Home at Last

by Shirlee McCoy

  One way or another, she wasn’t walking around in the hall, dropping heart-shaped stones.

  A cold nose nudged her hand, and she jumped a foot, her heart skipping crazily as she looked down into Rembrandt’s furry face.

  “You scared me,” she whispered, not sure why she was so jumpy.

  Certainly not because of the rock.

  What had Moisey called her brother’s heart-shaped finds?

  Hugs from God?

  Kisses from God?

  Neither sounded right, so Sunday grabbed Rembrandt’s leash and led him down the back stairs and into the kitchen. She took the notebook from the drawer, moving as quietly as she could, because Flynn was in the living room.

  When she stepped onto the back porch, the security light came on, and she thumbed through her notebook as she walked down the stairs.

  There! She found the entry, the words she was looking for circled several times.

  Kisses from heaven.

  As if Matt might blow a kiss down to earth and that kiss may land in pebble form: heart-shaped and beautiful.

  If only life could be so sweet and simple.

  She let Rembrandt lead her to the edge of the yard, through the flowerbeds and around the house. He took sniffing seriously, and she let him explore, her mind filled with Moisey’s words, the small rock pressing against her thigh as she walked, reminding her that it was there.

  The morning was chilly, the air crisp and cold. Fall would be there soon.

  School.

  How many days away?

  She closed her eyes, trying to see the calendar. She couldn’t, but she managed to remember the days. Fifteen.

  And the kids would be up at dawn, bickering over boxes of cereal and bottles of chocolate milk. Saturdays had been for pancakes, eggs, and bacon or sausage.

  Funny how she suddenly remembered that, and remembering made her want to do what she’d done so many times before—whip up a batch of pancakes, scramble some eggs, fry some bacon.

  The kids would enjoy that.

  Even on a non-weekend day.

  But, of course, she hadn’t cooked anything since the accident. She couldn’t remember recipes, and multitasking was nearly impossible, so she stayed away from the kitchen and let Rosie handle things there.

  It was easier that way.

  But maybe not better.

  And maybe the kids would rather her try and fail than not try at all.

  “Okay, Rembrandt,” she said. “That’s what we’re going to do. We’re going to make a nice breakfast, so the kids have full bellies for whatever today brings.”

  The puppy seemed excited about it.

  He dashed up the porch stairs and rushed back inside.

  Sunday wasn’t nearly as excited.

  The kitchen felt foreign, the refrigerator like a stranger’s when she opened it to grab eggs.

  And milk.

  She needed milk.

  And bacon.

  Was there any?

  She managed to find a package in the meat drawer, and she set it on the counter.

  She also needed something.

  Flour? And sugar? She needed those for pancakes.

  She thought.

  She searched the pantry until she found both, doing her best to stay quiet. She didn’t want company while she attempted to cook her first meal post-accident.

  She just wanted to be left alone.

  To focus and concentrate.

  Rembrandt tried to nab the bacon, and she caught him by the collar.

  “I think you should sleep with Moisey for a while,” she said. “She’ll like that.”

  She hefted him into her arms and managed to carry him upstairs. Moisey didn’t seem to notice when she set Rembrandt on her bed, and the puppy seemed happy enough to snuggle in close to one of his best friends.

  She left them there, closing the door and returning to the kitchen to make pancakes.

  Eggs?

  She saw them on the counter. Saw the milk. The bacon. Realized she needed pans. A couple of them.

  She opened cupboards until she found them.

  She set them on the stove, her heart beating a little too fast and a little too hard.

  She was scared, for crying out loud!

  Afraid to turn on the gas burners.

  Something she knew she’d done hundreds of times before.

  Probably thousands.

  “You can do this,” she told herself, turning the knob and watching as blue flames shot out.

  “Okay. That was easy. Now . . .”

  What?

  Bacon first?

  Pancakes?

  Eggs?

  Why was this so hard?

  That’s what she wanted to know. It was all she wanted to know.

  That and what to do first. Mix the pancakes or the eggs or cook the bacon.

  She had to do something. Flames were leaping out from under the cast-iron pan, lapping at the handle.

  She turned down the heat, grabbed the bacon, and cut open the package, laying slabs of bacon across the hot pan and listening as they sizzled.

  Then she grabbed the eggs and cracked them into a mixing bowl, her hands shaking as if she were performing a piano sonata in front of an audience without ever taking a lesson.

  “You have done this before,” she reminded herself as she dug through a drawer and looked for a whisk.

  The bacon was sizzling. Maybe burning. She abandoned the drawer and the search, raced to the pan, was relieved that the bacon wasn’t scorched.

  She had nothing to turn it with though.

  She ran to the drawer again, grabbing a fork and using it to flip the bacon.

  Now what?

  She whirled around, went back to the eggs and used the fork to scramble them.

  She could do this.

  She could.

  She hoped.

  * * *

  She was wearing cowboy boots, threadbare jeans, and an oversize button-up shirt secured at the waist with hair ties. The ends of it jutted out at her side, jumping and bouncing as she worked. A sliver of creamy flesh was visible above the waistband of her jeans, and he could see her shoulder blades jutting against her shirt as she measured flour and sugar and poured them into a dark red bowl.

  Her hands were shaking.

  He could see that, too, but he couldn’t see her face.

  She had her back to the doorway, her attention fixed on a piece of paper lying next to the bowl.

  A recipe?

  She reached for a bottle of vanilla, struggled with the lid, and finally managed to open it enough to pour some into a teaspoon measure.

  She poured over the bowl.

  And her hands were shaking.

  So, of course, more than a teaspoon of vanilla sloshed into the bowl.

  “Darn it,” she growled, using a fork to beat the mixture into submission.

  “This is going to taste terrible,” she continued as she carefully measured out oil and poured it into the bowl.

  “I don’t know about that,” he responded, finally deciding to step in. Not because she needed help with whatever she was making but because there was bacon on the stove, and he could smell it burning.

  She swung around, the fork in her hand, batter flying across the room and splattering his T-shirt.

  “Oh my gosh, Flynn! I’m sorry!” She grabbed a rag and rushed toward him, rubbing at the spots, her head bent so close to his chest, he could feel the silky strands of hair brushing his neck.

  Something shifted in the region of his heart.

  That’s the only way he could describe the feeling, the way he was thinking about burning bacon one minute and tucking strands of hair behind her ears in the next.

  His fingers lingering against velvety skin, as he scanned her face, thought about how different she was from the young woman he’d met at his brother’s wedding.

  Her wedding.

  Their wedding.

  That would be a very, very good thing to keep in mind.


  He took the rag from her hand and stepped away.

  “The bacon’s burning,” he said, to distract himself as much as to warn her.

  “Dang it!” She rushed to the pan, tried to lift crispy bacon with a spoon she grabbed from the draining rack.

  The bacon slid off the spoon, splattering grease across the counter and her hand.

  She jumped back, her elbow knocking the bowl and nearly upending it.

  “This is a disaster,” she muttered as she found a fork and tried to remove the bacon again.

  He reached around her, turning off the burner before something caught fire.

  Like her.

  “I should have done that ten minutes ago,” she said, sighing as she scooped up shriveled bacon and put it on a plate.

  “I’m more worried about your hand than I am about the bacon. Did you burn it?”

  She ignored the question, removing the remainder of the bacon, and setting the frying pan in the sink.

  “Sunday?” he prodded. “Your hand?”

  “It’s fine.” There was a hoarseness to her voice that might have been the beginning of tears, but he told himself she was tired or overwhelmed or frustrated, because any of those things would be easier to deal with.

  “Let me see.” He turned her gently, and he thought again about how much she’d changed from the girl she’d been.

  Her hair had darkened from honey to caramel, her freckles spreading from a few dots on her face to dozens on her cheeks and brow. She’d been pretty before, now she was beautiful.

  But there was more to it than that.

  There was in indefinable quality that spoke of experience and disappointment and pain and triumph.

  “I said, it’s fine,” she repeated, and this time there was no mistaking the tears in her voice.

  Or the ones on her face, trailing down her pale cheeks and splashing the front of her shirt.

  “What’s wrong?” he asked, wiping them away, his hands lingering on her cheeks, holding her still so that he could look into her face.

  He wanted the truth.

  Not some lie she made up to make them both feel better.

  “That,” she pointed at the bacon. “That.” She pointed at whatever was in the bowl. “And that.”

  She pointed at a pile of egg shells.

  “All I wanted to do was make them breakfast, and I couldn’t even manage that.”

  “It looks to me like you’ve got a good start.”

  “Burned bacon?” she asked, sniffing back more tears and running water into the pan.

  “I have it on good authority, that’s the best kind.”

  “From who?”

  “The twins. Milo especially loves extra crispy bacon.”

  “I hope he also loves lumpy pancakes and shells in his scrambled eggs, because that’s pretty much what I’m going to be serving.”

  “Pancakes, huh?” He glanced in the bowl and then at the recipe card.

  “It used to be I didn’t have to follow a recipe. Everything I needed to know was here.” She tapped her head, her finger just missing the edge of the scar that peeked out from the hair near her temple.

  “Is that the real reason you’re crying? Because you’ve lost so much?”

  “Maybe. Or maybe I’m just tired of everything being so difficult.”

  “I get that.”

  “I doubt it. From what I’ve seen, nothing is ever difficult for you.”

  “Obviously, you haven’t seen much. The day I started working for Emmerson? It was the worst day of my life.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah.” He opened a drawer and pulled out two frilly aprons. He tied one around his waist and the other around hers. It nearly wrapped around her twice, and he made a note to make sure she was eating. Every time he saw her, she seemed smaller. “I was twelve, and I thought I knew a lot.”

  “Most twelve-year-olds do.”

  “Maybe, but I think I cornered the market on bigheaded pride. School was easy. I never studied, but I always got As. I thought I understood a heck of a lot more than I did, so I was mouthy and rude, brash and full of myself.” He dumped the lumpy batter into the sink and handed her the bowl. “How about you start this again, and I’ll tackle the eggs? We can put the bacon in the warmer.”

  “Warmer?” For a second, she looked confused, and then she glanced at the 1920s stove with its old-fashioned knobs and huge gas burners.

  “Right.” She opened a small cupboard attached to the stove and put the bacon inside.

  “Right?” she asked as if she needed reassurance.

  “Right,” he agreed, lifting a second bowl, this one filled with eggs, bits of shell bobbing on the surface.

  “The thing about Emmerson?” he continued the story. Mostly to distract her. “He didn’t like snotty, loudmouthed kids, but he needed help, and I was there. So after I told him I was absolutely prepared to take over his equestrian operation . . .”

  “You didn’t.”

  “I did. I had a prepared speech that sang my praises and let him know just how good an employee he was going to get when he hired me.”

  “When?”

  “Like I said, I was cocky with confidence. I finished my speech, and he offered me the job. But instead of going out to the stables and telling me what he wanted done, he said that since I was ready to take over the operation, I could go ahead and do it. He handed me a shovel, put a cowboy hat on my head, and wished me luck.”

  “And?”

  “There may have been tears,” he admitted. “Mine and the horses’. I had no idea what they ate. I had no idea whether they were supposed to be in the barn or out of it. I had no idea they were so . . . big or smart or determined to have their way. In an hour, I’d managed to get kicked by an old mare, nipped by Emmerson’s donkey, and knocked over by a filly. I was lying in a pile of horse manure, staring up at the sky, when Emmerson finally came out to rescue me.”

  “What did he say?”

  “Boy, it took me seventy-five years to learn this business. Did you really think you could learn it in a day?”

  She laughed, the sound light and easy, her movement slow and precise as she measured flour and sugar, added baking soda, and scooped in a handful of oats. “He sounds like a great guy.”

  “He was. He taught me everything I needed to know to open a cattle operation, and he taught me how to be a man. A real one. The kind that knows how to shoe a horse—”

  “And pick shells out of eggs?”

  He met her eyes, realized she had been watching him as he strained the eggs through a fine-meshed sieve. “This skill is one I learned myself. My wife wasn’t the greatest cook, and sometimes I had to salvage the meal.”

  “You were married?!” She looked surprised. “I didn’t know. Or I’ve forgotten.”

  “I was married a year before you and Matt tied the knot and divorced four years after. Patricia and I had different ideas about things, and eventually that put too much of a strain on our relationship.”

  “What kinds of things did you have different ideas about?” she asked, ladling thick batter on the griddle. It formed a perfect silver-dollar-sized pancake.

  “She liked the city. I liked the country. She liked . . . stuff. Cars and purses and matched dishes. I liked crops and cattle and the hot sun on my face.”

  “Sounds like me and Matt,” she said as she flipped the pancake.

  “Does it?”

  She must have realized what she’d said, because her cheeks went pink, and she shrugged. “A little. He liked things. I liked the farm.”

  “He wanted more, and you were content?”

  “Something like that.”

  “That was Patricia’s fatal flaw, too.”

  “What?” she asked, putting the perfect golden pancake onto a plate and pouring two more.

  “Discontentment. She wanted more than what she thought I could give, so she went out and found what she thought she wanted. For a while, he seemed to make her happy.” He wasn’t sure why
he said it. Maybe he was hoping she’d open up about her relationship with Matt, tell him the truth about the trips to Seattle and Portland, the fine dining and the flowers that had been sent to places other than their home.

  He’d seen all those things in their bank records, and he’d kept quiet, because he hadn’t wanted to hurt her or the kids by suggesting something that might, or might not, be true.

  He’d assumed that Sunday had been in the dark, that she’d had no clue that Matt might be cheating.

  Had been cheating.

  Flynn knew the signs. Hell, he’d seen them in his marriage.

  And ignored them.

  For a while.

  So he’d known what he was seeing when he’d looked at the bank account and credit card statements. He’d thought that Sunday hadn’t realized the truth, because there’d never been a time when he’d visited that she’d hinted at unhappiness, acted hurt, or showed any indication that her marriage was anything but fulfilling.

  But she had known.

  She still knew.

  He’d seen it in her face when he’d mentioned Matt’s trips to Seattle and Portland. The fact that she’d gone through extraordinary effort to avoid him in the two weeks since then? Another nail in the coffin of proof.

  Yeah. Matt had been cheating.

  Sunday had known it.

  Maybe they’d gone out to dinner for their anniversary hoping to mend fences and make things right. Maybe Matt had wanted to save his family and his marriage, and he’d thought a nice dinner would be the best way to do it.

  Maybe he’d bought her flowers that weren’t ordered from the same company he’d used for his side chick, and maybe he’d given her a gift that was worth more than money.

  A promise of fidelity.

  A sincere apology.

  A vow to make things right.

  And maybe Sunday had agreed to keep trying, keep working, keep being married. Because she’d loved him, or because she hadn’t wanted the kids to have a broken home.

  If so, Matt had been damn lucky.

  Because if Flynn had been sitting at that table, he’d have told his brother exactly what he could do with his apologies. He’d have reminded him of just how many times their father had offered the same to their mother and to them.

  Change required more than words.

  It required hard work and soul-searching and sacrifice.