Chapter Twelve
It was almost Valentine’s Day before Belinda got to throw the Christmas dinner she wanted.
They had long since exchanged all the gifts, but that wasn’t the point of it.
“The point,” Belinda was muttering at him as she charged around that morning, putting things to rights, “is all of us spending time as a family. This time, with extra family.”
Zeke suspected that might be the real issue igniting his beloved today. Once Ramona’s parents heard that their daughter was going to marry a Montana cowboy and truly settle down with him in Cowboy Point, they hadn’t wasted any time making plans to come out and visit.
It turned out that Belinda and Bettina Taylor knew each other from childhood. Belinda had actually babysat for Bettina, which had made all the brothers laugh—and then demand that Ramona’s mom tell them what Belinda had been like as a bossy older girl who could tell Bettina what to do.
That was effectively the Belinda experience, Bettina had said, earning the Careys’ affection forever.
Belinda, on the other hand, had ordered them all outside to shovel the yard and the drive, so that their guests would feel more comfortable.
Her justice was always swift.
It had been a purely delightful New Year so far, Zeke thought, as he settled in at the kitchen table and waited for his family to come pouring in.
The little twin girls, Holly and Ivy, weren’t giving their parents much sleep but they were so cute that it was hard to be resentful.
Zeke and Belinda had hated seeing the older boys go back home, but they took comfort in the fact that theirs was the kind of family that spent a lot of time with each other.
Those boys would grow up running back and forth between their parents’ house and their grandparents’ house.
Soon enough, their sisters would join them.
“Or outrun them,” Belinda liked to say with a sniff.
Harlan and Kendall had announced only the other day that they were pregnant again, though it was early days. Little Kiel was only four months old but both Kendall and Harlan looked so pleased with themselves that it was impossible not to cheer them on.
“There’s a reason that folks like at least eighteen months between babies,” Belinda liked to mutter as she banged around in her kitchen. “I preferred two years.”
“Maybe they just want a lot of babies,” Zeke usually felt compelled to reply.
Wilder and Cat were focused on her studies, and a whole lot of aunting and uncle-ing around the ranch. Boone and Sierra were focused on the dairy and the big plans they had for the new summer season.
And Knox, the baby of the family who no one had really believed would ever settle down, had officially become Hailey’s only legal parent following the termination of Shoshana Delaney’s parental rights.
Zeke was proud of the fact that Ramona and Knox had offered the girl help to build her own life, and she’d been strong enough and determined enough to take it.
They’d gotten her out of her questionable living situation and into somewhere safer and better.
The last he’d heard, Shoshana was working on finishing high school.
And who knew what she would do then.
Knox had also made it clear that there was an open door for the girl whenever she wanted to see the baby she’d given him. It was up to her.
Zeke admired it.
At the same time, pretty much the day after Shoshana’s parental rights had been revoked, Ramona had started the adoption process. Everyone had told them that it would take a long time, so they might as well begin sooner rather than later.
Shoshana had given the doctor a hug and offered her wholehearted blessing.
In the meantime, Knox and Ramona were planning a wedding at the end of June right here in Cowboy Point—something Bettina had perhaps had a little trouble with, but she was coming around after staying in her father’s old house for a couple of weeks and seeing the town as a grown woman, not the eighteen-year-old who had left.
The two lovebirds wanted the whole thing on Mountain Mama’s patio, on the two-year anniversary of the day they’d met.
Zeke couldn’t wait to dance at the last wedding of his last single son.
But that brought up another pressing issue.
That being, his continuing-to-not-die thing.
He noticed how careful everyone was to talk about the future in his presence—meaning they were shutting him out of things for his own protection, and he hated that—and he knew the time had come.
Besides, his work was done.
“I’m still considering telling them that the cancer is in deep remission,” he told Belinda as they heard the sounds of voices outside and truck doors slamming shut.
“You do that,” his wife replied, making a ruckus on her stovetop. “Or you could be the Zeke Carey I married and own up to what you did.”
Then she looked over her shoulder and grinned at him in that wicked way of hers, and he knew that she had absolutely no intention of owning up to anything.
And he was standing there by the stove, kissing his wife deeply and maybe a little punishingly, as the first of the children came trickling in.
“Pull it together, Dad,” Harlan said with a laugh. “We have impressionable children here.”
“He means me,” Boone said, coming in behind him.
Zeke let Belinda go. And then spent the next few hours basking in his dream come true at last.
All of his boys with women they loved, who loved them back just as fiercely. Most of them with children. More on the way.
If there was a better life, Zeke couldn’t imagine it.
So after they’d all talked and visited and competed with each other to entertain Ramona’s parents with the best stories of Knox as a younger man—all, Zeke noted, stories that celebrated Knox instead of teasing him in any way, almost like they’d learned something now that the good doctor was on the scene—and after they’d all eaten entirely too much of Belinda’s pies, he stood up.
He waited for all their eyes to come to him. Zeke could admit that he’d always loved a good show.
“I have an announcement to make,” he told them.
He looked at all of their faces. Three generations of Careys under this roof that had held so many of their ancestors. He didn’t know how any man deserved to be this lucky.
This is your doing too, he told his Alice, in his mind. This is the path we started.
Then he looked at Belinda, and smiled at her, because they would be the ones to keep walking this path until they found its end. Together.
But first, he had a confession to make. “Almost two years ago, I gathered you together and told you that I was dying of cancer,” he said, getting right to the point. “There’s no particularly easy way to say this, so I’ll tell it straight. I lied.”
And for a moment, there was silence.
Then all pandemonium broke loose.
There were raised voices, shouts, all manner of carrying on—but Zeke saw after a moment that most of them were laughing.
“My first clue was the lack of chemotherapy,” Harlan was saying. “Or any doctors’ visits whatsoever.” Kendall rocked the baby beside him, and laughed—but then, Zeke knew that she’d known the truth for a while.
“Nobody lives with a diagnosis like that for two years,” Wilder was saying, and Cat was nodding like this was a topic they’d discussed a million times. “Even I know that.”
“We started a betting pool,” Ryder said, nodding at Wilder, though he was looking at Zeke. “I figured you’d confess at Easter, because you like a tidy number. Two full years.”
“I called him out on it,” Boone said in his booming voice. He shook his head. “The healthiest dying man I’ve ever seen.”
“I’ll admit that I had my suspicions,” Ramona chimed in. “But nobody asked for my medical opinion, so I kept it to myself.”
Sierra and Rosie were grinning at each other, making it clear that they’d known, too.
The only one who wasn’t laughing was Knox.
“I had no idea,” he said when everything quieted down.
“I thought you seemed healthy too. It never occurred to me that my own father would lie to me about something like that.” He stood up, little Hailey in the crook of his arm.
“Dad, that was a terrible thing to do.” He glanced at his fiancée, and smiled. “But I forgive you.”
“I couldn’t think of any other way that I would finally get myself some grandchildren,” Zeke told them all, unapologetically. “I’d like to say that I regret what I did, but I don’t.”
He waved his hand around the kitchen, taking in everybody sitting there. This glorious pageant of life that had started long before him and would last long after he was gone.
His true legacy.
“All of our lives are better for it,” he said. “And I’m delighted to say that I will die a happy man.”
He lifted up his glass, and toasted them, all of his beautiful children, and their children, and the bright future that he intended to share with all of them and his marvelous wife, for as long as he had left.
Then Zeke Carey grinned. “Just not anytime soon.”
The End