“Oh, don’t let this break him now.” She rushed out the door and past the cars, which were prepared for the burial at the church cemetery. She spotted the back of his blue suit jacket as he headed toward the water.
“Steven, wait!”
She caught up to him as quickly as she could on her sore feet. “Steven! These shoes are killing me. Slow down.”
He stopped, just long enough to size her up from head to toe in that critical assessment he had lately, a trait she knew he copied from her. “Go back inside, Mom. That’s your father, but sadly not my grandfather. What am I even doing here? No one wants me here, and apparently no one thinks I belong here either.”
The fury in his voice masked the tears she saw clouding his eyes. After all the life she’d shared with him as her one and only, she wanted nothing more than to have her little baby back and fix what had been done to him.
“I’m sorry, but our cousin, JoJo, has always been rude and uses every opportunity to act that way toward anyone she can, all the time.”
“Maybe so, but what hurts the most is that she spoke the truth. I have no father, never have, and you’ve never talked about him. I came from somewhere; someone besides you made me, and here we are. Grandpa never accepted me, for whatever reason; again, you don’t talk about that either. And for all it’s worth, Uncle Brandon is great, but he has enough kids for two or three men. He didn’t need me around other than to do work on his ranch. It was great, but not for me.”
The truth he spoke, neatly packaged in the simplest way, rendered her speechless, and Angela didn’t know what to say. Tears came before he walked away, their eyes meeting—his filled with pain, hers with regret.
When he walked away, her son took a piece of her heart with him, and she could only stand there and let him go. She felt defenseless, wishing she could turn back time. It was a while before she made it back to the funeral home and even longer before she saw him again, when it was all over.
“There you are. We were all worried, weren’t we, Emma?” Angela found her son sitting on the couch in his grandfather's house, a plate piled with three different kinds of pizza on his lap. The sounds from the video game system filled the room with its war saga, attracting his cousins to join in.
“Well, don’t be, Mom. Again, I can’t say this enough—I’m capable of taking care of myself. I was on the honor roll for many years, Mom, and despite how I look or what people think, I’m no dummy.”
“You were on the honor roll?” It was Wyatt’s turn to briefly gawk at him before shaking his head and turning to the game. “Whoa.”
“You could say that again, Wyatt. Yes, I was, and I can beat you in this game, too. I was just making a point to my mom so that she could stop worrying so much about me—I’m a grown man.”
Five
So troubled by Steven’s attitude and the contradicting things he said, Angela needed a break and some fresh air. Emma had long since gone to bed, Brandon had instituted an early bedtime for the kids, and the dogs were happily searching for missing snacks on the couches and the floor.
Sitting on the patio, Angela looked up at the clear, cold night sky and thought about Evander and her father. “His eyes are just like yours, Evander. Sometimes I wonder where you are, wishing I could talk to you. You’d be shocked to see how much he sometimes resembles you. It's all my fault, even if you don’t realize it—every bit of it. If Steven had you in his life, he’d have grown up differently. What a terrible thing to say and do. I forgive Dad, and maybe someday we will meet again.”
She knew that finding him in the military after so many years was unlikely. However, when a shooting star streaked across the sky in front of her, Angela closed her eyes and made a wish for good luck.
“That’s all I can do, pray that he finds himself, even without having a father figure. Maybe someday.” In that moment, shefound peace and hope, quietly speaking her words aloud in the surrounding air, with no one specifically listening.
The days that followed were a mix of emotions as the children and dogs got on everyone’s nerves. Brandon seemed immersed in his ranch from afar, spending more time on his computer, managing things than he did eating.
Angela found her spot in the kitchen, a place she could go to unwind and bake away her cares for as long as it took. She dusted off her hands, then added another scoop of flour to the bowl of gingerbread cookies she was making.
“Well, I hope you plan on baking Christmas cookies because we are going to have the biggest, best Christmas celebration here at Dad’s house—bigger than anyone in our family has seen.”
Another spoonful of vanilla was added to the mix, and Angela set it aside. “Dad hated Christmas, so why would you want to do a thing like that? We have a lot of work to do around here, and now you want to add that to the list. No way, that’s for you on that giant, fancy ran?—”
The front door crashed open, cutting off Angela’s words. “Emma, we got the biggest tree we could find. I think it's about fifteen feet tall.” Brandon called, holding the huge tree and his saw.
“Oh! Let me see, let me see!”
Clumsily, the children helped Brandon drag the tree inside. Shaking her head, Angela continued to stir the batter for what she hoped would be a truly delicious gingerbread cookie, her favorite. She hadn’t intended to make something Christmas-related, but the soothing scent always reminded her of this time of year.
“Why did we have to get a tree, Emma?” She refused to acknowledge the tree taking up half the living room as she dotted the cookie pan with dollops of cookie dough, tossing atiny morsel to Sadie at her feet. “Shh, you got nothing, you understand.”
The dog barked happily, causing a flurry of wagging tails heading toward her. “What. I don’t have dog biscuits!”
The deafening sound, which only Emma seemed to truly ignore, erupted into a riot of children’s laughter, and chaos started again as furniture was moved, nearly toppling over in the process.
The house vibrated with a strange mix of life and death from her father’s passing that Angela found hard to ignore. Lost in it, after baking the first batch, she’d had enough and stored the rest in the refrigerator.
Quietly, she slipped out to the patio, shut the door, and sat in a distant chair. “I can’t believe they all don’t notice that.”
