Chapter Two #2
He was not surprised to see that at least from the outside the house was neat and orderly. Not a trace of snow covered the driveway or sidewalk, as if the weather wouldn’t dare sully Colonel Douglas Caldwell’s property.
Ryan couldn’t deny it was a lovely house, on the shore of Lake Haven, with its stunning mountain backdrop.
It still seemed odd to him that his father would choose to retire here to this quiet Idaho tourist town, especially after a lifetime spent in positions of authority at various military bases around the world.
Diane probably had a huge role in that decision. She had grown up in Haven Point and had inherited the house after her mother died a few years earlier.
Audrey jumped out as soon as he turned off the engine.
“Here. You take the flowers,” he told her.
“You bought them.”
“They can be from both of us.”
She rolled her eyes but grabbed them and carried them toward the house. She rang the doorbell when Ryan was still only halfway up the sidewalk. As he walked up the steps, his leg aching with every movement, the door opened. His father stood silhouetted in the doorway.
“Audrey, my dear,” he exclaimed. “What a nice surprise.”
“Hi, Grandpa. Look who’s here! Uncle Ryan!”
His father looked up and some hint of emotion Ryan couldn’t identity flashed across his features but disappeared quickly.
“Son. Good to see you.” Doug smiled and held out a hand. After a pause, Ryan reached out and shook it briefly.
“How’s Diane?” he asked. While his relationship with his father was strained, he was fond of his stepmother. She was as warm and friendly as Doug was stiff and remote.
“Better but still in a great deal of pain. She’s being stubborn about taking her meds on a schedule.”
He could relate. He was the same. He rarely wanted to take more than the occasional ibuprofen now, even when he had a bad day, and hadn’t been thrilled at round after round of antibiotics.
“Is she up for visitors?” he asked.
“She will love it,” his father assured him. “She’s in the family room. We were watching a movie. Come through.”
Ryan scanned his memory but couldn’t remember a single time his father had relaxed enough to settle into the family room and watch a show with them.
Maybe he had blocked it out, though. Douglas hadn’t always been working. He could remember his father coming to the occasional soccer game or swimming together with the whole family at the base recreation center.
Ryan freely acknowledged that most of his memories of his father were tinged with bitterness for the hard, emotionless automaton he had become after Laura’s death.
The family room was spacious yet cozy, with a wide flat screen TV above a gas fireplace, plump, comfortable-looking furniture and floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the lake.
In a deep leather recliner, his stepmother stretched out with her leg up on a pillow. She looked as elegant and lovely as ever, though she had a wide bandage across her forehead and another across one cheek.
Still, she smiled when they walked into the room. “Oh, what a lovely surprise,” she exclaimed, her voice warm with welcome. “Hello!”
“Hi, Grandma Di.” Audrey leaned over and hugged her grandmother, careful of her arm in the sling.
Diane hugged her back with unfeigned affection. Whenever he talked to his stepmother, Ryan was struck by how different she was from the colonel. Warm where he was rigid, gentle where he was forceful.
Oddly, she reminded him of his own mother, whom he remembered as always laughing and smiling, even as cancer slowly stole away her life.
It baffled Ryan how a man as cheerless and cold as Doug somehow managed to convince two bright, bubbly women to marry him.
“These are for you,” Audrey said.
“More flowers? They’re beautiful. I would have known they were from Evergreen and Ivy without even looking at the card. Holly Moore does lovely work. Thank you so much.”
“They’re really from Uncle Ryan. I just helped him pick them out.”
Diane smiled at him. “Thank you. Doug, dear, will you set them on the table over there, where I can admire them?”
As his father stepped forward to take the flowers over to join several other arrangements on the table, Ryan leaned forward to kiss his stepmother’s unbandaged cheek.
“How are you?”
She made a face. “I’m fine. This is all a bunch of fuss over nothing.”
“It’s not nothing,” Doug said with a grunt. “You have a broken leg and a broken arm.”
“But other than that, I’m having a great week,” she said, grinning at Audrey and Ryan.
When his father married her a decade earlier, Ryan had been prepared to dislike her. Diane made that impossible.
“I’m sorry you were hurt,” he said.
“So am I. We had some lovely plans for the holidays but accidents happen.”
“Is there anything I can do for you?”
“Having you here with Audrey is enough. I was so touched when I found out you were coming to stay with her, though she is always welcome to stay here, of course. We would have loved having her.”
His sister was right. His father had his hands full helping Diane recover. They didn’t need the additional responsibility of taking a middle schooler back and forth to another town for school.
“I had plenty of leave coming to me. It worked out.”
“How are you feeling since your own hard landing?” his father asked.
Tension tightened his shoulders but he forced himself to relax. The colonel wasn’t being critical. He was only asking.
“Fine. Still on desk duty.”
“How are the other crew members?”
“Everybody is recovering.”
He didn’t like thinking about the incident, when an engine malfunction during a training mission had forced an emergency landing in the southern California mountains.
The quick thinking of his crew and the fact he was able to call for help promptly had prevented a bad situation from becoming catastrophic, though Ryan and one other member of his four-person crew were still sidelined from flying, awaiting medical clearance.
He didn’t want to talk about the crash, especially not with his father, who probably thought Ryan should have been able to prevent it.
“How’s Caldwell Aviation?” he asked instead. “Are you able to take off the time you need so you can be here for Diane?”
The irony of the question didn’t escape him.
“It’s a slow time of year,” his father said. “We usually have a few sightseeing flights, maybe some heli-ski tours, but it’s not as busy as the summertime.”
After moving to Idaho, his father had purchased two small prop engine planes and a helicopter and rented a hangar at the small county airport, creating Caldwell Aviation.
Ryan knew he flew small private commuter trips around the area, and sometimes took tourists and hunters on trips into remote areas of northern Idaho.
“I’ve got a good staff who are handling everything in my absence. We’ve had to cancel a few things and rescheduled others so I can focus on Diane for now.”
“That’s good,” Ryan said, instead of what he wanted to say.
Where was this performative show of spousal concern when the mother of your children was dying of cancer?
“You know, son, I can always use more help. If you’d like to take up a few flights while you’re in the area, we can set you up. It wouldn’t take you long to learn the ropes on either of our planes or the helicopter.”
While he wanted to get back up in the air with a fierce ache and knew it was only strict military guidelines, not capability, keeping him sidelined, he had zero interest in helping out his father.
“Audrey is my priority while I’m here.”
“Totally get that. But she’s in school, plus she’s got that babysitting thing after school for Kim’s boss, from what I understand. That will leave you with a big chunk of free time on your hands.”
Yeah. He had thought of that, wondering how he would fill his time over the next three weeks. He wasn’t good at sitting still, something his father probably knew about him.
“I’ll have to see once the dust settles.”
Audrey giggled suddenly and he looked over to see she was showing Diane something on her phone. He heard a song clip and guessed it was a social media video of some kind.
The two of them both laughed at the same time, though Diane’s laugh turned into a wince.
“Oh!” she exclaimed, holding her arm closer to her body. “It hurts to laugh.”
Audrey immediately looked stricken and lowered her phone “I’m sorry. I should have thought.”
“Don’t apologize, honey. It’s hilarious. I’m glad you showed me. People are so creative, aren’t they?”
“Yeah. My friends and I want to take the Secret Elf challenge.”
“What’s that one?”
“You take video of yourself secretly dropping off cookies or a little Christmas gift at the house of someone who might need a lift.”
“That sounds very nice.”
“Anonymously, of course. You’re not supposed to give away any identifying details, like address numbers or what the house looks like.”
“Naturally,” Diane said.
“I even know whose house I want to take it to. My friend Megan. Her parents are in the middle of an ugly divorce, which sucks at Christmas.”
“That is tough,” Diane said.
They visited for a few more moments but Ryan could tell Diane was tiring. She made the occasional grimace he doubted she was even aware of and occasionally lost the thread of the conversation, staring off into space instead.
He stood up. “We should go. We still have to pick up Audrey’s things from her neighbor.”
Diane smiled, though he saw the lines of pain bracketing her mouth. “Thank you for coming. You’ve lifted my day.”
“Is there anything we can help you with before we go?”
He expected polite denials. Instead, his father stood also.
“Diane should be back in her bed. It’s the most comfortable place for her, but she insists on getting up and coming out here as much as she can.”
“I like it out here. And I’m not very good at laying around in bed for hours at a time.” She nodded toward the screen. “What about the movie?”
“We can finish watching another day. Or we can always catch the ending on the TV in the bedroom,” Doug answered, before turning back to Ryan.
“Since you’re here, I could use help getting her back into our room. I can handle it on my own but as you’re here, it’s probably safer to have two of us for her to lean on.”
That was also something new, his father actually asking for help. “Absolutely.”
Audrey pushed over a folding wheelchair from the corner of the room while Diane worked the controls of her recliner, which Ryan noticed had a lift function.
“That’s handy,” he said.
“Isn’t it?” Diane said, with a smile that turned into another grimace. “We were able to rent it from a medical supply company, with help from the hospital social workers. I feel ancient using it, though I must admit it’s convenient.”
“We also rented a hospital bed and moved it into our bedroom, since we have plenty of space in there. When she needs a different position, it’s adjustable and also height adjustable so it’s much easier for her to get in and out.”
“I would rather sleep in my own bed, but your father’s right. For now, the hospital bed makes sense.”
Not sure of his role, Ryan stood by as his father guided Diane into the wheelchair then pushed her down a short hallway to their bedroom, a large space that contained a large king-size bed as well as a sitting area near the stone fireplace.
The bed had been pushed to one side and the sofa removed. In its place was a hospital bed covered with pillows and a coordinating quilt.
“How can I help?” he finally asked as his father moved his wife’s wheelchair next to the bed.
“This is the tricky part. She has to pivot a little and I’m always worried she’ll fall. Just stand close to provide support if she needs it.”
Diane seemed perfectly capable of making the transfer without his help, though she was pale, her mouth pinched, by the time she settled into the hospital bed.
“Thank you,” Doug said.
Ryan hadn’t really done anything but it was nice to feel useful. “No problem. Anything else?”
“We should be good. Think about what I suggested, taking a few flights for Caldwell Aviation while you’re here.”
“I will,” he said, not seeing the point in telling his father that while he would think about it, he had no intention of doing it.
As he and Audrey walked outside and headed for his truck, Ryan accepted the unpleasant reality that he was going to be in the same county with his father at least until Christmas. They were going to have to interact, whether he wanted to or not.
He could do his best to avoid the man, but that wouldn’t be fair to Audrey, who clearly loved her grandfather and step-grandmother.
Ryan would simply have to figure out a way to be polite to the colonel. Fortunately, he had plenty of practice from those years after his mother died, when he had been expected to pretend everything was fine.