Jamie helps you to make up your mind,” she told Dan. Her tone, warm and friendly, left no room for argument.
Still, Dan felt he had to at least offer a protest. “I can’t impose.”
“Family never imposes,” Jamie insisted. “End of discussion. You’re staying,” he said with finality. Then he got back to his initial question. “So where have you been all this time?”
That was simple enough to answer. “The last ten years I’ve been in Colorado.”
“Colorado?” Jamie repeated. “I can’t picture you in Colorado.”
Dan understood where Jamie was coming from on that. Colorado brought up images of big cities and he was a country boy at heart.
“I’ve been booking dude ranch vacations for city dwellers who fancy themselves cowboys,” Dan told his brother and Fallon. “It’s not a bad living,” he was quick to add. “And I get to spend most of my time on horseback.”
“Now, that I can picture,” Jamie told him. “You said you’ve been in Colorado for the last ten years, but you’ve been gone from Rust Creek Falls for twelve. Where did you go before then?”
“Cheyenne,” Dan answered. “I worked as a ranch hand there—along with Luke and Bailey. But they didn’t much care for it,” he confessed with a sad smile. “They got restless and then, one night, they just took off.” He paused, trying to deal with an unexpected wave of sadness that washed over him. Suppressing a sigh, he told Jamie, “I haven’t seen them since.”
Fallon leaned forward and put her hand up on her brother-in-law’s shoulder. “We’ll find them,” she promised.
“Isn’t she amazing?” Jamie asked him. There was pride in his eyes. “She just keeps spreading optimism wherever she goes, no matter what.”
A light pink hue rose to Fallon’s cheeks as she pointedly ignored her husband’s compliment. Rerouting the conversation again, she asked Dan, “Would you like to meet our kids?”
He could think of nothing that he would like better. “I’d love to,” Dan responded.
“Then come this way. You can come too, Jamie,” she added playfully, as if it was an afterthought. “Now, brace yourself,” she told Dan. “These are not your typical year-and-a-half-old babies. They could use Jared, Henry and Kate in caffeine commercials,” she confided.
“By the way, Kate’s the one with a bow on her head,” Jamie told him as they walked to the bedroom that the triplets occupied when they were downstairs.
He explained that the official nursery was upstairs, but because they wanted the triplets near them as much as possible, they’d created a second room for the babies downstairs where they could take their naps.
“She had such short hair,” Jamie explained, “everyone thought I had three sons. After a while, I got tired of telling them that Kate was a girl, so I put a bow on her to set them straight.”
“Now her hair is finally growing in,” Fallon told him as she led the way into the back room. “Which is a good thing, because she keeps pulling that bow off.”
Dan couldn’t hold back the smile when he stepped into the room and saw the triplets. The two boys were both on their feet, their chubby little fingers grabbing the side of their playpen and shaking it. Dan had a feeling that the playpen’s life expectancy was in serious jeopardy of being severely shortened.
The third triplet was seated on her well-padded bottom, serenely playing with a floppy-eared stuffed bunny, seemingly totally oblivious to the commotion her brothers were creating.
Beaming with unabashed pride, Jamie introduced his triplets.
“Dan, I’d like you to meet Henry and Jared,” he said, indicating the two standing boys. “And this little sweetheart is Kate. Kids,” Jamie said to his triplets, “this is your uncle Danny. Can you say ‘Hi’ to him?” he prompted.
An uneven chorus of something that could be thought to pass for “Hi!” rose up following Jamie’s request.
“They talk?” Dan asked, his voice a mixture of surprise and envy. He knew next to nothing when it came to children and even less than that when it came to babies.
“Talk?” Jamie echoed, then said with a laugh, “They don’t stop talking. Not even in their sleep. Of course, most of the time it sounds like gibberish and I can’t understand what they’re saying, but they seem to be able to communicate with each other just fine.”
“That’s because twins and triplets have a language all their own,” Fallon told her husband.
Dan dropped to his knees beside the playpen to get closer to the three little people who had been instrumental in getting him to finally come home. Something stirred within him as he watched them for a moment.
“Hi, kids.”
Again he received an uneven chorus echoing the greeting. Kate pulled herself up to her feet and made her way over to him. She offered him a sunny smile and just like that, she took him prisoner.
Dan ran his hand along her silky hair. “She’s going to be a charmer,” he told Jamie.
“What do you mean ‘going to be’?” Jamie asked. “She already is one.”
“You’re right,” Dan laughed, unable to take his eyes off the little girl. “My mistake.”
* * *
Dan spent the next hour getting to know his brother’s children as well as his brother’s wife. It was the best hour he could remember spending in the last twelve years.
But then it was time to put the triplets down for a nap.
“I’m afraid you’re going to have to leave the room now,” Fallon told him, apologizing. “I’ll never get them down for their naps if you’re in eyesight.”
“I understand,” Dan said. He was already at the bedroom door, although he did pause for one last backward glance.
“They’re something else, aren’t they?” Jamie said with pride.
“They’re beautiful kids,” Dan agreed. And then he thought of the circumstances that Jamie had been forced to go through shortly after the triplets’ birth. “You must have had a really hard time coping right after Paula’s death,” Dan said with immense sympathy. Again, he fervently wished he could have been there for Jamie.
“It was hard,” Jamie admitted. “But Fallon wasn’t kidding. It felt like the whole town pitched in to help. Otherwise, quite honestly, I don’t know what would have happened or what I would have done. When you have just two hands and three kids, the numbers aren’t exactly in your favor,” he told his brother, his words underscored with a good-natured laugh.
Dan had been under the impression that Fallon had really meant a few people at best. But there was no reason for Jamie to exaggerate. That hadn’t been in the nature of the boy he’d known.
“The whole town?” Dan asked in amazement, just to be sure.
“Yeah,
