by Marta Perry
So she kept talking—about the weather, her work at the day care, descriptions of some of the more colorful guests and their children who’d inhabited the lodge over the past year.
It wasn’t until they’d entered the main lodge and Nate was fumbling with his backpack that she stopped talking. She steadied the backpack as Nate slipped it in front of him, and then tucked her hands under Gracie’s shoulders while he worked the baby’s legs loose from the tight material.
She kissed Gracie’s soft cheek before tucking her against her hip and flashed Nate her most encouraging smile. “Well, I guess this is it.”
Nate’s lips pursed for a moment as he swallowed hard and worked his fingers through the short tips of his brown hair. “Yeah. I guess it is.”
“Is what?” came Vince’s voice from the front desk. Jess hadn’t seen Vince standing there when they’d entered; and if the way Nate’s shoulders visibly tightened and the slant of his clenched jaw was any indication, neither had he.
Nate didn’t answer, and Jessica took her cue from him, remaining silent as Vince approached. Unconsciously, she tightened her hold on Gracie, then purposefully relaxed again, knowing the baby would respond to the cues she was getting from Jessica.
“How’s my little niece?” Vince asked in the high-pitched singsong voice men used with children and animals. He reached for Gracie, and when the baby held out her arms to him, Jessica had no choice but to relinquish the baby to him.
“Oh, you are a sweetheart,” Vince crooned as Gracie laid her plump little hands on his face. Vince kissed the baby’s forehead, and then turned to Nate.
“How’s fatherhood treating you? You ready to wave the white flag in surrender yet?”
Jessica thought Vince’s tone was teasing, but she didn’t miss the way Nate drew himself up, his shoulders tight and his fists clenched against his sides.
“I don’t surrender,” he informed Vince through gritted teeth, his gaze narrowing. “Not now, and not ever. Just so we’re straight.”
Vince shrugged as if he didn’t care one way or the other, but his gaze became hooded.
Jessica remembered Nate’s comment about the bad blood between the two brothers, but all she could see was two grown men acting as mulish and stubborn as a couple of quarrelsome little boys. Each man was clearly taking his cues from the past, when they’d both been hotheaded teenagers.
Didn’t they realize they were both grown men now—capable, at least in theory, of talking through their problems as adults?
Jessica’s gaze shifted from Vince’s closed expression to Nate’s open glower.
Obviously not, Jessica thought, pressing her lips together to keep herself from grinning, knowing any humor she found in the situation would only add kindling to an already sparking blaze.
If she didn’t step in and stamp out the fire right now, she thought the two men might regress even further—into an all-out brawl.
Men.
She shook her head and stepped between them, stopping just shy of holding her hands palm out to stop them from advancing on each other.
“How would you like to spend some time with your new little niece, Vince?” she asked in a firm but placating tone.
“Well, sure. I’d love to,” he said, then frowned. “If Nate doesn’t have a problem with it.”
Nate glared at him.
“Why do you ask?” Vince queried, blatantly ignoring Nate as his attention shifted to the baby he still held in his arms.
Nate stepped to Jessica’s side. “I’m here to see Pop. Jessica is keeping the baby out here for me while I go in to visit.”
Jessica let out a breath she hadn’t even realized she’d been holding as the tension, while still fairly high-strung between the two men, dissipated enough that she was fairly certain one wouldn’t suddenly lunge at the other.
Fairly certain.
“Are you?” Vince asked, his voice cool.
“Unless you have a problem with it,” Nate responded, echoing Vince’s earlier sentiments.
Vince’s eyebrows arched and he shook his head.
“Not at all. About time, if you ask me. I didn’t tell Pop you were back home, like you asked. He’ll be surprised to see you.”
“That’s one way to describe it,” Nate answered, his voice so low that while Jessica barely heard the statement, she was sure Vince had not.
Slipping her hand into Nate’s, she squeezed reassuringly. “Take your time with your father, Nate. I’ll stay here with Vince and Gracie. There’s no reason to rush.”
Nate met her gaze, his eyes at once apologetic and grateful. He clipped a nod.
“I’ll be back soon,” he said, and then made a smooth, military about-face and strode toward the hallway.
Jessica watched him go, praying once again that Nate wouldn’t find things with his father as bad as he imagined them to be. After what she’d just witnessed between Nate and Vince, she was no longer so sure about Nate’s reception with his father.
And if things went poorly, she might be saying goodbye to Nate and Gracie much sooner than she would have thought. Her stomach tightened uncomfortably at the same time her throat closed. If Nate and Gracie left Morningway Lodge, would her heart leave with them?
Chapter 7
It didn’t take Nate more than a minute to reach the suite of rooms located on the far end of the first-floor hallway. He knew right where they were. These had been his parents’ rooms when Nate was growing up, with the boys sharing the room across the hallway. Now it was just Pop alone in the suite. Nate wondered if Vince still occupied the room across the way.
Nate hesitated in front of the door, noting how the glass door at the end of the hallway, which gave clients an easier access to their rooms from outside, was shaking from the breeze. He could feel the chill seeping through the edge of the glass door, and made a mental note of it, thinking it ought to be repaired. Not that it would be easy to mention a suggestion with any negative connotation attached to it to Vince.
Not that Vince would care to listen to any of his suggestions. Nate knew he had lost any claim to Morningway Lodge when he’d entered the military. That was how he wanted it to be, and it was a sure bet Vince didn’t want him interfering in any way.
Shaking his head to dislodge the unwelcome thoughts, Nate rapped three times on the door to his father’s room. He waited a moment, and then when no one answered, he tried the knob.
It turned. Thinking his father might be resting, he swung the door open on silent hinges and let himself into the room.
The living quarters were much the same as Nate remembered them. Several of his mother’s cross-stitched pictures still hung on the walls, and the furniture was the same—two plump old blue fabric easy chairs sat at an angle from an equally worn cream-colored sofa and a knotted pine coffee table that lent the décor a quaint look Nate had always loved. A small dining table and two hard-backed chairs stood in the far corner.
No need for a kitchen, Nate knew, for the chef in the main lodge always brought in meals for them. An open doorway in the middle of the right wall led to the tiny bed and bath.
It was only after he’d taken a moment to draw in his surroundings that Nate noticed his father, tucked into a wheelchair and facing the window. The curtains were open and the sun was streaming down on the old man, giving Nate the peculiar feeling he was looking at someone larger than life.
And that, Nate acknowledged silently, was what his father had always been to him.
Larger than life.
“I told you I wasn’t hungry,” Jason Morningway bit out without turning to see who was in the doorway. “Just take it away.”
“Pop?” Nate asked hesitantly.
His father jerked, then froze.
“Pop? It’s Nate.”
“Nate,” the old man repeated, wonder in his voice. “My son.”
Nate’s throat welled with emotion and he tried to swallow it back, but the stinging pressure at his Adam’s apple simply wouldn’t go away, making it difficult for him to breathe.
Slowly, the old man appeared to regain at least a semblance of use in his upper body, and using his right hand, he put pressure on the switch that turned his chair around. After a moment of adjusting the switch, Jason gazed up at his son.
Nate felt as if he’d been sucker punched in the gut. His breath swept audibly from his lungs.
This was the man who had so completely intimidated Nate as a boy?
Gone was the height and strength Nate remembered. In its place was a tiny, shriveled man confined to a wheelchair, with a flannel blanket tucked around his legs. His gray eyes were filmy and the muscles on the left side of his face drooped slightly.
Nate hadn’t realized until that moment how devastating his father’s stroke had been. Pop looked eighty, not the sixty-eight years old Nate knew him to be.
“Come here,” Jason commanded, and Nate immediately obeyed, for it was the imposing voice that Nate remembered from his youth.
His father stared up at him for a long moment without speaking. Nate noticed the way the old man’s shoulders were quivering and thought it might be from strain, so he swiped a hard-backed chair from the dining table and seated himself in front of his father.
He wanted to reach out and touch the old man, if nothing else to reassure himself that the moment was real, but he didn’t move a muscle.
His father had never been the touchy type. Nate could count on one hand the number of times Jason Morningway had embraced him as a child.
So he was surprised when his father lifted his frail right arm and clasped Nate on the shoulder. Nate could feel the chill of Jason’s hand through his shirt and he shivered unconsciously.
“Nate,” the old man said again. “My son.”
“I’m here, Pop,” Nate said. “I’m here.”
Though he knew it wasn’t his fault that he couldn’t be here when his father had collapsed, that he had been a continent away fighting for his country, he still felt guilty for his absence.
“A marine,” Pop said, as if somehow reading Nate’s thoughts.
Where Nate had expected anger, he heard pride, and his mind clouded with unexpected sensations.
“Yes, sir. Ten years, now.”
The old man wet his dry, split lips with the tip of his tongue and cracked a wavering half smile. “Your mother would have been proud.”
Nate’s eyes stung with unshed tears. He hadn’t cried since he was a small boy, and he wasn’t about to do so now, but the pressure behind his eyelids didn’t go away even after he blinked repeatedly.
“You’ve come home,” Pop said, as if he’d only now realized the fact. “Why?”
“Yes, well, I don’t know, really. And I doubt if I’ll be staying.”
His father’s face fell, and Nate scrambled to bring the tenuous smile back to Pop’s lips. Two minutes with his father and he’d already blown it.
“I have a baby,” Nate blurted.
At this awkward pronouncement, Pop’s gaze narrowed into an expression Nate was more familiar with. This was the father Nate had expected. Perhaps things hadn’t changed as much as they had first appeared.
“You got married?” the old man barked. “Vince never said.”
“No, sir,” Nate answered. He would have continued his explanation, but Pop cut him off.
“I raised you better than that.”
So the man still had some fight in him, did he? Somehow, his father’s reaction relieved Nate—Pop the way he had been and not as he was now.
“Yes, sir. I know you did. The baby is not my biological child. She was my best friend Ezra’s daughter. My battle buddy in Iraq. When he died, I became Gracie’s legal guardian.”
“Gracie,” his father repeated, testing the name on his lips. “Where is she?”
“A close friend of mine is watching her in the dayroom.”
“Well, I want to meet my little granddaughter,” Pop said, fidgeting with the blanket on his lap. Nate could see the old man only had one good arm to work with. His left arm lay virtually useless by his side. “How about you bring her to me?”
Nate stretched forward to tuck the blanket around his father and felt a shiver rock through the man.
“Are you cold?” Nate asked solicitously. Central heating kept the lodge at a comfortable seventy degrees, but Pop’s skin felt cold to the touch.
“I’m always cold,” Pop grumbled. “I can’t seem to warm up, not even under a dozen blankets. That stroke of mine nearly did me in. Still might,” he said with a disgusted grunt.
Nate wanted to cringe at his father’s fatalistic statement. He’d told himself over and over throughout the years he’d been gone that he didn’t really care about his family, for they never really cared about him.
But that wasn’t true. This was his father. Nate loved him despite his flaws.
Nate tucked the flannel blanket more tightly around his father’s frail shoulders.
“I’ll go get Gracie,” he said, deciding the best thing to do was get Pop’s mind off his ailments. “It’ll just be a moment.”
Pop grunted again and turned his chair back toward the window. “I’ll be here. Got no place else to go.”
The defeatist tone to his father’s voice saddened Nate. It was as if the man had just given up. He could understand the feeling, even if he didn’t agree with it. Pop was confined to a small set of rooms and a wheelchair.
That would take the fight out of most men, Nate thought.
But not his pop.
Pop was a scrapper and always had been. He’d started a business with little more than a wish and a prayer, and had built it up for himself with his own two hands. He’d worked hard over the years to provide for his family.
Only to have it end like this?
Nate vowed to himself it would not be so.
* * *
Jessica looked up just as Nate entered the dayroom. She tried to read his expression as his gaze met hers, wondering how it had gone with his father, but it was hard to tell.
His eyes were wide and his lips pinched. He looked lost, Jessica thought, like a little boy who’d wandered away from his parents in a department store and had looked up only to find the faces of strangers swarming in and out around him.
She was thankful she was the only one there to witness it. Vince had spent a couple of minutes playing with Gracie, and then had excused himself to go back to the office.
“How did it go?” she asked softly.
Nate didn’t immediately answer. Instead, with the gold flecks in his eyes shimmering brightly, he reached for Gracie, who flapped her arms and babbled excitedly at his attention.
“Okay, baby girl,” he murmured, swinging Gracie in the air and then kissing her chubby cheek. “Your grandfather wants to meet you.”
“Oh!” Jessica exclaimed, releasing the breath she’d been holding. “It went well, then?”
Nate’s gaze met hers over the top of the baby’s head, and he gave a clipped nod. He smiled, but it didn’t quite reach his eyes.
Impulsively, she stood and moved to Nate’s side, giving him a quick, spontaneous hug.
“Poor Pop,” Nate said, shaking his head. “I had no idea the stroke had debilitated him to such a colossal extent.”
“You couldn’t have known.”
Nate snorted. “Maybe deep down I knew, and I just didn’t want to face reality.”
“You’re here now,” she gently pointed out, absently stroking his shoulder.
“Well, I’m too little, too late,” he snapped derisively.
“Not at all. How can you say that? He was glad to see you, wasn’t he?”
Nate’s lips twisted as he nodded.
“And if tha
t wasn’t enough, I’m sure baby Gracie is going to make his day.”
Nate gazed down at Gracie, and then offered his hand to Jessica. “He seemed anxious to meet her.”
“Then what are we waiting for?” Jessica asked, pulling him toward the hallway.
Nate didn’t say anything, but he allowed her to lead him down the hallway and back to his father’s suite of rooms.
“Pop?” he called, entering the room without knocking on the door this time. “I’ve brought Gracie.”
Jessica had seen Jason Morningway off and on at the lodge, though he had been too ill in the past few weeks to make the foray out to the dayroom to interact with others. He looked a bit weaker than she remembered, but the joy shining from his gray eyes was unmistakable.
“My granddaughter,” he announced, wheeling his chair forward. “Thank the Good Lord. I didn’t think I would live to see the day.”
Nate’s hand clenched tightly over Jessica’s for a moment, and she gave him a reassuring squeeze back before letting go.
Nate crouched before his father and propped Gracie up on his knee, so the old man could see her and interact with her.
“Little darling,” Jason crooned, reaching his hand toward Gracie.
The baby wasn’t shy with strangers; or maybe, Jessica thought, Gracie instinctively knew that Jason Morningway was family. Gracie clasped her little fist over her grandfather’s index finger and babbled happily at him.
“She’s quite a talker,” Jason said with a gruff laugh. “How old is she?”
“Six and a half months,” Nate answered with a tentative smile. “And she’s already more than a handful, let me tell you.”
“As were you,” his father countered, a faraway look reaching his eyes. “Even before you were born, you were always on the move. I remember your mother saying she thought you were going to be a circus acrobat. And then as a toddler, we couldn’t keep you still for more than a minute. You’d climb on bookshelves, throw your ball through a window. One time you hid in the middle of an apparel rack at a department store and your mother couldn’t find you. You scared the wits out of her that day.”