know we were moving? Does he have a way of, I dunno, reaching us here?”
“Oh, honey.” Kenzie’s heart constricted into a tight fist. “I left a message at his last known phone number, but the person who lived there said she hadn’t seen your father in weeks.”
“Told you.” Using her thumb, Leslie crushed a corn chip on her plate. “If he cared about seeing us, or even hearing from us, he’d make it easier to find him.”
“You take that back!” Drew’s features contorted in fury, but beneath the youthful rage, he looked achingly vulnerable. Kenzie wanted to pull him into her lap for the hug she knew he wouldn’t accept. “Dad does care.”
Leslie rolled her eyes. “You really are a dummy.”
“Leslie Nicole! You can apologize to your brother or go to your room.”
The girl stood, her posture defiant.
“Les…” Far from sounding angry now, Drew’s tone was imploring. He wanted her to share his belief that their father loved and missed them and would make more time when he finally “hit it big.” Drew was the one who still allowed himself to hope, and Kenzie thought that was why he was always the angriest when Mick let them down.
Leslie tried to feign indifference. When the subject came up, she informed people that she didn’t miss her father and that they were better off without him. But Kenzie had heard Leslie sniffling behind closed doors after these declarations. Kenzie watched her daughter go now, wondering what was the best way to handle the situation. Which was more detrimental—verbally bashing her ex and disillusioning her kids, or allowing them fruitless hope?
“Dad will visit us again,” Drew maintained. “Eventually.”
They never knew when Mick would pop back into their lives. His sporadic phone calls usually came—at an inappropriate hour—from wherever his band was playing. Most years he managed to send small, truck-stop Christmas presents that his son treasured as if they were gold. Three times since the divorce was final he’d actually sent Kenzie cash. Mick Green wasn’t an evil man, but he was unreliable, inconsistent and suffered tunnel vision, keeping his eye on an unlikely prize and clinging to a fantasy of what he wanted to be when he grew up. Just as he hadn’t listened when she’d said the Jagger-nots might not be such a great name for his band, he’d resisted her suggestions over the years that maybe it was time to find a different way to earn a living. Preferably something that generated income.
Would it be best if he stopped contacting the kids altogether? Given the way Drew was looking at her now, his heart visible in his sapphire eyes, she couldn’t bring herself to ask Mick to do that.
“He could visit,” she finally conceded. “I think it’s unlikely we’ll see him soon, but you never know.”
Kenzie had never found time for another man in her life—not that there’d been a huge selection of age-appropriate bachelors in Raindrop. If she ever dated again, it would be a steady, predictable man with no creative aspirations. Someone she could depend on.
In the meantime, she’d just keep depending on herself.
Chapter Three
Though JT routinely lost track of time, his stomach always growled right on schedule at six on Friday. Enchilada night, or possibly taco casserole. His doorbell buzzed at exactly the expected hour—you could set a clock by Mrs. Sanchez—and he crumpled the drawing he’d been working on, tossing it in the general vicinity of an overflowing wastebasket. I should empty that. Mrs. Sanchez would bust his chops about the mess.
He opened the door of the apartment. Roberta Sanchez, who’d raised four children and was approaching double that in grandkids, lived below him with her husband, a MARTA bus driver. When she’d first heard that a widower had moved into Peachy Acres, she’d shown up with a covered pot of chicken tortilla soup. Food had followed every Friday since, with flan on his birthday.
“Buenas noches, Jonathan.” She marched toward his kitchen with a foil-wrapped glass pan.
“Nobody calls me that,” he reminded her.
Over her shoulder, she hitched a dark eyebrow. “Are you calling me a nobody?”
“Of course not.”
“Then shut up. Now be a good boy and find me a clean spoon, if such a thing exists here. No wonder you are uninspired to create beauty, living in such disorganization! Have you painted at all this week?”
He rummaged through a drawer. “You sound like Sean.”
“I sound nothing like that degenerate!” She sniffed. “You should have heard him flirting with my daughter Rosa in the elevator. It’s inappropriate, the things he says to a married woman.”
JT grinned inwardly, knowing full well that Mrs. Sanchez adored Sean, a feeling that was mutual even though Sean called her the Battle Ax.
She paused. “You’re not expecting him, are you? Maybe I should have brought more.”
He eyed the pan. “That would feed an entire dinner party. Is Enrique working the night shift? You could join me.”
“If you want me to join you, you should clean up this pit first.” Despite her words, she pulled two plates down from the cabinet. “I’ll stay. The good Lord knows my company is as close as you’ll get to a dinner party. You don’t want to be a hermit, Jonathan.”
“I’m doing my part to uphold the reclusive artist stereotype.”
“To qualify as an artist, shouldn’t you produce art of some kind?”
Touché. “Nag, nag, nag. It’s a wonder your children haven’t moved farther away.”
She sniffed again, not dignifying his jibe with a response.
The Sanchez family was the kind of close-knit group neither JT nor Holly had ever possessed. Holly would have loved Mrs. Sanchez; initially, that had been why he’d put up with the older woman’s intrusions. But she’d won him over with her drill-sergeant tone and twinkling dark eyes. She seemed to understand his loss without ever expressing the cloying pity that made him want to withdraw more. Plus her cooking was a little piece of pepper-laced heaven.
JT didn’t have a kitchen table, merely three padded, high-backed stools pushed up to the counter. He cleared away a pile of junk mail and an empty pizza box to make room for them to eat. Mrs. Sanchez pulled a carton of milk out of the refrigerator, opened it and immediately grimaced.
“Jonathan, this milk is older than some of my grandchildren.”
“An unfair comparison. You have grandkids born every ten minutes!” He said it lightly, but it was the Sanchez babies that had made him leave the rooftop Fourth of July picnic last month.
Roberta had browbeaten him into attending, but he hadn’t been able to bear it for long. Just as he hadn’t been able to bear the empty nursery in the house he’d shared with Holly. After all the work she’d put into it, wanting it to be perfect for their child, he couldn’t bring himself to paint over a single duck or bunny. The crib he’d assembled sat obscenely empty, and a month after he’d lost his cherished wife and the daughter he’d never had a chance to know, he’d bent over the railing and finally
