Wild Iris Ridge

She waved goodbye to the women, left a bill on the counter to pay Dermot for her breakfast along with a healthy tip and then walked out into the town that would be her home for the foreseeable future, like it or not.

CHAPTER FOUR

“COME ON, HONEY. You can do it,” Brendan urged his daughter.

“No! Don’t let go, Daddy,” Faith begged. “Please don’t let go.”

Brendan sighed as he held on to the back of her bike seat, wishing he could enjoy the sweetly warm April evening that smelled of life, new growth, somebody barbecuing down the street.

Another spring, another effort to get Faith to ride her bike without the training wheels.

Two years ago, she had begged him to take off the training wheels on her bike as soon as the snow melted. He had promised he would before the new baby came—but before he could follow through on his promise, Jess and the baby were both gone.

None of them had felt much like riding bikes that spring. When he pulled them out of the garage after the snow melted a year ago, Faith had insisted she wasn’t ready to ride without the training wheels. He had pushed a little but not too hard. Jessie had only been gone a year and Faith seemed to need the comfort of the familiar.

But she would turn eight years old during the summer. The time had come for her to stop clinging so tightly to the familiar and venture into untried territory.

He worried about the tentativeness she had developed since Jess’s death. She never wanted to try anything new—roller-skating, Girl Scouts, sushi.

She was an insanely smart girl, but she was beginning to let her fears rule her.

All of them had been in grief counseling for months after Jess and their unborn baby died. Maybe they weren’t quite done in that department.

At some point, he had to fight back against the tyrannical hold Faith’s fears had over her. He figured forcing her to lose the training wheels was as good a place to start as any and had removed them a week earlier, much to her dismay.

“Hey, Dad! Look! Here I go!”

Carter, still a month away from six, rolled past on his two-wheeler like Lance freaking Armstrong—but without the steroid abuse.

Carter seemed on the other side of the spectrum from Faith, totally without fear. He had begged Brendan to take off his training wheels the previous fall and he had done it with a great deal of trepidation, certain a five-year-old didn’t have the balance or coordination yet. Training wheels existed for a reason, right?

At the same time, he had hoped maybe seeing Carter make the effort might spur Faith to try a little harder.

Instead, as she watched her brother master the bike in just an hour, Faith only seemed to cling tenaciously to her conviction that she wasn’t ready.

“You’re doing great, Car,” he called. “Keep going.”

“I loooove my bike,” Carter sang out at the top of his lungs in one of his spur-of-the-moment song compositions as he rode past. “I love love love my bike.”

He had to smile at the sheer exuberance Carter brought to everything he did. What would he have done the past two years without both of his kids?

Probably wandered into the wilderness and became a hermit or something, growing a four-foot-long beard and living off beef jerky.

“Riding bikes is awesome and cool. I want to ride my bike to school,” Carter sang.

Even Faith smiled at her little brother.

Brendan took that as an encouraging sign. “Okay, let’s try one more time.”

Her smile slid away. “I don’t want to. Please don’t make me, Daddy.”

“You can do it, Faith. You just have to believe in yourself,” he urged, feeling like the worst parent on earth for pushing her out of her comfort zone. On the other hand, wouldn’t catering to her unreasonable fears be more harmful in the long run?

“I don’t want to!” she protested.

“One more, that’s all. I promise. And then we can put the bikes away and go for a walk.”

“I want to ride a bike,” she said, with traces of her mother’s stubbornness—okay, and his, as well—in her voice. “I just want to ride a bike that still has training wheels. Why can’t you put them back on?”

If the kid spent as much time trying to focus on her balance as she did arguing about why she couldn’t, they would all be better off.

“One more time, Faith. Come on, kiddo. You’ve got this.”

She glared at him but apparently accepted that he wasn’t about to back down. With him holding on to the seat for balance, she started her wobbly way down the ride.

“Don’t let go,” she said. “Promise!”

He didn’t answer. Instead, when she seemed to have sufficient speed and had reduced the wobble, he enacted one of those difficult parental betrayals and released his hold on her.

She rode about six feet before she realized he wasn’t holding on anymore...and promptly fell over.

“Owwww,” she wailed, not quite crying but close to it. “You let go! You promised you wouldn’t let go!”

“I never promised I wouldn’t let go.”

“Yes, you did! You did!”

She wouldn’t listen to him in this state, and he wasn’t going to stand here arguing with her. Close to the end of his patience, he was about to tell her so when an unwelcome voice intruded.

“Wow, Faith! You’re riding a two-wheeler? That’s wonderful!”

Both of them turned around swiftly to find Lucy walking down the sidewalk toward them.

She looked lovely and bright and more casually dressed than he had seen her in a long time, in jeans and a plain green tailored cotton shirt that matched her eyes. With her hair pulled up into a loose hairstyle on top of her head, she looked pretty and sweet and far too young to have been the marketing director at a major software company until recently.

He was supposed to make arrangements with her to drop off a few things for Faith and Carter. He hadn’t precisely forgotten; he had just done his best to put it out of his head so he didn’t have to dwell on more thoughts of her that seemed to have intruded far too frequently since she returned to town.

“Aunt Lucy!” Faith exclaimed, her voice overflowing with joy.

Her father’s minor treachery forgotten, she jumped up from the toppled bike and raced to Lucy, throwing her arms around her waist with an exuberant delight he rarely saw in his quiet, serious oldest child.

Lucy closed her eyes as she returned Faith’s embrace with a soft expression on her features that brought a weird lump to his throat.

He and Lucy might not get along for a dozen different reasons, but he couldn’t deny that she loved his children.

“What are you doing here?” Faith burst out. “I didn’t even know you were coming! How long are you staying? Where are you staying? Will you be here for my baseball game next week?”

Lucy laughed at the barrage of questions hurled at her like a broken pitching machine spewing balls at the new batting cages in town.