Unexpected Family. Molly O'Keefe

the housekeeper and cook. Mia and Lucy’s childhood hadn’t been unhappy, but it had never been secure. Not a moment had passed that they’d been unaware of their status. Every tie they had to this home and this land could be severed. And almost had been.

      That this was where Lucy chose to lick her wounds was even more strange. But beggars couldn’t be choosy. Broke didn’t even begin to describe her financial state.

      She parked beside her sister’s old pickup truck, rolled up the windows and turned off the engine. The quiet echoed and boomed like a heartbeat. Like the house was alive and waiting for her.

      Exhausted by the roller coaster of the night, she finally pulled herself out of the car and into the house through the side door. It was midnight and the house was silent.

      Mia and Jack were living a mile up the road, using the house Mia and Lucy grew up in—the little two-story that their mother, Sandra, had cared for so passionately—until their new house up in the high pastures was finished. Walter, Jack’s father, still occupied the ranch house. And for the past three weeks, Lucy and Sandra had been staying in the rear guest rooms of the house; they smelled like mothballs and had beds like hammocks.

      She unzipped her boots in the mudroom, stepped back and looked at her gray high-heeled Prada knockoffs next to the filthy work boots. She saw it as the perfect example of how she didn’t belong here. Had never belonged here.

      Just a little bit longer, she thought. Just until I formulate a plan. Get my feet under me.

      Through the dark she walked right to her mother’s bedroom and knocked softly on the door.

      “Mom?” she called, and she heard the bed creak.

      “Come in, Lucy,” her mother said, and Lucy walked into the small bedroom. Mom pushed herself up in bed, her black hair a cloud around her shoulders. The white of her nightgown glowed in the dark. “Are you okay, sweetheart?”

      Knowing she needed no special permission, she crawled into her mother’s bed, the warmth under the covers immediately banishing the chill of the evening.

      She curled up on her side and stared at her mother’s still-young face. They needed to find her a life. A man to take her dancing. A church group that would keep her young.

      “Fine,” Lucy whispered, and Sandra turned on her side, her hands under her chin, mirroring Lucy’s position.

      “It’s time for us to go home,” Sandra said.

      “What? Why?”

      “I thought it would be easier coming here,” she said. “But it’s difficult—”

      “Because of Walter?” Lucy practically spat the man’s name.

      “Not just Walter, he doesn’t help. This place used to be happy and now…now it is haunted.”

      “But Mia’s here—”

      “And married. Settled.” She blew out a long breath, looking at her hands. “There’s nothing for me to do here. No way for me to be useful.” Lucy could not understand her mother’s driving need to be needed.

      “But, Mom…” She grasped at straws, finally settling on the truth she hadn’t wanted to face in the five years they’d lived in Los Angeles. “You don’t like the city.”

      “That’s not true.”

      She gave her mother a wry look.

      “Well, I don’t like it here so much, either.” Sandra sat up. “There’s nothing for me to do here. I’m useless.”

      “You’re cooking—”

      “Cooking!” she cried, and then shook her head, as if biting her tongue.

      Lucy wrapped her fingers over her mother’s fist. Her father had died five years ago and, in the grand scheme of things, that wasn’t all that long. Sandra was still grieving.

      Yeah, Lucy thought, and you’re the ungrateful daughter keeping her someplace she doesn’t want to be.

      “What about your jewelry?” Sandra asked. “You’ve been gone three weeks—aren’t you needed back at your studio?”

      Her heart was a rock in her chest. Lying to her mother made her sick, but Lucy couldn’t give her mother more grief. Couldn’t give her a failure as a daughter. “I’m the boss, Mom. And I haven’t had a vacation in years. I’m…I’m burned out. I haven’t had a new design in months.”

      Sandra stroked back Lucy’s hair. “This is true. You work so hard. A few more days, then? And then we go back.”

      Lucy wished she was rich, and not for the first time. Wished that she could take her mom on vacation, whisk her away to Rome. But she was more than broke. And they couldn’t go back to Los Angeles, nor could they stay here much longer.

      Talk about limbo.

      Lucy forced herself to smile. “Sounds good.”

      “Sleep, sweetheart,” Sandra murmured, and Lucy let her eyelids shut, pretending to sleep so her mother wouldn’t worry.

      * * *

      LUCY STARTED AWAKE at the sound of her mother’s snores. Hard to believe, but Saint Sandra snored like a merchant marine. Her father had always joked about it, saying sleeping next to his wife was like being back in the navy—no one thought twice about it when they found him asleep on the couch. Chased out of his bed by his wife’s deviated septum.

      “Oh, man, Mom,” Lucy muttered, swinging her legs over the side of the bed. “We gotta get that fixed.”

      The moon in the window was so bright she could read her watch—3:00 a.m. It would be a battle getting to sleep again. She’d never needed a lot of sleep, but in the past year she’d flirted with insomnia. It was as if her brain was a giant hamster wheel, and every hamster in the world wanted a turn. She just couldn’t turn off her thoughts.

      She followed the moonlight that lay across the floor in big sheets, heading out the door of the room. But instead of going to her own room, she went to the kitchen. And to whatever dinner leftovers might be in the fridge.

      The carpet of the hallway changed to stone as she walked into the dining room and she rounded the counter that separated the kitchen from the eating area. Then she stopped dead in her tracks.

      Walter, owner of the Ranch and Mia’s father-in-law, sat on the floor in a puddle of moonlight, small orange pills scattered around him. His face unnaturally pale in the bone-white light.

      “Hey,” he said, trying to brace himself against the floor so he could move. But she could see he was in too much pain.

      “What happened?” she asked, crouching beside him. She smelled booze on his breath and she stood back up. “You’re drunk.”

      “I fell.” His hard face cracked into a grimace. “I think I hurt my leg.”

      His ankle, which jutted out from beneath the frayed edge of his light blue pajamas, was swollen and purple. Damn it, it had to be sprained and who the hell knew how long he’d been sitting here.

      “You fell because you’re drunk.”

      He sighed, looking down at his body as if it had betrayed him.

      “I dropped a pill and bent down to get it… . I just lost my balance.”

      “Because washing down Parkinson’s medication with whiskey improves balance?”

      “Could you…could you just get Jack? Or Mia?” he asked.

      Anger popped and pulsed inside of her. “No.” She went back into the mudroom and jammed her feet in her boots, then she grabbed the keys off the counter, calling Walter all the names under her breath that she was raised too well to say to his face. Stomping back into the kitchen she glared down at him.

      He stared down at his hands. Ashamed. Good.