A Forever Kind of Family

by Brenda Harlen

  Not just because it allowed them to share childcare responsibilities but because their offsetting schedules meant that they didn’t have to spend a lot of time together. Because their late-night encounter the night before had reminded her all too clearly how dangerous it was to be in close proximity to Ryan Garrett.

  “Mo!” Oliver demanded, banging his now-empty bowl on his tray.

  “Please,” Harper admonished.

  “Mo!” he said again.

  She got up to put some more macaroni in his bowl, shook her head when she placed it in front of him. “You are a mess.”

  “Mess,” he echoed, and grinned to show off his eight tiny pearly-white teeth in a mouth stuffed full of macaroni.

  Smiling, she ruffled the soft, wispy curls that fell over his forehead.

  He needed a haircut—his first haircut. A few months earlier, Melissa had told her that Darren was pushing her to take Oliver to the barbershop because he was tired of strangers mistakenly assuming their son was a daughter, even when he was dressed all in blue. Melissa had resisted, because she was afraid that if they cut off Oliver’s curls, they might be gone forever. And just in case, she’d already snipped one of them and tucked it into a clear plastic folder in his baby book.

  The baby book that Melissa kept in the top drawer of Oliver’s dresser so it was readily accessible to record her son’s every milestone. She’d documented everything from his weight and length at birth and the day he came home from the hospital to his first smile, when he rolled over, sat up, clapped his hands, waved bye-bye, got his first tooth and took his first step.

  It was a meticulous record of her love as much as her baby’s growth, and Harper didn’t know if she should continue what Melissa had started or leave the book as she had left it. Either way, she knew she had to talk to Ryan about taking the little boy for a haircut.

  Sooner rather than later if he was going to insist on putting things like cheesy macaroni in it.

  “I think that’s a sign that you’ve had enough to eat,” she said to him.

  “Mo!”

  She shook her head. “No more. Not today.”

  “Kee.”

  She was starting to understand his unique baby language and that word was one of his favorites. “Let’s get you cleaned up first. Then you can have a cookie.”

  She wiped his hands and his face—and his hair—with a wet cloth, ensuring that no traces of orange sauce remained. “There’s my handsome boy,” she said.

  He grinned at her, melting her heart. “Kee.”

  She laughed. “Yes, I’ll get you a cookie.”

  While he was munching on his arrowroot biscuit, she tidied up the kitchen. Then she washed Oliver’s hands and face again.

  “What are we going to do this afternoon?” she asked the little boy.

  He banged his hands on his tray. “Bah-bah-bah.”

  “I’m going to need a translation on that,” she said as she unbuckled him from his high chair. “Either you want to play ball or you want to pretend you’re a sheep—which is it?”

  “Bah-bah-bah.”

  “Blocks,” Ryan said from the doorway.

  Harper glanced up as she set the little boy on his feet. He ran straight to Ryan, who swung him up into his arms. “Do you want to play with your blocks?”

  “Bah-bah-bah.”

  Harper frowned as she moved into the living room. “Do you think his speech is delayed?”

  “No, I think he’s a sixteen-month-old with the limited vocabulary of a sixteen-month-old.”

  He was probably right but she thought she’d check the vocabulary lists in her books again to be sure. “Your conference call is done already?”

  He nodded. “I knew it wouldn’t take too long.”

  She put the bucket of blocks on the carpet and sat down to play with Oliver. The little boy immediately upended the container. “Are you going into the office now?”

  “Not today.”

  She started the base of a tower for Oliver, aligning three square blocks for the bottom, then overlapping a second row to hold the blocks together. “Why not?”

  “I thought I’d spend some time hanging out with Oliver this afternoon.”

  “Big,” Oliver said again, offering her a blue block.

  “He wants you to make the tower bigger,” Ryan told her, squatting down to add more blocks to the base of the structure she’d started to build.

  “You just want to play, too,” she remarked.

  He didn’t dispute her claim. “Do you have a problem with that?”

  “You had Oliver all morning—it’s my shift now,” she reminded him.

  “Just like no one’s keeping score, no one’s punching a clock here,” he said gently. “If there’s something else you’d rather be doing, I don’t mind honing my construction skills here.”

  She hesitated, torn between the temptation to accept his offer, annoyance that he handled the little boy so effortlessly and guilt that if she let him, she would again be doing less than her share. “I do have some notes to write up for Caroline for next week’s shows.”

  He shrugged. “Or you could take a nap so you’re not cranky tomorrow.”

  “I’m not cranky now,” she snapped, her tone in contradiction to the words.

  He just lifted a brow.

  She turned on her heel and walked out.

  Chapter Three

  Harper hadn’t planned to fall asleep.

  She’d decided that her notes for Caroline could wait, and she’d lain down on her bed to read another chapter in What to Expect the Toddler Years. She managed to keep her eyes open for four pages.

  When she woke up, it was almost five o’clock and her grumbling stomach chastised her for not thinking about dinner before she’d put her head on her pillow. After a quick detour to the bathroom, she headed down to the kitchen to see what she could scrounge up for the evening meal.

  But Ryan had apparently beat her to that, too, as he was peeling potatoes at the sink. Oliver was on the floor nearby, playing with some plastic lids. They both glanced over when she stepped through the doorway.

  “I guess I should say ‘sorry’ and ‘thank you.’”

  “Why?”

  “The ‘sorry’ because I was tired and cranky. The ‘thank you’ for letting me sleep and getting dinner started.”

  “No worries,” he said easily.

  “What’s for supper?”

  “Steak pie, mashed potatoes and corn.”

  “Do you want me to finish the potatoes?”

  “Are you going to eat any potatoes?”

  “Probably not,” she admitted.

  “Then you can make your salad.”

  She got the ingredients out of the fridge and set to work.

  * * *

  Half an hour later, they were sitting down to dinner, just like a regular family.

  Except that she had almost no experience being a regular family. She’d grown up in New York City, where her father was an actor and her mother was a talent agent. And for as long as Harper could remember, her parents had been going in opposite directions—to auditions and meetings and events. Occasionally one or the other would take her and her brother, Spencer, along for the ride, but more often they were left at home with the nanny.

  The unconventional upbringing was something she’d had in common with Melissa. Her friend’s parents had split when she was in the third grade, and after that she’d done her share of moving from one home to another, never feeling as if she completely belonged in either. As a result, she’d been determined to provide a better upbringing for her son—and a “normal” home in which parents sat down to share meals with their children. Harper wasn’t convinced that was “normal” but she was willing to do her part to maintain at least the illusion for the little boy.

  “This pie is delicious,” she said after she’d sampled her first bite.

  Obviously Oliver agreed, because he was managing to put more of the steak and gravy in his mouth than on his fa
ce.

  “One of my aunt Susan’s specialties,” Ryan told her. “I can only take credit for moving it from the freezer to the oven.”

  “Between your mother and your aunts and your cousins, we probably have enough pies and casseroles and pastas to last until Christmas.”

  “My family has always believed that food can help alleviate any crisis.”

  “That much food would solve the hunger crisis in a third-world country.”

  “My mother also knows that I can burn toast,” Ryan said. “And she probably didn’t want to make any assumptions about your cooking skills.”

  “I can put together a decent meal if I have the time and the right ingredients,” she admitted.

  “I wasn’t sure,” he teased. “Because I haven’t seen you eat anything other than salad.”

  “That’s not true,” she denied.

  “You’re right—salad and a taste of whatever else is put on the table.”

  Since that was closer to the truth, she didn’t dispute it. Instead she said, “Even over and above the stocking of our freezer, your family has been amazing. Although there were so many people here the day of the funeral, I’m not sure I remember even half of their names.”

  “I’ll make name tags for the next family gathering,” he teased.

  “That would be helpful,” she said, her response perfectly sincere. “But for starters, which one of your bothers has the little boy—Jacob?”

  “Jacob is Daniel’s son—but Daniel is my cousin. Braden and Justin are my brothers.”

  “Justin is the doctor?”

  He nodded.

  “Is he married?”

  “No.”

  “But Braden’s married?”

  He nodded again. “To Dana.”

  “Do they have any kids?”

  “Not yet.”

  “And you have a sister who has a baby girl, right?”

  “Nope—no sisters at all. You’re probably thinking of Lauryn, who is another cousin.”

  She frowned. “But she referred to you as her daughter’s ‘uncle Ryan.’”

  “It’s an honorary title.”

  Harper shook her head. “No wonder I’m confused.”

  “Andrew, Nathan and Daniel are my cousins through my uncle David and aunt Jane. Andrew is married to Rachel and the father of Maura. Nathan is married to Allison, who is the mother of Dylan. And Jacob’s father, Daniel, is married to Kenna.

  “On my uncle Thomas and aunt Susan’s side, there are three female cousins—Jordyn, Tristyn and Lauryn. Lauryn is the only one married, and she and her husband, Rob, are the parents of Kylie.

  “I also have three more cousins—Matthew, Jackson and Lukas—in upstate New York. Matt and his wife, Georgia, have four kids, Jack and Kelly have two, and Lukas and Julie have a toddler.”

  “Name tags would definitely help,” she told him.

  He just grinned. “What about your family?”

  “Small,” she said. “And scattered. My dad has a sister who works for an insurance company in Wyoming, but she never married and doesn’t have any kids. His mother is down in Florida, but I haven’t seen her since I was a kid. My mom was an only child, so there’s just my parents, myself and my brother.”

  None of whom had shown up for the funeral, despite the fact that Melissa had been her roommate in college and her best friend since.

  Gayle Everton-Ross had expressed sympathy when her daughter called to tell her about the tragic heli-skiing accident that killed Melissa and Darren, but she hadn’t been able to talk long, because she was on her way to a meeting. Peter Ross had been busy on the set of the popular soap opera The Light of Dawn, and Spencer, an underwear model and wannabe actor, had been playing a bit part in an Off-Off-Broadway production.

  “Are you close?” Ryan asked.

  She shook her head. “Melissa was more my family than anyone I’m actually related to.”

  “I have brothers and cousins,” he said again, “but Darren was my family, too.”

  “I know.”

  They finished their meals in silence. Even Oliver was quiet while he ate, more interested in his food than any attempt at communication. As Harper picked at her salad, she found her thoughts wandering. She’d met Ryan, through Melissa and Darren, more than six years earlier, but she wouldn’t have said that she knew him well. And while they were friendly enough, they weren’t friends—they were too different for that.

  They’d occasionally hung out together, usually in a group, but they didn’t have much in common and never really hit it off. Even when Melissa and Darren got engaged and asked Harper and Ryan to be their maid of honor and best man respectively, they didn’t work particularly well together. She’d claimed he was too laid-back and he’d accused her of being too uptight, but they’d managed to put their personal differences aside for the benefit of their friends.

  Then came the wedding night—when Harper ended up in Ryan’s bed. The next morning, they both agreed it was a mistake, and neither of them ever told anyone else what had happened.

  When Oliver was born, the proud parents again turned to their best friends, asking them to be godparents and co-guardians of their baby. They’d both agreed, neither of them willing to let a little bit of personal history get in the way of their friends’ wishes. Of course, neither of them had anticipated that the guardianship would ever mean anything more than their names on a piece of paper.

  Now, only a few months later, they had to figure out a way to work together for the sake of the little boy. Because the reality was that there wasn’t anyone else who could take care of Oliver.

  She was certain of that because she’d spent a fair amount of time over the past few weeks trying to figure out if there were any other options—and desperately hoping, for Oliver’s sake, that there were.

  Celeste Trivitt, his maternal grandmother, lived in France with her investment banker husband. She’d been devastated to hear of the accident that took her daughter’s life and immediately flew in for the funeral. Although she was happy to fuss over her grandson for a few days, she’d made it clear that her life was in Europe now. Oliver was lucky, she’d said to them more than once. He might have lost both of his parents, but he had Harper and Ryan to take care of him.

  Quentin Trivitt, Oliver’s maternal grandfather and Celeste’s ex-husband, also came for the funeral—with his thirty-four-year-old wife, who was seven months pregnant with their first child. They’d said all the right things, expressing empathy for the “poor little boy” and his situation but at the same time making it clear that their focus was on their own yet-to-be-born child. They had no interest in raising a grandson, too.

  On the other side, Oliver’s paternal grandparents were both living in an assisted-care facility in Greensboro. One of the attendants from the home had brought them to Charisma for the funeral and taken them right back again. Darren also had a sister, but neither Ryan nor Harper had ever met her and no one had known how to reach her to tell her about the passing of her brother and sister-in-law. Harper remembered Melissa telling her that Darren’s sister had been estranged from her family for a long time.

  Harper pushed away from the table and carried her plate, with half of her meal still on it, to the counter. “Do you ever wonder...?”

  Ryan began clearing the rest of the dishes. “What?”

  She hesitated to say the words out loud, as if doing so might be disloyal to her friend, but she finally said, “If maybe Melissa and Darren should have chosen someone else to take care of Oliver?”

  “Every day,” he told her.

  “Really?”

  He nodded. “But I figure they must have had their reasons for choosing us.”

  “Maybe,” she allowed. “I’m just not sure I’m the right person to do this.”

  “I have more than a few doubts about my suitability, too,” he said, surprising her with the acknowledgment. “But I’m not going to walk away without giving it my best shot.”

  She squirted dish soa
p in the sink and turned on the faucet. “You think I want to walk away?”

  “I don’t know—do you?”

  She considered the question as she watched the sudsy water rise in the bowl. “Yes,” she finally admitted. “There is part of me that wants to do exactly that.”

  “And another part?” he prompted.

  Harper plunged her hands into the water and began to wash the pots. “We had a long talk when Melissa asked if I would be the baby’s guardian,” she said, not directly answering his question. “While she was pregnant, when he was still ‘the baby’ and not yet Oliver. I thought it was strange that she would be thinking about such things before her child was even born, but Melissa always did like to be prepared, to run her life according to a specific plan.”

  “It’s a good thing she did,” Ryan said. “Because Darren wouldn’t know a plan if it bit him in the butt.”

  She smiled at that. “True. Anyway, I asked her—why me? Aside from the fact that I was her best friend, what made her think I could ever be the right choice to help raise her child?”

  Harper remembered every word of their conversation, could still hear the echo of her friend’s voice in the back of her mind so clearly that it made her chest ache and her throat burn.

  “What did she say?” Ryan prompted gently.

  “That she chose me because she knew if anything ever happened to her so that she couldn’t raise her child, I would love him as much as she did,” she confided. “And that’s the part that won’t let me walk away—the echo of Melissa’s voice in my mind, asking me to love her little boy for her. Because I already do.”

  He touched a hand to her shoulder. “Then I’d say it’s obvious that she made the right choice.”

  Harper still wasn’t convinced, but she knew that she wasn’t going to let down her friend. Not if she could help it.

  * * *

  Ryan considered it progress that he and Harper had actually managed to have a fifteen-minute conversation without sniping at one another. It was a minor step, and he knew they were going to have to do a lot better than that if they were going to figure out a way to make this guardianship situation work for Oliver, but at least it was a step in the right direction.