Chapter 4 #2
Sunny abruptly covered her mouth and coughed. Tessa snorted, declaring, “It’s the single worst chair in the Stillwater Valley, and I’m going to point it out to the magazine people personally so they understand the man they’re dealing with.”
Tessa stood up and slung the garment bag over her shoulder.
She paused at the door and aimed the rolled magazine at him like a benediction.
“This is your last chance to back out, Doc. Once I make the call and accept the offer of the shoot, half the town’s going to be tromping through your dining room before you know it. You’re aware of that, right?”
“I’m aware.”
“You’ll hate it,” Tessa warned.
“Aware of that too.”
She grinned and was gone, the screen slamming behind her. Hank stood in the wreckage of his quiet morning and listened to Sunny already murmuring about where to begin under her breath. He felt the floor of his settled life tip a few degrees toward something he hadn’t planned for.
His brothers stopped by at suppertime, uninvited and unannounced.
He knew it was them the second he heard two trucks in the drive simultaneously. And he knew why they were here because the news had plainly traveled from Tessa’s mouth to Dillon’s ear to Reno’s gleeful little heart. They were here to tease him over what he’d just committed to doing.
“There he is,” Reno announced, barging in to the kitchen via the back door. “The cover model himself.”
“They’re photographing a wedding gown. Not me.”
“You’re going to be in Mountain Bride,” Dillon chimed in.
“The house is going to be in Mountain Bride,” Hank corrected.
“Like a two-page spread or something?” Dillon asked.
“Four to six pages depending on how many of Charlotte’s other gowns they decide to include,” Hank said a little tightly.
“Dillon,” Reno said, turning to their middle brother in pure delight, “He knows the page count! He’s obviously thrilled about this.”
Dillon set a six-pack of beer on the counter, leaned a hip against it, and considered Hank with the unhurried attention he generally saved for animas that were contemplating biting him. “You really said yes?”
“I was outnumbered.”
Dillon laughed. “You were outnumbered by Tessa, alone. But there’s no shame in it. She outnumbers me all the time. It’s a little like being outnumbered by weather.”
Reno pulled three cans of beer loose and passed them out, saying, “So, Sully wants all of us to stand up with him at his wedding. Eight groomsmen. We’re going to look like a rodeo queen’s court.”
Hank winced and Dillon shrugged, commenting, “S’pose he needs all of us because Jenna wants to have all her WoWS friends stand up with her.”
“There are seven women in the WoWS besides Jenna,” Hank pointed out. “So one of us gets to sit out. I’m calling dibs on being that guy.”
“Why do you get to duck out of dressing up in an uncomfortable monkey suit and acting like a glorified waiter all day?” Dillon demanded.
“The rest of you guys are all married or about to be. You all need the practice standing in front of a church and not ducking because you think God’s going to strike you with lightning for being there.
Me? I’m a confirmed bachelor,” Hank declared.
“I’m the obvious choice to sit out. The rest of you will get paired with your fiancées to walk them down the aisle. ”
Neither Reno nor Dillon had a smart-aleck comeback for that, which startled him. He glanced up at his brothers and caught the worried glance the two of them exchanged.
“I’m fine,” he declared. “Don’t the two of you go getting any ideas about setting me up with anybody. I’ve got Madison to take care of now, and my practice keeps me plenty busy. I don’t have the time or inclination to start dating again.”
That was the plain truth.
That, and he was forty-one. He’d spent the past four years telling himself he had enough in life and didn’t need any more. Now that he’d gotten Madi back, he really did have everything and everyone he needed.
“You’re doing the jaw thing,” Reno said with a smirk.
“I’m not doing any jaw thing.”
“Dillon. Do you see the jaw thing?”
“Yup. Definite jaw thing,” Dillon confirmed.
“There is no jaw thing,” Hank exclaimed.
“Yes, there is. It’s the Steele-men-do-not-feel-feelings jaw thing.” Reno settled into a kitchen chair, clearly relishing getting to needle his older brother for once, instead of the other way around.
Reno continued, “You invented it. Hank. You taught it to the two of us. And here you are, clenching away over a bridal magazine like it insulted your mother.”
“I had a quiet house when I woke up this morning,” Hank said woefully. He took a pull of his beer and set it down. “I liked my quiet house.”
“No, you didn’t,” Dillon replied. It was said so gently, and so precisely, that it shut all three of them up for a second.
Then, because they were Steeles and silence with feelings loose in it constituted an emergency requiring immediate response, Reno clapped his hands and demanded to know what was for supper.
Hank told him tartly he wasn’t running a diner, and Reno said that was a genuine shame because the diner was closed now and he liked to support local businesses.
The dangerous moment slid past, and the three brothers set to work making hamburgers and firing up the cheap charcoal grill on the back patio.
Saturday came in gray and soft, a low sky resting on the mountains across the lake and the smell of rain that hadn’t yet made up its mind to fall. Sunny had asked to walk through his house properly to see what she was working with. Hank had said sure.
He walked the downstairs before she came and headed for the dining room.
He had to put his shoulder into pushing open the pair of tall pocket doors that he almost never opened.
He stood in front of the water stain that started narrow up by the ceiling and widened as it ran down the wall until it did, in fact, look just like Idaho.
There were going to be strangers in his house. Lights and ladders and cameras. And between now and then there would be workmen and noise and dust, and most of all, chaos. All his hard-won quiet would be yanked up like floorboards and paraded on the pages of a magazine.
Alarm skittered down his spine. He knew the feeling. It came from the same place most alarms in him did: the one with Lorraine lurking in it.
He hadn’t watched her closely enough. He’d known she was drinking a lot. He should have anticipated that, when she didn’t find happiness at the bottom of a bottle, she would escalate her substance abuse.
Sheets from his prescription pad had gone missing now and then, one at a time, infrequently enough that he told himself he’d miscounted.
Then pills started disappearing from the supply he carried in his medical bag for emergencies.
Painkillers, and then sedatives. Then, the stimulants.
When he realized what was going on, he’d cut off the pills and locked up his prescription pads.
Then she’d given up all pretense of hiding her substance abuse, and there was booze on her breath by noon.
Oh, he sent her to rehab. To expensive places with excellent results. But for rehab to work, a person had to want to get better.
Initially Lorraine relapsed within a few months. But then her relapses came within weeks, and then days, of coming home.
He kept believing he could get out ahead of her addictions, if he just paid more attention, came home a little sooner, watched a little harder.
You were never home, she’d told him.
The cruel part,the part that still got its hooks in him at three in the morning, was that the accusation that was unfair .
. . and also true. In and around keeping his medical practice afloat, he’d spent every spare second at home with Lorraine and Madison.
He’d gone without sleep. Worked weekends to make up for leaving work to get home in time for dinner.
Stayed up until the wee hours of the morning
But it wasn’t enough. No matter how much time he carved out for Lorraine, it was never enough.
Slowly, but surely, she had completely fallen apart.
He didn’t know what more he could’ve done, but obviously there was something he’d missed and hadn’t done for her.
He was her husband and a doctor. It was his responsibility to take care of her. To heal her. And he’d failed her.
He stood in his dining room and let the self-blame and guilt crest and roll through him. He was nearly steady again when the front door opened and the house was abruptly, completely, gloriously overrun.
“I am so sorry,” Sunny said before she was all the way through the door. “Charlotte’s twins came down with something, the play date fell through, and I just couldn’t ask Presley to watch them yet again. They’ll be quiet, they know how to be quiet boys. Boys. Inside voices. Inside bodies.”
The twin seven-year-olds did not, in any observable way, possess inside bodies.
They were already moving like a pair of border collies who’d been informed there was a ball somewhere in the house.
They came through the office door at a flat run, skidded on the old wool rug, and pulled up in front of his exam table with the hushed reverence of pilgrims who’d reached a shrine.
“Is that real?” one of them breathed.
Hank followed the small pointing finger to his stethoscope, coiled on the table. “Yes, it’s real.”
“Can you hear hearts with it?” the other twin asked eagerly.
“I can.”
The twins looked at each other. An entire conversation passed between them in silent shorthand.
Hank and his two brothers did the same thing.
A look passed between the boys that he recognized instantly.
It was the exact face he and Dillon and Reno used to make right before they did something their mother would not approve of.