kitchen table and hollered out as the girls ran upstairs. “So do we need to build a doghouse or not?”
“Yeah.” Gina, who had met them on the porch and, true to the small-town grapevine, had already heard that Polly and Sam had had words, prodded Sam through the doorway. She pushed past him to tell their younger sibling, “By all means, build a dog house—then we can send Sam to it.”
“Me? Why me?” Sam knew why. At the very least his behavior on this night meant to let the children show off was in bad form. “Polly’s the one who accused the girls of pulling the old switcheroo. I was just defending my daughters.”
Gina glared at him. “I think what you were defending was your own wounded ego.”
Sam clenched his jaw. “She was trying to—”
“She was trying to be a good teacher, Sam, and a good friend.”
“Whoa, switcheroo? Defending what?” Max stood and gestured broadly as he spoke. “Clue a guy in, will ya?”
“There’s nothing to clue you in on.” Sam pivoted on his boot heel and headed for the hallway. He didn’t have to take this in his own home. He was Sam Goodacre. He had a plan. He had a way of doing things that always worked for him. No stopping, no looking back.
Except…he twisted his head to glance over his shoulder at the door just as headlights slashed across the front of the old farmhouse.
“Who’s that?” Gina rushed into the hall. “Do you think something’s wrong?”
Sam ignored his sister’s question as he headed for the door, flung it open and stepped out into the September night air to greet the woman he knew he’d find coming up the walk.
Chapter Sixteen
“I saw Caroline mess up in the routine.” Sam came out of the house on the defense but not sounding like a man fully convinced of what he was saying. “If Juliette had been doing it, she would have gotten through it without a hitch.”
“Not if she didn’t have a chance to rehearse it,” Polly called out as she climbed from her car.
Sam slowed his pace.
Polly’s already-rapid heartbeat kicked up into at least double-time. She leaned in to look at Essie in the passenger seat and said, “Are you sure this is a good idea?”
“Hey, you know me, I’d never suggest anything half-baked.” Essie waved to her to go ahead to talk to Sam. Then she put her hand on the door handle. “If you need me, I’ll be here for you.”
“Will you?” Polly asked sincerely. “Because it seems to me you’ve been mostly somewhere else, Essie. Always ahead of me. Always putting in a few more hours of work to stay ahead of everyone.”
“If you felt that way…” Essie caught herself. “Why am I saying ‘if’?”
Essie’s eyes met Polly’s. “I know I’ve bought into the whole ‘do more, be more’ attitude of Mom and Dad. And I know what it did to you, Polly.”
“If it helps, in watching Sam and his girls, I’m beginning to see what it did to you, too, Essie.”
“I guess we both need to deal with the pressures of our past, huh? That’s what you were doing by becoming a teacher and moving here. I can’t tell you how much I admire you for it.”
“Really?” Tears welled in Polly’s eyes. “For once, maybe you could follow my lead.”
“I’ll take that under consideration.”
On the drive out here they had had a long- overdue heart-to-heart where Polly unloaded her feelings of never measuring up. Essie had laughed at that, not to be dismissive but because she had always felt that Polly was the one who had everything figured out, not bowing to their parents’ need to push the family so hard as evidence the divorce hadn’t left lasting scars.
Their parents had meant well; they wanted to make the best out of a lousy situation, the twins had concluded. Just as Sam was trying to do with his girls.
In seeing her own folks as loving and wanting so badly to do the right thing for their children as Sam, even if they didn’t go about it in the best way, Polly began to view things differently. That led her straight out to the Goodacre family farmhouse.
“You saw a redheaded girl with her hair in a ponytail like Juliette’s instead of Caroline’s pigtails make a mistake and recover from it without causing so much as a stumble.” Polly shut the car door and turned to Sam. She kept her tone even, reasoned and, some might say, loving. “Isn’t that just what someone might do if they had a handful of gymnastics programs and dance recitals under their belt?”
Sam stopped. He was halfway between the house and Polly’s car. “Polly, you’re saying you honestly want me to believe my girls…my Sunday school–going, raised-to-know-right-from-wrong girls pulled off this elaborate switch? That they’d lie, in essence, to fool their teachers and cheat me into giving them a dog of their own?”
“I don’t think they thought they were lying, Sam.” She came to him. There in the quiet of the darkening September sky she moved in until she stood so close that she only had to tip her head back slightly to look up into his kind, searching-for-understanding eyes. “I think…I know in my heart…they thought they were helping each other and helping you.”
His brow furrowed. He did not look directly into her gaze. “Helping me?”
“Making you happy, Sam.” She took a deep breath and held it a second, thought of all the years of keeping her true feelings to herself and what that had cost her, then reached out and slipped her hand in his. “They got a clear message that doing all these things and doing them well—following your rules—was what it would take to make you happy.”
“But I made the rules to try to make them happy,” he said softly. He raised his head and looked into her eyes. “Honest, Polly, that’s all I ever wanted.”
“That’s all you think you wanted, Sam. But happy wasn’t really your primary concern after Marie died, was it?”
He looked toward the front door, then up at the light shining from the second-story bedroom of the three little girls. At last he looked at Polly, then bowed his head slightly and gave it a slow shake. “No, I wanted to protect them from all the pain I was going through.”
“You accused me of running away to a dream that never existed, Sam.”
“Polly, I—”
“No, you were right. My own family said pretty much the same thing.” Polly held her free hand up, then brought it down to join her other hand on top of his. “They were right and they were wrong. Maybe I did run to an overly romanticized, even imaginary, past, but I arrived in Baconburg, met you and came home.”
He looked at her hands around his, then at her.
Her heart rate slowed. Her breathing, which she just realized
had been quick and shallow, eased. Looking into Sam’s eyes now she knew he hadn’t just heard what she’d said, he had listened. She really did feel now that the things she had dreamed of were possible—family, home, even love someday.
Sam’s shoulders rose and fell, then he took both her hands in his, turning them over as if studying them to see how she had done this trick of getting right to the heart of the matter. “I don’t see how this changes anything, Polly. I still want to protect my girls. I still want to teach them the skills I think they need to cope with all that can go wrong in life.”
She heard his words, but she had to ask, to clarify his meaning. “And I am something that can go wrong?”
He looked at her and said nothing.
The night seemed to close in around them. The light of the Goodacre home over Sam’s shoulders now made it seem distant and unreachable.
“I see.” She tried not to burst into tears right there on the spot.
Sam stood there talking about teaching his children his way to deal with the pain of loss. Wasn’t that just what she had done coming here? Full speed ahead without looking back? She thought about warning him, once again, that his way did not work for everyone.
It sure hadn’t worked for her. So she relied on what worked for her. She turned to leave. “I hope I am wrong, Sam, about the girls and the switcheroo.”
“Polly, I didn’t mean for things to turn out like this,” he called after her.”
“Neither did I.” She reached her car.
“I’m sure I’ll see you around,” he said, as if a neighborly shout-out would somehow move them quickly and smoothly into the next phase of their relationship. “It’s a small town, after all.”
