When Sparrows Fall

by Meg Moseley

  Miranda shook her head. “What’s keeping Jack and the boys? Why aren’t they home?”

  “Let’s call, so you’ll stop worrying.” Rebekah fetched the phone from the kitchen, dialed a number and handed over the phone with such briskness and authority that Miranda felt like the child instead of the parent.

  Jack answered with the boys laughing in the background. “We’re on our way, posthaste, and rest assured I’m not corrupting the boys any more than is absolutely necessary.”

  “You’d better not—”

  “Miranda, Miranda. Relax, darlin’. See you in a minute; we’re nearly home.” He hung up.

  “I forgot to tell you,” Rebekah said, taking the phone. “Pastor Mason called. He said he’ll call back later or just stop by.”

  Miranda’s pulse accelerated. “Did he say when?”

  “No.”

  “Did you tell him about my fall? Or about Uncle Jack?”

  “No. Was I supposed to?”

  “No! No, that’s fine, Rebekah.”

  Martha held up jeans with yellow daisies embroidered on the hip pockets. “Look, Mama.”

  “Put them back, please.” Miranda stood up too quickly, and her vision swam.

  Martha obeyed, then pulled a lacy pink dress from the bag. “A party dress! I love it.”

  It was nearly the same shade as a prom dress Miranda had once longed for. “You don’t need a party dress, Martha.”

  “But it’s the most beautiful dress in the world. I want it, Mama.” Martha held the dress up to her chin. “I want it so bad.”

  “Covetousness is wicked, sweetheart. It can lead to—to—just put it back, please.”

  “I hear a car,” Rebekah said.

  Miranda froze. She held her breath until she recognized the distinctive sound of the Audi. But Mason could be driving down Larkin Road, right behind Jack.

  “Uncle Jack’s home!” Martha dropped the dress and ran to the door.

  Jonah trotted after her, wearing a squashed cowboy hat. Far too big for him, it fell over his face. He tripped on a pile of clothing and lay there, laughing.

  “Rebekah, help.” Miranda’s voice cracked. “Help me maintain order here, please. Let’s put everything back in the bags.”

  On her knees in the clothing, Rebekah wasn’t listening.

  Michael and Gabriel rushed in, spouting a tangled story about a car wash and a dog in the park and chocolate milkshakes. Jack followed, his hair windblown, his shirt wrinkled, and his eyes twinkling.

  “Mercy me,” he said. “Where’d all this loot come from?”

  “From Miss Yvonne,” Martha crowed. “I love Miss Yvonne!”

  Jonah clambered to his feet and planted the cowboy hat higher on his forehead. Jack snatched the hat, clapped it on his own head, and scooped up Jonah.

  “Nice hat,” Jack said.

  Jonah giggled, retrieved the hat, and slithered to the floor.

  “I love these shoes.” Rebekah wobbled across the clothing-strewn room, wearing high heels. Already tall for her age, she looked years older than ten.

  “Looks like Miss Yvonne wants to speed up the process of bringing y’all into the current century,” Jack said, smiling.

  Fine, but not until Mason had moved away.

  Rebekah picked up a faded red T-shirt with shaggy-headed singers portrayed in black above the band’s name. “The Beatles? Who are they?”

  “I’ve heard of ’em,” Gabriel said, peering into one of the bags. “They’re a kind of car.”

  “A kind of car.” Jack’s smile vanished. “Miranda, you might as well be raising your family in a cave.”

  She swayed, and the room distanced itself from her. She groped for the back of Carl’s chair, found it, and hung on tight until the room returned to normal.

  Normal? This? No, it was crazy. It was too much. The hand-me-downs. Jack’s influence. The move. Mason’s threat—and her plan to lay low until he’d moved away? Jack would ruin her strategy without even trying, unless she made him her ally.

  Michael and Gabriel were playing keep away, tossing a tiny silver evening bag back and forth over Martha as she shrieked for it. Timothy came downstairs and roared at the younger boys to stop. Jonah giggled, strutting around the room in a lavender T-shirt decorated with LOVE in hot pink sequins. It hung past his knees, like a dress. Rebekah ignored the hubbub and burrowed to the bottom of a black trash bag like a puppy digging a hole under a fence.

  If Mason were to walk in.…

  “Look at ’em,” Jack said over the uproar. “The little sinners.” He glanced at Miranda. “That’s not an insult, you know. Sinners are all God has to work with.”

  She couldn’t bear the noise and the movement and the never-ending headache. “Settle down. Stop it!” Her words were lost in the din.

  “Pipe down, y’all,” Jack thundered.

  Silence reigned. Gabriel relinquished the evening bag to Martha without grumbling. All of them, even Timothy, gave Jack their complete attention.

  “Carry on, young ’uns,” he said, “but show some restraint, please.”

  Miranda crooked her finger. “We need to talk, Jack.”

  “We certainly do.” He threaded through mountains of garments and offered his arm. “Little pitchers have big ears. Let’s try the porch.”

  He escorted her outside, into cooler air. He closed the door, shutting out the children’s noise. She took the nearest rocker and considered how much to tell him.

  Not much. If she told him anything at all, he would demand details.

  “I’m very grateful for the help you’ve given us, Jack. You’ve been very kind.”

  “I sense a but coming.”

  “No, I really do appreciate the way you’ve disrupted your life for our sakes, but you’ve disrupted our lives too, and I need to explain—”

  “Your lives could use a little disrupting.” He took the other chair and started rocking. “I’m taking a leave of absence. I’ll have to be on campus now and then for committee work and so forth, but for the most part, I’ll be at your service. Chauffeur, baby-sitter, teacher.”

  “Thank you, but that’s not necessary.”

  “Not to worry. The policy is laid out in the faculty handbook, and it’s generous. A family emergency is a legitimate reason to take a leave of absence.”

  “This is not an emergency. We’ll get along fine without you.”

  “Starting when? Who’ll take you to your medical checkups? Who’ll drive to the store when you run out of milk? By the way, why don’t your friends stop by? Or don’t you have any? The children don’t seem to have friends either. You could at least let them play with the Gilbert kids. Why punish the children because the parents left your church?”

  How did he know about the Gilberts? “You don’t see the big picture.”

  “Oh, I’m afraid I do. Anyway, my leave of absence is a done deal. I submitted the paperwork already.”

  “Without asking me first?”

  “Yes, like you named me as the guardian of six children without asking me first.”

  Oh, he was quick. She had to stay on her toes.

  “Fine, but if you’re going to stay longer, you’ll have to abide by my house rules, and the first rule is that you remember it’s my house.”

  “I can’t argue with that one.”

  “And I’m in charge. You aren’t.” She took a quick breath, afraid he’d interrupt. “I want the children to put the hand-me-downs back in the bags.”

  Abruptly, he stopped rocking his chair. “Why? What’s wrong with those clothes?”

  “Nothing, but please don’t argue with my decision.”

  “But why—”

  “Don’t argue. It’s my house. My family. My rules.”

  He started the chair creaking again, back and forth in a slow, steady rhythm. “The children are family to me, and I worry about their isolation and the gaps I see in their education. The lack of fiction and extracurricular activities, to name a couple of examples. Most homescho
olers haunt the library and participate in everything from debate team to chess club and ballet, but your kids? The archangels had never been through a car wash until today.”

  She shot a glance at his sporty little car, gleaming in the last rays of the sun. A reminder of his carefree existence. “Thank you for your concern, but you don’t own my children.”

  “Neither do you, darlin’, and I’m afraid you need some help with their education.”

  “Am I not living up to your high standards? I’m recovering from a concussion, Jack! You still haven’t seen our typical school day. Even if you had, you have no right to interfere.”

  “I only want to make sure that my nieces and nephews are receiving a well-rounded education.”

  “They are.”

  “Yet Rebekah has never heard of the Beatles. If that’s not cultural illiteracy, I don’t know what is. If you want me to be the guardian, I’ll start tomorrow. I’ll take the whole kit and caboodle to ’Nooga and introduce them to the real world.”

  “You’re not taking my children anywhere.”

  “Not yet.” He stood up. “Sounds like a bar-room brawl in there. Let’s go break it up.”

  He offered his arm to help her up. She didn’t want his help, but she needed it. Like she needed it a hundred times a day. Once she was on her feet though, she removed her hand from his arm. He grasped her elbow. She shook him off.

  As she limped into the warmth of the house, she tried to see her household through his eyes. The mess. The commotion. The relaxed homeschooling that must have looked like educational neglect to a professor.

  Jack had never seen what DFCS could do to a family. He wouldn’t understand why she’d rather tangle with a grizzly than with a hostile social worker. If she didn’t meet Jack’s impossibly high standards, he might report her.

  twelve

  Moving slowly in the dark and blessed silence, Jack placed the bottle and the glass on the table between the twin rockers. Weary to his bones, he filled his lungs with cold air, exhaled, inhaled again, and lowered himself into the chair.

  When six riled-up kids didn’t want to go to bed, they kept popping up, like they belonged in the Whac-A-Mole game at a carnival. But they’d been quiet for half an hour now, and Miranda was in her room, either asleep or plotting his demise.

  She had a right to be angry. He shouldn’t have mouthed off.

  His eyes adjusted to the moonlight. Except for crickets and spring peepers, he was alone with his Glenlivet. He couldn’t keep an open bottle in the car unless he stashed it in the trunk, but that would make him feel like a lush.

  One of his duffel bags? No. He’d already caught Jonah snooping in their side pockets.

  If one of Miranda’s house rules was a ban on alcohol, she hadn’t mentioned it. He could plead ignorance. One of her cupboards, then. A high, out-of-the-way cupboard. If by some chance she stumbled across his booze and decided to be offended, that was her problem.

  At peace with his decision, Jack poured a finger of Scotch. He was glad it was too dark to see much. It was a sin to pour the good stuff into a scratched and clouded tumbler.

  He took a sip of the smoky, peaty potion. “Relax, Hanford.”

  Impossible. Nerve-racking images warred with each other in his mind.

  That helter-skelter version of school. Boys who’d never seen a car wash. The hand-me-downs. The brouhaha about his leave of absence and the kids’ education, and finally the stuffing of those forbidden fashions back into the black trash bags, much to Martha’s distress.

  How could a few bags of clothes set a woman off like that? Cheeks flushed and eyes blazing, Miranda was beautiful and incensed and not quite rational. A concussion was a brain injury though. Mood swings could be part of the package. Or she was born a shrew, and he was playing Petruccio to her Kate. Except matrimony wasn’t his objective.

  He closed his eyes and enjoyed the solace of his second sip. The wind in the trees began to wash the noise from his brain.

  By the time he’d mused his way through his allotted portion, fatigue had joined forces with the alcohol. He would sleep like the dead, even on that dastardly excuse for a couch. Even on a Friday night, when his demons sprouted fangs and claws.

  They still lived in the back of his mind, dark cousins of the fears that had plagued him when he was Martha’s age. He’d believed there were ghosts in his toy box. A bogeyman in his closet. A slimy, silver gray water monster in every storm drain. An embryonic Grendel had lived in Jack’s childhood nightmares long before he’d read Beowulf and recognized an old enemy. Gastbona, soul slayer.

  They’d surfaced again, every one of them, on a Friday when he was thirteen. They’d never quite left him.

  Suddenly hungry for warmth and lights, he went inside and opened the cupboard above the stove. Reaching in to put the Scotch away, he bumped something, knocking it over. His hand closed around a smooth object with sharp points here and there. He pulled it into the light.

  It was a creamy white porcelain angel, six inches tall. Traditional and elegant. Nothing about it said “earth mother.” Nothing about the angel matched the style of that cheesy plaque either.

  Jack raised his eyebrows. The pansy plaque was missing. It might have been broken, knocked off the wall by a rambunctious boy, or Miranda might have trashed it simply because it begged to be trashed. Maybe her tastes were changing.

  He still wanted to know who she’d been before she met Carl. Where she’d come from. Where she was going.

  Jack placed the winged figurine on the table, then fetched a sheaf of papers from one of his duffel bags and a handful of Carl’s books and booklets from the shelves.

  Miranda’s worries wouldn’t leave her alone. Sometimes social workers took children from good homes based on nothing but anonymous accusations. If a man bristling with educational credentials reported a homeschool mother for problems he’d seen with his own eyes, she didn’t stand a chance.

  She flung back the covers in the dark. She had to think about something else or she’d go insane.

  She switched on her lamp and pulled one of the magazines out of the Walmart bag. What a hypocrite, sneaking a magazine in the middle of the night when she’d made the girls give up the hand-me-downs.

  As soon as she opened the magazine, she knew its pages hid a perfume sample. Unable to resist the scent, she hunted it down. It was a new brand. Not one of the classics that she might have remembered. The ad included a blurry closeup of a man and a woman, their shoulders bare, their lips barely touching. The blur was a deliberate attempt to produce atmosphere and mood, but it didn’t enhance the image.

  No one had opened the fragrance strip yet. She slid her finger under it and tugged it open. Its fresh, floral scent teased her nostrils and took her back to high school, back to those few short years after she’d met Jesus but before she’d met Carl, when life had been ripe with dreams.

  Just before their three-day honeymoon, she’d bought a tiny bottle of White Shoulders with the last of her own money. But Carl had said perfume was as seductive as immodest dress and might lure a man to sensual thoughts. He’d poured her gardenia-scented treasure into the sink of the hotel bathroom. Having just promised to honor and obey, she hadn’t argued.

  She should have though. It might have set a healthy precedent.

  She flipped through the magazine, unable to focus her attention on recipes or weight-loss tips or the latest fashions. Nothing gripped her interest.

  Turning another page, she found an article that was considerably more intriguing than nine new ways to cook with yogurt: the phenomenon of May-December romances. Older men, younger women. Having married an older man, she was curious.

  According to the article, some young women wanted a father figure. An older man could provide both romance and security, and if he was also an authority figure, he could be especially appealing to a woman who didn’t have a good relationship with her father.

  That made sense, maybe. Miranda had never known her father. Maybe she’d
been primed to fall for Carl. Ten years older and wiser, he’d had a commanding way about him.

  She kept reading. A young woman’s need for a lover and a father figure, combined with a middle-aged man’s need to relive his youth, could lead from innocent flirtations to reckless behavior.

  That was a far cry from her own experience. Carl’s behavior was anything but reckless, and he was only twenty-nine. From her teenage perspective though, he was a much older man. He’d made her feel grown-up. Important. Honored to be the object of his affection.

  She turned the page and frowned as she read on. If the relationship was forbidden, involving marital infidelity or an age gap that was too large to be socially acceptable, the thrill was greater still. When a young woman fell for a much older man, she was likely to fall hard. He, flattered by her interest, would encourage it. With both parties adding fuel to the fire, the romance could heat up in a hurry.

  I’m not afraid of a little heat, Nicole had said, linking her arm through Mason’s. I want to know your mystery ingredients. He’d smiled and said he wanted her secret spices too.

  Miranda’s heart thumped at the memory and the inappropriate suspicion that followed. But that was ridiculous. They’d only been talking about chili.

  Closing the magazine, she placed the recollection in context. Abigail’s kitchen after the chili cookoff in the fall. Abigail was still outside clearing the picnic tables when Miranda stopped in the doorway, searching the counter for a bare spot where she could set a basket of leftover cornbread.

  If Mason and Nicole were only discussing food, they shouldn’t have dived for opposite ends of the kitchen when they realized they weren’t alone anymore. He went to the sink and washed his hands. She opened the fridge, her dark hair tumbling onto pink cheeks.

  Miranda’s heart beat faster as she recalled other snatches of overheard conversations. Furtive smiles. Body language that whispered secrets beyond recipes.

  Mason—and sweet, naive Nicole? Nicole, who blushed and simpered when he gave her a fatherly wink. Or maybe those winks weren’t fatherly.