A Mother's Strength

by Allie Pleiter

  When he looked up, a movement off to his right caught his eye. He glanced that way, expecting to see another white-tailed deer browsing along the tree line. He blinked and did a double take.

  There was a little kid in his yard.

  A tiny brown-haired boy dressed in red shorts and a striped T-shirt was hoisting himself onto the low rock wall that divided the yard of the original cabin from the rest of the centuries-old farm. No adult was in sight, and the kid couldn’t have been more than, what—three, maybe? Neil wasn’t all that good at assessing the ages of kids under twelve. Way too young to be off by himself, in any case.

  How’d the boy even get here? After doing some research, Neil had chosen this cabin for its isolation. Sweet Springs Farm had been allowed to stay when the Chattahoochee National Forest was formed around it, so both the 1940s farmhouse and this original Sawyer cabin were bordered by nothing but trees and wildlife. Ruby Sawyer’s farm was a brisk five-minute walk down the mountain, and as far as he knew, his elderly landlady lived alone.

  The little boy teetered on the wall, and Neil flinched.

  “Careful!” he called.

  At the sound of Neil’s voice, the child jerked his head in the direction of the house. The sudden movement made him lose his balance, and arms flailing, he plummeted off the side of the wall.

  A heart-stopping second of silence was followed by an escalating scream. Neil sprinted down the worn stone steps and dropped to his knees beside the howling toddler.

  “Are you hurt?” Wailing, the child nodded, his blue eyes shimmering with tears. “Where?” The little boy pointed to his knee, where an angry scrape was reddening with blood.

  “Whoa! Ouch.” Neil winced as the little boy yelled louder. “No, it’s okay! We just need to clean it up and put a Band-Aid on it, that’s all.” He hoisted the child to his feet and gently brushed off the clinging bits of grass and debris.

  As fat tears rolled down the child’s flushed cheeks, Neil scanned the yard. Still no sign of a parent. “Some­body has to be looking for you. Where’s your mom?”

  The child only sobbed on, but now there was a more desperate tone to the cries. Neil’s questions were making things worse.

  What was he supposed to do here? The ruffled edge of a disposable diaper was peeking above the waistband of the kid’s shorts. This little guy was barely more than a baby, and Neil worked with teenagers. Babies were way outside his skill set.

  Maybe if things had worked out differently three years ago, if he hadn’t forgotten his wallet that day…or if he hadn’t asked Laura to drop it off at his school on her way to the ultrasound appointment… Neil shook his head to clear it of the regrets that never missed an opportunity to jab him.

  Beat yourself up later, Hamilton. Right now you have to help this kid.

  “Let’s go inside, and I’ll doctor that for you.” He had two master’s degrees. Surely, he could figure out how to patch up a skinned knee. “Then we’ll figure out who you belong to.”

  The child was still crying, his face mottled red and wet with tears. His frightened eyes looked into Neil’s for a long second, reminding Neil of the times he’d startled a deer or a squirrel around the cabin. They always looked at you like that for a heartbeat or two while they decided whether or not to bolt.

  Finally, the little boy held up his hands, wiggling his fingers in a baby language so universal that even Neil could translate it.

  Carry me.

  He hesitated. Little kids weren’t his specialty. He’d never picked one up in his life, but it couldn’t be that hard, could it? He awkwardly hoisted the little boy up into his arms. To his relief, the child stopped screaming, hiccuped softly and laid his head against Neil’s chest.

  The kid’s yelling must have scared away everything in a half-mile radius, because Neil heard none of the usual birdsong or animal rustlings, just the sound of the child’s uneven breathing. Wispy hair tickled Neil’s chin, and small fists gathered handfuls of his shirt as the toddler clamped on.

  Neil’s heart stirred with a mixture of sympathy and anger. Poor little guy. What kind of parent let a baby wander around by himself on the edge of a national forest?

  He carried the child inside to the cabin’s cramped bathroom. Once there, he rummaged one-handed through his disordered medicine cabinet, impatiently tossing four herbal remedies for sleeplessness into the trash can.

  Might as well. The things didn’t work anyway.

  He finally unearthed a tube of antibiotic cream and a box of adhesive bandages. Balancing the toddler on the lip of the sink, he stuck a clean washcloth under the tap. He wrung it out and swabbed at the dirt and blood on the boy’s knee.

  The child yelped and shot Neil an accusing look.

  “Sorry, buddy. I have to clean it, but I’ll try to be more careful.” He dabbed very lightly. “Better?”

  The little boy didn’t answer, but he didn’t yelp again, either. He stuck one thumb in his mouth and watched solemnly as Neil finished cleaning the knee, applied the ointment and angled two bandages over the wide scrape.

  “All done.” Neil straightened and surveyed his work. Not bad for a total amateur. “You’re a brave little guy, aren’t you? What’s your name?”

  The child’s sad eyes studied Neil. After a long pause, the little boy popped his wet thumb out of his mouth.

  “Owiver.”

  “Owiver?” What kind of name was that? Neil puzzled over it for a minute before realization struck him. “Oh. Oliver? Like Oliver Twist?”

  The little boy blinked at the literary reference, but he nodded. “Owiver.” He looked at his knee, then back at Neil. “Fanks,” he offered shyly.

  Neil’s brain must have booted up its baby-talk translator, because this time he understood. “You’re welcome.”

  The child continued to look at him expectantly, but Neil had no clue what he was supposed to do now that the knee had been taken care of. Didn’t little kids usually get lollipops or something after incidents requiring Band-Aids? Neil had nothing like that on the premises. He had some chocolate-covered espresso beans, but he was pretty sure those weren’t toddler friendly.

  “Well,” Neil said finally. “I guess we’d better find your mother. She must be worried about you.”

  Oliver didn’t answer, but he broke his gaze away from Neil’s and became suddenly interested in an unremarkable corner of the bathroom. The thumb went back in his mouth, and for a second, Neil thought the toddler was about to start crying again. A warning bell pinged in the back of Neil’s brain.

  Shouldn’t a hurt kid want his mom?

  “Oliver?” A muffled female voice called frantically from outside the house. “Oliver! Where are you? Answer me, sweetie! Please!”

  “Looks like your mom found us.” Neil watched Oliver’s expression closely. The little boy tilted his head and glanced briefly in the direction of the woman’s voice. Leaning forward on the sink, he buried his face in the front of Neil’s shirt. The warning bell in Neil’s mind pinged louder.

  Even the teens he worked with wanted their parents when they were sick or scared. This wasn’t normal.

  “Oliver!”

  “Come on, buddy. I need to have a talk with your mother.” Neil gathered the little boy into his arms. It was easier this time, and the child relaxed against his shoulder, thumb still in his mouth.

  As he turned toward the door, Neil’s glance caught on their reflection in the medicine-cabinet mirror. His glasses were slightly askew, there was a shadow of summer-break beard on his cheeks, and his dark hair was rumpled because he’d forgotten to comb it before he’d discovered his keys were missing. Nothing unusual there.

  But cradled in his arms was a tiny boy, bits of dead grass still scattered on the back of his shirt, cheeks flushed pink, sucking his thumb, his head settled trustingly in the niche between Neil’s neck and his shoulder.

 
Now, that? Definitely unusual.

  Something sharp and hard sliced through Neil’s heart. My life could’ve been like this. Laura and I were supposed to have a son. God, why didn’t You—?

  He cut the thought short. He’d stopped asking God those questions years ago. What was the point?

  “Come on,” he repeated, patting the boy’s back with his free hand. “Let’s go see what this is all about.”

  He opened the front door just as a red-haired woman enveloped in an oversize green chef’s apron barreled up his front steps. She stopped so fast that she had to grab the rail to keep herself upright. She pressed her free hand over her heart and gasped.

  “Oh, you’ve got him!” Relief washed over her pale face as her eyes fixed on the toddler in Neil’s arms. “I’ve never been so glad to see anybody in my whole life! Oliver Johnston, you scared me and Grandma Ruby half to death! Honey, you have to stop running off like this.”

  The little boy’s only response was to burrow closer against Neil’s chest. Neil narrowed his eyes as he considered the woman in front of him.

  She was vibrantly pretty, in a flushed, disheveled sort of way. Her ruddy hair was pinned up in a haphazard bun that was slipping apart, and long strands had drooped to curl beside her left cheek. Her eyes were as green as the first spring leaves, and golden freckles spattered across the bridge of her nose. She was petite but not skeletally thin, and she favored eye-popping colors. Underneath the huge apron peeked bright purple short sleeves embellished with multicolored cupcakes.

  She smelled like freshly baked cookies.

  This was a kindergarten-teacher sort of woman, the kind of person he’d assume kids would be drawn to like ants to sugar, but Oliver sure didn’t seem fond of her.

  “Who are you, exactly?” Neil asked bluntly.

  “Oh! Sorry!” The woman had a generous mouth, and when she smiled, it seemed like the afternoon sun had brightened a few extra watts. “I’m so relieved that I forgot to introduce myself. Maggie Byrne.” She took her fingers off her chest, revealing Angelo’s scrawled in flowing white script across her apron. She extended the hand in his direction. “I’m Ruby Sawyer’s daughter. Oliver and I moved in with her about six weeks ago.”

  This was his new landlady’s daughter? Neil’s brain ticked over this information in a millisecond. And she worked at Angelo’s. Some little bakery downtown, wasn’t it? Yeah, the building with the pink-and-white-striped awnings and the white curlicued-metal furniture out front, always teeming with people.

  He’d never been there. Not his kind of place.

  After a second’s hesitation, he accepted the woman’s hand. Her fingers clasped his with a warm enthusiasm that made strange tingles run all the way up to his elbow. He released her hand as fast as he could, and she tilted her head, regarding him with a friendly curiosity.

  “You must be Ruby’s new renter. Neil…”

  “Hamilton.”

  “Right. It’s nice to finally meet you in person.”

  “You’re Mrs. Sawyer’s daughter?” Strange, then, that she kept calling his landlady by her first name. Folks in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Georgia trended toward the traditional.

  The relationship also seemed biologically unlikely. The two women looked nothing alike. This woman was all rosy color and curves, and Mrs. Sawyer was sallow and spare framed.

  “I am.” She made a point of looking him straight in the eye as she answered.

  Neil had worked with teenagers long enough to know when somebody wasn’t telling him the whole truth. Not that it mattered. This woman’s specific relationship to Mrs. Sawyer wasn’t his immediate concern. “Is he—” he nodded down at Oliver’s head “—yours?”

  “You mean is he my son? Yes, he is. Or rather, he will be really soon. I’m adopting him. He’s going to live with Grandma Ruby and me, and the three of us are going to be a family. Aren’t we, Oliver?”

  Neil narrowed his eyes. There it was again—that note of not-quite-the-truth.

  Maggie nibbled on her lip as she studied the toddler. “Is he okay, do you think? He…uh…doesn’t usually like to be held.”

  “All I saw was a skinned knee. I’m no doctor, but I think he’s all right.”

  “That’s a relief!” Maggie fished a cell phone out of her pocket. “I’d better let Ruby know Oliver’s safe and sound.” She kept her eyes fixed on the boy as she waited for an answer, as if she were afraid he was going to disappear again. “Ruby? I’ve found him over here at the cabin. No, he’s just fine, thankfully. You wait there. We’ll be home in a few minutes.”

  She ended the call and flashed a smile at Neil before turning her attention back to the boy. “Let’s go home and tell Grandma Ruby you’re okay. Maybe we’ll all have a glass of milk and a cookie. How does that sound?” Maggie held out her hands, but Oliver snuffled against Neil’s shirt and shook his head.

  Disappointment flickered in Maggie’s eyes, but she kept her arms outstretched. “Sorry,” she murmured, darting a glance at Neil. “He’s only been with me for about a month, and we’re still working on attachment. But we’ll get there, won’t we, Oliver? Thanks so much for your help, Neil. You’ve saved the day, you really have. Now, I’m sure you have things to do, so we’d better get going.”

  That was his cue to hand Oliver over. As if sensing Neil’s thoughts, the little boy clamped on tighter.

  “I could carry him back to Mrs. Sawyer’s for you,” Neil heard himself volunteering. “His knee was banged up pretty good, and I think he’s still upset.”

  “Poor little guy.” Maggie craned her neck to inspect his knees, zeroing in on the injured one. “Looks like you’ve administered some top-quality first aid.” As she angled Oliver’s leg for a better look, her fingers brushed against Neil’s chest.

  He jumped as if he’d been shocked, and she lifted surprised eyes to his. “I’m sorry! Did I poke you? Look, it’s kind of you to offer to walk back with us, but I don’t want to put you to any more trouble. You look like you’re all dressed up to go somewhere.”

  The meeting. He glanced at his watch and bit back a groan.

  It was too late to get to the high school, so he might as well see this little drama through. He’d reschedule with Principal Aniston later.

  “I’m not going anywhere. Not now, anyway. I’ll carry him.”

  Maggie smiled. “Well, okay. Thanks.”

  He edged past her down the cabin’s worn steps.

  “Neil?”

  He turned. “What?”

  “Would you like me to grab these for you?”

  She pointed to his keys, dangling from the dented doorknob. He blew out a weary breath. “Just leave them. Thanks.”

  Then maybe when he got back home, he’d be able to find them.

  Maybe.

  When Ruby had fretted over her new renter being such a “sad, quiet fellow,” Maggie hadn’t paid much attention. Most likely this Neil guy just wasn’t responding to Ruby’s firehose brand of neighborliness. Some folks didn’t. Maggie loved Ruby beyond all reason, but she knew her blunt-spoken foster mom could be an acquired taste.

  But now that she’d met him… Maggie sneaked a side­ways glance at the man walking silently beside her. Ruby might be getting older, but her instincts about people were as good as ever.

  A story of hurt was written all over Neil’s face. It was in his eyes, in the tense lines around his mouth and even in the stiff, slightly awkward way he carried Oliver. Maggie had a few instincts of her own, and they told her Neil Hamilton’s misery wasn’t fresh. His pain had settled in to stay, like a long spell of dreary winter weather.

  That was too bad. Maggie sighed as she sidestepped one of the many tree roots snaking across the red clay path. While waiting on customers at Angelo’s, she saw plenty of troubled folks, and she always wished she had more ability to help them. Unfortunately, most of the time all she co
uld do was sympathize—and maybe plop an extra cookie in their bag if Angelo happened to be in a good mood.

  She prayed for them, too, of course. She kept a little notebook of prayer concerns right next to her order pad in her apron pocket, and it was a slow day when she didn’t add at least three new ones. She did what she could. It just never felt like enough, not when she knew firsthand what kind of unhappiness existed in the world. That was why she was so thankful for the opportunity to help Oliver.

  If only he’d let her.

  She looked at the little boy nestled in the man’s arms. Oliver had never cuddled against her like that, not once. When Maggie picked him up, he held himself stiff as a board, his little hands placed against her chest, pushing her away. Or worse, he screamed at the top of his lungs. It broke her heart every time, even though Ruby promised Oliver would eventually learn to trust her.

  So far, she’d seen no sign of that happening. She cut another glance at her companion, wondering what it was about this particular guy that had broken through Oliver’s defenses.

  At first glance, she didn’t see anything obvious. Of course, even with that unapproachable expression on his face, Neil was no slouch in the looks department. Tall and lean, he had nice shoulders and thick dark brown hair that didn’t look as if it had seen a comb recently.

  He also sported a shadowy scruff of beard, but Maggie wondered if that was intentional or if he just hadn’t bothered to shave lately. She kind of liked the casual, tousled look. She’d never been a big fan of men who spent a lot of time in front of mirrors.

  But none of that was likely to matter much to Oliver—or to her, either. She’d take as many friends as the good Lord saw fit to give her, but she wasn’t interested in romance. Maggie had witnessed one relationship disaster after another growing up, each one worse than the last. Now that Oliver had come into her life, she was determined to stay peacefully single, just like Ruby, and build a family by offering a home to children who needed one.

  As if sensing her scrutiny, Neil glanced at her, his brown eyes cool and impersonal behind his rimless glasses. He turned his gaze forward again without speaking.