Beth couldn’t make out the words. From his intonation it sounded like a question.
So Beth replied to what she could only assume he’d asked. “Yes, I think she’ll let you play with the Magna-Doodle, but I want you to promise something, okay?”
Ryan nodded.
“I want you to promise that you’ll play with Katie today. Okay? Just like you play with Bo and Jay and Bethany Parsons.”
Ryan watched her lips and then her eyes.
“Okay?” she repeated.
He nodded again. Slowly, deliberately, his little chin moved up and down. The chin that had the same cleft in the middle as hers.
Ryan might not say much, but when he agreed to something, she could count on it. Soon after they’d arrived at the Neilsons he picked up one of Katie’s puzzles and took it over to sit by the little girl. He dumped the wooden pieces and, with the hand-eye coordination of a two-year-old, he started putting them awkwardly back on the board. Within seconds Katie turned around and placed another piece. Not a word was spoken between them.
Beth wished her own interactions could be so clean and simple. She spent the first five minutes staying out of the way, clutching her canvas bag.
Dinner was excellent—another cold main-course salad in deference to the weather. It was the first Sunday in September, and still too hot to even think about turning on the oven. Or eating anything warm, for that matter.
She was saved from having to sit next to Greg by Katie’s last-minute insistence that she get to sit by “Unca” which resulted in Grandma Neilson and Greg switching chairs to accommodate Katie’s booster seat.
“Lou can lose my high chair, Wyan,” the little girl said importantly as she climbed up and set her little bottom down in her new blue plastic booster.
Well before the end of dinner, Beth had fallen in love with Grandma Neilson. The white-haired, barely five-foot-tall woman didn’t let anything—not age, infirmity nor death—get in her way. She’d reduced life to its simplest terms. Being loved and loving others were what mattered. Anything else was simply an inconvenience to be dealt with as quickly as possible.
“So, Bonnie says you’ve got a cleaning business here in town,” Grandma said to Beth as she chomped on her Chinese chicken salad.
Dressed in a long-sleeved button-up blouse and pair of navy slacks in spite of the heat, Keith’s grandmother looked like she was ready to go to the office.
“I do,” Beth said, on edge that afternoon as she waited for a question she couldn’t answer.
Maybe this was too much of a life for her—having friends, trying to have family experiences. And yet, seeing Ryan sitting there in his high chair, pulled up to the table as though he belonged, watching him grin at Keith and babble a sentence to Bonnie, she wasn’t sure she had any choice.
She had no idea what she’d taken Ryan away from. Aunts, uncles? Maybe a grandmother or two like Grandma Neilson?
A father?
How could she not do everything possible to provide him with some of the same now?
“Good for you,” Grandma was muttering. “Get on with it, that’s what I say.”
Head bent over her plate, Beth nodded.
“Use your spoon, Katie, not your fingers,” Keith said. Greg leaned over to help his niece do as her father directed.
“Losing a husband is hard,” Grandma said. “I’ll grant you that, but you still have to get on with it, or the Good Lord would’ve taken you, too.”
“Sorry about that,” Keith said. “Grandma just tells it like she sees it.”
“I don’t mind,” Beth said. She had a feeling that if there was ever a time she needed someone to confide in, Keith’s grandmother would probably be her most sympathetic audience.
The least judgmental, anyway.
She’d understand how a woman could love her baby so much she’d do anything for him.
“Do you have room for another customer?” Grandma asked. “I’ve gotten myself on so many committees, I sure could use some help keeping up the house.”
Beth didn’t miss the way Bonnie, Keith and Greg shared surprised looks. But she didn’t really care.
“What committees?” she asked.
She gave up even trying to keep them straight after Grandma described the fifth one. The woman seemed to run the entire town single-handedly.
With a little help from Becca Parsons, apparently. Little Bethany’s mother had been mentioned several times during Grandma’s dissertation. Beth had yet to meet the woman who was not only a prominent member of Shelter Valley’s city council, but wife to the president of Montford University, as well.
“So, you got the time?” Grandma asked.
“I do,” Beth said. She didn’t really, but she’d make time. She really needed to be putting away more for Ryan’s education than she was currently able to allot each month.
If she were anyone else, she could just hire an employee or two. But she wasn’t. She was Beth Allen, nonexistent person. While she was diligently figuring out her taxes and setting aside the money to pay them if she was ever free to do so, she couldn’t actually file. She didn’t even know her social security number.
“I don’t accept checks or credit cards,” she said.
“Smart woman.” Grandma nodded approvingly. “Cuts down on bank fees.”
“You want to do my house, too?” Greg asked. “I could—”
“Forget it, buddy,” Beth interrupted before she was somehow trapped, in front of the sheriff’s family, into doing something she knew would be far too dangerous.
Greg Richards was in her thoughts too much already. She didn’t need to see where or how he lived. Didn’t need to know where his bedroom was, what his sheets looked like.
Didn’t need to know if he kept his refrigerator clean. If it was empty. If he picked up his clothes and left open TV Guides lying around.
But Grandma Neilson’s house was a different matter. Beth had a feeling there was a lot she could learn from Keith’s resilient grandmother.
THERE WASN’T SEATING for everyone in the family room, with Grandma Neilson added to the Sunday party. Conscious of the fact that she was the one who didn’t belong in that house, Beth quickly pulled out the piano bench and sat down after dinner when they all trooped in to watch a movie on Bonnie and Keith’s new LCD flat screen TV.
“Afraid you might have to sit by me?” Greg whispered on his way to the couch.
It was only because he was carrying Katie, who would have overheard, that she refrained from calling him a name she wouldn’t have meant, anyway. But it sure would’ve been good to say it. To at least pretend she wasn’t aware of every move the man made.
If she didn’t get control of her reactions to Greg, she’d have to stop coming to Sunday dinner. She could not be influenced by the woman inside her who wanted to love and be loved. Too much was at stake.
“You know how to play that thing?” Grandma asked, settling herself in the armchair next to the piano. Her wrinkled face was alight with interest as her watery blue eyes rested on Beth.
“Maybe.”
A rush of tears caught Beth by surprise, she blinked them away and turned to face the keyboard. Lifting and pushing back the wooden cover with practiced ease, she wished so badly that she had a mother or grandmother of her own. Someone to love and comfort her, someone who’d counsel and watch over her… She wondered if she’d left either—or both—back home. Wherever home might be.
No,