Built to Last (Harlequin Heartwarming)

by Johnson, Janice Kay

  “Yeah, Jennifer and I broke up.”

  Jo’s father sat in the armchair. “And Jo? You don’t have anybody important?”

  No, Dad. You taught us so little about intimacy, neither of us is apparently capable of finding true love.

  “Afraid not,” she said carelessly, then had an odd moment of shame, as if she’d denied something—someone—she shouldn’t. She tried to send a silent message: I’m sorry, Ryan. The moment she did, she frowned, trying to understand the shame. He wasn’t that important. Was he? She’d never let anybody be that important.

  Conversation remained stilted, Boyce talking more easily than either Jo or her father. A feeling of disbelief or perhaps disorientation kept sweeping over her. She’d look across the room at her father listening attentively to something Boyce said and think, He’s a stranger.

  Her more typical anger and resentment and disappointment seemed absent. There had to be some kind of connection before she could feel anything so turbulent.

  Jo stood abruptly. “I’d better check the turkey.”

  An expression of faint relief crossed her father’s face. “You did the cooking?”

  “Hey!” Boyce exclaimed. “I think I’m insulted.”

  Their father cleared his throat. “The last time you had me, your friend, Jennifer, made something rather odd. Spicy, too. Indian, I believe. I didn’t know what to expect today.”

  “Well, Boyce had no idea what to do with the turkey,” Jo said frankly, “so I took over the cooking. Excuse me for a minute.”

  She managed to spend much of the next hour in the kitchen, putting potatoes on to boil, snapping green beans, mashing the potatoes, opening a can of cranberry sauce. Boyce intermittently appeared to help her, and she popped back into the living room a few times to look sociable.

  Ask Dad about Mom, she ordered herself, watching him talk to Boyce about football. Now. Interrupt. Just say, Dad, did Mom ever sing?

  “You a Seahawks fan yet?” her brother asked her.

  “What?” She stared at him, before the sense of his question registered. “Oh. No. I’ve been to a couple of Mariner games, but not the Seahawks. Ryan—” She stopped.

  Her brother raised his brows. “Aha! Ryan…?”

  “A friend. The brother of one of my roommates. He enjoys baseball and I’ve gone to games with him twice. He’s never suggested football.”

  “A friend.” Boyce made the innocuous word sound as clunky and unlikely as a chunk of concrete rolling across the berber carpet. “He’s a friend.”

  “We’re dating.” She shot to her feet. “I’ll bet the green beans are done.”

  “You can run but you can’t hide,” he called after her.

  Cheeks blazing, Jo escaped to the kitchen. She fumed, why was she embarrassed? She dated. So what? She was an adult. And she wasn’t ashamed of Ryan.

  During dinner, she came to the conclusion that she was, once again, chickening out of asking her father about her mother. History was repeating itself. He’d gotten mad at her when she was eight years old because she wanted to talk about Mom, and she was still scared to ask.

  Well, she had a right! But not during dinner, she amended, catching her brother’s eye. He wanted to have his family here, all together. She could give him that much.

  “Your aunt Julia,” her father said unexpectedly, while dishing up a second helping of stuffing. “Do you hear from her?”

  “Yes, she stopped overnight in Seattle last month. We had dinner,” Jo said.

  “She’s well, then?” Finding a place to set the serving bowl back down, he seemed to be careful not to meet Jo’s eyes.

  “She looks wonderful. We should all age so well.”

  “Yeah, she’s hot,” Boyce agreed. “For her age.”

  “Careful.” Their father gave his son a look. “That’s my age you’re talking about.”

  Was that a glint of humor in his eyes? Jo studied him surreptitiously. No. Surely not. He had no sense of humor.

  Dinner was almost over. A pumpkin pie waited on the counter. Jo set down her fork, lifted her chin, and said, “Aunt Julia was telling me that Mom had a pretty successful singing career before you got married.”

  He glanced her way, gaze cool. “I believe she had some attention locally. She played coffeehouses. That kind of thing.” His tone was dismissive. “Recording was out of the question.”

  “Why?” She sounded, and felt, pugnacious. If he could deny that her mother had had any real talent, did that free him from guilt? “If she was that popular, who’s to say she didn’t have what it takes?”

  “She had nodes on her vocal cords,” he said dispassionately. “The doctor recommended that she stop singing.”

  Jo opened her mouth, then closed it. That was why her mother hadn’t sung?

  Not because she couldn’t bear to, but because her voice had begun to scrape her throat?

  “You never told me that.”

  “You never asked.” He pushed away his plate with an air of finality. “That was very good, Jo.”

  “I…thank you.” She looked down at her plate, saw that it was half-full, and used her fork to squish mashed potatoes into a smaller heap.

  “Are you ready for pie?”

  Unrelentingly civil, her father said, “I think I am. Pumpkin?” He swiveled to look toward the counter. “Ah. Good. I’d love some.”

  Frowning fiercely, Jo carried her plate to the sink. Her brother followed suit.

  “Told you so,” he murmured in her ear, before pouring coffee for all of them.

  Jo dished up the pie and carried the dessert plates—well, actually, the saucers that went with the coffee cups but had been pressed into service for pie—to the table.

  She gave them to her brother and father and sat down with her own. Instead of reaching for her fork, she said loudly, “You never liked to talk about her.”

  He lifted his head. “What?”

  “I didn’t ask about Mom because you used to refuse to talk about her.”

  Outwardly she was…not calm, precisely, but composed, determined. Inside, she shook, as scared of him as she’d been when she was a small child.

  His nostrils flared, but that was the only sign that she had disconcerted him even slightly. Instead he wore his usual mask. “I may have found it upsetting when she first died. I don’t recall you asking about her at all.”

  I was afraid to.

  Old resentment tumbled in her chest. How she had always hated that expression, the distant “Do I know you?” way he looked at her.

  For the first time ever, she didn’t back down. “Why didn’t you talk about her? Why did I have to ask? You must have known we were curious about Mom.”

  He carefully set down his fork, as if finally noticing that she was serious.

  “It…didn’t occur to me.” He cleared his throat. “I knew nothing about raising children. I never knew how to talk to you. What to say, or not say.” He looked from one to the other of them, seeming to struggle for the right words. “I’m just not much good at things like that. Or with people at all. I never understood why your mother was interested in me.” He stopped, brows drawing together as if he had surprised himself, or was annoyed with his frankness.

  Jo felt an inner quake she chose to ignore in favor of her familiar anger. “Did you love her?” she challenged him.

  His frown deepened as his irritation became directed at her. “What a ridiculous question. She was my wife.”

  Jo could hardly breathe, so tight did her chest feel. “That doesn’t mean you loved her.”

  “I’m not sure it’s any of your business,” her father said quietly.

  Jo fought an impulse to shoot to her feet. “She is my business. She was my mother, and I know almost nothing about her!”

  “You were old enough to remember her.”

  “But I don’t!” she shouted. “You wouldn’t talk about her, and I forgot her!”

  Somehow she was standing, stumbling over the chair, tears coursing hotly down
her face. Anguish filled her even as a part of her felt ridiculous for the scene she was making. Poor Boyce! that part of her thought, seeing him gape. But the rest of her, the child who blamed her father for so much, remained fiercely focused on him.

  He simply sat, very still, and said, “I didn’t know.”

  “You yelled at me when I asked about her.”

  He closed his eyes. “Talking about her would have made us all sadder.”

  Jo swiped at her cheeks. “I tried to forget her to please you.”

  Bleakly she wondered why she was telling him this. What possible good did it do now?

  He looked up at her, and for just a moment she saw grief in eyes that usually looked remote. “I didn’t know.”

  That was it. He hadn’t known how much his small daughter missed her mother, how desperately she had wanted to cling to her memory, how much she had needed him to help her.

  “I tried to tell you,” she whispered.

  Years seemed to settle on his face, making him less handsome, more worn and human. “I wasn’t a good father,” he said with difficulty. “I’d have done better if I’d had your mother to…nudge me. As it was, I was angry at her for a long time. For leaving us.”

  Boyce spoke up for the first time. “She didn’t choose to die.”

  “Of course not. But I was angry anyway. How could she do this to me?”

  “Stick you with us?” Jo asked harshly.

  This time when he looked at her his eyes appeared blind. So quietly she could barely hear him, he said, “Leave me.”

  Anger left her like helium from a punctured balloon. She sagged into her chair. All this time, and she had never understood that he was only grieving, too.

  “You did love her,” she murmured.

  Face ravaged, he said, “Of course I did. Why would you doubt that?”

  “Because you never said. Because you seemed to forget her so quickly.”

  “I am not a man who expresses emotion easily.”

  “Or willingly,” Boyce muttered.

  His mouth twisted. “It may even be that I don’t feel what other people do. But in my own way, I did love your mother. I have…never considered replacing her.”

  They sat silent for a long moment. Her father was the first to speak. Pushing back from the table, he said, “Perhaps I should go now.”

  “No!” Boyce protested. “No. Please, Dad. Let’s have pie and coffee. Don’t go.”

  “No.” Jo drew a ragged breath. “No, don’t go, Dad.”

  He hesitated, then inclined his head. One by one, awkwardly, they all reached for forks or coffee cups.

  “I am dating Ryan,” Jo heard herself say. “My roommate’s brother. He has children.”

  Her father raised his brows; her brother looked startled.

  “They live with his ex, but they’re with him for Thanksgiving.”

  “You’re not thinking of marrying him, are you?” her brother asked.

  “No, of course not!” she denied, too vehemently. “He hasn’t even asked.”

  “Is he going to?” Boyce asked.

  “I don’t know.” She felt herself frowning. “We’re not that far along. No. He won’t anyway. I told him I wasn’t interested in marrying.”

  “You sound like Jennifer.” Her brother looked at her with near dislike.

  Stung by the comparison—what did she have in common with his tattooed, pierced, sneering ex-girlfriend?—Jo snapped, “You don’t know anything about it.”

  Boyce snorted. “And they say it’s men who are afraid of commitment.”

  Now their father watched them, head turning, as if he were compelled to observe a particularly bizarre match where opponents lobbed words instead of balls.

  “I’m not afraid of anything! I just don’t want to be trapped, like—” Stunned, she bit off the rest. Trapped like her mother, who had not sacrificed a glorious career? Like Aunt Julia, who had never tried marriage herself, insisted all married women were?

  Her brother’s eyes narrowed. “Like who?”

  “My career is important to me.”

  “Uh-huh. And that has…what to do with anything?”

  “It’s different for women.” She glared at him. “They still do most of the cooking and housework and childcare. They’re the ones who sacrifice in a marriage.”

  Infuriatingly, he laughed. “You’ve been listening to Aunt Julia. I did most of the cooking, not Jennifer. She was awful at housework.”

  “Most men aren’t like you.”

  “This Ryan wants a wife so he’ll have a housekeeper?” Boyce shrugged. “Good decision, then. Marrying him would be stupid.”

  “Ryan doesn’t…!” Jo let out an angry huff of breath. Her brother was being deliberately obtuse. Anyway, what difference did it make if her brother got it?

  She turned in her seat to face her father. “Did Mom want children?”

  For a moment, his face softened. “Yes. She was so excited when she was expecting you, and then Boyce.”

  Tears stung Jo’s eyes. She blinked, trying to stop them stillborn. Inside, she welled with both intense grief and exultation. Mom had wanted her!

  Her voice sounded scratchy when she asked, “Did you want kids, too?”

  “Once I met your mother, I assumed we’d have them. It seemed…not my business.” He frowned. “I mean that only in the sense that I thought women took care of children. I suppose, in a way, I had the attitude of another generation. I was the breadwinner, she was the homemaker. I was completely unprepared—”

  He didn’t have to finish. For her death, he would have said. To braid your hair for school, or do multiplication flash cards with you, or to nurse you through chicken pox.

  None of them said more about her. They ate their pie, and Dad insisted on helping clean the kitchen. Working with the two men felt extraordinarily awkward to Jo. “Excuse me,” she said too often, being careful not to bump either or intrude on their tasks. They did the same, she noticed, as if all of them were on their best behavior.

  Yet it was nice, too. Jo couldn’t remember the last time they’d all been in the same kitchen. Probably not since she’d roared out of the house when she was eighteen.

  Today, the air was cleared. Even a new beginning made, although she couldn’t imagine ever being close to her father. She had too many bitter memories. Would forever suffer from bafflement that he could have been so unaware of the needs of his children.

  Still, something had started today. She was washing dishes, he was drying them right beside her while Boyce worked on the turkey carcass, and she felt no anger at all, no desire to escape.

  When he finally did leave, she and Boyce walked him out to his car. Fog had rolled in, swirling down the steep hill from the bay, muffling their footsteps and voices.

  “Thanks for coming,” Boyce said.

  Their father looked across the roof of his car at Jo. “I have things of your mother’s,” he said abruptly. “In a box. Some jewelry, some pictures. I’ll send them…if you’d like them.”

  This time, she let the tears fall. “Yes.” Her smile wavered. “I’d love them. Thank you.”

  Her father nodded, said, “Good night,” and got into his car. Side by side, Jo and Boyce stood watching until it disappeared into the fog.

  Then her brother laid a comforting arm over her shoulders and turned her toward the stairs up to his apartment. “You worked miracles, Josie,” he said, using Aunt Julia’s pet name for her.

  She smiled, sniffled and said, “I did, didn’t I?”

  CHAPTER TEN

  “I CALL THE FRONT SEAT!” Tyler called, racing ahead of his sister.

  “Oh, yeah, right!” she snapped. “It’s my turn and you know it.”

  Going down the walk behind his children, Ryan grimaced. He was getting sick of this particular battle, waged every time they headed for the pickup. He’d mercifully forgotten their power struggles, a gauzy curtain having settled over his memory.

  Ahead, Melissa shouldered her little
brother aside. He howled with rage and clung to the door handle.

  Wearily, Ryan said, “Enough! Okay, who rode in the front yesterday?”

  “You did!” his daughter exclaimed in triumph.

  “You did!” Tyler argued. “When we went to see—” He stopped, eyes widening.

  “We went to the movie yesterday afternoon,” Melissa reminded him with an air of superiority. “Last night, you rode in front when we went to Pagliacci’s. So there.”

  Tyler sagged.

  Ryan put Melissa’s suitcase in the back, closed the tailgate and canopy door, and came forward to unlock. He laid a hand on Tyler’s shoulder, but the boy didn’t even look up.

  All the way to the airport, Tyler slumped in back with his chin resting on his chest, while Melissa, once settled with a wriggle of satisfaction, fell into a brooding silence, her face turned away from Ryan.

  Why did Wendy have to move? he thought viciously. Things had been bad enough before, when they’d traded the kids every few days. This felt like a form of death to him, even though he knew rationally that they’d be back in a month for the Christmas holidays. From their unhappy silence, he guessed they felt the same. They’d both been crabby since they got up that morning.

  Worse, he kept wondering whether they’d missed their mother at all, or whether they were dreading going home. Tyler, more open than his sister, had said enough that Ryan knew he wasn’t happy in Denver. Melissa hadn’t talked as much. She’d never altogether relaxed with Ryan. When he asked how she and her mom were getting along, all she would say was a bright, “Fine!” that he wasn’t sure he believed. Neither of them spoke about their mother the way he’d expected, the “mom said this, did this, made me do this” kind of thing.

  He kept remembering Wendy’s reluctance to have children at all. She’d wanted to wait, even though when he suggested they start a family they had been married five years. “I’ll be fat!” she’d wail, or make a pretty moue and complain, “You know once we have a baby we’ll never be able to go out again.”

  As if he cared. He was a family man. He’d always wanted children, and he didn’t much like to party. Wendy had been good for him in that respect, forcing him to be more sociable than came naturally. But after five years, he’d been ready. He looked forward to wondering smiles and building blocks and bikes with training wheels.