Father Most Wanted

“These are them,” Brooke confirmed. Crossing to the sink, she poured herself a glass of water and drank half of it before continuing. “Seventy-five copies each of Willie Wanders off to the Wilderness and Willie Wanders Home. The hardback issues.” Her father’s creations, they were two of her personal favorites. “So, what’s up?” She placed an affectionate hand on her grandmother’s shoulder. The older woman barely topped five feet, and Brooke towered over her. “Are you planning to go into business yourself selling Dad’s books?”

Ada began taking out the books, placing them on the table in piles of five. “Not into business, exactly.”

Brooke studied her. She almost always knew when her grandmother was up to something. With an active mind and a body that refused to recognize its chronological age, there were times the woman was hard to keep up with. “Then what, exactly?”

Having made four piles, Ada looked at her oldest granddaughter proudly. “These are for the scouts.”

“Scouts?” Suspicion crept into her voice. She glanced at Heather, who merely shrugged her ignorance and went back to paying homage to the sprawled-out tabby on the floor, scratching him behind the ears. “What kind of scouts?”

“Little ones. I think they call them Brownies. Silly, naming them after something you bake in a pan. Do they still call them Brownies?” Ada asked.

“Yes, Oma, they still call them Brownies.” Brooke could remember her grandmother taking on a huge group of girls because Heather wanted to experience being a Brownie and there were no Brownie troops in the vicinity. Ada had started her own. Maybe her grandmother was getting nostalgic. “Did you volunteer to help some troop’s den mother out?”

“No.” Ada smiled at her matter-of-factly as she continued taking out books and placing them in neat piles of five. “I volunteered to be some troop’s den mother. Two troops, actually, but the second one’s only temporary, they tell me.”

Brooke should have suspected something like this was up, but she’d thought that her grandmother had asked for the books because she’d had a sudden whim to donate her father’s books to a local school. “Don’t you need a short person of your own before you can do that?”

“Not really.” Ada laughed at the quaint notion, moving around to gather books out of the box Heather had left on the floor. “And Elaine Wilcox is pregnant.”

Again Brooke looked at Heather, but her sister met her with the same uninformed expression. Big help she was. Just who was Elaine Wilcox? “There’s a connection here, right?”

“Of course there is. There’s always a connection, dear.”

“Okay, then, what is it?” Brooke took the books out of her hands, forcing Ada to stop and look at her in surprise.

“She can’t lead her troop anymore. Doctor’s orders. Something about a delicate constitution, she said. Sounds suspicious to me.” Ada shook her head. “But no one else could take over the troop and they were going to have to disband. Same with Sarah Nelson’s troop, but she’s just laid up with a sprained ankle. I couldn’t refuse them.” Ada looked into Brooke’s eyes. “You remember what it was like. If you could have seen all those long faces…”

“No,” Brooke said patiently, “I don’t remember what it was like. It was Heather who was a Brownie, not me.”

Bemused, Ada could only shake her head. “Oh, I am sorry, dear. Did you miss not being a Brownie?”

Brooke closed her eyes and exhaled a long breath. The conversation was going around in circles. Nothing new there. “No, not really.” Opening her eyes again, she pinned her grandmother with a look. Or tried to. “The point is, when and where did you see these long faces?”

Ada reclaimed her stack of books and continued divvying them up. “Monday. When I was driving home from my aerobics class.”

Ordinarily Brooke was very proud of her grandmother. A lot of other women of seventy-five had long since retired from life. Ada Carmichael believed in squeezing out every last drop that life had to offer. But this was squeezing it a bit too much.

“Maybe that aerobics class made you a little light-headed, Oma.” Brooke looked at the stacks and envisioned little girls to go with them. Energetic little girls. “This is a lot you’re taking on.”

Ada’s eyes met hers, amusement shining in them. “When has that ever stopped me?”

Brooke surrendered. Oma was what people liked to call an indomitable force of nature. There was no stopping her. “You’re right, what was I thinking? It hasn’t. But maybe someday it should.”

“We’ll talk about it then.” Finished stacking, Ada shifted her eyes to her other granddaughter. “You’re awfully quiet this evening, Heather.”

Still stroking the cat and getting infinite pleasure out of it, Heather looked at her sister impishly. She’d been biding her time, waiting for the right moment. It was here. “Brooke met a man.”

Brooke saw her grandmother look at her with sharpened interest.

Great, just great.

Leave it to Heather to get things all confused and sic Oma on her. Hoping to stem the tide she knew was coming, Brooke countered quickly with, “I meet men all the time in my store.”

Rising to her feet, Heather made a futile attempt to brush off the preponderance of cat hair she’d managed to accumulate in the short amount of time. “But this one made her smile. A genuine smile, Oma.”

Brooke gave her sister a withering look. Heather hadn’t even been in the store at the time. She’d just walked in a moment after Tyler and his daughters left. “How would you know?”

Undaunted, Heather grinned, lifting her chin. “I’ve got great distance vision.” For safety’s sake, she got on her grandmother’s other side, out of Brooke’s reach.

Blocking Brooke’s access to her sister, Ada looked up at her. “Tell me more.”

I’ll get you for this, Heather, Brooke thought.

She shrugged nonchalantly. “Nothing to tell. He has triplets, one got lost, I helped her find him, he was grateful and they bought books.” She aligned the piles on the table with one another. “End of story.”

Ada looked genuinely saddened. “Pity. Grateful men are the best kind.”

Was everyone missing the obvious here? “He has triplets, Oma.”

The fact left the woman unfazed. “Was his wife with him?”

“No, but—”

“Aha.” Triumph made its appearance in her eyes. Ada cocked her head again. “Nice-looking? Him, I mean.”

“To die for,” Heather interjected.

“Aha.” Triumph went up another notch.

Fun was fun, but this was really getting out of control. Brooke placed her hand over the closest pile of books. “Stop saying that, Oma, or I’ll take back the books.”

But the books had been temporarily forgotten. “Did he pay cash?”

“No, a charge card.” Brooke’s eyes narrowed. Now where was she going with this? “What does that have to do with—”

“You have his name, then. Track him down if you like him,” Ada said.

Yup, way out of hand. Why did her grandmother insist on trying to match her up? She knew what she’d gone through with Marc, how badly her heart had been broken. She wasn’t about to go on that merry-go-round again, at least not anytime soon.

“Oma, I didn’t say anything about liking him.”

Ada’s sharp green eyes went right through her, saying she knew otherwise. “This is the first conversation we’ve had about a man who wasn’t your father that’s lasted more than six seconds.” Point driven home, she continued, getting down to the practical. “Now then, there are places on the Internet that can cough up entire histories of people if you know where to look.”

Brooke felt as if she was standing in the path of a runaway train, and if she didn’t do something right now, she was going to be flattened. In self-defense, she picked up a book and held it out to her grandmother. “Tell me more about this Brownie troop.”

Ada waved away the question and ignored the book. “You don’t want to hear about them.”

When pushed to the wall, Brooke could be every bit as stubborn as her grandmother. And right now she was being pushed. “Oh, yes, I do. Passionately.”