The Foster Family (34 page)

“Grey!” David’s sleepy voice drifted through the house, and I hauled myself out of bed. Unsure, I held out my arms. Grey had no hesitation. He stood, took two wobbling steps on the unsteady surface, and launched himself at me. I caught him, and he adjusted himself on my hip.

“Doesn’t that hurt?” I asked, thinking it couldn’t be comfortable to have even his tiny junk all squashed up against bone like that, but he sucked happily on his cookie and looked at me with those big, scary-smart eyes.

“Come on. Daddy Dave’s looking for your punk ass.” I headed for the door. “Here, David. I found your escapee.”

“Geez, Kerry, I’m sorry.” He took the kid off me and scowled at him. “You were supposed to stay in the living room,” he admonished, then looked at me. “Should have warned you to close your door. He gets up stupid early. Usually, I lie on the couch and snooze while he smears cookie all over the place.”

“Doesn’t matter.” I rubbed at my eyes under my glasses and searched for the origin of the heavenly aroma of coffee coming from the counter. “He didn’t beat the sun. Is that caffeine?” I asked hopefully.

“Sorry, no. It’s my decaf. Nash has gone out to get you some of the good stuff.”

“Bless him,” I said. “Is the washer still downstairs? I have to wash my bedspread.” I gave Grey a mock-stern look. “Someone gooped cookie slime all over it and it’s disgusting.”

Grey smiled, the first such expression I’d seen on his serious little face, and I swear the room actually grew brighter.

David smiled too and kissed his son’s cheek. “I’ll put him in his chair and take care of that.”

“No, it’s fine. You don’t have to.”

“Kerry.” He turned from strapping Grey into his high chair and gazed at me, his face full of frustrated patience. “I can do shit, you know. I’m not sick. I’m not an invalid.”

“I know, I know. It’s just… I’ll do it. I really don’t mind. It’s sort of… my thing.” God, talk about awkward. There wasn’t really a good way to explain I was used to being the domestic bitch for a couple of guys who didn’t seem inclined to use me for anything else. It sounded lame even to me, but I liked that role. And the truth was what it was. But I couldn’t explain it to him.

He narrowed his eyes but held up both hands and backed off. “Okay, okay. It’s downstairs, yeah. And new linens are in the dresser. Blanket in the bottom drawer. Knock yourself out.”

“David….” God, it was starting already. I was fucking up and pissing people off, and how the hell did I do that so fucking well?

“No, it’s fine. I get it.” He didn’t. Not really. It was impossible to make him see without explaining the whole thing, and I wasn’t sure I was up for that. Not yet.

“I’ll start breakfast,” David said. “Any diet issues I should know about?”

I blinked at him. “N-no. No, I’ll eat pretty much anything except cooked spinach.”

He made a face. “Who eats cooked spinach?”

I laughed, nervous, and it showed, and he shot me a smile. “Go. It’s all good, Kerry. Sorry I went to defensive first thing in the morning. I’m usually more patient than that.”

“No, it’s fine.” Because I understood where he was coming from, because I knew. People thought because I wore glasses I couldn’t see far without, and because I was small and skinny, I was also weak. I wasn’t, but people assumed, and it was annoying. It had to be a hundred times worse for him.

“It’s all good, right?” I said. “You know, I just… I like to take care of my own shit. That matters to me. And I….” I breathed deep and let it out and spoke to his back because he was peering into the fridge, looking for whatever he was going to cook. “I like doing things for other people, right? So if I offer, it isn’t about, you know, your heart. It’s sort of about mine. It makes me happy. So. Let me, okay?” There. I’d explained as well as I could without TMI. My hands still shook, though, and my heart was racing insanely.

He was very still, back still to me, attention still ostensibly on the refrigerator contents, but he wasn’t moving at all.

“David?”

He straightened and set a carton of eggs on the counter before turning to study me, a different sort of look on his face than I’d seen there before. I had no idea what it meant, but it was stern and kind, like always, and little bit more… parental, maybe.

“Kerry, have you got someone you, um”—he waved a hand vaguely—“serve this way?”

“I—” Heat flushed up into my face and I couldn’t quite look him in the eye. “I don’t… maybe. I—” A sigh wheezed out of me, completely beyond my control, and my shoulders sagged. “I don’t think I want to talk about that. Not yet.”

“Is it why you came home?”

I met his gaze then. “Only partly. Nash sounded like he just needed… shit.”

David smiled then. “You can say it, you, know. He needed a hand. Some support. It’s tough on him when I get sick, and Grey is a handful any day of the week. It is good you came. And if you want to talk, you know you’re family, right? You can talk to us. We’ll listen.”

I nodded. “Yeah, I know.”

“And we won’t judge.”

It felt like a huge weight lifted when I returned his smile and nodded. “I do know, promise.”

“Good. Now go on and do your washing. I’m going to cook a heap of bacon so I can soak in the smell of it, but you have to eat it all, because Nash can only have a couple of slices and I have to make do with the smell.”

“Bacon is good,” I agreed. “But skip the eggs for me, then, and throw on some asparagus, if you have it. I love asparagus. And tomatoes.”

“Bacon, asparagus, and tomatoes.” He shook his head. “You really will eat anything.”

I grinned then. “No ramen, though. I’m sort of sick of ramen.”

“Used to be white rice,” he said. “When I was in college, you could buy a giant box of Uncle Ben’s for next to nothing and eat for a month. If you had a chance to splurge, peanut butter and apples were a nice change.”

“God, you were in college?” I asked, letting my voice rise in awe. “Did you have to buy your own rock and chisel back then too?”

He laughed and tossed a tea towel at me. “Put that in the laundry, brat.”

“Yes, sir,” I said happily and hurried off to my room.

I jumped when I turned and found him in the doorway. “You know what? You can say ‘Yes, Dad,’ instead of ‘Yes, sir.’ It’s kind of less… weird.”

I couldn’t help but grin at him. “I can do that.” I was way too old to need a dad, but so not the point.

“Good.” He went back to the kitchen, and I went back to stripping my bed. It really was good to be home.

Breakfast passed in a sort of domestic haze. It was a bit like that first dinner with Malcolm and Charlie. Sweet and awkward and hopeful, but unlike there, here, I had a very truly defined role. I was Nash’s son, and by extension David’s, even though I barely knew him. And as I set Grey’s sippy cup upright on his tray for about the thousandth time, I realized it meant this kid, this beautiful, watchful little boy, was my brother.

It was a weird revelation to have when I’d spent my life knowing I was an orphan without siblings or aunts or uncles or cousins. I was me, alone in the world.

I looked around the table as I sipped the last of the coffee Nash had brought me and smiled.

“What’s so funny?” Nash asked as he reached for the sippy cup and caught it just as Grey whacked it over the edge of the tray.

“Nothing’s funny.”

“What’s with that grin?” He peered at me, and I remembered that clear, honest gaze and his sparkling eyes like chips of burned amber.

I nodded. “Okay. The grin is because yesterday, sitting in the airport, I was imagining all sorts of scenarios that could happen when I got here. Like this little kid taking over my room, like you and David wrapped up in each other and me being invisible, like I don’t even know what. The place being a complete downer because of Lacy. And I know”—I held up a hand when Nash opened his mouth—“I had no basis to think any of that.” I snorted out a breath and pushed my glasses up my nose. “When I tell you all the shit that has been going on, Nash, you’ll be pissed I didn’t call sooner, but I had it in my head that you wouldn’t want to know what a fuckup I’d been, so I didn’t call, and now I’m here, and I know that was bullshit, and I look around, and I have this… thing.” I waved my hand to encompass them, the remains of breakfast, and the house. “My own room still here and David feeling good, and, like, possibly the smartest kid on the planet right now playing alarm clock, and hell. Yesterday, I had nowhere to live and no place to put my clothes or my cat, and now I realize how I was wrong about everything. I have a fucking little brother, I mean….”

Nash cupped the back of my neck with one big, calloused hand and shook me. It was his way of connecting. He wasn’t demonstrative, and his first crushing hug had set the groundwork for all of this spilling out of me.

“Don’t swear in front of your baby brother, yeah?” he said. “It’s bad enough I can’t clean up David’s mouth. If I remember right, you’re even worse.”

I smiled shakily. “I’ve been working on that, actually,” I said, touching my face, remembering that gag and the bruises and the fact Malcolm had cared enough to try. “Right now, I think, um, I should make a couple of calls. I should, you know, tell people I’m on the ground and safe home and all that shi—”

“Of course.”

“Then come back here and help with the dishes,” David chimed in.

“Yes, Dad,” I told him as I left for my room.

I heard Nash ask if I’d just called David “Dad” and his grunt when David said yes, and made a mental note to try not to call him Nash
all
the time.

I took a moment to decide if I should call Lissa or Charlie first, and settled on Charlie, because however that conversation went, I knew Lissa would be happy to hear from me.

When he answered, he sounded lazy and content. Not like he missed me at all.

“Hey, Charlie.”

“Kerry.” Was there a smile in his voice? It was so hard to tell. “Geez, kid, it’s like… ten o’clock in the morning. That means, what? Seven there?”

I groaned. “It’s too early to tell time,” I agreed. “Babies don’t sleep in.”

“Shitty,” he said.

“Is Malcolm not there?”

“Yeah. He’s in his office doing… officey stuff. I think he has more showings today, and I know he closed a deal that he has to finalize.”

“Why aren’t you at work?”

“I quit.”

“I thought that was just a threat so she could get away with treating you like a slave.”

“I don’t know for sure, but I was the one who firebombed that bridge, so no going back now.”

“Hmm.” His voice was so warm and solid, but for some reason, it felt faraway. Untouchable, like his hug at the airport had, and I couldn’t stand it. “Look, I don’t know how long I’m going to stay, but I wanted to just let you know I got here okay, and Nash and David are good, the baby’s awesome, and I miss you.”

Phone crickets.

“So, yeah. I guess I’ll… call about my stuff once I figure out—”

“God, Kerry, I miss you too. So does Mal, you have no idea.”

“You didn’t say anything,” I accused, aware that my voice had risen and the hurt was showing even long-distance. “At the airport, you didn’t say a word.”

“Not even good-bye,” he pointed out. “I couldn’t say that.”

“But nothing? Not a word?”

“I know, baby, and that was a crappy way to leave things. But I swear, it isn’t how we feel.”

“How do I know that?”

“You don’t.”

God, how was I going to hang on to the anger if he was going to be reasonable?

“And it’s okay,” he said, continuing over my heavy breathing. “I get that. I don’t know how to prove it to you, but if you come back, we will. Somehow. We’ll make this right. Figure it out, just like you said. You can stay there as long as you need to. Your place is here if you come back.”

“What about your needs in the meantime? What are you going to do with your new boy while you wait for me?” Long silence, and this time, I could feel his pain in it and I felt like an asshole for causing it. But it was a legitimate question, and I deserved to know. If they were offering me anything at all, I deserved to know the score.

“No other boys, Kerry. None. That isn’t what we want.” He took a deep breath and let it out, and I felt the calm extending to me even over the phone. “Just you. Take your time and decide what you want. Mal.” His voice dropped even lower and calmer. “Malcolm’s here. You want to talk to him?”

I didn’t even know. “I—”

“Kerry?”

“Yeah.” Malcolm.

“You okay?”

God. I didn’t know that, either. “Mixed-up,” I said at last.

“Yeah. I bet.” There was a pause and then a sigh. “It’s been a tough spring, and we haven’t been much help.”

“Forget it,” I told him, not up to talking about it or figuring anything out over the phone. “If you hear from Officer Karl, will you call me?”

“Of course.”

“I called him about Andrew’s girlfriend, but I never heard back. It might be nothing. It was just an idea.”

“I’ll make sure you know what’s going on. Does he know you left town?”

“Guess not.”

“Then I’ll tell him that too. Then if anything happens here, he can slap that hate-crime label on it and maybe something will get done about it.”

“I’m sorry, Malcolm. I never meant—”

“Not your fault, boy.” His voice had dropped to rough and rumble, and I shivered. There was a silence, because I had no idea how to react to him calling me that. Finally, though, someone had to say something.

“Tell Charlie if he wants a part-time job, he should talk to Lissa.”

“She wouldn’t hire him. She thinks we’re dog meat.”

“Um. After it’s been digested and expelled out the other end, maybe.”

He actually chuckled. “Yeah.”

“Still, he should talk to her later today. I’m going to call her now, so give her a few hours to calm down, then tell him to go over there and drop off a résumé. There are a ton of things he could offer her shop.”

“Grunt labor?”

“Yeah, that, and she’ll play the preggo card all day long with him. And organization. She’s not so hot at it, and Marcus only has so much time with his other job. And publicity. Charlie can do that, and he can revamp their website. He’s got that fancy camera. He can do it up right. Tell me he wouldn’t love to spend the summer playing in potting soil and taking pictures. Just tell him to call her.”