Ethan

Arabella had seen the result of one memorable fight between mother and son, back during her teenage years when she was visiting Ethan’s brother and sister with Mary. Arabella, Mary, Jan and Matt had been playing Monopoly on the living-room floor when Ethan and his mother got into it in the kitchen. The voices were loud and angry, and unfortunately for Ethan, his mother had been baking a cake when he provoked her. She threw a whole five-pound bag of flour at him, followed by an open jar of chocolate syrup. Arabella and Mary and Jan and Matt had seen Ethan walk by, covered from Stetson hat to booted feet in white flour and chocolate syrup, leaving a trail of both behind him on the wooden floor as he strode toward the staircase.

Arabella and the others had gaped at him, but one cold-eyed look in their direction dared them to open their mouths. Arabella had hidden behind the sofa and collapsed in silent laughter while the others struggled valiantly to keep straight faces. Ethan hadn’t said a word, but Coreen had continued to fling angry insults after him from the kitchen doorway as he stomped upstairs to shower and change. For a long time afterward, Arabella had called him, “the chocolate ghost.” But not to his face.

Coreen was just a little over five foot three, with the dark hair all her children had inherited, but hers was streaked with silver now. Only Ethan shared her gray eyes. Jan and Matt had dark blue eyes, like their late father.

“Do you remember when you threw the flour at Ethan?” Arabella asked, thinking aloud as she watched Coreen’s deft fingers working a crochet hook through a growing black-and-red afghan.

Coreen looked up, her plump face brightening. “Oh, yes, I do,” she said with a sigh. “He’d refused to sell that bay gelding you always liked to ride. One of my best friends wanted him, you see, and I knew you’d be away at music school in New York. He wasn’t a working horse.” She chuckled. “Ethan dug in his heels and then he gave me that smile. You know the one, when he knows he’s won and he’s daring you to do anything about it. I remember looking at the open flour sack.” She cleared her throat and went back to work on the afghan. “The next thing I knew, Ethan was stomping down the hall leaving a trail of flour and chocolate syrup in his wake, and I had to clean it up.” She shook her head. “I don’t throw things very often these days. Only paper or baskets—and nothing messy.”

Arabella smiled at the gentle countenance, wishing deep in her heart that she’d had a mother like Coreen. Her own mother had been a quiet, gentle woman whom she barely remembered. She’d died in a wreck when Arabella was only six. Arabella didn’t remember ever hearing her father talk about it, but she recalled that he’d become a different man after the funeral.

She twisted her fingers in the blue quilted coverlet. Her father had discovered by accident that Arabella had a natural talent for the piano, and he’d become obsessed with making her use it. He’d given up his job as a clerk in a law office, and he’d become a one-man public relations firm with his daughter as his only client.

“Don’t brood, dear,” Coreen said gently when she saw the growing anguish on Arabella’s lovely face. “Life is easier when you accept things that happen to you and just deal with them as they crop up. Don’t go searching for trouble.”

Arabella looked up, shifting the cast with a wince because the break was still tender. They’d taken out the clamps that had held the surgical wound together before they put on the cast, but it still felt as if her arm had been through a meat grinder.

“I’m trying not to,” she told Ethan’s mother. “I thought my father might have called, at least, since they put me back together. Even if it was just to see if I had a chance of getting my career back.”

“Being cynical suits my son. It doesn’t suit you,” Coreen said, glancing at her over the small reading glasses that she wore for close work. “Betty Ann is making a cherry cobbler for dessert.”