okay, big guy.”
“Fa-Fa?” It was Jake’s name for his sister.
“She’s not feeling so good.”
Jake stood up in his crib. “Fa-Fa?” he called again.
Frannie answered, “Day!” She couldn’t make the j sound yet, and she tended to drop hard sounds at the ends of words, so the k got lost, too, and she called her twin Day. “Ow, ow, ow!”
“Shh.” Daniel soothed her. “It’s okay...” Gently, he laid his wailing daughter on the changing table. As she wiggled and whined, he took off her one-piece pajamas and her diaper. Meanwhile, Jake jumped up and down in his crib, calling out “Fa-Fa, Fa-Fa!” in frantic sympathy, followed by a bunch of nonsense words to which Frannie replied with nonsense of her own—well, maybe not nonsense to the two of them. They had their own language that only they understood.
Keely came back with the thermometer in one hand, a bottle of liquid Tylenol and a dosing syringe in the other. “We’ll probably need it,” she said, meaning the Tylenol. Chances were way too good she was right.
He held out his hand as Frannie continued to cry and squirm. Keely passed him the thermometer—and Jake let out a wail from his crib.
“I’ll get him,” she said. “Tylenol’s right here.” She set it on the shelf above the changing table and went to reassure Jake.
The thermometer registered 102 degrees. He put a fresh diaper on Frannie and dosed her with the Tylenol as Keely sat in the corner rocker, soothing the worried Jake.
Once he had Frannie back in her pajamas, he walked the floor with her until the Tylenol seemed to kick in. She went to sleep against his shoulder.
He kissed the top of her sweaty little head and glanced over to find Keely watching him.
She mouthed, Sleeping? At his nod, she nodded back, pointing at Jake, who was curled up against her, sound asleep, too.
It was only a few steps to Frannie’s crib. He carried her over there and slowly, gently, laid her down. She didn’t stir as he tucked the blanket in around her.
Across the room in the other crib, Keely was tucking Jake in, too. She turned off the lamp, and they tiptoed from the now-quiet room together.
“Psst. Maisey,” he whispered. The dog lurched to her feet and waddled out after them. Daniel closed the door. “Whew.”
Keely leaned back against the wall next to her bedroom and said hopefully, “Maybe they’ll sleep the rest of the night and Frannie will be all better in the morning.”
“Dreamer. And what rest of the night? It’s already morning, in case you didn’t notice.”
“Don’t go overboard looking on the bright side there, Daniel.” She glanced through the open door to her room and blew out her cheeks with a weary breath. “Sadly enough, though, you’re right. The clock by my bed says it’s almost five. Tonight is officially over.”
“Let’s hope we get lucky and they both sleep till, say, eight.”
“As if.” She laughed, a sort of whisper-laugh to go with their low, careful whisper of a conversation. The low light from the wall sconces struck red glints in her brown hair, and she looked sweet as a farm girl, barefoot in those flannel pajamas that were printed with ladybugs.
He thought of Grace suddenly, knew a stab of annoyance that kind of soured the companionable moment between him and Keely—and there it was again, that word: companionable. He’d felt companionable with his dead wife’s cousin twice in one night, and he didn’t know whether to feel good about that or not.
“What?” Keely asked. “Just say it.”
He went ahead and admitted what was bugging him. “Grace. She’s got one of the baby monitors in her room, so she had to hear what was happening. But she didn’t even come check to see if we needed her.”
“Yeah, she did. She came in the kids’ room before you. I knew she’d been out late and could use a little sleep, so I said I could handle it and sent her back to bed.”
He hung his head. “Go ahead. Say it. I’m a crap brother.”
Maisey chose that moment to get comfortable. She yawned hugely, stretched out on the floor and lowered her head to her paws with a soft doggy sigh.
Keely said, “You love Grace. She loves you. Ten years from now, you’ll wonder what you used to fight about.”
“Uh-uh. I’ll remember.”
“Maybe. But you’ll be totally over it.” Would he? He hoped so. She said, “When I was little, living with the band on my mother’s purple bus, I used to dream of a real house like this one, dream of having sisters and brothers. Family is hard, Daniel. But it’s worth it. And I think you know that it is.”
“Yeah,” he admitted. “You’re right.”
Family was everything. But that didn’t stop him from fantasizing about totally non-family-related things. Partying till dawn, maybe. A game of poker that went on till all hours, with a keg on tap and all the guys smoking stinky cigars, telling politically incorrect jokes. A one-night stand with a gorgeous woman he’d never met before and would never see again, a woman who only wanted to use him for hot sex.
Now there was a big as if. He’d been with one woman in his life and was perfectly happy about that—until the past few years anyway. He just wasn’t the kind of guy who went to bed with women he hardly knew. The one time he’d tried that, six months ago, he’d realized at the last possible moment that sex with a stranger just wasn’t for him. His sudden change of heart had not endeared him to the lady in question.
And Keely was watching him again, a hint of a smile on her full mouth.
“I’m going to work on thinking positive,” he promised her, because she did have a point about his negative attitude.
She gave a whisper-chuckle. “Anything is possible.”
He clicked his tongue at Maisey and she dragged herself up on her stubby legs again. “Night, Keely.” He turned for his room at the end of the hall.
“Night, Daniel,” she whispered after him.
* * *
When Keely woke up it was ten after eight Sunday morning and no one was crying. She put on her vintage chenille robe over her pajamas and looked across the hall.
Both cribs were empty.
Downstairs in the kitchen, she found two smiling cherubs eating cut-up pancakes off their high chair trays and both Daniel and Grace at the breakfast table, neither one scowling.
Yes. Life was good on this beautiful, foggy-as-usual Sunday morning in Valentine Bay. She poured herself coffee.
Grace said, “I’m here till two, Keely, so if you need to run errands, go for it.”
“Keewee!” crowed Jake, pounding on his tray.
