by Mari Carr
* * *
Leo glanced at the screen of his phone and frowned.
“Telemarketer?” Yvonne asked.
He shook his head as he answered. The call was from Denise’s husband, Ryder Hagen, and while it wasn’t completely out of the norm for Ryder to call him, it was definitely unusual.
“Hey, Leo. Sorry to bother you. Um…where are you right now?”
Ryder’s tone put him on instant alert. “What happened? Is Vince okay?”
“Yeah, yeah. Vince is fine. He and Clint are both at school.”
Leo blew out a long, relieved breath and fought to control his suddenly racing heart. “Oh. Good.”
However, even as he said it, he knew things weren’t good.
“What do you need, Ryder?”
Ryder fell silent for a moment. “Can we meet somewhere right now? To talk?”
Something was seriously wrong, something bad enough that Ryder felt the need to speak in person.
“You know where Pat’s Pub is?”
“Yeah. I do.”
“I’m here right now. Would you want to come here or should I—”
“I’m not far. I’ll come there.” Ryder hung up before Leo could ask what the hell was going on.
Ryder had been true to his word about being close. He arrived at the pub fifteen minutes later. Yvonne had been sitting with Leo at one of the booths, trying to distract him while he stressed out over what Ryder could want. The other man had married Denise two years after she’d rejected Leo’s marriage proposal, and the two of them had had a son, Clint, together. He was a decent guy, and Leo figured if his son was going to spend his weekdays with a stepdad, he was glad it was Ryder.
Yvonne started to stand up when Ryder arrived.
Ryder held up his hand to stop her. “Maybe…you should…”
His words drifted away and Leo knew some serious shit had just gone down.
Ryder was his polar opposite as far as careers went. Leo was a farmer, through and through, happiest when he was outside, soaking up the sunshine and fresh air, digging in the dirt. A lot of schools came to the farm on field trips, and teaching young kids how to grow their own vegetables made him feel like he had a real purpose in life.
Ryder, on the other hand, was the stiff-collar, expensive-suit professional businessman type. He sat behind a desk all day and the only digging he did was through spreadsheets, a fate Leo considered worse than death.
But right now, there was nothing put together about the other man. His hair was standing on end as if he’d run his hands through it a million times in the last hour. He was pale, and there was a distant look in his eyes that had Leo wondering if it had been safe for him to drive here.
“I can stay if you want,” Yvonne said, looking at Leo, who nodded once. He and Ryder had probably had five solo conversations in the past ten years. Most of Leo’s communication about Vince was done with Denise.
The three of them sat down.
“Ryder,” Leo prompted when the other man didn’t speak.
“Denise is dead.”
It took a full minute for those three words to sink into Leo’s brain. “I don’t…”
Yvonne didn’t say anything, but instead reached out to take Leo’s hand. He gripped it tightly in his as he tried to make the words make sense.
“She dropped the boys off at school, and then…” Ryder took a deep breath. “The police think she must not have seen the stop sign. She was sideswiped by a truck in an intersection. The truck hit the driver’s side. She was…” Ryder swallowed, and Leo knew he was fighting to say the words. “She was killed instantly.”
Leo wasn’t sure how long the three of them sat in that booth in silence. He couldn’t find the words, couldn’t figure out what to say. A million emotions slammed into him from every side.
Yvonne broke the silence first. “Where are the boys, Ryder?” she asked quietly.
With each passing moment, Ryder became more of a zombie. As this new reality sank in, Leo felt a kinship with the other man, understanding that pushing their emotions down deep seemed to be a shared characteristic.
“School,” Ryder said.
“Do they know yet?”
Ryder shook his head.
Yvonne glanced at the time on her phone. “School lets out in an hour. Someone needs to pick them up, right?”
Ryder nodded.
“Okay. Do you want me to help you?” Yvonne asked.
Leo was used to Yvonne’s larger-than-life personality, her boisterous laughter, her anything-goes attitude. It was a trait that ran strong through her family. But right now, she sounded like their savior, the only one at the table capable of thinking beyond the next five minutes.
“Yeah. I—” Ryder ran his hand through his hair. “I don’t know what to do. How am I gonna…”
“You’re going to call the school and tell them I’m picking up the boys today. Vince knows me. We’re buddies. He’ll be okay with that, and he can reassure Clint. The two of you are going back to your house, Ryder, and you need to discuss how you want to explain this to the boys. I think you should do it together.”
Leo felt the first chink in his armor. While he was sad and confused, his son would be devastated. Destroyed. He was only nine. How did Leo tell his nine-year-old son his mother was gone forever?
Ryder’s son, Clint, was only seven.
They’d agreed to Yvonne’s plan, and the next few hours had felt like a decade. He’d stayed with Ryder and the boys that night, Vince begging him to share his single bed. He’d held his son all night as he cried.
Leo spent the next week at Ryder’s place, neither man feeling prepared to deal with Denise’s funeral or their sons alone. The old saying proclaimed there was safety in numbers, but in this case, there was comfort too.
At the end of the week, he and Ryder had returned to Pat’s Pub, to Yvonne, neither of them sure where to go from there. While he and Ryder loved their sons, and were fully capable and prepared to raise them, a new concern had arisen the previous night when they’d realized the boys, who’d grown up as true brothers—closer than any two boys Leo had ever seen—tearfully asked if they were going to be split up.
“What are we going to do?” Ryder asked.
Leo shrugged. He’d spent the entire week trying to adjust his work schedule to accommodate Vince’s, but there were lots of overlapping parts unaccounted for. Ryder had mentioned the same thing. Truth was, the boys’ lives were going to change drastically. Leo lived in a different school district, and Ryder confessed Clint would now have to spend a great deal of time in childcare, given his long work hours.
“The answer is simple,” Yvonne said, as if they were missing something entirely obvious. “Leo moves in with you and the boys.”
Leo frowned and started to shake his head.
“Think about it,” Yvonne continued. “Your job has you out of bed at the ass-crack of dawn every day, while Ryder works bankers’ hours. I realize that means a bit of a commute for you, Leo, but it’s not completely undoable. Ryder will handle the morning shift—making breakfast, packing lunches and getting the boys to school, while you’re the evening shift. You can rearrange your deliveries so that you can pick up Clint and Vince from school, then you handle dinner, homework, bath and bedtime. This way, the boys get to stay together with loving parents, and Vince doesn’t have to change schools. They’ve suffered a huge loss. I think the best thing you can do for your sons right now is keep the rest of their lives as close to normal as possible. At least for the time being anyway. Do a six-month trial run, then reevaluate.”
* * *
Leo grimaced at the memory. Yvonne had thrown that “normal” word at him twice in his life, using it to describe things that were far from normal.
And yet, she’d been right.
Or at least, he’d thought so. Until Ryder got that big promotion last month at work. It required him to be out of town several days a week for training, and Leo was dying on the vine, trying to do it all until Ryder could
settle into his new position. The fact the boys were out of school for summer only exasperated things. Instead of just keeping them occupied in the evening hours, he was dropping them off at day camps or putting them to work at the farm or dragging them around on his delivery runs. They were almost always with him, and each other. Which meant the noise level and ridiculous brotherly squabbles were at an all-time high.
If he had a nickel for every time one of them bitched about the other one touching him or hogging the controller or turning the channel, he’d be drinking piña coladas on his own private island by now.
He glanced around, spotting the mountain of dirty clothes that had started creeping out of the laundry room and into the hallway. There was a layer of dust on every piece of furniture in the living room, and he didn’t have to see the kitchen to know that if their dinner hadn’t been scorched, they would have been eating on paper plates because the rest of the dishes were in the sink.
Typically, he could handle real life shit better than this. But with Ryder gone so much and the constant distraction of the boys, and the fact he’d had to extend his own work hours because his dad had pulled a muscle in his back, he simply couldn’t do it.
He stood from the floor and walked back to the kitchen, dumping the shards of glass in the trash can.
“You guys need to clean your room. The smell is getting pretty unbearable,” he called from the kitchen, when he realized the two boys had started wrestling. They were giggling now, but past experience had proven that would turn to crying or true fighting before long.
“We already cleaned it,” Vince called out.
Leo knew that was a lie. He’d had a hell of a time getting his son to do anything this summer. He wasn’t sure if it was puberty or laziness, but he’d had enough.
“You realize I can confirm that lie in about five seconds.”
Vince mumbled something incoherent, which was a good thing. Leo had a feeling if he’d heard it, he’d flip out.
He closed his eyes and groaned when there was a knock on the door. The last thing Leo needed to deal with was someone trying to sell him something. He stomped to the front door, ready to use whoever was on the other end as a whipping boy.
He was fucking done with today.
With this week.
This life.
He swung the door open—then pulled up short when he saw Yvonne standing there, smiling and holding a picnic basket in her hands.
“What’s that?” he barked, feeling instantly guilty at his rudeness.
Of course, it was Yvonne, which meant she merely lifted one eyebrow, silently chastising, even as she gave him a classic smartass response. “You clearly never watched Yogi Bear. This is called a picnic basket,” she said slowly, as if he wouldn’t understand the words.
He narrowed his eyes. “I can see that. What are you doing here?”
Yvonne didn’t bother to respond. Instead, she skirted by him into the house. She’d been here countless times in the past three years. She and her cousin Darcy were their primary babysitters whenever he and Ryder were in a pinch and needed someone to watch the boys.
“Vonnie!” Clint and Vince yelled out in unison, delighted to see her.
“Wow,” Yvonne said as she looked around the place. “I’m glad I missed the tornado that tore through here. Is that smoke I smell?”
“Dad burned dinner,” Vince explained.
Leo rubbed his eyes wearily…until Yvonne lifted the picnic basket.
“He did that on purpose,” she lied, “because he wanted this to be a surprise.”
Clint jumped up and down, skipping along behind Yvonne as she carried the picnic basket into the dining room. “What surprise?”
“Dinner. But before we can enjoy that, you boys need to help me clear off this table.”
Leo had said the same thing to them at least twelve times this week—the dining room table was covered with their art supplies, Legos, and a million scraps of paper Clint insisted he needed to keep for some unfathomable reason.
Interestingly, in the face of good food, whatever significance the paper held vanished as Yvonne went to the kitchen and returned with a trash bag that Clint happily helped her fill.
Leo watched in quiet amazement as Yvonne—with the help of the boys—managed to put the dining room back to rights in less than five minutes.
Then she went one step further, opening the picnic basket, spreading a red-and-white checkered tablecloth on the table, and pulling out a meal that had Leo’s mouth watering.
She’d brought fried chicken, homemade potato salad with real bacon bits in it, and a leafy salad that she’d dressed in such a way that neither boy bitched about having to eat vegetables.
The three of them attacked the food like tigers who’d just killed an antelope, while Yvonne laughed at their exuberant eating.
Throughout the meal, Yvonne asked the boys about their summer vacation, then skillfully turned the conversation to the state of their bedroom once they were finished.
Suddenly, Vince recalled that maybe it wasn’t as clean as it could be. Yvonne told them she had one last surprise in the basket, but they wouldn’t get it until they’d cleaned their room.
Vince didn’t look too concerned about not getting his treat, until she added, “Until it’s done to my satisfaction. I will be checking your work.”
Vince groaned. “Aw, but the room is really dirty!”
“Stop grumbling and get to it. These homemade chocolate chip cookies are going to make it worth the effort, I promise. Or skip it. That just leaves more cookies for me and your dad.”
“Cookies!” Clint yelled. “I’m going right now.”
Within minutes, she had the dining room table cleared again, and both boys working in their bedroom fast and furious to earn their reward.
“How did you know their room was a mess?” Leo asked.
Yvonne looked around the rest of the house and let that answer his question. The place really was a trash heap at the moment.
“So,” she said, looking at Leo, “your turn.” She turned away from him and headed to the kitchen, leaving him no choice but to follow.
“My turn?” he asked as he entered the room.
“The rest of this house looks like hell too. No cookies for you if you don’t tackle at least some of it.”
He sighed. “Shit got away from me.”
She nodded, but her expression told him that response didn’t get him out of the doghouse. “So why didn’t you ask for help?”
The truth was, it had never occurred to him to ask her for help. He was already concerned he abused their friendship more than he should, asking her to babysit every now and again.
She studied his face. “We’re friends, Leo.”
“I know that.”
“Friends ask for help.”
Leo didn’t reply. He couldn’t. He wasn’t made that way. He’d been raised in a family of farmers, which meant he’d lived his entire life taking care of his own. If he planted a bed of vegetables, they were his to care for, to water, to nurture, to harvest. Responsibility had been drilled into his head from the cradle.
When he’d discovered Denise was pregnant with Vince, he’d been determined to do the right thing. He’d made that beautiful baby with her, and there had never been a question that he wouldn’t give their son whatever he needed to live and thrive. He and Denise had come up with a shared custody arrangement with the help of their parents, and the night Vince was born had been the happiest of his whole damn life.
From the night of graduation until Denise passed, he’d worked long hours and had even picked up some extra handyman jobs so that he could provide child support for Vince and afford to live on his own without being beholden to his parents for anything.
That’s just the way he was made. Asking for help felt like the equivalent to admitting defeat.
“I didn’t want to impose,” he said at last.
Yvonne rolled her eyes like he was the world’s biggest idiot. “Sound
s like Vince isn’t the only one who needs a good kick in the rear. Lucky for you, I’m here and very, very wise. I can help you.”
He was actually able to grin at her joke, thanks to his now full stomach. “I’m doing just fine.”
Of course those words would have held more weight if she wasn’t standing in the middle of a fucking disaster zone.
“Mmmhmm,” she hummed. “I can see that. Actually, you and Ryder are usually able to stay on top of stuff. I’ve never seen things this bad. What’s been going on?” she asked as she started filling the sink with hot water and dish detergent.
“You don’t have to do that,” he said.
Yvonne ignored him, snapping her fingers to her thumb in classic “shut your trap” style.
He knew her well enough to know he wouldn’t win this argument, so Leo picked up a dishcloth and started wiping up the counters and kitchen table. “Ryder got a promotion at work.”
“Darcy told me. I think that’s great. I know it’s the job he’s been working his ass off for.”
Leo knew the same thing, which was why he felt guilty for being pissed off about being left holding the bag. “It’s terrific, and he deserves it. Nobody works harder than him.”
Yvonne glanced over her shoulder at him, and he could see from her expression he hadn’t tempered his tone enough. “That’s debatable. You probably give him a run for his money. Does this promotion mean longer hours?”
Leo nodded. “And he’s had to go out of town quite a bit lately for training.”
“I see.”
“And my dad pulled a muscle in his back, and my brother can’t do all the farm work on his own, something he’s been passive aggressively letting me know for a week now. I’ve taken the boys out there a few hours each day, all of us pitching in when we can, but prodding the boys to work is harder than doing the damn job myself. Plus, Clint takes karate on Tuesday nights, and Vince’s little league games are eating up three nights a week.”
“Damn. It’s critical mass here.” She gave him a quick wink that told him she was teasing, but he couldn’t help but hate the way he was coming across in this conversation.
“I’m not complaining,” he insisted. “I’m just saying I’m busy.”
