Page 37 of SEAL’S Baby Surprise (Lanes #2)

Julia sticks her tongue out at me and flounces off the bed, making it bounce. Lee sucks in a tiny breath, so I know it hurt her. “I don’t like mostly no,” she says, going over to Richard. “I bet Uncle Richard will give me a horse.”

“Not until you know how to ride and take care of one,” Richard says. Then he looks over at me. “You got a live one here,” he says.

I sigh. Julia looks and is beginning to act a lot like Izzy.

Well, I’ll just have to try to parent better than Izzy’s parents did.

At least my friend is backing me up on this one.

“I know,” I say. “But horses are living creatures, and deserve proper care. Do you know anything about horses, Richard?”

As he shakes his head, Lee pipes up, “I do. There was one summer where I went to a horse ranch for troubled teens. It was the one boarding school I really enjoyed.”

Julia brightens at that. “So, can we get a horse?”

Lee shakes her head and says gently, “Your dad is right. The Beach wouldn’t be a good place for a horse, and I’m going to be kind of busy to help you take care of one.” She looks over at where Mimi Quinn has settled into a rocking chair with Al.

“Someday, then?” Julia persists.

“Someday, maybe,” Lee says. “We’ll have to see what happens.” And she leans into me. I hold her, savoring her warmth and the serene backup on my ruling that we are not getting a horse right now.

Julia sighs. Then she asks, “Can I have a merry-go-round? It has horses that don’t eat anything. And I could share it with Betty and Bobby.”

Richard laughs, I drop my face into my palm, and Pops Quinn says, “She’s got you there. Maybe you could even charge admission.”

I groan. “Julia . . .” I start.

The little imp laughs. “Just teasing, Daddy. Although, a merry-go-round would be really cool.”

Lee buries her face in my armpit. I can tell from the way she is shaking that she is laughing.

I sigh. In the heart of family, a man does not get respect. I voice my frustration. “I get no respect around here.”

Lee smiles up at me. “But we do love you.”

Julia zips back over to me. “I love you, Daddy. And I love Lee, and baby Al, and Aunt Kandis, and Uncle Richard, and Mimi and Pops Quinn, and Pops McKinney, and Artie . . .

I realize that while I love Lee, Julia, and Al the most, I love all those other people, too. Family, friends and neighbors . . . I am a rich man in ways that I never dreamed possible.

POST EPILOGUE: TEN YEARS LATER

Julia

I watch as Uncle Richard again reads the address from his phone. “I know this is where the GPS shows we should go,” he says. “I sure wish I knew why Andrew wants us to go through this stuff.”

My dad says, “Who knows? I sure don’t. Maybe I’d understand better if I’d ever met him.”

“We could go see him,” Mama Lee says. I call her Mama Lee because it makes her happy.

She isn’t my birth mama, but she’s been mom to me since I was six years old, and Daddy married her.

It’s kind of funny, because Al couldn’t say “Mama Lee” so he calls her “Momly”, even though at ten years old he can say it right.

Don’t get me wrong. I love my little brother, but he can be a real pain sometimes. Aunt Artie, who runs a free clinic, and Mother Hubbard, who has a cottage school, both say that being a real pain is perfectly normal for ten-year-old boys.

Mimi says that we owe it to him to teach him better. I just wish it wasn’t up to me to teach him, sometimes. Not always.

Daddy dotes on him, but still doesn’t let him get away with stuff. He dotes on me, too, and doesn’t let me get away with things, either.

Sometimes I wish he wasn’t so very dedicated to being fair. Especially since we have two younger sibs: Augusta, age eight and Thomas, age six.

We have cousins, too. Charlie, age fourteen (who is a bigger pain than my brother), Lettie, age eight, and Winnie, who is age six, like Thomas.

“There it is!” says Aunt Kandis, pointing at a neon sign that reads: Temperature Controlled Storage.

Uncle Richard pulls into the driveway, and goes into a little office building. He leaves the bus running — yeah, that’s right. A bus. It takes that to seat all of us. Anyway, he leaves it running so he can keep the air conditioner on.

He comes back, then follows an attendant on a motor scooter down into a maze of units with roll-up doors, and then through a maze of more units that have regular doors. Then he arrives at one, gets off his scooter, and unlocks the door for us.

We all pile out into the August southern California heat. Then we go inside the unit. It’s not just cool in there, it is almost cold.

Inside, it is stuffed with boxes. There doesn’t seem to be any order to them.

But in just a few minutes, a car drives up outside. Caleb, Uncle Richard’s “fixer” and Andrea, his secretary, walk in. Andrea is carrying a tablet in her hand, and she goes along the box stacks.

“If what he sent is correct,” she says, “This should be the one.”

Andrea is about a hundred years older than God, and she’s super efficient. She’s been Uncle Richard’s secretary since before he and Aunt Kandis were married.

If there’s anything to know about the family, she probably knows it because she was Grandpa Lane’s secretary before she was Uncle Richard’s.

Grandpa and Grandma Lane are dead. They drowned when the cruise ship they were on sank off the coast of Africa. They had been visiting Uncle Andrew, who has been in Africa as part of a medical missionary team since about forever.

Now, Uncle Andrew has sent a text to Uncle Richard saying that he should look for Grandpa and Grandma Lane’s personal effects that are stored in this big place.

Farther on, past the boxes, I can see that there is furniture, recreational stuff, like golf clubs, and that kind of thing.

“Where do you think those papers might be?” Richard asks Andrea.

She shrugs. “Honestly, I have no idea. I know that your father went a little ancestor-mad about the time that Rylie was about six years old, and that was when he started insisting that she be placed in boarding schools.”

“I wondered about that,” Richard said. “Neither Andrew or I went to boarding school. Or at least not until we were in our teens and Dad got this bee in his bonnet about sending us to West Point. I remember the high old temper tantrum he threw when he learned that we had to be at least seventeen.”

“So what did he do?” my dad, Austin, asks.

“Sent us to military prep schools,” Richard replies.

“We got shuffled around a lot because Dad would be upset by some school policy or other that didn’t fit his idea of what we should be doing or learning.

It doesn’t make for a real stable lifestyle, so by the time I hit NYU, I was pretty much of a real .

. .” he pauses, looking around at the assortment of young ears who would overhear his words, “idiot.”

“You weren’t quite that bad,” my dad says. “But you weren’t real focused. You were a great drinking buddy, though. We could always absolutely count on you to stick with us, no matter what kind of mess we got into. Even though the lot of us nearly got expelled a time or two.”

“Really?” Charlie asks, his eyes getting big.

“Really,” Uncle Richard says. “Son, this is a real serious case of do as I say and not as I did. Your Uncle Austin and I, and our roomies could cut a real swath through town on Saturday nights. It’s a wonder we didn’t get into worse trouble than we did.”

“I do recall having to pay for broken property several times,” Andrea says.

“And I had to bail them out a couple of times,” Caleb adds. “But the real truth is, they never got into all that much. And once Richard and Austin got on the sports team, they cleaned up their act considerably.”

“Had to,” my dad says. “Otherwise, we’d have gotten kicked off the team. It was probably our saving grace.”

“So what are we looking for?” Mama Lee asks.

“The family tree our dad put together,” Uncle Richard says. “According to the email I got from Andrew, there’s something in it that we need to check on. As far as I know, our family records start when we got off the boat in New York.”

“So we’ve got a million boxes to go through, and no real idea what we’re looking for?” Mama Lee says, looking at the mountain of packing cartons.

“That’s about the size of it,” Uncle Richard says.

“It’s not quite that bad,” Andrea says. “We know that all those materials were in your father’s office when we packed it up. So we shouldn’t need to go through everything.”

The parental units (I won’t call them adults or grown-ups—immaturity reigns with that bunch) find a table and start unpacking boxes.

Most of the stuff is bound ledger sheets. Some of it is old computer disks. Some of them are even, get this now, antique floppy disks. And when they say “floppy” they mean floppy! How could anyone figure you could permanently store anything on those?

The younger kids and I get bored with all the dusty papers and go off to see if we can find anything more interesting.

There’s old dressers, with drawers filled with costume jewelry. One big trunk contains toys that you can wind up with a key.

I find a set of living room furniture where the chairs and tables make a kind of little alcove. I’m tired of my sibs and cousins, so I slide into it. It is dim and a little dusty in there. But it is quiet. I can hear the other kids rampaging around.

A coffee table is sort of standing on end in it. There’s a drawer in the table that should have been long and flat. but with the table standing up, it makes more like one of those pantry drawer things where you can pull it out and find all the spices.

I tug on the drawer. It slides right out, and inside it is a hand-tooled photo album, kind of like the ones Aunt Kandis uses to keep family pictures in.

I open it up. It’s got some really old photographs in the front. Then, farther over it has pictures of Grandma and Grandpa Lane. I recognize them from the framed pictures Uncle Richard has in his house.