“I’d offer to help,” Josh said, “but I remember this kitchen. Two people can’t work in it without bumping into each other. We’d be jammed so close it’d practically be indecent.”
If Harve noticed the remark, he didn’t show it. He stared sadly at nothing in particular and kept up his melancholy crunching.
The dryer stopped, and Briana’s heart soared in relief. She told Josh, “If you want to help, get your clothes and get dressed.”
He shrugged, went to the dryer, gathered an armful of clothes and disappeared into the bathroom.
Harve, still the picture of gloom, said nothing. He kept shoveling cornflakes into his mouth like an automaton. She filled the bowl again.
She said, “I suppose you’ll want to go to your place and see how things are. And you’ll want Inga to be with you. I’m sure Josh would sit with Poppa for a few hours.”
“I don’t want Inga with me,” Harve said, not looking at Briana. “I don’t want anybody with me. Unless you’d go, I’d rather be alone.”
Briana felt helpless. She picked up the coffeepot. “I’m sorry, Harve. I can’t. I have to go to St. Louis. I just have to. It’s another doctor’s appointment.”
He paused, staring at the unfamiliar spoon. “You couldn’t change it?”
“No,” she said softly. “I really, really can’t.”
She felt truly sorry for him, but she knew what he had lost was material. She thought of Nealie and Nealie’s illness and knew she would sacrifice every possession she owned to make the child well.
Just to say something, she said, “Is the coffee okay? Want more?”
Harve shook his head, still in his private mourning. “It’s weak,” he said. “No more.”
The downstairs bathroom opened. Josh sauntered out in jeans and the faded lone wolf sweatshirt. At the same moment, Nealie burst out of her door, wearing her school clothes.
She ran down the stairs, and Josh caught her up and carried her, giggling, to the kitchen counter. He set her in the chair next to Harve, and Briana set a filled plate before her.
Nealie looked at her plate, her parents, then Harve. “Isn’t this fun, Harve?” she asked. “Everybody’s here. It’s like you came to a sleepover at my house. Are you staying again tonight?”
Harve didn’t answer. He stared at nothing in particular.
“For fun, we could all change places,” Nealie said, digging into her pancakes. “Mommy could sleep with me. Or you could sleep with Daddy, and Mommy could have my bed, and Zorro and I could sleep on the couch. Or you could have my bed, and Mommy and Daddy could sleep together.”
She paused and smiled brightly. “That way they could make me a baby sister.”
Harve turned slowly and stared at her, as if she were a small, loquacious Martian who had suddenly materialized next to him. Josh stared at her, too, and so did Briana, embarrassed beyond words.
Nealie gripped her fork and looked at them all in righteous bewilderment. “Why’s everybody looking at me?” she demanded. “What did I say?”
JOSH WALKED BRIANA to her truck. At its door, he took her by the arm and looked down at her. “Look,” he said. “You’ve got to get Harve out of here. There are too many people around us. You and I need time alone together—it can’t go on like this.”
She looked at him, her dark eyes full of regret and confusion. “What can I do? Travel back in time and keep the fire from starting? Cast a magic spell and make a guest house appear? What do you want?”
“I want to be with you, talk to you, work things out.”
“Let me go,” she said. “I’ll be late for my appointment, and Nealie’ll be late for school. And here comes Penny’s car.”
“Penny,” he said in frustration. “Good grief, it’s like living in Grand Central Station.”
Penny’s car pulled up beside them, and Penny rolled down her window. “Hey,” she said in concern. “I heard about the fire last night. Are Harve and his aunt okay?”
“They’re here,” Briana said, disengaging her arm from Josh’s grasp. “Inga’s up at the house with Poppa. Harve’s inside. I think everything’s going to be all right.”
“Gee, I hope so,” Penny said. “Is it okay if I go in?”
“Yes, fine,” Briana said. “I’ll see you later, Penny. You, too, Josh.”
Josh had no choice but to watch Briana go. The truck disappeared down the lane, just as it had yesterday and would again tomorrow. The clinic was monitoring her with extraordinary vigilance because of the rarity of Yates’s anemia.
He muttered, repeating his own words, “You and I need time alone together—it can’t go on like this.”
But the wind rose, sweeping his words away, out over the frozen land. It was as if the elements mocked him, saying, “Yes, it will go on like this, and you will never have her. She belongs to this place and these people and not you. Never you.”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
HARVE STOOD ALONE in the freezing wind, looking at his house.
It had taken him a long time to work up the courage to come. Inga had called, saying she would get someone to stay with Leo, that she would go to the house with him.
But Inga always tried to put a bright face on things, and he did not want that, not now. The only person he would have wanted with him was Briana, but she had said no. He and his home were not as important to her as a trip to St. Louis. Penny had tried to offer her sympathies, but he hadn’t wanted them. After Briana’s refusal, he wanted to be alone with his grief.
When he drove up to the house, he could not get out of his truck. He sat and stared at the damage, his mind dulled with shock and dread.
Where the shed had stood was only a blackened concrete foundation, covered with rubble and ash. It glistened under a thick glaze of ice, as if all the burning was encased in crystal.
The house, when he managed to look at it, seemed at once both ruined and impossibly beautiful. The roof had caved in, and most of the second story was gone. The outside of the first story was blackened, its windows empty sockets. But it, too, was almost completely covered with cascades of ice, a house out of a frozen fairy tale.
At last he found the courage to get out, walk around the house again and again. Then he went to the front door and found it blackened and knocked from its hinges. Gingerly he stepped inside.
Smoke still hung in the air. Everything stank of it. The living room was chaos. Most of the ceiling had caved in. Furniture had been knocked topsy-turvy and covered by rubble.
It was as bad as he expected. Yet here and there he saw the glint of something salvageable—a cast-iron lamp base, a plant stand of wrought iron, a brass picture frame.
He feared what the other rooms held. He wandered down the hall like a ghost. He was so lost in his thoughts and memories, he didn’t hear the car drive up or footsteps on the sagging porch.
He stood in the kitchen, which was the greatest mess, for the firemen had burst in that way with their axes and hoses and extinguishers. He stood in the midst of the rubble, staring at the charred table lying sideways on the floor. Dishes had been rattled out of the cupboards and lay broken and mixed with bits of the partly fallen ceiling.
A woman’s voice, said, “Hello, Harve. Are you okay?”
Briana! Harve thought, spinning to face her. She had come after all! But instead, there stood Penny in her green jacket and cap. Her hands were jammed into her pockets, her emerald eyes serious.
“What are you doing here?” he asked, disappointed and puzzled.
“It’s my lunch hour,” she said. “I wanted to see how you were.”
He shook his head and looked around him. He made a helpless gesture. “I’m grateful anything’s still standing,” he said, his throat tight. “But it can’t be saved. I’ll have to salvage what I can, pull it down and rebuild. But—but I don’t even know where to start.”
Penny looked him square in the eye. “It doesn’t matter where. Just start.” She picked up a large metal trash can that had been knocked over and
set it up right. She knelt and began gathering broken crockery and throwing it into the container. For a moment, Harve watched her without comprehension.
Then she examined something and said, “Look. This isn’t broken. Here.” She handed it to him. It was his cereal bowl. He could have kissed her.
AT FIVE MINUTES to one, Briana’s downstairs phone rang. Josh leaped for it, hoping it was Briana saying she was on her way home. It wasn’t. It was Penny.
Her usually brisk voice was hesitant. “Hi,” she said. “I’m calling from Harve’s place.”
“His phone’s working?” Josh asked. He felt a sense of loss that the caller wasn’t Briana.
“No, I’m on my cell phone,” Penny said. “Listen, I know this is irregular, because there’s a lot of work in the office today. But do you think that Briana would care if I stayed over here awhile and helped?”
He knew Briana would be there herself if she could. “Stay as long as you want,” Josh said. “Is it bad?”
“Yeah,” said Penny. “Almost a total loss. But we’ve just got to roll up our sleeves and get to work.”
He had to admire the spirit in her voice. She sounded determined and undaunted.
When he hung up, he looked around Briana’s cheerful living room. It seemed so empty without her and Nealie that he couldn’t stand it. An unbearable restlessness filled him.
He made a single phone call, and then he left.
Fifteen minutes later, he pulled up to the fire-stricken house and sucked in his breath at the damage. He’d seen worse, far worse in his time. He’d seen whole city blocks that had been destroyed, by malice, not accident.
But this was more personal. He threw his parka in the back seat, grabbed a pair of work gloves he’d found on Briana’s back porch and strode up the front stairs of the Oldman homestead.
He found Harve and Penny in what was left of the kitchen, hard at work. Josh rapped at the fire-scarred frame of the door.
Penny’s eyes widened. Harve looked at him in disbelief. “You! What do you want?”
Josh pulled on the work gloves. “I came to help,” he said.
BRIANA PULLED INTO her drive just as Josh did in his rental car, back from picking up Nealie at school. She grinned to see Nealie come out of the car in a tumble of skinny arms and legs and run toward her. Briana hopped from the truck, picked up her daughter and hugged her. “Hello, sugarplum. How was school today?”
“I got an A on my spelling test,” Nealie said, her arms around Briana’s neck. “And the teacher’s reading us a book on George Washington ’cause it’s almost his birthday.”
“Happy birthday, dear George.” Briana laughed, then she sniffed at Nealie’s hair. “I swear,” Briana said, drawing back to look at the child. “You smell a little smoky.”
“Oh, that’s Daddy,” Nealie said, clambering from her mother’s arms. “He’s just stinky.”
Josh climbed out of his car. His face and neck were filthy with soot, his jeans and sweatshirt permeated with ashes and dirt. A blackened pair of work gloves stuck out of his rear pocket.
Briana blinked in amazement. “What happened to you?”
“I’ve been over at Harve’s,” he said without emotion.
“You?” Briana asked, astonished. “Helping?”
“Trying to,” he said in the same tone. “I’m not much of a handyman.”
Nealie danced up the steps. “Daddy says he’s not a handyman, but he’s got a strong back. He’s strong all over. I bet he has Harve’s house all fixed by tomorrow.”
Josh fell into step beside Briana. She looked at him. Even his ears were sooty, and he had a black streak across one cheekbone. “Can things be fixed soon?” she asked. “Really?” She hoped so not only for Harve’s sake, but for hers and Josh’s, as well.
But Josh shook his head. “No. It’s going to have to be torn down. He’ll have to rebuild. It’s going to take at least a week to clean up the mess.”
“Oh.” It was all Briana could say. She unlocked the front door and Nealie flew inside, calling for Zorro the cat. Briana and Josh followed, but he stopped at the rug in the entryway, kicking off his wet boots. “I’m dirty. Let me clean up. Then can we talk?”
Nealie was going upstairs, cradling Zorro in her arms, crooning him a nonsensical song. Briana stared after her, not wanting to meet Josh’s eyes.
Josh said, “I asked if we could talk.”
“I should go see Poppa.”
“You should also lay down the law and tell him that you’re staying in your own house tonight. Harve can go up there and stay. Enough is enough. You and I have to talk.”
“I know,” she said. “I’ll try to wrangle some time for us. But I need to stay at Poppa’s just another night or two—”
“Briana,” Josh said, warning in his voice, “this is ridiculous. There’s no damn reason for Harve to sleep down here.”
“Poppa’s still nervous about being alone at night,” Briana said. “He feels safer with me there. Now, with all this other commotion…”
Josh frowned in disgust. “You don’t want to chance being alone with me too much, do you? Why? Afraid you might decide you really do care for me still? More than you want to admit?”
An involuntary shudder quaked through her. Perhaps what he said was true. She let Leo manipulate her because it was safer than trusting herself alone with Josh.
She put her hand to her forehead. “Look, my whole life seems crazy right now. I’m being shot full of these hormone cocktails until I can’t think straight—maybe I do feel safer at Poppa’s. I don’t even know anymore.”
He took a step toward her, reached to touch her shoulder. She flinched at the anticipation of his touch, which she both desired and feared.
He saw her reaction and let his hand drop to his side. “Okay, Briana. I understand. You’re like Alice in Wonderland right now. If you think you need to stay with your father a while longer—do what makes you feel best. But I do want some time with you tonight.”
She smiled with relief. “You understand?”
His expression was far from happy. “I think I do. You’d better go now if you have to see Poppa.”
He said Poppa with sarcasm, but she ignored it. “I’ll run up there while you shower and Nealie changes,” she said. She hesitated, then added, “I’m proud of you for helping Harve. I really am.”
He shrugged, his brow furrowed. “Penny started it. She went over during her lunch hour. She called to see if she could stay and help. I figured you’d let her.”
“Of course,” Briana said. She had a sudden impulse to touch his rugged face, to wipe the dirt from his upper lip with her fingertips.
He gave her an ironic smile. “Your brother showed up a little later, even though he’s got that god-awful cold. Then some other people. Most of them are still working.”
“You and Larry and Harve working together?” she said, still yearning to touch him. “You must have made a strange team.”
“Yeah,” he said. “We did.”
LEO LEANED BACK in his recliner, holding the television remote control as if it were his scepter. “When’s Nealie going to come see me?” he demanded. “I miss my little Funnyface.”
“I’ll bring her later tonight,” Briana said. She sat on the sofa, clutching a fringed pillow. “She can stay for a while and watch a video with you. Josh and I have things to discuss—about her future.”
Leo’s white eyebrows rose suspiciously, like a pair of arching caterpillars. “Her future? What things? College? That’s a long way off.”
“Just things, Poppa,” Briana said. “But now let’s talk about you. How do you feel today?”
“Worried,” Leo retorted.
Briana hugged the pillow against her stomach more tightly. She realized it was as if she was trying to protect the child she prayed would soon be inside her. “Worried about what?”
“You and these shots. Your brother and his cold. Harve and Inga,” Leo said. “Harve’s sick about that house. He doesn’t
know which way to turn. I wish I was in shape. I could take charge. Your uncle Collin and I built that house of yours from the ground up.”
Briana nodded dutifully, although she knew that Uncle Collin had done most of the work.
“I worry about Inga, too,” Leo said, lowering his voice to a dramatic whisper. “I caught her drying her eyes once. Oh, she pretends she’s cheerful, but she’s got a tender heart, she has.”
Briana nodded again, clutching her pillow.
Leo said, “Grief just seems to make her work harder. Notice this room? She really brightened it up. She’s got a gift for that kind of thing.”
Briana had to agree—Leo’s house was starting to look homey again. She was about to say so, but at that moment Inga entered, bringing two china cups and saucers on a tray.
“Hello,” Inga said with a sort of stoic breeziness. “How are you, Briana? Feeling better? I hope these trips to the doctor are helping. I’ve brought you both some nice herbal tea.” She set down the tray and handed each of them a cup.
Briana murmured thank you, but Leo looked askance at the tea. “This herbal stuff again? I’d rather have coffee.”
“Too much caffeine isn’t good for your heart, you know that,” Inga said with a smile. “You need to mind the doctor and change your habits. Your loved ones want you to be around for a long time. Isn’t that right, Briana?”
“Yes,” Briana said. “I want you to take care of yourself, Poppa.”
“Oh, I don’t want to leave this old earth yet,” Leo said. “I have a farm and a family to take care of—and my neighbors.” He beamed at Inga. “I have other plans, too. Another greenhouse. My newsletter. Inga, I must show you my newsletter.”
“I’m sure it’s fascinating,” said Inga. “Harve’s told me how incisive your thoughts are on genetic engineering. He’s pretty much decided not to just dabble in organic farming, but to go over to it full-time.”
“He’s spoken of it.” Leo nodded with pleasure and satisfaction.
Inga steepled her fingers and looked thoughtful. “Maybe good can come of this tragedy. Maybe he’ll not only change the house, but the whole farm. To be more like yours. You’re kind of an idol to him, you know.”
The Baby Gift Page 19