by Arlene James
He leaned a hip against the old-fashioned, chrome-edged counter and folded his arms, facing Abby. “Should’ve told everyone sooner,” he admitted. “Hard thing for a soldier who isn’t one anymore.”
Abby came around the worktable and enveloped him in a hug. “I’m sure glad you came home,” she said.
Dan could obviously tell that she was speaking but couldn’t know what she was saying, so he looked to Becca. She told him out loud what Abby had said so that Abby would know she hadn’t made herself understood.
“She’s glad you came home.”
Dan smiled and hugged Abby back. “Me, too.”
Just then Jemmy bolted into the room in her bare feet, wearing shorts and a T-shirt. “Mr. Dan, Mr. Dan! I gots a turtle in a box in the yard. Come see.” As she spoke, she ran out onto the closed-in porch that served as a second bedroom. Becca called her back into the room, while Abby dabbed at her eyes with the hem of her apron.
“Honey, what have I told you about speaking to Mr. Dan?”
Jemmy looked up at Dan and asked politely, “Want to see my turtle? Please.”
Dan smiled. “Sure.”
“But not until you get some shoes on,” Abby instructed.
Jemmy bolted for the porch again, crying, “They’re under the bed. Mr. Dan can help me.”
Becca caught her by the shoulders and turned her back to face Dan. “I’ll help you with your shoes, but you have to remember to look Mr. Dan in the face when you speak around him.”
“How come?” Jemmy wanted to know, not for the first time. Becca had always told her that it was the polite thing to do, but this time Dan went down on his haunches next to Jemmy and told her the truth.
“I have to read the words on your lips because I can’t hear.”
She checked briefly to be sure his ears were where they should be and repeated her question. “How come?”
“A big boom damaged the nerves in my ears. It was so loud it knocked me out of the room, which was underground, and put me to sleep for a long time.”
“How long?”
“Two days.”
Jemmy’s eyebrows went up. “How come you were under the ground in a room? Was it a storm? Sometimes we might go to the cellar if a bad storm comes.”
“I was looking for bombs.” He glanced up at Becca and added dryly, “Found some.”
She bit her lip to keep from laughing, because it really wasn’t funny.
“Why were you doing that?” Jemmy wanted to know.
“It was my job,” he said simply. “I was in the military.”
“What’s miltry?”
“A soldier,” Becca explained.
Eyes rounding, Jemmy blurted to Dan, “You’re a soldier?”
“I was,” Dan answered. Then he looked up at Becca and said, “Now I’m a carpenter.”
“Like Jesus!” Jemmy announced importantly.
Knowing he’d missed that, Becca waved his attention back to her daughter.
“What?”
Jemmy said, “Jesus was a carpenter. He made chairs and crosses and stuff.”
Dan smiled. “That’s right.”
Abby suddenly shoved a paper towel full of pieces of cabbage at Becca, saying thickly, “Ya’ll go on and tend that turtle while I get my bread in.”
Knowing that she was anxious to have a good cry in private on Dan’s behalf, Becca nodded and turned Jemmy toward the porch. Dan rose and followed.
Like the rest of the house, the porch-become-bedroom was cramped and faded, much as it had been when Cody had slept here on the full bed as a boy. Dan took that all in before turning to pay indulgent attention to Jemmy who babbled about her turtle while Becca wrestled shoes onto her feet.
Those shoes would have to be replaced soon, as Jemmy was outgrowing them, but Becca couldn’t worry about that now. It was a beautiful spring Sunday in Oklahoma, and the world felt bright and glorious, especially as Jemmy blossomed and preened for Dan.
It struck Becca then how much her little girl missed her father. John Odem did his best to fill in, but it wasn’t the same as having a daddy to poke twigs at your turtle and smile as you tried to impress him with what a responsible pet owner you were. Becca had been too busy to notice how hungry her children were for male attention, but as always, God had seen the need. And sent Dan Holden.
Chapter Five
Crouched over a patch of sand with Jemmy, Dan enjoyed the sunshine as he watched the little girl feed bits of cabbage to her turtle. He felt lighter somehow, breathed easier, as if a weight had been lifted from his chest.
Apparently a previous owner had written the turtle’s name, Buddy, on its back with a black marker, and Jemmy had suffered through weeks of worrying that the writer would return to claim the animal. During that time the Kinders had posted a sign in their store window, much as people often did for stray cats and dogs. Dan had smiled when he’d seen it.
Found—Turtle
Doesn’t answer to the name Buddy.
Jemmy petted the hard shell, watching with satisfaction as her silent companion munched at the pale green hunks of cabbage. Turtles had always struck Dan as stoic creatures, but every time Jemmy brushed her fingertips over the turtle’s back little Buddy closed his eyes, looking for all the world like a turtle that had found a piece of turtle heaven. Maybe he himself had been a little bit the way he’d imagined turtles to be: slow, unemotional, silently enduring a lonely existence. Now, for some reason, he felt a kinship with this little fellow.
Dan wondered where the turtle’s original owner might be. Surely anyone in the area would have seen Jemmy’s sign. There wasn’t another grocery store for miles around, and a turtle couldn’t have traveled far on its own. Could it? Maybe he and Buddy were more alike than he even knew.
Have you been around the world, Buddy? Dan wondered. Did you travel far away and somehow find your way home again, like me?
He felt a tap on his shoulder and looked up at Becca.
“Dinner’s ready.”
He nodded and stood to watch as Jemmy carefully transferred Buddy to his cardboard box house with holes cut in the sides. She placed the box, with a bed of yellow grass and a large bowl of water inside, beneath the shade of an oak tree.
Becca waved Jemmy forward, then followed her into the house. She said something to the child, who nodded and rushed on into the kitchen. “You’ll want to wash up, too,” Becca said, turning to him. “You can use the kitchen sink as soon as Jemmy’s done.” She followed the child, presumably to be sure that she washed her hands sufficiently.
The instant he stepped up into the house, a mélange of rich, complex aromas tickled his nostrils and made his stomach rumble in anticipation. While he waited for his turn at the sink, he looked around the back porch. It had been sealed off with heavy plastic sheeting and plywood to make a bedroom, with a metal rod hung across one end for a closet. Atop that rod and the odds and ends of clothing that hung from it lay a battered old tan felt cowboy hat that Dan recognized as belonging to Cody, a memento of the boy he had been. That hat said to Dan that the Kinders were irrefutable proof that happiness wasn’t about things or money—not that he’d ever really believed that. Still, he’d always had nice things and plenty of money to buy more if he needed or wanted. He had good parents and wouldn’t wish for any others, but he couldn’t help feeling a little envious of Cody at the moment. How simple and fulfilling his life must have been.
Simple, fulfilling and short, Dan reminded himself as Becca beckoned him. While he washed up, she helped Abby carry food to the table. With his hands clean and dry, he moved out into the space that served as the dining area. It was nothing more really than an awkward corner at the end of the living room where doors from all the other rooms in the house—bedroom, bath and kitchen—could swing open without colliding, but Abby had managed to tuck a round, claw-foot table and a number of mismatched chairs into it. Obviously no doors could be opened when the table was occupied, so the kitchen door had been removed from its hinges. John Ode
m was already sitting at the table when Dan arrived, with CJ propped up by pillows and tied with a dish towel to a chair beside him. A space equal to the boy’s reach had been cleared on the tabletop. Deprived of more interesting utensils, he smacked the table repeatedly with his hands.
John Odem said something and pointed to a chair across the table from him, but Dan was uncertain if it was meant for him or someone else until all the females moved to other chairs. He waited until Abby, Becca and Jemmy were seated before pulling out the chair and sitting down. He positioned himself and scooted up to the table. The cushion felt a little lumpy and uncertain, but he didn’t let that bother him—until he looked up and saw that everyone was staring at him.
Suddenly Abby glared at John Odem. Obviously scolding him, she shook her finger, speaking furiously. Unsure what was going on, Dan looked at Becca.
“John Odem’s a great prankster,” she explained with a wry smile, “and this time he meant to pull a trick on you, but the joke’s on him.” She moved her gaze to John and told him what Abby apparently had not.
“Didn’t hear?” John said. “How could he not hear that?”
Abby apparently spelled it out for him. John’s mouth gaped open so wide that Dan began to fear his upper denture would fall out. Then John smacked his knee and began to laugh. The old man howled until tears ran in rivulets down his craggy face.
It certainly wasn’t the sort of reaction Dan had expected, but it all began to make sense when Becca said, “There’s a whoopee cushion under the seat pad of your chair.”
A whoopee cushion. Dan rolled onto one thigh and thrust a hand beneath the pad tied to the chair, extracting a small, collapsed bladder with a nozzle on one end. John Odem went off again, and this time Dan joined him.
Abby rose from her seat and snatched the thing from Dan’s hand, her face red with embarrassment. She took the carving knife to it, sawed right through the rubber, and as she worked she lambasted poor old John Odem. Dan could see her jaw working but not what she was saying. Whatever it was, John took it all in stride, laughing at himself as easily as he’d laugh at anyone else.
The situation was pretty darn funny, and laughter, it turned out, seasoned a meal to perfection.
Dan shook his head regretfully, looking down at the easy chair John had invited him to take after turning on a basketball game on the TV. “Put me right to sleep,” he explained. Catching the wave of Abby’s hand from the corner of his eye, he turned to her.
“We don’t mind if you take a little nap, Dan.”
He smiled. “You ought not, after all that good food.” He patted his middle.
“Well, then, stay and take a snooze,” Abby insisted.
“Have to go, but thank you.” He walked across the room and kissed her cheek, explaining, “I talk to Mom on Sunday. She’ll worry if I’m late.”
Abby nodded and patted his shoulder. “You go on then, son, but you come back again real soon.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
She turned and spoke to Becca, who ducked her head and moved to open the front door for him. He wasn’t certain what had been said until they stepped out onto the stoop and she pulled the door shut.
“I was told to show you out.” He smiled his understanding. She tilted her head to one side. “Can I ask you something?” He nodded. “How do you ‘talk’ to your mom?”
“E-mail. Chat online.”
“Oh. Of course. So you don’t have a phone, but you do have a phone line.”
“For the computer and security system. For emergencies.”
“That’s good.”
He wrinkled his nose and admitted, “My parents worry.”
She smiled. “I understand.”
“I know.” He swept his gaze over her face and said simply, “Thank you.”
Her eyes held his for a long time before they slid away. “It wasn’t as hard to tell Abby and John as you thought it would be, was it?”
“No.” Now that it was out in the open, he found that he was glad.
She wrapped her arms around herself as if suddenly chilled, and he felt the impulse to put his own arm around her, pull her close to his side. He looked away to gather himself, but her clean scent lingered. When he looked back, Becca asked, “Will I see you tomorrow?”
He hadn’t worked the past Monday, figuring she needed some peace and quiet on her day off. Besides—and it was the oddest thing—as comfortable as her company often was, she made him uneasy, too.
“Summer’s coming,” she pointed out when he hesitated. She didn’t have to say that the heat would make her and the kids miserable and the outside work unbearable for him.
He didn’t hesitate any longer. “I’ll be there.”
She brightened. “Good.”
He saluted her with a little wave and went down the steps, pausing at the bottom to remove his keys from his pocket. It had been a lovely afternoon—relaxed, funny, companionable. He’d felt a part of something again, more at home than with his own family, who tried to hide their pain at his loss with well-meaning smiles.
Feeling a tug on his pant leg, he looked down to find Jemmy at his knee. She’d gone outside to tend her turtle the instant she’d been excused from the dinner table, but had apparently made her way around the house in time to catch him before he left. She crooked her tiny finger at him, and he dutifully bent low to read her words, but to his surprise, she just wrapped her thin little arms around his neck and hugged him tight.
For a moment he couldn’t breathe, but it had nothing to do with the stranglehold Jemmy had on him. For an instant he knew what it would be like to have a child of his own, a fragile little person who loved without reserve. He felt a sharp pang of regret, and then she pulled free and ran back to her beloved turtle. Dan blinked, put properly in his place—one rung below Buddy. Then he stood and caught the look in Becca’s soft green eyes.
Suddenly he knew that his feelings for Becca were becoming complicated, even more so because they seemed to be reciprocated. Surely she wasn’t looking at him as a new daddy for her children. That wouldn’t do. He could never do the things that real fathers did, or even fit husbands, for that matter.
Troubled, he turned and went on his way.
Dan woke before the sun and fought back the impulse to dash straight out to Becca’s. He dressed in lightly starched jeans and a soft, drab green, military-issue T-shirt, the tail neatly tucked in, and tugged on his comfortable lace-up work boots, no longer shined to a spit-polish gleam. After taking his time shaving, he scrambled some eggs and made a pot of coffee for breakfast. Even after that, it was still too early to go out to Becca’s, so he thumbed through the local, county-wide newspaper.
Increasingly restless, he prowled the house after he finished the paper, but the emptiness and silence seemed unusually oppressive. He’d almost forgotten what a lonely world it was without sound to fill it: the tick of a clock, the hum of a ceiling fan lazily circling overhead, the ring of a telephone or doorbell… Funny he should think of those things now after all these months.
Desperate to keep busy, he turned on the TV set, but morning television couldn’t hold his interest, and he couldn’t seem to settle down to serious reading. He decided to go through the toolbox in the bed of his truck, reorganize things a bit. That was good for a long while, at the conclusion of which Dan figured he had the neatest toolbox for miles around. He glanced at his wristwatch. Eight o’clock. Still too early to show up for work on Becca’s day off.
He opened the hood of the truck and checked all the fluids, then he checked the air pressure in all the tires and even swept out the floorboard and shook the mats. Finally he stacked the carefully painted cabinet doors in the bed of the truck, making sure to cushion them with an old quilt, and climbed behind the wheel.
It was just after nine when he pulled up in front of Becca’s house. Barely had his feet touched the ground when the screen door flew open and Jemmy tore out of the house wearing a flowered cotton nightgown with a ruffle around the hem. She bar
reled straight into him, threw her arms around his legs in an exuberant hug and began jumping up and down, talking all the while. She caught his hand and pulled him toward the house. Surprised, he could only wonder if something had happened to Becca or CJ. Scooping Jemmy up into his arms, he literally ran toward the house, only to see Becca calmly step out onto the porch in cutoff jeans and a faded yellow blouse with the tail tied at her waist.
“What’s going on?” he asked, hoping his panic didn’t show.
She sipped from the glass of orange juice in her hand, smiled and told him, “You’ve been invited to breakfast with Jemmy and her dolls. She was worried you wouldn’t get here in time.”
He smiled with relief, though he had reservations. Jemmy had adopted him into the family, but she didn’t understand what problems came with him. Framing his face in her small hands, she turned it so he could see her speak.
“It’s a breakfast party in my bedroom and we got strawberries with cereal and juice.”
He thought of his father sitting at a child-sized table, pretending to drink tea from toy cups while his sister babbled imaginary conversations with her dolls, and his heart squeezed. Setting Jemmy on her feet, he said, “Had breakfast,” and quickly turned back to the truck.
How Jemmy took that or what Becca might have said to her once his back was turned, he couldn’t know and wouldn’t think about. Some distance was needed here, and yet he hadn’t been able to think about anything else this morning except seeing Becca and the kids again. Just looking at Becca, all clean and fresh, made regret clench in his gut. He shouldn’t have come today, but it was too late to make excuses and go.
Grimly determined to be strong in this, Dan hauled his tools into the house and set to work. He had cabinet doors to install, a floor to scrape and a full box of inexpensive self-stick vinyl tile to lay down before he could say that the kitchen was finished and get at that porch. He got busy, as near blind to the goings-on around him as he could make himself and still get the work done. It was easy to tune out, really, with no sound to distract him and the precise placement of hinges and handles to absorb him. He worked steadily but swiftly, step by logical step, measuring, marking, drilling, placing, setting, tightening until every screw in every hinge on every door was in its proper place.