A Place to Call Home (44 page)

I said nothing else and let Roan enjoy that small consolation for the rest of the night. Matthew would go home eventually, with or without the truth to propel him. Like foxgloves, we always came back to where we started.

The next day, after a lunch none of us did more than pick over, Matthew and Tweet cornered us in the living room.

Matthew glanced from Roan to me, frowning. “Look, I’m prepared for the worst, but I’m hoping for the best. Don’t try to shield me. All I need is the truth. Just an honest reaction from the Delaneys. I want to meet them.”

Roan and I traded strained glances. Honesty. Matthew had no idea. Suddenly Matthew pushed a phone across the coffee table. “Speakerphone,” he noted patiently, tapping the console. “Call your mother, Claire. We can all listen.”

I froze. “Why?”

“Tell her about me. I know that’s a lot to ask, but I want it straight. I want to hear her reaction.” He smiled tentatively. “If I’m welcome to visit, I want to know it right
now.
”

“
Matthew,
” Tweet moaned. “It’s not fair to judge people with shock tactics. You wouldn’t do that to one of our patients.”

“If I want to know whether a cow kicks, I give her a chance to kick me,” Matthew replied. “But at least I stay ready to jump out of the way.” He tapped the phone. “Claire.
Please
call my
Aunt Marybeth
and tell her about me.”

Your Grandmother Marybeth, I corrected silently. “Can I tell her you compared her to a cow?”

“We’re not going to do this,” Roan said. “Not this way, Matthew.”

“I have to,” Matthew said. “Bigger, we agreed yesterday, didn’t we? I thought that’s what you meant. I should meet these people.”

Roan raised a hand. “You should … get them out of your system,” he said carefully. “But Claire and I thought we’d go back and tell them about you—and how you ended up with me—”

“Roan needs to explain, for his own sake,” I put in.

“—plow the field for you,” Roan continued. “Plow the field before you plant the seed.” When Matthew looked at him askance, Roan added, “It’s a saying I learned from Claire’s grandfather. Grandpa Joe. He had a lot of sayings.”

Matthew’s great-grandfather, I thought.

Matthew shook his head. “Bigger, you can’t protect me anymore. I’m going to meet my father’s family on my terms.” He tugged on his ears firmly. “Either Claire places the call or I’ll do it myself.”

I looked at Roan. We were trapped. Mama, don’t fail me, I prayed silently as I reached for the phone.

“Your mama’s in the pottery room,” Renfrew snapped. “Where are you? Where’s Roanie? Come home. You’re scarin’ everybody. Your mama ain’t sleepin’. Your daddy’s smokin’ too much on his pipe. Rest of the family’s all jabberin’ about you and Roanie like crows pickin’ an ear of corn.”

“We’re coming home soon,” I said patiently. “Would you please go get Mama? I need to speak to her.”

“Why? You sound okay. You know I don’t never bother her when she’s in her—”

“Miz Mac,” Roan interjected quietly, leaning over the phone. The four of us were hunched over it as if it were a shrine. “If you’ll get Marybeth out of her pottery room this one time, I promise you she’ll forgive the interruption.”

“Roanie! Roanie, I’m gonna do it for you.” We heard her slap the phone down.

“Who was that?” Tweet asked. “And does your mother go in the
potty
room a lot?”

“Pottery room,” I corrected numbly. This was absurd. “And that was the housekeeper.”

“Renfrew,” Roan said flatly. “She’s crazy about me. She used to fight me for my underwear.”

“Don’t,” I begged. “She’s Missus Mac,” I told Matthew and Tweet. Then to Roan, “Don’t get them started on the wrong foot.”

“Which foot would that be?” he asked darkly.

“Claire!” Mama’s voice sang out of the speakerphone, melodic and Southern, and urgent. “Is it an emergency? Are you okay? Is Roan okay? Where are you? When are you coming home?”

“We’re fine, Mama. We’re … in Alaska, Mama.”

“
What
? Wait! Holt! Holt! Get on the other line! It’s Claire. They’re in
Alaska
! Just a second, sweetie. Daddy just came in from the barns. He’s been out there all morning. He’s got a dozen llamas with a hoof fungus.”

Matthew and Tweet squirmed closer to the phone. They consulted with each other in frenzied whispers, gesturing in wild patterns. Matthew grabbed a notepad and jotted a pharmaceutical name on it.
Tell him to get this ointment from his vet
, he wrote underneath.

I rubbed my eyes. He was so eager to please. Roan made motions at Matthew.
Calm down. Calm down
.

“Hey,” Daddy’s deep voice grunted at us suddenly.

“Hi, llama-papa.”

“Hear your mama breathin’ heavy on the other line? Tell her to calm down.”

It was an epidemic. “Mama, everything’s fine.”

“Tell your daddy. He’s the one who smells like an ashtray.”

“I just need to discuss something with y’all. Is this a good time?”

“Oh, for lord’s sake, talk,” Mama said.

“I don’t want a lot of people overhearing. Where’s Amanda?”

“She left for summer camp yesterday,” Mama said quickly. “And Josh is in Atlanta.”

“As usual,” Daddy said.

I exhaled. I’d settled a crucial preliminary problem. Josh. We had to get home and deal with Josh in private and in person. “Where’s Miz Mac?” I asked. “Still nearby?”

“Miz Mac always eavesdrops,” Mama said. “So there’s no point worrying about her. Honey, what’s going on? You and Roan are coming home, aren’t you? Tell me. Tell me and your daddy straight out.”

“We’re coming back,” Roan interjected. “I’m giving you my word on it.”

“
Roan,
” Mama and Daddy said in unison. “It’s good to hear you,” Daddy went on. “We’ll take you at your word anytime. All right?”

“That’s good to know,” Roan replied evenly.

“What’s in Alaska?” Daddy asked.

I hesitated. “It’s not a what, it’s a
who.
”

“Besides Roan?”

“Because of Roan.”

Silence. Mama said quietly, “Roan, you wouldn’t have asked Claire to meet somebody unless you thought she’d be happy about it. So I’m assuming this who isn’t a wife.”

“Not even a girlfriend,” Roan answered in a strangled voice. Mama’s approach could be disorienting.

“Then you’ve got a child. Or children.”

Silence. Roan looked at Matthew. “You could say that.”

“You’re divorced?”

“Never been married.”

“I see.”

“Hold on,” I said loudly. I was shaking. So was Tweet. Matthew was tugging his ears and Roan was as tense as a stone wall. “Mama. Daddy.” I took a deep breath. “He brought me here to meet Matthew.”

“Who?” Daddy asked.

Oh, God. “
Matthew
. Uncle Pete’s
Matthew
. Roan located Sally McClendon years ago. She died and he adopted
Matthew
. That’s why he’s been so secretive. Matthew.” There, in a hard nutshell, was the story.

More silence. Matthew’s expression went from hopeful to desperate. “They don’t even remember me,” he muttered. He dug his hands into his knees and stared at the phone. We all did.

Then came a soft wail of delight. “Is he there?” Mama shrieked. “Matthew? Is Matthew right there?”

Matthew’s mouth opened and shut. “I’m … I am here,” he said, inching closer to the phone. “Hello.”

Mama said, “Oh, thank you, Lord,” in a soft, high-pitched voice at least a dozen times, and then there were noises, and eventually we heard Daddy in the background calling out, “I had to change phones, she had to sit down on the floor, but she’s okay—”

“I don’t care how this happened, I don’t care what happened, or where or how or who or anything else right now,” Mama yelled tearfully, “but y’all bring Matthew here, you
bring
him here, you bring him
home
with you.”

“Bring the boy home,” Daddy said in a gravelly voice. He had obviously snatched up Mama’s phone—his voice was clear and rang as beautifully as a brass bell. “It’s a miracle. Come home and worry about explaining it later.”

Tweet started sobbing, and Matthew had tears on his face, and Roan and I sat there together on the couch, relieved by one small victory but too worried to relax. This was only a beginning.

I
told Mama and Daddy I’d call when we got to Ten Jumps. That we’d bring Matthew and Tweet to the farm for supper. “Don’t invite anybody, please,” I urged. “Let’s not rush the whole crowd at ’em right away. We’d need name tags and a genealogy chart, and it’d just be overwhelming.”

“Okay,” Mama said too blithely.

Matthew and Tweet transferred their menagerie of dogs and birds to the temporary care of trusted co-workers at the wildlife center, then we packed and caught a jet bound for Seattle the next afternoon. Matthew popped a bottle of champagne during the flight. “To Sullivans and Delaneys,” he said. Tweet laughed and pointed at me. “You do that just like Matthew. Only he does it when he’s upset.”

“What?”

She laughed harder. “You pull on your ears.”

Roan and I were astonished and anguished over a chain of events happening too quickly for the facts. What Matthew didn’t know would hurt him. The more I brooded over Josh’s betrayals, the angrier I became. He could keep his cowardly secret and let everybody go on believing a he, or he could confess to Matthew and the family.

I almost wished he’d deny the whole thing and we could get away with never mentioning it to anyone. But if
Josh denied Matthew, Roan would be more brutal than anyone else; I really believed he’d ruin my brother in revenge.

We stayed in Seattle overnight, at Roan’s house, but were besieged by phone calls from home—conversations with my parents, with Grandma Dottie, with all of my brothers except Josh, who was still out of town, and with cousins, aunts, uncles—they were all excited and pleased, and many of them wanted to talk to Matthew, and to Tweet, who grew so flustered by all the attention, she retreated into a discussion of viral poultry diseases with Daddy.

I asked Mama and Daddy to warn the family that one subject was
absolutely
off limits in these conversations: Roan. He listened to the rest of us chatter on the phone and I think he felt his happiness was being carved away from him in painful slivers; his biggest fear at the moment was that someone would mention his past to Matthew.

Thankfully, everyone seemed so humbled by what he’d done—taking Matthew to raise, doing so well by him, and bringing him back, to boot—that it was embarrassing to mention the past. I’m sure no one was eager to tell Matthew, a former outcast himself, how the family had ignored Roanie Sullivan, then warily embraced him, then discarded him. It was easy to warn the family off that subject, at least during the first flush of homecoming.

Matthew was ecstatic. “It’s turning out to be so easy,” he said to me out of Roan’s earshot. He had a bewildered expression. “I don’t understand why Bigger worried so much all these years. I think he’s so cynical about people that he twisted this family thing out of perspective.” Matthew sighed and nodded wisely. “You know, I’ve decided he was just born with the kind of personality that looks every gift horse in the mouth.”

I almost said,
He’s got good reason to believe that behind every gift horse there’s a horse’s ass
, but I didn’t want to encourage the
discussion. Roan deserved to explain himself to Matthew in his own way, when he was ready.

Ready or not, he’d have no choice soon.

“I need a stiffer drink than this tonight,” Roan complained in the shadows of a small balcony outside his bedroom door. “And I don’t say that very often.” He tossed the remnants of a beer away. I sat between his bare legs on the balcony’s cedar floor, naked except for the large Navajo blanket we shared. I tried to meditate on the slow chuckle of the fountain in his garden.

“Here, you can have the rest of mine.” I twisted inside the blanket and his arms and held my shot glass of bourbon to his lips. He took the rim between his teeth and tossed the bourbon into his throat. “No hands,” I noted as I retrieved my glass. “You learned that trick in a bar.”

“No. I learned it when Matthew was still in diapers. Change enough dirty diapers and you can learn to drink, eat, or sign your name without using your hands. You learn not to forget and put your fingers near your mouth.”

I tried to laugh, but I could imagine him all too well, fifteen or sixteen years old, a rough-looking, skinny, hulking teenage boy taking care of a child. “I love you,” I said simply. “I love you more now than I did when we were kids, and more than I did when you came back a few weeks ago, and more than yesterday. And more than this morning.”

He curved his head around mine and kissed me. “Are you a little bit drunk?” he teased gruffly.

“Maybe. But that only makes me clear on what I really feel. I need to make you believe we’ll be okay back at home. Matthew will hear about Big Roan. About the past. About us. There’s no getting away from that. But we’ll be okay.”

“I don’t ask for many guarantees. I’ll tell you what I want. I want to laugh with you. Sit and look at you. Wake up with nothing to think about but how warm and smooth you feel against me. I want us to be peaceful with each
other. Be together and make a life together. All of this has been worth it, if we can have that.”