A Roof Over Their Heads

by M. K. Stelmack

  The social worker gave him a look that could’ve cut rock. “You’ve never dated and yet you consider yourself romantically involved? So, to be clear, you’ve never seen her away from the kids?”

  He hadn’t. He had proved her point. “I’ve never seen her away from the kids. Yes.”

  “You still consider yourself part of this family?”

  Seth paused. Did he? He ate with them, played with them. Yesterday morning, he’d signed Amy’s consent form for a hot lunch because Alexi was busy packing Bryn’s lunch. Yes, he had become a substitute father.

  A substitute Richard.

  “Yeah, I suppose so,” he conceded.

  “How far are you willing to go to become a permanent part of this family?” she pressed.

  Seth couldn’t stop himself from glancing at the window. He lowered his voice. “Are you asking me if I’d marry Alexi?”

  “If you want to say that, you can.”

  “If I were to marry her, how would that affect the adoption process?”

  “If you were to marry her before the adoption was complete, I would have to factor that in. If it were to occur afterward, there’s not much I can do about it.”

  It was as much as he suspected. “So I should wait to have a long-term relationship until the adoption is approved?”

  Marlene lifted up her hands. “How often do I need to tell you I can only base my decisions on what I know. If you don’t want me knowing stuff, don’t tell me!”

  “You and your flipping birds find out anyway!”

  She flapped her notes at him. “I already had to deal with your involvement in this family because of Matt and Matt’s foster mother. Now you tell me you are contemplating a long-term relationship that might involve marriage. And you ask me how this is going to affect the adoption process. I told you from the first meeting that you and Alexi were complicating things. At first it was because of her. Now it’s because of you both. Short answer—the current adoption process has ground to a halt until we deal with you. Now tell me a bit about yourself.”

  Seth wondered if she jumped around with her questions to deliberately keep him off guard.

  It was working.

  He’d hoped to take the attack to her but there was no outflanking this one. He felt cornered. “What do you want to know?”

  “It’s not what I want but what you want to tell me.”

  “We could go back and forth all day.”

  “I’ve got to go back to the office to record this interview, so the less I have to write the better. Get to the point.”

  She was like the paparazzi, hounding him for juicy details. “What don’t you know?”

  “Surprise me.”

  “I have a brother and a sister. My dad died twenty years ago. My mother died eight months ago. I was born and raised in Spirit Lake. I took over my dad’s business. I have a pretty ordinary life. I play baseball. I served on the Rotary Club as—”

  “Stop. I’m bored.”

  “What do you want to know, then?”

  “Ever been married?”

  “No.”

  “Common-law relationship?”

  “No.”

  “Are you gay or straight?”

  “What? Are you even allowed to ask me that?”

  “I can ask whatever I think will affect Matt.”

  “And you think that would affect Matt?”

  “Why else would I ask it? You think I have some gratuitous interest in your sexual preferences?”

  Seth stared. She stared back. He sighed. “I definitely prefer females.”

  She drew an enormous square on her legal pad and put a huge check mark in it. “There.”

  Seth felt torn between wringing the woman’s neck and taking her out for a beer.

  On it went with questions that may or may not have applied, in Seth’s estimation. What experience did he have with children? What did he see as his primary role with the boy? What stresses did he expect to have with this adoption? How did he plan to address those stresses? He answered the same question in a hundred different ways and the answer was the same. After a gruelling two hours in which he felt that they might as well have been under a bare bulb in a dark basement, she declared, “Okay, then, I’m done.”

  “When will you make your decision about me?”

  “It’s a process. Got to write a report, give it to my supervisor, follow up with my supervisor. If there are more questions, and there usually are, we’ll set up another meeting. Meanwhile, I might need to talk to Matt. See how he’s feeling about things. But that evil is for another day.”

  She stood, jamming her legal pad into her already overstuffed bag. “You want a bit of a behind-the-scenes glimpse into the working of my mind?”

  Seth got a sudden uneasy feeling in his stomach. “Sure, hit me.”

  “Believe it or not, I’m not usually so frank with the people in my cases. No really, I’m not. But I like you, Seth. I really do. Except I don’t think you realize the seriousness of this situation. This is not quite what you call ordinary circumstances. You appeared in the life of this family at exactly the wrong time.”

  “I don’t think you can argue that they needed me. I helped them when no one else did—or could.”

  “Yeah. I’ll send you a medal.”

  “I’m not—”

  “Yeah, you are. You pulled a Good Samaritan act. You got a mother who died in the past year, you take over your father’s business, you do everything that you ought to do. You even took a rap for your sister.”

  Crap, had the woman spoken to Paul? “What bird told you that?”

  “I don’t know. I have a whole coop of them. Point is, you have a habit of doing whatever you think is the right thing, never mind the consequences. Actually, both of you have the tendency but you have it especially bad.”

  “Thanks, Dr. Phil.”

  As usual, she ignored him. “Thing is, there’s a process none of us can pretend out of existence. Do you know that you’re the fourth father figure in Matt’s life?”

  “No... I—”

  “The first, his real father, was shot, and a good thing, too. Otherwise, I might’ve been up on murder charges myself. The second was his grandfather who was the sweetest man alive until cancer made him the sweetest man dead, and then there was Richard, and we all know how that ended.”

  Something didn’t make sense. “Wait,” Seth said, “you’re talking like you’ve known Matt for a long time but you only now got his case file.”

  Marlene snapped her briefcase shut and leaned on it. Papers crunched under her weight. Her eyes bore into his. “Why do you think Matt came to Spirit Lake?”

  “Alexi said he was following his gut.”

  Marlene snorted. Not the loud braying kind she’d sent his way earlier but a soft huff of understanding. “Following his gut home, more like.

  “I opened a case file on him six years ago when the boy was five, and I worked north of here. I handed it over to the Calgary office when he moved to his grandfather’s. Imagine my surprise when it ended up back on my desk.

  “I’ve always wondered how that boy got along, and when he came back, I wondered why here? I did some digging. It turns out that his mother’s parents lived for the first five years of his life in Spirit Lake. I don’t know all what happened in those years, but I bet his only good days were spent here. What I do know is that he’s gone through hell and back, and then through hell again.”

  There was open fury in the caseworker’s eyes.

  “Question is whether you have the guts to bring him back out of it.”

  * * *

  SETH EXAMINED THE quality of his guts for the rest of the day. He thought while Callie napped and Alexi sponged wallpaper off the living room walls. From the couch, he found himself caught up in the rhythm of her movements, the up-down
of her hand plunging into the bucket of water and rising, water streaming, to the damp wall, her hard dab-dab-dab, lifting away the paper to reveal the painted layer underneath, an ugly yellow like decayed leaves.

  She was beautiful, yes, and everything she did was beautiful. The stretch of her arms, lift of her little finger as she wrung out the sponge... Seth shifted into a more comfortable position on the couch. If he was turned on by a woman peeling off wallpaper, this was serious.

  He closed his eyes and they never opened until the noise from the kids coming home from school woke him. He never slept during the day, and now he’d done it twice in a week. He hauled himself into a sitting position just as all four kids clustered around him. Three faces wide and wondering like he was Santa, and the last and oldest, pained like he was a ghost.

  Enough of that.

  “About time you all got home,” he said, reaching for his crutch. “We need to pick the last of the apples for your lunches tomorrow. And there’s the lawn to rake. Quick, out of school clothes and let’s get at her.”

  Relief washed Matt’s face smooth, and he shot off with the rest of them. Yeah, all of this, too.

  Chores, eating, homework and bedtime meant he and Alexi barely exchanged a half-dozen words until the kids had settled into bed, Callie falling fast asleep beside Seth on the couch. Alexi sat on a chair, gluing eyes onto something with feathery fur, a long corkscrew neck and floppy puppy ears.

  Seth eyed Callie. He didn’t exactly want to have this conversation with her right there but he didn’t have much choice.

  He spoke quickly and quietly. “I guess we might as well hurry up and get married.”

  Alexi jerked, the glue gun slipped and a plop of hot glue fell onto the faux fur. She growled in frustration and left.

  Before Seth had two thoughts about what to do, she returned fast with a bottle of cooking oil. She filled a cotton ball with it and began dabbing at the glued fur.

  Seth waited.

  It wasn’t until the light brown fur was wet and dark with oil that Alexi spoke. “I admit I don’t know much about marriage proposals having only received one in my life but I’m pretty sure yours sucked.”

  He’d reached that conclusion himself. “I can’t exactly go down on bended knee.”

  “You could’ve maybe asked for my attention, done a little introduction to the subject, considered that I was holding a dangerous object—” her long fingers rubbed and teased the damaged fiber “—I dunno, said you’ve loved me, maybe.”

  Love. Remarkable how he could do that much thinking and still get it wrong. “Honestly, I never thought much about love.”

  “This is a marriage of convenience, then.” Alexi gave the fur a vigorous rub.

  “No, marriage is never convenient.”

  This time the rubbing could’ve cleaned the fur clear off.

  “What I mean to say is that marriage is a commitment,” Seth rushed on, “and I’m willing to make that commitment.”

  “Seth!” She gave the stuffie an impatient shake and the puppy head on the spring-loaded neck swayed in contemplation. “You’re the kind of man who’s willing to commit himself to a criminal record on the spur of the moment. Believe me, I don’t question your ability to commit. But you’re doing exactly what Marlene said you do, which is what you think is the right thing and damn the consequences.” By now, she had the head bobbing in fierce agreement.

  Seth chose to sidestep her point. “You were listening to the interview.”

  The puppy head was pointed to the sliding door off the living room. “The porch is wraparound and you two weren’t the quietest.”

  Speaking of quiet... Seth glanced at Callie who frowned and kept on sleeping. “Then you know I was already considering marriage. It had nothing to do with the interview today,” he said in a low voice.

  Alexi matched his voice level. “But what made you decide to pop the question—no, wait, make the statement—tonight?”

  “Because I decided to act on what I want.”

  “Which is what exactly?”

  “To make a life with you and the kids.”

  “No, you marry someone to have a life with her. Not with her kids. You could have a life with the kids without marrying me.”

  Seth opted for silence. Whatever he said next would last forever. He wanted Alexi, more than anything in his life. But she was right. Mel was right. He found commitment easy. He didn’t realize how much his intentions burdened others. How much he judged others for their inability to commit.

  Alexi seemed to interpret his silence as agreement. “No, Seth. I’m not going to marry you. You want to do this for my family, but marriage is to me. Me. And I want us to feel that we belong to each other. I’ve had that in my life. I want it again. I thought I could have it with you. But not like this. Do you understand?”

  Though he didn’t trust that he could say what was in his heart, he gave it a shot. “Listen. I know I started this off badly. But I do want you, Alexi. I do. Is it so wrong that in wanting you I also want to do the right thing?”

  Her hand cupped the puppy head, stilling it. She set the toy on the table. “But is it the right thing? All this could do is complicate the adoption process, and that would build up resentment between you and me. I’m not sure what you’re thinking, Seth. I honestly don’t know.”

  Seth sat back in his seat. What was he doing? He wanted to be with Alexi and her kids but—

  “I’m not doing this just for myself, truth be told.”

  This time, Alexi waited.

  “Mel told me a few weeks back that Dad planned to buy this farm. Mel did it now to set things right. I guess Dad wanted it because he thought I’d like to farm.”

  “Are you saying you want to marry me because your dad would’ve wanted you to be on the farm?”

  “No. I fell off a roof, too. I fell off, wanting more. Like Dad. I lived but the wanting’s still there. You said yourself that you didn’t want to live with regrets. That was why you invited me to stay here. I just feel that not marrying you, not getting on with life, that’s what I will regret.”

  Her face softened. She scooted on her wheeled chair to him, raised his good hand to her cheek. “If we got married, and we couldn’t adopt Matt because of your past, would you regret marrying me?”

  Hadn’t he made himself clear? Then Seth felt a cold certainty, like the kind that comes with knowing a death has occurred. “I think,” he said, “the question is would you?”

  She rested her forehead against his hand, the hard curve of her skull pressing against his knuckles. Her head bowed, she spoke quietly, as in prayer. “I let you stay with us out of respect and gratefulness for what you’ve done for us, and yes, out of a hope for what we might build together down the road. It sucks that Marlene caught us. Still, I don’t regret it. But yes, I feel that if we married and things fell through with Matt, then we would’ve let him down.”

  She lifted her head, her eyes wet, and returned his hand to his knee.

  “I don’t trust that our marriage would survive that.”

  Seth stared at his hand, the undamaged body part that had swung a hammer more than half his life, and little else until now. In the past week, he held hands instead, the hands of everyone in this family except for Matt who had lent his shoulder to lean on. It took all his willpower but he used his hand now to push off from the couch. He swayed a little but he got his crutch squared under him and made it to his bedroom before collapsing on the bed. He loved her.

  Not that it made a difference. Love wasn’t going to solve their problems.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  IT WAS A quiet breakfast, mostly just the clink of bowls and spoons, and Bryn’s occasional gusty sighs brought on by the inescapable prospect of school. Amy was reading a book and Callie sat beside Seth, watching him with one eye, Alexi with the other, such intensity in her expressi
on that Alexi wondered if Callie had overheard last night’s conversation.

  Seth sat sideways to the table to extend his leg with the cast, replacing flashlight batteries, a cup of coffee by his elbow. She’d brewed it strong enough to rev a jet but Seth didn’t seem to mind. It was hard to tell with his chair turned away from where she stood at the kitchen counter, making lunches.

  “Hey, Matt,” Seth said. “You know how to use a hammer?”

  There was a pause. “I understand the concept.”

  Alexi smothered a smile, knew that Seth had to be doing the same. “How about after school we put fresh wire up around the apple trees? Ground’s only going to get harder, and the deer and rabbits will strip the bark off come winter.”

  “Can I help? Why can’t I help? I can hammer, too,” Bryn piped up.

  “You and I,” Seth said, “will put on the wire after Matt hammers in the stakes.”

  Clever. Bryn agreed to anything that teamed him with an adult. Sure enough, Bryn gave a whoop. Matt said nothing, his head down.

  “Matt?” Alexi said. “Sounds like something you could handle.”

  “Okay,” he said in little more than a whisper.

  What was this about? “Matt? You feeling okay?”

  Matt lifted his head. “Sure, Seth Greene. I’d like to help you out.”

  Amy groaned and looked up from her book. “Why do you always say his full name?”

  His gaze travelled past Alexi through the kitchen window. “I call Seth Greene by his full name because saying it makes him real.”

  Seth’s grip on his coffee cup tightened. Good thing it wasn’t made of paper.

  Bryn opened his mouth, no doubt to challenge Matt, but Alexi cut him short. “Bryn, Amy. Time to brush your teeth and get out the door. The bus will be here in exactly eleven minutes.”

  Which gave her time to stuff the lunch bags into their backpacks. As she reached for Matt’s, he took the lunch from her hand. “Here, Mom. I’ll do it.”