Married by Accident Read online

  His brow creased in an uneasy frown. “It’s not your place to do a thing like that.”

  “Since he’s decided to believe that I’m his daughter-in-law and that Brady is my child, I’d say it very much is my place.”

  “Oh, come on. You couldn’t do it anyway—hurt a sick old man like that.”

  “I couldn’t? Walk out that door and find out.”

  He hovered there for a moment, scowling. Then, muttering something unpleasant, he dropped into the chair once more.

  They sat there, waiting. Cole stared broodingly into the middle distance and Melinda talked softly to Brady, who gazed up at her from the cozy nest of his blanket, his little mouth working, sometimes seeming to smile and now and then to frown.

  After a few minutes, Melinda glanced over at the door that Cole had shut. “You’d better open that. I have the strangest feeling your sister is going to try to sneak off somewhere. I want to be sure we catch her when she comes down those stairs.”

  He grunted. “You’re real full of suspicions all of a sudden.”

  “Thoroughly justified suspicions, I think. Open that door.”

  He just sat there.

  “Cole,” she said as a warning.

  So he dragged himself to his feet and went to the door that led to the hall. Annie was just tiptoeing by as he opened it. She stopped in midstep, her eyes going wide. Melinda thought of the white-tailed doe they had seen on the road, frozen at that final second before she bolted for the shelter of the trees.

  Annie’s stillness ended abruptly in red-faced animation. “Oh! Cole. I was thinkin’ I’d just go on out and start bringin’ all the stuff inside. I mean, you’ll want to get that trailer turned in as soon as we can—”

  “Better come in here first.”

  “But I—”

  “Annie. Come on.”

  She stared at him for a moment, then blew out her cheeks in a gusty breath. “Oh. all right.” She trudged over the threshold and Cole shut the doors behind her.

  As if he knew the sound of his mother’s voice, Brady let out a questioning cry.

  “He’s hungry,” Annie said.

  Melinda rose and gave her the child. Cole turned away as Annie settled into a chair, opened her blouse and put the baby to her breast. “Would you give me a diaper?” Annie asked. Melinda got one from the diaper bag and laid it over Annie’s shoulder, covering the pale slope of her breast. Then Annie said to Cole, “You can turn around now.”

  But Cole didn’t turn. Clearly he felt no more eagerness than his sister did to discuss how they would make this impossible situation right.

  Melinda still stood near Annie’s chair. She could clearly see Annie’s left hand, which supported the baby as he nursed.

  “Where is your wedding ring?” Melinda demanded.

  Annie sucked in a big breath and let it out in a defiant rush. “I took it off.”

  “Why?”

  “Why do you think? I hid it in a drawer in my room, is what I did. I don’t want Dad to see it right now.”

  “And why is that?”

  “You are actin’ mean and snooty. I’m just not going to talk to you if you are going to act like that.”

  Melinda rubbed the bridge of her nose between her thumb and forefinger in an effort to diffuse the tension gathered there. She tried to speak more gently. “Annie, there is no point at all in hiding the truth from your father. He’s going to have to find out sometime anyway and—”

  “Sometime. But not right now.”

  “It will do no good at all to—”

  “Oh, but it will!” Annie burst out with determined zeal. “It will do some good. It will give him a chance to get to know Brady a little, it will give him a chance to...settle down and get used to me being here again. To realize—”

  “Annie. It’s just another way for you to avoid letting him know that things didn’t work out for you in Los Angeles.”

  “He already knows that. I’m back home, aren’t I, and Jimmy’s nowhere in sight?”

  Melinda looked at her friend and shook her head.

  Annie pressed on. “What I’m saying is, he can see with his own eyes that things didn’t work out. I’m here. And Jimmy isn’t Let him have a little time to deal with that, before we go hittin’ him with the rest of the news.”

  “Annie—”

  “No. Listen. All right, it’s true. It’s gonna be the hardest thing I ever did, to tell my father the rest of the truth. But it’s gonna be real hard for him, too. And if we...put it off for a few days, let him think what he wants to think, just for a little while, then I honestly believe he’ll take it better than he would take it now.”

  Melinda sank to the chair next to Annie and tried another approach. “Annie, think. Think about how readily your father has accepted the idea that Cole had an affair with me nine months ago, an affair that supposedly produced a baby. Now, virtually out of the blue, Cole appears with what your father decides is a new wife and a son—and your father is thrilled. If he can accept that—”

  Annie pressed her lips together. “Uh-uh. It’s not the same. Not the same at all. Cole is thirty. He makes a good living—and my father’s been after him for quite a while now to settle down. Him showin’ up with a family is only exactly what my dad has been waitin’ for. While me, I’m barely eighteen. I got no job. I don’t even have my high school diploma. And my husband has run off and left me. How can you call it the same, Melinda? It’s as different as day is from night.”

  Cole turned around then. “Annie’s right about that.”

  Melinda sent him a killing look. “Now you decide to speak up—to say something that doesn’t help at all.”

  “It’s only the truth.”

  “You’d be better off not to mention the word ‘truth’ around me for a while, Cole Yuma. I’m beginning to wonder if either you or your sister know the meaning of the word.”

  “Melinda!” Annie exclaimed in wounded outrage. “How can you say such a thing?” Brady popped off the breast right then and let out a startled cry—in reaction to his mother’s agitation, no doubt. Annie straightened her blouse, laid the baby over her shoulder and gently patted his back, glaring at Melinda all the while.

  Melinda slumped back in her chair, closed her eyes and pinched the bridge of her nose again. “I can’t believe this is happening.”

  Annie lowered Brady to her lap, smoothed the diaper onto her right shoulder, readjusted her blouse and then put Brady to work on her other breast. That accomplished, she asked briskly, “Cole, how much can Dad get around?”

  “He can get himself from his bed to his chair,” Cole admitted warily. “He can even bathe himself, using that sprayer hose I installed in the bathtub and sitting on a stool. At this point, he can also stagger a few steps with a walker.”

  “But he stays in his room most of the time?”

  Cole nodded. “You know how he was. Strong as a horse. He doesn’t want to see people. Doesn’t want them to watch him struggle with the simplest things.”

  “So he’s hidin’ in his room, really.”

  “That’s right. I’ve been tryin’ to think of ways to lure him out of there. Since he won’t move downstairs, I’ve been thinking of widening the door of his room and getting a stair elevator for him, thinking that would at least give him a chance to get himself downstairs now and then. But I just haven’t gotten around to that yet. I’m kind of hoping, now you’re here, that he’ll try a little harder, practice with the walker, let me get a physical therapist over from Fredericksburg once or twice a week. He’s been told repeatedly that if he’ll just put himself through the therapy, within a couple of months he could go back to work at the hospital, maybe take over the small animal hours, teach the vet class we give at the high school every year...”

  Annie’s chin jutted out with determination. “We are gonna get him to put himself through the therapy, Cole.”

  “I knew you’d say that.” Cole looked at his sister with tender gratitude. “We can work it out
. If only he’ll pull out of his depression and work with us.”

  “I think he will.”

  “So do I. Now.”

  “But for a while,” Annie went on, too slyly by half, “until you widen his bedroom door and we get that stair elevator, he’d have a heck of a time leavin’ his room unless someone carried him out, right?”

  “Right.”

  “And we don’t really need a nurse, now that I’ll be here in the daytime. We could care for him ourselves, if we had to, couldn’t we?”

  “What are you getting at, Annie?”

  “Well, if there was just us, if there were no strangers around to ask questions—and if we all agreed to it—then it wouldn’t be that hard, just for a few days, to let him think—”

  Melinda could not believe what she was hearing. She shot to her feet. “Absolutely not. I will not be a part of this. It is wrong. Wrong and manipulative.” She glowered from brother to sister and back again. “I mean it. Both of you. When your father wakes from his nap, we will tell him the truth. Do you understand?”

  Annie stared at her, a series of emotions flashing across her flushed face: hurt, anger, resentment—and finally unwilling acceptance. She looked down at her baby and sighed.

  Melinda turned to Cole.

  And he nodded. “All right. We’ll tell him the truth as soon as he’s had some rest.”

  Annie’s silent acquiescence wasn’t enough for Melinda—not at that point, anyway. “Annie?” she prodded.

  “Okay,” Annie muttered without looking up. “We’ll tell him the truth. When he wakes up.”

  They spent the next hour and a half unpacking, lugging Annie’s and Brady’s things up the stairs and stacking the boxes of household goods that Annie didn’t need right then in the garage around the side of the house. There were four bedrooms upstairs: the large master suite, Annie’s room and a nearly identical one next to it, which Annie earmarked immediately for a nursery. There was also another bedroom, a bright east-facing one that Gerda Finster had used. Annie led Melinda there.

  “You can see the sun come up in the morning beyond those oaks out there.” Annie pointed out the window, at the trees beyond the windmill. “It’s a pretty sight.” The bed was covered with a wedding ring quilt. Annie sat down on it, leaned on one hand and traced the shapes of the entwined rings with a forefinger.

  Melinda went and dropped down beside her friend. She bounced up and down twice. “Nice, firm mattress. I like that.”

  Annie looked up. “Oh, Melinda. I’m sorry if I was mean. I’m just...it’s like you said. I’m so scared to hurt him. And scared to see his face when he finds out that Brady is really mine.”

  “He loves you. He’ll accept the truth.”

  “Oh, I do hope you are right.” Annie leaned sideways against Melinda’s shoulder and Melinda wrapped an arm around her. They sat for a moment, not speaking.

  Then Melinda asked, “Where does that lead?” She gestured toward the door on the wall perpendicular to the one that led to the wide stair landing.

  “That goes to the master suite,” Annie explained. “But don’t worry. It has a lock. My dad won’t be bothering you—as if he would or even could.”

  “Of course I’m not worried about that. But why the door in the first place?”

  “This was supposed to be the nursery. That way the lady of the house could slip in and out real easy when her baby cried at night.”

  “Then you and Cole slept here, as babies?”

  “Mmm-hmm, But as soon as we got to be two or three, we moved to our own rooms on the other side of the landing. This became the guest room. It’s a good size for that. Big enough for a double bed and bureau and a nice, comfortable chair or two.” She gestured toward the pale blue wing-back chair over by the window. “I hope it’s all right for you. You could have Brady’s room if you want. It’s a little larger than this one and—”

  “Annie. This is lovely. And I do want to see the sun come up over those oaks out there.”

  “Okay. If you’re sure.”

  “I am.”

  Annie chuckled to herself. “It’s so funny...about rooms. When Cole came back from veterinary school, he had gotten real independent. Wanted to get his own place. But he’d always planned to follow in Dad’s footsteps, to work with Dad and someday take over the hospital himself. So Dad said there was no reason for him to move away. That he could have his own place downstairs. You know what they did?”

  “What?”

  “They rebuilt the old parlor, the two of them. Cole’s got a big bed-sitting area and his own bathroom down there now. And Dad swore he wouldn’t keep tabs on what time Cole came in at night. That was a big concession for Dad. I think Cole was sowin’ a few wild oats. And Dad thinks a man’s oats should be sown only within the state of holy matrimony—if you know what I mean.”

  Melinda let out a chuckle of her own. “I do.”

  “Oh, I was so hurt. I wanted my big brother back in his room next to mine. I didn’t want him downstairs, livin’ like a grown-up, comin’ and goin’ just as he pleased. But I didn’t get my way in that. It was a hard lesson in life for me—that sometimes, a gal is not going to get her way.”

  “You know, I’ve noticed that you still think you ought to get your way most of time.”

  Annie widened her eyes. “Who? Me? No...”

  They laughed together, then Melinda said more seriously, “Maybe you’ve underestimated your father. If he can help his son build a place where he can live his own life, then—”

  “I know what you’re sayin’. But it’s different with me. I’m his daughter. My mom died givin’ me life and that has made me all the more precious to him. He says I look like her. It’s just harder for him with me than it was with Cole—to let me make my own choices, to have to watch me live with the choices once I’ve made them.”

  “Wait and see.”

  “I guess I don’t have a choice about that at all now, do I?”

  “Don’t start in again.”

  “Oh, I won’t.” Annie pulled a sad face. “I have accepted my fate.”

  The beeper the nurse had given to Cole went off at four-thirty. Annie hurried upstairs to check on her father.

  Then she returned to the garage, where Melinda and Cole were stacking the last of her boxed housewares against a side wall.

  “He’s awake,” she announced bleakly. “And he wants to talk to us.”

  “Good,” Melinda said, “since we need to talk to him, too.”

  The three of them trooped back up to the master suite, where Preston was sitting in his wheelchair a few feet from the bed. A smile of greeting stretched his mouth. “Ah. Here you all are. Come in. Sit down.”

  But no one moved. The three of them stood there, huddled by the door, each too apprehensive to take a single step.

  Preston said, “Well, now. You three sure look nervous. Don’t you worry. What I got to say is good.” His brows drew together. “Wait a minute. Something’s goin’ on.” He pondered, then demanded, “Where’s that Gerda?”

  Cole cleared his throat. “Mrs. Finster quit, Dad.”

  Preston mumbled something, and shook his head. “I oughtta be sorry, I suppose. But I guess I’m not. That is a good, God-fearing woman, Gerda Finster. But she’s been a pure...” He paused, clearly searching for a certain word. Then he found it. “T-torment. That’s it. She’s been a torment to me. Cheerful and bossy. It’s a combination I cannot abide.”

  “Well,” Cole said wryly. “She won’t be tormentin’ you any longer. She’s gone.”

  Preston sighed heavily. “I suppose someday I’ll have to apologize to her. Maybe sometime when I see her at church.”

  “I’m sure she’ll appreciate that.”

  “Humph. I’ll just bet she will.”

  Melinda cast oblique glances at Cole and then at Annie. Neither of them looked as if they knew how to begin. So Melinda spoke up gingerly. “Um. Mr. Yuma, we—”

  He grunted. “Mr. Yuma? What’s that? You mig
ht as well get used to callin’ me Father, don’t you think?”

  Father. He wanted her to call him Father...

  She shot more sideways glances at Cole and his sister. No help there. She sucked in a breath and tried again. “I...that is, we...”

  Preston waved her forward. She noticed that he had a small black object clutched in his hand. “Come on. You come on over here. I told you before I don’t bite, and I meant it.”

  She glanced at Cole for the third time. He stared back, looking miserable. So she made herself step forward, leaving the other two by the door. “Mr. Yuma...”

  “Father.” He corrected her again. “You have to practice it. Get used to it. You’ll be sayin’ it from now on. Hold out your hand.”

  He gave the order so suddenly that she responded without thinking. Her hand went out—and he dropped the object he was holding into it.

  “I would be honored,” he said, “if you would take that.”

  She stared down at it. It was a velvet jewel case, the kind that a ring would come in. “I don’t—”

  “Go on. Open it.”

  She knew what it was, of course. And she didn’t want to open it. But somehow it didn’t seem to be an option to refuse. So she lifted the lid—and gazed bleakly down at the old-fashioned engagement diamond and wedding band inside.

  “It was...my Anna’s.” The rumbling voice broke. He said something else, something garbled that she couldn’t understand. And then he said, “Sorry. Sometimes I can’t make the words...” She looked up, into a pair of old eyes that had suddenly grown moist with tears. A tightness seized the back of her throat. She could feel her own answering tears, rising, blurring her sight.

  “Please,” Preston said. “I’d be honored if you’d wear them.”

  Melinda opened her mouth—and then shut it. Oh, how could she do it? How could she tell this sweet, overbearing old man the truth that he so obviously did not want to hear?

  Cole moved forward then, and stood to the left of her, as Annie came up and stood on her right. Melinda felt a little stronger, with the two of them on either side, seeming to offer support.