“The noise is going to make you crazy.”
“Nah. I’m about as crazy as I’m going to get. Is George gone?”
Noah nodded. “But he’ll be back when the church is open.”
“Go on then. Go do your pastor thing. I’ll paint and answer the phone and be close by in case Jo needs me for the kids. She’s not going to need me, though. She’s got this situation wired—she knows exactly what to do.”
“You okay with that, kiddo?” he asked.
“Yeah,” she said in a breath. “I can’t believe what a break it is—having someone like her fill the bill. I don’t think all the court motions in the world could have worked out better. Sometimes I end up being so goddamn lucky.”
His lips quirked up and he shook his head.
“I guess you wouldn’t have exactly put it like that, huh?” she asked.
He leaned forward and gave her cheek a kiss. “No, I might not have. But I know you didn’t mean any disrespect. Remember, I’m the guy who saw you on your knees.”
“Who’d’a believed it would finally pay off, huh?” She grinned widely.
“I’m going to get out of here before I do something crazy and get caught by a construction worker or something. I’ll call to check in from time to time, make sure you’re doing okay and there aren’t any new developments. Call Brie first thing and ask for a restraining order. Arnie isn’t worth trusting.”
Ellie was back at the Fitch house before Jo had returned from fetching clothes for the kids from Arnie’s. Nick was in charge. The kids were watching a little afternoon TV and he was in the kitchen. “Jo told me to get started on dinner. I’m not trusted with anything more complicated than peeling potatoes and carrots,” he said.
“Would you like me to take over?” she asked.
“I’m almost done here. I expect her any minute. And she said no more than an hour on the TV, so I have my eye on the clock.”
“Nick, this is wonderful of you—watching out for my kids like this. I owe you an apology. That first day I met you, when I wanted to rent that room, I made some assumptions about you that were wrong. You haven’t been anything but respectful to me. I’m sorry I was so rude.”
He stood at the sink, peeling carrots. He glanced over his shoulder. “No apology necessary, Ellie. Your assumption wasn’t far off base. I’ve done some real dumb-ass things in this little town. I should be the one to go around apologizing, not you. But you and your kids are completely safe here. I’d never let anything happen to them. And, my God, it is good to see Jo so happy.”
She took a step toward him and spoke to his back. “Then why?” she asked. “Why did you get yourself that terrible reputation? I can tell you’re crazy about Jo. You’d be lost without her, I know you would.”
“You’re right. And I don’t know why. Lonely, maybe. Cross because I wasn’t getting my way? A couple of times I thought maybe Jo would be jealous and—” He shrugged. “It really doesn’t matter. It’s been a long time since I did anything as stupid as make a pass, and that’s when I almost came up against Jack Sheridan. Whew,” he said, shaking his head. “That was years ago, and if Mel hadn’t put me straight right quick, Jack would have killed me. That was before they were together, you know. But Mel was already his woman in his eyes.” He glanced over his shoulder again and smiled sheepishly at Ellie. “You’re old enough to know this, Ellie. Men can be very stupid.”
She took another step toward him. She put a hand on his shoulder. “Nick, listen to me. Don’t waste another minute. This thing with Jo has gone on too long. Fix it.”
He looked down. “I wish I knew how.”
“Beg,” she said. “Ask her forgiveness. Say you were stupid and wrong and that you need her. And, for gosh sakes, tell her how much you love her. It shows all over you when you’re within ten feet of her. The two of you have already wasted so much time.”
“It might not make any difference, you know. Jo might not want things back the way they were.”
“You have two choices, Nick. You can find out, or you can go on like this and never know.” She grinned at him. “By the way, I didn’t have a boyfriend, six-five or otherwise, and the only judge I know is my worst nightmare.”
He grinned back. “I know.”
Vanni was doing much better at keeping up with two little ones and a house, thanks to Ellie’s help. She’d even gotten pretty adept at putting two toddlers in car seats and carting them off for shopping errands. Her days were a bit more tiring, of course; there was no way to minimize the work involved, nor the amount of cleaning and laundry. And diapers? She was up to her eyeballs in diapers without the energy to begin potty training Matt. But Ellie promised to be back—she had just needed two or three days in town so she could be available to her own kids. Just one day of help from Ellie would probably put Vanni right again.
Much of the time lately, when Vanni was in the same room, the kids were set free. If Vanni wasn’t exactly doting on Hannah, little Matt certainly was. Hannah followed him around—he, toddling; she, crawling at top speed and pulling herself up to a standing position on any piece of furniture that she could reach. Matt would bring her toys; she would offer hers to him. It was when Vanni noticed Hannah taking a couple of tentative steps from her spot leaning against the coffee table that Vanni realized she would be a year old in a month.
Her first birthday.
When Matt was taking first steps, Vanni and Paul and anyone else within shouting distance would be coaching him, reaching out hands for him, praising him, taking movies. But Hannah was doing it on her own.
Was this because she was the second child, or because she was Terri’s child? Vanni asked herself.
When Matt was about to have his first birthday, Vanni and Paul and Walt were planning a wonderful big birthday celebration to include all their friends. But, with some shame, Vanni realized she was going to have to look at the documents that came along with Hannah to find out her exact date of birth.
“Mama!” Hannah said triumphantly. Then she went splat on her diaper-cushioned butt and laughed.
“Yes,” Vanni said, smiling at her, “you’re walking! Big girl!”
Thankfully the doorbell interrupted her thoughts and she went to answer it. It was a UPS delivery, a very large box addressed to Mr. and Mrs. Haggerty. She signed for it and brought it into the great room where the children played. She put the box on the floor in front of the couch and sat down. “What do you think we have?” she said to the kids, who migrated nearer, curious. She opened the box and found a letter on the top of the Bubble Wrap. “Hmm, a surprise, I think,” she said. She opened the letter and read:
Beneath the shoe boxes, a treasure trove. While Hannah hung on her knees and Matt tried to grab at the things Vanni removed from the box, Vanni pulled out picture after picture—school pictures, those cute toothless, pigtail pictures, pubescent shots of what Vanni had always referred to as the “big-teeth” age. Terri in braces, Terri in dance class, Terri helping someone wash a car. And then there were prom pictures and winter-dance formals and the homecoming game with Terri right out in front, a trim and beautiful high school cheerleader who could not have imagined her life would be cut short at the age of thirty, leaving a baby behind.
Vanni tried looking through the pictures though her eyes clouded with tears. She simultaneously kept rescuing photos from Matt’s eager little hands. Finally, frustrated, she leaned Hannah against the couch and picked Matt up. She found his favorite blanket with the satin binding and snuggled it to him, putting him down in the playpen. It wasn’t exactly nap time, but when the blanket came out, it meant quiet time. He did a little insulted fussing before his thumb found his mouth and he nestled down.
She went back to the sofa and lifted Hannah onto her lap. She continued to sift through the pictures, showing them to Hannah, saying, “Hannah’s mama, see?” Hannah didn’t grab or fuss, but leaned against Vanni and just looked as each picture was pulled out. And then there was a framed wedding picture. Terri had been married? Vanni didn’t know that. Obviously she hadn’t been married while Paul dated her, and if she’d been married afterward, Hannah would have had a stepfather. She looked very young in the picture; she must have been divorced before Paul met her.
There were several albums that Vanni pulled out and stacked on the couch, one of them a wedding album.
Beneath the albums was a smaller box. Inside, carefully preserved, were several items. A white, lacy christening gown wrapped in tissue paper, a silver cup and spoon, badly tarnished, a couple of rattles, a pink knitted baby sweater with a hood and matching mittens. And inside more tissue paper, a floppy, sorely used stuffed puppy with one eye. “Oh, Hannah,” Vanni said. “Oh, Hannah, Mama’s puppy.”
“Bah-bah,” Hannah said, hitting the stuffed toy.
“Sweet puppy,” Vanni choked out, pressing the toy to Hannah and holding her tight. Vanni rocked Hannah back and forth, tears running down her cheeks.
Hannah settled back against Vanni and looked up at her face. She put a pudgy little hand against Vanni’s cheek and said, “Mama.”
“Yes, my little angel,” Vanni said with a sniff. “I’m going to be your mama. Yes. Mama loves you.”
By the time Vanni had given the kids lunch and settled them in their cribs for afternoon naps, she had everything from that box spread across the dining-room table. Then she called Jack. “Can you give me Rick Sudder’s phone number?”
“Sure,” Jack said in some confusion. “You all right, Vanni?”
“I’ll be okay—it’s just real important that I talk to him right away and I don’t know when he works or goes to school, or anything.”
“Well, he and Liz just moved into their own place in Eureka near the college. It’s a little dump, but they think it’s the frickin’ Taj Mahal. He has classes three days a week, works for Paul on Tuesdays and Thursdays and some Saturdays, so he’d be in Eureka today. I have no idea of his class schedule and I don’t know if they have an answering machine. Here’s the apartment number,” he said, reeling it off. “But, hey—he’s got that cell phone I gave him when he was in the hospital. He gets no reception in Virgin River, but it works fine in Eureka. Whether he carries it or stuffed it in the back of some drawer—”
“Jack!”
“Yeah, okay. Here’s the number,” he said, reciting it. “You sure you’re okay, Vanni?”
“I’ll be fine, thanks.”
Vanni immediately dialed the apartment number and of course, there was no answer and no machine. Then she tried the cell phone and it went directly to voice mail. “Rick, it’s Vanni Haggerty. God, I hope you actually carry that cell phone so you get this message. I really need to talk to you the second you get this. Nothing’s wrong, Rick, but it’s real important. Please call.”
While Vanni waited, she continued looking through the dozens of snapshots and pictures. She had put Hannah to bed with the stuffed puppy. If she didn’t hear from Rick by early evening, she would call his grandmother, Lydie Sudder. But really she’d rather—
The phone rang and she grabbed for it. “Hi, Vanni, it’s Rick. Is everything okay? You sounded a little—”
“Freaked out?” she asked with a nervous laugh. “Rick, you know we have Hannah with us now, right?”
“I heard that, yeah. Paul said he was living in some kind of day-care center.”
She laughed, but there were tears in her throat. “Yeah, that’s a true statement. Listen, Rick, I hope this doesn’t make you uncomfortable, but there aren’t too many people I can ask. I know your parents were killed when you were really young…”
“Car accident,” he said. “I was two.”
“Like Hannah’s mother, but she’s not even a year yet. What I want to know—did you cry for your parents? Did you grieve? Did you miss them? Want them? Feel like something was missing out of your life?”
Silence answered her while he thought. “I don’t know if I cried for them when my grandma first brought me home to Virgin River—you’d have to ask her. But growing up? Vanni, I don’t remember them at all. Sometimes, when I look at the old pictures, I think I remember them a little bit, but really, I don’t have a single true memory of them. I hate that.”
She sighed. “But how could you help it? If you can’t remember, you can’t remember.”
“I had a lot of questions, growing up. And I had some pictures. Not a lot of pictures. First of all, my gram didn’t take a lot of pictures of my dad when he was growing up. They were kind of poor, picture taking wasn’t a big thing. My mom had hardly any family—her folks died when she was real young, and no one knows what happened to pictures of her, if there were any. But there were pictures of them with me when I was a baby, and I had my gram to answer questions about my dad’s growing-up years. And she said they were real in love and happy to be having a baby.”
Terri wanted her baby, Vanni remembered. “I’m trying to understand what Hannah will need,” she said, almost more to herself than to Rick.
“She doing okay?” Rick asked.
“She’s doing great. She has no idea all she lost,” Vanni said.
“Well, there’s one thing I remember from growing up. My gram was so great to me—I couldn’t ask for more. I never knew my grandpa, but my gram took good care of me. And I had Jack. Then Preacher. But there was one thing…I always wished I could have had a mom and a dad, like other kids. You know—a regular family. But, hey, accidents happen to families. I had the next best thing. I have to say, there wasn’t anything about my growing up I’d call bad. But a regular family…That would have been good.”
What if Paul and I were killed in an accident like Rick’s parents? Like Terri Bradford had been? Who would take care of little Matt? Matt was luckier than Hannah—his paternal grandparents were alive and well, Vanni’s father a young sixty-two and her brother, Tom, twelve years younger and devoted to Mattie. Paul’s parents and brothers considered Mattie their own. There were many people to keep Mattie’s parents alive for him, to assure him he was loved and wanted, to be sure he knew the details of his ancestry.
Vanni was quiet for a minute. Then she said, “She’s going to have a regular family. A ton of pictures of her mom and details about her life, her family, so she knows what she needs to know about herself.” And she will never doubt, Vanni vowed, that she has a loving home.
Paul should have shot straight home after he was finished supervising work on the church, but, gee—Jack’s Bar was right there. He knew that Ellie had family stuff going on and hadn’t been to his house to help Vanni and, frankly, his house with a tired wife and two wild little kids wasn’t exactly a relaxing place most days. So he clapped Noah on the back and said, “Let me buy you a beer, pal. I need one and it probably wouldn’t kill you.”
“Wouldn’t kill me, that’s for sure,” Noah said.
They walked out of the church and across the street and Paul said, “So, there was a big deal going on at Jack’s last night and I missed the whole thing. Ellie’s ex showed up and spewed a whole lot of bad trash about her being a stripper and stuff, and the whole thing ended with her kids living with Jo and Nick Fitch.”
“How do you know all that already?” Noah asked.
“Well, I could’ve found out from Jack, but I was still home this morning when Ellie called Vanni. That true?”
“What part?” Noah asked.
“The kids are with Jo and Nick now?” Paul asked.
“That’s a fact,” Noah said. “Turns out Jo and Nick are certified foster parents, though they haven’t had any kids in a few years. And the social worker from Child Welfare was up a creek—had a court order saying the kids were to be with the stepfather, and that turned out to be a bad choice. So it was a solution. And a good one for Ellie.”
“Wow. And it’s true? She’s a stripper?”
Noah stopped walking and looked at Paul. “No. She’s a pastor’s assistant.”
“Right,” Paul said, losing that boyish grin the second he saw the angry tic in Noah’s jaw. “Okay, my bad. That wouldn’t do so much for you. Sorry.”
Noah started walking again. “Sure makes life interesting, though,” he said. “And all this has made Ellie’s life a challenge, to say the least.”
“And all that other stuff? Vanni says that other things he said—like about drugs and stuff—”
“Not a kernel of truth to it,” Noah said.
Both men walked up to the bar and Jack was right there. “Paul,” Jack said, “what’s going on out at your place?”
Paul shrugged and shook his head. “Same old stuff, far as I know.”
“Vanni called here earlier. She was looking for Rick’s phone number and she sounded a little…frazzled or something.”
“Rick’s number? Why?” Paul asked.
“She didn’t say, just that it was important and she was in a big hurry. I asked her if she was all right and she said she’d be fine.”
Paul turned questioning eyes to Noah. “Hey, I don’t have the first idea,” Noah said.
Paul didn’t think about it long. He turned on his heel and without saying goodbye, he darted out of the bar, jumped in his truck and drove home. All the way there he was saying to himself, Please let it not be any more nuts than usual.
When he walked into the house, he could hear Vanni talking to the kids in the kitchen and the sound of little fists and little spoons banging on high-chair trays. There was a huge mess scattered around the dining room. A box sat beside the table and there were smaller boxes and pictures and stuff everywhere. And of course the great room was strewn with baby gear and toys. On some bizarre instinct, he peeked into the master bedroom. He saw a couple of suitcases on the bed. And he thought, This isn’t happening to me.
He went to the kitchen. “Hi, honey,” he said tentatively.
“Oh, Paul, you’re home!” she said. She didn’t look as though she was leaving him.
“Have you been cleaning out closets or something?”
“No. Will you turn on the oven, please? Three-fifty. I’ve got a frozen lasagna to put in there. I hope you’re not starving, because I’ve been really busy.”
He turned on the oven. “Vanni, are you leaving me?”
She laughed at him. “For a few days. I’m taking the kids to Grants Pass. I’ve already talked to your mom and she’s going to help me with them and watch Matt for me. I could’ve called the Rutledges,” she said, speaking of little Matt’s biological grandparents. “But frankly, I’m not up to explaining Hannah to Carol just now. What I have to do is take Hannah to see her grandmother—I don’t know how sick she is. What if she doesn’t have long to live? What if I miss a chance to ask her questions about Hannah’s mother? There are things Hannah is going to need to know.” Vanni was rambling, talking more to herself than to Paul, it seemed. “There doesn’t appear to be family Terri was close to while growing up. I don’t dare waste a second. I’m afraid to even wait till the weekend. I’m going to pack tonight after the kids are in bed and leave right after breakfast.”
Paul was really sorry he hadn’t had that beer. It felt as if the ground was moving under his feet, things were shifting so quickly. He reached into the refrigerator and pulled out a bottled beer, popped the top and sat down at the kitchen table. Vanni was trying to referee dinner, two kids in two high chairs with Matt pretty adept at getting the food from his bowl to his mouth, while Hannah was just barely getting the occasional spoonful there. Her hands sure worked good, though.
“Hannah took steps today, Paul. All by herself. Didn’t you, sweetheart?” she said to the baby. “Such a big girl.” Then to Paul, “Her first birthday is coming up in just a month and we haven’t even talked about it. I got the digital camera out and took a few shots of her standing, but I want a movie camera. Right away. The digital will do a two-minute movie and that’s not good enough. I don’t care what usually happens—the second child in this house isn’t going to have an invisible childhood just because I’m really busy. Maybe I’ll pick one up on my way into Grants Pass so I can get some movies of Hannah with her grandma.”