He didn’t want to start a fight by pointing out that he couldn’t be less interested. Clearly this was a major undertaking for Kendra. What faster way to doom their future than to refuse to see what she was hoping to do here?
She returned and spread papers on the coffee table. “Jamie is studying architecture and interior design, and she’s really got a good eye. On the other hand, the drawings are Greek to me.”
He sat quietly while she explained the possibilities, the choices, the potential. His discomfort grew. He saw immediately that Kendra was not simply planning to add another bedroom and a larger living area. This house promised to be a showplace. For her, the Foggy Bottom condo would never again be more than a convenient place to sleep. Home would be here.
“What do you think?” she asked at last.
“Are you planning to move here permanently?”
She looked up from the plans. “I’m just taking everything a step at a time. Does it seem that way to you? That I’m doing this to get away from you?”
He never answered those kinds of questions. “It doesn’t feel like it has anything much to do with me.”
“It’s your land. I’ve always wanted you to be involved in everything we do here.”
He was saved from answering by a clatter on the porch. Two little girls burst into the room. “We have peanut butter chocolate and blueberry sundae,” the older said. “Are you Uncle Isaac?”
Isaac stood and watched a graceful young woman who looked nothing like Kendra and everything like Kendra’s mother walk into the room.
“Yes, you have to be Isaac,” she said, following up on her daughter’s words. “Of course I’m Jamie. The munchkin with the ice cream is Hannah, and the urchin with the curls is Alison.”
The munchkin and the urchin looked friendly enough, although he knew little about children and had thought even less about them.
Until recently.
Jamie held out her hand, and he shook it, murmuring all the acceptable responses. She flashed dimples just like her mother’s, but not with the coy and somehow predatory expression that accompanied Riva’s. She looked genuinely happy to meet him, as if something good had just walked into her life.
“There is a snake under the house,” the munchkin said. “His name is Black Beauty, and he is to be admired from a distance. He sucks eggs but does not eat Oreos.”
Isaac looked at Kendra, who was watching him. “Snake?”
She shrugged.
“Black Beauty?” he asked Hannah.
“If I were a snake, I would marry him.”
“If you were a snake, he would be lucky to have you.”
Hannah smiled, and dimples flashed. “Alison and I can show you where he lives. You must hold her hand, though. She is still a little girl.”
Jamie tried to intercede. “Uncle Isaac just got here, Hannah. He’s probably tired from the trip.”
Isaac held out his hand. “Not too tired to see if Black Beauty is visiting.”
“Oh, he doesn’t visit,” Hannah said. “It’s his house. We are the visitors. He was here first.”
“BB’s a black rat snake,” Kendra assured him. “Not poisonous.”
Isaac had a little girl holding each hand now. He felt like a giant. “We’ll be back in a few minutes. Jamie, I’m looking forward to hearing all about your trip down here.”
“And probably a lot more,” she said.
His eyes met hers. He nodded. She smiled again. He was a cautious man who had every reason to distrust Kendra’s sister.
He found himself smiling back.
K
endra had dreaded Jamie’s reunion “celebration.” She’d imagined Isaac stiff and unnatural with the girls and suspicious of her sister’s motives. Instead, he seemed entranced by her nieces, particularly Hannah.
As a gift, he presented Hannah and Alison with a bright red bag filled with bubble wands of all shapes and sizes, then taught them to make bubble solution with dishwashing soap and the addition of glycerin. Clearly, somewhere in the midst of a busy day, he had read up on the chemistry of this particular childhood pleasure.
Outside in the sunlight, the girls spent the better part of two hours creating bubbles. Or, more accurately, Hannah produced and Alison chased. While he watched, Isaac assembled the new charcoal grill and set it far enough away from Bubble Central for safety.
Jamie was tireless. She prepared a pasta salad with a balsamic poppy seed dressing she made herself, shucked sweet corn from Florida, and snapped the ends off Michigan asparagus. She baked a hot-water sponge cake to top with fresh whipped cream, then sliced strawberries and lightly sugared them to draw out the flavor. She answered her phone at least twice, although Kendra couldn’t hear the conversations. Jamie made sure of that.
Kendra settled herself on the new porch furniture with a tall glass of Jamie’s homemade lemonade and a book on signature quilts. She didn’t get far. She was distracted by the sight of her husband with the girls. Isaac, the same man who had sidelined discussions of raising a family by saying he knew nothing about children and sworn he didn’t have time to learn.
He would make an excellent father. She saw that now. The girls already adored him. He was patient, but, even more so, fascinated, as if he had discovered a new species in the most remote corner of the Amazon rain forest and was determined to preserve every chromosome strand.
The irony wasn’t lost on her. Isaac would make an excellent father. She was fairly certain she would make an excellent mother. Unfortunately, children were no longer an option.
“I think everything’s almost done.” Jamie came out to the porch, wiping her hands on a checkered dish towel. She had flour on one cheek; she wore another dish towel as an apron, tucked into a peasant skirt. Kendra almost expected her to yell for Laura, Mary and Pa. Time for supper at
The Little House on the Prairie
.
“Come sit with me,” Kendra said. “You’ve been working too hard.”
Jamie perched on the edge of the porch and leaned against a post. “Cooking’s recreation for me. And let’s face it, children aren’t the best critics, so cooking for you is a treat. Hannah wants everything exactly the same way every time. Add a quarter of a teaspoon of something as exotic as oregano, and she’ll starve herself out of spite.”
“Where did you learn to cook?”
“I began by doing food prep at a chain restaurant and worked my way to line cook before I started back to school. I even thought about pursuing cooking as a profession, then I won that contest I mentioned.”
“I wonder what Jimmy would say about his daughters? Me in the same business he couldn’t wait to get rid of. You chopping veggies and broiling fish.”
“At least newspapers are in the bloodline. I doubt any other Dunkirk or Delacroix ever went to bed with the stink of raw onions and garlic on her hands.”
“Can you see the horror on Riva’s face?”
Both women burst into laughter, and it was cleansing. That they could laugh at anything about their childhood was a beginning.
“What’s so funny?” Isaac came up to the perch to sit next to Jamie. The girls were on their final wand. Their attention spans were admirable but soon to be exhausted.
“Our mother,” Jamie said. “Have you met her? And, yes, I know she’s not a healthy woman. But we can laugh at the parts of her that are purely perverse, can’t we? Lord knows we’ve cried over them.”
“I’ve met her.” Isaac’s voice vaulted higher. “‘Kendra, darling, is this mar-r-r-rvelous creature really your choice for a mate? And to think I believed you had never learned a thing I tried to teach you. And here is this man, this gorgeous, gorgeous man!’”
Kendra was astonished. She had been married to Isaac for seven years and she’d never realized what a mimic he was. He had captured their mother exactly.
Jamie was laughing again. “Oh, she didn’t! Wait, of course she did. Does she proposition you when Kendra leaves the room?”
Kendra answered that one. “We agreed to synchronize our bladders when Riva’s in town. Isaac heads for the bathroom when I do and waits by the ladies room door until I come out.”
“Poor Isaac.” Jamie wiped her eyes. “And here comes the moment when I’m supposed to say maybe Riva’s crazy, but she’s really good-hearted underneath. But of course it’s not true. She’s just who she is. One of a kind. Completely unaware there’s another person living on this planet.”
Kendra wasn’t shocked at the sentiment, but she
was
surprised Jamie was so comfortable with this sad truth. There was no blame in her voice, no self-pity. She wasn’t sure that at Jamie’s age she had been so aware or forgiving.
“So tell me about your job,” Jamie said to Isaac. “I just know a little, and it’s fascinating.”
Kendra watched Isaac launch into an abbreviated version. He was enjoying himself. Isaac never flirted. Not precisely. But when he liked a woman, he was capable of giving her his undivided attention. Jamie had it now.
Jamie was even more interesting to watch. Despite the jokes at Riva’s expense, Jamie had learned a few things from their mother. Although her response to Isaac was subtler than her response to Cash, like Riva, she gloried in male attention. She didn’t bat her eyelashes, but she leaned forward, flashed her dimples, used her hands in ways that were almost provocative to illustrate a point.
Kendra wondered if Isaac recognized what was happening.
The girls broke up the conversation. Isaac’s wands had worked a miracle, but the miracle had ended. Jamie took them inside to get drinks and celery and carrot sticks so they wouldn’t fall apart while the steaks were grilled. Isaac got up to light the coals.
“She’s not what I expected.” He dusted his hands off on his jeans.
Kendra descended the steps to join him. They walked slowly toward the grill. “No?”
“I like her. I wasn’t prepared to. But she’s great with the kids. Take it from me, that’s the best way to figure out true character.”
“She’s doesn’t believe in rules.”
“Sure she does. She just doesn’t go around spouting them. Look how well behaved the girls are. The rules are part of the way they live.”
They were arguing about how to raise children. She felt a stab of anger, one she didn’t want to examine too closely. “Sorry, but the girls rule the roost. Jamie goes along.”
“I think you’re filtering some of what you see through the lens of your past.”
“Oh? Then how’s this? I think she’s selling drugs.” She told him what she had observed and, finally, what she had heard last night.
He was silent until they reached the barbecue grill. “There could be another explanation.”
“Isaac, don’t you get it? Jamie knows how to make you like her. She was flirting with you. And apparently it’s working.”
He frowned. “She wasn’t flirting. She was being friendly. Don’t you think I can tell the difference?”
“Jamie’s determined that both of us will like her. She’s doing everything imaginable for me. But I’ve been around people like Jamie before. You can’t trust them or anything they say. I was on my way to forgetting that until last night. Then I heard her on the phone.”
“So why don’t you just have it out with her? Tell her what you heard and ask her what it means.”
“I don’t want to alienate her. I don’t want her to walk out of my life again, not when I’ve just gotten to know the girls. I need to be there for them. It’s a familiar story, isn’t it? Families all over the world putting up with things they shouldn’t have to, solely because children are involved.”
“And now you’re going to say she
had
the girls so she could use them as weapons?”
“No, she loves them. I know that. But what’s going to happen to them when she’s caught selling meth or crack or angel dust? And if she’s selling, is she using? What if one morning Hannah goes in to wake her mother and finds her dead?”
He rested his hands on her shoulders. “I can only tell you what I see. A young mother working hard to raise her children well. A sister trying to reestablish a relationship that means something to her. A vibrant, interesting woman you’ve missed like hell all the years I’ve known you. And my wife, who still wants to take care of her baby sister.”
“Jamie’s the same woman who walked away ten years ago and until now hasn’t given me the time of day.”
“Is that what this is about, K. C.?”
She changed tack. “Where does the K.C. come from, Isaac? That’s what you called me in the early days.”
“In the days where we weren’t certain of anything except that we couldn’t keep our hands off each other?”
“We seem to be doing that part well enough.”
He was silent for too long. “I’ve been afraid of hurting you,” he said at last.
“A legitimate fear.”
“Well, I think that went well, didn’t it?” Jamie looked tired from an afternoon of cooking, cleaning and managing her daughters. After a truly delicious dinner, Isaac had left for D. C. He had attained favored uncle status. The girls had even tried to block his exit.
“Everything was great.” Kendra was still simmering, but she refused to examine the reason too closely.
“Are you and Isaac okay, sis? I know it’s not my place to ask, but I sensed tension. You can tell me to butt out.”
Kendra answered more sharply than she had intended. “I guess if we were okay, I wouldn’t be living here.”
“I thought you came to get away from the city and recover?”
“That’s certainly part of it.”
Jamie changed tactics. “I like him. He’s pretty buttoned down, but I sense a lot under the surface. Am I wrong?”
Kendra surprised herself by wanting to admit the truth. She took a chance. “I don’t know anymore. When we married, I thought that was the perfect combination. Someone who didn’t make demands. Someone who would reveal himself a little at a time. Only the last part hasn’t turned out to be true.”
“Jimmy and Riva did a number on us, didn’t they? I looked for love in all the wrong places, and you looked for it in acceptable doses.”
Kendra thought that was surprisingly insightful. “Apparently both of us got what we wanted.”
“I sure did, but I have the girls, and that makes up for the mistakes. Although it doesn’t make up for the people I hurt along the way.” She put her hand on Kendra’s arm as if she planned to say more. Her cell phone played its tune. “Damn.”
“Don’t answer it,” Kendra said.
“I have to. I’m sorry.”
Not as sorry as Kendra was. Clearly nothing was as important to her sister as the person at the other end of the line.
Jamie got up and started down the steps for the clearing. “I’ll have a cigarette while I’m at it and kill two birds with one stone.”
The expression seemed apt. Kendra felt her anger growing. She wasn’t sure at whom it was aimed. Isaac, for discounting her so easily and in so many ways? Jamie, for ably presenting one picture of herself and living another?
Jamie disappeared behind the van. That seemed to be the end of it until a little voice called from inside the cabin. “I don’t feel so good….”
Kendra went inside just in time to find Hannah getting off her air mattress.
“Bathroom,” she said, hand over her mouth.
Kendra opened the doors and quickly escorted Hannah into the bathroom, and just in time. With efficiency, the child vomited Jamie’s excellent meal into the toilet.
Once she finished, Kendra wet a cloth and wiped the little girl’s face, then she helped her rinse her mouth in the sink. Hannah was perspiring and trembling, and Kendra put her arms around her. “Feel better?”
Hannah nodded. “Too many strawberries.”
Kendra hoped that’s all it was. “Do you feel good enough to go back to sleep?”
“Where’s Mommy?”
“Outside. I’ll tell her you’re sick.”
Hannah nodded. “Okay.”
Kendra knew better than to lift a six-year-old so soon after major surgery. Instead, she guided her across the porch. Jamie was nowhere in sight. She tucked Hannah back into bed and covered her with a light blanket. The little girl’s eyelids fluttered shut. Alison was snuffling away.
Kendra waited by the door, but Hannah didn’t seem to require anything else. In fact, she looked as if she had already fallen back to sleep.
Outside, Kendra cautiously took the steps and went to find her sister. She could hear Jamie’s voice as she approached the van. It hadn’t been her intent to eavesdrop—at least, she told herself as much. She wasn’t using Hannah’s illness as an excuse, but she slowed as she neared the van, and Jamie’s words became audible.
“Come on, we’ve been through that. Either you’re with this or you’re not. Nobody’s going to let you out gracefully. You know darn well what the consequences are if you screw up.”
There was silence, then Jamie spoke again. “Fine, that’s what you want me to tell Rosario? That you refuse to come through? That you’re holding on to the stuff you got and hoping for big money? And you think, for some reason, this has nothing to do with your deal with us?”
Another silence. “Honey, I’ve been where you are, and I can assure you that all the tears in the world aren’t going to make him change his mind. You can’t sob your way out of this, and you can’t beg. Either you make good on your promises or your life won’t be worth living. I can tell you right now, Rosario will turn this over to the big boys, and they don’t have his patience or forbearance.”
Kendra had heard enough. She rounded the van. “Hang up,” she said.
Jamie was startled. Her eyes widened. “Hold on,” she said into the telephone. She covered it with her hand. “What’s going on?”
“Your daughter’s sick. She’s back in bed now, but she vomited up her dinner.”
“Alison?”
“No, Hannah.”
Jamie bit her lip. “Strawberries. Darn it. This happened last time I made shortcake. She doesn’t know when to stop.”