A Sweetbrook Family (You, Me & the Kids)

by DeStefano, Anna

  She’d help Josh with Daniel. But for both his sake and hers, what had passed between them in the closet could never happen again.

  “If it helps,” she said, remembering her earlier advice to Daniel, “get angry again, just like you did today with Jenkins. Let yourself get angry a little more often, and see where that gets you. Take it from me. Get angry enough, and you can do just about anything.”

  * * *

  JOSH WATCHED AMY HEAD for the kitchen, her shoulders back, her head held high. She was an amazing paradox—as brave as she was scared. And something told him she was worlds tougher than he was.

  This latest flare-up with Daniel had knocked him for a loop, but Amy had come out swinging. And that made him like her even more.

  The memory flashed of the taste of her lips. The strength of her spirit, which had been sucking him in for days. Her determination to make things work for her and Becky. Her protectiveness of Daniel.

  A greedy part of Josh wanted a piece of all that fire for himself. His hands were still shaking from the need to kiss her again. He wanted her to stop denying how good they would be together. It was selfish, but he couldn’t help wondering, as he followed her to the kitchen, what this family he was trying to make with Daniel would be like if Amy and Becky were a part of it, too.

  He found the kids quietly gobbling oversize pieces of chocolate cake and watching cartoons on the tiny TV perched on the kitchen counter. They were sitting together while totally ignoring each other, but at least they weren’t fighting. Amy was pouring herself a glass of water at the sink.

  It was a taunting domestic scene straight out of his book of not going to happen.

  The phone rang, and he turned to the built-in desk in the corner to pick up the cordless handset.

  “Hello,” he said, catching Amy’s concerned glance.

  “Josh, it’s Barbara. I just got your message. What’s happened?”

  “We have things under control for now,” he said as quietly as possible. Daniel tensed, regardless, even though the boy didn’t look away from the TV. “Why don’t we talk about it on Monday?”

  “You told Daniel about his father being in Sweetbrook?”

  “Yes,” Josh replied, as Amy joined him. He braced his arm on the bookcase above the desk. “And as we expected, there were some…concerns.”

  “I’m glad Daniel knows, because I received a call earlier from his father.” Worry leaked through the social worker’s composure. “He says you threatened him in your office today. He’s talking about filing an assault charge.”

  “He instigated the confrontation, Barbara.” Josh ground his teeth as he resorted to his nephew’s patented he-started-it argument. “Jenkins doesn’t want his son. He’s after my family’s money. He came right out and said so.”

  Amy pulled at his sleeve. “Tell her I heard the whole thing,” she whispered.

  He covered her hand, which now clung to his arm, and to his relief she didn’t pull away. At least she no longer shied away from his touch.

  “I have a witness,” he said into the phone. “She’ll tell you Jenkins started the whole thing, and that he wasn’t harmed.”

  “He says you threatened him.”

  “I made my intentions clear.”

  Which was totally not his style, but it had done the trick.

  Get angry enough, and you can do just about anything.

  “You have to keep it together around the man, Josh,” Barbara warned.

  “Then Curtis Jenkins needs to stay away from my nephew.” He slapped his palm on the desktop, fighting the red haze misting before his eyes.

  “This isn’t like you.” The caseworker’s concern shifted to a full-fledged warning. “I think I can smooth this over, but you don’t want a history of reacting irrationally on your record. Jenkins is coming off as the injured party here. Meanwhile, you’ve filed a formal statement claiming he’s abusive. If you’re not careful, the judge might see you both as a threat, and place Daniel in foster care until this whole mess is straightened out.”

  “That’s ridiculous.” No way was anyone placing Daniel in the child welfare system. “Jenkins threatened to blackmail me. He said that if I don’t let Daniel go without a fight, and foot their bills to boot, I’ll never see my nephew again.”

  “I understand, and I’ll hold Jenkins off legally for as long as I can. But if the man wasn’t motivated before, he is now. You should expect to be served papers challenging custody by early next week. Have you made any progress getting Daniel to talk about what he remembers?”

  “No, Daniel isn’t ready to talk about his father yet. And I’m not pushing him any more than I already have.” Josh turned, to find both kids listening.

  Daniel’s loaded fork hung, forgotten, between the plate and his mouth. There was fear in the boy’s eyes, but something else, as well. Something closer to trust than Josh had ever thought possible.

  “But we’re making progress,” he said, biting the bullet and doing the best he could. Just like Amy, he wasn’t giving up, no matter the odds. “And we’re going to keep at it.”

  Daniel’s tiny nod hit Josh like the highest high-five in NBA history.

  From the start, Josh had been terrified of losing his nephew. First to the anger that had swamped Daniel after his mother’s death, and now to Curtis Jenkins. And initially, Josh had hung in there more to make up for how he’d failed his sister than anything else. But not anymore.

  This wasn’t about guilt or responsibility. He wanted Daniel in his life. He wanted the boy to feel safe, to maybe even learn to want a family with Josh. And thanks to Amy’s gentle words and the fighter’s spirit, he and Daniel were finally moving in a positive direction.

  He still might not be able to fix things for his nephew. There were no guarantees. But he wasn’t letting Daniel go without one kicking, screaming, Amy Loar–size fight.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  “MOM, DID YOU EVER have trouble…” Becky glared at her math problems the next morning. The series of words and numbers she’d scribbled on her latest homework paper had been torturing her since she’d first tried to solve them an hour ago.

  “Did I ever have trouble with what, sweetie?” Her mom sat beside her at the kitchen table, tuned into the Internet on her laptop. Her head came up in response to Becky’s question.

  Another Kodak moment for the Loar family.

  Becky tossed her pencil in the general direction of her math book. It bounced and tumbled to the floor. She slapped her hands on the table, flinching as her mother touched her shoulder.

  “You mean did I ever have trouble finishing schoolwork?” Amy asked. “Even though I knew I was smart enough to do it?”

  Becky blinked, then squinted in suspicion. She turned her mom’s laptop so she could see the screen.

  CHADD: Children and Adults with Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder, the Web page header read.

  “Learn anything handy?” Becky asked, masking her surprise with the sarcasm she knew her mom hated.

  They’d been sitting there all morning, working side by side in Grandma Gwen’s ancient, spick-and-span kitchen, ever since her grandmother had left to work a half day Saturday at the bank. Her mom’s nose had been buried in the laptop the whole time. Not doing her office work, it turned out.

  “I’ve learned a lot that jives with what Mr. Fletcher and Mrs. Cole said yesterday.” Her mom shifted her chair nearer and closed the laptop. “That a lot of ADD kids are incredibly bright,
but they have difficulty handling certain kinds of schoolwork and classroom situations. What’s sometimes thought to be lack of effort or interest is often due to frustration and withdrawal, because a child can’t seem to get the information in her brain organized and down on paper.”

  Becky’s eyes watered. Something tickled her nose. “You don’t know that’s me. You don’t know anything about it.”

  “No, we don’t know anything for sure. That’s why the testing we talked about yesterday is so important.”

  Talk, talk, talk.

  She and her mom had talked more in the past two days than they had in the entire last year. They’d talked before going over to Principal White’s. They’d talked on the ride back. They’d talked until Becky had fallen asleep on the couch in the living room last night, and her mom had finally let her go to bed. They’d finally agreed over breakfast this morning to give it a rest, at least for a while.

  Becky guessed their rest time was over.

  “We can learn more about it once we get home,” she declared. “I don’t have to be in Sweetbrook to do that.”

  “You have teachers and school officials who know you here, Becky.”

  “You mean I have people like Grandma, who’ll put up with me so you don’t have to.”

  The pain that flashed across her mom’s face made Becky feel like a brat. It had her blinking back more tears.

  Who cared?

  She straightened in her chair and shoved back the apology working itself free from her anger.

  As long as she got to go home, who cared?

  Her mom suddenly got that look in her eye that meant Becky could knock off the guilt trip. “My only reason for sending you to Sweetbrook was because I thought this was better for you than shuffling back and forth between before- and after-school care in Atlanta. I can’t help that I’m working twenty-four–seven right now. If we want to live in Atlanta, this is what it’s going to take to get us started. Is that what you still want?”

  Becky stared at the table and chewed at the ragged thumbnail that kept getting shorter and shorter. She really was a brat sometimes.

  “Mom—”

  “Do you still want to live in Atlanta or not?” her mom asked, in the voice Becky had heard her use over her cell phone when handling a problem at work.

  “Yes,” she mumbled, sneaking a peek at her mom’s face.

  “Honey, you know that when I left your father, I left with nothing. No credit, no savings, not even enough income to afford a decent mortgage.”

  Becky nodded, some of the anger returning. Her dad was a jerk.

  “And you know that my job at Enterprise, this promotion I’m working so hard for, is the only thing giving us a chance to live someplace like Atlanta without me asking your dad for help.”

  “But you wouldn’t do that!” Her mom couldn’t be thinking about going to her dad for anything. “Not after…”

  “I don’t want to.” She swallowed, her skin paler than before. “But I can’t stand to see you this unhappy. And now, with the possibility that we’re dealing with something like ADD on top of everything else, we’ve got to come to some kind of decision, honey. This weekend.”

  “That’s not fair.” Becky slammed the math book closed. “Why does everything have to be so final? I just want something to be the way it was before. I want to come home.”

  “And I want you home with me.” Her mom’s voice rose, too. “But I’ve been reading everything I can find on ADD since I got here. Your teacher’s right. Your symptoms are almost a perfect match. The high intelligence that conflicts with low academic achievement in the classroom. The way you’re having more difficulty with each passing school year, as the classroom structure becomes less and less flexible and you have to sit and concentrate for longer periods of time. The difficulties keeping your homework and your stuff here organized, like when you forget where you left your hairbrush four times in one morning—”

  “So I’m stupid already! I get it!” Becky jumped to her feet, fighting the urge to hurl everything on the table across the room, including the dumb laptop.

  “Sit down.” Her mom grabbed her arm. “We’re going to finish this conversation. I don’t care how many temper fits you pitch.”

  Becky pulled against her mom’s strength, fought not to hear the unhappiness in her voice. It was so much easier to be a pain than to listen, even when the last thing she wanted to do was hurt her mother.

  Her mom had been hurt enough.

  Becky dropped back into the chair.

  “Honey,” her mother said in a strained whisper. “You know you’re not stupid. And I think, deep down, you know you need help.”

  Becky shrugged. No matter how hard she tried, she kept falling further behind at school. If that wasn’t stupid, what was?

  “And I know,” her mother continued, “just how terrible it feels to need help, when it’s been a long time since anyone’s truly been there for you.”

  Becky bit her lip, trying to stop it from trembling at the thought of what her dad had done to her mom. What he’d done to them both. She dropped her head and wiped at her eyes, and her mom pulled her into a hug she seemed to need as much as Becky did.

  “Do…do you hate him?” she finally asked, even though they never talked about her father. “I hate him so much.”

  Her mom hugged her closer. “I…I try really hard not to hate him. I don’t like to think he has that kind of control over what I feel anymore. But I’ll never forgive him or myself for what all this is doing to you. You deserve a happy childhood. You deserve a normal father—”

  “I don’t want him as my father!” Her mother’s shoulder muffled Becky’s sob. “I don’t want anything from him, ever. Not even his name.”

  “I know, honey.” Her mom smoothed a hand down Becky’s back. “And I’d love for you to change your last name to match mine and Grandma Gwen’s. But I want you to take your time deciding. I want you to be sure.”

  “I am sure.” She sat back, mopping up the wet streaks on her face. “And I don’t care what you say, I hate him!”

  “You have every right to. Just like you have every right to be angry at me.” Her mom ran a hand down her own cheek. She cleared her throat and gave Becky the look that always meant they were going to have one of those talks. “I should have left your father years ago. I never should have become so dependant on him. I let him convince me I couldn’t make it on my own, and I kept you trapped right along with me. But I’m doing everything I can to fix things. You’re right—it isn’t fair. But this is the way things have to be. I’m stretched so thin in Atlanta, I don’t have a second to myself. I’m lucky I didn’t lose my job by coming here this weekend. And that’s why I still think you’re better off with Grandma for a while longer.”

  Becky made herself listen. Made the obnoxious girl inside her shut up for a minute. It wasn’t fair, none of this was, but it wasn’t her mom’s fault, either.

  “If we’re going to make this work…” Her mom’s words came out tired and tough at the same time. “If we’re going to get our second chance in Atlanta, I need you to let the people here help you while I can’t. I need you to grow up just a little bit more.”

  But an ugly thought wouldn’t stop whispering in Becky’s ear. What if she was so messed up no one could help her?

  “Becky?” her mom prompted.

  “What if I can’t?” Becky asked. “What if I can’t get smarter…?” She made herself continue, because if she didn’
t say it now, she wasn’t sure she ever would, and she had to know. “What if Daddy… What if it was me? I mean, I make everyone so angry here. I don’t fit in. What if it was me he couldn’t live with? Maybe it was me making Daddy so mad all the time.”

  “Oh, honey!”

  She was back in her mother’s arms in an instant, back where she wanted to stay, despite the mixed-up things she said when she was too mad to think straight.

  “Don’t ever think that.” Her mom hugged her harder. “You’re the best thing that ever happened to me and your father. It’s not your fault he couldn’t see that.”

  “I’m sorry.” Becky clung to her mom’s shoulders. “I’m so sorry. I want to help, Mom…. I really do.”

  “I know you do, honey.” Her mom kissed her temple.

  Becky had forgotten how good it felt to be rocked in her mother’s arms. To feel safe, instead of scared and alone.

  “Here.” Her mom eased back and took off the necklace Becky had given her last Christmas. “I want you to keep this until you move back to Atlanta with me. I’ve never taken it off, not once, since you gave it to me. Maybe it will help you remember I’m always thinking about you, even when we aren’t together.”

  Becky fastened the gold chain around her neck with clumsy fingers. The cool feel of the dangling heart against her skin brought with it her last happy memories of what used to be her family.

  An image of Daniel White’s face flashed through her mind—the only person in Sweetbrook who was more in need of a hug and a special memory than she was. And the one person she owed a bigger apology to than her mother, if what she’d overheard last night was for real.

  “Mom, is Daniel going to be okay?” she asked, wanting to think about anything but her own problems for just a minute.

  Her mom hesitated before answering. “I don’t know, honey.”