A Father, Again

Jon Tucker trotted down his back veranda steps and strode across his weed-blooming yard. Under his arm, the cardboard box rustled. It wasn’t that he resented cats. He didn’t like them touring his yard, was all. He didn’t like anyone on his property.

What he did like—prized—was his solitary life.

That’s why he’d bought this quiet, street-end property with its decrepit Victorian and two acres of woods.

His brothers knew the score, even though they didn’t relish it, even though they had tried to change his mind more than once. Heck, after his twenty-two-year absence, who could blame them?

He could forgive Luke and Seth.

He wouldn’t forgive his neighbor.

The woman just didn’t get it. Cats roamed. The orange lady in the box was an expert. He’d chased her off his land time and again since moving back to Oregon’s Columbia County two weeks ago. Now, she’d had the gall to birth three kittens on his shirt. His favorite shirt. The last of his police-academy attire, the last tangible link to the force that had been his life, his blood, for two decades.

The last link to his memories.

His nightmares.

The neighbor woman would pay. Damn straight she would.

He sidled through the narrow gap in the ten-foot juniper hedge dividing their backyards. Most likely, when it was planted years ago the owners had been on more friendly terms. Their kids, dogs—and cats, no doubt—had beat this path through it. Well. He’d call the local greenhouse the instant he dumped off the wailing felines and order another shrub to fill in the spot. What did it matter, his mounting costs?

Shifting the box, he climbed the three back steps of the cottage’s porch. His boot heels rapped the slats of its deck. His knuckles rapped the door.

The place needed an overhaul. A big paint job. In contrast, the yard would scoop the blue ribbon at the local fair. Dethatched turf; daffodils and tulips nodding from borders; the apple tree blossoming in the May sunshine; bedding frames in a porch corner.

He knocked again.

Where was she? He’d seen her old red Toyota in the carport.

The door cracked open.

A woman stood in a rectangle of muted light.

He stood tongue-tied, impassioned rants gone.

She was tiny. Lower than his shoulder. Auburn hair. Ratty blue sweatshirt. Small, bare feet. Maroon-stained toenails.

“Yes?”

One word. It locked his gaze to her caution-filled, flax-brown eyes; an instant later, she blinked and sucked in a quick breath.

A small meow tore through his trance.

C’mon, Jon. You’re here for a reason. Thrusting the box forward, he said, “Your cats.”

She grabbed the unwieldy carton; the door swung wider and he saw a child, a girl a bit younger than Brittany, hovering near the kitchen table, big-eyed behind round lenses, pinky in her mouth.

“Cats?” The woman frowned. “We only have one. Sorry. We try to keep her in the house, but sometimes she slips out the door behind us.”

“Now you have four,” he said gruffly. “Kitty had a litter.”

Her eyes widened. She peered under a flap. “Oohhh,” she exclaimed softly. “Sweetpea… No wonder you were so fat.”

Sweetpea?

His neighbor looked up. His throat tightened. Hers was an honest face, a gentle face. Life’s not honest, he wanted to tell her. It’s cruel. Callous. Unjust.

A shy half smile. “My daughter Emily—” she glanced back at the child “—found her in an old tub of dried sweetpea vines inside our garden shed a month ago, thin as a rail and shaky with hunger. I don’t think she’d been fed in two weeks. We put ads in the paper, but so far no one’s claimed her.”

Jon stared at the woman. Green and gold dappled her irises. He turned on his heel.

“Wait—” She followed him across the porch. “Where did you find Sweetpea?”

“On my shirt.” In the shadiest corner of his back deck, to be exact. Where he’d tossed his sweatshirt on the Adirondack chair when the temperature broke the eighty-degree mark while he’d been hammering in a new railing. He trotted down her steps and headed for the chink in the hedge without a backward look.

“Sweetpea,” he muttered. More like sourpuss. The claw marks on his hands proved it.

He’d get that extra juniper in before the sun went down.

Rianne Worth watched the broad back of her visitor disappear.

Jon Tucker.

Heavens, when had she seen him last? More than twenty years ago, at least. She hadn’t recognized him. Not until he’d looked directly at her, demanding she keep her cats off his land. Those eyes, oh, she’d remember them in any decade! Eyes she still saw every so often in her slumbering dreams. Inscrutable, more than a little perilous.

“Who was that man, Mommy?”

Rianne turned to the child at her side. Her shy angel-girl. One day—soon—Emily would shout and laugh and charge into rooms like any normal eight-year-old. You will, Em. I promise. “Our new neighbor, pooch.”

“He looks mean.”

Rianne couldn’t deny it; he had looked mean. And angry.

What had the years done to shroud him in that aura of arctic barrenness? The Jon Tucker of her youth flashed across her mind. Rough-and-tumble black hair, leather jacket, souped-up yellow pickup. Tough and grim. Kind in heart.

“Is he like Daddy?”

God forbid. “No, honey he’s not like your father.” At least not the Jon she remembered. “He doesn’t like to be bothered, that’s all,” she said, trying as always to look for the good, the decent. She knelt and held open the box flaps. “Come see what he brought.”

“Oh, Mom-meee!” Emily breathed reverently. “Sweetpea’s got babies!” She reached in a tiny finger.

“Careful, honey. Don’t touch the kitties for a week or so.”

“I know. We learned that in science.”

Rianne touched her daughter’s hair. “Smart girl to remember.”

“They’re so cute.”