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“Maybe when I get better organized…”
Ross smiled broadly. “Great! Because there’s an inherent bonus in talking to Mom’s group.”
“What’s that?”
“There’s a Daddy Club meeting going on across the shop at the same time.”
“A what?”
“The Daddy Club,” he explained, “is a group I formed for single fathers needing help dealing with their children. We have men who are changing diapers and staying up all night with teething babies, and others who are going through the minefield of raising teenagers and staying up all night waiting for them to come home. But you’d have free child care while you’re talking to the ladies, because we’ve just turned part of the stockroom into a playroom full of toys and games, and we dads alternate supervising.”
Susan tried to take it all in. A self-help group of single fathers holding meetings in a hardware-and-muffins store where women were learning to work with tools.
Micah smiled at her perplexity. “It works, believe it or not. You’ll have to come and see.”
Susan was beginning to believe that she would.
But for now, she had to deal with Aaron Bradley and his propensity for taking over.
She raised an eyebrow at him. “It’s very nice of you to bully your friends into helping,” she said politely, “but I’ve got it covered. My friends are coming to help.”
As she spoke, Paulette and Chris arrived, stepping into the living room and studying with interest the collection of men.
Paulette wore black tights, a baggy black sweater and hiking boots with black socks. Her luxuriant blond hair had been pulled into a ponytail on one side of her head, giving her a frivolous look very much at odds with her television savvy.
Chris wore green velour sweats that highlighted rather than concealed her diminutive proportions. Bleached blond hair was cut short around a wide-eyed gamine face.
All three men turned and stared.
Susan made introductions, noting with a hint of disappointment that now that she had four little boys following her everywhere, men would never look at her the way these men studied her friends. Then she admitted to herself with bleak candor that they’d never looked at her that way before.
Aaron turned to Susan his eyes alight with amusement. “This is your idea of a moving crew?” he asked.
“They’re my friends,” she replied, a little annoyed with the question. “And they’re busy. I went for loyalty, not muscle.”
“I beg your pardon,” Chris interrupted, walking up to Aaron, her eyes filled with amusement, also, but mingled with pride. “I run a fitness center.”
Aaron gave Chris a smile that caused the smallest flutter in Susan’s chest. She chided herself for her absurdity. The smile hadn’t even been directed at her.
“But furniture has to be carried, not run on,” he said pointing toward the stairs. “Why don’t you direct, and we’ll be the muscle?” He looked over her head at Paulette. “Or did you want to direct, too?”
Paulette laughed. “No, no. Chris can direct. I’m just here to look pretty.”
Micah smiled at her. “You’re doing a wonderful job.”
Paulette tucked her arm in his as they followed Chris and Ross up the stairs.
Aaron crossed to the table and looked down into his nephews’ still-troubled little faces. “I bet you’re thinking that moving’s going to be really awful,” he said.
Paul and George nodded. Ringo continued to pick cereal out of his bowl and eat it with great concentration.
“We don’t want to go,” John said. “Everything’s…different.”
Aaron picked George up, sat in his chair, then perched the boy on his knee. “But everything’s different whether you stay here, or go to Susan’s. And Susan’s got more room than you have here, and a much bigger yard.”
“She doesn’t have a pony,” George reported.
“Or a dog,” Paul added.
Aaron’s expression said that he agreed those were severe failings. “But don’t you think it’d be cool to have a big swing set with a slide and monkey bars and stuff like that?”
Paul and George looked interested.
“I’m going to order one this afternoon,” Aaron said with an apologetic glance at Susan. “And a sandbox for Ringo.”
Susan presumed the apology was for not having asked her first. Usually his presumptions annoyed her, but she understood that he was desperate to cheer the boys up, just as she was.
“I can build a shelter over it,” she contributed, “so that you can even use it when it rains.”
“We have to go to a different school,” John complained.
Susan nodded. “Yes, you do.” She wanted to add that he’d make friends in no time, but she knew he didn’t want to hear platitudes.
“I hate that,” he said.
Aaron nodded. “That’s tough. But we’ll put up a hoop at Susan’s—” again that apologetic look “—and get a basketball so you can practice for the team. Maybe a baseball and a glove, too. For spring practice.”
Susan remembered the price of the new palladian windows she’d put in the back of her house, which looked onto the woods, then dismissed it at the sight of the thin smile on John’s face. It was fragile, but it was there.
“There’s probably not even a park around,” John said.
Aha! Finally! A chance to one-up him. “I have three acres,” Susan said. “If there’s no park and you get a team together, you can play at our place.”
She saw the light go on in his eyes.
“Okay,” he said simply, then concentrated on his cereal.
“I want a ball and glove, too!” Paul demanded.
“Me, too!” George said.
Aaron nodded. “Balls and gloves for everybody,” he promised.
“All right!” Paul exclaimed. “Then we’ll have a team!”
Chapter Three
They were moved in by lunchtime, and after the promised pizza for the boys and the moving crew, Aaron took John, Paul and George with him to shop for playground equipment. Ross and Micah went along in an advisory capacity, and Paulette and Chris stayed to help Susan remake beds, replace drawers and redistribute toys.
“What do you know about Micah Steadwell?” Paulette asked.
Susan stood on top of a stool, putting away the box of groceries she’d brought from Becky’s kitchen. Paulette handed things up to her, and Chris sat on a rug on the hardwood floor playing ball with Ringo.
“Not much,” Susan replied. “Just that he owns a nightclub, and that he and Aaron were good friends all through high school.”
“You don’t know if he was with the rock band the Knights?”
Susan frowned down a her. Ten years ago the Knights had been one of those music groups whose sound and lyrics struck an empathetic chord with young people. Their reputation for hard living, however, made parents mistrust them.
“I don’t know,” she said. “Aaron didn’t say anything about that.”
“I think I recognize his face.” Paulette handed up a cardboard tub of hot-chocolate mix. “But they all had wild makeup so it’s hard to tell. And he seems so…I don’t know, mature, I guess.”
“Ten years can make a big difference in someone’s life,” Chris offered. In her distraction, Ringo’s large colorful ball hit her in the face. She pretended to glower at the little boy, who laughed with delight. “Especially in your twenties. How old is he now?”
“I’d guess middle thirties.” Paulette handed up a box of crackers. “He did tell me he’s single and that he’s pretty busy with the club. I’d take that as a warning that he doesn’t have time to date but he flirted with me all morning. I don’t know what to make of him.”
“Maybe you’ll just have to see what develops.” Chris reached out to catch Ringo’s throw. “I’m not usually one for subtlety but if he has a wild past, that’s not a very safe bet today.”
Paulette nodded, clearly lost in thought.
“But you,” Chris said to Susan, “have no doubt what you have on your hands.”
“Four little boys leave little to wonder about.”
“I’m not talking about the boys.” Chris lifted Ringo into her arms and carried him to the counter, where Paulette and Susan worked. “I’m talking about that most dangerous and appealing of God’s creatures, the macho male who is too good at heart for you to be upset by his take-charge tactics.”
Susan rapped a knuckle lightly on Paulette’s head. She came out of her thoughts with a start to hand up a cake mix.
“He does annoy me,” Susan corrected, putting the box away, “and I don’t find that quality at all appealing.”
“He got the moving done in half the time it would have taken us.”
Susan held on to the shelf and made a face at her. “And whose fault is that Ms. Size Three, Hear Me Roar? If you guys had a little more meat on you—” she swatted playfully at Paulette’s ponytail “—and a little more serious approach to manual labor, I’d have had a more impressive-looking moving crew. They wouldn’t have been able to laugh at us.”
“They stopped laughing,” Paulette pointed out, “when Chris carried the campaign dresser in all by herself.”
Chris rocked from side to side with Ringo, shrugging away any glory for the feat. “The drawers were out. It was a cinch. But I think it’s rotten that you two stuck me with the one married man among the three.”
Paulette made a scornful sound. “You can wrestle them to the ground. You don’t have to charm them like we do. You deserve a handicap.”
“How long is Aaron staying?” Chris asked Susan.
Paulette handed up cereal.
Susan stepped off the stool to the counter to reach the highest shelf. “I’m not sure,” she said, holding on to the door as she put the cereal away. “Maybe tonight.”
“I thought he was staying to put the playground equipment together.”
“I can do that.”
“But the boys seem to really like him. He might want to hang around awhile just to…you know, be here.”
Susan sighed. “That’s true but that isn’t going to help me much when he leaves and does his usual three-year disappearing act.”
Susan held her hand down for the next box, and when nothing was forthcoming, she looked down wondering if she’d have to nudge Paulette again. But Paulette wasn’t there. And neither was Chris.
She turned carefully on her perch to see Aaron standing behind her, hands on his hips as he looked up at her, his stormy eyes telling her he’d heard everything she’d said. Behind him the boys played excitedly at the table with what looked like new Matchbox cars, Ringo in possession of a big plastic truck. Paulette and Chris stood together on the other side of the room, looking concerned.
Susan wasn’t sure what made her lose her balance—the embarrassment of having been overheard speaking her mind, guilt over having condemned a man who’d offered nothing but kindness since he’d arrived, or the simple physics of a body occupying too narrow a space.
Whatever the reason, she was suddenly flailing and trying to turn the fall into a leap, because Aaron seemed to be making no move to catch her.
His hands left his hips just as she’d braced herself to break both legs, and he caught her against him, one arm under her bottom, the other at her back.
She half expected him to fall backward but he caught her firmly. They stood for one protracted moment, his steely arm under her backside, his hand clutching her thigh, his breath warm against the soft skin exposed by the V neck of her sweater.
Then he let her slide down his body until her toes touched the floor. She felt every muscle he possessed from neck to knee.
She didn’t want to look into his eyes, but she didn’t want to be cowardly, either. She’d said what she felt and, right or wrong, she had to stand by it.
She raised her eyes to his and saw not the anger she’d expected but a sadness she couldn’t entirely understand. Somehow it made her feel even worse.
“Tomorrow,” he said in an even tone of voice, “we’ll get you a taller step stool.”
Paulette and Chris excused themselves, and as Susan walked them to the door, Ross, Micah and Aaron carried the jungle-gym boxes into the backyard.
Paulette hugged her. “You’re sure you’re going to be okay for Friday’s show?”
Susan nodded. “Sure. I don’t know what I’ll do with the boys yet. I’m not putting John and Paul in school until Monday.”
Paulette smiled. “Maybe we can work them into the show.”
Susan looked doubtful. “I don’t think so. Too many power tools. Too much potential for on-air disaster.”
“But we film. We can work it out.”
Chris gave Susan a hug. “Just tell him you didn’t mean it and you’re sorry.”
“I did mean it,” Susan said defensively. “I just didn’t mean for him to hear it.”
Chris studied her with a furrowed brow. “It isn’t like you to be so judgmental. Your father was a flake. That’s a different thing from someone who’s spending every waking moment trying to build a business.”
Cut to the quick because Chris was right, Susan followed her to her van and said tightly, “Family should always come first.”
“He’s here, isn’t he?”
With that, Chris and Paulette climbed into the green van and drove away. Susan went back into the kitchen to find George and Ringo playing happily with their trucks, but John and Paul were not at the table.
Susan went to the French doors and saw the boys helping the men pull the long wooden pieces of playground equipment out of the boxes. Off to the side on an even stretch of grass between the garage and the large shed she used as a shop, Aaron was spreading sand presumably to give the boys a soft spot to land in case of a fall.
Even as she defended herself in her mind, she admired the fact that he’d thought of everything.
She opened the doors. “Do you need tools?” she asked no one in particular.
Aaron didn’t even look up at her.
Micah pointed to a long metal box. “I keep a toolbox in my truck,” he said.
She nodded. “Hot coffee?”
Micah and Ross replied in the affirmative.
A short while later she carried out three mugs and placed them on the edge of a nearby planter. Aaron offered a perfunctory thank-you while concentrating on attaching the seat of a swing to the chains.
The set was up by dusk, and Susan put on the outside lights in the back so that Aaron could supervise a test of the equipment.
She made a chicken-noodle casserole from a recipe she’d found in Becky’s box, put together a salad and baked a tube of refrigerator biscuits.
Micah and Ross left when it appeared that the equipment was sound. So that Aaron didn’t have to leave the boys, Susan walked the men to Micah’s truck and thanked them for their help.
Ross left her a business card for Hardware and Muffins, and Micah told her that she was welcome as his guest at the Knight Club if she ever needed an evening away from the boys.
She waved as they drove away.
The boys had to be dragged in to eat half an hour later, their cheeks pink, their eyes bright. This was a very different group, she thought, from the boys who’d sat around the table at breakfast, despondent about having to leave their home.
She knew she had Aaron to thank for that.
“You don’t have to go tonight do you?” John asked as they ate ice cream for dessert.
Surely Aaron would look at her now. He hadn’t met her eyes since she’d turned around on the countertop to find him standing there.
Before he answered John, he would have to know if she would offer to let him stay.
“You said,” John reminded him, “you were gonna buy Aunt Susan another step stool tomorrow. So you’re not going home yet, right? That means you have to sleep someplace. And this is our house now, too, so we can invite you to stay here.” John looked to Susan for confirmation. “Right?”
Aaron did meet her eyes then, but the small yet friendly connection they’d made yesterday was gone. It was like looking into the eyes of a stranger—one who didn’t particularly like her on first impression.
She had to look away. “That’s right,” she told John. “The sofa in the family room opens up.”
“See?” John said eagerly.
Aaron nodded. “Then I accept your invitation,” he said.
Susan began clearing the table, and the boys helped, falling into a routine she’d apparently already established at his brother’s house.
Wanting to help without actually being in contact with her, he wet a couple of paper towels and washed Ringo’s face and hands, then cleared the front pocket of his coveralls of noodles. He freed him from the high chair and washed it off while the toddler ran his colorful truck over Aaron’s feet.
The table cleared and the dishwasher doing its work, Susan took the boys into the family room and handed John the remote.
“You can be in charge of it,” she said “but you have to try to be fair about what you watch, okay? Everybody should have a say in it.”
“Uncle Aaron got us some videos.” John held up a paper bag.
“Harriet the Spy and The King of Egypt.” He studied the remote. “So I press TV/VCR then Play, right?”
“Right.” Susan glanced back at Aaron. Fortunately Ringo was busy trying to redecorate his face, so he didn’t have to meet her gaze. He hadn’t decided why he didn’t want to. Either he was angry with her because he knew he should have made more time to spend with Dave and his family and he’d been plagued by the guilt of it since he’d learned Dave and Becky had died. Or he just didn’t like what looking at her did to him. Her large brown eyes seemed to demand, as well as condemn, though he didn’t think she was even aware of that.
It was as if he had something she needed, and it was in her eyes every time they shared a glance.
But he had a business to run that was becoming more and more of a rebellious child every day. It was growing bigger and smarter and seemed to require more careful and attentive management.
He couldn’t play with the guys in Research and Development anymore. He had to keep his eyes on the money, the numbers, with the competitors looking for takeover and the government looking for mistakes.
And Starscape represented his whole reason for being, the light he’d seen at the end of the interminable tunnel of his childhood, the success for which he’d worked so hard, the proof that his stepmother had been wrong and he was worth something, after all.
He couldn’t care for a family and keep his business, too. It had to be one or the other.
“It’s time for his bath.”
He came out of his thoughts to find Susan studying him with puzzlement, her hands on the child he held in his arms. “Unless,” she said, as though trying to figure out why he held on to Ringo for dear life, “you’d like to give him a bath yourself. But I warn you—you’ll need a wet suit and a snorkel.”
She smiled.
He didn’t want to respond to it, but it took every fiber of his self-control to stop himself.
“You do it,” he said, letting her take Ringo. “I’ll supervise the film festival.”
Hurt flickered in her eyes, then was gone with a tilt of her chin. “Okay. There’s more coffee in the pot. I’ll be at least a half hour.”
“Take your time.”
They were halfway into the film when she returned with sweet-smelling Ringo in footed blue pajamas. She held him out to his brothers, who hugged him good-night, then to Aaron.
Ringo clung to Aaron’s neck as though he had no intention of ever letting go. Aaron finally carried him upstairs and helped Susan tuck him in. She turned on a music box on the dresser and handed him the scruffy bear he often toted around by the foot during the day.
In a moment Ringo was rubbing his eyes sleepily and yawning. He didn’t seem to notice when they crept out of the room.
Susan stopped Aaron halfway to the stairs. She looked both defensive and apologetic. “I’m sorry about that remark,” she said. “You’ve done a lot for the boys since you’ve been here and they…we all appreciate that.”
He turned to her, hands in his pockets, expression remote. “Really. You made it sound as though all my being here has done is intensify your problems because eventually I have to go.”
“I’m sorry,” she said, her voice rising a little in agitation. “It’s just that helping them through the loss of their parents has been hard, but your being here has helped a lot. John barely spoke until you arrived. But you have to go home and…they lose again. I feel inadequate to the task of making them understand.”
“Maybe I should just take them with me.” He’d entertained that thought before he’d seen her in action with the boys. Now he wondered if that was what she wanted from him, if that was the need he saw in her eyes. She was young and alone and had her own demanding career.
She gave him an impatient look. “How could you possibly care for four little children?”
That made him defensive. “The same way you will. I’m sure I’d be awkward at first, but they respond to me and that’s a start.”
“They’d never see you.”
“I’d hire a nanny.”
Her eyes darkened and pinned him in place. “You might remember that I was given custody. It’s what your brother and Becky wanted.”
“I understand that,” he replied patiently, “but the job’s too big for one—”
“Who said the job was too big?” she demanded. “Did I say that? No, I didn’t. I just said that I felt inadequate, but that doesn’t mean I won’t do my damnedest to see that they’re loved and cared—”
He raised a warm gentle hand to cover her mouth. “You’re shouting,” he said quietly, the suggestion of a smile turning up the corners of his mouth. “I wasn’t questioning your determination or your willingness to do the job. I was just wondering whether any one person should have to do it alone.”
She caught his wrist and pushed away his hand, but his index finger slid over her lips in the process. The sensation seemed to ripple all over her body.
“The reality is that I am alone.” She spoke firmly so that he would have no doubt about her conviction to see this through. “I’m sure once we’re all settled into a routine, once they’ve made friends at school and gotten acquainted in the neighborhood…”
It was as she spoke, her color high, her eyes bright with maternal fervor, that he saw the need in her eyes take on a complexity he hadn’t noticed before.
She needed him—out of the picture.
So that was it. As difficult as the task of mothering the boys would be, she wanted to do it alone. Of course. It was so much easier to move forward when you didn’t have to consider anyone else’s input.
“Tomorrow we’ll get whatever you need for yourself and the boys,” he said, “then I’ll get out of your way.”
She frowned. “I didn’t say you were in the way.”
“You didn’t have to. So I presume it’ll be all right with you if I just show up every three years or so?”
He knew that was nasty, but he was feeling nasty. She’d completely misunderstood what he was trying to do here and he just couldn’t figure her at all. So even though they had four little boys in common, it didn’t look as though they were going to find a way to come together on anything.
She sagged visibly. “I said I was sorry about that. I’m defensive about people who come and go in other people’s lives, because my father did that. He built bridges in Africa and Central America. I know what it’s like to be on the receiving end of love that’s only intermittent.”
“Maybe the love was constant,” he suggested after a moment. “It was just that the nature of his work only allowed you to see him intermittently.”
She shook her head. “All the child knows is that he’s never there. And after you’ve waited months and months and he finally arrives, you suddenly realize that he’s going to be gone again before you know it. I don’t think children should have to live like that.”
“I had no children when I embarked on this life. And it’s not like I go thousands of miles away. I just go to work.”
She nodded. “But the result is the same. Your family never saw you and they missed you.”
She was right. Guilt rattled inside him.
“Why don’t you relax for the rest of the evening?” he said, moving toward the stairs. “I’ll get them going on their showers after the movie.”