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Still trying to wrap his head around the odd sensation of having never left—he could swear even the orange, red and yellow rooster-patterned potholders were the same ones he remembered—Ben smiled, picked up his fork. “That’s okay, I’m fine.”
“You don’t look fine. You look like somebody who hasn’t had a decent meal in far too long. Did I give you enough eggs? Because I’ve got plenty more in the pan…here,” his mother said, reaching for his plate, “I might as well give them to you now, save me the trouble later—”
“No, Mama, really, this is plenty,” he said, shoving a huge bite of eggs into his mouth. “Thanks.”
The phone mercifully rang. The minute the wisp of a woman and her canine entourage shuffled and clickety-clicked to the other side of the kitchen, Ben quickly wrapped half of his breakfast in his paper napkin to sneak into the garbage later. He’d die before he hurt her feelings, but he’d also die if he ate all this food.
Why, again, had he expected this trip home to provide him with the peace he so sorely needed? Not only was his mother fussing over him like he was a kindergartner, but the minute he got out of his truck he could feel all the old issues between him and his father rush out to greet him, as bug-eyed and overeager as the damn dogs. And then, to top it all off, there was Mercy.
Oh, boy, was there Mercy.
Ben took a swallow of his coffee, wondering how a ten-second interaction could instantly erase an entire decade. For one brief, shining moment, as he’d watched her battling that bush—he chuckled, remembering—he was twenty-whatever and about to combust with need for the hottest tamale of a woman he’d ever known. Who, physically at least, seemed to be in the same time warp as his mother’s house. Except he was glad, and surprised, to see she’d finally given up on trying to tame her insanely curly hair. Not much bigger than one of the Chihuahuas—although a helluva lot cuter, thank God, he thought as the biggest one of the lot returned to cautiously sniff his ankles—Mercedes packed a whole lot of punch in that thimble-sized body of hers.
Except, her appearance aside, he doubted she was the same woman she’d been then. God knows, he wasn’t the same man. Why he’d thought—
Stupid.
Yeah, his mother had wasted no time in telling him Mercy was still single, but Ben somehow doubted his abrupt departure all those years ago had anything to do with that. Mercy as a torch-carrier? No damn way. A grudge-nurser, however…now that, he could see.
Not that he’d broken any promises. After all, she’d been the one who’d made it clear right from the start that it had only been about itch-scratching. Because he knew she wanted what her sisters had—marriage, babies, stability. And she knew the very thought made him ill. So there’d never been any illusions about permanent. Still, that didn’t excuse Ben’s taking off without giving her at least a heads-up. She’d deserved better than that.
She’d also deserved better than a pointless affair with some pendejo who’d been convinced that running away was the only way to solve a problem he didn’t fully understand.
Too long it had taken him to realize what a dumb move that had been.
“You’re finished already?” his mother said at his side, going for his plate again. “You want some more—?”
“No! Really,” Ben said with a smile, carefully tucking the full napkin by his plate. “I’m fine. It was delicious, thank you.”
She beamed. “You want more coffee?”
“I can get it—”
“No, sit, I’m already up.”
After handing Ben his coffee, Juanita sat at a right angle to him, briefly touching his hand. Although her stiff, still-black hair did nothing to soften the hard angles of her face, her wide smile shaved years off her appearance. “It means a lot to your father,” she said softly in Spanish, “that you came back. He’s missed you so much.”
Ben lifted the mug to his lips, not daring to meet his mother’s gaze. He’d known how much his leaving would hurt Luis, but staying simply hadn’t been an option. Now, however…
“Just doing my duty,” he said, only to nearly choke when his mother spit out a Spanish curse word. Now he looked up, not sure what to make of the combined amusement and concern in her ripe-olive eyes.
“For ten years, you stay away,” she said, still in Spanish. “As if to return would contaminate you, suck you back into something bad—”
“That’s not true,” he said, except it was. In a way, at least.
“Then why didn’t you even come home for holidays, Benicio? To go off and live your life somewhere else is one thing, but to never come home…” Her face crumpled, she shook her head. “What did we do, mijo?” she said softly. “Your father adored you, would have done anything for you—”
“I know that, Mama,” Ben said, ignoring his now churning stomach. He reached across the table and took his mother’s tiny hand in his, taking care not to squeeze the delicate bones. “I was just…restless.”
Not the entire truth, but not a lie, either. In fact, at the time he might even have believed that was the reason he’d left. Because he’d never been able to figure out why, after he’d been discharged from the army, he couldn’t seem to settle back into his old life here. But time blurs memory, and motivations, and reasons, and now, sitting in his mother’s kitchen, he really couldn’t have said when he’d finally realized the real reason for his leaving.
But for damn sure he’d always known exactly what he’d left behind.
His mother smiled and said in English, “Considering how much you moved around inside me before you were born, this is not a surprise.” Then her smile dimmed. “But now I think that restlessness has taken a new form, yes? Something tells me you are not here because of Tony, or your father, but for you.”
A second or two of warring gazes followed, during which Ben braced himself for the inevitable, “So what have you really been doing all this time?”
Except the question didn’t come. Not then, at least. Instead, his mother stood once more, startling the dogs. She took his empty mug, looking down at it for a moment before saying, “Whatever your reason for coming back, it’s good to have you home—”
“Ben!”
At the sound of his father’s voice, Ben swiveled toward the door leading to the garage, where Luis Vargas, his thick, dark hair now heavily webbed with silver, was attempting to haul in a state-of-the-art set of golf clubs without taking out assorted wriggling, excited dogs. Ben quickly stood, tossing his “napkin” into the garbage can under the sink as his father dropped the clubs and extended his arms. A heartbeat later, the slightly shorter man had hauled Ben against his chest in an unabashedly emotional hug.
“I didn’t expect you for another couple of hours, otherwise I would’ve stayed home!” The strong, builder’s hands clamped around Ben’s arms, Luis held him back, moisture glistening in dark brown eyes. Slightly crooked teeth flashed underneath a bristly mustache. “You look good. Doesn’t he look good, Juanita? Dios,” he said, shaking Ben and grinning, “I’ve waited so long for this moment! Did you eat? Juanita, did you feed the kid?”
“Yes, Pop,” Ben said, chuckling. “She fed me.”
His father let go, tucking his hands into his pockets, shaking his head and grinning. A potbelly peeked through the opening of his down vest, stretching the plaid shirt farther than it probably should. “I see you, and now I’m thinking, finally, everything’s back the way it should be, eh?” He slapped Ben’s arm, then pulled him into another hug while his mother fussed a few feet away about how he shouldn’t do that, the boy had just eaten, for heaven’s sake.
Now the house shuddered slightly as the front door opened, followed by “For God’s sake, woman! I’m okay, I don’t need your help!”
Ben stiffened. Damn. Would another hour or two to prepare have been too much to ask?
Apparently not, he thought as, in a cloud of cold that briefly soothed Ben’s heated face, his brother and sister-in-law, along with their two kids, straggled into the kitchen.
“Look, Tony!” Luis swung one arm around Ben’s shoulders, crushing him to his side. “Your brother’s finally come home! Isn’t that great?”
His brother’s answering glare immediately confirmed that nothing had changed on that front, either.
Chapter Two
“So…” Tony banged his crutches up against one wall and collapsed into the nearest kitchen chair, stretching out his casted foot in front of him and glowering. Shorter and stockier than Ben, Tony resembled their father more than ever these days. A neat beard outlined his full jaw, obliterating the baby face Tony had detested all through high school. “You made it.”
His mother was too busy fussing over the kids to notice the vinegar in her oldest son’s voice, but Ben definitely caught his sister-in-law’s irritated frown.
“Don’t start, Tony,” she said softly, and his brother turned his glower on her.
“Yeah, I made it,” Ben said, taking the coward’s way out by turning his attention to his niece and nephew. A sliver of regret pierced his gut: Although his mother had e-mailed photos of the kids to him, he’d never seen them in person before this. His chest tightened at the energy pulsing from lanky, ten-year-old Jacob, at little Matilda’s shy, holey half-smile from behind her mother’s broad hips.
“Come here, you,” Anita said, shucking her Broncos jacket and holding out her arms, her fitted, scoop-necked sweater brazenly accentuating her curves. Ben couldn’t remember Mercy’s next youngest sister as ever having a hard angle anywhere on her body, even when they’d been kids. A biological hand Anita had not only accepted with grace, but played to full advantage. Her embrace was brief and hard and obviously sincere. “Welcome home,” she whispered before letting him go.
“You haven’t changed a bit,” Ben said, grinning. “Still as much of a knockout as ever.”
Her laugh did little to mask either her flush of pleasure or the slight narrowing of her thick-lashed, coffee brown eyes as she gave him the once-over. Masses of warm brown curls trembled on either side of her full cheeks. “And you’re still full of it! Anyway…little Miss Peek-a-Boo behind me is Matilda, we call her Mattie. And this is Jacob. Jake. Kids, meet your Uncle Ben.”
Since Mattie was still hanging back, Ben extended his hand to Jake, gratified to see the wariness begin to retreat in his nephew’s dark eyes. “I hear you play baseball.”
A look of surprise preceded a huge grin. “Since third grade, yeah. Short stop. Do you?”
“After a fashion. Enough to play catch, if you want.”
“Sweet! Dad’s like, always too tired and stuff.”
“That’s crap, Jake,” Tony said, and Anita shot him a look that would have felled a lesser man.
“And when’s the last time you played with him, huh?”
“For God’s sake, ’Nita, my leg’s broken!”
“I meant, before that—”
“Are you the same Uncle Ben that makes the rice?”
In response to his niece’s perfectly timed distraction, Ben turned to smile into a pair of wide, chocolate M&M eyes. Twin ponytails framed a heart-shaped face, the ends feathered over a fancy purple sweater with a big collar, as the little girl’s delicate arms squashed a much-loved, stuffed something to her chest. Ben was instantly smitten. “No, honey, I’m afraid not.”
“Oh.” Mattie hugged the whatever-it-was more tightly. The ponytails swished when she tilted her head, her soft little brows drawn together. Curiosity—and a deep, unquestioning trust that makes a man take stock of his soul—flared in her eyes. “Papi talks about you all the time,” she said with a quick grin for her grandfather. “He says you usta play with Aunt Rosie and Livvy a lot when you were little.”
“I sure did.” Ben nodded toward the thing in her arms. “Who’s your friend?”
“Sammy. He’s a cat. I want a real kitty, but Mama says I can’t have one until I’m six. Which is only a few weeks away, you know,” she said to Anita, who rolled her eyes.
“You must take after your mom,” he said, with a wink at Anita, “’cause you’re very pretty.”
“Yeah, that’s what everybody says,” Mattie said with a very serious nod as her mother snorted in the background. “I’m in kindergarten, but I can already read, so that’s how come I know about the rice.” She leaned sideways against the table, one sneakered foot resting atop its mate, then closed the space between them until their foreheads were only inches apart. “My daddy broke his leg,” she whispered, like Tony wasn’t sitting right there.
“I know,” Ben whispered back. “That’s why I’m here, to help your grandpa until your dad can go back to work.”
“Never mind that it’s totally unnecessary,” Tony said to his father, not even trying to mask his irritation. “For a few weeks, one of the guys could drive me around. Or you could,” he directed at Anita, who crossed her arms underneath her impressive bust, glaring.
“And I already told you, I don’t have any vacation time coming up—”
“And maybe,” Ben’s mother said, clearly trying to keep her kitchen from becoming a war zone, “you should be grateful your brother is back home, yes?”
“Yeah, about that,” Mattie said, startling Ben and eliciting a muttered, “God help us when she hits puberty,” from Anita. “If you’re my uncle, how come I’ve never seen you before? And are you gonna stay or what?”
Ignoring the first question—because how on earth was he supposed to explain something to a five-year-old he didn’t fully comprehend himself?—Ben gently tugged one of those irresistible ponytails and said, “I don’t know, bumblebee,” which was the best he could do, at the moment.
An answer which elicited a soft, hopeful “Oh!” from his mother, even as his brother grabbed his crutches, standing so quickly he knocked over his chair.
“We need to get goin’,” he said. “’Nita, kids, come on.”
“But you just got here!” Ben’s mother said as his father laid a hand on his arm.
“Antonio. Don’t be like this.”
“Like what, Pop?” Tony said, halting his awkward progress toward the door. “Like myself? But then, I guess it doesn’t matter anyway now. Because it’s all good, isn’t it, now that Ben’s back. Kids…now.”
Both Jake and Mattie gave Ben a quick, confused backwards glance—Mattie adding a small wave—before Anita, apology brimming in her eyes, ushered them all out. In the dulled silence that followed, Ben’s mother scooped up one of the whimpering little mutts, stroking it between its big batlike ears. “It’s Tony’s leg, he’s not himself, you know how he hates feeling helpless.”
Ben stood as well, swinging his leather jacket off the back of his chair. At the moment, it took everything he had not to walk out the door, get in his truck and head right back to Dallas. Why on earth had he thought that time in and of itself would have been sufficient to heal this mess, that everyone would have readjusted if he took himself out of the equation…?
“Where are you going?” his father demanded.
“Just out for a walk. Get reacquainted with the neighborhood.”
“Oh.” His father’s heavy brows pushed together. “I thought maybe we could watch a game or something together later.”
“I know. But…” Ben avoided his father’s troubled gaze, tamping down the familiar annoyance before his mouth got away from his brain. Knowing something needed to be fixed didn’t mean he had a clue how to fix it. Not then, and not, unfortunately, now. He smiled for his mother, dropped a kiss on the top of her head. “I’m not going far. And I’ll be back for that game, I promise,” he said to his father.
“Benicio—”
“Let him go, Luis,” his mother said softly. “He has to do this his own way.”
Ben sent silent thanks across the kitchen, then left before his father’s confusion tore at him more than it already had.
For maybe an hour, he walked around the neighborhood, his hands stuffed in his pockets, until the crisp, dry air began to clear his head, until the sun—serene and sure in a vast blue sky broken only by the stark, bare branches of winter trees—burned off enough of the fumes from the morning’s disastrous reunion for him to remember why’d he come home. That he’d made the decision to do so long before he’d gotten the call from his father, asking for his help.
So even if everything he’d seen and faced and overcome during his absence paled next to the challenge of trying to piece together the real Ben out of the mess he’d left behind, he still felt marginally better by the time he turned back on to his parents’ block…just as Mercy’s garage door groaned open.
From across the street, he watched her drag a small step stool outside, wrench it open. Now dressed in jeans and a bright red sweater small enough to fit one of his mother’s dogs, she plunked the stool down in the grass in front of her house. She jiggled it for a few seconds to make sure it was steady, then climbed and started to take down the single strand of large colored Christmas lights at the edge of the roof. In a nearby bald spot in the lawn, that Hummer-sized cat of hers plopped down, writhing in the dirt until Mercy yelled at it to cut it out already, she’d just vacuumed. Chastened, the beast flipped to its stomach, its huge, fluffy tail twitching laconically as it glared at Ben.
Speaking of a mess he’d left behind. If he knew what was good for him, he’d keep walking.
Clearly, he didn’t.
“Need any help?”
Mercy grabbed the gutter to keep from toppling off the step stool, then twisted around, trying her best to keep the And who are you again? look in place. But one glance at that goofy grin and her irritation vaporized. Right along with her determination to pretend he didn’t exist. That he’d never existed. That there hadn’t been a time—
“No, I’m good,” she said, returning to her task, hoping he’d go away. As if. All too aware of his continued scrutiny, she got down, moved the step stool over, got back up, removed the next few feet of lights, got down, moved the step stool over, got back up—
“Here.”
Ben stood at her elbow, the rest of the lights loosely coiled in his hand. A breeze shivered through his thick hair, a shade darker than hers; the reflected beam of light from his own truck window delineated ridges and shadows in a face barely reminiscent of the outrageous flirt she remembered. Instead, his smile—not even that, really, barely a tilt of lips at once full and unapologetically masculine—barely masked an unfamiliar weightiness in those burnt wood eyes. An unsettling discovery, to say the least, stirring frighteningly familiar, and most definitely unwanted, feelings of tenderness inside her.
She climbed down from the stool. “You started at the other end.”
“Seemed like a good plan to me.”
“Creep.”
That damned smile still toying with his mouth, he handed the lights to her.
On a huffed sigh, she folded up the stool and tromped back to the garage. The cat, wearing a fine coating of dirt and dead grass, followed. As did Ben.
She turned. “If I told you to go away, would you?”
He shrugged, then said, “How come you’re taking down your lights already? It’s not even New Year’s yet.”
