Yuletide Hearts (10 page)

“Why?”

Callie suspected he slid a look her way, but pretended oblivion. “Kitchens make women happy. They like their kitchens just so, no matter how much they cook. Or don't cook, as the case may be.”

Yup. Definitely targeting her. Such a guy thing to do. Teasing by innuendo. Kind of enchanting, actually.

“And a kitchen's called the heart of the home,” Matt went on, abutting the next cabinet group to the first set they'd installed. “People are drawn to the kitchen. It brings back memories for lots of folks.” Matt snapped his tape shut, and waved a hand around. “Your mom did a great job planning this one.”

“She did.” Hank agreed as he and Callie finished the lower bank of cabinets on the inside wall. “Pantry space, work space, and she picked out appliances that weren't top end but would last.”

“Top end being ridiculously expensive,” Callie added. “Unless you're a Food Network chef or planning a humongous family, a nice four-burner stove with a convection oven does everything I need it to do.”

“Because you don't live to cook,” Matt teased from across the room.

“You're a quick study, marine.” She slanted him a look of approval as she and Hank marked space for the upper cabinets. “Eating is essential. Cooking isn't. Hence the impressive frozen food sections in today's grocery stores. And a fresh apple.” She held up her half-eaten one as an example and grinned. “Lunch on the run.”

“Because I've found myself inundated with crew members who tend to elongate their lunch hours rather than shorten
them, let me just say I appreciate the difference more than most. The Marek family is amazing.”

“Can't disagree.” Hank stood, checked his watch and headed for the door. “I'm going across the street to check on the turkey and start the other stuff. No, General, you stay here.” He waved the dog back into the front room. “I'll get the potatoes peeled and the table set. Then you guys come on over in an hour or so.”

Another hour gave them time to finish those upper cabinets while Jake applied rustic-styled hardware to the lower ones. Callie nodded, balancing with one foot on the ladder, the other on the untopped cabinet unit below to get the best angle for drilling. “Sounds like a plan. Thanks, Dad.”

Hank sent her a fond grin. “You're welcome.”

“Like this, Matt?” Jake held out a burnished handle and lined it up with the holes Matt had drilled in the honey-toned maple doors.

“Yes.” Matt crouched alongside the boy, looking like a proud father. Strong. Determined. Gentle. Stoic. “Now start the first screw just enough to hold things in place, then do the same with the second…” Matt paused while Jake followed instructions, his face a study in concentration while Matt looked on, smiling.

“You've got it.”

“I did.” Jake sent a grin Matt's way and high-fived him. “You can help Mom now. I've got this.”

Callie bit back a laugh.

Matt straightened, patted Jake's shoulder and turned her way, his quiet look saying what they didn't dare say out loud.

The kid was outrageously cute, but at eight years old the last thing a sturdy boy like Jake wanted to hear was “cute.”

Strong, yes. Tough? Most assuredly.

But cute?

Not so much.

Matt adjusted the cabinet jack below the first upper cabinet while Callie read the level. “We're good.”

He handed her the drill and she did her best to ignore his proximity as she installed the holding screws, but that worked for all of two seconds.

Oops. Serious trouble.
When all else fails adopt a code of silence or go to inane conversation.

Option two. It
was
a holiday. Silence seemed rude.

“You like this color for the cabinetry?”

Matt swept the kitchen a quick look. “It's great.”

“I kept it light because even with south-facing windows, winter nights are long.”

Matt nodded, agreeable. Maybe too agreeable. Which meant she might not want to talk about long winter nights. Cozy fires. Deer browsing for food beneath snow-swept hillsides.

“And I did the wall board in here myself,” she continued as she settled the last screw into place on cabinet one.

“Lovely,” he replied, but it only took one look to see the grin that said he wasn't just thinking about plaster board. Maybe silence
was
a better choice.

“I like that you allowed space for built-in wall shelves flanking the fireplace in the living room,” he told her.

“Dad's idea.” Callie angled the drill until she felt the screw bite into the stud. “He said Mom begged for more storage space. Cupboards. Closets. Shelves. And of course, like the shoemaker's wife goes barefoot, she was still waiting for those extra cupboards when she died.”

“Sorry.” He sent her a look of sympathy that made her feel like what she said mattered. “When did she pass away?”

“I was ten.” She made a face as she sidestepped to the next cabinet. “It was rough, but she was a great woman. And Dad loved her so much, the kind of love everyone wants to find, you know?”

“Reason enough to write fiction, I guess.”

“Ooh. Cynical.” She sent him an over-the-shoulder frown. “Nothing wrong with happily ever afters, is there?”

“If they existed, no.”

“And on that note…” She sent him a “let's change the subject” look and quipped, “About the weather we're having lately…”

“Safe topic.”

“Weather is what it is. Human relationships?” Callie flashed him a grin and shrugged. “Whole other box of tools.”

The General stood, paced to the door and whined. “Jake, can you take The General out, please?”

“Okay.”

Once Jake had pulled on his thick hoodie and dashed outside with the dog, Callie nudged Matt for his attention.

“Hmm?” He looked up, a pencil held tight in his teeth, his square positioned to mark the outside of the last wall cabinet on that side.

Callie jerked her head toward the door. “You did a great job working with him.”

Matt shook it off. “No big deal.”

Callie hesitated, then waded in. “It
was
a big deal to Jake. He loves learning the trade. Trying his hand at things. And when we were working steady two years ago, he was too small to be much help but he longed to learn.” She settled a warm look on the work-in-progress kitchen. “This is what he's been waiting for. A chance to try his hand at things. Be the apprentice. I just wanted to say thank you when he wasn't around.”

 

Her heartfelt words made Matt suck in a breath, and her sweet expression loosened a rusty internal clamp left over from his painful childhood. He glanced away, wondering how much to say, then shrugged, wondering where the shot of pain came from after all this time. He'd thought it erased, two decades of good negating one of bad.

Obviously it didn't work that way.

“My grandfather taught me a lot of what I know,” he told her but didn't meet her gaze. “He was a lot like your dad.

Strong. Kind. Straight-shooting. And he loved God, heart and soul.”

“You miss him.”

“Oh, yeah.” Matt hauled in a breath, then swept the well-apportioned house a look of appreciation. “But mostly I want him proud. I want him watching me from heaven, knowing I stayed on the straight and narrow. Knowing I didn't stray. That I listened to everything he said and carried it with me.”

“He knows.”

“You think?” Matt faced her, hands out.

Callie smiled down at him, her look endearing. Engaging. “Oh, yes. I believe that utterly. When I've messed up, I can almost feel my mother's arm around me, saying, ‘Well, then. Fix it.'”

Matt smiled. “Exactly.” He hesitated, then waded into last night's dinner dilemma. “You know that Don's my stepfather.”

Callie nodded as she applied the next screw. “Dad said as much. But that's all he said. And I couldn't wrestle information out of Buck either, so that's all I know.”

“Neal Brennan was my father.”

Callie stopped working and turned full about. “Jeff's father?”

“And Meredith's. Yes.”

“Meredith was a year ahead of me in school,” Callie mused. “Beautiful. Polished. Cheerleader. I didn't know her, but a part of me would have loved to be just like her.”

“Kids hide a lot under an illusion of success.”

“Did you?”

He snorted. “Not hardly. I went the other way.”

Her expression said “Tell me more,” but he wasn't about to spill everything here and now, when Jake would rejoin them at any moment.

“So Don married your mother…”

“If only it was that easy.” Matt finished leveling the last cabinets, face forward. “My mother cheated on Don. She was a waitress, Neal was a customer. A rich customer. I was the
result. No one knew until Neal made it public knowledge when I was eight years old. Don walked out, started drinking, and I never heard from him again. My mother began entertaining guy after guy, never happy. Never content. She died during my first tour in Iraq.”

“Oh, Matt.” Callie touched his arm, sympathetic. “I'm so sorry.”

“Yeah, well.” He shrugged one shoulder, and changed the subject, feeling like he'd shared enough darkness to shadow a blessed holiday. “We're good here.”

Jake burst back through the door, scrubbing his hands together, the dog trotting alongside. “It got cold out there.”

Matt knew that. And working in a house all day with no heat wasn't exactly comfortable, even with their layers. “One more cabinet and we'll call it a day. I've got to grab a few things at the lumber yard in the morning, so I'll head over first thing. They open at six.”

“It's Black Friday,” Callie reminded him.

He'd forgotten that.

“Most of the craziness will be at the big stores and the shopping areas in Olean, but…” she let her voice taper and shifted a brow up, “the lumber yard had an ad in today's paper, so they'll be busy.”

He should have made the run yesterday, but he didn't and he hated standing in line. “Shop-a-phobic?”

He grunted. “Not when there's a point to it. But Black Friday?”

“Want me to go instead?” she asked as she applied the last two mounting screws.

Matt shook his head as he and Jake gathered tools. “No. My bad. And if they have a quick lane open, I'll still be able to get in and out.”

Callie's doubtful look said that wasn't going to happen, but Matt could hope, right?

 

“This is amazing, Hank.” Matt walked into the dining area a short while later and swallowed a lumber-sized lump in his throat, the laden table set for four. “What can I do to help?”

Hank beamed. “Have a seat. We're all set except for mashing the potatoes and saying grace. Only thing is, Callie doesn't let me get away with quick grace on Thanksgiving, so I might hold off and do the potatoes after we pray.”

“Funny, Dad.”

Hank grinned her way, his pride and affection for Callie and Jake obvious, and as they finished drying their hands and settled in at the festive table, one of Matt's heart clamps loosened a little bit more.

He fit at this table. With this family.

He didn't dare make too much of that. He comprehended the darkness of past sins.

But it felt good to be here. Real good. And Matt hadn't sat at a family table to have a holiday dinner in fifteen years, so this…

Oh, this was nice.

They joined hands, heads bowed as Hank said the blessing, and while slightly longer than his usual, it wasn't overdone to the point of cold potatoes.

“You were right.” Callie sent Matt a look of unsurpassed happiness a few minutes later. “This turkey is magnificent.”

He grinned. “Told you so.”

“Son, I haven't had a bird taste this good in a long time,” Hank confessed. “We always buy the frozen ones they sell cheap in November. This—” he speared a piece of white meat and held it aloft “—reminds me of turkeys we had when I was a boy, when my parents would go to the farm and pick theirs out.”

“Free range. Some mighty good eating right there.”

“And even though I'm eating a feast,” Callie confessed, “I'm already envisioning turkey sandwiches with cranberry sauce. Turkey and biscuits. Turkey and rice.”

“And pie,” Matt added with enthusiasm.

His tone of appreciation made her flush. “Now the pressure's on. What if they're not good?”

“They'll be wonderful.”

“You used your mama's crust recipe, and crust makes the pie,” Hank declared. “Now, Jake, if you'll hand me that dish of sweet potatoes, I think I've cleared a corner on this plate of mine.”

Jake laughed and passed the bowl left, his eagerness for food warding off the urge to converse, unusual for Jake. But Matt understood the boy's attentiveness to a meal like this, and couldn't deny he felt the same way.

Warm. Fed. A place to belong.

Guilt niggled him out of nowhere.

Where was Don tonight? Did he catch Thanksgiving dinner with a friend? Or had this been his only option and Matt ruined it by being there?

Sizing up the amount of food they had, the twinge of guilt grew. There'd have been plenty of food for Don and leftovers.

Did he want his former stepfather hanging around?

No.

But that gut feeling went against the grain of faith. Matt knew better. And if his original reason to work in southern Allegheny County was to mend old fences, he could have started with Don.

“Matt, you okay?” Jake asked when he'd been quiet too long.

“I'm fine, bud. Just thinking of how wonderful this is. How blessed I am to be here.”

Hank met his look across the table. Read his mind. Matt saw it in a tiny flash of satisfaction that crinkled Hank's gaze.

He'd messed up by leaving Don out of this equation. But because Don was staying in town for the winter, Matt could find some way to fix it.