PROLOGUE
TEN MONTHS AGO
“Take your backpack and put it by the front door so you can find it before the bus gets here in the morning, Adam, and then I need you to set the table,” I yelled as Adam tried to sneak past me and out the door so he could find his friends.
“It’s Heath’s turn tonight!” Adam argued. “The calendar says …”
“Boy, don’t tell me what the calendar says,” I warned him. “I told you to do it and if you’ll think back to the other day, you told Heath you’d take two of his days if he’d let you borrow his bike until we could go and get the new valve stem for yours.”
“Oh,” Adam grumbled as he walked over to the bar and picked up the stack of plates and utensils I had there waiting for him. “Yes, ma’am.”
“Are your brothers still upstairs?”
“Yeah,” Adam told me. “Heath is helping Joshua with his math homework. He’s stuck again.”
“Some people are math people and some people aren’t. You and Heath are the math people; Joshua and I, not so much.”
Adam laughed, “The last time you tried to help with our math homework, the teacher asked me nicely to tell you to please not do that again.”
“I wrote her a very nice note,” I grumbled.
“Ms. Brown,” Adam tried to imitate my voice and he wasn’t far off. “It doesn’t make any sense for the boys to answer the word questions you sent home. Who really needs 14 apples and if they have that many, why do they care how much more their tree is going to yield?”
“It’s true!” I laughed. “If they’ve already got 14, then they need to quit being greedy and bake a pie or something. God!”
“You’re so funny, Jamie,” Joshua, our youngest boy said as he walked into the kitchen. “My teacher asked me why there were dirty fingerprints all over that note you signed for me. She started chewing on me about washing my hands and I had to remind her that you’re a mechanic - it wasn’t my fingerprints all over the sheet.”
“Jamie always leaves smudges around the shop no matter how much she washes her hands. Hey, are we going to talk about our birthday party tonight?” Heath asked me as he pulled some paper towels off the roll, folded them like his dad liked them, and then handed them to Adam so he could put them on the table.
“Yes, we need to do that. Word has it that your dad might be home by then, so if we push the party out another week or so, he might be here for it. That will put it a week closer to Joshua’s. ”
“Awesome!” Heath yelled and fist bumped Joshua.
Adam had turned 14 the month before and his father had missed that party along with the one the year before since he had been on back-to-back deployments overseas. Wyatt had written him a letter and was even able to send a taped greeting to him that we played during the party, but Adam was still upset he had missed it. Somehow, Wyatt hadn’t made it to a single one of Adam’s birthdays in the last five years because he was overseas or on some other assignment every single time. I didn’t know how to help Adam get over his anger at his father about that. I hoped that someday he would appreciate his dad’s dedication to the army and understand why he’d missed so much.
Soon, it wouldn’t be an issue, I told myself. Wyatt and I had talked about it by phone a couple of times and I was hoping that he was thinking about getting out of the Army when his 10 years was up rather than re-upping and staying on active duty. He knew that I needed him to come home and help me raise his sons day to day in person rather than just giving me input through phone calls and letters.
Joshua and Heath were Irish twins and not just brothers, but the best of friends. In three weeks, Heath would turn 11 and three weeks after that, Joshua would be 12. The two of them handled their father’s absence much better than Adam did and I thought that might be because they had each other. They even chose to share a room even though we did have an extra room in the house one of them could use.
I shook off my wandering thoughts and pulled the casserole out of the oven and took it to the table. In minutes, everything was set, plates were filled, and I was settled in and ready to enjoy a nice dinner with my boys.
“I talked to Jill yesterday,” Adam told us as he passed the bowl of salad across the table to Heath. Heath turned his nose up at the greens, but put a decent amount on his plate anyway, which made me smile.
“How’s she doing?” I asked Adam.
Jill was the boys’ mom. She had left Wyatt and the boys when they were small: Adam was four, Heath was two, and Joshua was barely one. She didn’t really have a reason other than she felt like she needed to live her own life and she hadn’t been able to do that since she’d had married Wyatt and had Adam at 18.
Jill and I had become friends over the five years that Wyatt and I had been together, even though our friendship was rocky at first because she was convinced that Wyatt was going to ‘ruin another young girl’s life’. I didn’t see it that way and had loved Wyatt and his rowdy boys from the start. The boys took to me instantly and Wyatt loved me too, but he refused to marry me because of how bad Jill’s leaving had hurt him.
Even though I met Wyatt when I was 18 and we started dating when I was 19 and we were only 10 years apart in age, he was convinced that I needed the freedom to live my life and choose whether or not to stick around with him and his boys.
That had been one of the major sticking points in our relationship, one of the things that had caused the most arguments between us. The fact that I could live in his house and have custody to take care of his children during each of his deployments wasn’t enough to show him that I was in this for the long haul. I considered his kids to be my own even though there wasn’t much more than a 10-year age difference between Adam and me, I was the mother figure in their lives.
I was the one that bandaged their cuts, dried their tears, dealt with their daily schedules, and tucked them into bed every night. I was their mom, just not by blood. Or in name, but that was Wyatt’s decision, not mine.
“She said she’d be in town on business in a few weeks and wants to take us all out to dinner. She promised that it wouldn’t be another fancy place, so you won’t have to get all girly and dress up and we won’t have to wear ties.”
“That was a disaster,” I laughed. “I have never had a more uncomfortable meal in my life.”
“I never thought I’d see you in a dress,” Heath hooted. “It was weird.”
“Your mom really wanted to go to that restaurant, so I went out and bought myself a little black dress just for the occasion.”
“You looked pretty,” Adam smiled. Then he ruined that nice compliment by adding, “You didn’t even look like yourself.”
I wadded up my napkin and threw it at him, causing all three of the boys to laugh.
“How long will she be here this time?”
“A week or so,” Adam shrugged.
Jill was an independent contractor who worked with the army on their computer networking. She was a partner in a company that supplied equipment to each base that kept all their shared information in sync. She traveled extensively from one base to another as needed and came to visit her sons a few times a year.