“Thank you, dear,” Carlie said to Darren.
He grinned at Libby as he put a large frying pan on the stove and turned the heat on under it. “Sure, Mom.”
JARED AWOKE to a slap in the face. Well, it wasn’t a slap exactly, more like a sort of pounding applied to his right cheek, then, when he was too confused to respond, on his forehead.
Fortunately, he thought, as he struggled to surface from the remnants of a dream about fishing on the banks of Loch Broom, there wasn’t much power behind whatever drove the weapon.
He opened his eyes just in time to stop a tiny hand from landing a blow on his nose. He blinked and discovered Savannah kneeling on his chest. She still wore her Pocahontas pajamas, but her eyes were large and bright and wide-awake.
“Come on!” she said excitedly. “There’s a man making pancakes! And Grandma…Grandma Somebody gave me this!” She held up a stuffed rabbit wearing a dress. In the rabbit’s apron pockets were three baby bunnies. “And there’s puppies everywhere! Come on!” She scrambled off him and was gone.
He put a hand over his eyes and groaned, trying to brace himself for what lay ahead. His mother was here. Apparently she’d ignored his request for a few days to settle in. Or Darren hadn’t passed it on. He could be cussed that way.
From beyond his open door, he heard the thump of dog feet on the carpeted stairs, then loud giggles when they intercepted Savannah on her way down.
He checked across the hall, found Zachary’s crib empty, and concluded that Libby must already be up. He showered, shaved and dressed.
A cozy group was assembled in the kitchen when he got there. Libby stood at the stove with Zachary in her arms, laughing with his brother as he removed a golden, paper-thin crepe from a frying pan with a skilled flip.
His mother sat at the end of the table nearest them with Savannah in her lap. Each of them held one of the pocket bunnies and appeared to be manipulating them in conversation.
“The carrots are so poor this year,” his mother said in an animated falsetto. “I just don’t know what to have for breakfast.”
Savannah wiggled her bunny from side to side and replied, “You can have one of my crops.”
“Crepes,” Darren corrected from the stove. “Like grapes, only crepes.”
“You can have one of my crepes,” Savannah amended.
“And some of your apple compote?”
Savannah shook her head. “I don’t have apple compote.”
“Sure you do.” Darren served up a small bowlful from a pan on the stove, spooned up some and offered it to her.
She dutifully opened her mouth and took a taste. Her eyes gleamed. “Yummy.” She held her little rabbit up to his mother’s and said very seriously, “You can have a crepe, but the apple stuff is mine.”
His mother laughed and hugged her.
“That smells wonderful,” Libby said, inhaling the apple-and-spice aroma.
Jared watched Darren reach into the drawer behind him, extract a fork and spike up a slice of apple. He held it out to her and she took it off the fork with her teeth. Anger, ripe and completely unjustified, swelled inside him.
It was punctured an instant later when Savannah noticed him, squirmed off his mother’s lap and came to him to take him by the hand and pull him into the room.
She pointed to his mother. “That’s your mom!” she said, obviously pleased to know that. Then she pointed to Darren. “And he’s your brother!”
“Very good,” he said, lifting her onto his hip. “Good morning. Did you sleep well?”
“Uh-huh. We’re gonna have pancakes with whipped cream!”
“That sounds…good.” He added the last lamely, unable to think of anything that sounded worse at that hour. Savannah, however, seemed enthused.
Darren glanced at him over his shoulder. “Relax,” he said. “I’m putting applejack in yours and skipping the cream.”
Jared felt relief. “Now you’re talking.”
His mother opened her arms for Savannah. He placed the child in her lap, then leaned down to kiss his mother’s cheek.
“What a nice surprise, Mom,” he said. He was sincerely glad to see her, but she openly admitted to a meddlesome nature, and he wasn’t anxious to have her second-guessing his parenting skills at a time when he felt very much as though he didn’t have any.
Then he remembered that she’d arrived at Darren’s before he, Jared, had even gotten home from Scotland and decided to adopt the children. So, something else must have brought her here.
“What’s taken you away from the shop?”
She heaved a deep sigh and shrugged a shoulder while hugging Savannah to her. “Maybe we can talk about it later?” she asked hopefully. “I have to leave this afternoon. Gertie sat in for me for a few days so I could come down, but she’s expected in Bend for the weekend. I thought you were coming back last week. I didn’t know about the…” Unwilling to upset Savannah, she didn’t say the words. “You know.”
He nodded.
“Darren was nice enough to put me up.” She smiled at her younger son’s back. “Did you know he has the Bad Boy Channel?”
Before he could reply, Darren turned away from the stove, a pancake turner waving accusingly in her direction. “How do you know I have it?” He forestalled her attempt to reply with a quick “Because you watched it yourself!”
She tilted her chin indignantly. “I was trying to find CNN.”
Darren snickered and turned back to his work.
“Did you sleep well?” Libby asked him as he took Zachary from her. She fixed him with an innocent stare, through which he could see a wealth of smugness. She added with all apparent concern, “Once you finally got to bed, I mean?”
His brother carried a platter to the table, which caused his mother to move Savannah to another chair while she hurried to help Darren with all the accompaniments.
Isolated at the end of the counter with Libby and the baby, Jared looked into her clear blue eyes and found that this morning, her impertinence intrigued him.
The night she’d hired on, and last night, her presumptions had annoyed him. But he’d thought about her in the wee hours of the morning while he’d slept fitfully, and decided that he found her reactions interesting.
She meant the children no harm; he was certain of that. That she cared for them was in her eyes, in the way she touched them, in the way she hovered, even when he was near.
So she must be governed by a need to discredit him, though he couldn’t imagine why.
What did that all mean? Until he could figure it out, he didn’t mind doing what he could to unsettle her self-satisfaction.
“Zack did keep me up quite a while,” he admitted genially, dodging the baby’s hand as Zachary slapped at his chin. He finally caught it and shook it playfully. “Why? Were you spying on me again?”
Her even look slipped just a little and for an instant he saw fear in her eyes. He knew she was recalling his threat about letting her go if he caught her watching him.
Curiously, the fear appeared very genuine. As though it involved more than her loss of a job. He wondered about that as she blinked and met his gaze again.
“No, I wasn’t,” she replied, her voice just a tad shaken. “My room is next to yours. I heard you.”
“But I made a point of being quiet,” he needled. “Were you listening for me?”
A little color crept into her cheeks. He found that curious, too.
“Of course not,” she denied. “I was…I had a touch of insomnia.”
“Guilty conscience for having spied on me the first time?”
Libby was beginning to get the feeling she was being toyed with. There was amusement in the dark depths of his eyes and a slightly arrogant indolence in the way he watched her.
“More likely, it was a reaction to intimidation by an unreasonable employer.” She returned the half teasing, half serious accusation.
He tilted his head in a gently scolding manner. “You’re trying to make me be
lieve you’re afraid of me?”
For an instant, before she could hide the truth in her eyes with another blink, they did betray fear of him. That so surprised him, particularly considering her rather forceful behavior on behalf of the children, that for a moment he was stunned.
Then Darren pulled a chair out and beckoned Libby to sit in it.
“Come on, come on,” he ordered. “Both of you. I didn’t get up at the crack of dawn to fix your breakfast just to have you let it get cold.”
The crepes were delicious. Jared was happy to see that Savannah devoured them. Libby, on the other hand, ate one and toyed with the others, watching him surreptitiously when she thought he was distracted by his mother’s conversation.
But he could feel her eyes on him. He thought he might even be haunted by that quick glimpse of fear he’d seen. He would certainly be plagued by the question of what the hell it meant.
Was her pugnacious attitude toward him an attempt to conceal some vulnerability his presence caused her?
That didn’t make sense. She was the one who’d agreed to take the position. And who’d pleaded to maintain it twice.
Whatever her reservations toward him, she seemed delighted with his brother. That anger Jared had felt when he’d walked into the room tried to rise again, but he pounded it down with the clinical observation that if they found each other good company, it was not a problem for anyone. Particularly not for him.
It just felt as though it was.
“And so…I just don’t know what to do about it. I mean, am I too old even to be thinking in those terms?” He came out of his thoughts, to find that his mother’s earnest eyes were on him and that she was apparently coming to the end of a question he should have been paying closer attention to. “But then, the Chambers are very long-lived, you know. Your grandfather died at eighty-eight. I could have another twenty-five years. And if I can have them doing the tango—shouldn’t I?”
The tango. He tried to clear his mind of all the personal complications of the past few days and concentrate on his mother. Though she sometimes exasperated him, she’d been a model mother, and still did her best to be understanding and supportive. There wasn’t time enough to give back all she’d given him.
He placed his hand on the back of her chair and accorded her his full attention. “Clarify that for me,” he said, trying to skirt the fact that he’d apparently missed a lot of what she’d told him.
She asked with a sigh, “You weren’t listening, were you?”
“I was…distracted,” he admitted, indicating the baby asleep in his carrier on the other side of him. “Tell me again. What was that about the tango?”
She opened her mouth to begin again, when the back door opened after a perfunctory knock.
“Hi!” Justine called, waving a white bag. “I stopped at the bakery on my way in. I thought Savannah—”
She proceeded two steps into the room, and fell over Tippy’s leash as the dog strained across the opening to reach a small portion of milk and egg left in Spike’s bowl. She almost caught her balance, but Spike shot past her out the open door and Tippy tried to follow, tripping her up again.
Libby and Carlie screamed as she landed with a crash, jarring the door and dislodging the loop of the terrier’s leash, which was secured to the knob. He ran over her back and out the door in pursuit of his companion.
Libby, closer to the door, started toward her, but Darren reached her first. He lifted her to her feet, brushed down her short skirt and asked in concern, “Justy, are you all right?”
She stopped in the process of straightening her sweater and looked up into his eyes, her own going a little misty with recognition. “Darren,” she said in soft surprise.
The next instant her gaze hardened and she shook off his supporting arm. “I’m quite all right, thank you. This must be what it’s like being the rabbit at the dog races.” She smiled wryly toward the table. “Hello, Carlie. Good morning, all.”
Libby took Justine’s arm and pulled her toward her chair. “Here, you sit down. I’ll get you a cup of coffee.”
Justine gave Darren a lethal look and hobbled along with her. “I can’t stay. I just thought Savannah might like a doughnut for breakfast.”
“That’s a good way to instill the habit of having a nutritious breakfast,” Darren grumbled, his manner changing from solicitousness to irritability. He pulled his jacket off the back of his chair.
Justine pointed to the whipped cream in the bottom of a bowl on the table. “I’m sure artery-clogging whipped cream sends a better message. Oh, do you have to go? Too bad.” She added the last with grave insincerity.
He opened his mouth to reply, but Jared stood and walked him forcefully toward the door. “Thanks, Darren,” he said, opening the door and pushing his brother through when he would have tried to turn back to have the last word. “I appreciate your fixing breakfast.”
“Sure.” Darren shrugged his tux jacket into place as they walked toward his gray Volvo station wagon. The good humor with which he’d made a second round of crepes had evaporated with the arrival of Justine. “I think you’re nuts to take the kids, but they are beautiful, and being nuts doesn’t seem to have stopped you from being successful with whatever you decide to do, so who am I to criticize?”
Jared jammed his hands in his pockets as Darren unlocked the tailgate. The day was crisp and clear, and the cold air from the ocean bit through his sweatshirt.
“You know, maybe you and Justy should try to settle this issue between you,” he suggested.
“Why?” Darren asked coolly, lifting the door and revealing a pumpkin the size of a footstool. “That would be productive only if we wanted to salvage the relationship.”
“Don’t you?”
Darren reached into the back to drag the pumpkin forward. “Of course not. She’s a shrew who has little interest in me except as a sperm bank.”
Jared laughed. “Poor you.”
Darren straightened and gave him a judicious look. “I appreciate a lusty woman as much as the next guy, but when it comes down to it, I’m not making babies I don’t get to father.”
“I understand that.” Jared grew serious. “But what are you going to do about the fact that you still love her? And she loves you.”
“If that were true,” Darren said wearily, “wouldn’t she want to marry me?”
“Her father was abusive. Deep down she probably thinks fathers—any fathers—are scary.”
Darren put an emphatic hand to his own chest. “What in God’s name is scary about me?”
Jared couldn’t help another laugh. “You mean besides your preference for country-and-western music and your pre-Columbian mask collection?”
Darren closed his eyes and asked fervently, “Why do I even try…?”
“Because I saved you from Willy Goldbeck when you were eight. If I hadn’t pulled you out of the trash compactor, you’d be part of some cardboard box made of recycled materials.”
“Yeah, well, who let Mom believe that the cat and not her precious firstborn son broke that Zsolnay vase that was going to finance her trip to Europe?”
Jared nodded. “That was very heroic of you and I’ll appreciate it till my dying day.”
“Which could be looming on the horizon if you don’t quit hassling me about Justy.” Darren lifted the pumpkin with a groan and handed it to Jared.
“I’m not hassling you.” Jared braced his feet to accept the weight. “I just think you’d both be better off if you fought it out, rather than sniping at each other every time you meet. What does this thing weigh?”
“Forty-two pounds. I thought Savannah might think it was fun. How’s she doing?”
Jared inclined his head in a gesture of uncertainty. “I’m not sure. I don’t know what she was like before. Sometimes she looks at me as though she’s terrified of me, but last night she told me she liked me. So…we’ll see what happens as time goes by.”
Darren closed the tailgate and smiled suddenly. “Th
e nanny was a good choice on your part.”
“I didn’t choose her,” Jared denied. “I called the agency and they sent her over.”
“Then you got really lucky.”
“Maybe.”
“What do you mean?”
Jared opened his mouth to explain, then decided he didn’t know how. “Could we talk about this,” he asked, “when I’m not holding a forty-two-pound pumpkin?”
Darren walked around to the driver’s side door. “You need to build up those biceps. I’ll be back for Mom after lunch. She left her car at my place.”
“Thanks again for breakfast.”
“Anytime.”
LIBBY, HELPING CARLIE clear the table and load the dishwasher, glanced out the window at Jared and Darren standing near the Volvo. Jared was laughing and Darren looked disgusted with him—in a tolerant sort of way.
She envied them their relationship. She’d been raised without siblings and orphaned while still too young to feel truly secure within herself. She wondered what it was like to have someone you could call if you wanted to discuss a life-altering decision, or if you simply felt lonely or afraid.
She had Sara and Charlene, of course, but that wasn’t like having someone who’d shared your life from infancy, and whose life was irrevocably tied to yours.
So, she usually made all her big decisions on her own. And if she felt lonely or afraid—she lived with it until she got over it.
“I wish Darren would sit Justine down and talk to her,” Carlie said, “instead of engaging in this verbal barrage every time they see each other.”
Savannah sat at the table with a coloring book and crayons Carlie had also brought.
Carlie settled herself at the other end of the table with the bag of apples and a peeler. “Would you fill that bowl with water and bring it to me, please?” She pointed to a yellow bowl on the top shelf. “And maybe the newspaper for the peelings.” Her pointing finger moved to a folded paper near the phone. “How do you feel about Puerto Rico?”
Libby used a chair to climb onto the old counter and held on to a shelf with one hand to steady herself. “I’ve never been,” she said, reaching overhead for the heavy bowl. “But I understand it’s quite beautiful.”
The Comeback Mom Page 8