Читать книгу A Family for Christmas - Kate Welsh - Страница 10

During the ten years of her marriage, Maggie had been in the company of her in-laws only a handful of times. She knew them to be stiff, formal people. She’d felt uncomfortable with them even though they hadn’t objected to her marriage to Trent. They’d hosted the usual engagement party and rehearsal dinner, and Albertine had attended her bridal shower. But when Michael had fallen head over heels for her maid of honor, Maggie had seen their true colors—the people behind the polite facades they presented to the world. It had been an eye-opener, not a very pretty sight.

Sarah was the daughter of Maggie’s mother’s livein maid. She and Sarah had grown up together. When Maggie had been headed for an exclusive private high school, her father had pulled some strings, donated some money to the school and arranged for Sarah to attend on a scholarship. There wasn’t a day of Maggie’s life when Sarah hadn’t been there—’til now— and back then, they’d been inseparable.

At first, any friend of Maggie’s was good enough for Michael, as far as her in-laws had been concerned. But then Sarah had made the grave error of explaining their lifelong friendship. The Osbornes’ opinion had changed in the blink of an eye on learning that Sarah was the child of a maid.

But Michael had loved Sarah to distraction. He’d agreed to begin attending services with her on Sundays. The change in him had been dramatic, but Maggie hadn’t understood the source of that change back then. She’d thought her friend Sarah was solely responsible. But she’d been wrong. Jesus, working in the life of a misunderstood, angry young man, had sparked the changes.

But whatever the source, Trent had been thrilled when wild, unpredictable Michael had stopped getting into scrapes with the local police that Trent or their parents had to pay his way out of. After a few weeks, Michael had gone to Trent and told him that he wanted to go to school to learn to be an auto mechanic. Trent finally seeing real excitement in his brother’s eyes about learning something, had loaned him the money without a thought. And for the first time in his life Michael had flourished.

A year later, Michael and Sarah had been married at Maggie’s parents’ home, under the same rose trellis where Maggie and Trent had stood a year earlier. Michael had invited his parents even though they didn’t approve of Sarah’s background. And they had attended. But it had been painfully obvious that they’d only gone because they hadn’t wanted their friends to know that Michael’s choice of a bride was causing a rift in the family. But there was a rift. And only now, hearing her in-laws denigrate Michael even in death, did Maggie realize how deep it had gone.

“I’m sorry, Trent,” Ed said with a grimace. “This is one of those times I wish I’d been wrong, but I had a feeling they’d pull something like this.”

Trent grimaced and shook his head. “No. It’s better this way. Now that the other shoe has dropped, we know for sure where it is.”

Maggie dropped her arm from Trent’s waist. “I’m stunned. They’ve always been hard people, and you and Michael haven’t been close to them since before he and Sarah married. But to belittle Michael that way, and in front of one of his children, is unbelievable.”

“And unforgivable. The worst part of the whole thing is that they don’t care about the kids. It’s the appearance that they do that matters to them. And they probably just don’t want me raising them.” Trent looked uncomfortable, as if he’d revealed something accidentally.

“It’s probably more that they don’t want me involved,” Maggie said. “She’s always held my acceptance of Sarah as an equal against me. And did you hear that crack about our church? The one about me being as bad as Sarah at raising them was a little strange, though. How would she know what kind of mother Sarah was? This whole thing is just so unbelievable. If Albertine was always scandalized by the number of children they had, why would she want to raise them? That letter she wrote to Sarah when she heard Grace was on the way was nothing short of cruel. ‘Only animals have more than two children’? When Sarah called and read it to me, she was in tears and Michael was furious.”

Trent frowned but remained silent Trent had been even angrier with his parents than Michael had. Maggie had wondered why then, and wondered again now, noticing his eyes glitter with suppressed fury.

“I’ll keep an eye out for it in case they saved it,” Maggie promised, hoping to change the subject.

Ed’s smile was almost mischievous. “They did, and now I have it. Michael was smarter than most people gave him credit for. He was determined that if something happened to him, Sarah would have plenty of ammunition in case his parents went after custody. And he was sure they would. They blamed Sarah for every step Michael took in a direction that they didn’t approve of.”

“Speaking of the children,” Maggie said. “I think we should go check on them. I haven’t seen Grace or Daniel yet today, and they were asleep when I saw them yesterday. I wonder if the hospital would let Rachel in to see them. I think it would do all of them a world of good to be together. Especially Mickey.”

Trent and Ed needed to sign papers for the release and transportation of Mike’s and Sarah’s bodies back to Pennsylvania, so Maggie took Rachel along with her to see the others. The nurses in pediatrics, who had shuffled patients to put Mickey’s siblings in the room next to him, saw no problem with one more child visiting.

Rachel went immediately to Daniel, who was alone in a crib on the left near the windows. Maggie walked to the other crib where Grace slept on her side, facing into the room, her teddy bear clutched in a death grip. The bandage on Grace’s upper-left arm covered a laceration that would no doubt leave a nasty scar, as would the one on her thigh that had been caused by the flying glass. Amazingly, she hadn’t suffered facial injuries. Maggie looked into her little cherub face and touched her carrot-red curls. Careful not to wake her, Maggie then tiptoed away to Daniel. She could hear grumbling across the room about having been put in a crib like a baby.

And then the hard part began.

“Where are Mommy and Daddy?” he asked.

It had been a long day, Maggie thought at almost midnight, as she tossed the last little outfit into the laundry bag and leaned against the wall. Grace was too young to understand that Mommy and Daddy were in heaven and wouldn’t be back. She’d just wanted her parents, but Maggie’s familiar face had gone a long way toward soothing her and making her feel more secure. Daniel understood a little more and oddly had been more easily consoled. He was nowhere near as aware of the changes ahead as Mickey and Rachel, though.

It was Mickey who worried Maggie the most—and not just because of his medical condition. He was too quiet. Too detached from all that was happening. After a conference with his doctor, Maggie and Trent had decided she would have to remain in Florida with the other children until Mickey could safely be moved to a hospital back home.

By the end of the day, Trent and Ed somehow had found and rented a small furnished house not far from the hospital. Ed had taken Maggie to rent a van which they’d equipped with a car seat for Grace, while Trent had visited with the children.

He was so good with them—teasing smiles out of Grace, reading stories to Rachel and Daniel, and playing board games with Mickey—that Maggie was confused. Why was Trent so sure that he would be a poor father? It simply made no sense.

But whether he was ready for parenthood or not, the children, except for Mickey, had been ready to be released by the end of the day. Grace was badly bruised in addition to the lacerations, and she was cranky and out of sorts. Plus, Maggie was sure Grace felt the tension of the adults who populated her world and was reacting to it.

Grace had finally drifted off about an hour ago, after Maggie spent time rocking her. Trent, meanwhile, had read several stories to Rachel and Daniel, had supplied the requisite extra glass of water and had tucked them in—several times.

And so now it was midnight and all the children were finally settled. Maggie pushed away from the wall, knowing she had one more task to perform. She had to talk to Trent and get him to talk to her. She found him in the living room, staring out the patio doors at the rain.

“I hope this weather doesn’t mean you’ll have a rough flight in the morning. What time do you take off?”

Trent glanced back at her for a second. “Not until ten. The first available flight was at dawn, but I didn’t think it would be good for the kids to have another adult just disappear on them.”

Maggie stared at him. Even she hadn’t thought of that. Trent became more of a puzzle about the children every time he opened his mouth. “Are you too tired to talk awhile?” she asked. “I thought we should formalize some plans.”

Trent turned, his smile bitter. “We’ve been married ten years, Mag. Why not say what you mean? You’ve never had trouble expressing your feelings in the past. I seem to remember several dissertations on my faults that lasted a good long while before you walked out.”

“Fine. Where do we stand?” she asked flatly.

Trent visibly started. “I—I don’t know.”

Maggie closed her eyes and took a deep breath. Please help me say the right things, Lord. “I shouldn’t have left you, Trent. Both Michael and Sarah tried to tell me that I still loved you too much to start over without you, but I wouldn’t listen. I couldn’t see past the emptiness inside me that called out for a child. Then I left and the emptiness grew. I managed to achieve so many of the goals I thought I wanted—the house in Valley Forge, the reduced hours at work. I found that hole I’d wanted to fill with a child filled with the love of Jesus. Then I found out that even as a single parent I had a chance for a foreign adoption, but the emptiness only got worse because you weren’t there to share it with me.”

Maggie blinked to clear her swimming vision. “I was wrong. I promised you for better or worse, but when worse came along, I folded my tent and walked off. I can’t change what I did. I can only tell you how sorry I am and will be for the rest of my life. I can only tell you that I love you. And that I’d like to try to make it all up to you.”

Trent closed his eyes and sighed. “I don’t honestly see how you can.”

Maggie felt the pain of his words in every pore of her body, but she prayed for strength and found it. She reached out and laid her hand on his arm. He stiffened at her touch and tears flooded her eyes, overflowing down her cheek, blurring her focus. “Please let me try. Please.”

Narrowing his blue eyes, he stared at her for a long moment. “I don’t know.” He turned and walked away, dropping into the rattan sofa against the far wall of the small parlor. He was silent for several minutes, staring ahead. Then he looked back over at her. In his eyes she saw such stark longing and desire that she gasped, but his clenched teeth and hand said that his need for her still warred with pain and anger. “Why don’t you tell me why I should?” he demanded.

“Because I’ve never stopped loving you. And I think it’s God’s plan that we be together.”

“You left me!” he shouted, his voice breaking, his anguish bursting through the anger.

And that pain—pain she’d inflicted—felt like a knife in her heart. “I know it won’t be easy for either of us, but I think we can salvage our marriage.”

“It was you who decided to scuttle our marriage in the first place.”

Regret had never weighed more heavily on Maggie’s shoulders. She walked to the sofa and sat on an ottoman placed nearby. The hurt and confusion on his face nearly overwhelmed her. How could she have done this to him? “I’m sorry I left you. I’m sorry for all the arguments before I did. But we have ten years together behind us, and the raising of four children ahead of us. I think those are fourteen pretty good reasons to try again. And you can’t say I only want to try now because of the children. You know I felt this way before the accident. Even before I learned about the foreign adoption possibilities. You know that!”

“And I told you how I felt every time you contacted me.”

Had he decided not to reconcile, after all? She braced herself. “This morning you told Ed you were agreeable to getting back together. Have you changed your mind?”

Trent shook his head. “The kids need both of us to protect them from my parents. I just don’t know how to handle you and me.”

“You could try relying on the Lord. It’s the best way I’ve found to face adversity.”

“I don’t even know what that means. Who is this Lord? A God who cares about us? Who fixes things and changes lives? I sure never met Him at the church I grew up in. He’s a concept I can’t even relate to.”

Maggie nodded. The last she’d heard from Michael, Trent still saw faith as a crutch. At least now he was questioning in his own way. “How about taking it one day at a time? How about looking at me and the kids as a package deal. Please say you’ll move into the house with us. That you’ll be waiting for us when we come back north.”

“I…I’m not sure. I just don’t know if I can. I’m going to have to play it by ear. Like you said. One day at a time.”

Trent stared at the key in his hand. Then at the lock. He’d waited a week since the memorial service and funeral. And he knew he couldn’t put it off any longer. The last time he’d talked to Mike, his brother had most of the house torn apart to put in a new climate-control plant. Which meant there was not only no heat or air-conditioning, but no hot water, either. Ed had called to warn Trent that if his parents did sue for custody, a home study would be done on both environments.

One step at a time, he reminded himself, and turned the key. But when he went inside, he wished he could take back that last step. He hadn’t understood: this wasn’t torn apart—it had been demolished. There were almost no walls! What had they been thinking to call this mess a paradise. It sure didn’t look like Paradise Found to him! It was more like Paradise Lost!

Trent closed his eyes, then slowly opened them again. Nothing had changed. Studs. Subflooring. Exposed pipes. Then he remembered the kitchen Mike had mentioned finishing. A bathroom and a room he’d created as a family room from two smaller ones at the back of the house. Mike had begun the project shortly after Maggie walked out on their marriage. How could nearly nine months have gone by since he visited Mike and Sarah at their own house?

He’d seen them often, but at his place. He’d met them at the zoo one day. Had taken them to a lake in Jersey another. But he hadn’t come to their home. Mike had told him the place was torn up, and Trent had used it as an excuse because he was afraid to run into Maggie. Afraid he’d weaken, take her back. Afraid he’d pull her into his arms, kiss her senseless and beg her to forgive him for denying her the children she needed, then never let her go.

Trent shook his head and picked his way through the entrance foyer, past the remnants of a sweeping staircase, and down the hall to the kitchen for which Mike had been so full of plans. He pushed open the leaded-glass swinging door, and stood spellbound.

The room stood like a monument to his brother’s talent. For so long Mike had been told that to work with his hands would be unseemly. Trent didn’t know Mike’s Lord, but he thanked Him just the same, because somehow He’d given his brother the courage to be who he was meant to be. And now Trent understood why Mike and Sarah had named the house Paradise Found.

Black granite counters gleamed. Oak cabinets shone. It was…overwhelming in its beauty. He ran his hands over the cabinets and the frosted leadedglass inserts. He recognized the cabinet doors that framed the glass. On his last visit, just after a particularly nasty fight with Maggie, Mike had shown Trent the prototype he’d just finished. Sarah’s art—bordered by Mike’s.

Tears flooded his eyes. Trent made his way to the kitchen table and dropped his head onto his forearm where it rested on the table. Some minutes later he found himself stroking the surface of the big round oak table. Lifting his head he noticed that it sat in a large alcove with tall windows affording a wonderful view of the woods that bordered the back lawn. Wainscoting, painted taupe, came up to the sill of the windows, and Victorian print paper graced the small amount of wall space left by the windows.

Trent looked back at the surface of the table. He ran his hand over it again, marveling at the smoothness of the hand-rubbed patina. His brother again. Trent had seen it months ago, in pieces and stripped to its nicked surface in Mike’s workshop.

He looked out the window and realized that his brother had created the alcove by bumping the walls out into the back porch. Curious, he went to the door and out onto the porch. The porch hadn’t suffered, but now followed the four walls of the interior alcove. The bump-out caused the porch roof to form a mini turret. Like most of the house, the porch wasn’t finished. But Trent could visualize exactly what Mike had planned.

And plans reminded him of Mike’s workshop in the old carriage house. He jumped down off the unfinished back porch and headed that way, but he hesitated once he reached the threshold, not sure he could take many more haunting memories. Trent looked back at the house and the new, unpainted wood of the porch. Resolutely he turned and unlocked the workshop door.

The memories came at once. Painful, poignant and wonderful, they flooded in. The odor of newly planed wood. The smell of Sarah’s soldering gun. Mike, his safety glasses perched on his head, grinning over the floor plans. Sarah, tossing a wad of paper at Mike in retaliation for his incessant teasing, her sweet loving smile shining in her eyes.

He glanced at those same sparkling eyes in the picture on one of the shelves above Mike’s workbench. It was a candid shot of the four of them that had been taken on Mike and Sarah’s wedding day. A day that had almost not happened, thanks to his parents.

They’d been horrified when Sarah had innocently revealed that she wasn’t Maggie’s neighbor but that they’d lived on the same property—Maggie in the main house and Sarah as the daughter of the maid in the apartment over the carriage house. Seeing Sarah as a lower-class influence on Michael, they’d tried to pay her to get out of Michael’s life.

Trent would never forget the day he’d opened his door to find Sarah, pale and shaking like a leaf in a hurricane, the check still clutched convulsively in her hand. Trent had shouted for Maggie immediately and had called Mike to come to their apartment. And nothing had been the same between either the two sons and their parents since.

Mike had moved in with him and Maggie for a while, and later Trent had become Mike’s silent partner in an auto garage that catered to luxury cars and their owners. It had been a great joke between him and his brother that growing up with parents like theirs had ensured the business’s success by teaching Mike exactly how to deal with the finicky demands of many of the Main-Line’s wealthy residents.

Trent shook his head as he stared at those four smiling faces. They all looked so happy—and they had been. But now everything was different. It was hard to think of them as gone. The workshop felt as if they were still there.

And so did the house, he realized, and glanced at the slot next to the picture. The floor plans Mike had drawn up were where he’d always kept them. Pulling them out of the cubbyhole, Trent watched his hand shake. He unrolled them and found more there than just the blueprints he’d seen before. Every idea and plan Mike and Sarah had decided on was cataloged. Wallpaper swatches, paint colors, quantities needed and estimated costs—all were there.

An hour later the house had taken shape in Trent’s mind.

The monstrosity no longer seemed that, he realized, but another page in the unfinished book that his brother’s life had become when an overtired trucker had driven on into the night instead of pulling over. And like the raising of Mike’s kids, it was another thing Trent knew he would see through to its finish. He owed that to Mike, the one person who had loved him unconditionally.

With that thought, another devastating one occurred to him. “Maybe I should have given him a chance. Maybe if I’d told him I wasn’t really his brother, he would have loved me anyway,” Trent said aloud. “Maybe he still would have wanted to be my brother.”