Page 88 of The Formation of Us

From the minute he and Faith were married yesterday, Cora called him daddy, but each time he heard the word from her sweet little mouth, it melted him.

“No, princess.”

“What about a dog?”

Adam lifted his head as if someone had just handed him a silver dollar. “Are we getting a dog?”

Faith laughed. “No, Adam. And before you ask, we don’t need a dog.”

His expression fell and he turned back to his book.

Duke thought of Boyd’s crazy dog Sailor and knew Adam would love a mutt like that. But he wasn’t talking about pets on his first night of being a family man.

Cora slid off the sofa and leaned against his knee. “Will you tell me a story?”

He glanced at Faith, but her smile said she wasn’t about to bail him out of his new duty “Sorry, Cora, I don’t know any.”

“Just make up something,” Adam said, his eyes glued to his book. “She won’t care.”

Make up something? Duke had spent so many years teaching himself to be precise, accurate, and truthful, he couldn’t begin to concoct a tale. But Cora’s hopeful stare melted him. Gads, he couldn’t fail at his first test as a father. “All right,” he began, summoning his nerve. He would tell her a true story. “One winter when I was a boy we had a huge storm that buried everything in snow.”

“What kind of snow?”

“Um, the white, fluffy kind,” he said, seeing Faith hide a smile behind her hand. “My brothers and I spent the morning shoveling out the entrance to the barn. When we finished, we decided we could slide off the roof and land in the huge snowbank we built.”

Cora’s eyes goggled. “Was it scary on the roof?”

“Not really,” he said. “My brothers and I climbed trees much higher than our barn.”

Adam closed his book and sat up to listen. “Did you go off the roof?”

“All afternoon. We hit that pile so many times it half crumbled. Kyle gouged a path through it, and before long, we had a long, icy slide. My brother Boyd got this crazy idea about riding our toboggan off the roof. He said we’d slide down the shingles, hit the snowbank, shoot through the grooved path, and sail clear across the yard.”

Adam’s eyes lit with excitement. “Did you do it?”

“Unfortunately, yes.”

Faith winced. “You didn’t.”

“Radford warned us not to. Kyle said we were crazy But Boyd made it sound like such an adventure, I had to try. We got the sled clear to the roof peak, but when I jumped on, my weight jerked the sled out of Boyd’s hands. He was supposed to ride with me, but I streaked down the roof alone and shot into the air like a lightning bolt.”

“Dang! How far did you get?” Adam asked.

“Too far. I overshot the snowbank and landed in the shoveled driveway. I broke my arm, and when my parents found out what we were up to, we all got a strap laid across our backsides.”

Faith arched an eyebrow at Adam. “So the moral, young man, is that you don’t climb onto the roof.”

“Sorry, wrong story,” Duke said. This job as father was more complicated than he thought.

“You’re fine,” Faith said, “but I know a certain young man who might be impressed and tempted to try something like that.”

He’s a boy, Duke wanted to say. Boys climb trees. They swing from wild grape vines to drop twenty feet into the gorge. It was the adventure and the thrill that drove them to be daring—or dumb. Duke didn’t know about girls, but Evelyn had done many of those same daring, albeit dumb, things with them. That wild sense of adventure, to him at least, had been the best part of his childhood.

Not that he wanted Adam jumping off a roof. But a boy was entitled to some adventure in life.

Faith chased the children upstairs to put on their nightclothes. Alone for the first time all evening, Duke stole a kiss from her, and she was so warm and willing, he wanted to carry her straight to their big bed and make love to her.

But that had to wait, because for the first time in his life, Duke helped his wife tuck their children in bed. Adam suffered Faith’s hug, then dove onto his new mattress. He sat on the coverlet in his nightshirt looking suddenly uncomfortable. “Um, I don’t know what to call you, Sir.”