Father Most Wanted

But ultimately there was no way around it. He knew he had to do it. And he had to do it alone.

Time, everyone had said, would help him heal. Time was sure taking a hell of a lot of itself about it. The irony made him shake his head.

Impatience burrowed into the weariness, making itself known. He raised his eyes to the clock again.

She was late.

He felt a pang. Maybe Carla wasn’t going to call tonight. Maybe she couldn’t get away. They’d both agreed that she wouldn’t call him from the house. There could be consequences, and it was too much of a risk to take, even though everything so far appeared to be going smoothly.

But appearances could be deceiving, and he wasn’t about to take chances. Not with his sister’s life and certainly not with the girls’. Losing Gina had been far more than enough for him to endure.

The telephone on the side table next to him rang, slicing through the faraway sound of his daughters’ voices. Tyler quickly covered the receiver with his hand and yanked it up to his ear.

“Hello?”

“Is this the party to whom I am speaking?”

Dark half-formed thoughts vanished into the evening. “Very funny, Carla. I thought maybe you weren’t calling tonight.”

“Things came up.” He could hear the unspoken apology in her voice. “I couldn’t get away. Enough about me. How’s everything with you?”

He looked around the room with its unpacked boxes of possessions that had never been his. Possessions that gave credibility to the life he had assumed. The room reflected his life, as well. “Chaotic, utterly chaotic.”

The voice on the other end laughed with distant memory. “Sounds just like you. Are the girls adjusting?”

Pride whispered through him. His daughters were resilient and undefeatable. “Better than me.”

“They’re younger,” she said. “You’ve got more to deal with. But you’ll get used to it.” She paused, then added, “You were always good about rolling with the punches.”

He wished he shared her optimism. Wished it could snake its way through the phone lines and infuse him. Just long enough for him to get beyond the walking wounded and begin to move on. But it’d been nine months, and all he was doing was still going through the motions.

“I’m not now, Carla. This time it feels like I’m down for the count.”

“Not you. Never you,” she said. “Look, I’d better go, just in case.”

He glanced at his watch and realized that she must have looked at hers. Wariness had become second nature to him. “You didn’t use the same public phone, did you?”

“I’m not an idiot.”

He laughed, affection sneaking forward. “The jury’s still out on that.”

“Still have that wry sense of humor, I see.” And then her voice became softer, more serious. “I miss you.”

He wished she wouldn’t say that. But even so, the words comforted him. “Yeah, me too.”

“Watch your back.”

“Always.” It was never himself that he was concerned with. He had to be careful for the girls’ sake. Until he could be sure that everything was really truly over. Finally over. “Same time next week.” It was more of a hope than a question.

“I’ll try.”

He couldn’t ask for any more than that.

Tyler hung up and looked thoughtfully at the telephone. The only thing he had of the past was a disembodied voice whispering in his ear for the briefest of calls. Anything longer might be asking for trouble, at least for now, and trouble was the one thing he had to avoid at all costs.

So far, the cost had been very high.

A small figure stood in the doorway. Tyler separated himself from the past and returned to the present.

“Daddy, you promised to read to us.”

He rose. There were now three of them eagerly spilling into the room. “So I did. Which story shall I read first?”

“Mine.”

“No, mine.”

“Me first, Daddy.”

Three books from three different sets of hands were thrust at him from three different directions. Tyler smiled to himself. Here we go again.

“Okay, where do you want this, Oma?” Brooke asked. Her father’s mother had been “Oma,” the German word for grandmother, to her ever since she could remember.

A grunt accompanied Brooke’s question. Unable to see, she felt her way into the kitchen, shuffling as she went. But there was good reason for that. Somewhere on this floor was Jasper, her grandmother’s longtime pet. Thirty-one pounds of territorial, caramel-colored, generally unfriendly cat. There was no way Brooke wanted to take any chances of stepping on him. Jasper was as unforgiving as they came.

“Right on the table will be fine, dears,” her grandmother called out.

From the pitch, Brooke guessed that the woman who had spent more than twelve years raising Heather and her was not in the room with them now.

“Great. Now all I need to know is where’s the table.” Behind her, Brooke heard a loud thud. It was the sound of Heather depositing the box of books she had brought in with her on the floor.

“Well, I can tell you that it’s not here,” Heather announced, blowing out an exaggerated breath as she massaged one forearm.

Craning her neck as far as possible, Brooke tried to peek around the box she was holding. Hers was larger and heavier than Heather’s—she’d insisted on it. She managed to glimpse the edge of the kitchen table and hoped there was nothing on it as she made her way over. Finally finding something to rest the box on, she eased it onto the flat surface.

“It wouldn’t have killed you to help guide me, you know,” she said to Heather.

In response, Heather clasped her hands over her heart, rolled her eyes heavenward and pretended to sway. “Oh, yes, it would. The pain, the pain.”

“You are, you are,” Brooke responded before sucking air into her lungs.

She was going to have to get out more, she told herself. There was no reason to feel so winded, carrying books from the car in her grandmother’s driveway to her kitchen.

Of course, the books did weigh a million pounds…

Ada Carmichael came into the kitchen, a welcoming smile on her perfectly round face. She looked at the two girls she considered as much her daughters as her granddaughters, each, in her own way, so like their father. Great affection coursed through Ada’s veins as it always did whenever she saw the duo.

She looked from one box to the other before pausing to open the one on the table. “So, these are them?”