Yours, Mine...or Ours?

And, ohmigod—stepbrothers or stepsisters? Lots of her friends were part of these blended families, and they all totally hated it. So, yeah, she was cool with things, just the way they were.

But then, as she sat there, combing her fingers through her long hair, trying to look for split ends in the firelight, some of what Kevin said sank in. About how Dad always put her first.

For the first time since they’d arrived, she felt her lips curve into a smile.

Finally, she thought. Something to work with.

“It’s not fair!” George said, all elbows and indignation as he stood, arms crossed over his new SpongeBob jammies, in the Texas Hold ’Em–themed bathroom that made Violet’s eyes roll in their sockets. “Why do I hafta go to bed the same time as Zeke? He’s five years younger’n me!”

“Hey!” Violet said over the giggling, wriggling, terrycloth-covered mound that was her younger son, her mood perking up at the small miracle that had just taken place in this hideous bathroom that was not, thank God, hers. A small miracle that was somehow enough to momentarily blot out the cloud that was losing her job and having no home of her own and Rudy Vaccaro, with his damn strong jaw and kind blue eyes and his obvious penchant for helping the helpless.

And the letter, waiting for her on the entry table downstairs.

“What?” George said, damp red hair standing in spikes all over his head.

Violet grinned, heartened, and Rudy’s strong jaw and blue eyes faded a little more, even if the letter didn’t. “You just subtracted!”

“I did not,” he said, skeptical.

“You certainly did. You said Zeke was five years younger than you. Which means you subtracted his age—four—from yours—nine—to figure that out.”

“I did?”

“Uh-huh. Without even thinking about it.” She gave him a thumbs-up. Unfortunately her son was no fool.

Unlike his mother.

No. No, she was not going to believe that the occasional foolish choice made her a fool, kind blue eyes and strong jaws be damned.

“You didn’t answer my question,” George said.

“Since the answer’s no different than it was last night, or the night before that, or the night before that,” Violet said, yanking a Thomas the Tank-Engine top over Zeke’s damp, honey-gold curls, then kissing a soft pink cheek, just because she could, “there didn’t seem to be much point. Get your teeth brushed.”

Skinny bare feet stomped across the damp, slightly musty-smelling carpeting to the sink. Wall-to-wall in a bathroom? Let alone one used by small boys with delusions of Olympic glory in the hundred-meter freestyle? Not to mention lousy aim? Insane. But that was Betsy for you, Violet thought as, on the floor below, two of her best friend’s little boys launched into yet another brawl—

Her stomach clenched as It’s over, somebody else bought the house, nothing you can do about it now sailed through her head, along with the blue eyes. And the smile. One of those kick-to-the-nether-regions smiles, deep creases carved into slightly bearded cheeks…

Violet plopped her butt on the closed toilet lid with Zeke on her lap, tugging down the back of George’s pj top where it had stuck to his damp skin. “Have I told you recently how crazy I am about you guys?” she said, suddenly overcome with love and gratitude, despite the sensation of trying to dig out of a hundred-foot-deep sandpit with a teaspoon.

His mouth full of toothpaste suds, George looked at her, eyes bright with worry, and she thought, So much for falling back on maudlin sentimentality as an antidote to stress.

But she smiled anyway, inhaling her four-year-old’s berry-scented shampoo and innocence, and she cocooned him more tightly, cursing Mitch. Cursing herself, for finding herself attracted to another blue-eyed man, one who’d bought her inheritance out from under her. By rights she should have been heaping Irish curses upon his head. Not that she knew any, but she could probably find one or two on eBay, if she tried.

Her eldest eyed her for a moment, thankfully derailing thoughts of curses and sexual longing and such, then spit out his toothpaste. His front teeth were beaver teeth, enormous, one of them crooked. Braces, she thought, almost drowning in panic.

“You lost your job, huh?” George said, eyes huge in the mirror, beaver teeth glinting against a toothpaste-slicked lower lip. “Because of us?”

Swear to God, she would kill Maude Jenkins with her bare hands.

“Yes, I lost my job,” Violet said, being brave. “But no, not because of you.”

“But Maude said—”

“Maude’s a big fat poopyhead,” Zeke piped from Violet’s lap, and she bit her bottom lip to keep from laughing.

“We don’t call people poopyheads,” she said, kissing damp curls.

Zeke twisted around to look up at her, a single tiny crease marring that wonderful, perfect forehead. Mitch’s forehead, she thought, barely dodging the stab of regret in time. “What do we call ’em, then?”

Bitches, Violet thought with a sigh, getting to her feet, Zeke molded to her hip like a baby monkey. “Come on, you two—let’s get to bed.”

“Aw, Mom…”

She took George’s chin in her hand, which, she realized with a start, wasn’t nearly as low as it used to be. “Tomorrow, you can stay up later. Tonight, I need you to go to bed at eight-thirty.”

“Why?”

“Because I’m about to keel over.”

“That doesn’t make any sense.”

“Sometimes life doesn’t make any sense,” Violet muttered, steering him out of the steamy bathroom into the chilly, wallpapered hallway lined with photographs of somebody else’s children. “Suck it up.”

George griping and moaning the whole time, they made their way down the stairs of the tiny two-bedroom house, to the half-finished basement they’d called home for the past six months. Betsy’s husband, Joey, had originally fixed it up as a place where he and his buddies could watch games and not get in Betsy’s hair, which Betsy finally figured out was Joey-speak for hiding out so his sons wouldn’t get into his. It was what it was. Stained carpeting over the cement floor. Fake knotty pine paneling on two walls. A pair of small, grimy, shrub-choked windows hugging the ceiling that let in neither air nor light. An ancient, slightly musty pull-out couch on which all three of them slept.

True, Joey had grumbled a bit at first when his wife so generously offered his refuge to Violet when her life took yet another in a very long, very boring series of tumbles. But he was a good man, that Joey, the best in his price range, so he’d come around. Sometimes he even took Violet’s two with his three to McDonald’s or someplace, just so both women could catch their breaths for an hour or so.

Mitch had been like that, too, once upon a time.

Ignoring the temptation to wallow, Violet tucked both boys into bed like a normal mother, blinking away the tears pooling in the corners of her eyes. At times like this, all she wanted was to reverse the clock, to return to that brief period of her life when things actually made sense, when she knew she was loved.

Or at least believed she was.

Especially the weeks leading up to Mitch’s vanishing act, so she could study them, dissect them, figure out what had gone wrong. Because that’s what bugged her the most, that unanswered “Why?” The letters, filled with apologies without explanations (what the hell was she supposed to do with those?), weren’t helping, either.

Upstairs, Betsy’s boys went for each others’ throats, as usual. Joey worked second shift at a nearby machine factory—he wouldn’t be home before midnight. Violet’s kids, however, were nearly out before she doused the light, leaving only the night-light on so a sleepy boy wouldn’t break his neck tripping over forsaken skateboards and soccer shoes and badminton sets if he needed to go potty. They could sleep through anything, thank God. Unlike her, Violet thought wearily as she glanced up at the vibrating ceiling, thinking, For cripes’ sake, Betsy, put your kids to bed.

Overhead, something crashed; Betsy started yelling; somebody burst into loud tears.

That’s it, I’m outta here, Violet thought, dragging her old down coat on over her bathwater-splotched sweats. Not that she could actually leave, but even standing outside in twenty-degree weather was preferable to grinding her teeth for the next two hours until, one by one, her friend’s children passed out.

From the closet-size living room, she could see Betsy’s short, gelled, multitoned hair poking out over the top of the sofa, like a spooked tortoiseshell cat. “CSI’s on,” she yelled as Violet passed, cramming her own insane hair into the first hat she could find, a SpongeBob deal she’d given George for Christmas. Under normal circumstances, Violet loved CSI, in all its permutations. Tonight, however, she was feeling anything but normal.

“Thanks, I think I need to get some air,” she said, yanking open the door.

“You’re not leaving the kids with me?” Betsy called out over the shrieks of her youngest, a two-year-old who communicated mostly through punching and screaming.

“Of course not, Bets, I’m just right here in the yard.”