Mess With Me

by Kylie Gilmore

  His phone rang and he snatched it up, ridiculously hopeful that it was Ally. Nope. Joe, his honorary dad.

  “Hey, what’s up?” Ethan said curtly.

  “I’ve got some news.”

  Ethan straightened, immediately on alert. “What happened? Is everything okay?”

  “Everything’s fine. I wanted to let you know Peggy’s estate is going to you and Zach. She left you everything.”

  Joe’s voice reached him through a long tunnel. His foster mom left him everything? He could barely comprehend.

  “Eth?”

  “What estate? Why me and Zach? Why am I just hearing about this now? Peggy died two months ago.”

  “It takes a while for these things to go through. She made me executor of her will. It had to have a court hearing first. We were waiting to hear if any kin might object to the will. No one came forward. Now it’s official. Her house and everything in it are yours.”

  He stared at the floor, his vision blurry. Why would she leave it to him?

  Joe went on. “I’ve been looking in on the house once a week. It’s in good shape. Zach stopped by this morning and I gave him the key. He’s waiting to hear from you about going over there.”

  Ethan jerked his head up. “Yeah, okay. Bye.” He hung up and called Zach.

  “Guess you heard,” Zach said.

  “You got some time to go over there?” It was Sunday, so they both had the day off.

  “Yeah, I’m home. I’ll meet you there in ten.”

  Ethan drove over in case he needed to haul something away, though he could’ve walked, he lived just on the other side of town. He beat Zach there and parked in front of the three-bedroom ranch house that had been his first real home. The white vinyl siding and black shutters were in good condition, the yard full of leaves again. He’d just raked them a couple of weeks ago. His heart lodged in his throat. He could just see Peggy out here in her old brown coat and sensible brown shoes, raking the leaves like she did every fall. She was a no-nonsense practical woman. Strong. She must’ve been so strong to build a life on her own, a widow who’d lost her only son and then went on to foster so many kids well after the age most people retired.

  He made his way to the backyard, grabbed the rake leaning against the back of the house, and got to work, his mind wandering back to Peggy’s death right in this yard. She’d died under the heat of the late August sun, pulling weeds in her flower beds. Eighty-four years old and her heart just gave out. Unfortunately, since she’d been in the backyard when she collapsed, her neighbor hadn’t noticed until it was too late to revive her.

  Guilt stabbed at him and he raked harder, long sweeping strokes. He hadn’t seen Peggy since his birthday back in June. She’d made him his favorite dessert, carrot cake. He gave her a gift card to her favorite store, Target, like he always did when he visited. Now it seemed so impersonal. They hadn’t hugged.

  He stopped, leaning on the rake, lost in memories of this house and Peggy.

  “Eth!”

  He snapped to attention at Zach’s appearance. His foster brother was his age, tall and lean with dark brown hair on the shaggy side and a full beard that probably fit in perfectly with his job as a professor. “Hey.”

  “Ready?”

  His knees locked. It was never going to be easy to go through Peggy’s things. He hadn’t been inside the house since his birthday. “Sure.” He set the rake back against the side of the house and followed Zach to the front door.

  “Did you know Joe was the executor of her will?” Zach asked.

  “No, but I’m not too surprised. Joe was her emergency person. They were in touch a lot when we were kids.” Peggy had thought it important that he and Zach have a male role model and encouraged them to spend as much time as they wanted with the Campbells. With all the boys close to their age hanging around the Campbell house, that meant they spent nearly all of their free time there. Peggy’s house became a place to sleep and eat. She was brisk and efficient, the place was always clean, homemade meals on the table. His gut churned. He’d taken her for granted. She had nobody. Her husband long ago passed, her son killed by a drunk driver. Why hadn’t he visited more? He hadn’t realized how much he meant to her.

  “True.” Zach pulled the key out of his jeans pocket, stuck it in the lock, and blew out a breath.

  Ethan reached out and finished the job, opening the front door. Neither of them moved.

  “Why did she leave everything to us?” Ethan asked. “There was a constant parade of foster kids through this house before and after us. I don’t get it.”

  Zach turned to face him. “She loved us the most.”

  “Bullshit. She didn’t love us. She never said she loved us. I can’t remember even a hug from her.”

  Zach’s light brown eyes met his, sad and sympathetic. “She wasn’t an affectionate woman, but that doesn’t mean she didn’t love us. She took good care of us, gave us a stable drama-free home. She worked with Joe to make sure we had a father figure.” Zach’s voice choked and he pinched the bridge of his nose.

  A weight pressed on Ethan’s chest, the tension unbearable. He stepped around Zach and into the house, barely seeing it. Regret hammered him. She had no family. He and Zach were both orphans. Was that why she loved them? Because they were the same? Alone.

  He looked around at the same furniture from when he’d lived there—beige sofa, brown high-back chair, simple wooden coffee table and matching end tables. A tall standing lamp next to the chair for reading. No decorations, no framed pictures. Austere, neat, no sentimentality. Just like Peggy.

  “It never changed,” Zach murmured, joining him in the center of the room.

  “I always had this weird sense of déjà vu when I visited. Like any minute you were going to walk out of the kitchen nine years old again.”

  “Yeah.”

  They took a tour of the place. It was a modest space. He and Zach had probably stayed the longest. There were always two or three more kids rotating through, a lot of siblings that stuck close together. Most of them went back to their parents or other family.

  Zach went into their old room and sat on the twin bed that used to be his.

  Ethan remained standing, his mind a jumble of old memories. “If she loved us so much, why didn’t she adopt us?”

  Zach shook his head. “I don’t know. Maybe she tried, but there was some bias against her because she was single. They didn’t do many single-parent adoptions back then. Maybe she needed the money the foster care system sent for us.” He lifted his palms. “Does it really matter now?”

  It shouldn’t, but it did. He shoved his hands in his pockets and turned away. It would’ve made a huge difference to him to know he was loved, to know he was good enough to be adopted. Zach already had that. He remembered his mom loved him before she was killed. Ethan had no memories to fall back on.

  He headed over to the hallway and peeked into the other small bedroom. Bunk beds and a twin bed. Wood dresser and nightstand. Neat and empty. Then he went to Peggy’s room. He’d never spent any time in here, just peeked in once in a while as a kid. It was just as plain as the rest of the house. A queen-size bed with an oak headboard and a light blue comforter. The long dresser and two nightstands were matching oak. There was only one bathroom in the house, out in the hallway. Geez, what had that been like for her to share a bathroom with two teenaged boys and a parade of other kids? He’d never thought about it before.

  He opened a nightstand drawer and found a small spiral notebook and pen. He closed the drawer again and gingerly sat on the side of the bed. It smelled like her in here, clean like fresh soap and lemon Pledge.

  Zach came in and looked around.

  “There’s a notebook in the nightstand,” Ethan said.

  Zach pulled it out and opened it, showing Ethan with a small smile. “Grocery lists and menus. She probably used these when she was still fostering.”

  Ethan took a look, recognizing one of the meals he’d had, meatloaf and homemade mac
’n cheese.

  Zach looked through a small closet with a rack of housedresses and a few nicer dresses she’d worn to church. Shoes lined up at the bottom, sweaters neatly folded on the top shelf. Ethan stood and paced the room.

  Zach started poking through the dresser drawers. He stopped at the bottom drawer and pulled out a large envelope. He carefully pulled the contents out and laid them on top of the dresser. “Eth.”

  “I feel weird looking at her stuff.”

  “It’s us.”

  The weight on his chest made it hard to breathe. Zach was spreading out some pictures. How could he not have known he was special to her? He made his way over to Zach and stared in shock. Individual wallet-size school pictures of him and Zach, every grade, along with pictures of each of them on their birthday, every year from nine to eighteen, and then Ethan and Zach together at their high school graduation in cap and gown, grinning at the camera. Zach was valedictorian with a ton of honors. Ethan was not.

  The kid pictures of him and Zach were a study in contrasts. There was Zach, staring back at the camera with solid confidence, knowing he was smart because he got straight As, knowing he was loved because he remembered his mom. And then Ethan, the lost little boy, then angry, then teenaged sneering.

  “Her husband,” Zach said, setting more pictures out. There was a man in a Marine uniform and their wedding pictures. Peggy looked completely different as a bride. Her hair was dark brown and past her shoulders; she had round cheeks like she still had some baby fat. She’d always looked thin when he’d known her, and her hair had been short and gray. He looked on the back for the year and showed Zach.

  “Child bride,” Zach commented. “Eighteen.”

  “You think she was pregnant?”

  “People got married younger back then. Maybe her husband was stationed overseas and it was easier to get married.”

  There were a lot of pictures of her son. He flipped to the back of one, where her neat print said: Michael, one year, five months. He’d been born a couple of years after the wedding. The pictures stopped abruptly at age nine.

  “That’s when he died,” Ethan said. And he’d been close to that age when he arrived here.

  “Yeah. She told me about it once. He was riding his bike in the early morning and a drunk driver hit him. It was a teenager on an all-night bender.”

  He swore under his breath. “I didn’t know all that.”

  “She told me stuff sometimes. I think it was because I was so quiet sitting there at the kitchen table long after everyone else was done eating.”

  “You were always so slow.” He pushed down the stab of jealousy. Peggy had never confided in Ethan.

  “I was usually thinking,” Zach said. “Some people talk more because the silence makes them uncomfortable. She probably would’ve told you stuff if you’d sat there long enough.” He held up a small white envelope. “Sealed.”

  “Maybe it’s from her husband.”

  Zach handed it to him. “No address. You open it.”

  Ethan’s stomach rolled. “It’s private. Just put it back.”

  “We’re her kin. No one else is ever going to see this stuff. We have to decide what to do with it. Maybe this will tell us what she wants.”

  “Then you open it.”

  “I did the pictures. You think that was easy?”

  He studied Zach for a moment. His face was pinched, tight with tension. “You sounded normal.”

  “I was looking at it intellectually like an anthropologist. Letter is more personal. Please, Eth. Can you take this one?” Zach walked over to the bed and sat down.

  “Fine,” he grumbled. Zach had that luxury, hiding in his head because he was an academic. Ethan didn’t work that way, he felt everything in his body. He carefully opened it and pulled out a neatly folded piece of lined paper. He unfolded it and began to read, her neat handwriting at once bringing back memories. She would leave little notes for them sometimes, like if they got home too late for dinner, just simple stuff like “meatloaf in the fridge.”

  “Read it out loud,” Zach said.

  Ethan swallowed hard. “Dear Ethan and Zach, you are my greatest success story. I’m so proud of how you became like brothers and helped each other to be the best you could be. It was my—” Ethan’s voice choked and he looked to the ceiling for a moment, fighting back tears. He cleared his throat and continued. “It was my privilege to watch you turn into the great men you are today. Ethan with your outstanding service as a police officer, and Zach out there teaching people about people.”

  Zach’s voice held a note of amusement. “She never did understand my job as an anthropologist.”

  “Can you blame her? It’s not like a lot of people around here do what you do.”

  “Guess not. Keep going.”

  Ethan took a deep breath. “You’re my family now, so I’m leaving you the house and everything in it. Joe has all the legal particulars. I was glad to be a safe place for you to land if only for a short portion of your life. I have one thing of value hidden in the oatmeal container in the back of the kitchen cabinet. It’s my engagement ring, an antique twin marquis diamond ring from my husband’s mother. Maybe one of you would like to carry on the tradition and give it to a woman one day, or maybe you’d each like a diamond to set in a new ring. I’ll leave it to you to work out the details. Love, Peggy.”

  Ethan stared at the letter for a moment before lifting his head to an empty room. He set the letter down on the dresser and headed over to the kitchen, where Zach was digging through some of the high cabinets. Ethan thought for a moment. Where would Peggy hide her only treasure?

  He squatted down and opened the largest lower cabinet Peggy used like a small pantry for items she used infrequently. And there it was—behind the flour, sugar, Bisquick, and a Ziplocked bag of raisin bran. He retrieved the oatmeal container and opened it. Oatmeal. Dig deeper. He shoved his hand in, and there at the bottom was a plastic bag. He pulled it out. A Ziploc sandwich bag with a diamond ring inside.

  He straightened and took out the ring, holding it up and looking at it from all angles. It was unusual—two marquis-cut diamonds sat at an angle nestled by smaller chips of diamonds on a gold band.

  “Found it,” he muttered.

  Zach shut a cabinet and crossed to him. “Wow. They don’t make them like this anymore.”

  Ethan offered it to him. “Here. You’re into old stuff.”

  “I already gave Carrie an engagement ring. It’s your turn.”

  “I’m not getting married.”

  “You will.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I’ve seen the way you look at Ally.”

  Ethan clenched his jaw. He’d already screwed things up permanently with Ally. Now she was leaving.

  Zach shoved his shoulder. “Peggy’s giving you the look from heaven right now.”

  He reluctantly smiled. Peggy never raised her voice. When she was displeased, she’d just shoot you this quelling look that made you stand up straighter. He carefully put the ring back in the plastic bag and stuck it in his pocket.

  Zach put his hands on his hips and looked around. “You want this place?”

  Ethan considered. “No. It’s too much her.”

  “Yeah, I get that. I want Carrie to pick the house she wants. So we agreed on selling? Split the profits?”

  “Yeah. We can run an estate sale for the furniture, donate whatever’s left.”

  “I think Peggy would be okay with that. She’d want us to have a good start for our own homes.” He rubbed his beard. “I’ll take the pictures of me, you take the pictures of you.”

  Ethan nodded. “What about the pictures of her husband and son?”

  “We’ll divvy them up.” Zach clasped his hand and then pulled him in for a hug.

  Ethan, who normally wouldn’t hug his brother more than a quick around-the-neck squeeze, returned the hug, wrapping his arms around Zach and clapping him on the back. “She made us a family and I didn’t know
it until now.”

  Zach pulled back and gave him a watery smile. “She loved us.”

  “Yeah,” he choked out. “She did.” And he felt that all the way through, the knowledge warming him, making his heart open, his chest expanding like he could breathe a full breath for the first time in his life. Like he was a new man. One who’d been wanted and loved as a kid.

  Zach squeezed Ethan’s shoulder. “I’ll gather up the stuff in the envelope and we’ll go.”

  Ethan nodded and just stood there alone in the kitchen, memories of Peggy cooking and serving up dinner flooding him. He could practically taste his favorite mac ’n cheese. Peggy washing dishes in her apron with the little red ruffle around the edges. The rectangular Formica table full of kids, talking and shoveling in food, Peggy quietly presiding at one end of it. He hadn’t been paying attention. Hadn’t noticed the love she showed through her actions, her quiet patience, her competent care. She’d given him the foundation he’d needed. She’d given him love. He’d been longing for what he’d had all along.

  Her death had been a wake-up call, making him try to be more open, but he hadn’t quite gotten there. He’d frozen up when Ally had said she loved him. And what about everyone else? Peggy, Joe, his honorary brothers and sister.

  His heart thundered in his chest. “I love you, Peggy,” he whispered, the words strange on his tongue. A rush of warmth ran through him. For a moment he swore he felt the soft touch of a hand on his back.

  Zach appeared in the living room with the envelope. “Ready?”

  He swallowed hard. “L—” He coughed, his cheeks burning, but he forced the words out anyway. “Love you, bro.”

  Zach smiled widely. “Love you too.”

  Ethan nodded once, patted the ring in his pocket, and followed Zach out the door with a lightness in his step.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Ethan finished raking Peggy’s yard, drove home, tucked the ring and pictures in a drawer, and then walked right back out, too keyed up to be confined. Instead he walked across town to Joe’s house. He needed to talk to him about Peggy.