Chapter Twenty
The next day was a Sunday. Aidan knew this even before he opened his eyes, because on Sunday mornings, Alexandra would make flapjacks.
The smell wafted up the stairs, tickling his nose and awakening his stomach before the rest of him.
Even so, he lay in bed for a moment, staring up at the wooden plank ceiling.
He’d as good as told her she’d come west because no one else would have her.
Then he’d watched her march off down the hill and stumble, and he hadn’t gone after her.
His stomach growled, which decided things for him—he couldn’t be blamed for having to eat, after all.
He rose and dressed hurriedly, shoving his legs into his trousers and throwing on a shirt.
He was sitting on the edge of his bed, pulling on his socks, when he heard the children enter the hallway and stampede down the stairs.
Blast, Aidan cursed inwardly. There were only so many flapjacks to be had, and he refused to be caught with a scant plateful again.
He stood, still trying to wrangle his socks, and half-hopped, half-ran to the door.
He took the stairs two at a time, holding to the railing, his feet several steps ahead of the rest of him.
When he arrived at the kitchen, everyone save Alexandra was already seated. They all turned to stare at him. Alexandra, with a large platter heaped with flapjacks, arched a brow at him.
“Good morning,” Lisa said smoothly, taking a napkin and laying it perfectly on her lap. The children followed her lead, tucking napkins into collars, the picture of politeness.
“‘Morning,” he offered, his voice still gravelly with sleep. He eyed Alexandra warily, unsure if he would be welcome at the table. She gazed at him steadily for a moment, letting him linger in his uncertainty.
Alexandra began to serve the flapjacks, laying some on Aidan’s plate first. She stopped and stared at him expectantly, her peace offering steaming and making his mouth water.
“What?” he finally asked as the seconds ticked by on the clock in the living room.
“I figured you were in a hurry,” she said evenly, giving him a not-so-subtle once-over.
He glanced down at himself. His shirt was still untucked, his collar open. His suspenders still flapped about his legs, hanging on by their buttons. Hastily, Aidan jammed his shirt into his trousers.
“Are you sitting with us today, Uncle Aidan?” Bella asked.
Aidan, mid-tuck, glanced at her. Her eyes, dark like Brendan’s, were round as a doll’s. She looked at him with an expression already primed for disappointment.
Alexandra began to lay flapjacks on the children’s plates. “I’m sure your uncle has much to attend to this morning,” she said softly, trying to lessen the blow.
Aidan looked about the table. Bella was watching him still, but the boys were staring down at their plates. Lisa was sipping a cup of something warm and steaming, a shawl about her shoulders, serene but watchful. Alexandra, still serving, refused to look at him.
He shifted uncomfortably. It was true that he had a habit of grabbing his plate and retreating to eat either on the porch or all the way out at the barn if it was a particularly raucous morning.
He endured dinners altogether, which he accepted as his duty, but he tried his best to avoid other mealtimes.
The moment stretched. He could feel the weight of expectation pressing down on him, at war with his own desire for solitude.
Aidan pulled his chair out and sat down. He glanced up once to find Lisa, at the opposite end of the table, gazing at him approvingly. He looked down again, inhaling deeply. Two slices of bacon appeared, placed there gently by Alexandra.
He looked up at her, surprised, and nodded his thanks. She offered him a small smile. He looked down hastily again, taking up his fork and knife.
“Jam?” Alexandra asked.
“Jam?” Aidan said, looking up again. The children were busy passing a small jar of jam around, red as rubies. “There’s jam?”
“You can’t eat flapjacks without jam, Uncle Aidan,” Gary said plainly as if Aidan were foolish.
“How long has there been jam?” Aidan demanded. “Are you telling me I’ve been eating flapjacks all this time plain when I could’ve been having jam?”
Alexandra, done serving, took her seat at the table. “Well, you might have had some if you didn’t race out the door each Sunday.”
Aidan gave everyone at the table a narrow-eyed look. “I see,” he said, as the jar at least made its way down to him, “this is a conspiracy of sorts.”
“You’ve found us out,” Alexandra said dryly, pouring herself a cup of coffee. “It’s all an elaborate effort to teach you good manners through preserves.”
The children giggled. He hadn’t had the chance to be the fun uncle he’d been before Brendan vanished.
“Uncle, did you and Pa steal a jar of plum preserves from the store when you were little?” Bella asked around a mouthful of flapjack.
Aidan froze. He hadn’t heard the children speak of their father in weeks, not since… since. Danny had brought him up briefly the other day, but that was it—Aidan figured he was old enough to handle it. He wasn’t much older than Aidan had been when he’d lost his mother.
He’d been careful never to bring him up, for their sakes, or at least that was what he told himself. It was all too easy to imagine the tears that would follow the slightest mention.
And yet, here they were, asking about Brendan as if it were the easiest thing in the world. They were all looking at him, waiting for him to say something, even Lisa and Alexandra. Gary pushed his flapjack around on his plate. The children seemed both older and smaller at the same time.
They didn’t know Brendan for very long at all, Aidan realized with a start.
He swallowed his mouthful of flapjack hard; it nearly stuck in his throat. He placed his fork and knife down on his plate, leaning on his forearms and folding his hands one over the other.
“That’s true,” he admitted at last. “This was before we settled in Nevada, y’see,” he explained, getting lost in the memory.
“We’d been living in St. Louis for a while, before we came west. Brendan and I had gotten it into our heads that we would run off and be explorers on the frontier.
Only thing was, we had no notion of the supplies we’d need.
” He could feel his mouth lifting into a smile. “I had a fearsome sweet tooth—”
“Had?” Alexandra muttered, which made the children giggle again.
Aidan sent her a mock-ferocious look. “Anyway,” he said pointedly, “I took it into my head to steal a jar of plum preserves from the general store. I wore a mask and everything.”
“How did you get caught?” Danny inquired, a forkful of flapjack forgotten halfway to his mouth.
“The brave steed I was meant to be escaping on was a donkey,” Aidan said with a sheepish chuckle.
“Honestly, walking would probably have been faster. Anyway, the storekeeper caught me, naturally, and made me work all day in his store as punishment, though thankfully he never told our father. Thus, my life of crime came to an end.”
“You must miss him terribly,” Alexandra said quietly.
Aidan glanced up and found her watching him with something approaching tenderness. He inhaled and quickly averted his eyes.
“To that point,” he said, rushing right past her comment, “Danny gave me a good idea the other day.”
“I did?” Danny said through a mouthful of flapjack.
“Figured it might be nice to have a place for your pa,” Aidan said. “Someplace you all can go and… well, not exactly visit with him, but… a place for him. We could make a little shrine of sorts, since there’s no proper headstone anywhere.”
“That’s a fine idea,” Lisa said, nodding in approval. “Have you a particular spot in mind?”
“Up the hill there, just behind the barn. That way it’s almost like he’s still keeping an eye on all of us,” Aidan explained, his throat growing tight.
“This is a good way to spend a Sunday,” Lisa said. “All of you hurry up and finish eating, so we can get to it.”
The children hurriedly bent their heads to their task, shoveling food into their mouths in great bites. Aidan half-considered correcting them, but couldn’t bring himself to do it. He glanced at Alexandra to see if she might comment on their table manners.
Instead, he found that she was still watching him. Her brow was slightly creased as if she were trying to work out something Aidan had said.
Pointedly, he looked down and tended to his own plate. Mechanically, he ate the flapjacks and bacon. The whole time, he could feel Alexandra’s eyes on him, green and watchful.
***
The sun wasn’t quite all the way overhead by the time everyone was organized and ready to head out. The children were surprisingly subdued. They seemed to understand the gravity of the situation.
Aidan led them all up the hill, near where Alexandra had gathered the roses the evening before.
The children busied themselves finding stones to pile up, while Aidan drove a plain stake into the ground that simply had Brendan’s name etched into it.
Alexandra led them off to gather flowers where the roses grew.
The sound of the wooden mallet against the stake echoed hollowly around them. The dirt was soft and loose enough, but every time he lifted the mallet, it weighed as much as a block of iron. He hesitated for a moment, gathering his strength and his thoughts.
“I can’t tell you how many little signs I helped plant like that during the war,” Lisa said quietly. She stood near Aidan, arms folded, watching him drive the stake into the ground. “You’d think it would have gotten easier there by the end, but it never did.”
Aidan straightened and looked at Lisa. “You were in the war?”
“A nurse. Philadelphia, mostly,” Lisa said. “It… never really leaves you, losing someone like this.”
“How’d you get through it?” Aidan asked.
Lisa met his gaze levelly. “By focusing on the living. They’re still here,” she said, nodding toward the children. Alexandra was shepherding them back toward the improvised memorial, gently scolding and petting in turns.
Aidan considered for a moment, then nodded. “I guess we can’t ever go forward if we’re looking backward.” He hit the stake one last time.
“Very true,” Lisa agreed. She frowned, discreetly pressing a hand to her side. She had gone the color of the stake he’d just driven. Aidan meant to say something, and then the children arrived.
The children arrived, their arms full of branches and leaves and the occasional wildflower. With Alexandra’s help, they laid all of their greenery on the shrine.
Everyone stood back and looked at him expectantly.
He figured he ought to say something, but he had very little idea of what that should be.
He’d been a boy when his own mother died, and a young man with a brother and no prospects when his father followed her.
They hadn’t been a particularly church-going family, but his mother had made sure that they knew all the Bible stories.
Aidan cleared his throat. “We, uh… we’re here to remember our brother and father, Brendan. He was… good.”
Alexandra gave him a plaintive look, and he cleared his throat again.
“I reckon we ought to say a prayer for him, being as we can’t put him in a churchyard proper.
I imagine the good Lord will hear us, even all the way out here,” Aidan continued.
He reached up and pulled his hat off, and he heard Alexandra gently telling the children to bow their heads.
“Lord, we ask that you watch over Brendan—take him to your side, so that he might… he might rest a spell. He wasn’t a perfect man, but he always tried to do his best, which I suppose is all we can ask of anyone. He was a loving father and—and he was—”
Aidan’s throat unexpectedly closed off. His vision narrowed, growing black at the edges, and his ears filled with a rushing sound like the moment right before a flash flood. It wasn’t right to talk about Brendan in the past tense like this. How could he eulogize someone that shouldn’t even be gone?
There was pressure on his hand. It was steady, holding him tightly, anchoring him to the present.
He blinked down at his own hand like it was a foreign object, and found that Alexandra had taken it.
He stared at her for a breath, feeling exposed and unprepared for anything.
He clutched her hand like he was drowning. She squeezed his fingers.
He took a deep breath. “Keep him close, Lord, and keep watch over us, too. We’re… we’re all right, here, together. Amen,” he added.
There was a collective murmuring of “amens” around the little shrine, punctuated with a sniffle here and there. Aidan wasn’t sure what he expected, but it wasn’t this lightness. It wasn’t like the hurt was gone, not exactly, but more like it was smoothed down, rounded at the edges.
“That was lovely,” Alexandra said approvingly. She squeezed his fingers one last time and let him go. Aidan tried not to feel disappointed at the loss of contact.
“Can we visit Pa every week?” Bella asked.
“Of course,” Aidan answered gruffly. He cleared his throat, which still felt raw and worn.
Alexandra smiled at him over the top of the children’s heads.
It was an unexpectedly warm smile, her eyes soft behind her spectacles.
When she looked at him like that, he felt like he could handle anything—the uncertainty of the future, bandits masquerading as moneylenders and the money owed them before winter, the changing world; all of it seemed manageable.
And then Lisa, standing to the side and overlooked for the moment, collapsed.