Page 42 of Love Walked In
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Mari
Uniform houses in brick and stucco with black or white doors lined Jamie’s street.
Some had cars parked out front, others had prickly rosebushes standing sentry outside, but the lack of character made my teeth itch.
I found myself tugging on the bottom of my sweater as I walked, playing with my parka zipper.
Leo finally tugged my hand away from where I was pulling on a loose thread on my cuff. “Look at me?”
He was still the skinny man with black-and-silver hair and browline glasses that I’d met on the first day, his forehead furrowed with concern. But I hadn’t known there could be so much warmth in his brown eyes, how his full mouth could be gentle or devilish instead of tense or sullen.
“Remember, I have you,” he said softly, and I squeezed his hand, thanking him for that sweet protectiveness. I couldn’t imagine doing this walk by myself.
Finally we reached the address Jamie had texted me, a house that looked like all the others on the street… except for one thing. I smiled at the door painted pumpkin orange.
“See?” Leo said. “They believe in color, too. Ready?”
It was like there wasn’t enough oxygen in the world, but I was here now. “Ready.”
Bark! I heard first when Leo pressed the doorbell, then the skittering of claws on wood.
Graham opened the door, a huge smile on his face.
“Down, Rosie!” The yellow Labrador just barely obeyed, wriggling ecstatically.
“I’m sorry, she’s a bloody nuisance when she’s this excited.
” He reached out for me, and for a split second my muscles froze with wariness.
But then his face fell a little, and I remembered that he was my new favorite friend before he’d transformed into my half brother.
I stepped into him, and when his arms closed around me, I felt the same quiet click, a lonely puzzle piece inside me slotting into place.
After he and Leo slapped each other’s backs hello, he said, “Come through to the kitchen.”
We walked down a narrow hallway to a sunlit kitchen, battered maple cabinets and navy-and-white-checked tiles. Jamie and a very tall, slim woman with light blond hair turned from laying out mugs on a tray. “Bloody hell,” she blurted.
“Um, hi?” I said.
“I’m sorry, love, I have no manners,” she said, her voice as quick and bright as birdsong. “I’m Annika, your…” She paused when Jamie looked up at her pointedly, then shook her head. “Let’s say I’m Jamie’s wife for now. Graham’s mum, too.”
They were being so careful, and I felt another layer of my armor fall away. No one was comfortable with this, and someone had to take the first step into unknown territory. “That’s OK. I know this is weird. It’s really nice to meet you, though.”
She smiled hugely, relief written everywhere on her face.
“That’s good of you to say. We’ll muddle through, I think.
” A little laugh bubbled out of her. “I don’t know what Graham was playing at, being all secret squirrel.
I’d have known you were Jamie’s in a second.
” She turned to look at Jamie. “With her coloring, she looks a lot like your mum when she was young. Those pictures of her with the three of you she has in her sitting room, you know the ones with baby Keith? It’s just uncanny. ”
Jamie nodded and smiled. It was still surreal, noticing facial expressions on someone else that I’d seen in the mirror.
“Danny and Tim went out to get some cake,” Annika continued. “They’re so excited to meet you.”
Jamie rolled his eyes slightly. “As far as teenage boys are excited about anything.”
Over my shoulder I could feel Leo was hanging back a little; all of his attention was on me. I took his hand and said, “This is my…” Man, we were all having trouble naming things today, weren’t we? Leo was clearly holding his breath. “Boyfriend, Leo,” I finished.
“Ooh, hello,” Annika said, looking him up and down as she shook his hand. She glanced at me. “Well done .”
Leo adjusted his glasses and blushed a shade of peach I wanted to eat, and I grinned and said, “Thank you.”
“You two work together at the bookshop, then? Not that that’s a bad way to meet someone.” Annika looked at Jamie and raised her eyebrows lasciviously. “You see someone across the office and know that’s the only person you’ll ever want.”
Leo tensed next to me, and I felt my cheeks flush. I’d been free and independent so long, but I didn’t want to embarrass everyone by announcing that Leo wasn’t my forever, wasn’t even my next two weeks.
It was unavoidable, the stone-cold truth, and I wasn’t happy about it. Not at all.
“Is that what happened to you?” I asked Annika, putting more warmth into my voice. “You saw Jamie and you knew?”
Annika smiled. “That’s right. I was the new teacher, and Jamie was the one who showed me around our school. He was a proper grown-up, with his glasses and his broad shoulders and a sensible car.”
“Insofar as a twenty-seven-year-old is a grown-up,” Jamie said wryly.
“To a twenty-three-year-old, you were,” she said with a grin. “I’d been dating boys and I was ready for a man.”
“ Mum, ” Graham moaned into his hands. “They don’t need to know .”
Jamie flushed scarlet, but Annika cackled a little bit. “And he liked to play football and read poetry.” She pressed her hand to her chest. “Poetry! Who could resist that?”
My dad looked at his feet and rubbed the back of his neck. “I was a pretentious shortarse.”
Annika laughed. “You were gorgeous. Still are.” She turned back to me. “So we fell into each other, and Graham came along not long after that.”
“Make it stop,” Graham muttered.
She reached up and ruffled his hair. “Shush, be happy your parents still fancy the pants off each other after twenty-five years.”
It was like this happy scene was happening in a movie and all I could do was watch. But then I felt Leo’s hand in mine, a gentle squeeze. I was here, too. I could be part of this, if I wanted.
Just when it looked like Jamie was going to die of aw-shucks, the front door opened and closed with a slam, and heavy feet tromped toward us.
Two teenage boys appeared, the ones I’d seen on Graham’s phone.
One had his blond hair short and spiked, and the other had a sandy-brown mop that almost covered his eyes.
“Danny, Tim, this is Mari and her boyfriend, Leo,” Annika said.
“Hullo,” they chorused, and I smiled and said a soft “Hi.”
“What did you get, lads?” Graham reached out to grab Danny’s bag.
“Custard creams and a coffee and walnut cake,” Tim said.
“My favorites,” I said. “You guys have all these amazing baked goods that I didn’t grow up with.”
Graham grinned at me. “Cake’s a universal language, isn’t it?”
As the boys unpacked the goodies, Danny looked over his shoulder at me. “So you live in California?” he tried.
I nodded, maybe a little too enthusiastically. “I do, near San Francisco.”
“I want to move there, someday,” Tim suddenly said. “California.”
“Tim wants to be an actor,” Annika said, wrapping her arm around his shoulders. “He’s been the lead in the school play for the past three years.”
Tim jutted his chin out. “I’m going to be an actor. I want to go to RADA, not uni. And then I’ll go to LA and get on a TV show.”
“Manifest it,” I said without thinking and he grinned at me. “See,” he said to his mom. “ She knows.”
“You can study drama at uni, too,” Annika said in a tone that told me this hadn’t been the first or the tenth time she’d said it. “I don’t know how I ended up with such a willful child.”
Jamie caught my eye and rolled his, and I snorted involuntarily.
“Who do you support, then?” Danny asked. “For football?”
I blinked. “You mean soccer? I mean, Graham told me that I’m a Spurs supporter, whatever that means.”
“Noooooooo,” Leo groaned, while my brothers and father cheered. He wrapped his arm around my waist. “Sure I can’t convince you to support Arsenal instead?”
“She’s Spurs by blood, mate,” Graham said with a laugh. “You can’t have her.”
I raised my eyebrows at the boys’ possessiveness. “Don’t you get divided houses here?”
Leo squeezed gently. “I’m not saying you can’t support Spurs, but then I’d need to leave the house on North London derby days.”
I sobered as I realized he meant it, that he could imagine a future where we lived in the same place, where we’d share a TV and bicker over sports, of all the ridiculous things.
All of a sudden I felt like I stood on the border of an unknown country, looking through the gaps in a high fence at soft, green rolling hills under buttery, warm sunlight.
It wasn’t a fence I’d ever thought about climbing before, but for a split second I wanted to try, even if the barbed wire cut me open. “You say that like I should know what any of this means,” I said, trying to keep the worry out of my voice.
“You’ll learn,” Jamie said with a wide grin. “We’ll teach you.”
Except I wouldn’t, and they couldn’t. But I didn’t want to create a cloud over the warm haven we’d created.
Annika raised her hands and shooed us out. “All right, tea’s getting cold, everyone go to the sitting room and we can chat more there.”
I ended up talking to my brothers about fantasy novels, telling them about Susan Cooper, Tamora Pierce, S.
A. Chakraborty. I devoured a slice of coffee and walnut cake and sipped black tea.
All the while, Leo silently checked on me, a hand light on my back.
I felt my guard relaxing, sitting down, even letting itself slouch a little bit.
I could come back, I thought. This didn’t have to be the last time I saw them. I could save up for another flight, maybe next year. I’d have somewhere to return to that made me feel as warm and safe as the stacks at Orchard House.
The doorbell rang. Jamie looked at the door, then at Annika. “We weren’t expecting anyone else, were we?”
Tim put his hand up. “We saw Auntie Simi at the shops, and she asked who we were buying the cake for.”
Annika groaned into her hands. “And of course she called your gran.”
“Could we pretend not to be home?” Jamie asked hopefully.
She snorted. “That’ll hold up about as well as a chocolate teapot and you know it.” She turned to me, her face encouraging. “She’s a bit of a handful, but a nice lady, your gran. And she’d love to meet you.”
The doorbell rang again, and everyone was looking at me. It’d been a lot already. But if anything was going to exorcise the memory of my step-grandmother and her bitter lemon mouth, this was it. “The more the merrier, I guess.”
Jamie hopped up and disappeared. I heard the door opening, his “Hello, Mum.”
“Don’t you ‘Hello, Mum’ me,” an older woman’s voice with Jamie’s accent said. “Not after what you’ve been hiding. What did you get up to on that American adventure of yours, then?”
“I was a grown man,” Jamie protested. “I didn’t have to tell you everything.”
An indignant sniff. “Maybe you bloody well should have. Where is she? Where’s my granddaughter?”
Annika mouthed, I’m so sorry.
The living room door opened, and a woman with my face fast-forwarded fifty years bustled in, then stopped cold and stared at me. “Look at you!”
“Hi,” I said lamely, and Leo’s hand found my knee.
“I can’t believe you were going to keep her from me,” she said to Jamie. “She’s me .”
“We didn’t want to overwhelm her, Hazel,” Annika said firmly. “She only found out Jamie existed a week ago.”
Hazel reached out and squeezed my arm. “Rubbish. You’re not overwhelmed, are you, sweetheart? Not by your old gran.”
Jamie and Graham broadcasted a silent apology at me, but all I could do was shrug. “No, I’m fine.”
She put her hands on her hips. “Of course you are, you’re a Mackay woman and we Mackay women can take whatever the world throws at us. My God, it’s like looking in a mirror.” She reached out and touched my cheek, her face marveling. “I want to know every little thing about you.”
My mouth opened, closed, all my usual easy conversation up in smoke. I had no idea what to do with that. How much did she actually want to know anyway? Did she only want the sweet, sunshine part of me, or would she accept the darkness and the loneliness, too?
The doorbell rang again, and I heard rumbling male voices outside the window. Jamie looked at my grandmother. “Mum,” he said, the word full of admonishment. “What did you do?”
She blinked at him innocently. “Don’t you think your brothers deserve to meet their niece? The granddaughter I always wanted?”
I stiffened as the tiny living room filled up with men and boys.
It wasn’t just my uncles, Adam and Keith.
It was all their sons too, a whole pack ranging in age from six to sixteen.
I heard a cacophony of names, Sam-Joe-Mike-Luke-Charlie, eyes and hair in the full range of colors, but sharing my downturned eyes, my wide mouth.
“They’re a bunch of monkeys, but they’re already excited to have a girl cousin,” my grandmother said affectionately. “You can boss them around as much as you like.”
All of them wanted to talk to me, yelling over each other to ask me questions, and Rosie started barking again. I answered as many as I could, but I could feel the claustrophobia creeping up on me again, icy fingers squeezing my throat.