Frog by Mary Calmes (read along books TXT) 📗

who care about them unconditionally and are invested in them. Children need role models, and not just heroes and miracle workers, but simply someone to stop and ask them how their day was, to pack a lunch sometimes, and sing along to the radio in the car.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“You need to understand something that you might have missed.”

I waited and noticed, again, how lovely she was. Her little heart-shaped face, almond-shaped black eyes, high cheekbones, and porcelain skin all added to her beauty.

“The day their nanny and their father walked out, you walked in.”

She lost me.

“Close a door; open a window. Do you understand?”

“Not really.”

She tipped her head as she smiled at me. “Even if their father returns—which, from the deterioration of the marriage that I witnessed, I find highly doubtful—his children are scarred by his leaving. If he returned, the trust could, in time, be remade. But now, with his absence, the space between them looms wider and wider. So now we’ve taught children to fear being abandoned, and so as adults they either push people away so as not to be hurt, or hold them too tight and suffocate them.”

“That seems much too simple to me.”

“And maybe it is, maybe this won’t affect them at all. What are your thoughts?”

“I have no idea.”

Quick nod of her head. “I think the lesson of leaving will remain. We all carry what we’ve learned with us, our experiences, and for Tristan and Micah, now they won’t be so free with their hearts.”

I looked across at them, three little boys squealing in delight as they played on the tire swing, faces red with both exertion and the chilly December air. The thought was sobering and sad that what their father did was imprinted on them forever.

“Phillip is young. He might not hold on to his father’s disappearance, but the other two are old enough to wonder, now, who else will go?”

I cleared my throat. “It’ll be me. I’m fixin’ to leave in a couple weeks, right after New Year’s.”

“That won’t work.”

“Pardon?”

“Micah is bonded with you, Weber Yates. He might even talk either to you or about you fairly soon. It’s in his eyes, the excitement, the expectation. He so wanted to tell me about you today. He couldn’t draw fast enough. He wanted to express things, and when I was deliberately obtuse, he was very irritated with me. I think he thought I was smarter.”

Her smile was wicked.

“You tricked him.”

She shrugged. “I have a small window to bring him back from this before he closes off completely. Shocking him, putting him in a situation where someone else could be hurt if he didn’t use his voice—that’s all shit, you understand?”

I laughed at her. “I can’t believe you said shit.”

“Well, this is not a movie on the Lifetime Channel. We have to actually deal with this in real time and with real therapy. He had his voice shocked out of him. It won’t be shocked back. It doesn’t work like that. It will come when it’s ready. But if he can deal with the world without it, what’s to make him want it back?”

“Yeah, I guess.”

“But you, my dear man, you he wants to talk about and he wants to talk to. You’re the anomaly, the new piece. He was abandoned, and you appeared. Tristan has the same eyes for you, full of want and hope. Whatever you do, don’t kill it because I’ll have to kill you.”

And she was tiny but really scary at the same time.

“That’s bullshit,” I growled at her. “You don’t get to lay that crap at my door. I ain’t responsible for the psyche—didn’t think I knew that word, didja?—of them three boys.”

She started giggling.

“Why are you laughing?”

“Oh my God.” She was laughing, loud and not ladylike at all. “Who are you? Where did you come from?”

“Before this?” I was confused.

And that was it: she was gone. She was a puddle of tears and snorts and raucous, howling laughter.

“Ma’am, you have lost your mind.”

It was like throwing gasoline on a fire.

I had no idea what set her off, but as she didn’t seem to be returning from the edge of sanity, I called the boys to me so we could go. The woman, doctor, shrink, was insane. Why she had to hug me goodbye, and why I let her, I had no idea.

ITWASa blur of activity. Tristan and Micah to judo, Pip to music, home for a snack, all three to gymnastics, then Tristan to soccer practice, and Micah to baseball. I was exhausted just from the driving, which fortunately for me was all programmed into the GPS of Carolyn’s SUV that she had left with me that morning. She had taken Cy’s second car, his normal, everyday one, his Lexus, and he had taken the BMW.

“Do you have a license, Weber?” she had asked me tentatively.

I had pulled it out from my wallet and passed it to her.

“Arizona?” She smiled at me.

I nodded.

“Wait, are you kidding me?” she asked when she noticed the expiration date.

“Nope, 2031 is when it expires.” I waggled my eyebrows at her. “And the address is a PO Box of a friend of mine, so I’m good.”

“This is good until 2031?” She could not get over it.

“Yes, ma’am.” I chuckled. “Issued in 2003, ya see that?”

“Ohmygod.” She was indignant. “You won’t even look like that in twenty-eight years. What the hell were they thinking?”

“That they are a highly transient state, and they don’t want fifty million people in line at the damn DMV.”

Her face transformed into a huge smile as she passed me her keys. “Here you go, cowboy. Drive safely, and take care of my boys and the Enterprise, all right?”

Why she was calling her car the same name as the starship that Captain Kirk was in charge of I had no idea until I had to park it.

“Mom says she docks it. She doesn’t park it,” Tristan informed me.

And I looked like every other asshole in the parking lot doing the eleven