Annie Jones - Home to Stay

He strummed his fingers on the tabletop, giving her time to conclude, then finally asked, “So you adopted as a single mother?”

“Eight years ago.” She nodded, glad for the distraction. “Aunt Sammie or Claire never told you?”

“I never talk to Claire about personal things. As for your aunt? I never asked.” He laid his hands, palm up, on the table and lowered his gaze to them. “That first year after you’d gone when you didn’t come back, not even for the holidays, I told Sammie Jo I didn’t want to hear about you again. Not ever. I guess she got the message. And right or wrong, I just felt—”

“Bended.” Ruth pressed down a pointed tip on the paper then moved to the final stage. “Pull, pull, pulled. Careful, it can still be broken.”

“You said a mouthful, kid.” He seemed transfixed by Ruth’s fingers working over the tiny piece of paper. “She does this a lot, huh?”

She nodded. “She can’t dress or feed herself without help. But this she can do. Folding and unfolding, creasing, pressing flat, turning, lining up, tucking in then opening up. You show her how to do it once, and…”

Ruth opened her hands to reveal her creation, an understatedly elegant origami bird. “Crane!”

“Very pretty.” Hank held his hand out toward the girl.

“Too-oo much.” She dropped the crane into his open palm.

“That about sums us up, I guess. Very pretty but too-oo much.” Emma tried to smile.

Hank put his hand on her arm.

“Static encephalotrophy.” She said the diagnosis out loud then followed up with, “Brain damage that won’t get worse…or better. Same diagnosis as cerebral palsy, only Ruth’s is less physical and more learning- and behavior-based.”

“So you have to learn to work with what you have,” he surmised.

“Not exactly the Newberry way, is it?” She bit into her toast and tore a corner off.

He sat back in his chair and chuckled. “No, I’d say the Newberry way is—”

“Who belongs to that SUV out there with the Georgia tags?” The front door went banging against the wall as Samantha Jo Newberry’s rasping voice rang through both stories, each of the five bedrooms, down the hallways and most definitely into the big, open kitchen. “If it’s a birder, I’m here to help. If it’s my baby Emma come home at last, I’m here in the doorway with my arms open wondering how long I have to wait before I hobble in there, hunt you down and hug the stuffin’ out of you!”

“Great-aunt Sammie!” The chair legs complained against the old floor as Ruth pushed it away from the table. It almost tipped backward.

“Whoa!” Hank caught it with one hand.

Emma darted her hand out to help her daughter. Her hand landed firmly on top of Hank’s.

Ruth scrambled down off the tilted chair unaware of either of them. “Great-aunt Sammie. Great-aunt Sammie! It’s me! It’s your pretty-great favorite kid, Ruthie!”

Emma watched her daughter lope away to greet Sammie Jo. Emma should have jumped up with equal enthusiasm and done the same, but she couldn’t seem to move. All the importance of her rash rush to return home settled over her. Hank, Ruth, her aunt, her sister, Gall Rive, the past, the future she had come here to contemplate and everything they carried with them settled like a mantle onto her shoulders.

Hank’s dogs followed Ruth, their tags jingling rhythmically.

Emma returned her attention to Hank. She realized she had closed her hand over his, her grip tightening.

Hank did not shy away or even flinch at her touch. He met her gaze, his eyes kind but unrevealing as he asked a “safe” question. “Pretty-great kid?”

“The last time Sammie Jo came to visit us in Atlanta, we explained that she was Ruth’s great-aunt, to which Ruth let it be known she was a pretty-great kid herself.” A combination of love and recognition resounded from the foyer, with Sammie Jo laughing, dogs snuffing, their tags jangling and Ruth demanding to know where they kept the cake around this place. Emma managed an amenable smile. “It stuck.”

“I can see why. The kid has a point.” Hank settled Ruth’s chair’s legs onto the floor but did not withdraw his hand from beneath hers. “They are both pretty great.”

Had she heard right? Hank Corsaut admitting he wasn’t totally put off by a kid?

“Cake. Pink cake. Mom doesn’t know where it is. My dog-friend’s daddy doesn’t know, either.” Ruth’s voice echoed a bit through the high-ceilinged house. “Come get it for me.”

Emma sighed and shut her eyes. It was all too much to process given her state of mind and the state of her life.

“You want cake? Then cake you shall have!” Sammie Jo’s own voice rang out with a regal tone. “If I don’t have any, we shall make one. Hang what the doctors say about diet and restricting cholesterol.”

“Great, yes.” Emma pulled back her shoulders and slipped her hand away from Hank’s. She stood. “But she’s also a very big responsibility.”

“You talking about your daughter or your aunt Sammie Jo?” Hank grinned at her.

That grin gave her just the boost she needed to deal with the double trouble of her two most childlike and demanding relatives. She turned and headed toward the foyer, compelled to make one thing perfectly clear as she did. “Sammie Jo is my sister Claire’s responsibility.”

He stood up so quickly it made the table wobble and strode behind Emma, adding, “Except when Claire is busy.”

“Which is, like, all the time, to hear her tell it,” Emma chimed in, winding her way through the cluttered living room toward the front door where she could hear Ruth, Sammie Jo and the pair of dogs scuffling around.

“Which is, like, all the time,” Hank affirmed, keeping up with every sidestep and curve in the path Emma was blazing. “When Claire is busy, your aunt, and by extension, this sanctuary, has become my responsibility. Of course now that you’re here—”

“No. Don’t even finish that sentence.” She pulled up short and spun on her heel.

“Give a guy a heads-up before you up and change course like that, will you?” Hank managed to stop just inches shy of slamming into her. He held his arms out and his hands up like a man trying to avoid brushing against a live electrical fence as he muttered, “Heads-up, right. Look who I’m talking to.”

She tipped her chin up and narrowed her eyes. “If that’s a veiled reference to our breakup, Hank, it needs to be very clear that you are the one that changed the course of our relationship. You are the one who waited until the night before our wedding to tell me that you did not want to have children.”

“Really, Em? You want to launch into this now?” He retreated a step, his hands still up.

“I was actually sort of proud of myself for having held off this long,” she shot back. Before she could even take another breath, she cringed inwardly. She had made so many strides in life to keep her wild, impulsive tendencies under control, but standing back in this home of her childhood, after just a few minutes gazing into Hank Corsaut’s eyes, and she was blurting out things like that. She pressed her lips together.

Another step back and Hank dropped his hands to his sides.

“I’m sorry.” Emma hung her head, humbled by her own overreaction. “I probably made a big mistake even coming back here. I thought I’d find answers, that the path I need to take would become more clear with distance from my real life but—”

“Emma! My sweet, sweet, baby girl!” Sammie Jo appeared in the doorway from the foyer to the living room.

There was no evidence of a health problem in the rosy color of her cheeks. Her once strawberry blond hair, now streaked heavily with white, hung in a long thick braid over one shoulder. She had tucked her turquoise jeans into her high-top tennis shoes. Despite Ruth whirling about on tiptoe, her tutu bouncing and the dogs winding around Sammie’s every lumbering, labored footstep, she entered the room like a diva commandeering the stage.

When all eyes focused on her, she threw her arms open wide, sending her hand-beaded dangly earrings swinging. “Look at you, all dressed up in that fabulous little black dress and…is that a diamond bracelet? Très chic! But your hair…”

“Note she’s not surprised at what I’m wearing, just that my hair is mussed up a little.” Emma went to her aunt, her arms open wide to wrap her in a hug.

“A little? Emma, honey, a little mussed up is what my hair was when I did a nosedive into the bougainvilleas.” Sammie Jo enveloped her in two tanned, freckled arms.

Emma sank into warmth and the wonderful generosity of her aunt’s unwavering love. This, she realized, was why she had come. She had been stressed, afraid and even in the middle of a crowded restaurant with a man who promised her everything any girl could ever want, she felt alone. Here, in this house, in the arms of the woman who had raised her when her mother died, all of that melted away. She was loved. And more than a bit curious. “You fell into the bougainvilleas?”

“Not on purpose, sugar. I was having a heart attack!”

Emma pulled away, her own heart racing. She twisted her neck to give Hank a scolding look. “You said it wasn’t a heart attack.”

“Oh, now, calm down, Emma, honey.” Her aunt gave her one more brief hug before releasing her, stepping away and starting to pick her way over the tangle of dogs and Ruth. “It wasn’t really a heart attack and I didn’t actually fall into the bougainvilleas.”

“I caught her.” Hank leaned against the doorway, his arms folded.

“You make a habit of hanging around waiting for Newberrys to keel over?” Emma managed to keep her anxiety over her aunt’s precarious health from making that sound like an accusation.

“I’ve just been telling everyone I had a near heart attack and fell into the bougainvilleas because it’s so much more interesting a story than a medication mix-up inducing an episode that caused my heart to stop for maybe two, three seconds which wouldn’t even have rated a call to the doctor if the town vet had minded his own business.”

“You make yourself my business, woman, whether I like it or not.” Hank shook his head.

“Boo-gun-veel-yas,” Ruth sounded out slowly at first then began to spin around, repeating it faster and faster like the beat of a song that she alone could hear. “Boo-gun-veel-yas, boo-gun-veel-yas.”

“That must have been awful for you, Aunt Sammie.” Emma went to her aunt’s side and took her by the arm. Sammie Jo nodded toward the couch and they headed that way, a bit more slowly than her aunt’s usual speed.

“It was awful,” Sammie agreed in her rich Louisiana accent. “And I would have been alone. Of course, God would have been with me—is with me, always—but I had my cell phone on me when I first started feeling poorly so I made a call and this one here—” she pointed to Hank in the same antagonistic attitude he’d been giving her but couldn’t keep it up as she smiled, touched her fingers to her lips then blew a kiss to the man as she said “—came running.”

Emma met Hank’s gaze again, and again found herself overwhelmed by the sense that he could help her find order where now she mostly knew turmoil.

“The pair of them insisted I keep that phone near me and charged up at all times.” Sammie Jo reached out to grab Hank by the arm as they passed him and her strong, slender fingers curled in a squeeze of obvious gratitude. “Of course, now that you’ve come here to stay, that won’t be such a worry.”