Adding Up to Family

by Marie Ferrarella

  “I suppose I can understand that,” Steve admitted, knowing how he felt at times. “And what I can also say is that I’m glad you feel that way about your breakthrough with my daughter.” He paused for a moment. “Would it be violating some sacred trust if you told me what yesterday morning was all about?”

  He saw the expression on her face. He could tell she was debating the pros and cons of telling him. Steve thought of what Chris had told him in the office yesterday. Watching her eyes, he asked, “It is about a boy, isn’t it?”

  “No,” Becky answered, “I promise you it’s not. It might be someday,” she allowed, thinking ahead, “but not now.”

  “Then what was it?” He found that he really wanted to know. “Stevi was practically throwing a tantrum yesterday morning. I admit that she’s been standoffish and distant lately, but she’s never done that before, not even when she was a little kid.”

  Becky continued to watch him as he spoke. “And you haven’t figured it out yet?”

  “If I had, I wouldn’t be asking you right now,” he pointed out.

  He was right. Becky paused, searching for a way to delicately tell Steve something he might not welcome hearing. It meant his having to let go, at least to some extent, of the little girl Stevi had been up until now.

  But he was Stephanie’s father and he did deserve to know. Becky made her decision. “Your daughter became a woman yesterday.”

  “Became a woman?” he repeated, confused. “What is that supposed to—”

  And then his eyes widened just as he was about to take his last swig of beer. Putting the bottle back down on the table, he stared at Becky in bewildered disbelief.

  “No,” Steve cried, finding himself in complete denial. “It can’t be that. She’s just ten years old,” he protested.

  “Almost eleven, according to Stephanie,” she reminded him.

  Steve paled then as the full import of what was being said hit him. Hard. “Oh Lord, there will be boys, won’t there?”

  Becky wasn’t going to try to lie about it. “Probably. Eventually,” she added. “But what you have going for you is that Stephanie is very smart and she takes after you. She’s not going to become some wild party child overnight—or probably at all.”

  “But there will be boys coming around,” Steve lamented, unable to get past that thought. After all, he’d been one of those boys at one time, excited to be alive and testing new ground.

  “Not for a while,” Becky calmly assured him. She smiled at him. “So you don’t have to start digging that moat around the house to isolate her from the world just yet.” Rising from the table, she patted Steve’s arm. “Stephanie has common sense, Mr. Holder. She’s going to be fine.”

  “She has common sense and you, right?” he asked, looking up at the woman as if she was his last bastion of hope.

  “Well, yes,” she allowed. As long as she was here, she’d be here for Stevi—and for him. However, things did have a way of changing. “But—”

  He didn’t hear her protest. He only heard his own thoughts forming. “And you’re a woman.”

  Becky smiled. “You noticed.”

  Oh, he had more than noticed. And if she wasn’t his housekeeper, he might be tempted to show her just how much he noticed. But right now, he couldn’t do anything that might risk scaring the woman off.

  Despite the fact that he found her attractive in a way that he hadn’t found any other woman since he’d lost Cindy, that was just something he wasn’t going to allow to surface as long as he needed Becky’s help with Stevi. His daughter was the most important person in the world to him.

  He cleared his throat and tried again. “What I mean to say is that you know what she’s going through. You understand what it feels like to be an intelligent preteen who has all these emotions running amok all through you—”

  “Well, I wouldn’t exactly say amok,” Becky replied.

  Words were failing him and he knew it. But then, he’d never felt as if there was this much at stake before. “Whatever you want to call it, you’ve been there and can explain it to her a lot better than I can.” His eyes were practically begging her for her continuing help. “You can be her guide through all this.”

  Becky sat back down, scrutinizing him more closely. “This really does scare you, doesn’t it, Mr. Holder?”

  “More than you can possibly guess,” Steve confessed, although it wasn’t easy. If this wasn’t about Stevi, he would have just let the matter go. But it was about his daughter and he wasn’t ashamed to make this plea. “I need help, Becky. I thought so before today and now I think so more than ever. You came into my life—our lives,” he corrected, “just in time.”

  She felt a warmth pass over her, embracing her from top to bottom. Humor entered her eyes. “So you’re not letting me go?”

  For just a moment, at the start of this, until she’d realized otherwise, she’d honestly thought that the conversation had been heading in that inevitable direction.

  “Letting you go?” He stared at her as if she’d lost her mind. “No. Why in the world would I do that?” Steve asked. “You’re the first housekeeper whose cooking didn’t make me reach for a bottle of antacids, and more importantly, you’re the first housekeeper that Stevi really likes.”

  “Stephanie,” Becky quietly corrected.

  “Right. Stephanie. See, you even remember to use the name that she wants me to use. That’s really tough, you know,” he confided. “She’s been Stevi to me for so long.”

  Becky nodded. “I totally understand,” she told him sympathetically. “But for whatever reason, your daughter likes to be called Stephanie. She probably thinks it makes her seem more like an adult.” She could see that he needed more of an incentive to use the name than that. “You calling her by that name shows your daughter that you respect her choice and that you respect her, really.

  “To be honest,” Becky said, “I like the name Stevi better myself, but it’s not about what I like, or even what you like. This is about what your daughter wants. Right now, at this age, she’s having just as much trouble figuring herself out as you are. You can show your support by listening to what she tells you when she talks—because there will be times that she won’t talk at all and that will be even harder on you.”

  Steve listened intently. He was clearly impressed. He loved his daughter and he didn’t want them to become strangers.

  “You really did go through all this yourself, didn’t you?” he marveled. He knew he’d assumed it, but it was only now really hitting home.

  “Adolescence is a really hard time,” Becky admitted. “Don’t you remember going through that yourself? That uncertainty, that confusion?”

  Steve’s laugh was self-deprecating as he shook his head. “To be honest, I really don’t think I remember any of it.”

  “Another handy device to use—total denial. A lot of adults have no recollection of ever being adolescents. Others, like me, have total recall of those years.”

  “All I can say is that it’s lucky for Stev—Stephanie that you do,” he said.

  “A for effort,” she told Steve with a grin, for correcting himself before she did. “Now, if you’re willing to listen to a little more of my advice...”

  “Sure,” he said, thinking she was going to say something more about Stevi.

  “You look like you really should go to bed.”

  “What?” He gazed at her, startled because she had said something that dovetailed with a stray thought that had insisted on drifting through his mind. It definitely involved going to bed, but not for the sake of sleep.

  “Bed,” Becky repeated. “Unless the fate of the world depends on you burning the midnight oil again, I think you really should get yourself into bed. If I can be honest with you...”

  “Don’t stop now,” he told her.

  She wasn’t sure if he was being
sarcastic, but she continued nonetheless. “You look like your batteries could really stand to be recharged.”

  “I guess they do,” he agreed. He smiled at her as he rose from the table. “You know, this might be a totally selfish thing to say, but I’m glad you decided to turn your back on the aerospace world.”

  She laughed, shaking her head. “Could I get you to put that in writing?”

  He thought that was rather an odd thing for her to say. “Why?”

  “For my mother,” she answered. “She’s very disappointed in me. I know that she feels like I’ve bailed out. The funny thing was,” she went on, taking his plate to the sink, “when I was growing up, I think I made her uncomfortable. I’d catch her looking at me at times like I was some sort of anomaly of nature because I studied so much.”

  “Anyone who graduates from MIT at age eighteen is not a run-of-the-mill kid,” Steve pointed out. “She was probably having trouble coming to grips with the idea that her daughter was less than half her age and at least twice as smart as she was.”

  “Is that how you feel about Stephanie?” Becky asked him.

  “Only because I wish there were more times when she would stop studying and just enjoy being a kid—the way she used to.” He sighed, thinking back to less complicated times. “She has so much time to be an adult and so little time to enjoy being a child. I guess that was what I was trying to get across to her.”

  “Give her a little time. She just might surprise you and come around again,” Becky told him.

  She saw the sadness in his eyes as he said, “I wish I could believe that.”

  She thought for a minute. “Tell you what. Stephanie’s summer school classes are over with in another few weeks. Why don’t you plan to take her on a two-day trip doing whatever it was that the two of you used to do when you went away? Maybe she’d even welcome it.”

  He really wanted to believe her, but he needed something more to hang on to. “Now, what makes you think that?”

  “Because, for one thing, Stephanie’s just as scared of becoming an adult as you are of having her become one. Even as she’s straining at the bit, trying to break away, there’s a part of her that’s secretly pleased that you’re still holding on to the reins, trying to keep her in check.”

  “You know what you said earlier tonight about being afraid that I was thinking about letting you go as a housekeeper?”

  She was back to studying him, wondering if he’d changed his mind again. “Yes?”

  “I think that what you should really be afraid of is that I’m not going to let you go even if you wanted me to.”

  Becky blinked, confused. “Excuse me?”

  “In plain English, then,” he said, trying again. “You, Rebecca Reynolds, have a job here for life—or for as long as you want it, at any rate. Because I need you to help me navigate some very choppy waters.”

  Becky smiled. There was nothing like being needed. She really loved the feeling. “I’d be happy to, Mr. Holder.”

  “Steve,” he corrected. “‘Mr. Holder’ makes me feel ancient.”

  Becky inclined her head. “Steve. Now get to bed.”

  He forced himself not to allow her words to mess with his brain, and refused to allow his imagination to run wild. He didn’t need any more complications in his life than he already had.

  “With pleasure,” he answered, moving quickly toward the stairs.

  Chapter Ten

  It took Becky less time to get used to the routine than she had anticipated.

  She had lived by herself these last few years, so it did take her a little while to adapt to living in a house with other people. But oddly enough, it didn’t take her nearly as long as she’d thought it would. Moreover, it hadn’t really occurred to her that she was lonely until she didn’t find herself alone anymore. The emptiness that she had been living with dissipated because it became filled.

  And it no longer was the sound of her own voice that occasionally broke up the stillness. Instead, it was Stephanie calling out to her, asking her for help with a particularly taxing problem that involved schoolwork. Other times, although admittedly that occurred less often, it was Steve who called to her, wanting to use her as a sounding board for some concept he wanted to bounce off her.

  In his case it was never anything specific—she understood that he couldn’t deal in specifics with someone who wasn’t cleared to be read into the program. But it was just vague enough for her to be able to offer suggestions. Not because Steve found himself stumped, but because he enjoyed being able to discuss, however vaguely, what he was doing. He liked the fact that she could understand terms that would have had anyone else staring blankly at him.

  And as Becky was acclimating herself to her new world and her new “family,” the end of summer school kept growing closer.

  “You know what that means,” she said to Steve one evening.

  Stevi had finally gone to bed and they were in the kitchen. He was nursing yet another cup of coffee—black—and she was finally getting around to the dinner dishes she’d left in the sink.

  “No more school?” Steve guessed, tongue in cheek, even though he had a feeling that Becky wasn’t going for that.

  And she wasn’t.

  “And?” Becky coaxed.

  Steve thought for a moment, trying to come up with another response, then shook his head. “Sorry, I’ve got nothing.”

  She rinsed off a large platter, putting it on the drying rack. “Your brain is full of numbers, so you’re excused,” she told him.

  “From this conversation, or from the fact that I don’t have an answer?” he asked, curious if she was dropping the matter or still determined to arrive at some sort of an answer to her question.

  “The latter.” She took pity on him and gave him a hint. “Does the word camping mean anything to you?”

  A nostalgic smile curved the corners of his mouth as he thought back to happier times. “It used to,” he told her. And then his smile faded somewhat. “But not anymore.”

  He had obviously forgotten what they’d discussed the first week she had come to live with his daughter and him. “Think again,” she coaxed, waiting for the legendary light bulb to go off in his head.

  He was about to profess that nothing was coming to him—and then it did.

  Maybe.

  “Stevi—” he began, and saw that Becky was giving him a look, one he had grown familiar with. He’d slipped again.

  “Stephanie,” he corrected. Becky smiled at him approvingly. He pretended not to notice. “Stephanie is willing to go on a camping trip?” he asked incredulously. He’d begun to think that maybe, after all this time, his daughter had lost her taste for “roughing it.”

  “Why don’t you ask her?” Becky urged.

  “You wouldn’t be setting me up, would you? Because even rough and tough dads have feelings,” he confessed to her. “I know most women don’t believe it, because it goes against the image that we’re trying to project, but we do.”

  Becky laughed. She’d never bought into that image. The man might appear rugged, and there was no arguing with the fact that he certainly was manly looking, but she had never had the impression that he was a steely tower of unapproachable maleness.

  “I think that Stephanie would like to be asked to go on a camping trip,” she told him.

  Steve came to attention. “Did she say that?”

  There was no missing the hopefulness in his voice. Still, she wasn’t going to lie to the man. She wanted to be totally honest with him. Having him laboring under the wrong impression might destroy all the groundwork she had carefully laid out so far in her attempt to bring father and daughter closer and closer together.

  She weighed her response. “Not exactly in so many words...”

  “Then in what kind of words?”

  Rinsing off a few more di
shes, she placed those on the drying rack, too. “Well, Stephanie started to talk about the camping trips that you’d taken her on and I managed to coax a few stories out of her.”

  “And that’s it?” he questioned. “Why would that make you think that she wants to go on a camping trip with me? The last time I mentioned taking one, she looked at me with that pitying, condescending look she’d learned to perfect and totally dismissed the mere suggestion of a camping trip as being, and I quote, ‘lame.’”

  Undaunted by his revelation, Becky was determined to push on. “That was undoubtedly during her initial discovery period.”

  “She’s not a fledgling lawyer,” Steve told her. “She’s my daughter.”

  “I know that,” Becky answered. “I was talking about her ‘Stephanie discovery period.’” When he continued to look at her, completely unenlightened, Becky added, “She was just starting to figure out how she should act, who she was, that sort of thing...”

  He thought back to when all of this self-exploration had begun in earnest. “That was, like, three months ago,” he reminded her.

  She waited for more. When it didn’t come, she asked, “And your point is?”

  “Three months,” he repeated. “You’re telling me that she’s now ‘found’ herself?”

  Steve would have loved to believe that was happening, but he was a realist. A person’s behavior didn’t change overnight.

  “What I’m saying,” Becky said patiently, “is that Stephanie’s a little less lost now than she was then. A little less scared and threatened by all these changes, as well.”

  Steve knew he’d be better off just discounting the whole idea. But the possibility of doing something he used to love with his daughter was awfully tempting. And although he didn’t want to get his hopes up too high, he had to concede that Becky did have a point. For the most part, the hostile flare-ups had decreased and at times Stephanie behaved almost like the girl he had loved for the last ten years.

  “Maybe you’re right,” he agreed.

  He noted that she didn’t respond with “Of course I’m right.” He liked the fact that Becky wasn’t full of herself, but then, he had already seen enough examples to show him that she wasn’t.