Father to Be (2 page)

By the time they reached the crossroads near old Mr. Hayes’s place, he’d come up with the best chance he was likely to get. As soon as the cop passed the mailboxes clumped together on the far side of the road, he spoke up. “Hey, that’s our mailbox back there. Can I get our mail?”

Nathan was giving him a distrusting look in the rearview mirror, but he stopped, shifted into reverse, and backed up.

“Don’t get too close. Ours is the one falling over backward. You can’t reach it from the car. I’ll have to get out.” It really was their mailbox, and looked it. It had been beaten in and hammered back out too many times to count. The bottom of the post had rotted away, and it tilted so far that only the barbed wire fence kept it from falling down. The lid was broken off, and when it rained, the mail inside would get soaked, if there ever was any.

There hadn’t been for more months than he could remember.

Nathan came to a stop in the middle of the road, and Caleb scooted onto the edge of the seat. The backpack with the groceries was on the opposite floorboard, but he couldn’t reach for it, couldn’t risk getting seen. His nerves were tingling, his hands getting sweaty, as he prepared to make his big break.

Then Nathan looked at him. “Sit back, Caleb. Alanna? Do you mind?”

“Of course not.”

Caleb waited until she circled the truck, then he dove through the open door. He hit the ground hard, rolled, and came up on his feet, then vaulted the fence and headed into the woods. The trees grew heavy, and their branches scraped his skin and tore at his shirt, but he didn’t slow down. He heard shouts behind him—Alanna calling his name, the cop yelling at her to wait in the truck—then the sounds of pursuit, and he ran faster, blindly crashing through the undergrowth.

Stinging sweat dripped into his eyes, and he wiped them with his shirt-sleeve. His side was beginning to ache and his breaths were labored when he saw the fallen tree ahead. He couldn’t go under it, and with all the brush along the sides, he couldn’t go around. That left only over. He hit it at a run, the bark biting into his hands as he scrambled for a hold. He thought he’d found one, when abruptly he went sailing over the tree. He landed on the other side, then something dropped on top of him and pinned him there.

“Why’d you run, Caleb?” Nathan Bishop demanded.

With one side of his face pressed into the dirt, Caleb muttered, “You figure it out.”

“I’d say it’s because you’re scared to go home—scared to let your folks know you got caught stealing. But even if you’d gotten away from me tonight, I would have shown up tomorrow. They still would have known.” He breathed
in a couple of times, deep and loud. “If I let you up, will you promise not to run off again?”

“No,” Caleb replied, but he let go anyway. Caleb sat up and wiped dirt from his face.

“Lilah Brown is your mother, isn’t she?”

“I don’t have a mother.” Not since she’d walked out two years before, when she’d gotten tired of being poor and never having money to spend on pretty things. She’d found a man who didn’t mind buying pretty things, and she’d left her family behind. She didn’t want them, and they didn’t want her.

“So you live with your father. It must be hard for him, taking care of the farm and you kids all by himself.”

Gritting his teeth, Caleb fingered a new hole in his shirt and said nothing.

“With him working so hard, he wouldn’t be happy to find out you’d been caught stealing, would he? Unless maybe he put you up to it. Was that it? He figured they’d go easier on a kid than on him?”

“My dad doesn’t steal!”

“So you’re afraid of what he’ll do when he finds out that you do. Will he punish you? Beat you? Hurt you?”

“
No!
Of course he won’t! He
loves
us! Don’t say he doesn’t!”

“It has nothing to do with love, Caleb. Some people hurt their kids without meaning to. They love them. They just don’t know how to deal with them.”

“Not my dad! He’d never hurt us—never! He loves us and takes real good care of us!”

“Then why are you stealing food?”

Caleb slumped against the tree trunk. The shadows were getting deeper. Before long it would be dark. Maybe then he’d stand a better chance of getting away. But he didn’t know these woods, and he didn’t like the dark. Bad things happened in the dark—like his dad leaving.

“Is your father at home waiting for you, Caleb?”

“Yes,” Caleb lied. “He’ll be worried.”

“Then let’s get you home so he doesn’t have to worry.”

Caleb didn’t get up, and neither did the cop. He was looking at Caleb real hard, as if he could see everything, and his voice when he started talking again was soft, pitying, because he’d already figured out the truth. “Your father isn’t home, is he, Caleb? He left, like your mom did.”

“
No!
He’s coming back. He said he would, and he always does what he said.”

“How long has he been gone?”

Caleb stared at the ground, wishing a hole would open up and transport him away from there. Sometimes it seemed like that was what had happened to their dad. He’d just disappeared.

“Caleb? How long?”

He wanted to lie, but it wouldn’t work. Now that the cop believed his dad was gone, nothing would change his mind except seeing him, and there wasn’t much chance of that happening. “I don’t know.” But he knew exactly—thirty-nine days. Somehow that sounded better than nearly six weeks or a month and a half.

“Come on.” Nathan stood up and pulled Caleb up too, then held on to his arm as they started back toward the road. They hadn’t gone far at all. In just a few minutes they were back at the truck, where Alanna was watching anxiously from the front seat.

“Where do you live?”

Caleb nudged gravel with his foot.

“You can tell me, Caleb, or the sheriff’s department. It’s your choice.”

The cop was wrong. He didn’t have any more choices. They’d run out when the store guy had grabbed him.

He gestured grudgingly down the road. “It’s that way. Turn left at the first road and go all the way to the end.”

Nathan put him in the backseat again, then pulled away from the mailboxes. Caleb stared out the side window. Thirty-nine days. That was all it had taken for him to screw up—to disappoint his father and put his family in danger. Less than six weeks. Not even a month and a half.

Just thirty-nine lousy days.

S
ince moving to Bethlehem eighteen months earlier, J. D. Grayson had developed a rhythm to his life. Monday through Friday he kept regular office hours, though the office varied from a shabby space at the hospital to an empty classroom at school to an unused storeroom at the nursing home. Evenings and weekends he worked on the house he was building outside town. Saturday mornings he had breakfast at Harry’s Diner, and Sunday mornings, like most other folks in town, he attended church. Interspersed in his schedule were daily five-mile runs, frequent visits with friends, occasional dates, and rare overnight liaisons. It was a comfortable life—more comfortable than he’d had any right to expect—and one he’d needed badly when he’d come to Bethlehem. One he wasn’t eager to shake up in any way.

But apparently someone else had other ideas.

He’d barely made it to the bottom of the church steps after the Sunday morning service, when a woman approached. She was pretty, slender, not too tall. She wore a shapeless white dress that reached almost to the ground and an earnest expression that only young children and innocents could pull off. She managed. Her long hair was tied back, and her hands were clasped around the handle of an oversize attaché case. “Dr. Grayson? Can I have a moment of your time?”

The Winchester sisters had invited him for dinner, as they did every Sunday, and he’d rather not keep them
waiting, but he could spare a few minutes. In Bethlehem a person always made time for someone who needed it. That was one of the reasons he’d moved there. “Sure,” he said, gesturing to a stone bench nearby. “I have a few minutes.”

She seated herself on the bench, opened the attaché, and rummaged inside for a business card. “It’s a generic card—I don’t have my own yet—but you can call me Noelle.”

The card was familiar—raised black ink on white stock, the state seal, the social services address at the courthouse. That office had been closed down since before he’d moved to town, and all of Bethlehem’s social service needs had been handled out of Howland. Apparently, that was changing.

He tucked the card into his pocket. “What can I do for you, Noelle?”

Once again she rummaged inside the case, this time pulling out four five-by-seven-inch photographs and arranging them on the bench. Kids, he could see from where he stood. Kids in trouble. A knot began forming in his stomach.

“These are the Brown children—Caleb, Jacob, Noah, and Gracie. She’s five.” Earnestness gave way briefly to a smile as she gazed at the last photo. “They live a few miles east of town—or, at least, they did. Their mother left them about two years ago, and their father disappeared six weeks ago. They’ve been on their own since then.”

J.D. slid his hands into his pockets and refused to look at the photographs. It was a beautiful Sunday afternoon. The temperature was comfortable, the sun was shining, and after dinner with the Winchester sisters, he was going to hang eighteen sets of cabinets in the kitchen of his new house. It promised to be a relaxing, productive day, as Sundays should be, and he didn’t want to spoil it with
conversation about kids whose parents had thrown them away.

But he was a psychiatrist. He listened to a lot of conversations he didn’t want to hear. He heard things that should never be imagined, dealt with the aftermath of things that should never be done. He’d
lived
the aftermath. If he couldn’t handle it, then he should find a new job.

“Where are the kids now?” he asked, careful to keep his voice even, his tone strictly professional.

“They were taken into custody Friday night. They’re at Bethlehem Memorial for physicals and observation.”

“And you want
my
observations.”

She looked startled. “Oh, no, Dr. Grayson, not at all—at least, not just yet. The children are fine. They’re ready to be placed in their foster home.”

The relief he felt shamed him. Tomorrow he could deal with unwanted, abandoned kids, but not today. Not on one of his regular put-J.D.-back-together days.

“Then, what do you want from me?”

Her forehead wrinkled, as if she were puzzled that he hadn’t figured it out yet. “Why, we want you to provide that foster home.”

Surely he hadn’t heard right. There was so much more to assigning a child to a foster home than this. There were interviews to conduct, investigations to begin, home visits to attend to. All the preliminary work on prospective volunteers completed, so they would be approved and ready when a situation arose.
He
was certainly not one of those volunteers. Hell, as a psychiatrist,
he
would be the last person he’d approve for it.

“Look, I’ve worked with social services enough to know that this
isn’t
how you do business. People have to volunteer for this. They have to undergo a thorough investigation. You can’t just choose someone and dump the kids on him.”

His argument didn’t faze her at all. “You’re right, Dr. Grayson. This isn’t how we normally do business. But this is a special case. And we’re talking a short-term arrangement—a few weeks, not more than a month. That’s all.”

“I’m sorry. I can’t help you.”

That didn’t faze her either. “Not me, Dr. Grayson. The children.”

She gestured to the photographs, and this time he couldn’t help but look and notice details. The anger in the oldest boy’s eyes. The other boys’ fear. The girl’s old-beyond-her-years solemnity. Good-looking kids whom nobody wanted. Rejected by their mother, then their father. Destined for a bleak future and probably children of their own to neglect and abandon, who would then face the same future or worse. A vicious cycle … unless someone stopped it now. He knew it could be done with the right home, the right parents. But his wasn’t the home, and he certainly wasn’t the parent.

“You know nothing about me.”

“To the contrary. I took the liberty of making a few inquiries. You don’t have an arrest record. You’re not in debt. You have an excellent work record. The hospital administrator says you’re a brilliant psychiatrist. Even the nurses adore you. Your landlady calls you an ideal tenant. You don’t drink. You don’t drive recklessly. You’re reliable, trustworthy, and you’re in church every Sunday morning—though the pastor says he wouldn’t mind seeing you a few other times when the doors are open.” She took a deep breath, then smiled gently. “For now that’s all we need to know.”

For now
. Did that mean
later
there would be a more extensive background check?
Later
they might delve into all the nooks and crannies of his past?

He shook his head. “I’m a single man with a full-time
job. I can’t do justice to four children with my work schedule.”

“In a town like Bethlehem, you’ll have no trouble finding neighbors to help out. And we don’t discriminate against single parents, Dr. Grayson. Your marital status has nothing whatsoever to do with your parenting ability.”

Oh, but it did, J.D. thought bleakly. More than this naive social worker could imagine.

“I’m a man,” he tried again. “That little girl”—Gracie, five, old beyond her years—“needs a woman. A mother.”

“She needs
you
. Trust me on this.” Noelle’s words hung between them, soft, reassuring. “Just a few weeks, Dr. Grayson—that’s all I’m asking of you. The authorities are trying to track down a relative who might be able to take the children. If that fails, then we’ll look for a permanent placement.”

A few weeks. She made it sound so easy, but if there was one thing kids weren’t, it was easy. They were trouble, frustration, and love, all wrapped together in one untidy package. They brought out the best in a man—and sometimes the worst. They could love you, hate you, break your heart.

The Brown kids had already had their hearts broken, had already been abandoned twice. They deserved better than that, deserved an adult they could trust, someone they could count on to be there for them anytime, all the time.