by Holly Jacobs
He’d once remarked that he wasn’t sure how they managed to stay married when they never agreed on anything, and later, his mother had pulled him aside and admitted that she frequently took the opposite side to his father’s because it made for a more interesting conversation.
Later, his father had confessed the same thing.
Which made Finn wonder if they truly knew where either stood on any issue, but it also made him realize how well-suited they were for each other.
He missed his parents so badly sometimes he ached with it. He’d pick up the phone to tell them some news, and soon remembered the car accident. Would Bridget’s loss have the same effect on him once some time had passed? Probably.
Maybe that’s why he’d come home less frequently after his parents died. He and Bridget couldn’t recapture this feeling of family...of completeness.
Watching the five Keiths talking—they radiated complete.
That was the perfect word to describe them.
After his parents had died, he and Bridget had been broken. Then she’d formed a family unit with her kids and he felt left out. Not a true part of it.
Could he really form another family unit—just him and the kids? All of a sudden, it seemed too much, too daunting even for him.
He realized that Zoe, Mickey and Abbey were joining in with the Keiths, that they seemed to feel at home. He felt a new wave of guilt.
If he left them here, they’d have this...a big, boisterous family to spend time with, to help care for them.
Filing papers saying he wanted to be the kids’ guardian was easy when he’d been in Buffalo.
Now, tiny doubts crept in.
But try as he might, he couldn’t imagine walking away from his nieces and nephew.
He’d let down Bridget when she’d been sick.
Hell, if he was honest, he’d let her down before that, and now it was too late to fix things with her. But he could fix things with her children.
He looked at them.
Not only could he fix things with them, he would.
And he’d give them the best life possible.
In Buffalo.
* * *
MATTIE WAS QUIET ON their way back to the house.
Zoe, Mickey and Abbey made a break for their rooms as soon as the front door was open. She knew that they enjoyed her parents and her brothers, who were essentially giant kids themselves. But for them, after years of being with just their mom, her family’s Sunday dinners were a bit...not just a bit, but a lot more than they were used to.
She glanced at Finn and wished he’d disappear, as well. But he wasn’t saying goodbye or moving toward his car.
“So, were you coming in, or leaving for Buffalo?” she asked, praying he’d take the hint and leave for the city.
“Since the kids are upstairs, maybe we could talk.”
Mattie sighed. She should have known better than counting on Finn to do what she wanted.
“If it’s about the kids specifically, sure. If it’s about Colton and Sophie’s wedding, I’m in. If you want to talk about the fact you’re suing me? No thanks. You brought the lawyers into this, so we’ll let the lawyers handle it.”
“How are you going to afford a lawyer?” he asked as if it was the first time he’d thought of it.
It probably was the first time he’d thought of it. Finn’s family wasn’t rich, but they’d always been comfortably set. His father used to own a plastics plant outside town. When their parents died, Bridget and Finn sold the plant, and she’d lived off the proceeds.
Her father had worked at the plant. He’d kept the books there for many years and provided a decent life for his family, although not to the same degree as the Wallaces.
“I don’t think that’s for you to worry about. I’ve got money set aside.” Money that she’d saved over all those years from all those jobs. It wasn’t much, but she’d put it aside painstakingly so that when she did find her dream, she’d have money to invest in it. School. A business. Some career. She still wasn’t sure.
Now her brother Rich was an entrepreneur. The family had known that ever since he opened his first lemonade stand when he was seven. Ray was...well, it might be tempting to say politician, because as the mayor, that designation fit. But at heart, he was a public servant. He was someone who always strived to improve their community.
She studied Finn. He was a doctor. A surgeon. Someone who saved lives on a regular basis.
At twenty-nine, Mattie was no closer to discovering her dream. It was a bit discouraging sometimes. And now she’d have to fight tooth and nail for Bridget’s dream—for keeping her friend’s children here in their home. “I’m making calls tomorrow,” she told Finn, “and I’ll see what he or she advises. Until I consult with someone, I don’t think we should discuss it. I’ve seen enough Law & Orders and The Good Wifes to know that I shouldn’t talk to you without a lawyer present.”
“That’s in a criminal case,” Finn argued. “This isn’t that.”
“Feels sort of like it to me.” It felt like a lot of things. Like he was calling her competence into question. Like he didn’t believe she loved the kids enough to stay put. Like he didn’t trust her. “I mean, you’re asking someone to judge my fitness, right?”
“Mattie, I don’t doubt your fitness, I simply think...” He paused.
“You simply think I’m getting antsy. That I’m going to pack up and leave them.” She felt guilty as she said the words because she had felt the urge to pick up and go more than once, but she wouldn’t. It wasn’t that she was only held here by a promise to a friend...she was really here out of love for the kids.
She heard strains of “Waltzing Matilda” in her head. Ray had given her a poster when she was in her teens with all the Australian terms from the song. A Mathilda was an affectionate term for a swag or a swagman’s pack. He camped by a billybong—a pool of water. Jumbuck—a sheep. The squatter or land owner...
She’d proudly hung the poster in her room and loved the sound of the foreign words on her lips. She used to gaze at the image from her bed and dream about the day she could pack her swag and head for the open road.
No, she wasn’t going to throw her Mathilda on her back and leave because it would be convenient for Finn Wallace. “I’m not going anywhere, Finn,” she said as much to herself as to him. “I’ll handle the lawyer’s fees and I’ll fight to keep the kids. So we don’t have anything to talk about.”
“And that’s that?” he asked.
“Are you going to drop the suit?” she countered.
“No.”
“Then that’s that. We’ll let the court figure it out.” What had she expected? That he’d say, never mind. You keep them. No, Finn Wallace was not the kind of man who would give up and back down.
He nodded. “I’ll be back next weekend.”
“Fine. I mean, it will look good for your suit to be here regularly. Right? Busy doctor, taking a break from saving the world to rescue his nieces and nephew from a guardian with wanderlust?”
“Mattie, I’m not—”
“And I’m not interested in the case you’re building for the judge. I’m interested in the kids. I’m interested in what your sister wanted, the kind of life she envisioned for them. What you’re offering them isn’t it. She didn’t want them to be a side note in your busy schedule. She wanted someone who would make them a priority. Someone who would set everything else aside and concentrate on their well-being.”
>
Mattie couldn’t give them as much as Finn financially, but that much she could do. She was doing it. Zoe, Mickey and Abbey were the focus of her life. Everything else was peripheral to them. Mattie might sometimes wish to move on, to see someplace new, to meet new people, but she wouldn’t indulge herself. The kids were what mattered.
“Maybe all my wandering has an upside. You see, I don’t have a career or some grand calling. I have a job. And while you can’t put a career aside to take care of kids, you can put a job aside, especially a job where your brother’s the boss.” She looked directly at Finn. “Goodbye,” she said quietly. “We’ll see you next week.”
She went into the house and softly closed the door behind her. She didn’t want Finn to tell his lawyer that she’d slammed it in his face.
Everything she did from here on out would need to be done with Finn and his lawsuit in mind.
The kids needed her. They needed to know that they were important and not forgotten. They needed to be here in this house that was built on memories and love. They needed to be in this town, surrounded by people who knew them and loved them.
She thought about her family telling stories about her and Bridget. The kids needed that, too. A connection to their mother through stories, through other people who’d known her, who remembered her, who’d loved her.
They needed to go to school tomorrow and be with the same classmates they’d been with since starting school. They needed to spend their allowances at MarVee’s Quarters, to go to story time with Maeve at the library and say hi to Hank Bennington in the diner. They needed to know if they had to run away, they could run as far as JoAnn Rose’s B and B and be safe.
Yes, that’s what she could give them.
She could give the kids Valley Ridge.
Even if it meant clipping her own wings for the next dozen or so years to do it.
CHAPTER FIVE
ON WEDNESDAY, after a horribly depressing meeting with H. T. Aston, attorney-at-law, Mattie glanced at the dashboard clock and noted she only had an hour until school finished. Since it had appeared so precariously close to raining this morning, she’d told the kids that she would pick them up, even though their schools were within walking distance of both the coffee shop and home. She’d managed the meeting with the lawyer by asking Rich to cover for her because she had an appointment about a female thing. It wasn’t a lie...exactly. She did have an appointment, and Mattie was female.
Okay, so it was near enough to a lie and karma had bitten her in the butt, because the meeting had gone horribly. That’s what happened with lies—even near lies—you got bad results.
Her lawyer’s advice kept playing over and over again in her head. She didn’t know what to do. Once the kids got out of school, chaos would reign and she could avoid thinking about it, but now? It was simply too quiet. What she really needed was a sounding board and some advice.
Without planning to, or meaning to, Mattie stopped the car in front of the two-story white house that she had grown up in.
Mattie sat for a moment and stared longingly at her bedroom window. She knew her mom had packed up her childhood toys, books and that “Waltzing Matilda” poster. Her mother had even repainted. But it was still Mattie’s room. The bed she’d slept in since the day her mother had brought her home was still underneath the window. The dresser that she’d kept her clothes in was on the south wall. The quilt that had covered the bed the first time she’d seen the room still covered it.
That first day, she’d been so scared. Her parents were gone, and some stranger had taken her from the hospital and brought her here. She didn’t know it then, but this was supposed to be temporary placement. A foster home.
At four she hadn’t know what a foster family was. She wasn’t sure she’d even really understood that her parents were gone forever. She remembered waking up in the hospital, and a nice lady telling her that there had been a car accident and her parents were in heaven.
Well, she thought she remembered it. In her mind’s eye, she could see a woman with a warm smile sitting next to her and holding her, telling her it was okay. Everything would be all right.
But maybe she just remembered hearing about that day and had turned the retelling into a memory. Sort of like Abbey remembering the now-infamous bath time.
Either way, the Keiths had adopted her and made her their own. The kind woman who’d sat on her bed and reassured her had become a mother to her. Maybe not the mother who’d given birth to her, but the only mother she really remembered.
Her birth parents had loved her, too. She was so young that Mattie didn’t remember much about them, but she knew that. She remembered her mom smiling, handing her a doll.
She’d had the doll when the car accident happened, and it came with her when she moved to the Keiths’ house. Somewhere in her boxes in the attic, that doll was tucked away.
Like the memories of her first family.
Mattie knew she’d been lucky to have found a new family.
Her mother liked to tell the story of her friend Deborah Keller. Mrs. Keller and her husband hadn’t been able to have children of their own. They’d adopted many, and after listening to Mrs. Keller rhapsodize about her growing family, her mom had talked to her dad, and they’d decided to try and foster a child.
Obviously, Mattie didn’t know any of that when she first came home. And she didn’t know that right after they’d brought her home, they’d gotten pregnant with Ray.
Then Rich.
Despite the fact they had two biological children, Mattie had never felt as if she were less loved than her brothers.
Her parents often told her how special she was. Every year on October 15, they celebrated her Homecoming Day, a tradition that was inspired, once again, by Mrs. Keller. Her mother’s friend said everyone had a birthday, but only very special children were chosen, and the day they came home was a day to celebrate.
After the boys were born, her mom told her all the time that she was so grateful to have a daughter. Recalling these details should have lightened her mood, but it didn’t.
Mattie sat in the car lost in the past, wrestling with the present and worrying about the future.
Suddenly, the front door opened and her mom stepped out on the porch and waved at her.
Mind made up, Mattie got out of her car and tried to smile. “Hi, Mom.”
Her mom drew her into a big hug, then inside, away from the gloom. “Honey, aren’t you supposed to be at work? Did you and Rich argue?”
“No on both counts,” she replied, feeling a bit sheepish about lying to her brother.
Rich talked about expanding the coffee shop’s menu and hours, but so far, he was satisfied with the coffees, pastries and closing in the afternoon. He was hot on some new project. Some secret new project. That’s why he’d needed to hire Mattie for Park Perks. He wasn’t talking yet about his next plan, and she’d learned not to ask.
Rich didn’t give up his secrets until he was good and ready.
Except to their mother. If their mom asked, Rich would cave. Grace Keith could ferret information out of any of them, and had a well-honed ability to tell if one of her children was stretching the truth. She gave Mattie that look now. “Mathilda, what’s going on? Rich said you went to see the doctor.”
“That was an exaggeration. But Rich didn’t ask questions because I told him it was a female thing. No man asks questions about female things.”
Her mother didn’t crack a sm
ile.
“I did have an appointment,” Mattie continued, “though not with a doctor, which I knew he’d assume I meant. I had an appointment with a lawyer. I wasn’t going to say anything to anyone, but I need your advice.” More than that, Mattie needed her mother to hug her and assure her that everything would be all right. “But, I don’t want you to say anything to anyone else, Mom.”
Her mother led her to the couch and sat next to her. Then her always prim and proper mother mock spit into her palm, and made a cross over her heart, causing Mattie to smile, just as it always had. The boys used to do that when they were little. Mattie could remember screaming à la Zoe about how gross they were. So much about her little brothers she’d considered annoying or disgusting.
“You can tell me anything, Mattie. You know that. I could sense something was bothering you at dinner on Sunday. When I called yesterday, you told me it was nothing...but I didn’t believe it then and I certainly don’t believe it now.”
“Finn still wants the kids,” she blurted out. Hearing the words spoken out loud eased some of the tension in her.
“Oh.” Her mother digested that fact a moment, then asked, “But you said no?”
“I said no again, the same way I said no when he asked after Bridget’s funeral. So, rather than asking this time, he’s suing me. I mean, a stranger came to my door and handed me the official papers. Finn’s taking me to court. And there’s no way anyone with a lick of sense would give me custody of the kids over Dr. Finn Wallace. He saves lives on a regular basis. Me? I pour a good cup of coffee, and can put an excellent froth on your cappuccino.”
“Mattie...” Her mother didn’t say anything else, but she didn’t need to, because what else could she say? You’ve always been a disappointment to us? Your brothers excelled at everything and you...well, there were a few weeks that you didn’t have detention back in school, and for the most part, you were an unimpressive student. Your father and I worry that you’re never going to find where you belong.