Vickie Taylor - Keeping Caroline

Caroline putting on makeup? She rarely wore cosmetics, and never around the house. Pondering the significance of her taking time for makeup on his first day here, he took a seat at the kitchen table. It didn’t take long for him to wish he’d waited outside. As he watched Jeb wolf down pancakes as if the boy had a hollow leg to store them in, his heart gave its usual twist in the presence of children.

Jeb reached forward, feeling his way along the table, looking for his juice glass. “Where’s your dog?” he asked.

“Outside.”

“Can I pet him?” His hand flopped across the tablecloth like fish on land.

“No.” Matt winced at the harshness of his voice. Silently he leaned across the table and pushed the glass in front of Jeb’s hand. Savannah must have seen him as she turned, because she smiled gratefully.

Matt turned his gaze out the window. “I’m sorry. But I told you, he’s a police dog, not a pet.”

“Jeb, you stay away from that dog, you hear me?”

Jeb managed an injured look even as he downed half a glass of OJ in one swallow. “Yes, ma’am.”

“Mississippi, right?” Matt guessed, watching Savannah wipe her hands on her apron.

“What?”

“Your accent. You from Mississippi?”

“Georgia,” she said. “But my family’s from Mississippi. Maybe I picked up a little bit of their voice.” After a moment she added, “You’re good with accents.”

He shrugged. “I’m a cop. I notice details.” And not just accents. He noticed lots of details—such as the fact that Savannah walked with her shoulders slightly hunched and never quite turned her back on him.

He was still wondering why when Caroline came downstairs. Immediately he understood why she had taken the time for makeup. Judging by the puffy half-moons under her eyes, she hadn’t slept any better than he had.

Did she really think he didn’t know her well enough to see through a little cream and powder?

“Good morning,” she said, a little too brightly.

“Morning.” Because he couldn’t figure out what else to do with his hands, he wiped his palms on his jeans. A lifetime ago he would have wrapped her up in a bear hug, lifted her off her feet and kissed her until the serious little hooks at the corners of her mouth turned upward and a spark of laughter lit her tired eyes. But those days were gone forever. It was best to not focus on the past.

He’d come here to get on with his life, not to look back.

“Breakfast?” Savannah asked Caroline.

Caroline shook her head. She spread her palm across Jeb’s nappy crown and shook. “Morning, little rebel.”

Jeb smiled, pancakes puffing his cheeks out like a chipmunk’s. “Mornin’, Miss Caroline.”

Matt stood. “I thought we could walk around the house today. You can show me what you want done so I can get together a list of the materials I’ll need.”

They strolled through the house, intimate strangers, discussing pulling up musty carpeting and restoring the hardwood floors beneath; replacing windows warped shut; modernizing the kitchen and enlarging the laundry room. At the staircase, he started up.

Caroline tugged on his sleeve. “No. The upstairs isn’t too bad. It’s just my living quarters, anyway, and the nursery.”

Matt stiffened instinctively. “Nursery?”

“One of my little charges is an infant, almost five months old. I moved the nursery upstairs so she’d be away from the noise and the dust when you start working.”

Nodding so that he wouldn’t have to talk around the lump in his throat, Matt followed her. God, a baby. He didn’t know how Caroline did it. It hurt him just to think about a tiny, dependent life lying up there.

Caroline led him to the worst part of the house, the old den and semi-enclosed back porch. “This will be the center of the day care. If we knock out the wall here.” She pointed to the back door. “And enclose the outside but leave lots of windows, it would be like a big solarium. A bright, sunny playroom.”

Matt pushed on one of the porch’s corner posts. Rotted wood crumbled beneath his fingers.

“Kids need sunshine,” she said hopefully. “But you know how the weather is out here, half the year it’s too hot to go outside and the other half it’s bitter cold. Can you do it?”

“This wood is in bad shape,” he said. “It would have to be completely reframed.” Then, seeing her crestfallen expression, he sighed. “But I’ll figure out something. I’m going to need to borrow your car to get some supplies from town. And I’ll need tools.”

“Everything I’ve got is outside in the shed. You can buy whatever else you’ll need. I’ll give you some money.”

He gave her a look that said not in this lifetime and headed out.

“Matt, wait.” Propped against a lopsided screen door, she chewed her lower lip. “Have I ever given you reason to think that I blamed you for…what happened?”

The slumbering beast he’d caged deep inside himself rumbled, stretched in slow awakening. “It was a long time ago. What does it matter now?”

“That’s not an answer.”

“What do you want to hear?”

“The truth. I want to know if you thought I blamed you when Brad died.”

He shrugged and started to turn away. She stopped him, her fingers digging pits in his biceps.

“Matt?”

“Except for the years I was away in the army, I’ve looked out for you since you were twelve years old. I’ve made sure nothing ever hurt you.”

“And?”

“And when Brad was sick, sometimes you looked at me like you couldn’t understand why I wasn’t looking out for you then. Why I wasn’t protecting both of you.”

“It was leukemia, Matt. No one could have protected us from that.”

He could have contacted more doctors, Matt wanted to argue. Found one with a treatment none of the dozens of others he’d contacted knew of. He could have taken his son to another hospital. He’d flown with Brad to St. Jude’s in Tennessee—the best of the best when it came to treating children’s cancer in the U.S.—but he could have taken him to one of the research centers in Europe. He was his father. He should have been able to do something.

Matt wanted to tell Caroline she was right to hold him accountable, but he couldn’t. He couldn’t speak at all. His jaw had hardened to the point he thought it might shatter.

Caroline dropped her hand from his arm. “I’m sorry. I never meant to make you feel responsible.”

Without a word, he pounded down the crumbling back steps, hardly noticing the sag of weakened boards beneath his weight. Deep within his chest, the beast—the truth—clawed toward the light.

It didn’t matter whether or not Caroline blamed him for Brad’s death.

He blamed himself.

Matt hacked at the weathered boards on the back wall of the house with the claw end of his hammer, tearing out the old wood so it could be replaced with new. High clouds over the sunset gave everything around him a watery gray tone. He’d have to quit soon; there wouldn’t be enough light to continue. Maybe tomorrow he’d buy some halogen lamps at the Feed and Lumber in town. The more hours he worked, the sooner he’d be done. Free to get on with his life, such as it was.

And the harder he worked, the less time he would have to think. But busy hands didn’t necessarily mean a busy mind, he’d learned. If anything, the repetitive swing, dig, pull of the hammer allowed his consciousness to fade back from his task, let his thoughts wander where they would.

Which was right back to Caroline.

He’d spent the better part of the week ripping off the face of the old house, carefully placing new supports and joists as he worked. The plastic construction fence he’d strung around the work area kept Jeb out of his way. The roar of power tools drowned out the cries of the baby from upstairs, and his wife kept the twins pretty well corraled. But no amount of sweat or noise could contain his memories. His mind insisted on traipsing through the minefield that was his past.