32. Jasper
The last thing Jasper wanted to do after a day like today was make French toast for the two least grateful children on the face of the planet, but making French toast was exactly what he found himself doing.
“I think it needs more cinnamon,” Trixie said from somewhere over his shoulder. She had some kind of god-awful pop singer blaring out of a portable speaker, so he could barely make out the words. “Chloe always puts in a dash of vanilla, too.”
“And sugar!” Theo cried as he bounded into the room. Jasper would have yelled at him to slow down, but the blessed boy yanked the speaker out of his sister’s hands and switched it off. “No more Taylor Swift,” he announced firmly. “Anything but Taylor Swift.”
“Can I help it if she speaks to my soul?” Trixie countered, but she didn’t turn the music back on, so Jasper assumed they were safe. “Do you want me to finish that, Jasper? I don’t mind. I’m done with my homework.”
“No, I’m happy where I am,” he said, and was surprised to find he meant it. The idea of him making breakfast for dinner for a pair of unruly brats while Catherine Martin and a young man who shared his blood were wandering around the town was preposterous in the extreme, but everything about this situation was preposterous.
She’s alive. She’s been alive this whole time.
“Do you have maple syrup?” Trixie asked as she started yanking open cupboards to pull out plates and silverware. Jasper realized with a start that she was setting the table. Theo, too, busied himself finding the milk in the fridge and pouring everyone out huge overflowing glasses of the stuff. He’d had to buy no fewer than three full gallons of milk since these two had invaded his home, which made him realize two things: one, that Chloe’s grocery bills must be astronomical; and two, that he loathed the taste of the stuff.
He didn’t stop Theo from filling his cup, though.
“Oooh, he has real maple syrup,” Theo announced when he found the little jug Jasper kept stored in the fridge door. “Like, the fancy kind that comes from actual trees. Is it okay if we use this, Jasper, or is it only for special occasions? We can always eat it plain. We do at home all the time.”
Jasper’s chest gave a small heave at the simplicity in the boy’s tone. It had been a long time since he’d belonged to those hand-to-mouth days, when something like real maple syrup was an unimaginable luxury, but memories were resurfacing at an alarming rate. He remembered all too well the hunger that was more than just physical need, the determination to make do with what was available, however little it satisfied. Life had never been easy for people like him, but that didn’t mean he had to sit back and watch these poor kids get pushed down the same path.
“It’s all yours, Theo,” he said. “I never cared for that sugary garbage anyway.”
“Yesss!” Theo’s eyes lit up as he hooked his finger in the jug and carried it to the table. Trixie stopped in the middle of laying out the forks and knives to stare at Jasper. He didn’t appreciate such intense scrutiny from a girl who spent as much time in the bathroom as that one, but he could hardly say as much out loud. These dratted children latched onto a weakness faster than a shark following a trail of blood.
“If you don’t like sugary garbage, why do you have it?” Trixie asked.
“It was on sale,” he lied.
She peeked at the bottom of the jug. “The price sticker says fifteen ninety-nine. That doesn’t sound like much of a sale to me.”
“That’s because it’s the Canadian price,” he responded, thinking fast. Then, because he could see from her look of doubt that she was about to ask about exchange rates and the costs of shipping, he narrowed his eyes and growled, “Do you always argue this much when someone makes you dinner?”
“Yes,” she replied. “It’s why I do debate. Otherwise, people just think I’m annoying.”
That startled a laugh out of him. If someone had asked him, standing across from Catherine a few hours ago, if laughter was a thing he’d ever consider himself capable of again, he’d have thrown them out of the room. The thing about these dratted Sampsons, however, was that you couldn’t throw them out of the room. Not for long, anyway. They just kept coming back, and so eagerly that you had no choice but to let them.
Even though Jasper had never admitted it out loud, he liked to imagine that his own brothers and sisters had grown up like this—getting by on the little they had, aware of how unfair their sacrifices were, but still able to find happiness in one other. From the few interactions he’d had with them over the years, he suspected they had.
Not always, obviously. Harriet died during a flu outbreak when she was only twenty-two, and their mother hadn’t been too far behind. Uli crushed his hand in a logging accident a few years later, but both he and Olly went on to attend college, so he must have been able to get by without it. Bobby never traveled much further than Aberdeen and, as far as Jasper knew, still lived there in a sad, lonely house like Jasper’s, but Tina married young and had a huge crop of kids. He sometimes got cards from a parcel of great-nieces and grandnephews he’d never met. They were polite and cheerful, sending him pictures of faraway places he’d never been and didn’t want to visit. Jasper couldn’t recite their names to save his life, but it was nice to see them getting on so well.
“What is it, Jasper?” Trixie asked. “Why do you suddenly look so sad?”
He grunted, startled back into an awareness of his surroundings. “I’m not sad,” he said. “I was just thinking.”
“About what?” Theo asked. He was eyeing the frying pan like he’d never seen food before, so Jasper clicked off the burner and slid the toast onto a platter. Theo and Trixie were eager to pounce on it, but not so eager they dropped the thread of the conversation.
That was another thing about the Sampsons. They were tenacious little monsters, and Jasper liked them all the more because of it.
“You’re not still upset about us staying here, are you?” Trixie asked as she watched Theo pour out half the maple syrup onto his plate. She took a decorous amount for herself, but Jasper could tell she wanted a lavish pool of her own, so he picked up the jug and did it for her.
She uttered a short protest before giving in with a giggle. “If Chloe saw this much sugar on my plate, she’d freak out.”
“And make us brush our teeth three times before bed,” Theo added through a mouth thick with French toast.
Trixie wrinkled her nose. “With baking soda, too. It’s so much grosser than real toothpaste, but it’s cheaper than cavities, so Chloe makes us use it.”
Since all four of the Sampsons had excellent smiles, Jasper was forced to agree with Chloe on this one. He was about to say as much when Trixie reached over and touched his hand. “It’s okay if you don’t want to talk about it, Jasper. We won’t make you.”
“It’s fine,” he said. Since this came out as a quick, harsh burst, he coughed and tried again. You couldn’t lavish a couple of kids with expensive maple syrup and then get stingy when it came to what really mattered. If he took nothing else away from this mess his life had become, it was that. “I was just thinking about my own brothers and sisters. I was wondering if they were like you guys growing up.”
“No way,” Theo breathed. “You have brothers and sisters?”
Theo’s comment made him want to laugh, but Trixie cut right to the heart of the matter. “What do you mean, you wonder? Don’t you know? Didn’t you grow up with them?”
He shook his head. “Not really, no. I was about your age when I moved away. Most of their growing up happened while I was gone.”
Neither child attempted to smile at this. Theo, for once in his life, wasn’t shoveling food into his mouth. He held his fork halfway between his lips and the plate, the syrup falling in gloopy drips.
“You left them?” he asked somewhat blankly. His brow wrinkled. “You mean like Chloe? You moved away for college?”
Jasper was tempted to lie, but something about the boy’s wide frank gaze stopped him. These kids were so much more like him than he’d ever wanted to believe. For years, he’d been watching them over the fence with their noise and their activity, their constant go-go-go lifestyle. Seeing them play—and hearing them laugh—always made Jasper feel like an outsider looking in, and he was ashamed to admit that his automatic reaction was to act like an outsider looking in.
To admit how much he wanted to be a part of it, of them, would be to admit that his entire life had been spent longing for the things he couldn’t have. First it was Catherine. Then it was the family he was so close to having with her. Then it was everything else: the ups and the downs, the laughter and the tears, the thousand different worries and joys that made life worth living.
“No, Theo,” he said, but with a smile that he hoped would make his situation seem a little less bleak. “I left to go to work. Decades of it, in fact—hard manual labor that left me very little time or energy outside of getting by.”
Jasper could tell his confession startled them. To look at him now, with his knees protesting every time he get up from the couch and an acid reflux that seemed to flare up the moment he got near a piece of fruit, you wouldn’t think that he’d once been a strapping young thing who could chop down a tree in under thirty minutes flat.
“My family was a lot like yours,” he said, a little gentler. There was a time and place to describe the hardships of being a logger in the sixties, but this wasn’t it. “There were six of us kids. My mom earned a living taking in laundry, but there never seemed to be enough money to keep all of us fed, let alone dressed and shod. I was the oldest, so I had no choice but to earn as much as I could and send it home.”
Trixie gently set her fork down and gave him her full attention. Theo wasn’t far behind.
“You took care of them,” Trixie said, her decisiveness matched by a nod that made him feel as though he was facing his own private Judgment Day. Whatever else happened to this girl in her lifetime, she was going to cut quite a path through law school. “The same way Chloe takes care of us.”
“Yes,” he said, though he wasn’t in entire agreement. Chloe didn’t just provide financially for her siblings—she was also the one who washed their socks and made their meals, sang to them when they were sick, and oversaw their homework. That took a kind of strength he’d never possessed. “Unfortunately, there weren’t a lot of jobs close to home—not ones that paid enough, anyway. I moved here, sent what I could back to my family, and eked out a living on the rest.”
“Is that why you didn’t marry that lady?” Theo asked. He resumed eating again. “The one from the books? The one who stopped by the house today?”
Jasper started. “You know about that?”
“Of course.” Trixie came perilously close to rolling her eyes at him. “We might be kids, but we’re not children.”
Oddly enough, her words made sense. By age and comparison, the Sampsons would always seem like kids to Jasper, but they’d stopped being children the day their mother walked out on them.
“I didn’t marry her for a lot of reasons, yes, but that was the main one,” he said. His own plate of French toast had long since grown cold, so he pushed it away. “In those days, women didn’t have very many options once they got married and started having kids. There was no way I could’ve supported her and a family of our own and kept taking care of my brothers and sisters. I had to choose one or the other.”
“And you chose your brothers and sisters?” Theo asked—anxiously, Jasper suspected, as though he needed to hear a confirmation that the choice was one he’d make again, if given a chance. That however hard Chloe’s life might be, it was the one she wanted to be living. “Even though you didn’t get to grow up with them or hang out or anything?”
“No, I didn’t choose them,” he admitted. At sight of the expression on Theo’s face, an old, familiar wave of guilt moved through him. He was quick to clarify. “Not because I didn’t want to, Theo, but because I didn’t have to. Catherine made the decision for me.”
Once he said the words aloud, the truth of them struck home—and they struck hard. Jasper’s early life had been defined by a series of sacrifices he’d been forced into by circumstance. The early death of his father, the precarious financial situation the family had found themselves in, his mother’s dependence on a support network that had been placed entirely on his young shoulders—he’d never been given a voice in any of it.
If given another opportunity, however, he would do the same thing over again. Because the truth was, life wasn’t always about making good choices. In many ways, it was about having good choices. For over six decades, Jasper had operated under the belief that he’d never been given any but bad choices. Would he rather lose the love of his life, or watch his family starve? Would he rather carry the burden of loneliness and hard work for the rest of his life, or soul-crushing guilt?
He realized now that the weight of those decisions had never been his to bear. More than sixty years ago, a tiny slip of girl facing social ruin and ostracism had volunteered to bear it for him. She’d given up her home and her family, the comfort of everything she’d ever known, and taken Jasper’s choices—both good and bad—with her.
It was the exact sort of thing a young Catherine Martin might have been expected to do. Jasper hated her for it. And, his heart said with a stutter, he loved her for it.
Again. Still. Forever.
“Is it true that you’re related to Zach?” Theo asked suddenly. “Noodle said he’s your grandson.”
Jasper nodded, not trusting himself to speak.
“So if he marries Chloe, will that make you our grandpa?” Trixie asked, her brow knit as she tried to work out the potential branches of the family tree. “Or close enough to count, anyway?”
Theo’s eyes opened wide. “We’ve never had a grandpa before.”
“You could take us fishing!” Trixie cried before wrinkling her nose in sudden distaste. “Actually, I don’t like fishing, and neither does Noodle, but that’s what all my friends’ grandpas do. Either that or fall asleep in front of the TV.”
“Maybe he could just play Frisbee with us instead,” Theo offered.
Jasper held up his hands, warring off a surge of euphoria. He wasn’t sure where it was coming from. It could have been the sudden realization that instead of hating Catherine, he wanted to see her again. It might have been the fact that these children were planning their sister’s wedding to Zach after an acquaintance of exactly one month.
Then again, it could have also been that the prospect of taking these kids under his wing and throwing a Frisbee with them sounded like something he would very much like to do.
“Wait. Why do you look so sad again?” Trixie demanded. She dropped her fork and ran over to him. Flinging an arm over his shoulder, she squeezed in what could only be termed a hug. Not one to be outdone, Theo was on his feet and crushing Jasper from the other side.
“We don’t have to play Frisbee,” Theo said. “It was only a joke. We can do all the things you like instead.”
Jasper couldn’t resist the impulse to ask. “And just what the devil do you think I like?”
He didn’t know how or why, but the kids seemed to sense right away that something had shifted…and that the something was him.
“Reading stuffy old books,” Theo announced proudly.
“Pulling weeds for like eight hours every day,” Trixie added.
“Yelling at kids!”
“Making puppies cry!”
“Crushing the bones of your enemies!”
By the time they’d reached the end of their list, the two were about to collapse in giggles. To Jasper’s surprise, he wasn’t too far from it himself.
“I always knew there was a reason why Noodle is my favorite honorary grandchild,” he grumbled as he lifted his fork and begin eating the cold French toast. Lest they get the wrong idea—which their sudden gasps of delight seem to put them in severe danger of doing—he pointed a piece at them and added, “He doesn’t talk back like the rest of you.”