A Family for Christmas

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“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.”

Chapter Four (#ulink_f2b18c2e-f31e-567d-8f22-d4b5ed94415e)

“Aunt Maggie,” Rachel said, “are we really going to leave Mickey here? Why can’t he come home with us?”

Maggie glanced at Rachel in the rearview mirror of the rental van she’d picked up at the airport. “Mickey’s going to be fine at Shriners. You saw all the other kids. He’ll have lots of company and get the therapy he needs. We can come visit, and before you know it, he’ll be home with us, driving you crazy the way he used to.”

“I love you, Aunt Maggie, but I wish it could be like it used to be. I even prayed for it a few times, but I know it can’t happen.”

You aren’t the only one praying for the impossible, Maggie thought. “I love you, too, sweetheart, and I understand how you feel.”

Two weeks had settled the two younger children into a secure routine with her, but Rachel and Mickey were having a tougher time adjusting. Rachel, at least, talked about her grief and loss. Not so Mickey. He was still silent and deeply depressed.

“Will Uncle Trent be at our house?” Rachel asked from behind her.

“That’s what I’m thinking,” she said, and forced what she hoped was a confident-looking smile. In truth, she had no clue where Trent was. She’d been unable to reach him to tell him they were returning. She’d left message after message on his answering machine at home and on his voice mail at work but he hadn’t gotten in touch with her. By late yesterday she’d swallowed her pride and called his secretary’s extension. Ellen told her that he’d taken a few days off, that her orders were not to disturb him unless it was a dire emergency, and that Maggie should be able to reach him at his home. But he wasn’t at the condo. Or else he wasn’t answering the phone when Maggie was the caller.

And this after two weeks of silence.

She’d heard nothing directly from him. She’d returned, not knowing his decision regarding their marriage. And, of course, he had no idea at all that she and the children were back. Which left Maggie alone with three children to face the house and its memories. She had no idea how they’d react.

“There’s the river down there,” Daniel shouted. “Does that mean we’re on the Sure-kill?”

“Yes, this is the Sckuykill Expressway.”

“Uncle Trent calls it the Sure-kill Distressway,” Rachel added, “but I don’t think it’s so funny anymore.”

“I’m sure he doesn’t, either,” Maggie said, then gritted her teeth. Uncle Trent again. Children were so easy to read. Rachel and Daniel and even Grace in her limited capacity had talked incessantly about their uncle in the last several days. His absence was clearly noted, and it just as clearly caused worry. He’d checked in on Mickey, calling to talk to the boy’s doctors and Mickey himself every other day, but there’d been not a word for Maggie.

He didn’t return her calls, either. When the offers of help had come from the Shriners organization for Mickey to enter their new facility in North Philadelphia, and from Angel Flight East for their transportation, she’d called Trent all weepy and grateful. It had been such a weight off her shoulders and such a tremendous answer to desperate prayer that she hadn’t been able to help the frequent breaks in her voice. All he had done in response was to say a few stiff words, and to contact the Florida doctors to help coordinate Mickey’s eventual move.

Didn’t he realize the strain all this had been? Maybe not, a quiet voice argued. She certainly hadn’t understood what it would take to just start her day at seven making breakfast. After feeding and dressing three children, it was off to the hospital. And even that was complicated. She had to shepherd all the children to the car, get two buckled in their seats and Grace in her safety seat, then drive to the hospital. In the parking lot, it started all over again. The walk into and through the hospital, keeping track of them, was complicated as well. And now after two weeks alone, she was tired and scared that it might continue that way for the foreseeable future.

And what would she face when she reached the house? When she’d been there last month, the kitchen had looked like a war zone, but Michael had done wonders by her last visit, a week before they left on vacation. It was just that the house needed so much more. Maggie had never understood how Sarah had kept her sanity while dealing with a house that looked for all the world as if it were in the middle of being torn down.

“Aunt Maggie, do you know about the water?” Daniel asked.

Maggie started at the sound of his voice. “The water in the river?” she asked.

“No, silly, the water at our house. You said we were still going to live there, right?”

“We’re almost there. What about the water?”

Rachel sighed. “It was just that Daddy didn’t know. But Mommy wasn’t mad,” she was quick to reassure Maggie.

Maggie didn’t feel reassured. Instead she had a sinking feeling in the pit of her stomach. “Daddy didn’t know what?”

“About the old heater. We just camped. You know.”

Maggie didn’t camp. Had never ever wanted to camp. Couldn’t imagine anything worse than camping with little children all under the age of nine. “Camped?”

Was that a squeak in her voice?

“Yeah, like when we go camping and Mommy and Daddy cook the water for dishes. We have to cook it at home, too. Just like camping! But just ‘til the new heater is hooked up, Daddy said.”

“Sarah, you were amazing,” Maggie whispered, and prayed for strength.

The house came into sight just then. It sat high on a rise at the end of a drive that was several hundred yards long; it seemed to peer imperiously down the hill at them through two eyebrow windows cut into the roof. Michael had called the house a “grand old lady.” To Maggie, the peeling paint and half-finished porches made it look more like a derelict. But although the house looked less than inviting to her, it was home to these children, and Maggie would do nothing to change their perceptions of it.

She stopped the van in front and started to set the brake.

“Um, Aunt Maggie,” Rachel said, her voice hesitant, “I think maybe we should go in the back door.”

Maggie hated to ask the obvious question, but it just seemed to pop out anyway. “Why?”

“’Cause Daddy finished undoing the front of the house.”

Maggie gulped. “Undoing?”

“The old walls and the floors,” Rachel answered.

“And the steps,” Daniel chirped. “Don’t forget he pulled down the old rickety steps.”

Don’t jump to conclusions, Mag old girl They’re only little. They probably don’t mean it the way it sounds. Besides, you were here a week before they left. And anyway, he couldn’t have taken out the heater, taken down the walls and stairs and torn out the floors. There’d be nothing left! He couldn’t! Could he?

Maggie forced herself to put the car in park and to stomp down on the parking brake. “I only have a front door key, kids. It’s this way or the highway.”

“We were just on a bunch of highways,” Daniel complained. “I want to get out and ride my Big Wheel”

Maggie chuckled as she turned off the car. “That’s sort of an old expression my grandfather used. ‘It’s my way or the highway,’ he always said.”

“What’s it mean?” Daniel demanded.

Maggie shrugged. “This way or forget it, I guess,” she said, a little distracted as she unbuckled Grace from her car seat.

“That doesn’t make sense,” he grumbled. “Why are big people always using old sayings that don’t mean what they say they do? I think it’s a ‘spiracy to keep kids from being too smart.”

“Oh, no. Here we go again,” Rachel groaned and rolled her eyes.

Too late Maggie remembered Daniel’s penchant for needing to know the literal meaning in everything he heard. “We’ll sort it out later, Daniel Right now Grace needs a nap, and I think you could use a little lie-down, too.”

Grace perked up, and her eyes opened from their half-mast position. “Not tired,” she chirped, then ruined her lively pretense with a wide yawn.

Maggie tapped Grace’s little nose. “Careful before you catch a fly in that mouth.”

“Where’s a fly?” Daniel asked.

Maggie laughed and changed the subject. “Let’s get a move on, everybody. Into the house. We’ll worry about the luggage later.”

They proceeded as always with the routine Sarah had used, and which Maggie had adopted. She took Grace’s hand, Rachel took Daniel’s and they walked across the yard, up the steps and up to the front door. Maggie unlocked the door, opened it and peeked in. She stifled a gasp.

Rachel and Daniel had been alarmingly close in their description of Michael’s latest demolition. The only thing left of the interior front of the house were studs, subflooring and the central staircase horses. Wires hung everywhere. There were holes here and there in the subflooring. She couldn’t take the children in there! It was a minefield.

Maggie felt Rachel tug on her sleeve. “You want me to go and open the door? Mickey did it for Mommy. I’ll be careful and not touch a thing, and I’ll watch out for the holes.”

Just then, however, the door from the kitchen pushed open and a man in jeans and a dark T-shirt came toward them. Dust motes floated in the sunlight between them. “Maggie? What are you guys doing here?”

Maggie squinted. The voice was Trent’s, but it couldn’t be him. He walked closer, and she backed up onto the porch. It was, of course, Trent, but his black hair was dusty and mussed. There were streaks of dirt on his shirt and jeans and on his forehead behind an errant lock. Maggie had never seen him so disheveled. Or so masculine. If this was indeed Trent, he should have gotten into jeans and T-shirts years ago.

“Trent?” she said foolishly, forgetting that she was supposed to be angry at him.

He followed her gaze to his clothes and shrugged. “They’re Mike’s. I didn’t have anything to do this sort of work in.”

“’This sort of work’?”

“I was putting in a new hot-water heater. It’s all set.”

His smile was boyish as if he were showing off a school project. Trent had put in a water heater? Maggie should have been relieved. There’d be hot water after all. But she knew Trent. Lord, she prayed, tell me what to say.

“By yourself?” she asked, trying to keep a neutral tone, still not sure whether to be proud or horrified. This was Trent. The same Trent who had tried to fix a leaking pipe in their first apartment with a wad of chewing gum.

“Yeah. And it wasn’t too bad. Mike has the most incredible set of how-to books. I wanted to get more done before you got back. Why are you here? Why didn’t you warn me? I could have met you at the airport. Is Mickey at Shriners already?”

If you’d called me even once in the last two weeks, you might know. She glanced at the children taking in their whole conversation and guarded her tongue. “He’s all settled in. He still isn’t bouncing back emotionally but he was ready to travel, so I decided it was time to come home. I left messages with our flight number on your answering machine and your voice mail. I even called Ellen. She said you were at home, but I didn’t think of calling here.” I didn’t know to call here, she added silently.

Trent glanced at the children. Did he seem nervous? “Well, this is my home now too, right? I guess I should have had the phone company forward my calls here. You should do the same with your house.”

“Uncle Trent, why did you have a different house from Aunt Maggie?”

“’Cause they’re getting a divorce,” Rachel informed Daniel. “Mommy explained all about it to me. But if Uncle Trent’s moving here with us, how will you get divorced, Aunt Maggie?”

Maggie’s gaze flew to Trent’s. “We’re not,” Maggie said with false cheer. “Uncle Trent and I have been talking about getting back together. We sort of canceled the divorce. We’re going to be your guardians together. Remember? We talked about this.”

“But Uncle Trent never called us. He called Mickey. We thought he didn’t care about us. I’m just a girl and so is Grace.”

“And I’m just a little kid,” Daniel added.

Now she knew she wasn’t imagining Trent’s fear of these children; there was such stark terror in the depths of his gaze that her heart shuddered. Then Trent dropped to one knee. Guilt had replaced the terror. “I love you all very much. I’m sorry you misunderstood. I didn’t think how you’d feel not hearing from me. I’m so sorry. I was very upset by what happened to your daddy and mommy, and when I’m upset I work to help me forget. Unfortunately, that means I also forget things I shouldn’t.”

Rachel nodded sagely. “I heard Daddy say that to Mommy. He said you were sad about losing Aunt Maggie so you were working too much. It sounded very silly to me. You should have just asked us. Aunt Maggie wasn’t really lost at all, cause we knew where she was all the time.”

Trent looked up at Maggie. Two bright flags of red had appeared on his cheekbones. Rachel with her out-of-the-mouths-of-babes wisdom had clearly exposed a truth he’d rather have kept to himself.