Family Be Mine

So I respect his pride and his privacy.

Respect nothing. You call the tingling sensation you felt when he gripped your forearms during isometric exercises “respect”?

“Earth to Sarah,” Julie called, interrupting her internal debate. “Are you still with us?”

Sarah shook her head. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to flake out there. My thoughts just kind of got away from me. Chalk it up to general tiredness and pregnancy muddleheadedness, I guess.” She blinked a few times, warding off the light-headedness she was feeling. It was a little hot in the shop.

Then she gripped the arms of the chair. “I really have been looking forward to this all day. It’s just the logistics of getting up that seem a bit daunting.” She pressed down to hoist herself up.

Which is when a weird thing happened.

Because instead of heaving herself into an upright position, Sarah became strangely conscious, almost out-of-body conscious, of pitching forward. And her nose—it really was her nose and not someone else’s she kept thinking—seemed to be getting closer and closer to the rug. This isn’t part of the playbook, she told herself.

And that thought came right before her left temple made contact with the cream-colored rug.

CHAPTER FIVE

HUNT FILLED THE VASE with water from the sink in Ben’s kitchen, turned off the tap, and ambled over to the table, careful not to lose any of the hydrangea branches that jostled against each other. He placed the vase in the center of the wooden farm table and fussed inexpertly at the heavy blooms, the globes of dusty-blue flowers drooping toward the table.

“There, that should do it,” he said, and backed away.

“I thought I should bring something to Katarina if I was going to drop in.”

“She’s not here right now to thank you.” Ben leaned against the kitchen counter, his arms crossed, and watched Hunt’s efforts with a skeptically raised brow.

“The dog trashed another bush in your mother’s yard, didn’t he? And you’re just trying to hide the evidence, right?”

Hunt shrugged. “Well, something good might as well come from Fred’s enthusiastic communing with nature. Besides, I think she was returning from her book group by six, and I didn’t want her to look out the window and notice the damage. I made it with plenty of time to spare, I think.” He instinctively glanced at his wrist before he remembered that he had stopped wearing one right after he’d finished chemo and no longer had to get to appointments on time.

No matter, he slipped his hand in the side pocket of his chinos for his BlackBerry. Nothing. Well, that suited him just fine. This was the New Hunt, the Stress-Free Hunt. He started to whistle off-key. The noise caused Fred to lift his head from licking the tile floor around the rubbish bin. He stared at his master with a wrinkled brow that might mistakenly be interpreted as intelligence. Then he scampered out of the kitchen with an unfocused sense of purpose.

“He’s not going to do anything destructive, is he?” Ben asked. He watched Fred bolt down the hallway, his four paws barely touching the hardwood planks.

“He’s fine. As long as you don’t have any exotic fish in the house, I wouldn’t worry.”

“I’ll be sure to keep the cans of tuna fish under wraps.” Ben kept his arms crossed and waited.

“Listen, I’ve been doing a lot of thinking.”

“Sometimes a wise move,” Ben said sardonically.

Hunt continued undeterred. “I’ve come to the realization that I want to do something to help mankind. Make a difference for humanity.”

“That’s great.” Ben uncrossed his arms. “Let me ask you, though. In the process of all your thinking, have you narrowed it down a little? Thought of anything in particular?”

Hunt wagged one finger in the air. “Not yet, but that will come. The crucial thing for now is that I am thinking about what I want to do.”

Fred chose that moment to rush back into the kitchen. A white athletic sock hung from the corner of his mouth. He checked that Hunt was still there before twirling around and racing out again, the sock streaming behind his flopping ear.

Ben headed after the mutt. “You’re lucky that I’m pretty sure that sock was Matt’s.” He walked to the bottom of the steep stairs leading to the second-floor bedrooms.

The eighteenth-century cottage had originally consisted of little more than the kitchen, but it had been expanded in the late nineteenth century to include a living room, dining room and a study on the ground floor. The attic had been refitted into two bedrooms at roughly the same time. The upstairs and downstairs bathrooms didn’t come until the twentieth century, and Ben had recently updated them again.

“You know, Hunt, I was more than happy to renovate the bathrooms as a measure of my love and devotion to my lovely wife, but I hadn’t counted on refinishing the stairs.” He winced as the dog’s nails scurried frantically on the wood as he bounded up the stairs, made a tight circle around the landing, and threw himself headfirst down once more. He stopped only to deposit the sock at Ben’s feet before charging up yet again.

Ben turned to Hunt who had followed him, still muttering something about humanity. “You know, I’m going to bill you for the damage, and no amount of Adult School attendance is going to get you out of it.” Ben shook his head in disgust.

Hunt smiled as he watched Fred repeat his frantic maneuvers. “Give him a break. He’s never used stairs before.”

“Poor baby. To have to live in a house with an elevator must be such a deprivation.”

“That was the architect’s idea, not mine. He called it ‘an elegant solution to a challenging space.’ His way of saying my downtown Grantham lot was way narrower than he originally realized, and why not spend another twenty grand or so on my modern folly.” Hunt marveled at the dog’s fierce glee. “Can you imagine the utter joy he must be feeling at experiencing something for the first time? To be that exhilarated, that overcome with emotion.” He turned to Ben. “Can you remember a similar feeling? I know I can’t. It must be like an awakening…like experiencing birth all over again.”

“Listen, I can appreciate that he’s a puppy and excited. Just don’t start getting all New Agey on me.”

Hunt huffed. “You’re such a cynic.”

“I might be a cynic, but I’m a happy cynic. Happy that you actually came by to see me. I was beginning to think you were only capable of migrating from your Bat Cave to your mother’s stately mansion. What a relief to know you still remember how to drive out here! See, I can be as enthusiastic as that dog of yours. Speaking of which, go bring him down from upstairs.” Fred had taken a sudden detour and veered to the right in the upstairs hallway.

Hunt trudged up the stairs, frowning when he had to grip the handrail for leverage. He hated being weak. More than that he hated having other people see him this way.

Was it any wonder why he had started to avoid people in general? And if he had to go out, that he made a point of putting up a good front, especially with his mother? His mother… For all her outward concern, she was supremely intolerant of sickness. He knew she thought it a sign of weakness. “I simply refuse to be sick,” she was fond of announcing to him in particular.

It was easy to think that way, Hunt surmised, when you’ve never been sick a day in your life, not that he’d ever pointed that out. Not that she would have listened.

By the time he reached the top of the stairs, Hunt was puffing. He stopped to regain his breath, then whistled. No response. “Fred, where are you, buddy?” He pulled the dog’s leash from his back pocket.

From downstairs, Ben’s footsteps moved away from the stairs. “I’ve got to clean up the living room before this baby shower, and I don’t want to find out that he’s gotten into something up there,” he called up.

A moment later Hunt descended with Fred on the leash. He found Ben in the study. “I hope you weren’t too attached to that particular roll of toilet paper. I found another one in the vanity and hid the shredded bits in there instead.”

Ben finished straightening up the piles of library books and magazines. “Good. A move like that will make Katarina think that Matt did it,” he said, referring to his son.

To give Ben due credit, Matt, besides toting the usual baggage of a sixteen-year-old, had only recently come into his life after the death of his mother. Neither Ben nor Matt had known about each other before the reading of the will, and while both were determined to make the relationship work, they were still feeling their way. Katarina helped with smoothing out the relationship, providing mediation and the love, and a secret weapon—her grandmother.

“I don’t think the kid has anything to worry about,” Hunt replied to Ben. “Hey, the kid can take care of himself. After all, he’d have Lena defending him like a mother hen no matter what.”

Ben hunted around for a place to put a pile of old newspapers and settled for dumping it in the log carrier by the fireplace. “That oughta do it. Amada is away for the week visiting her cousin in Mexico, and I was put in charge of tidying up. You don’t know how to vacuum, do you?”

“How hard can it be? If I can graduate from Grantham University, I should be able to work a simple machine. Here, hold the dog, and point the way.”

“It’s in the hall closet.” Ben took Fred’s leash. The dog eyed him cautiously, then pulled away with all his might in the direction of Hunt. “I don’t think Fred has quite warmed up to me.”

Hunt came back dragging the canister vacuum behind him. “Don’t take it personally. He’s afraid of men. Try looking smaller.” Hunt bent down and peered around the back of the vacuum. “There must be a cord hiding somewhere.”

Ben hunched his shoulders, but at six foot three it was a little hard to look small. Then he tried sitting on the arm of the couch. Fred just pulled harder. “I don’t think this is working.” He nodded toward Hunt. “It’s down on the left side.”

“Check.” Hunt pulled out a length of cord and plugged it in.