Susan Floyd - My Three Girls

Karen asked the question with such hope, and Dana was glad she didn’t have to disappoint the little girl.

“Yes. Your uncle Brady and I are going to get married on Friday, so you can stay here.”

Karen’s eyes went wide and then filled with tears. In an attempt to soothe her Dana said, “I know this is all happening very fast. But we’re not going to try to be your mom and dad.”

Karen shook her head. “I used to pray that you’d be our mother. You were always so nice to us. I loved my momma, but she didn’t love us back.”

Dana didn’t know what to say. This sweet girl was giving so much of herself, but Dana couldn’t do the same. Brady kept telling her this was only temporary. If she gave her love to the children and then had to watch them walk away, she might never recover. How was she ever going to resist these three girls?

Dear Reader,

This book started with a newspaper article my late father had saved for me about a one-room schoolhouse. “Hey, look at this, Sus,” he said with a grin. “Wouldn’t this be a great story?” Unfortunately, my father isn’t here to witness his kernel of an idea come to fruition, but I still like to thank him for his inspiration, which led to this story.

Now take three abandoned children starving for love, a schoolteacher reluctant to ever become attached to any of her students again and a deputy sheriff racked with guilt because he believes the children’s plight is the result of actions he took several years before. Mix them all together, stir in generous amounts of chaos, unresolved feelings and long-kept secrets and bake with a marriage of convenience. Season with healing and forgiveness. Is this the recipe to make a family?

Join Dana Ritchie and Brady Moore as they wade through this crazy thing we call life and together discover that two are stronger than one. You—my readers—mean everything to me, and I love to hear from you. You can write to me at P.O. Box 2883, Los Banos, CA 93635 or by e-mail at susfloyd@yahoo.com.

Sincerely,

Susan Floyd

www.millsandboon.co.uk

This book took the work of several people from San Benito,

Monterey and Merced Counties.

Heartfelt thanks to:

Monterey County deputy sheriffs

Greg Liskey, Mike Richards, Larry Robinson

and Jeff Stiarwalt (for the adventurous “ride along”).

Merced County deputy sheriffs

Tomas Cavallero and Richard St. Marie (for brainstorming

at the Los Banos Campus Career Fair).

Panoche Elementary School District, San Benito County

Ginger Gardner, Teacher and Principal

Elsa Rodriguez, Teacher’s Aide, Cook, Janitor

and Groundskeeper

Mario Bencomo, 5 thgrade Aaron Blanco, 7 thgrade Ian Blanco, 5 thgrade Dustin Borba, 1 stgrade Alyssa Cabral, 4 thgrade Chantelle Lippert, 7 thgrade Jacob Lippert, 6 thgrade Zoa Lopez, 6 thgrade Tristan Redondo, 2 ndgrade

This is dedicated to all my students at Merced College,

Los Banos Campus, who have brainstormed titles, offered

plotting advice and understood the value of a “redo.”

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

DANA TUGGED at the collar of her sleeveless cotton dress, feeling a damp film of sweat on her sternum. Indian summer in California’s Panoche Valley was just more of the same—dry and brittle, the victim of a scorching summer. Cattle on the rolling hills searched for shade and found it at the chain-link border of a one-room schoolhouse, a green oasis of non-native shade trees nestled in a valley of brown.

Dana glanced at the large clock on the wall. It was nearly six on a Friday, but it wasn’t strange that she was still at work. When she was twenty-four, Dana had taken on the role of principal and teacher at one of the smallest schools in California’s Central Valley, a job that took someone who was either a loner or a certified workaholic.

Dana was both.

For the past five years, she’d embraced the isolation, hoping that work and the dark, still nights could wrap her in a protective blanket. It hadn’t always been that way. There was a time, new teaching credentials in hand, she had taught in an urban school filled with low-income children even more thirsty for the safety school offered than for the subsidized cartons of milk. She’d had colleagues then, a few she might call friends, but those faces were a blur now. The only face she saw with heartbreaking regularity was the one she tried not to see, the one permanently imprinted in her vision like a sunspot. Round cheeks, clear brown eyes, a shock of black hair.

Dana reached over and jerked down the shade. The temperature of her west-facing office dropped ten degrees. Now wasn’t the time to be thinking about him, what he’d be like as a teenager. With brisk movements, she began to sort through the forms on her desk, prioritizing the night’s work. Even though she only had twelve students, she needed to fill out the same reports that the larger schools did. Fire safety, student evacuation plans, building and lighting requirements.

If she filled out enough forms, if she buried herself in her work, the unbearable pain became a dull knot where her heart once was. That had been a successful strategy for five years, but now that the frenzy of developing lesson plans, organizing the school year and implementing the latest state-mandated curriculum had become more routine, the grief she’d thought she’d been able to sidestep dogged her relentlessly. Her mother had told her in her no-nonsense manner that the loss of a child, even if the child wasn’t hers, was something that no one ever got over, and that she needed to face her grief rather than run away from it. Dana disagreed. Grief could be put off if one kept busy enough.

Which was why this situation was perfect for her. After all, how many people could boast of no commute, no neighbors, no true boss, except for the school board who supported every one of her efforts to update the small school? When she finished her day’s work, which generally wasn’t until nine or ten in the evening, she just walked fifty feet to the district-owned, two-bedroom cottage she called home, ate a sandwich or a bowl of cereal and flopped into bed. On Saturday, she would return to the schoolhouse to work on the endless list of minor repairs it needed. On Sunday, she would clean and set up the classroom for the following week. It was a wonderful system that had kept the terrible waves of depression at bay for years.

“Hellooo?” a singsong voice called.

Dana’s head snapped up at the intrusion. No one ever came onto the school property after school hours unless it was parents’ night. But that only happened twice a year. She pushed away from her desk and poked her head up over the file cabinets.

“Hello? Miss Ritchie?”

Dana groaned when she recognized the person and the oh-too-sweet-voice at the same time. Beverly Moore. The only parent she had personality conflicts with. Maybe it was because Mrs. Moore was new and hadn’t quite acquired small-school etiquette. Most of her parents traveled as far as forty miles to drop off their children, and Dana did what she could to accommodate their schedules, since they didn’t have a lot of time for chit-chatting. Most lived and worked on ranches or farms so rural that running water was a luxury. Like the school’s, their electricity was gleaned from a generator. When the parents picked up their children at two-thirty, they were single-minded in their efforts to get back to their properties. Livestock needed to be fed, fences needed to be mended. Dana used the snatches of time before and after school to update them quickly on their children’s progress or lack thereof.