When Love Comes Home. Arlene James

he’d declared, and he wasn’t going back after the first of the year. Paige had quietly but firmly refuted that, which had sent him slamming into his room.

      Their counselor, Dr. Evangeline, had strongly recommended public school for Vaughn. Paige’s first impulse had been to hold him out until the start of the new semester, giving them a chance to get to know one another again, but Dr. Evangeline had insisted that Vaughn needed the socialization, needed to find replacements for the buddies he’d left behind in South Carolina. When the doctor had pointed out that because of state attendance standards, keeping him home those three weeks between Thanksgiving and Christmas vacations could cause him to be left behind a year, Paige had been convinced.

      She constantly fought the impulse to hold him close and never let go again, so it had been difficult to take him down on the Wednesday after Thanksgiving and enroll him in the Nobb Middle School, which was part of the large, wealthy Bentonville district. He’d hated it from day one.

      He hated Dr. Evangeline, too, a fact he’d made known during their first joint session with her. It hadn’t been pretty. Since then he’d repeatedly said that a “guy” would do better, understand more, “actually listen, maybe.”

      Paige worried that Vaughn had a problem with women in general, starting with her. He not only disdained the psychologist to the point of rudeness, he disliked his female teachers—though the lone male in the group hardly fared any better—complained that the husband of the couple who taught his mixed Sunday school class deferred too often to his wife, and made sure that Paige knew how far short she fell of the Nolan ideal in parenting, running a household and everything else.

      In short Vaughn hated everything and everyone in Arkansas, including her. Maybe most especially her. Those sentiments had grown darker and more vocal over time, especially since Dr. Evangeline had suggested that Vaughn should not be allowed contact with his father at least until he settled into his mother’s household again. That, more than anything else, had enraged Vaughn.

      Now Paige no longer knew what the right thing to do was. She only knew that her son resented not being allowed to call his father and that it was just one item on a very lengthy list.

      Matthias limped into the living room, his cane thumping pronouncedly on the hardwood floor with every step. The weather had turned sunny and mild, but his arthritis had not noticeably improved. That had nothing to do with the frown on his weathered face, though.

      “It ain’t my habit to give advice unasked,” he announced, “but I’m makin’ an exception here and now.”

      Resignation weighing heavily on her, Paige crossed her legs, denim whispering against denim. “Go ahead. Say it.”

      “It’s time to tie a knot in that boy’s tail.”

      “And how would you suggest I do that, Matthias? Take a belt to him?” They both knew that was out of the question.

      “Stop letting him walk all over you. Ever since he’s been here you’ve bent over backwards trying to please, but the world just ain’t ordered to his liking. We know who he’s got to thank for that, even if he don’t. Maybe it’s time he was told.”

      She shook her head. “I don’t think it’s wise to run down his father to him. That’s Nolan’s game, and it’s bound to backfire. It’s bad enough that Vaughn’s life has been turned completely upside down without me trying to turn him against his dad.”

      “He can be glad it ain’t up to me,” Matthias mumbled, heading back into the kitchen where she had a pot of stew bubbling on the stove and corn bread baking in a cast-iron skillet. “I’d show him upside down.”

      Paige closed her eyes and fought the bleakness of despair with the only tool she had. Lord, help me do what’s best for my boy, she prayed silently. Show me what needs to be done and give me the strength and patience to do it. Help him understand how much I love him, how much You love him, and thank You for bringing him home to me.

      She could only trust that one day Vaughn would be thankful, as well.

      “Happy New Year.”

      “Hmm?” Grady turned away from the window, a cup of coffee in hand to find his brother standing in their father’s kitchen, grinning.

      “What’d you and the old man do last night, party until the wee hours?”

      Grady snorted. “Hardly. I might have been the youngest one here, but I went to bed as soon as the ball dropped in New York.”

      “Party pooper,” Howard groused, coming into his kitchen with one arm draped around his daughter-in-law’s shoulders. “Look what Katie brought us.”

      She slipped free of Howard and carried the enameled pot with its glass lid in sight of Grady before placing it on the range.

      “Spaghetti?” Grady noted, surprised.

      Katie turned her dentist-perfect smile on him. “You’re not superstitious, are you, Grady?” Katie asked.

      “Black-eyed peas are just more traditional.”

      She scrunched up her nose. “Never could stand them.”

      Grady shrugged, wondering if Paige Ellis would serve black-eyed peas on New Year’s Day. He immediately regretted the thought. She should have been out of his head long ago. But at odd moments like this, she suddenly sprang to mind. He couldn’t imagine why.

      After the long debriefing he’d had with his brother on the Monday after Thanksgiving, Grady had refrained from asking Dan if he’d heard from her. Other than being pestered more than once by Janet to submit his billing report and expenses from the trip to South Carolina, the case had not been mentioned again except in passing. Grady couldn’t help wondering what the last six weeks had been like for Paige, though.

      Had the boy come around? Was he walking the woods that surrounded her old house with that dog at his heels, pretending at some childish fantasy? Did he gaze at his mother with worshipful eyes now and grimace halfheartedly at the way she babied him? Had he made friends with Matthias?

      “Where on earth are you?” his father’s voice asked.

      Grady realized with a jolt that the conversation had carried on around him. He shook his head, gulped his coffee and said that he needed a good rest in his own bed tonight. He couldn’t for the life of him remember why he’d started sleeping over at his dad’s on New Year’s Eve, anyway. Except, of course, that he never had anywhere else to go, and Howard always claimed to need help with the party he routinely gave. He’d started doing that about the time Grady had gotten divorced.

      They were a matched pair, Grady and his father, despite the thirty years between them, both big and square-built with deep, rumbling voices and hands and feet the size of platters. Both alone.

      “Do you know what your problem is?” Howard asked, and Grady just barely managed not to roll his eyes.

      “Here it comes,” he groaned.

      He didn’t really resent his father’s lectures. His father’s concern for him was a good thing. They had never discussed those difficult early years after his mother’s death when the distance between them had seemed to stretch into infinity. But it was after his divorce, that he’d discovered how firmly his father was in his corner.

      “Your problem,” Harold said, ignoring Grady’s irreverence, “is that you spend too much time alone.”

      “And you don’t?”

      “That’s different.”

      “I’ve been alone four years, Dad. How about you? More like thirty-four, isn’t it?”

      “Thirty-three. But I’ve had my family. When are you going to start one, Grady?”

      “As soon as some woman throws a rope around him and drags him back to the altar,” Katie said drolly.

      “That’s pretty much what the last one did,” Dan noted.