A Family for His Boys
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M. K. Stelmack
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18,5K
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CHAPTER ONE
GRACE JANSSON TOUCHED her house key to the lock, and from inside came a distinct thud and scrambling. A break-in. She’d lived for fifteen years in Calgary, a major city a short two-hour drive away, and never once had been a victim of property crime. Yet two months into her new life in the remote foothills of Southern Alberta and some perp had selected her for a home invasion.
Or maybe an animal. Maybe she’d left the back door unlocked, and a deer or raccoon had pushed its way in. She had swept out deer droppings and carried out a swallow’s nest when she’d moved in.
A chair scraped across the floor. A long scuff mark across her newly polished wood floor. Definite human activity.
She whipped out her phone to call the police. A piercing howl broke from inside, followed by yipping, and then a smashing and tinkling of fine crystal. Her mother’s vase.
The little, thoughtless stinkers. The tenor of their voices gave away their youth. Probably not much older than her toddler-aged nephew and six-year-old Sadie.
Inside, abrupt silence fell and then the pounding of feet. Oh no, they weren’t.
She raced to the back of the house, her feet slipping on the slushy March snow in time to spot a small boy dart out the back door. He caught sight of her and, not stopping, called over his shoulder. “Saul! Hurry!”
The second boy burst out, but Grace was there to grip his unzipped jacket. He froze, and then screamed, “Amos!”
Amos tore back and grabbed the hand of who must be his twin. The familial likeness to each other and to their father was too much.
“Hey, listen—”
Amos used the edge of his hand to chop on her grip. Ineffective, but it hurt. Well, if he saw her as the enemy, she might as well play the role. She pulled Saul against her, taking him into both arms. He didn’t resist.
“Leave me alone,” she said to Saul’s defender, “or I will feed your brother cookies while you watch.”
He stepped back, but his scowl remained. “You don’t have cookies. We checked.”
“Including the cupboard above the fridge?”
Amos looked over at his brother, whose shoulders sagged. “It was too high. I couldn’t reach,” Saul said. His near-black hair curled at the ends, just like his father’s.
“That’s okay,” his brother said. “Who puts cookies there, anyway?” His hair was even curlier and longer, and right now, hair length was the only way she could distinguish the twins. They both wore the same blue shirt jackets, blue jeans and snow boots.
“Someone,” Grace said, “who battles her impulses. Now, can we agree that if I release your brother, you will both come inside like gentlemen and partake of cookies and juice?”
“And then we can go?”
“And then I will release you into your father’s custody.”
“Dad’s not around.”
“Then, to whoever is taking care of you.”
Saul dipped his dark head. Dirt smudged his neck, and Grace resisted the temptation to rub it off. Amos fixed Saul with a warning look.
“Please tell me someone is taking care of you.”
“Uh,” Amos said, “you better just call Dad.”
He seemed to assume that she had his father’s number, as if everyone would know who he was, and probably in this community, everybody did.
She knew that the boy’s last name was Blackstone, that he was twin to Saul, that their father’s name was Hawk Blackstone and that her new home was the old homestead of the Blackstones’ before Hawk and his parents moved to their present location on the adjoining quarter more than ten years ago, leaving The Home Place to gather dust and bird nests, it would seem. Word from her father was that Hawk’s parents had moved into town when Hawk had brought his bride there to live.
She also knew things Amos didn’t. Like how she and their father had once been good friends until fifteen years ago, but that in the past six weeks or so since she’d formally occupied the place, neither had renewed contact. Which only went to show that back when she was eighteen to his twenty, she was right to think that he would move on.
But she had his number. Mateo, her sister’s husband and Hawk’s former employee, had insisted she have it in case she ever needed help. As Mateo recited it, Grace had finished it for him. Hawk had not changed it in the past fifteen years. He didn’t care for change. Her complete makeover of his fourth-generation home place over the past year probably had him grinding his teeth.
“I intend to call him, but right now, let’s assess damages.”
The twin whirlwinds had ransacked the place she’d originally planned as her weekend home, but now was her full-time residence and location of her bed-and-breakfast. Kitchen cupboard doors were flung open, potato chips strewn across her granite countertops, and there was a huge sticky spot on her tiles from spilled juice. All six of the specially upholstered chairs restored from the original were missing from around the dining table.
The boys had dragged them into the living room, which had sustained the worst damage. A dozen or so of her quilts, productions created over the course of the past fifteen years, her comfort and her pride, were now stretched and bridged between furniture, stuffed under chairs and strewn across her floor.
“Do you realize,” she said to the boys captured in her hands, “that if you two were adults, you could end up in jail for this destruction?”
The eyes of both boys widened, and Grace mentally kicked herself for scaring them. That was Hawk’s job, not hers. She could play the stern but forgiving neighbor.
“This was our place first,” Amos argued, “but then you moved in.”
“Because I’m the owner. I get to do that, according to the law.”
Amos twisted at her grip on his wrist, but she held on. “It’s still our place.”
“In that case, why did you wreck your own place?”
“It’s not wrecked. Everything is just...moved.”
Saul’s hand in her other grasp twitched. “There is the glass thing.”
At the base of the bureau, bought by her great-grandfather, lay her mother’s crystal vase shattered into a million pieces. And gone with it, the hands-on reminder of the years of bouquets she and her sister and her father had brought home to her. The dandelions and weeds with stems so short her mother had tamped them in with a damp towel. The sunflower cut from the garden for her birthday. The dozen roses on Valentine’s Day. The Mother’s Day bouquets of tulips or daisies bought from saved allowances. Gone.
Gone like her mother. Broken glass. Broken neck. Both accidents. In both cases, she hadn’t been there to prevent them.
“You’re right, Amos. Most everything was just moved. By you two, and you two are going to move it all back.” With her help. She couldn’t see them ever properly folding a quilt.
Saul pointed at the remains of the vase. “And that?”
“That I will take care of.” She’d sweep up the worst now, and would likely find bits here and there for weeks, months after. That was the nature of breaking something this precious. You could never be sure of finding all the pieces. “But first, I’m calling your father.”
AT FIRST, Hawk ignored the incoming call from a private number. Creditors and collection agencies had sneaky ways of contacting him. He tapped End Call and turned back to loading cartons of eggs into his grocery cart. Now that his father had moved back from Ridgeview after his mother’s passing last year, he household easily went through a dozen a day. His father suggested they buy chickens, like when Hawk was a kid. “It will teach the boys responsibility, like it taught you.”
Responsibility hadn’t come from tending chickens; he’d been born to it. As an only child, it had been on him from the time he could spell his last name to uphold the Blackstone legacy. Outside of the twins, he had done a poor job so far.
“And where are those boys of yours?”
Hawk looked up from his eggs. Irina Sandberg. She and her teenage granddaughter, Amy, lived across from the old Blackstone homestead. He did a hard mental check. From where Grace Jansson lived.
“At home with Dad. I thought it would go easier.” Last time, with the boys, he had spent as much time taking out bags of candy and boxes of sugary cereal as packing in the items on the list. And a good thing. Easter chocolate and candy lurked at every twist and turn.
“And how is Russell?” Irina and Russell had known each other all their lives, and she and his mom had been fast friends.
His phone buzzed. Again, the private caller and again, he cut it off. “Good, good. You know Dad.”
Irina, slim and level with the third grocery shelf, stood with a bag of potatoes and a carton of milk and a ham in her shopping basket, yet she carried it on her arm as if it were a tiny purse. She seemed to expect him to elaborate, but he didn’t know what to say that wouldn’t give away his secret worries about his dad’s health.
“He keeps busy. With the horses and the boys.”
His phone buzzed from the same number. He would let it go to voice mail. Maybe they’d leave him alone if given the opportunity to leave a message.
Irina tapped the bag of coffee beans, also in her basket. “Tell him to come over for coffee anytime.”
It might be a good outing for his dad. He had not been himself these past weeks. He would stop one job, start another. Perhaps he needed to get out of his head for a while. “I’ll let him know, Irina.”
His phone pinged a notification and then rang again. “You might as well get that,” Irina said, sidling away, “if you want any peace.”
She was probably right. He swiped up on his phone screen. “Hello?”
“Hawk Blackstone?”
The lesson he’d learned was never to give the caller your identity. “Who’s this?”
“Grace. Grace Jansson. Do you remember me?”
Well, it wasn’t as if he could have avoided her forever. He forced out a steady exhale. “I do.”
“That’s good, because I have visitors you might know. Amos and Saul.”
Why had his dad taken the boys there? “You should say hello at least,” his father had complained in February when she moved in.
“Same distance for her to come here as for me to go there,” Hawk had countered. A whole half mile.
His dad had let it go, as he had a lot of things lately.
“I see.”
“So.” Grace drew out the one word long enough to have said ten. “I thought that, as their father, you might be interested to know that your children are wandering about the country on their own.”
What? “They’re supposed to be—” What did it matter now what should be? “Are they okay? They have hats, jackets?”
“Fully equipped, but hungry. The conscripts are disassembling the fort they made of the living room before they receive their rations of cookies and juice. But they are unscathed after their skirmish with enemy forces.”
When they were kids, he and Grace, sometimes with her younger sister, Haley, and her childhood friend-now-husband, Mateo, had played out elaborate scenarios of forts under fire, besieged castles, ransacked temples. Two minutes into their first conversation in more than a decade, and it felt as if he and Grace had never parted.
Except they had. “Is the enemy holding them for ransom?”
“One demand. Pick them up in person. Come alone.”
“Give me an hour. I’m in Diamond Valley right now.”
“That’s only thirty minutes away.”
He needed to find out what was going on with his dad first. “I have an errand I was hoping to take care of.”
“Fine. Any longer, and I will cut their hair.” Amos erupted in the background with a panicked cry.
“Can you put Amos on the phone?”
“I thought you’d never ask.”
There was a shuffling and muttering, and then, “Dad?”
“Amos. I’m coming to get you, but you and Saul need to stay put. Promise?” He didn’t like to bind them at age five to their word, but he couldn’t have them turn into runaways, either.
“Promise.”
With Amos’s buy-in, Saul would also comply. “And, Amos...why did you run off on Grandpa?”
“We didn’t. I said we were going for a walk and he said okay, so we did. We got permission. We did nothing wrong.”
Sometimes Hawk envisioned Amos making that same defense before one authority figure after another in his future.
Amos’s voice dropped. “Hurry. I’ve seen the scissors.”
For a second, Hawk contemplated delaying his arrival, just to see if Grace would inflict the arduous ritual on the twins, first encounter with his boys notwithstanding. Once when she was ten to his twelve, she had pulled out the electric trimmer from the barber’s kit from the bathroom vanity and waved it at his bushy head. He had agreed to a one-inch trim, but she had put on the wrong attachment and plowed a buzz cut from tip to crown before she realized her mistake. To stop her tears, he told her it suited him fine in this hot weather and to just give his whole head an army cut. She actually had the gall later on to tell him it had all worked out for the best, hadn’t it? And because it was only hair, he’d agreed.
“Sit tight. Be good. Keep your promise.” A little late for the first two orders, but wasn’t three the lucky charm?
He called the land line to the house. His dad had a phone, but the two were rarely together.
“Hello?” His dad sounded as steady as ever.
“Hey, Dad.”
“Hawk. You left town yet?”
“About to.”
“I see we’re nearly out of milk. Do you mind picking some up?”
His dad didn’t seem troubled that he hadn’t seen the boys in a good hour. “Dad, are you—”
“I was putting together some milk and cookies for the boys when I saw we’re getting low.”
Hawk walked down an empty aisle to gain a little privacy. “Dad, are you aware that the boys walked on their own all the way over to The Home Place?”
“A walk? Saul asked to go on one a while back. I didn’t think they’d go so far. I guess it will be a while before they are back.”
What was the matter with him? “Dad. They are five. You can’t leave them alone outside. There’s still snow on the hill. The same hill bears and cougars take.”
There was a long pause and Hawk could hear his father breathe deeply. “I’ll go get them,” he mumbled.
“No, stay there. I already arranged with Grace that I would pick them up.”
“Grace? You talked with her?” His voice brightened.
“She called me to say she had the boys.”
“Well, that’s good,” his dad said. “Be sure to thank her for me.”
That was appropriate if Grace had penned a wandering calf, but he was talking about his grandkids. Something was definitely wrong with his dad. Of all the other things going wrong in Hawk’s life, this one scared him the most.
FIFTY-EIGHT MINUTES after talking to Hawk, a black crew cab truck rolled past the window where Grace and the twins sat at the kitchen table, and parked on her new gravel pad next to the house. The first occupant of her guest parking spaces, though not the one she’d expected.
“Dad!” It was about the tenth word Saul had said to Amos’s ten thousand. And after taking his twin’s lead during the entire visit, even letting Amos select the cookies to eat, he was the first out the kitchen door, Amos right behind.
She reached the door in time to see Saul vault into Hawk’s arms. Hawk stood, holding Saul, his free hand opening to take Amos’s. The arrangement happened so quickly and naturally that it must be habitual.
The three looked like they belonged in a picture gallery of country living. Hawk, lean and strong in his cowboy hat and jeans, and, tilted into him, the boys with their dark swirls of hair and bit of baby chubbiness.
She felt like an outsider, and, well, she was. No one from the community had dropped by since she had moved in.
Yes, she could’ve come to his place. It hadn’t stopped her nearly three years ago when she’d come to tear a strip off Mateo after he’d deserted her sister, Haley. Back then, her sole purpose had been to persuade Mateo to leave the Blackstone Ranch and return to Haley. The only words she and Hawk had exchanged were to convey her dismay overthe sale of The Home Place. She had left, determined to find a way out for Hawk. Her father had come up with the solution when he bought the place and turned management over to her. Hawk had got much-needed cash, and she, thanks to her dad, had prevented her favorite piece of land from falling into stranger’s hands. And no, she was not a stranger. At least, not to the land.
Hawk walked with the boys toward her, across the snow-pocked grass. Maybe, just maybe, the snow might melt in time for her first guests booked for the Easter long weekend two weeks from now.
“Thanks for watching over the boys,” Hawk said.
“My pleasure.” It was. She had next to no experience with kids, outside of her nephews and niece, almost three-year-old Jonah and his baby brother, Jakob, plus six-year-old Sadie. Young kids, but the responsible adults in their lives had never made the mistake of actually leaving her alone with them. “I’ve never taken care of kids on my own before.”
“I’m sorry this was your introduction. Amos, Saul, what do you say?”
“Thanks for the cookies,” Amos said.
“Thanks,” Saul said to Hawk’s shirt collar.
“And what about making a mess of her place?”
“But we cleaned it all up,” Amos said.
“Except for the vase,” Saul said and received a glower from Amos.
Hawk’s lips thinned, and Grace spoke hurriedly. “That old thing? Don’t worry about it.”
Hawk held her gaze, and she forced herself to shrug and smile. The last thing she wanted was for Hawk to feel indebted to her, especially over an accident. She was the last person on earth to judge someone for careless impulses.
“Boys, what do you have to say for yourselves?”
Saul turned his head to Grace. “I’m sorry for wrecking your place.”
“Me, too,” Amos conceded.
“Apology accepted.”
With his load of boys, Hawk turned to the truck. “Thanks again.”
That was it? No small talk about the spring winds, the cost of doing business, how she was settling in or who was not taking care of his kids when he wasn’t around?
She couldn’t let it go.
“Wait.” She came down the porch stairs. “I have one more demand before I release the kids.” Saul looked worried; Amos, curious.
“They have to try out my play pit.” She pointed to a clump of poplars, among which she’d set a barrel, stumps, a hammock, a rope lashed between trees. “Fifteen minutes, and then they have to give me their honest opinion.”
“Come on, Saul,” Amos said.
Saul looked at his dad. “You can choose,” Hawk said. “You can stay with me or go with your brother. I’ll be here, either way.”
“Go with Amos,” Saul whispered.
“And there are toys in the storage bin,” Grace called after them. “It’s for guests with kids,” she added for Hawk’s sake. “I’m opening a bed-and-breakfast. In time for the Easter long weekend. I’m calling it The Home Place.”
If he recognized the name as the casual reference the Blackstones made to the old homestead, he only gave a careful nod. “Easter is in two weeks? It’s still the middle of March.”
“You haven’t seen the chocolate bunnies in the store?”
“That’s no guide. Christmas goes up in October.”
He had a point. “This year the moon has decreed that Easter comes at the end of March.”
“Okay.”
“I remember us playing in the trees when we were kids, so I added some equipment.”
“Okay.”
“I would show you around inside, but there’s no taking eyes off those two.”
“Yeah.” He dragged his hand down his face. “Thanks again.”
She noted the strain around his eyes, the tension across his shoulders. Back when they were kids, she would have nudged his shoulder, needled him until he let loose with whatever was bothering him. Usually horse related. And then she would impart advice or try to fix it herself. She couldn’t stand to see him upset.
And she still couldn’t. “That’s three times, Hawk. I know you appreciate what I did. The question is, why did I have to do it?”
He gave her a wary look.
“Look, it’s me you’re talking to. I’m not about to sic child protective services on you. I can see that the boys think the sun rises and sets on you, but come on, Hawk. What gives?”
He looked at his boots. “Miscommunication between Dad and me, that’s all.”
There was a mountain more, but experience had taught her that Hawk could avoid questions like birds dodged vehicles. “Your dad lives with you now.”
“He moved back when Mom passed a year ago.”
“I heard,” she said. Hawk’s mom had been an endless source of iced tea and clean clothes and warm smiles for Grace during her summer stays. The Blackstone and the Jansson ranches were five hours’ drive apart, but Grace had never experienced a second of homesickness under the care of Hawk’s mom. Grace had bawled for days when her dad told her that cancer had taken Angela. “I am sorry.”
“Yeah, it’s been hard on dad,” Hawk said.
“I guess it’s good having him around. An extra hand, right?”
“It’s under control,” Hawk said.
That comment was odd. “I didn’t say—”
He sighed and rubbed his temple. “Look, Grace, I know you mean well, but we haven’t really talked for nearly fifteen years. Why start now?” He took a step away from her. “Amos, Saul, time to go.”
In other words, mind your own business. Something she’d never been good at, but he had a point. He didn’t want her in his life, and she had no reason to be.
“What did you think of the play pit?” she asked the boys as they rejoined their dad.
“It’s cool,” Amos said and Saul smiled. He had a different smile, both happy and uncertain. As if asking for permission to feel joy.
“Can we come play here tomorrow?” Amos said.
“No,” Hawk said, swinging Saul into his arms. He took Amos’s hand. “What do you say?”
“Please don’t thank me again,” Grace told Amos. “Or else I will give you that haircut here and now.”
Amos clamped his mouth shut. Hawk turned his dark eyes on her. “I’ll take my chances with the haircut, and say it again. Thanks, Grace.”
She had got his thanks more times than enough, but not a single answer to what was happening in his life. Seeing him so stressed had stirred up her old desire to set things right for the man she had once considered her best buddy.
A dangerous impulse she had to resist. She had never been any good at going half measures. When Hawk had angled for more than friendship fifteen years ago, she had made a clean break from him. She couldn’t pursue her legal career and a life with him. All-in or all-out. She had flung herself into her career, and her driven personality had won her cases but not the support of her coworkers. Hawk was right to slam on the brakes to any renewal of their friendship.
“I should be the one thanking you,” Grace muttered to Hawk’s retreating truck.
