The Sweetheart Rules (25 page)

“If we could adopt her. I know Jasmine doesn’t want a dog, but if you adopted it, then maybe if I came to Alaska to visit you, I could play with her, and she could keep you company when I’m not there.”

“Jelly Bean, I live on a base with a bunch of noisy, rowdy guys. I don’t need a dog to keep me company.”

“Yeah, but you said today that you’d be awful lonely when you left us. If you had Cinderella, you wouldn’t be so lonely.”

“Puppies are good comp’ny,” Ellie said. “So are kitties. You should get a kittie, too, Daddy. Then they could be friends.”

“Two pets? I’m not so sure about that, El. But a dog…” He considered the idea. He’d never had a dog. How did a man get to his mid-thirties and never own a dog? He had the room in his base housing, a little two-bedroom house that had always been too big for one man. Room for a dog, and for a set of bunk beds for the girls to come visit. It’d be a long stretch of time, between school schedules and his deployments, until he saw the girls. Jenny was right. A dog might be nice company. He’d have to find someone to watch the dog when he was on a mission or deployed, of course, but it was doable.

A man with a dog would need a vet he could consult with, too. A nice, friendly, small-town vet who could help him make the transition to dog owner. Yeah, that’s why he wanted the dog. So he’d have an excuse to call Diana.

He met Jenny’s eyes in the rearview mirror. “You’d have to promise to visit a lot.”

“I would.” She nodded several times. “As often as I could.”

Ellie bounced up and down in her seat. “Me too, Daddy! Me too!”

He chuckled. “I guess I’m taking a dog back to Alaska with me and making lots of room for two little girls.”

A smile spread across Jenny’s face like fresh butter on warm toast. “That’s going to be awesome. Thank you, Daddy.”

Daddy.
For that word, he’d adopt an entire Noah’s ark of pets.

“Guess this means I’ll have to adapt my slogan, too,” he said to Jenny.

“What slogan?”

“‘Where you guys go, I go.’ Now it’ll be ‘wherever you guys go,
Cinderella and I
go.’”

“You promise?” she asked again, just as she had all those weeks ago, but this time her voice wasn’t filled with wariness or hurt, but with confident teasing.

“Scout’s honor.” He held up three fingers. Jenny matched them with her own hand, and the two of them shared a momentary connection through the mirror’s eye before he went back to watching the road.

An hour and a half later—and a lot of discussion about the best way to scratch Cinderella behind the ears and how to make her do tricks—Mike pulled into the cracked driveway of the house where he’d grown up. It was the same squat bungalow he remembered, only painted light blue now instead of the off-white he remembered. An older model Taurus sat in the driveway, below a cheery, sunflower-decorated flag that read
WELCOME
. Bright pink and red flowers bloomed beneath giant shrubs in the front yard.

Mike turned off the car and stared at an image from his past. The rental clicked as the engine cooled.

“Daddy, how’s come we’re not getting out of the car?” Ellie said.

“Oh, sorry. Let’s go.” He unbuckled, then got out and helped the girls out of the backseat. Jenny grabbed the bag he’d picked up on the way here, then took Ellie’s opposite hand.

The front door opened and Mike’s mother stepped out onto the porch. She was wiping her hands on a floral apron, something she always did when she was nervous. One hand sliding over the other with the fabric caught between, back and forth, back and forth. A fine dusting of flour covered the front of the apron, dulling the flowers’ vibrant colors. A tentative smile trembled on her lips, but when the girls rounded the car, the smile burst like a sunrise on her face.

He remembered that smile. That apron. It warmed him deep inside, but he held those emotions in check, a practiced response that came from years of disappointment. He wasn’t getting his hopes up—and yet he had, just by coming here.

Mike followed behind his daughters as they climbed up the three wooden steps and stopped on the porch. “Hi, Mom,” he said.

“It’s so good to see you.” Helen Stark’s smile wobbled, and tears shimmered in her eyes. She held her gaze on his face for a long time, as if she couldn’t believe he was there, then bent down and smiled at the girls. “And you girls must be Jenny and Ellie.”

“I’m Jenny,” Jenny said, pointing to her chest. “And this is Ellie.”

“Are you my grandma?” Ellie asked.

Pride bloomed in Helen’s eyes. “Yes. Yes, I am.”

“Good. Cuz I need anotha grandma.” Ellie propped her fists on her hips. “Tucker’s grandma makes him cookies. Do you make cookies?”

“Your dad told me all about Tucker’s grandma when he called yesterday. And I think I have her beat.” Mike’s mother grinned, then tapped Ellie on the nose. “I made chocolate chip cookies
and
peanut butter cookies.”

Ellie jumped up and down, her flip-flops slapping the porch. “Those are my favorite!”

“Which ones?”

“All cookies!” Ellie laughed. Jenny, Mike, and his mother joined in, the sound filling the small porch like sunshine.

“Come on in and we’ll get some cookies while they’re still warm. I have iced tea, too”—she glanced at her son—“and I baked that chocolate peanut butter cake you used to like, Michael.”

Was it weird to be so touched that his mother had remembered his favorite childhood treat? “I still like it, Mom. Haven’t had it in a really long time, though.”

She nodded, her eyes welling. “Well, come in, come in, and get out of the heat.”

The girls scampered ahead of them, beelining for the kitchen and the promised cookies. Mike walked beside his mother, noting that her steps were slower now, and that there was a slight hitch in her gait. “I was surprised to hear you moved back into the old house.”

He’d expected her to keep the fancy house on the hill after the divorce. But she’d returned to the house of his youth, and as he looked around, he saw the same pictures marching down the walls of the hall, the same collection of porcelain figurines in the dining room hutch, the same bench his grandfather had made sitting by the front door.

“I wanted to start over,” she said. “Go back to the beginning, where things… made sense. Where
I
made sense. I’ve always loved this house, and it held a lot of happy memories before…”

“Before Dad died.”

She nodded. “I set up your old room for you and the girls. I know you’re not staying here tonight, but if you ever…” She caught herself and waved off the words. “Well, I don’t want to pressure you. Let’s plan one visit at a time.”

He stopped her before they reached the kitchen. Her short brown hair had grayed in the ensuing years, but the lighter color suited her well, made her eyes seem brighter. She’d lost some weight, and in her face, he saw the bloom of health and happiness. “I’m done staying away, Mom. I waited too long to come back as it was. I just had a”—he sighed—“a hard time dealing with everything.”

“I don’t blame you at all, Michael. Not one bit.” Apology filled her features. “I never should have married Keith. I did it too fast, too soon. He was such a charmer, and by the time I realized what he was really like, it was too late.”

“And you were trapped.”

She gave a half shrug, a small, sad smile on her face. “Yeah.”

“We don’t have to talk about this now,” Mike said. “Let’s just… visit.”

“No, we need to talk…” She sighed, and her gaze went to the kitchen. “We should have talked a long time ago.” His mother gestured toward the dining room, and he followed her in there, out of earshot of the girls. They sat at one end of the long cherry table, beside dusty place settings that said his mother had been waiting a long time for someone to come and visit.

She let out a breath and laced her hands together on the table. “You were young and I wanted to try and keep as much of it from you as I could. Keith controlled everything, Michael. The bank accounts, the money, the bills. I didn’t even have a checkbook of my own. At first, I thought it was great that I didn’t have to worry about paying the bills or making sure the checks didn’t bounce. But then I realized he took control of it because it was the best way to keep me under his thumb.”

Mike’s blood boiled at the thought of the hell his stepfather had brought to their lives. “I should have kicked him out. I should have stood up to him.”

“You were a child.” She cupped his cheek, her gaze soft with understanding. For a moment, he was five again and his mother was telling him to be careful on the swing set or to make sure he looked both ways before crossing the street. “I was the mom. It was my job to protect you, and I didn’t.”

“Why didn’t you just leave?”

She turned away and blew out a long breath. “A man like that, he finds a woman’s weaknesses and he plays on them like he’s tuning a piano. He knew I was terrified of losing everything, especially the roof over our heads, and that’s what he used to keep me in my place. I was so afraid to end up homeless and lose you to the state or worse. I was so terrified of ending up poor and alone.”

“Wasn’t there life insurance from Dad?” They were the questions he hadn’t asked as a kid because he hadn’t known how the world worked, how everything spun on dollars and cents.

“Very little. By the time I met Keith, we were broke. After paying for the funeral and the bills, we were down to two dollars in the bank. I had a little boy to feed, and a waitress job that barely paid enough to cover the light bill. To me, Keith was like a knight on a white horse, taking care of everything and saving us. It wasn’t until we were married that he got mean.” She heaved a sigh, one that was weighed down with years of regrets and what-ifs. “I should have left. I
tried
to leave, a hundred times. Every time he’d get angry, he’d apologize and swear it was the last time. But when he broke my hip,
I’m
the one who decided that would be the last time.” She reached up and brushed away a lock of hair on Mike’s forehead, as if he were still the little boy she remembered and not a six-foot-two man. “It took me a long time to realize that there are more important things in this world than financial security. Far more important things. Like you. I should have realized it sooner. I’m sorry, Michael. I’m so, so sorry.”

“Me too, Mom. Me too.” He thought of all the years she had let that monster stay. All the times she had believed his promises. On the drive up here, he’d thought about why his mother would have lived like that, why she would have stood by while his stepfather drank and beat him and ruined their lives.

The stories his mother had told him over the years began to coalesce in his mind. How she’d grown up dirt poor, living in a house without indoor plumbing, baking in the heat of Florida. How she’d dropped out of high school, married his dad, and then taken menial jobs to pay the bills because she never went back for her diploma or a GED. Maybe that had set the stage for a lifetime of needing the security of a full bank account.

The girls had finished their snacks in the kitchen and headed outside to play in the yard. Mike and his mother moved to the kitchen table so they could watch Ellie and Jenny through the sliding glass door. “Your daughters are beautiful,” she said.

“They’re amazing. Every day I discover something new about them. Jenny loves
Star Trek
—”

“Just like you did when you were young.”

“And Ellie is learning how to write her name. She’s putting it on everything—the milk carton, the refrigerator, the trunk of my car.” He chuckled. “I think I need to enforce my crayon rules.”

His mother laughed. “That reminds me of the time you colored on your walls. You wanted us to paint your room red and your dad said no, so you decided to do it yourself with the crayons. You ran out of red, went to purple and blue and yellow. By the time you were done, it was a rainbow on the wall.”

“I remember that. I don’t think I painted over it until I was twelve or thirteen.” A punishment from Keith for daring to compare him to his father. Keith had made Mike scrub off every last waxy line, then paint the room a dull puce that Mike had hated.

His mother reached for his hand and held it tight. “I wish I could go back and change it all, Michael.”

The past was in the past for a reason, Mike decided. He couldn’t go back and alter history, and if he did, he might not have ended up where he was today. Serving in the military, the father to two amazing daughters. After serving in a parental role, Mike understood the difficult choices that his mother had faced.

“If there’s one thing I’ve learned, Mom, it’s that it’s hard to be a parent when you’re just kind of thrust into the job before you’re ready. You were sixteen when you had me. Married before most kids graduate high school. Heck, you were just a kid yourself.” He watched the girls playing tag, laughing and teasing each other as they circled around the grassy backyard. “The best thing Jasmine could have ever done is leave the girls with me for a month. It gave me time to figure out how to be a father, and how to connect with them.”

“I’m glad. And I’m really glad you brought them here.”

“Me too.”

His mother ran a hand over the kitchen table, a maple one so similar to the one that had been in the house years ago that Mike could have sworn it was a twin. “It’s funny, the one thing I always refused to do was sell this house. I rented it out over the years, but wouldn’t sell it. It was as if I was hoping that if I held on to it, you’d—”

“Come back home.”

She let out a little laugh. “You’re a grown man now. Of course you wouldn’t be coming home to stay. But I wanted to have this place for you and for me, just in case. Keeping this house and moving back here taught me I was stronger than I thought. I’ve gone back to school, gotten my GED. I’m working full-time—just as a cashier in a greenhouse, but it’s a start. I enrolled in business school, too. Imagine that, at my age, going back to college.” She dipped her head and smiled. “I’ve been thinking I might want to manage a greenhouse someday.”

“You’d be great at that, Mom. You always did have a green thumb.”

“It all comes back to our roots, doesn’t it? We used to have a garden at the house where I grew up, and almost everything we ate came from the land. I’ve never lost that love for getting my hands in the dirt and watching something I planted grow.” A tease lit her eyes. “Though I never expected the boy I gave birth to would grow over six feet tall.”