A Roof Over Their Heads

by M. K. Stelmack

  “You bet.”

  “You called Connie yet?” Mel said.

  “Why should I?” Seth opened his phone to check his weather app. Maybe there was something nasty coming. Hot and humid, yeah, but electrical, too. Made people lazy and twitchy at the same time.

  “Maybe she didn’t get the widow’s message. Maybe she doesn’t realize how much of a not-good situation she’s in, legal-wise.”

  Seth’s thumb paused over the phone screen. He’d told Mel about the renovation disaster over at the house but he’d never considered that the mom might call a lawyer. She struck him as more of a problem-solver than a troublemaker. Then again, hauling his sister’s butt into court was one way of solving the problem.

  He hit Connie’s number. He didn’t get through and he didn’t leave a message. Seth called again. And again and again.

  Mel tipped the box toward Seth, and Seth shook his head. It was part of their ritual. Seth would take one, maybe two, of whatever Mel had on hand and no more, even though Mel would continue to offer.

  Connie had her own ritual around not answering her phone. She seemed to think he really had to mean it. Or, as he suspected, she liked to have him riled right from the get-go.

  After what seemed like the ninety-seventh try, she answered with, “What? What!”

  “Your tenants moved in today.”

  “They did? Today?”

  “Yes. She said she left you a message.”

  Connie’s tone switched from surprise to accusatory. “You talked to her.”

  “Not by choice. I don’t even know her name.” He meant that last bit to prove how little he knew this woman, but to his ears it came out peeved, as if he’d missed out. Not that he was going to ask Connie because she would love to know he wanted something from her. Lord it over him, angle for something in exchange. He didn’t want her to know it mattered when it was already absurd that it did.

  “For your information,” Connie said, “I called her, like, days and days, weeks ago to tell her not to come, but her line was disconnected.”

  “It was working today.”

  “I called her landline and I don’t have her cell number.”

  “She called yours, so you do now.” Seth heard her draw breath, no doubt for another excuse, so he got to the point. “You better do something before you’ve got a tenant sic’ing lawyers on you. You’re in the wrong here, Connie.”

  “Oh, when am I not?” she snarked. “Leave it to me, will you?”

  Resentment rushed through Seth but he bit it back. “I want to leave it to you. That’s why I didn’t tell your tenant that you were my sister, because then she would start leaning on me to fix your problems. And I think both of us can agree that I’m through doing that.”

  “And I think both of us can agree you have no business interfering. In case you’ve forgotten, it’s my house now.”

  As if he ever could. “Then start acting like it is.”

  Mel nudged Seth. “Tell her we’re having a pickup ball game. Tell her to come.”

  “Tell her yourself,” Seth said and switched to speakerphone.

  But Connie had overheard. “Tell him I’m busy tonight.”

  Mel jabbed a finger at the phone. “No, you’re not. Ben ate at Smooth Sailing earlier and told me you weren’t working tonight.”

  There was a hiss and splutter from Connie’s end. “What? Did he say— Never mind. I’m busy doing something else. Thanks for the invite, Mel.”

  She ended the call before Seth had a chance to speak.

  “I thought that went pretty well,” Mel said and popped another Timbit.

  “Next time you call her,” Seth said.

  “I can’t. I don’t have a cell phone,” Mel explained. “Oh, look. Ben’s here.” And in a clear-cut case of ducking the issue, Mel was off, abandoning his box. Seth peeked inside. Empty. Of course.

  He picked up Mel’s garbage and carried it to the trash can at the edge of the field. He should be sorting everyone into teams but he needed a moment to calm down. He always had to after dealing with Connie. Tonight’s call had left him more than normally irritated. Thirty-two years old, and still acting like a teenager. Worse than a teenager, because at least then all her rebellions had been about making something of herself. Now she was messing around and messing up, creating havoc wherever she went.

  The widow and her kids were only Connie’s latest victims.

  Hard to think of the mom as a widow. She was too young—he doubted she was as old as him. And too beautiful. Too beautiful to have her face twist in sorrow when her boy let drop about his dead dad. Seth understood why the kid had said it. His own dad had passed twenty years ago, and he’d never forget the day it happened.

  Seth cut over toward Ben’s truck to thank him for the bats. Sure enough, he’d brought the pink-and-purple one. Paul was using it to lob a long one into the outfield. Mel went tearing after it, like a dog playing fetch. But it was only when Seth was up close that he saw the second bat. It was the big old wooden one. Seth should’ve known.

  There was a time when Ben might’ve gone from friend to brother. About two years ago when Ben loved Connie, and Connie had loved him right back. When she’d bought him the heaviest slugger she could source, Ben converted her pitches into home runs, and she watched with a silly grin as he circled the bases, circled her—just like they were kids again.

  But then she’d cheated on him in plain sight, and Ben had been forced to see her for what she was. Seth avoided talking about her as much as possible in front of Ben.

  Mel had no such discretion, it turned out. On their way to the diamond, Ben said to Seth, “Mel told me you called Connie. She tell you she’s in Las Vegas?”

  Seth stopped cold. How was Connie going to help the widow from there? Answer: she wasn’t going to.

  Next question: Who would help the widow?

  Ben stopped, too. “She left Monday with that guy she’s with now.” He put a choke hold on Connie’s bat.

  Trevor. A real piece of work. Of all the morons Connie had hooked up with since Ben, this one scared Seth with his level of pigheaded stupidity.

  “She needs to come home,” Ben declared.

  “You know what she’s like,” Seth said.

  Ben stepped back and swung the bat so hard, it whistled. “No. You know what she’s like. I know what she can be like.”

  Ben continued on to the diamond, putting distance between them. In another country and Connie could still screw up their lives.

  CHAPTER THREE

  ALEXI WOKE TO wind attacking the tent. The wall beside her buckled inward, and the nylon formed a cold suction over her face, then released as it was sucked outward. Thunder rumbled on and on, low and disgruntled like how she felt.

  As if her day hadn’t been bad enough, now there was a night storm to endure. She hadn’t thought to check the weather since the evening had been so calm and cloudless.

  Payback for making assumptions about how things ought to be. She fumbled for her cell phone. It was 1:17 a.m. And 2 percent battery. More payback for waiting on a call from the landlady that never came. She would’ve given up a lot sooner if she’d known the charger was missing. Payback again for not thinking ahead. After patting down the van seats and floor where it ought to be, she’d crawled into the tent, ankle and head throbbing, drawn a bath towel over herself as a blanket and passed out.

  She shut off her cell just as the wind threw itself against the adjacent wall where the four cocooned kids slept, Matt on the far side. The wall pulled straight but the wind hit again, and this time tore out a tent peg, that part of the wall collapsing on the smallest cocoon. Callie.

  Her small daughter thrashed about, her body caught inside her sleeping bag, ramping up her panic into train-whistle screams.

  That snapped Bryn upright. “Bears! Bears!”

  Ale
xi’s half hour of cuddling and low-talking at bedtime to convince Bryn that Spirit Lake was a bear-free zone was blown to pieces because she’d used a rock instead of a hammer, packed who knows where, to drive in the tent peg. Payback.

  “It’s okay, it’s okay,” Alexi slurred. She flipped back the towel and tugged Callie away from the slumped tent wall. Another part of the tent dropped onto Alexi’s back like a predator. Great, the six-man tent was now four-and-falling.

  “S’okay, Callie. Mommy’s here.” She held out her hands in the dark until Callie’s arms whacked them. She snapped her fingers around them and pulled Callie’s warm, vibrating body against her. “It’s okay. No bears. Part of the tent just came down.” She half dragged, half lifted Callie and her bag closer to Matt’s side of the tent.

  The news was not comforting to Bryn. “We’ll all suffocate and die!”

  “No, we won’t—”

  A vicious shriek of wind smacked the tent, and a section slumped onto Bryn’s head. Now all four kids, Matt included, were screaming.

  The dark form of Bryn bowled his way past Alexi to the zippered opening. “I’m dying! I’m dying! We’re all going to die!”

  With Callie clamped to her, Alexi caught the back of Bryn’s pajama top, which threw him into more of a frenzy. She felt the cloth twist, Bryn stripping out of it. “No, Bryn, wait!” And he broke out of the tent.

  “No!” Her cry was shredded in the wind, weak and useless. Cold air circled them. Icy air not right for a hot summer night.

  The first hailstone bonked off the main pole.

  The second, third, fourth thudded and rolled along the part of the tent still erect. And then the number was no longer distinguishable as hail descended in a hard torrent.

  They needed to get to the house fast.

  She reached for Matt, banded her fingers around his upper arm. “Take Amy. Run into the house. Stay there.” She groped for Amy who, good girl that she was, had already shimmied out of her sleeping bag. Alexi hauled a sleeping bag up and over their heads. “Okay. Hold it up. Keep together.” She widened the tent flap for them. “Go. Don’t stop.”

  She didn’t wait to see if they made it. She needed to get Callie inside and then twice in one day, call the police for the exact same reason. A runaway. There would be a report this time. Payback, payback, payback.

  At least she had enough charge to call. She tucked her phone down inside her bra, and using both hands, since there was no way on God’s green earth Callie would let go anyway, she settled her bath towel above their heads.

  “Okay, Callie, on the count of three, I will run to the house and you just hold on tight to me with your arms and legs, okay?” Callie flattened herself even more against Alexi, the sides of her knees like hammerheads against Alexi’s ribs. “One, two, three!”

  And they were off. The wind immediately snatched the towel from her hands, and hailstones pummeled her. She shaped one arm into an umbrella over Callie and hobbled double-quick. On the back stairs, her bare feet skidded on hailstones and she flung out her arms to grab hold of the railing.

  Exposed to the ice chunks, Callie howled. Alexi hauled herself and Callie up the last remaining steps and to the door illuminated by the outdoor light.

  It was flung open as she approached, but not by Matt.

  “Bryn! You’re here!”

  He hadn’t run off. Common sense or Matt had prevailed. Either way, it was a gift, a break, a win. She fell back against the door.

  “Yep,” he said to the obvious.

  The inside lights were turned on, so she could see that they were all safe and sound. And wet, their pajamas stuck darkly to their upper bodies. She’d left the windows open so it was every bit as cold as outside, but it no longer stunk as much. Not that they had a choice of accommodation.

  She knelt, taking care with her hurt ankle. “Okay, guys, wait here. I’ll run out and get the sleeping bags and we’ll sleep here for the rest of the night. It’s dry here, there’s a roof over our heads. And in the morning—” she looked at Bryn “—we’ll figure out the rest.”

  Callie stuck to her, a damp, flesh-and-bone magnet. “I want to go home.”

  Alexi said what she’d been repeating all through the packing. “Home is where we’re all together, sweetie.”

  Only the promise of a warm, cozy sleeping bag and the wheedling of the other kids persuaded Callie to loosen her grip on Alexi. Once free, she lost no time plunging back outside. The fall of hailstones had thinned but they were up to her ankles. The tent roof was so weighted down that she had to hunch as she wadded all the sleeping bags into hers.

  She drew a deep breath, gave herself a one-two-three count and dashed back as fast as her hurt, numbed body would allow. She dumped the bags on the kitchen floor with quick instructions to Matt, and then plunged outside again to retrieve the pillows. When she got back, Matt was sitting cross-legged on the floor with Callie curled in his lap while the other two were laying the bags out.

  This time, she arranged herself like a mother cat, the kids stretched out perpendicular to her, their heads against her belly side, all easy to reach in the night if she needed to. And like tired kittens they all fell asleep almost instantly, even Bryn.

  Of course, now she was overtired and couldn’t sleep. She knew why. She hadn’t said good-night to Richard. Talking to him would completely drain the battery, leaving her unable to make even an emergency call. And hadn’t she moved, put herself and the kids through this whole ordeal, in order for them to start to construct a new life without him? Hadn’t she promised herself that to recognize the necessity of moving on she’d stop this self-destructive habit on the one-year anniversary of his death?

  Except who could’ve predicted a day like today? God knows what she would’ve done if Seth Greene hadn’t come to the rescue. Tall and contained and so serious. Normal people greeted other people with a smile. He watched and, she was pretty sure, judged. Whatever. She had no reason to see him again.

  Or anyone, for that matter.

  Alexi felt a sudden fluttering in her chest that rose to a wild battering, like she’d swallowed a bit of the storm.

  If she were to get through the night, and the next morning, she needed something—someone—to bring her a thin sliver of peace.

  She slid open the phone and tapped to full screen Richard’s picture. Not the one she’d wallpapered with him at the playground rope hive with the kids hanging around him. This was the one she’d taken the morning after their wedding, fifteen years ago. She’d called to get his attention and he’d looked over his shoulder at her, a smile already in place. He’d smiled all the time.

  What else is a man to do, he said, when he’s looking at you?

  Seth Greene could’ve told him.

  The battery icon slipped to 1 percent.

  “Hi, Richard,” she whispered. “I tried not to do this but I can’t. Today has been...too much. I tried to do alone what we’d always done together. You and I moved to Calgary to make a home because we never had a real one. We’d made a family because we never had one. And it all made sense when you were alive. Now it’s me. Alone. With the kids, and Matt not yet ours. Or, I guess, mine. And today was rotten. The house is not a home. It’s not even a house. Tonight was worse. There was a hailstorm and—and—I think I made a mistake. I shouldn’t have moved the kids from our home in Calgary. I thought I could move on. But look at me. It’s been a year and I still don’t know how to get through without you. There’s going to be so many bad—”

  The screen went black and the battery icon flashed on. Gone. “I don’t know how I’m going to get through this, Richard,” she whispered into the dark. “I really don’t.”

  * * *

  MATT WASN’T ASLEEP. He’d almost been there, warm and limp in the sleeping bag like a wiener in a hotdog, rain drumming his brain to mush, but then Mom’s whispers set up a steady drip on his sens
es, until all else sank away except for her voice.

  She talked to Daddy-R every night. When he was working up north, her voice, low and breathy and inaudible, would drift down the hallway and put him to sleep. After Daddy-R died, she carried right on talking to him. Matt hadn’t known she was talking to a phone pic of him or exactly what she said.

  Until tonight. Tonight he heard how sad and lonely Mom was. That all her smiles and peanut butter cookies were fake.

  It was all his fault.

  Before living with Mom and Daddy-R, he’d run away twice. Not the way Bryn ran, a sudden bolting and a quick corralling. No, he planned his escapes. The first time it was to get away from his mom and to his dad. The second time it was to get away from his dad to his grandfather. Then when his grandfather died and he was stuck in a foster home, it was to his new dad. He hadn’t known who his new dad was, only that his gut said he was at Walmart, so every day Matt walked along streets, across a field and a parking lot to the store and, while families shopped for cereal and lightbulbs, he shopped for a dad.

  His gut was right. He found Daddy-R in the shoe aisle, buying running shoes for three kids, and Matt, spying through the racks in another aisle, watched him get his kids exactly what they wanted. With each kid holding their shoe box, he had said, Now. How about we find the most beautiful woman in the store and take her home with us?

  The kids knew it was their mom, and Matt had trailed after them to where she was in the fruit section loading an already heaping cart with apples, oranges, strawberries, everything.

  Matt had seen how Daddy-R kept his eye on her as soon as she was spotted, and he never stopped until he kissed her right there in the store. That’s when Matt’s gut had spoken. This one. Take this one.

  When the other kids got into the van, he did, too. And once Daddy-R and the mom with the blue eyes understood he wasn’t getting out, he became part of their family.

  Then Daddy-R had died, and he didn’t know what to do. Until two months ago his gut had spoken again as he’d stared at a map of Alberta one afternoon. There. Go there. His finger was on Spirit Lake. His head had argued with his gut. It was just a place where he’d built forts from sand and sticks on the beach. His gut kept right on sparking and glowing like a stirred fire no matter what he told it, so he gave in and prepared to go.