The Family Plan

by Gina Wilkins

  “Other than intrusive early-morning phone calls, you mean?”

  “Other than that,” Nathan agreed equably.

  “No, nothing’s bothering me in particular. What’s up with you? Why did you call?”

  “I just felt like checking in. I haven’t talked to you in a couple of weeks.”

  “Still got the kid?”

  “You know I do.”

  “Pretty weird, bro. You raising a kid, I mean.”

  “I know. But she’s a pretty cool kid. Why don’t you have dinner with us one night this week and find out for yourself?”

  “We’ve had this discussion. I don’t need any more siblings. The two I’ve got are trouble enough—you calling me during prime working hours, Deb nagging me every few days to try to talk sense into you.”

  “Deborah’s been calling you about me?”

  “Yeah. Even though I keep telling her I don’t have any influence over your actions. Never have. Never wanted to.”

  Though their personalities were very different, they had been closer than this once, Nathan mused, remembering summer days of swimming and skateboarding, autumn afternoons of basketball and football, spring weekends of baseball and tennis. Gideon had always been rather quiet and introspective, content to spend hours in his room with piles of novels and notebooks for his own scribblings, but he’d withdrawn even more into himself as he’d left his teen years.

  Nathan had tried countless times to identify the turning points in his brother’s life, any specific causes for the changes in him. But whatever traumas there had been, if any, Gideon kept them to himself. To their parents’ dismay, he dropped out of college his junior year. A year later he’d sold his first short story. Almost four years after that his first novel had seen print.

  His early readership had been small but loyal; his earnings, modest, but sufficient for his simple tastes. And now he seemed to be poised on the brink of breaking out into a larger market. His tightly plotted and eccentrically cast novels were becoming more popular through enthusiastic word-of-mouth from his core of longtime readers. If Gideon was excited about the new direction his writing career was taking, he kept that to himself, as well.

  “You remember what today would have been, don’t you?” Nathan asked quietly, wondering if the date had had anything to do with Gideon’s difficulty writing that morning.

  Gideon’s reply was curt. “I remember.”

  “You want to talk about it?”

  Gideon had been estranged from their father even before Stuart had left the family, but Nathan couldn’t believe his brother hadn’t suffered in some way from Stuart’s death, even though he had steadily refused to discuss his feelings. Nathan didn’t think it was healthy to keep feelings so deeply bottled up. He’d been trying for years to maintain open lines of communication between himself and his younger brother, even though he usually felt as though he was the only one making any effort at all to reach out.

  He couldn’t remember the last time Gideon had called him. He couldn’t help wondering if he would ever hear from his brother again if he didn’t initiate the call. The thought that they could actually drift that far apart made him even sadder than he had been before he’d placed this call. Maybe dialing his brother’s number hadn’t been such a good idea, after all.

  “No, I don’t want to talk about it.” Gideon’s reply was adamant. A heavy silence followed it.

  Nathan tried to think of something more to say. “Maybe when you get a little extra time we can get together for a game of racquetball. It’s been a long time since I’ve stomped you.”

  “A very long time,” Gideon retorted. “As I recall it, I whupped your butt the last five or six times we played.”

  “Yeah, well, I’ve practiced a bit in the past year or so since you last defeated me. I might just surprise you.”

  “Could be. I’m out of practice. Haven’t been to the gym in a while.”

  “So you want to get together for a game sometime?”

  Gideon’s hesitation was long enough to make Nathan believe his brother was looking for a reasonably civil way to reject the offer. Instead he said, “Yeah, okay. We’ll do that sometime.”

  It certainly wasn’t an enthusiastic response, nor had he made any specific plans, but he hadn’t closed the door Nathan had so tentatively opened. Nathan took some encouragement from that. “Great. Give me a call sometime.”

  “Sure. Is there anything else, or can I get back to work now?”

  “Go back to work. I just wanted to say hi.”

  “Okay. See you around.” Just as Nathan was preparing to hang up, Gideon added gruffly, “Thanks for calling.”

  A dial tone sounded in Nathan’s ear almost before Gideon finished speaking. Nathan stared for a moment at the receiver, disproportionately pleased by his brother’s parting words, yet wondering if they had really meant anything.

  Was Gideon really glad that Nathan stubbornly kept in touch or was it just something he’d said automatically, trying to be polite? And yet, when had Gideon ever done anything just to be polite?

  He punched in a new set of numbers before he had a chance to talk himself out of doing so. His sister was not an early riser, and the hoarseness of her voice let him know he had awakened her. “Hi, Deb, it’s me. Sorry if I called too early.”

  He could envision her pushing her blond hair out of her face, frowning and struggling to sound awake and coherent. “I wasn’t asleep,” she lied blatantly. “What’s wrong, Nathan?”

  “Nothing’s wrong. I just wanted to talk to you a minute.”

  “What about?”

  “I just talked to Gideon. He said you’d been calling him about me.”

  “I only called him twice,” she replied a bit defensively. “I wanted to know if he’d made an effort to talk you out of ruining our mother’s life, but he said it was none of his business what you do. I knew you wouldn’t listen to me, but I thought maybe you’d listen to Gideon if he would make the effort.”

  “Deborah, I’m not doing anything to ruin Mother’s life. Stop being so melodramatic.”

  Her indignant huff sounded clearly through the phone lines. “You’re wrong, of course. Mother is pretty much devastated by what you’ve done. She told me that every time she goes out in public she dreads the possibility of running into you. And she wonders if everyone who knows what you’ve done is staring at her and talking about her.”

  “Deborah, all I’ve done is take in a little girl who had nowhere else to go. My own sister—and yours, I might add. I can understand Mom having a little trouble dealing with the circumstances of Isabelle’s conception, but I am having trouble understanding why you are taking such a hard line. You’ve always liked kids, Deborah. I can’t imagine that you would seriously advocate putting any little girl out on the streets, especially your own flesh and blood.”

  “That’s not fair,” she protested, the quiver in her voice betraying that his criticism had hurt. “I’m hardly advocating any such thing. I wholeheartedly agree that a good home should be found for her—just not there, right under Mother’s nose.”

  “So you’re saying I should move away? Just sell my firm and settle quietly somewhere else, where none of you will ever have to risk seeing me again?”

  “Damn it, Nathan, you make it sound as if we’ve thrown you out of the family! You’re the one who initiated this situation. You’ve made your choice between your family and a new family, just like—”

  Her words stopped abruptly, leaving a brittle, painful silence in their place.

  “Just like Dad did?” Nathan leaned heavily against the kitchen counter. “That’s what you and Mom are thinking? That I’ve betrayed and abandoned the family, the same way Dad did?”

  “You’ve made it quite clear that you’ve chosen Kimberly’s daughter over us,” his sister replied stiffly. “You just said that you’re willing to move away with her and never see the rest of us again.”

  “Like Dad did.” Nathan shook his head in frustration. “De
borah, you can’t really believe the situation is the same. Dad was a married man who betrayed his family for another woman—a woman who knew he already had a family and fell in love with him, anyway. I’ve never said I approved of the choices they made, but they were adults. They had plenty of other options. Isabelle’s just a baby. She had absolutely no say in anything that happened to her.”

  Trying to keep his voice low despite the intensity of his emotions, he straightened and began to pace with the phone. “Yeah, I could have given her up. That’s what I went to California to do. The only person I talked to who was interested in adopting her wanted my professional advice about how to get around the legal safeguards of a little girl’s trust fund.”

  Deborah was silent for so long he wondered if she had thrown the phone aside. Was she even listening?

  When she finally spoke, her tone was uncharacteristically subdued. “I’m sorry, Nathan. I know you believe you did the right thing, and I know it hurts you that your family hasn’t been more supportive. But, I need more time, okay? I just can’t deal with it right now. Especially not today.”

  So she, too, was aware of the date. “I haven’t left the family, Deborah,” he said, his tone more gentle now. “I haven’t betrayed anyone, including Mom. And I haven’t chosen Isabelle over any of you. I just couldn’t abandon her—any more than I could any of the rest of you.”

  “Maybe I’ll understand that someday. I don’t know if Mom ever will.”

  “I’m trusting that she’ll come around eventually. She needs time, too. I understand that.”

  “Just—do your best to keep from hurting her any more, will you?”

  Remembering the look on his mother’s face when she had spotted them at the deli, Nathan winced. “I’ll try,” he said, but short of actually moving away he didn’t know how to guarantee that they wouldn’t end up in the same place again. Honesty just wasn’t that big a town.

  “Are you doing okay, Deb? Are you happy?”

  Her reply was so dispirited that it made his chest ache. “Who, me? I’m fine. No problems here.”

  “Is there anything I can—”

  She cut in with a flat, unamused laugh. “Don’t you ever get tired of being the big brother all the time, Nathan? Take care of your other little sister—this one can take care of herself.”

  She didn’t give him a chance to quiz her any further. Muttering some excuse about having things to do, she brought the call to an abrupt end.

  Nathan’s head was hurting when he hung up the phone. Maybe calling his siblings hadn’t been such a good idea, after all. He didn’t seem to have accomplished anything.

  “Sorry, Dad,” he murmured. “I tried.”

  Dragging her stuffed owl behind her, Isabelle padded into the kitchen, bare pink toes flashing beneath the hem of her long pink nightgown. Her blond hair was tousled, her eyes still heavy-lidded when she smiled up at him. “My tummy woke me up. It’s hungry.”

  He had to smile at that, of course. Lifting her into his arms, he gave her a hug and a kiss on the cheek. “Good morning. How do pancakes sound for breakfast?”

  “Pancakes sound yummy.”

  Chuckling, he set her in her booster seat and moved to pour milk and orange juice into glasses. He just wished it was this easy to make his other siblings happy.

  Chapter Ten

  Lindsey Newman lowered the two-page letter she had been reading and studied Caitlin over the top of it. “Wow,” she said.

  Sprawled on her sofa, Caitlin nodded. “I know. Wow.”

  “If this opportunity comes through, it could be very big for you.”

  “I know. Los Angeles. Well, I never expected an opening like this to crop up so soon.”

  Lindsey tapped the letter. “This must be some good friend to recommend you for something like this.”

  “Tom and I were good friends in law school,” Caitlin admitted. “He graduated a year ahead of me and pulled some strings to get into his uncle’s firm in Los Angeles.”

  Lindsey’s eyebrows lifted. “How good a friend was he?”

  “We dated a few times. And, okay, maybe he was a little more involved than I was. He wanted to get serious, but I convinced him I wanted to establish my career before I became too deeply involved with anyone.”

  “It’s obvious he hasn’t completely given up on the idea. I bet he figures that if he can get you on the partnership track in his uncle’s firm, there would be no reason why the two of you couldn’t get together.”

  No reason, Caitlin mused, except that she wasn’t interested in Tom that way. Never had been and couldn’t foresee that she ever would be. She was, however, intrigued by the implication that he could get her an interview in his long-established and very successful law firm. After all, this was exactly the kind of break she had been hoping for—wasn’t it?

  “Are you going to let him arrange an interview for you?”

  “I thought I would try to set something up with him after the first of the year.”

  “Why so long?”

  “I have too much going on here to possibly get away before then. The malpractice case alone is taking hours of my time, and I’ve barely gotten started on that one.”

  “Mm. It wouldn’t have anything to do with you being perfectly content right here, would it? Maybe you really like being a partner in a smaller firm. And maybe you aren’t interested in this Tom guy because you have a more interesting fella here.”

  “Don’t start, Lindsey.”

  “I still can’t believe you turned Nathan down when he asked you out.”

  Caitlin wished now that she hadn’t admitted in a weak moment that Nathan had asked her to dinner. That was what came from having only one close girlfriend, she thought ruefully. Eventually Lindsey learned everything there was to know about Caitlin’s life.

  “You would have turned him down.”

  “Sure—because of the kid. But you’re just chicken.”

  “Cautious.”

  “Same thing.”

  Caitlin let that pass.

  “So,” Lindsey asked, “have you told him you might have a chance with the big L.A. firm?”

  “No. The letter was in my mail when I got home from the office yesterday. I haven’t seen Nathan since.”

  “Are you going to tell him?”

  “Certainly I will, if I decide to go to L.A. for an interview. But there’s no need to mention it yet. Nathan has enough to worry about for now.”

  “He won’t like it. He’ll try to talk you out of going.”

  Caitlin shrugged, not quite meeting her friend’s eyes. “He could find another associate easily enough.”

  “Something tells me it wouldn’t be losing a business partner that would concern him most.”

  “What is it with you trying to match me up with Nathan?” Caitlin asked in frustration.

  Lindsey grinned. “Hey, I just hate to see a prime young male go to waste.”

  Her smile faded a bit then. “And, besides, I really don’t want to see you move to L.A., either.”

  “There’s certainly no guarantee that I’ll move to L.A. I don’t even have an interview yet, remember? Even if I should get an interview, that doesn’t mean I would get an offer. And even getting an offer doesn’t mean I would accept if it didn’t feel right.”

  Lindsey shrugged. “I just know you’ll get any position you go after. Any firm would be crazy not to want you.”

  “Thanks, but you’re hardly objective.”

  “There is that.” She set the letter on a table and stood. “I’d better get ready for my sales trip tomorrow. I’ve got another load of laundry to do tonight—or I’ll have to risk being in a car accident wearing ragged underwear, something my mother always warned me against.”

  Caitlin stood to walk her friend to the door. “Do us both a favor—don’t have a car accident even wearing brand-new underwear.”

  Lindsey laughed. “I’ll do my best.”

  Caitlin’s telephone started ringing almost as soon as she c
losed the door behind Lindsey. Somehow she knew whose voice she would hear when she answered and she was right.

  “How’s it going, beautiful?” Nathan asked cheerfully.

  She settled into a chair, curling her feet beneath her. “Is this an obscene call?”

  “It can be. Want me to talk dirty to you?”

  “Why don’t you tell me why you called?”

  “I just wanted to hear your voice.”

  She toyed with a tassel at the corner of a small tapestry throw pillow. “That sounds like a line.”

  “It isn’t, you know. I really did just want to talk to you.”

  “Anything in particular you want to discuss?”

  “Not specifically. How about you? Anything interesting going on in your life today?”

  Her gaze was drawn to the letter still lying on the coffee table. “No. Nothing exciting. You?”

  “Not a lot. Isabelle and I went to the park this afternoon. That was an experience.”

  “I’m sure it was. Did you have fun?”

  “Yeah. Even though I was dismayed by how many people let their kids run wild in places like that. Some of those kids were hellions—pushing, shoving, breaking in line, screaming when they didn’t get their way. I can tell I’m going to have to be careful about making sure Isabelle hangs out with the right friends. I wouldn’t want her to start imitating some of those brats.”

  Caitlin couldn’t help smiling. He sounded so much like an indignant parent and so different from the carefree bachelor he had been so recently.

  Her amusement faded when he said after a slight pause, “Today would have been my father’s sixtieth birthday.”

  “It must have been a difficult day for you.”

  “A bit. Dad loved birthdays. He always insisted on balloons and a cake. Even after he left, I tried to make a point of calling him on his birthday, though neither Gideon nor Deborah did, of course.”

  “At least you have the comfort of knowing you acknowledged the occasions while your father was still living. I wonder if Gideon and Deborah regret not doing so when they had the chance.”

  “Maybe. I talked to both of them today. Gideon said he was having trouble concentrating on his work, and Deborah seemed sad. I’m sure both of them were affected by the date.”