Built to Last (Harlequin Heartwarming)

by Johnson, Janice Kay

This was her best chance—and she was scared to take it.

  “Why are you just standing there?” Emma asked from the stairs. “That’s Ryan’s truck out there, you know.” She craned her neck and peered out the narrow sidelight. “Another car’s behind him and can’t get by. He’s starting forward. Hey! He isn’t waiting for you!”

  Jo tore her gaze from the package. “He’s probably just going around the block.”

  “Why are you standing there?”

  “I just noticed the package that must have come today, from my father.”

  “Oh. Yeah. It was on the doorstep. I brought it in. I’m sorry, I forgot to tell you about it.” Emma crossed the entry hall and picked it up. “What’s in it?”

  “I…don’t really know.” With shocking ferocity, Jo wanted to snatch it out of her hands.

  “It’s kind of heavy.” Mouth pursed, Emma shook it experimentally. “Like it’s books or papers or something?” she said in disappointment.

  “Photos and letters, maybe.” Unless…was there any chance her mother had kept a journal? One in which she wrote about the birth of her daughter, the dreams she’d held for her?

  Oblivious to her turmoil, Emma asked, “Do you want me to take it upstairs and put it in your room?”

  Jo stole an agonized glance outside. Ryan’s truck hadn’t reappeared, but it would any moment. She couldn’t open the package now. He’d be hurt if she blew him off and didn’t go to the airport with him to pick up Melissa and Tyler.

  “Sure,” she said, forcing a smile. “If you don’t mind.”

  Emma shook her head. “Will you show me if your dad sent something cool?”

  Jo nodded, caught a flash of red out of her peripheral vision and said, “I’ve got to go. Thanks, Emma. I’ll see you.” She grabbed a coat and fled out the front door just as he pulled up again between rows of parked cars.

  “Didn’t you hear me?” he asked when she got in. “I had to go around the block.”

  “I’m sorry.” Jo fastened her seat belt. “I was on my way out the door when I saw that a package had come from my father.”

  He glanced at her sidelong as he maneuvered around a double-parked car. “Did you open it?”

  “No, I didn’t have time. Besides, I didn’t want to just peek,” she confessed. “You know?”

  He reached out and squeezed her hand. “Yeah. Some things are meant to be savored.”

  Or cried over, Jo thought. She definitely wanted to be alone for this.

  “Excited?” she asked, deliberately distracting him.

  His grin flashed, as boyish as his son’s. “You can’t tell?”

  “Oh, I kinda got the idea.” She looked ahead at busy traffic as they neared the freeway on-ramp. “I hope they don’t mind me being there.”

  “They liked you. Melissa asked about you the last time we talked.”

  “Really.” Jo tried to hide her extreme skepticism about his implication that his almost-teenage daughter was dying to see her. Melissa had probably been hoping her dad would say he wasn’t seeing that woman anymore.

  “She wondered if you’d decided to keep that dream-catcher. Because if you did, she thought we should buy one for Emma for Christmas.” His voice easily mimicked his daughter’s. “Because it’s, like, the perfect present for Emma.” He resumed normal tones. “She wished she’d thought of it.”

  Surprised and moved, Jo said, “She did help me pick it out. Maybe it should be from the two of us.”

  “I think she’d like that.” He was silent for a time, frowning ahead at a slowdown near the Mercer exit. “Wow,” he said suddenly. “Half of me is excited that they’re coming, and the rest of me is already in mourning because the visit is only for ten days and then I won’t see them for almost six months. This visitation thing is awful. Sometimes I think it might be easier on all of us if I just got out of their lives.”

  Jo protested, “You know that isn’t true.”

  “Isn’t it?” he asked savagely, hands wrapped so tightly around the steering wheel she expected the plastic to crack. “Yeah, maybe it’s good they know their father cares. But do you think they want to get on an airplane every couple of months and try to figure out how to accomplish a midair change of loyalties?”

  “If I could have seen my mother, too,” Jo said with absolute certainty, “I would have wanted to no matter what. Even if it was only for two weeks at a time.”

  Ryan’s face changed. “Jo! I’m sorry. I’m whining, and there are plenty of people with worse problems than mine.”

  She bit her lip. “Just…remember. Your kids do want both parents.”

  His hand caught hers, squeezed and didn’t let go. “Yeah. Okay.”

  They didn’t say much more during the drive to Sea-Tac, south of the city and Boeing Field. Jo felt guilty. She should have listened, not belittled his misery. But she also believed with all her heart that Melissa and Tyler needed him. All she had to do was remember Tyler’s unhappiness when he talked about the move and wishing he could live here in Seattle.

  Melissa and Tyler’s flight was on time. An attendant walked the two kids out and smiled when she saw them rush to their dad’s outstretched arms.

  They didn’t notice Jo, standing back, until they’d started talking excitedly about Christmas and the presents they’d brought and had he put up lights yet and decorated the tree and…

  “Oh.” Tyler saw her. His grin didn’t falter. “Hi! I didn’t know you were coming.”

  Jo smiled. “I was here to keep your dad from pacing a rut in the carpet while he waited.”

  Behind her father’s back, Melissa rolled her eyes, but in a friendly way. “You should have seen Tyler! He kept whining, ‘When will we get there?’ until I thought I’d scream!”

  “Yeah, well, they’re a matched pair,” Jo said, while Ryan listened to Tyler. “What a pretty sweater, Melissa.”

  The eleven-year-old glanced down. The loosely woven, fluffy aqua sweater was paired with a tank top in the same color beneath it. “Oh. Thanks. Dad sent it for my birthday.”

  “Really?” Jo exaggerated her surprise. “He can pick out clothes for a girl?”

  Hostility flashed briefly. “Hasn’t he bought you anything yet?”

  Jo didn’t let her smile waver. “Not clothes. I haven’t had a birthday since your dad and I met.”

  “Oh.” Melissa looked down, her cheeks reddening. “Dad, um, actually always buys me cool stuff. Mom doesn’t think so. She likes—I don’t know—different things.” She smoothed the sweater. “Since we were coming here, I thought…”

  Loyalties, switched midair. Jabbed by pity, Jo reached out and hugged Ryan’s daughter, letting her go before she could stiffen or pull away.

  “That was a nice thought,” she said quietly, before turning to Ryan. “What say we go get the baggage?”

  The kids continued to chatter while they waited for their suitcases to appear and then on the drive home about Christmas and the flight and how Mom wouldn’t let them open presents from her before they left.

  Tyler’s excitement briefly dimmed. “Mom seemed really sad when she said goodbye. Didn’t she, ’Lissa?”

  His sister frowned. “I guess. Maybe because we won’t be home for Christmas.”

  “Having your parents be divorced stinks sometimes, doesn’t it?” Ryan asked. “I wish there was a way we could both have you at important times.”

  They nodded, subdued for a mile or two. Then Tyler burst out, “Did you put the lights up yet, Dad? Huh? ’Cuz I could help if you didn’t.”

  “Oh, like you could help,” his sister scoffed. “You couldn’t reach anything.”

  Ryan grinned at Jo, who was laughing. Had she and Boyce bickered nonstop like this? Had she considered it her duty to squelch her little brother at every opportunity? Maybe sometime she’d ask him.

  When she told him what was in the package from their father.

  Remembering that it waited at home, she felt hot and cold. She wished she hadn’t promised to have di
nner at Ryan’s, that she could go home, sit cross-legged on the bed in her room with the box in front of her and slowly peel back the flaps. At the very same time, she wished that she wasn’t going home tonight at all, or better yet that the box of her mother’s things was still a promise and not a reality waiting like a slow-ticking bomb in her room.

  Why had so much had to change so fast? she wondered in sudden panic. Why couldn’t she have gone along the way she was, content to hate her father? Happy with the independent life she’d chosen?

  How had she come, in a dizzying four months, to pitying both her father and—of all people!—Aunt Julia?

  Could she possibly be considering marriage? Not just marriage, but one that would make her a stepmother, even if only for a month or two a year?

  Jo made herself take slow, even breaths. She wasn’t married yet. No need to freak.

  A deep rumble of laughter snatched at her, like a lifeline tossed to a woman fallen overboard. She turned her head, seeing the lines of amusement that carved Ryan’s craggy face, the warmth in his gray eyes as he looked at his son, and her heart cramped.

  Yes, she was thinking of marrying him. Scary as the thought was, she’d come to the point where she couldn’t imagine not doing it.

  However petty it made her, she just wished he didn’t have children, that loving him wasn’t so complicated.

  LOCKING THE FRONT DOOR behind her and turning off the outdoor Christmas lights, Jo pretended she didn’t hear someone moving quietly in the kitchen. Helen or Kathleen. She didn’t want to talk to either, be offered a cup of herb tea, hear about their plans or even worries. Now that she was home, she felt as if she were being tugged upstairs by a force stronger than her fears.

  Open me, the box whispered, for her ears alone.

  She tiptoed to the stairs and made it halfway up before she saw movement below out of the corner of her eye. The deep auburn hair was unmistakable. It was Helen, who stopped, looked up with a face somehow distorted—and withdrew, surreptitiously, back into the kitchen.

  Jo hesitated, her hand on the banister, until she understood that Helen had looked the way she did because she’d been crying. Her face had been blotchy and puffy.

  Jo fought her longing to go on to her room and the magical, terrifying Pandora’s box that awaited her.

  Then she turned and went back downstairs, letting her footsteps fall naturally.

  Helen was just turning off the lights in the kitchen. “Oh!” she said with false surprise. “Jo. You’re home.”

  Jo hovered in the doorway. “Are you all right?”

  Quiet for a moment, Helen stayed back in the darkness. “Yes.” She sounded sad but calm. “I’m fine. Truly, Jo. Just…suffering one of those little blips that widows do. I’m ready to go to bed.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Yes.” Head high, Helen came toward her, not trying in the light coming from the hall to hide the ravages left by tears.

  Jo backed out of the doorway. “I was just going up to bed myself.”

  “Did you lock?”

  Jo nodded.

  Helen passed her and started up the stairs, her back proudly straight. Following, Jo said, “Helen?”

  Her housemate stopped at the top of the stairs without turning. “Yes?”

  Before she could change her mind, Jo asked, “Do you ever regret having married Ben? Given how hard his illness was, and how sad you are now?”

  Helen turned at last and looked at her, but blindly. Her face crumpled. “No.” She drew a ragged breath. “No. Never. Not for a single moment.” As tears wet her cheeks again, she seemed to focus on Jo with understanding and even compassion. “The joys are worth the sorrows, Jo. I promise. They are.”

  Jo nodded jerkily, wishing she could believe this grieving woman with her whole heart.

  Helen went straight to the bathroom, then stopped in front of the door. “Do you mind?” she asked.

  “No, go ahead. I’m going to…read for a while before I go to sleep anyway,” Jo lied.

  She closed her door and turned, for a moment not seeing the parcel. Panic and fury swept her. What had Emma done with it? She’d wake her up! She’d…

  There it was, neatly centered on her desk. Jo’s knees briefly buckled. How ridiculous, to get so emotional. If she’d had to wait until tomorrow, what difference would it make? She’d waited twenty years, hadn’t she?

  She took scissors from her desk drawer and the package to her bed, switching on the reading lamp that sat beside it. Jo hesitated, then tugged her sweater over her head. Pajamas first. She might as well be comfortable.

  In a sacky T-shirt and flannel pj bottoms, feet bare, she settled in the middle of the bed. With the scissors, Jo neatly slit the tape, set down the scissors and took a deep breath. Her hands were shaking, she noticed with distant wonder, as she lifted the cardboard flaps.

  On the very top lay a bundle of photos secured with a rubber band. Breath shallow, Jo picked it up and found herself looking at her mother.

  A very young mother. Rhonda Dubray looked no more than nineteen or twenty. She wore shorts, a halter top and sandals. Long dark hair, parted down the middle, was pulled into a ponytail. Arms outstretched, she was balanced precariously on one foot on a driftwood log on a beach. Her laughing face looked uncannily like the one Jo saw every morning in the bathroom mirror.

  In the next snapshot, she was younger yet. Jo had seen this one, in her aunt’s photo albums. In it the sisters, dressed in Sunday best, leaned against each other, arms around each other’s waists, heads tilted so they touched as they smiled at the camera. Rhonda was half a head taller than her slightly younger sister.

  Other casual photos followed: Jo’s mother playing a piano, her gaze fixed intently on the sheet music; holding an armful of cut roses, as if surprised coming in from the garden; and singing, clearly on stage at a coffee shop. In that one she was sitting, guitar balanced on her knees, the microphone close to her mouth. Her hair flowed loose and she wore some filmy white shirt with embroidery. Jo peered closely. A Mexican peasant blouse. Her mother looked like a young Joan Baez or Carly Simon.

  A wedding photograph, in which Jo’s absurdly young parents posed stiffly, her father in a dark suit and tie, her mother with a circlet of flowers around her head and wearing a simple white dress. The young man in the picture stared straight ahead, as if self-conscious, while the young woman’s head was tilted just enough to let her look at her new husband’s face.

  Jo didn’t start to cry until she reached the photo of her mother holding a baby, apparently in the hospital. Above the standard-issue faded blue gown, her dark hair was tangled around a face that glowed with delight and love as she gazed down at the infant in her arms.

  Me, Jo realized. That was me.

  She had an album on her shelf that she’d taken when she left home, one that held her school pictures as well as some her parents had taken of her and Boyce when they were little. A few included her mother.

  But not this one. She had never seen this one.

  Others followed of her mother with Jo at home, first as a baby, then as a toddler. There were lots of these, as if her father had been as eager as any new parent to freeze forever the stages of his small daughter’s life. Tears wet her cheeks and kept falling as she understood that her parents had been proud. Of her.

  Boyce came into their lives. A snapshot showed a three-year-old Jo making a horrible face at her new baby brother while her mother laughed in the background. Jo’s first day of kindergarten was immortalized in a slightly different pose than the one in her album—but there she stood, small for her age, hair pigtailed so tight it must have hurt, legs skinny beneath a red dress she knew her mother had sewed.

  How funny. Jo frowned in space. She’d forgotten that, but suddenly she had a vision of herself standing beside her mother, who was working on her sewing machine. Jo was watching the needle flash, up and down, up and down, as the fabric she had picked out slipped beneath it. Mom had made a pinafore, too, but Jo had
refused to wear it the morning of kindergarten. Mom hadn’t minded. She’d said, “You look so pretty in red, I don’t blame you.”

  Her voice was as clear as if she were standing beside the bed right now. She sounded…affectionate, proud.

  She’d walked Jo to school that first day, all the way to her classroom door. Then, when Jo froze outside, suddenly scared to go in, Mom had given her a gentle, loving push.

  Other images followed, other clips Jo’s memory had stored until this day. A fall she’d taken from a swing set, and the fright in her mother’s eyes as she helped her up and brushed her off and took her home to bandage her scrapes. A fight with Boyce, and Mom’s disappointment in her, more effective than any raised voice. A piano lesson, her sitting on the bench beside her mother, Mom gently guiding her hands. They’d owned a piano, Jo suddenly knew, an old-fashioned upright. Her fingers recalled it, the rosewood cover she lifted, the faintly yellowing ivory keys, the faded linen runner that went over the top. What had happened to it? she wondered. It disappeared from her memory along with her mother, and must have gone about the same time. Had her father sold it because it reminded him too much of his dead wife?

  But she didn’t linger on the piano, because she heard a song, low and haunting. Nothing she knew or could put words to, just a beautiful, lilting impression. Her mother sitting on the edge of her bed, tucking her in. Singing to her.

  The box held letters, some of which she read, some of which she kept to read another day. A small book labeled My Child held proud notes of when Josephine Dubray had smiled and rolled over and sat up and walked. Small versions of her school kindergarten and first-grade pictures were glued inside. The entries ended there; nothing had been written for second grade, not even her teacher’s name. Jo didn’t remember it, either. Her mother had died in August that year.

  A jewelry box held a few good necklaces and bracelets, some of which pinged at her memory and others of which weren’t familiar. But with them were her mother’s wedding and engagement rings, gold, the small ruby flanked with tiny diamonds a testament to their youth and optimism when Jo’s parents said, “I do.” Jo slipped the rings on her finger, and found they fit perfectly.