Day by Day (18 page)

“My turn,” Ginger announced. “I’m sorry I didn’t talk to you about the backpacks you had hidden in your mother’s old closet. Maybe if I had talked to you when I found them, you wouldn’t have felt so alone.”

When her grandson turned and looked at her, she almost melted when she saw the trail of dirt his tears had left on his cheeks. “It’s okay, Grams.”

She smiled, reached across him and grabbed a handful of corn chips. “Your turn,” she said to her grandson.

Vincent started swinging his legs. “I’m sorry.”

Tyler nodded, urging the boy to continue.

“I shoulda stayed in my room, like Gramps told me to. I just wanted to see my mom, but I didn’t want to make you sad,” he whispered.

She ran her fingers through his matted hair. “It’s okay now.”

“You’re forgiven,” Tyler whispered.

Vincent sniffled, made half a smile and reached into the suitcase. He took a pretzel with one hand and a handful of corn chips with the other.

The ’fess up party continued until dark. By the time they walked home together, they were well on the way to creating the family Vincent needed and deserved. Ginger had only one new fear—that one day, in the next few weeks or months or years, Lily might realize what she had done and decide to take Vincent away, leaving Ginger and Tyler with a void in their lives that could never be filled again.

O
n Sunday night at the end of the extended Thanksgiving weekend, Barbara collapsed on the love seat in the living room and put her feet up on the double-sized ottoman. She was too exhausted after four straight days of child care to get up again to turn on a light, and settled for having dim light filtering into the room from the chandelier in the foyer. Shivering, she pulled the afghan from the top of the love seat onto her lap, eager to see the end of the holiday and resume a normal routine.

The girls would return to school tomorrow. John would go to the office. She would work in Grandmother’s Kitchen to start preparations for closing her shop and brace herself for the next holiday she would have to celebrate for the first time without Steve: Christmas.

Before she had a chance to slide down that slippery emotional slope, John joined her in the living room, handed her a mug of warm cider, sat down and put his feet
near hers on the ottoman. “Are the girls finally asleep?” he asked.

“Finally. They’re so excited about going back to school, they had a hard time settling down.”

She took a sip of cider, snuggled closer to him and spread the afghan over his lap, too. She wished she could find a way to close the emotional distance between them, but for now, she settled for having him next to her on the love seat as gift enough for her to enjoy. “I’m glad Rick called on Thanksgiving and had a chance to talk to the girls,” she offered, deliberately steering the conversation toward their second son, who was still stationed in Germany with the U.S. Army.

When John let out a sigh, his arm pressed against her. “He doesn’t seem to be in any hurry to settle down and have a family of his own, though.”

She nudged his shoulder with her own. “I’m his mother. I’m supposed to be the one worried about getting him to marry and have a family. You’re his dad. Aren’t you supposed to understand how much fun it is to be able to date all sorts of beautiful and fascinating women?” she teased.

He took a long drink of cider. With his expression shadowed, he took her hand. “He might not be able to find a woman as beautiful or as fascinating as his mother, but he’s put his career ahead of his personal life for long enough. It’s time for him to think about getting married.”

His compliment warmed her heart almost as much as the memories of when they had dated themselves. She squeezed his hand. “Don’t worry about Rick. He’s his father’s son. When he meets the right woman, he’ll move heaven and earth to marry her, just like you did.”

He chuckled. “If I remember correctly, there were four truckloads of topsoil, an equal number filled with mulch, a load of sand and hundreds of paving bricks I had to move that summer.”

She laughed with him. “I was only twenty-one when you asked my father for permission to marry me. When he said you had to help him to relandscape and hard scape the backyard before he gave you an answer, I thought you would change your mind.”

“I got to know your father pretty well that summer. He got to know me, too, and he taught me a lot of lessons before he finally gave me his blessing.”

Touched by memories of her late father, she swallowed hard. “Such as?”

“Responsibility. Taking on a task, any task, and doing your best to see that the job gets done, one step at a time. Or in the case of the brick patio we were installing, one brick at a time.” He paused. “Rick is a good son, a good man and an outstanding officer. He’s learned to be responsible in his military career, but he has personal responsibilities to meet now for himself and for his family.”

She struggled to understand exactly what he meant, turned and stared at her husband. “Do you really think he should get married because it’s his responsibility? He doesn’t owe us—”

“He owes Steve,” he insisted. “They were brothers.”

She narrowed her gaze, but with the dim light, it was hard to see the look in her husband’s eyes. “What on earth are you talking about? Steve isn’t here. Rick getting married couldn’t change that.”

“No, it wouldn’t, but Rick should be married with his
own family precisely because Steve isn’t here. But Jessie and Melanie are.”

Her heart started to pound. “You mean you want Rick to get married so he can take the girls to live with him?”

“No.” He tightened his hold on her hand. “No. That’s not what I’m saying at all.”

She pulled her hand away. “Then what are you saying?”

“I’m saying that I love those little girls, and I want to raise them. But we all have to face reality. I’m sixty-one years old, and you’re not that far behind me. The twins are only six years old. Look ahead. There are a good fifteen years, at least, before they’re adults. By then, I’ll be seventy-six years old and you’ll be—”

“Never mind. I see where you’re headed now,” she insisted.

“Neither one of my parents lived to see sixty-five. Your parents each lived just past seventy. Where would the girls go if something happened to us before…before they were old enough to be on their own? Don’t tell me you haven’t thought about it. You must have.”

She leaned against the back of the love seat, closed her eyes and balanced the mug of cider on her lap. She was annoyed with him for voicing one of her greatest fears, but she was also relieved he was sharing a similar one of his own and hopeful his willingness to talk about his feelings was a sign the emotional wall between them was crumbling. “I’ve thought about it,” she admitted.

“And?” he prompted.

“And I’ve pushed it aside. With the investigation stalled and no arrests yet, taking care of the girls and deciding to close the shop, I just don’t have enough energy left to worry about that, too. Not right now.”

“Well, I have. I think about it every day. When I go to the office at night…” He paused and cleared his throat. “I don’t have appointments at night. Not business appointments anyway. Some nights I’ve met with some friends to review the plans I’ve drawn up to make sure the girls are taken care of financially if anything happens to us, and I’ve met with Carl Landon to talk about redoing our will.”

She reached out and took his hand again. “What about the other nights?” she whispered and held tight as he struggled to find his voice.

“I think about Steve. How we lost him so…unexpectedly. I think about the girls and how much they miss him, too, and how they’d be all alone…if we weren’t here.”

She set her mug on the end table on her side of the love seat and wrapped her arms around his chest. She could feel him tighten, not against her embrace, but against the sobs he held back. “I know,” she whispered. “I miss our boy, too, but we still have his girls and we have Rick.”

He coughed and cleared his throat. “That’s why I wish he would get married and start a family. If anything happens to us, I’d want the girls to have a good home where I know they’d be loved.”

She pressed her face against the column of his neck. “Rick would take the girls. He doesn’t have to be married or have his own family to do that.”

“No, but it would be better for the girls if he did. It would look better, like we anticipated the possibility that we might not live long enough to raise the girls, but we had a contingency plan for them, just in case we needed one.”

She held on to him and let go of her disappointment that
he had been avoiding her and the girls by working at night. “You’re a methodical and exacting man, but you also can be very controlling,” she murmured. “I suppose those qualities might make you a good CPA, but this isn’t a company you’re trying to protect. It’s our family. But I agree with you on several points. Yes, we should have a good financial plan for the girls. Yes, we probably should have had our will redone before now, but you can’t be paranoid. And you can’t expect Rick to get married and start a family out of any sense of responsibility to Steve or the girls or to us. We have to have faith and trust God will watch over the girls for us. How it looks to anyone else shouldn’t matter. Besides, we’re all still hurting so badly, we need time to heal. We have plenty of time to think about what kinds of plans we need to make in case we don’t live long enough to raise the girls.”

He put his arm around her and rested his chin on top of her head. “You’re right. It shouldn’t matter how it looks to anyone else, but I’m afraid it might.” He drew a deep breath. “Regardless of how much faith we have, we don’t have as much time as you think. I—I talked with Carl on Tuesday afternoon. He’s set up a meeting for us in his office for tomorrow morning at nine o’clock, and I told him we’d be there. I didn’t want to spoil the holiday for you, too.”

“A meeting?” She pushed away from him and sat up so she could face him. “You set up a meeting for us with the lawyer for tomorrow and you’re just telling me now?”

“I didn’t ask for the meeting. He did.”

“So now our lawyer is in charge of us as well as the media?”

“No. That’s not…It’s not like that at all.” He shook his
head, set his own mug aside and took both of her hands. “Do you remember when Steve brought Angie home to meet us and she told us about being orphaned and being transferred from one foster home to another?”

“Of course I remember.” Fear scratched at her wounded heart. “Please don’t tell me she’s come back. Not after all this time. Not when she made no effort at all to contact Steve or her own children. Please don’t—”

“No. She hasn’t come back, but her…her parents…They’re not dead. Apparently, they’re very much alive and they’ve hired a lawyer. They know about the twins.”

She gasped, even as visions of a custody battle for the girls made her stomach roll. “They’re alive? That can’t be true. Angie said—”

“I know what she told us, but apparently, she was as good at lying as she turned out to be at disappearing. From what their lawyer told Carl, Angie grew up on a dairy farm in upstate New York. At least until she turned fifteen. That’s when she ran away.”

“So they claim. These people,” Barbara argued. “How do we know they aren’t lying? How do we know they’re Angie’s parents at all? They certainly never made any effort to see the girls when Angie was here, or later, when Steve was left trying to be both mother and father to the twins. Why now?”

She waved her hand to dismiss the entire idea. “I can’t believe these two people are anything more than sick charlatans who are trying to take advantage of all the publicity surrounding Steve’s death, and I can’t believe Carl would get us involved.”

“He’s had their story checked and double-checked. He’s
looked at all the documents their lawyer produced. Everything. The birth certificate, medical records, dental records, even the reports from the detectives they’d hired over the years when they could scrape up the money. If we believe Angie is Jessie and Melanie’s mother, then we’ll have to believe these are her parents.”

She huffed. “Of course I believe Angie is their mother. I was in the delivery room with her and Steve, remember?”

He nodded and stroked the side of her arm. “Do you also remember when Angie broke the cap on her front tooth?”

She shrugged, too shaken to think beyond the idea the twins might have another set of grandparents to be able to think clearly. “Not really.”

“Sure you do. It was only a few days before the wedding. She was so embarrassed by her smile, she told Steve they would have to postpone the wedding unless she had her tooth fixed.”

“Oh, that’s right. Now I remember. We called Dr. Wilson for her. He was leaving for vacation the next day, but he stayed late to see her.”

“Dr. Wilson still has the full set of X-rays he took that day. According to Carl, when Dr. Wilson compared his X-rays to the ones her parents provided through their lawyer, he said there was no doubt in his mind. The X-rays are a match.”

Barbara closed her eyes for a moment to refocus her thoughts. When she reopened them, she held tight to her skepticism. “That only proves Angie is the twins’ mother. Like I said before, that doesn’t mean these people are her parents or the twins’ grandparents.”

She remained stiff, disappointed John had kept this from her, even when he pulled her back against his chest. “Lady, you would have made a great lawyer.”

With thoughts of Steve, her resistance melted and she accepted the support her husband offered. “My son was a great lawyer,” she whispered.

“And he’d be as proud of you right now as I am for being so protective of the girls. The Carrs, they’re Angie’s parents…Except her name wasn’t Angie. It was Sharon. Anyway, Micah and Ruth have agreed through their lawyer to submit to a DNA test or anything else we’d want in order to prove they’re Jessie and Melanie’s grandparents.”

Soothed by the steady beat of his heart against her cheek, she sighed. “What does Carl think?”

“He thinks they’re legitimate. We’ll ask for the DNA test, of course, but the results will probably just prove these people right.”

She sighed again. “What about Angie or Sharon—whatever her name is—Steve’s wife? Steve’s ex-wife,” she corrected herself. “Do they have any idea where she is?”

“They’ve only been able to trace her as far as Las Vegas. She was there two years ago. Since then, her trail has gone cold. When the tabloids ran the story about the girls who killed Steve, they recognized Ang—Sharon’s picture and hired a lawyer.”

She squeezed her eyes shut, but the fear that they might lose custody of the girls was too real to block out. “What do they want?”

He set her back from him and put one hand on each of her shoulders. “Right now, they claim they only want to meet us and to learn as much as they can about their
daughter, her life with Steve and the twins. Ultimately, they want to see the twins, too.”

“They can’t see the girls. Not yet,” she insisted.

“No, they can’t. They know they won’t be able to see them unless and until the DNA results are conclusive. In the meantime, Carl said we should bring some pictures of the girls tomorrow. Then, we’ll see. If—if they’re the girls’ grandparents, too, then I guess we really can’t keep them from getting to know their own grandchildren.”

“No,” she admitted with a great deal of reluctance. “We can’t, but we can try to convince them that it’s in the girls’ best interests to grow up with us, right? I mean, these folks, the Carrs, they’re virtual strangers. The girls have been through enough. They don’t need to be shifted from the family they know to one that’s completely foreign to them.”