Finding Her Christmas Family

by Ruth Logan Herne

  “Lorenzo.” His mother’s sharp intake of breath italicized his name, but Aunt Shelly gave him a silent thumbs-up behind his mother’s back.

  “I’m not going to sugarcoat this, Mom. We can’t,” he told her. “We’re running out of time. Dad, if you don’t start cooperating, you’re going to lose even more function and eventually there is no way back. But if you start listening—”

  His father glowered and did his best to fold his arms, even though the left side didn’t want to cooperate.

  “—and trying, you can begin retraining your brain and your muscles to react again. Is it going to be hard? Yes. Tiring? Absolutely. Successful?” Renzo paused and held his father’s gaze. “I don’t know. But if you refuse to try, then we have no other choice and they’ll release you to a nursing home without rehabilitation options because why waste the room on someone who is refusing rehabilitation?”

  “Can’t move.” His father groaned the words from an uncooperative mouth, but Renzo didn’t cave. He couldn’t afford to cave.

  “With time and effort you could. The man I know, the man who raised me to stand strong no matter what the odds, to face each day with my feet firmly on the ground, always said he wanted to die in the saddle. With his boots on. So now it’s up to you. I can’t tell you it won’t be a tough road back, but you’ve never shied away from a rough road before, Dad. I can’t imagine why you’d want to do it now with so much waiting for you at home. So much to live for.”

  His mother had been staring at him, as if unnerved by his audacity, but when she turned back to Roy, she crossed her arms and followed Lorenzo’s lead. “He’s right, Roy. And you know it. And it’s not about having a farm to run and work to do, because there’s always plenty of that to go around and maybe you’d like a break from all that, anyway. It’s about being part of our boys’ lives. Raising the girls. Being with family and friends, and if the good Lord was calling you home, my guess is you’d already be there. You’re not, and Renzo’s right. Maybe it’s time to realize that God saved you for a reason. Not that sweet young doctor or Renzo or the paramedics, but God, Himself. And if that doesn’t give you the gumption to pick up the fight, I don’t know what will.”

  She stopped talking.

  Renzo stayed quiet, too. He stood at the end of the bed, praying he wasn’t being an insensitive jerk, but when his father turned his head away, and a tear slipped down Roy’s weathered, weakened cheek, Renzo’s heart slipped with it.

  “Go.”

  His father wanted him to leave. That only exacerbated the pain in Renzo’s chest. He turned to leave. His mother reached out for him, but what could she say? He’d taken a shot and missed the target. That wasn’t something that happened in his job, and yet it seemed to be happening with remarkable frequency in his life.

  “I’ll call you later,” she whispered. “And Renzo, thank you.” She gripped his sleeve tightly. “Thank you for your honesty, for taking a stand.”

  For all the good it did.

  He walked out, not wanting to upset his father further. Maybe the fight looked too hard, or the climb too high. Only his dad could make that decision.

  He got to the elevator just as Aunt Shelly reached his side. “You did good, kid,” she told him. “Buy me coffee, and we’ll let them stew on your words. You don’t mind buying an old lady a cup of coffee, do you?”

  “I don’t know any old ladies,” he told her, and loved seeing her smile. “But I’d be honored to buy my beautiful aunt a cup of joe. I hear they’ve got one of those famous coffeehouses nearby.”

  “Well, it is Seattle,” she teased back. “And I could go for an extra-hot macchiato right about now while I thank you for saying what I’ve been wanting to say the past week. If my Charlie were here, he’d be fighting tooth and nail to spend another week with me. To gain a little more time with the kids and the grandkids. To see Roy give up like that made me angry. But you’ve said what needed to be said, and now we’ll give it time to sink in.”

  “I don’t want him to hate me.”

  Shelly gripped his arm snugly. “There’s no chance of that. He raised you to be forthright and honest, and that’s what I saw in there. Now the choice is up to him. We’ll just pray him to the right one, eh?”

  “Yes.” They found a coffee shop downstairs. He bought her coffee and they sat in a windowed waiting room, drinking it. They didn’t talk about Roy and his choices.

  They talked about her kids and grandkids and what they were doing for Christmas. And of course, how much they would miss their father during the holiday season. And when tears slipped down Aunt Shelly’s cheeks, he tugged her into a big hug. If Roy Calloway was his usual self, he’d understand the ramifications of his choices. How those choices would hurt his wife and his sons and those precious girls. But he wasn’t himself, and Renzo drove home, half-wishing he hadn’t taken a stand and knowing he had no other choice. He wanted to talk with Sarah. Tell her what he’d done, but Sarah wasn’t waiting in the house like he expected. Kyle was. And he shrugged into his coat before Renzo even got up the back steps.

  “Where’s Sarah?”

  “Went home. She needed to do some things and asked if I’d step in. She said her mom was spending the weekend back in Seattle with her father.”

  She was putting some space between them. Space he didn’t want, but probably deserved because his options were narrowed by circumstances out of his control. “Thanks, Kyle.”

  His brother shrugged. “How was Dad? Same as yesterday?”

  Renzo nodded as he slung his jacket on a hook inside the door. “Yeah. I yelled at him.”

  Kyle had been about to turn toward the front door. He stopped. “You did?”

  “Kind of. Yes.”

  “Man, you’re something, Renzo.”

  A flash of anger thrummed along Renzo’s spine. Something? He’d give him “something.”

  “I wanted to do that yesterday,” Kyle admitted, and his words made the flash of anger disappear. “I wanted to tell him to at least try. Try to do the therapy, try to follow directions, try to regain control of his body because our father never gives up on anything. He never has, so seeing him like that, feeling sorry for himself, stabbed me in the gut. How am I supposed to be strong if my father falls apart?”

  “You’ve always got me, Kyle. We’re brothers. I’d never turn my back on you. And if there’s ever anything I can do to help you with whatever’s going on, I’m here for you.”

  Kyle choked back a sigh. “I wish it was that easy,” he replied. “But it’s not. Probably never is. Gotta go.” He pulled the door open and started to step outside, then turned back. “Thanks, Renzo. I know I’m not on top of my game, and I don’t know when I will be. But I appreciate the backup. More than you know.”

  “We’ve got this,” Renzo assured him, but when Kyle shut the door, Renzo sighed.

  They didn’t have it. Not really. Not yet, anyway, but if they stuck together, they could make a difference to the ranch at least.

  He trudged back into the kitchen. There, on the wall, above a couple of cute pictures of the girls was one of his grandmother’s wall hangings. She’d done all kinds of needlework in her day, but this one was her favorite and his mother had hung it in the kitchen as a daily reminder. Thy Will Be Done...

  That was it. Short. Straightforward. Succinct.

  A biblical direction to put everything into God’s hands. Renzo stared at the simple prayer.

  He didn’t like handing over control of anything. Not his life, his work, his family. The detective in him was often questioning circumstances, timing and sometimes God. Why would Jenn die and leave three premature infants? Why would a just God take her?

  “Renzo?”

  A plaintive voice called to him from upstairs. He moved to the stairway and looked up. “What’s up, honey?”

  A sad face looked back at him. “I wet the bed.”
>
  Naomi. She’d had a recurring problem with bedwetting that they thought they fixed with a buzzer system that helped wake her, but Kyle wouldn’t have known about that. He never requested details about the girls, or their problems. “No worries. We’ve got this.” He went upstairs, changed her bedding and when she’d climbed into warm, dry pajamas, he tucked her back into bed. He went to kiss her good-night, but her silent tears surprised him. “Hey. What’s up? This isn’t a big deal, honey. It happens to everyone now and again.”

  “But I’ll have different jammies on,” she whispered, the catch in her voice ramping up his sympathy. Of course it was always on “high” when it concerned these girls. They owned him, completely, and he was okay with that. “Then everyone will know I wet the bed again.”

  “By everyone, you mean your sisters,” he said softly. “Because you already know I don’t care. And why would you be afraid to have Chloe and Kristi know you had an accident? Isn’t that what family is for? To love one another? To stand by each other?”

  “They’ll think I’m a baby,” she whispered. “I don’t want anybody to think I’m a baby. I just want this to stop happening.”

  Truthfully, he hadn’t given much thought to her buzzer system in the past few weeks, so he couldn’t fault Kyle for this one. “We’ll use the buzzer every night again, just long enough for your body to remember to wake up. Okay?”

  She frowned, and a tiny shuddering sob wrenched hold of his heart, but then she nodded. “’Kay. I’m sorry I forgot.”

  “Oh, sweet thing.” He reached down and hugged her. “Me, too. Silly us. Now we’ll remember. And when your jammies are clean, I’ll bring them up to you, all right?”

  Relief eased her delicate features. “Okay. Thank you, Renzo. Love you.” She yawned.

  “Love you, too.” He tiptoed out, put everything into the washing machine and started it.

  There were several single parents on the force. A few guys and two women. He used to shrug off their dilemmas as poor planning.

  What an idiot he’d been, because life resisted planning when it revolved around kids, cars and electricity. A problem with any one of the three could throw a single parent’s life into a temporary tailspin. Till now, he’d never sympathized with it because there’d been three of them raising the girls. As a party of one, he realized his limitations.

  And if Sarah took custody of the girls, how would she handle all of this? The thought of a live-in nanny raising the girls hit him square in the chest. He didn’t want a stranger having that kind of influence on them. No stranger could know them like the Calloways did. And yet if Jenn had known about Sarah, the girls would probably have been left in her care. There was absolutely no reason they shouldn’t be in her care, except that Jenn hadn’t known and the Calloways had stepped in for four wonderful years. The thought of stepping away was wrong. So wrong. But so was what happened to Sarah and Jenn.

  He turned on a college football game while he waited for the laundry to be done, and when he’d gently changed a very sleepy Naomi back into her original pajamas, he finally went to bed.

  Sleep was a long time coming that night, and when it finally did, images of his father and the girls floated around in his dreams. For the first time in his adult life, he woke up unsure of what he should do.

  And that didn’t work for Renzo Calloway. Not by a long shot.

  Chapter Eleven

  Sarah approached the front desk of the nursing home with a confidence she didn’t feel, and when a young woman brought Lanny Drew to the visiting room, nerves sent a shiver up her spine. The aide set the brakes on the wheelchair, made sure Lanny was comfortable, then walked away to the desk in the nearby reception area.

  Sarah took a deep breath. “Thank you for seeing me, Mr. Drew.”

  “Call me Lanny. Please,” he added, sighing as she took a seat across from him. “I don’t mean to stare at you. It’s only because you look so much like her, you know? I see you and I think of Jenn and how much she meant to us. Then my girl was gone and the triplets were born and I couldn’t take care of them. It felt like everything was over even though their lives were just beginning. With other people,” he added. “And that felt wrong, too, but there were no other choices. I couldn’t have taken on caring for three babies even if I were healthy, which I wasn’t, but it sure felt like everything that had been normal became abnormal in just a few months’ time.”

  “It had to be so difficult for you. And I’m so very sorry for your loss, Lanny.”

  “You’d have liked her,” he said gruffly. “I didn’t like her decision to go ahead and have a baby, but Jenn was one to go her own way most times. Still, the thought of those three girls has kept me going this long. In my own way, I’m happy for that. They got to know me some and I’m glad. They’re amazing, aren’t they?”

  “They are,” she agreed. “I find myself marveling at them. So much alike, yet so different.”

  “Something that makes no sense,” he told her. “Considering they’re identical.”

  “Renzo reminded me that their genetics might be the same, but their souls are their own.”

  Lanny surprised her with a snort. “I used to hang on to all that. When my wife passed away, at least I had Jenn. I centered everything around her. Then suddenly things went bad when she was expecting the girls and I think of how many times I prayed for my wife, then for Jenn, and it got me nothing. Absolutely nothing. It’s easier to shrug it all off now. Way easier than trying to figure out how a loving God allows so much sadness in the world.”

  “It’s hard to be optimistic when you’re sick,” she sympathized. “When your body fails you. Or when you’re in pain.”

  He drew his brows down and in. “And when your whole world is taken from you. That, too.”

  And yet there were the girls, three amazing blessings. The Lord giveth and He taketh away. But she wasn’t here to argue about faith with this man. He was hurting emotionally and physically and maybe seeing her made things worse. She leaned slightly closer to him. “Can you tell me about Jenn? Would you mind?”

  “I wouldn’t mind.” He contemplated her for a moment. “She was lovely, like you. And she had a good head on her shoulders. I think she was like her mama that way.”

  His words didn’t just startle Sarah. They shocked her. “I don’t understand. How would you know that?”

  “The letter.” His expression indicated surprise. “The one that came with her when we picked her up in Seattle. We saved it for her, of course. No names on it, nothing to indicate who she was, that’s how she wanted it, but the letter was real nice and showed the kind of person she was.”

  Sarah didn’t expect the surge of raw emotion, so when it blindsided her, she wasn’t prepared. “Jenn got a letter?”

  Tears obstructed her vision and when she tried to dash them away, more took their place.

  “You didn’t?”

  It was hard to form words around the solid lump in her throat. She swiped at her eyes with a tissue and shook her head. “No. I did not.”

  “I’m sorry.” The old fellow became distraught. “I didn’t mean to make you sad. I just thought if Jenn had a letter, you had one, too.”

  A letter from her mother. Did it explain her choices? Why she gave away two beautiful daughters? Why she closed the door firmly on any future relationship?

  Sarah grabbed another tissue from the nearby table and composed herself as best she could. The last thing she wanted to do was upset this sick man. “I’ll check with my parents, but I’m pretty sure if there was a letter, they’d have shared it with me. What did it say? Do you still have it?”

  “It said she was sorry. Real sorry, but that she was doing what was best all around. I don’t rightly know where the letter is. When they moved me in here, things got muddled. And Jenn had the letter, last I knew, so it might be somewhere packed up with her things. Renzo might know. Or G
ina, more likely.”

  Gina, who was caught in her own desperate situation right now, fighting for the life of her husband.

  You’ve waited this long. You’ve had a great life. Take a breath and remember why you’re here.

  She took the mental advice and Lanny’s hand. “I’ll check on it. And sorry I got emotional,” she told him softly. “But it’s all such emotional stuff, isn’t it?”

  “It is,” he replied. “I’ve shed my share of tears, but Jenn was a strong one. She did so well in school and beyond, and she was respected by everyone that worked with her up in Wenatchee. Her patients loved her, and she stood by them. She never cared if they were rich or poor. She took everyone as a child of God. And when I’d get mad at God, she’d hug me and say ‘Daddy, you’ve got to get hold of yourself because one of these days you’re going to run out of time to tell God you’re sorry. We’ve been blessed by so much. Let’s just cling to that, okay?’”

  “She sounds wonderful.”

  “Well, she was, and that’s why I get so mad when I think about why she died so young. It makes no sense, not a lick of sense, and when folks told me that my Mary was probably up there, with her arms out, waiting for our girl, I near got sick to my stomach because I didn’t want them up there. I wanted them here. With me. And if that’s the way God does business, I wanted no part of it. Not then. Not now.”

  His grief made her chest ache. He hadn’t gotten over the anger of one loss before he’d faced another one, and now he was just plain mad. Especially at God. She changed the subject purposely. “Did Jenn have boyfriends?”

  That made him laugh. “Yes. And no. She had a bunch, then kind of shrugged them off as she built her career. Maybe there wasn’t the right one, maybe she set her standards too high. For whatever reason, she dated here and there but said there wasn’t anyone truly special. There were a couple I thought might work, but they faded away, if you know what I mean.”

  His words almost exactly described her romantic history—until she met Renzo Calloway a few weeks ago. There was no denying the spark there. And their kiss had ignited more than a spark. How she wished the timing was different. “I know exactly what you mean,” she told him, referencing the romances that faded with time. “Is that when she decided to become a single mother?”