that would be lovely?
Nope. Something was way off, here. The clothes and makeup did not jibe with that accent. Or her manner. Even in black bicycle shorts and a tank top, even made up like Elvira’s sister—and what was with that hair?—she was classier than any woman he’d ever known.
And maybe when he had a spare couple of minutes—ten, twenty years from now—he’d try to figure it out. Now, however, he had about a million phone calls to make, and so was extremely grateful that Rosie, still in her nightgown, he realized, had plopped herself down in the middle of the debris-strewn living room floor, giggling at Mr. Noodle’s antics on Sesame Street.
Sighing, he glanced around the room. The house was a lot like the dog: sorta this, sorta that. Somebody’d decided to add a few rooms to the original two-story structure, probably ten years before Steve’s birth. The result was not what one would call aesthetically pleasing. Or particularly well built. Floors slanted, door didn’t always shut tight, that kind of thing. But he could afford the payments, it was out in the country, and it had six bedrooms.
The house was furnished, if you could call it that, with whatever anyone had seen fit to foist off on him. On them, now. All donations were welcome, as long as they didn’t smell like someone’s basement or weren’t too pukey a color. It wasn’t as if he didn’t like places that were all fixed up and nice-looking, as much as he simply didn’t have the energy to be bothered. If someone wanted to give him their cast-off sofa, and it was still in reasonable condition, well, that saved him from having to go to some furniture store and pick one out, didn’t it?
Not to mention having to buy one. Ted and Gloria had both had life insurance policies, but those had gone into a trust fund for the kids’ education. And Steve had quickly discovered just how fast five kids could eat up the cash. Still, between his working for his father and his steadily increasing income from his photography, they did okay.
Ignoring yet another twist to the old gut, Steve walked back to the kitchen and called his folks, both to ask his mother to baby-sit and to tell his father he’d be late. Then, leaning with his back against his tornado-stricken kitchen counter so he wouldn’t have to look at it, he picked up the phone to call—yet again—the employment agency. He’d just gotten through to the director when he saw Lisa make her way slowly down the hall, her legs and arms pockmarked with assorted bandages and Pokemon “bandy-aids,” but otherwise moving fairly well for someone who’d just done a forward vault off a moving bicycle.
He lifted a hand in acknowledgment, then pointed to the phone. With a little smile, she nodded, then lurched off toward the living room. In sensible little white sneakers, he noticed.
Just as he noticed that the bicycle shorts left little to the imagination—
“Mrs. Anderson! Hi!” He tore his gaze away from things he had no right to be gazing at and concentrated on the subject at hand. “It’s Steve Koleski…”
The conversation went straight down from there. Five minutes and a great many sighs later, all he had was a half-assed apology for Mrs. Hadley’s behavior and the possibility of a wonderful woman (an adjective Mrs. Anderson used with great frequency and with scant regard to reality) in her mid-fifties whose employer’s youngest child was graduating from high school and thus would be seeking a new position in about two weeks. Other than that, though, Mrs. Anderson was sorry to say, she had no one. No, she insisted, no one.
Steve hung up and groaned loudly enough to make George lift his head. Two weeks? How the hell was he supposed to work full-time and manage five kids on his own for two weeks? Granted, the older kids still had a month of school, so at least they were otherwise occupied most of the day, but he couldn’t impose on his mother to sit for Rosie that long. Not that she minded, but Rosie wasn’t his parents’ responsibility. She, and her siblings, were his. A responsibility he’d willingly accepted when he’d told Ted and Gloria he’d be thrilled to be the children’s godfather, even though, like most people, he never dreamed—
“Excuse me?”
Lisa’s perky accent jarred him out of his musings. She stood at the kitchen doorway, holding Rosie’s hand, a pair of creases nestled between her heavy brows. “Are you all right?”
Between the gentle, obviously genuine concern in Lisa’s voice and the way she and Rosie had clearly bonded in such a short period of time, it was everything Steve could do to keep himself together. But he did. He had to. “More or less,” he said with a shrug. “It’s just been a doozy of a morning, that’s all.”
Lisa quirked her bright red mouth. “And having a cycling casualty to tend didn’t help matters any, I’m sure.”
“That wasn’t your fault,” he said softly, and the quirk twitched into a smile.
“No, I don’t suppose it was. Well, except for being foolish enough to not think anyone else might be on the road, at least. Anyway,” she said on an exhaled breath, “if you tell me where sweetie’s clothes are, I can get her dressed for you.”
Steve was around the counter in three strides, shaking his head. “Forget it. You…sit somewhere. I’ll get her dressed—”
A tiny glower met his attempt to pick Rosie up. “No.”
Now down to his last milligram of patience, Steve squatted in front of her, matching her glower for glower. “Lisa’s not feeling very well, honey,” he tried, except, naturally, Lisa pulled the rug right out from under him by announcing in that prim little way she had that she was feeling just fine, thank you, and if he’d simply tell her where the child’s clothes were, they could get on with it.
“See?” Rosie said, and Steve gave up.
“Fine, fine.” He got to his feet. “She and the twins share a room, upstairs. Her clothes are in the small, white dresser under the window. Her shoes, however, could be in Alaska for all I know—”
“No, silly!” the child said, yanking her sandals up to her shoulders. “They’re right here!” Then she strutted out of the room, shaking her head.
They both followed the baby out into the hall, standing at the foot of the stairs and watching her ascent for a moment before Steve heard himself say, “Their parents were killed in a fire, last August.” He felt Lisa’s gaze zip to his face, heard the soft “oh” of surprise and sympathy fall from her lips. “I got this call, two-something in the morning. Mac, in hysterics, calling from the hospital.”
For the rest of his life, he’d remember that night. That call. The devastating feeling of utter helplessness that swept through him when he tore into the ER to find a scared, filthy, thirteen-year-old boy trying to keep it together for the sake of his younger brothers and sisters, a kid refusing to let the social worker the police had quickly gotten on the case take them away, insisting his Uncle Steve would be there, his Uncle Steve would take care of them….
“Steven?”
He glanced over, nodded. Continued. “They’d just bought this old house, over in another township. We knew the wiring was bad…” He paused, collected himself. “I was supposed to go up there the next weekend, start working on it. The fire started in the wall between the kitchen and Dylan’s bedroom, in the middle of the night. Ted and Mac—he’s the oldest boy—woke up first, got the twins and the baby out, then realized Gloria had apparently gone in to Dylan sometime during the night and fallen asleep on his bed. Ted tried to get to them, but a wall collapsed, trapping him.”
He stopped, tried unsuccessfully to quell the nausea that swamped him everytime he had to explain. “He never had a chance. But before the fire department got there, Mac…Mac went back in. He managed to get Dylan out through a window, but his mother…” He shook his head. “That ratty old quilt Rosie drags around? That’s about all that was left, only because she took it with her when Ted grabbed her from her crib.”
“Oh, God,” Lisa whispered. When he dared to look at her, he saw something in her expression that soared far beyond compassion. Light from the living room windows slashed across features