The Prodigal Valentine

“After a fashion. Enough to play catch, if you want.”

“Sweet! Dad’s like, always too tired and stuff.”

“That’s crap, Jake,” Tony said, and Anita shot him a look that would have felled a lesser man.

“And when’s the last time you played with him, huh?”

“For God’s sake, ’Nita, my leg’s broken!”

“I meant, before that—”

“Are you the same Uncle Ben that makes the rice?”

In response to his niece’s perfectly timed distraction, Ben turned to smile into a pair of wide, chocolate M&M eyes. Twin ponytails framed a heart-shaped face, the ends feathered over a fancy purple sweater with a big collar, as the little girl’s delicate arms squashed a much-loved, stuffed something to her chest. Ben was instantly smitten. “No, honey, I’m afraid not.”

“Oh.” Mattie hugged the whatever-it-was more tightly. The ponytails swished when she tilted her head, her soft little brows drawn together. Curiosity—and a deep, unquestioning trust that makes a man take stock of his soul—flared in her eyes. “Papi talks about you all the time,” she said with a quick grin for her grandfather. “He says you usta play with Aunt Rosie and Livvy a lot when you were little.”

“I sure did.” Ben nodded toward the thing in her arms. “Who’s your friend?”

“Sammy. He’s a cat. I want a real kitty, but Mama says I can’t have one until I’m six. Which is only a few weeks away, you know,” she said to Anita, who rolled her eyes.

“You must take after your mom,” he said, with a wink at Anita, “’cause you’re very pretty.”

“Yeah, that’s what everybody says,” Mattie said with a very serious nod as her mother snorted in the background. “I’m in kindergarten, but I can already read, so that’s how come I know about the rice.” She leaned sideways against the table, one sneakered foot resting atop its mate, then closed the space between them until their foreheads were only inches apart. “My daddy broke his leg,” she whispered, like Tony wasn’t sitting right there.

“I know,” Ben whispered back. “That’s why I’m here, to help your grandpa until your dad can go back to work.”

“Never mind that it’s totally unnecessary,” Tony said to his father, not even trying to mask his irritation. “For a few weeks, one of the guys could drive me around. Or you could,” he directed at Anita, who crossed her arms underneath her impressive bust, glaring.

“And I already told you, I don’t have any vacation time coming up—”

“And maybe,” Ben’s mother said, clearly trying to keep her kitchen from becoming a war zone, “you should be grateful your brother is back home, yes?”

“Yeah, about that,” Mattie said, startling Ben and eliciting a muttered, “God help us when she hits puberty,” from Anita. “If you’re my uncle, how come I’ve never seen you before? And are you gonna stay or what?”

Ignoring the first question—because how on earth was he supposed to explain something to a five-year-old he didn’t fully comprehend himself?—Ben gently tugged one of those irresistible ponytails and said, “I don’t know, bumblebee,” which was the best he could do, at the moment.

An answer which elicited a soft, hopeful “Oh!” from his mother, even as his brother grabbed his crutches, standing so quickly he knocked over his chair.

“We need to get goin’,” he said. “’Nita, kids, come on.”

“But you just got here!” Ben’s mother said as his father laid a hand on his arm.

“Antonio. Don’t be like this.”

“Like what, Pop?” Tony said, halting his awkward progress toward the door. “Like myself? But then, I guess it doesn’t matter anyway now. Because it’s all good, isn’t it, now that Ben’s back. Kids…now.”

Both Jake and Mattie gave Ben a quick, confused backwards glance—Mattie adding a small wave—before Anita, apology brimming in her eyes, ushered them all out. In the dulled silence that followed, Ben’s mother scooped up one of the whimpering little mutts, stroking it between its big batlike ears. “It’s Tony’s leg, he’s not himself, you know how he hates feeling helpless.”

Ben stood as well, swinging his leather jacket off the back of his chair. At the moment, it took everything he had not to walk out the door, get in his truck and head right back to Dallas. Why on earth had he thought that time in and of itself would have been sufficient to heal this mess, that everyone would have readjusted if he took himself out of the equation…?

“Where are you going?” his father demanded.

“Just out for a walk. Get reacquainted with the neighborhood.”

“Oh.” His father’s heavy brows pushed together. “I thought maybe we could watch a game or something together later.”

“I know. But…” Ben avoided his father’s troubled gaze, tamping down the familiar annoyance before his mouth got away from his brain. Knowing something needed to be fixed didn’t mean he had a clue how to fix it. Not then, and not, unfortunately, now. He smiled for his mother, dropped a kiss on the top of her head. “I’m not going far. And I’ll be back for that game, I promise,” he said to his father.

“Benicio—”

“Let him go, Luis,” his mother said softly. “He has to do this his own way.”

Ben sent silent thanks across the kitchen, then left before his father’s confusion tore at him more than it already had.

For maybe an hour, he walked around the neighborhood, his hands stuffed in his pockets, until the crisp, dry air began to clear his head, until the sun—serene and sure in a vast blue sky broken only by the stark, bare branches of winter trees—burned off enough of the fumes from the morning’s disastrous reunion for him to remember why’d he come home. That he’d made the decision to do so long before he’d gotten the call from his father, asking for his help.

So even if everything he’d seen and faced and overcome during his absence paled next to the challenge of trying to piece together the real Ben out of the mess he’d left behind, he still felt marginally better by the time he turned back on to his parents’ block…just as Mercy’s garage door groaned open.

From across the street, he watched her drag a small step stool outside, wrench it open. Now dressed in jeans and a bright red sweater small enough to fit one of his mother’s dogs, she plunked the stool down in the grass in front of her house. She jiggled it for a few seconds to make sure it was steady, then climbed and started to take down the single strand of large colored Christmas lights at the edge of the roof. In a nearby bald spot in the lawn, that Hummer-sized cat of hers plopped down, writhing in the dirt until Mercy yelled at it to cut it out already, she’d just vacuumed. Chastened, the beast flipped to its stomach, its huge, fluffy tail twitching laconically as it glared at Ben.

Speaking of a mess he’d left behind. If he knew what was good for him, he’d keep walking.

Clearly, he didn’t.

“Need any help?”

Mercy grabbed the gutter to keep from toppling off the step stool, then twisted around, trying her best to keep the And who are you again? look in place. But one glance at that goofy grin and her irritation vaporized. Right along with her determination to pretend he didn’t exist. That he’d never existed. That there hadn’t been a time—

“No, I’m good,” she said, returning to her task, hoping he’d go away. As if. All too aware of his continued scrutiny, she got down, moved the step stool over, got back up, removed the next few feet of lights, got down, moved the step stool over, got back up—

“Here.”

Ben stood at her elbow, the rest of the lights loosely coiled in his hand. A breeze shivered through his thick hair, a shade darker than hers; the reflected beam of light from his own truck window delineated ridges and shadows in a face barely reminiscent of the outrageous flirt she remembered. Instead, his smile—not even that, really, barely a tilt of lips at once full and unapologetically masculine—barely masked an unfamiliar weightiness in those burnt wood eyes. An unsettling discovery, to say the least, stirring frighteningly familiar, and most definitely unwanted, feelings of tenderness inside her.

She climbed down from the stool. “You started at the other end.”

“Seemed like a good plan to me.”

“Creep.”

That damned smile still toying with his mouth, he handed the lights to her.

On a huffed sigh, she folded up the stool and tromped back to the garage. The cat, wearing a fine coating of dirt and dead grass, followed. As did Ben.

She turned. “If I told you to go away, would you?”

He shrugged, then said, “How come you’re taking down your lights already? It’s not even New Year’s yet.”