Yours, Mine...or Ours?

“This makes what, Violet?” she said. “The third time this month?”

“I know,” she said, flushing red as she began gathering the jagged pieces of earthenware, their soft clanking like screams in the deep hush. Rudy squatted to help her; she glared at him, then shrugged. “Zeke ran out in front of me—”

“And didn’t I say you could only bring the kids here while you worked as long as they weren’t a nuisance?”

“It was an accident, Maude.” The waitress kept her eyes on the floor, tense fingers clutching two neat halves of a broken plate, weariness and embarrassment stiffening her back. Kevin appeared with a gray plastic tub, started tossing the mess into it; Rudy tried to pry the broken plate from Violet’s hands, which earned him another glare. She tossed the destroyed crockery into the bin, saying, “I’ll pay for the loss. Like always.”

“I’m sorry, Violet, I really am,” the older woman said, not sorry at all. “This isn’t working out—”

“No! Maude, please!” Tears bulged in Violet’s eyes when she looked up. “I promise it won’t happen again—”

Rudy was on his feet, staring down whoever the hell this Maude was, his steady, now-we-don’t-want-any-trouble cop’s voice barely masking his irritation. “Like she said, it was an accident. So how about cutting the lady a break?”

“You stay out of this,” Violet said, now standing as well, the eyes inches away, as were the breasts, like double-dip mounds of pistachio ice cream, or maybe mint, the image almost enough to neutralize a tone meant to shrink gonads in a hundred-yard radius. Too bad for her Rudy’s were the nonshrinkable variety. He may have turned in his badge and gun, but not those. “I don’t need some stranger fighting my battles for me!”

“Then let me introduce myself,” he said, extending his hand. “Rudy Vaccaro.”

For a second, he thought she might spit at him.

“Who?” Maude said.

“He bought Doris’s place,” Violet said, and something in her voice brought his head around. Then, to add to the bizarreness, Maude laughed. Rudy’s head swung back to Maude. Who was smirking.

“No, mister, I sincerely doubt she wants your help,” she said, as Stacey returned with the younger boy, who immediately plastered himself to his mother’s side. As Violet cupped the boy’s head, her boss said, “So what’s it gonna be? You gonna find somebody to babysit your brats or what?”

The waitress flushed again, the deep pink a weird contrast to the orange hair, then turned, wagging her hand at the older boy. “Get your stuff together. We’re leaving,” she said softly.

Kevin tugged Rudy’s sleeve and whispered, “Not your problem, bro, let’s get back to the table, okay? Rudy!”

Torn, Rudy frowned into his brother’s eyes. “Obviously, you hanging around is only making this harder for her,” Kevin said under his breath. “Come on.”

After a final glance at Violet as she herded her sons through the restaurant and out the back door, Rudy followed his brother and daughter back to the booth. But everyone was still staring, and he knew damn well they were the subject of at least a half-dozen whispered conversations, too.

So when the other waitress brought them their redone dinners, Rudy asked, “Okay, clearly I’m missing something. What’s my buying the Hicks place got to do with Violet?”

Her eyes banged into his. “You don’t know?”

When Rudy shook his head, the waitress said, “Then let me be the first to break it to ya…”

Chapter Two

“Let me guess,” Kevin said as they made their way back to the car. “You’re about to bust something trying to figure out what to do about this new wrinkle.”

Rudy waited until Stacey, who’d run ahead, was out of earshot before he replied, “Yeah. Nothin’ worse than being the bad guy when it’s not even your fault. I mean, if there wasn’t a will—”

“Then I would think legally you’re in the clear,” his brother said, halting in front of a gated sports equipment store. “Not that I’m any expert, but like you said, you didn’t do anything wrong. Now, what I’m wondering is, what you’re gonna do about Violet?”

Rudy frowned at him, tempted to think he’d liked his brother better when he’d been a stoner and too out of it to stick his nose in. “What makes you think I should do anything about Violet?”

Kevin chuckled. Rudy sighed. Okay, so those damn pale green eyes were burned into his brain, along with all that I could fix you crap. Which was really stupid because maybe—maybe—Rudy could fix a house, but fixing women wasn’t part of his job description. Especially since, if memory served, women didn’t generally take kindly to being fixed.

But the more Darla, the other waitress, had yakked away about Violet’s situation, the more Rudy realized he had to do something. He’d had no idea, obviously, when he’d bought the place that the old lady had promised to leave it to Violet—

“Da-ad!” Stacey called, hopping up and down beside the car, her hands jammed inside her vest pockets. “Hello? Open the door?”

“Oh, sorry,” he mumbled, hitting the remote on his key chain. The car be-booped itself unlocked. Stacey yanked open the door and scrambled inside, slamming it shut again.

Somehow, he doubted Darla had exaggerated about Violet’s situation, even if she did have that gleam in her eye common to people taking comfort in other people’s troubles. She’d told him all about how Doris Hicks’s daughter had thrown Violet and her sons out of the house she’d believed would be hers in exchange for the eighteen months Violet had spent helping Doris to keep the inn open—an arrangement mutually beneficial for both an old woman determined to stay in her own home and a struggling young mother whose husband had taken a hike.

He could only imagine how blindsided she must’ve felt. Just like he’d been when Stacey’s mother had said, “Forget this,” leaving a rookie cop with a colicky six-month-old and a hole in his heart the size of the Grand Canyon. But at least Rudy’d had a safety net, in that huge extended family. There’d always been a home for his daughter, even if not one he’d envisioned.

He pulled up in front of the inn, shrouded in darkness save for the moonlight and the anemic ghosts of a half-dozen or so wussy, solar-powered yard lights standing lethargic sentry along the disintegrating walk. Armed with a flashlight, Stacey shot out of the car—bathroom call, Rudy was guessing. Kevin, however, stayed put, staring at Rudy’s profile. Noting, no doubt, that Rudy hadn’t killed the engine. Then he chuckled.

“I’ll start a fire, how’s that?”

Slamming the door shut behind him, Kevin started up the walk, warbling some country song Rudy didn’t recognize.

And Rudy drove back into the winter night, hoping maybe to put a fire or two out.

Rubbing her bottom—still tingling from the ice-cold toilet seat—Stacey crept back to the even colder, totally dark front room, where she found her uncle kneeling in front of the woodstove wedged into the fireplace. By the puny beam of his flashlight, he was trying to coax some kindling to catch fire. Stacey shuddered. Like it wasn’t creepy enough in here in the daylight. Sure, she’d gone camping and stuff, but this was different. Maybe because she’d wanted to go camping and she so didn’t want to be here.

“Wh-where’s Dad?” she said through chattering teeth.

“He had something he needed to do,” Uncle Kev said between puffs to the kindling. “He’ll be back soon.”

Stacey rolled her eyes, even though that was so juvenile. But honestly, why was it so hard for grown-ups to just be up-front with you?

“It’s so cold in here,” she said, rubbing her arms. She’d ripped off her coat when she’d run inside earlier, but now she found it again in the weak, fluttering light and shrugged back into it. Yeah, freezing to death was real high on her list. And without electricity or phone service or broadband or anything she couldn’t even log on and check her e-mail and stuff. What was the point of giving her a new laptop for Christmas—a bribe, she knew, for destroying her life—if she couldn’t even use it?

Tears pricked at her eyes, but she blinked them back. No way was she going to let her dad and Uncle Kev think she was some dumb little crybaby. Not that she had any idea yet how to convince Dad that moving here had been, like, the lamest move ever, but acting like a whiny brat—tempting though it was—wasn’t going to do it. Probably.

“It’ll warm up pretty quick now,” Uncle Kev said, sitting back to admire his handiwork through the open stove doors. Stacey glanced around, shuddering again. Nothing like dancing shadows to up the creep factor. She inched closer to her uncle, now sitting on a superthick, unrolled sleeping bag in front of the fire. Grinning up at her, he patted the space beside him.

She sighed and joined him, cross-legged, elbows on her knees, chin sunk in her palms. One of those heavy silences fell between them, the kind right before the adult says something Really Important.

What now? Stacey thought as her eyes slid to the side of his face. The flames made him look older, she decided. More serious, maybe. Not like the goofball who usually hung out in her youngest uncle’s body. Objectively speaking—a phrase she’d picked up from a book or something—she’d have to say that Uncle Kev was the best-looking of the five brothers. Her grandparents had only had one girl, her aunt Mia, who was marrying this superrich dude in Connecticut the following summer and had asked Stacey to be her junior bridesmaid—

“I know you’re pretty unhappy about this move,” Uncle Kev finally said, interrupting Stacey’s daydream about dresses and shoes and stuff.

“Let’s see,” she said, her chin still propped in her hands as she again stared into the hissing, sputtering fire. “I had to leave all my friends, start in a new school in the middle of the year, I’m guessing there’s no mall within five hundred miles, and this house is like, totally disgusting.”

“Okay, the leaving your friends and new school in the middle of the year—yeah, those really blow. But I happen to know there’s something even better than a regular mall, not ten miles away.”

“Like what?”

“A two-hundred-store outlet mall.”

“Yeah, right. Dad taking me to an outlet mall? Get real.”

“So you’ll make new friends, Stace. Friends with moms who love nothing better than goin’ to outlet malls. And the house isn’t gonna be disgusting forever, because your dad and I are gonna get it all fixed up, get rid of the sucky carpet and wallpaper… You’ll see,” he said, nudging her with his shoulder. “It’ll be great. So you think you could just, you know…give it a chance? Because this is really important to your dad.”

Stacey sighed, wishing the fire was one of those Harry Potter things that sent you someplace else. In her case, back to her grandparents’ nice, warm house in Springfield. Of course, they weren’t gonna be around all the time anymore, she knew that. That’s one of the reasons she couldn’t stay behind, because they were gonna do some traveling and wouldn’t be there to take care of her. And her aunts’ and uncles’ houses were too full of their own kids, and maybe she could’ve gone to live with Aunt Mia, but then she would’ve still had to go to a different school….

“I just don’t get why things couldn’t stay the way they were,” she said, still staring. “Why we couldn’t stay where we were.”

“Because your dad was unhappy, Stace,” Kev said softly, and Stacey’s eyes shot to his. Yeah, okay, her uncle was definitely a hottie. Objectively speaking. Her dad was okay-looking, she supposed, but nothing like Kevin. Women went stupid when they saw Kevin. Okay, so sometimes women went all zombie around her dad, too, but that’s probably because he was so freaking big he scared ’em.

She looked back at the fire. “He never said anything to me about being unhappy.”

“No. He wouldn’t. And he’d kill me if he knew I was saying any of this to you, so you gotta promise to keep your yap shut, okay?” When she nodded, secretly thrilled to be part of a conspiracy, Kev said, “The thing is, from the minute you were born, everybody’s been hot to give your dad advice on how to raise you, what he should and shouldn’t do, stuff like that. He finally got tired of all the interference. Well, actually, he’s been tired of it for a long time. He just couldn’t do anything about it before now.”

Stacey felt her brow knot. “Interference?”

“You know, not being able to make his own decisions. About you. If you want my take on it, I think he was afraid of losing you. That it was getting harder and harder for the two of you to have your own thing, you know?”

“That’s nuts,” she said, her jaw crunching from her holding it in her hands. “Nothing’s ever gonna come between Dad and me.” This was one of those things she simply knew, the way she knew she’d never, ever like Brussels sprouts. “And anyway,” she added, still crunching, “so why couldn’t he just, I don’t know, get us our own apartment or something in Springfield?”

“Because sometimes a person can’t figure out who they really are until they break free of everything they’ve known before. Am I making any sense?”

Not really. But another thrill made her shiver, that Kev thought she was mature enough to handle what he was telling her. Not that she liked it, necessarily, but you can’t have everything.

She sat up straight to look at him. “Is that why you left home?”

“Basically, yeah. But some of the stuff I was into… Trust me, Stace, you don’t wanna know. I was a mess. Your dad, though—he’s always been solid as a rock. Dependable. Selfless. Always puttin’ everybody else first. Like you. No matter what, it’s always been about you. You first, then everybody else, then—maybe—him.”

He got up to stoke the fire, setting off a miniature fireworks display before he shut the doors with a screechy clang. Then he straightened, his hands in his pockets. It was finally beginning to warm up a little, enough for Stacey to open her coat. She wondered where her uncle was going with this.

“That’s kinda the point I’m trying to make,” he said, “in my own convoluted way—that on the surface, this might seem to be all about him. Except…” He sort of laughed. “Except your dad’s not capable of making anything all about him. So this whole crazy scheme—it’s about you, kid. You and him. See?”

But before she could say anything, her uncle’s cell rang—thank God they at least could get a signal out here—and he excused himself to answer it. Stacey wondered if it was a girlfriend. As cute as he was? He probably had girls up the wazoo. As opposed to Dad, who never had any. At least, not that Stacey was aware of. Thank God. She used to watch these movies or read books where the kids were all about trying to get their single father or mother hooked up with somebody, and Stacey had always thought, Why? Because she and Dad were fine, just the two of them. There was no way anybody else would ever fit in.

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.