Mrs. Miracle (8 page)

T
he blue dress. No, the red one. Reba couldn’t decide. Both were festive, one in silk, the other in a lightweight wool. She’d tried on the two outfits at least a dozen times, those dresses and everything else inside her closet, including a couple of items left over from her college days.

This wasn’t an ordinary dinner date. This was an evening to be spent with Seth Webster. She closed her eyes and cradled her arms around her middle, breathing in deeply as she contemplated what was in store for her.

Disillusionment, no doubt, Reba decided. She’d set herself up for a major disappointment and knew it. Brad Pitt himself couldn’t live up to
the fantasy she’d created in her mind with Seth. He was her dream man. Why she’d picked him out of all the men she saw in the strip mall parking lot, she couldn’t even begin to guess. Theories had bounced around her mind all week, and she’d dissected and examined them until she couldn’t think straight any longer. She’d worried and stewed over this one date more than she had over her high school prom.

She wanted everything to be perfect: her dress, her hair, her…attitude. For one night, one short period of time, she longed to place the hurts of the past behind her, forget that the two people she’d loved most in the world had betrayed her. Forget that this one act had colored the way she’d looked at all relationships since.

For this one night she wanted to pretend her heart hadn’t been stricken. That she was footloose, carefree. That she was capable of dreaming again and having those dreams come true.

The doorbell chimed. Panic set in, and Reba glanced at her watch as her heart bounded to her throat like a bouncing basketball. It had to be Seth. Not so soon. Not already.

She calmed herself, then opened the front door and let him inside her home. If she’d gone to trouble to look her best—and she had—then Seth had, too. His hair was freshly cut, she noticed, and he’d donned a crisp-looking business suit.

“You didn’t say where we were dining,” she commented as he helped her on with her coat.

“I didn’t know,” he admitted, and chuckled. “I ended up getting a couple of suggestions from my housekeeper. She made the reservations. I hope you like Thai food. If not…”

“It’s my favorite.” It’d been months since she’d eaten at a Thai restaurant, and it sounded perfect. Perfect.

Although they were both a bit nervous at first, the uneasiness soon disappeared, and as Seth drove to the restaurant they chatted like longtime friends. Rarely had Reba felt more at ease with a man, especially one she barely knew.

“I understand you met the twins,” he commented. “My twins, Judd and Jason.”

“Wednesday night.” Her first night working with the children for the Christmas pageant.

“Jason’s actually glad to play the role of an angel.” The two boys struggled to be different from each other, seek their own identity.

Reba grinned. The six-year-old’s animated face had sprung to life with delight. “Judd wasn’t nearly as keen on the idea,” she said, hiding a smile. It’d been easy to read the first-grader’s thoughts. He’d wanted to play a Roman soldier and carry a spear and shield. Instead he’d be flapping a pair of aluminum wings and a tinsel-wrapped halo. To be fair, she didn’t blame the lad, but the older boys had dibs on the more masculine roles.

“He’s adjusting,” Seth assured her. He looked away from the road long enough to smile at her. “That’s quite a project you’ve taken on.”

She was only beginning to understand how large the task was going to be. “Practice went well, and several adults volunteered to lend a hand.”

“I’ll help too if you find you need it.”

“Thanks, I just might take you up on that.” The inside of the car was warm and cozy. Warm and intimate. Comfortable in a way that was foreign to her. Since breaking her engagement with John, Reba had felt uneasy with men. Oh, she’d dated, but she’d never allowed a relationship to grow serious. Generally, after a few times out, she found a convenient excuse to call it quits. Counseling probably would have helped her face her fears, but in seeking professional assistance, she’d have to confront far more than her reluctance to enter into another relationship. A trained professional would soon root out the heart of the matter, and she’d be forced to peel back the wound of betrayal and talk about what had happened with John and Vicki.

Reba couldn’t bear it. Not with a stranger. Not with anyone. She wanted to think it would be different with Seth, but it was too soon to know.

The restaurant was perfect. Romantic, exotic. Fun. They removed their shoes and were seated at a low-lying table, the seats padded with large satin pillows propped against the wall. The waitress, a beautiful, unbelievably small Asian woman, filled the gold-edged china cups with fragrant tea and left them to read over the menu.

“Everything looks wonderful.”

“I’m partial to anything with peanut sauce,” Seth said.

“Me too.”

Their eyes met and held, and some unfathomable emotion flickered between them, as though this one small detail were crammed with incredible meaning.

Reba discovered her appreciation of Thai food wasn’t the only thing they had in common. With every subject introduced they uncovered a link in one form or another. For years she had been a Seahawks fan. Seth loved football, too.

She adored Steve Martini courtroom dramas. Seth had devoured every one of his books and considered him as fine a writer as Grisham.

She collected stamps and had from the time she was in high school. Seth’s collection dated back to his grandfather.

Reba barely noticed when their food arrived. Although every bite was delicious, she found it to be something of a distraction. She could have talked to him all night.

“This is almost spooky,” she said as she piled steaming rice onto her plate. “The next thing I know you’re going to tell me that you play the piano as well.” She’d taken lessons for six years and loved to sit down even now and pound out her favorite songs.

“I do.” His eyes crinkled with silent laughter; then abruptly it faded. “Or I did at one time…
years ago. I haven’t touched a piano in quite some time.” This last bit was mumbled almost as if he didn’t want her to hear.

“It’s easy to get out of practice.”

“I haven’t played since Pam died.” He watched her as he spoke, as if he expected her to tell him it was pointless to deny himself that one small pleasure. She didn’t.

“People don’t understand why. Most people,” he amended.

“You don’t need to explain it to me.”

“I want to,” he said, his eyes solemn. “I suspect I need to.” His shoulders tightened as he leaned against the pillows, and he paused as though needing time to formulate his thoughts. “The piano was something we shared. Pamela loved to hear me play. She loved music. She’d lie down and close her eyes and…I can’t explain it, not with words. It sounds humdrum, almost silly. After I buried her, I couldn’t look at the piano any longer. Playing it again was intolerable, and soon after the funeral I sold it. Having it out of the house was a relief. Over time a lot of people have tried to convince me to play again. But I have no desire to do so.” His gaze held hers. “I suspect it sounds theatrical, perhaps a bit hysterical.”

“It doesn’t,” Reba rushed to tell him, wanting to assure him that his actions made sense, at least to her. She leaned forward and pressed her hand over his. “I understand, Seth.” And she did, more than he realized. More than he’d ever know. He’d
given up his music because that part of himself, this one fiber of his life, was interwoven with his memories of his young wife. To sit down and run his fingers over those ivory keys again would be reliving those times he’d treasured with Pamela. The joy he’d once experienced with music would now produce only pain.

“Thank you,” he whispered after an awkward moment. “For not lecturing me, for not attempting to reason with me. It’s been four years….”

Four years.
The rest of his words faded away. Another coincidence. Another irony. It’d been four years since she’d broken off her engagement with John, since she’d last talked to or had anything to do with her sister. Four long years.

The evening took a turn toward the somber following the discussion about music, but even that didn’t dim the sense of discovery she experienced.

Seth drove her home, and while they didn’t speak, the silence was warm and friendly. It was as though each one needed to absorb what had happened, absorb this second chance they’d been unexpectedly handed. Afraid to consider anything more than this one dinner together.

“I’ll see you Sunday at church, won’t I?” Seth asked as he walked her toward her front door.

“Of course. I’m going to sit in with the children during Sunday school. I’m a stranger to most of them, and my chances of a successful Christmas program will increase the sooner they’re more familiar with me.”

“Afterward…how about dinner with me and the boys? Mrs. Miracle is a fabulous cook.”

Reba was amused by the children’s pet name for the housekeeper. Mrs. Miracle. It felt as though a miracle had happened in her life already, just meeting Seth. She wondered if he’d kiss her and was amazed by how much she wanted him to.

The house was dark, the porch light dim, encouraging, and she longed for the feel of Seth’s arms. Hungered for the comfort she instinctively recognized she’d find in his embrace. When he did take her gently in his arms, she experienced that and much more.

Seth’s kiss was sweet and undemanding. Slowly, as though he wasn’t sure he was doing the right thing, his lips found hers. His touch was tentative, light yet tender and fierce all at once, as if he too were dealing with an abundance of frightening emotions. Exploring them, she suspected, was as scary for him as it was for her. Perhaps more so, since he’d been married.

When he lifted his head from hers, she sighed softly, then wrapped her arms around his middle and braced her forehead against his shoulder.

“I wasn’t sure if kissing you was the thing to do.”

“I’m glad you did,” she whispered.

“Me too.” He stroked her hair, his fingers tangling with the short curls. “You’ll come to the house after church? For dinner with me and the kids?”

“Yes.” Her voice was barely audible.

“Good.” He tilted her head upward to meet his descending mouth and kissed her again. Hunger mingled with gentleness, and this time they ended the contact with heady reluctance. Once more Reba hid her face in his shoulder and inhaled deeply, seeking to find her equilibrium.

“I’d better get back.”

She nodded. “Dinner was wonderful.”

“I thought so, too.” He retreated two steps.

She raised her hand and wiggled her fingertips. “Good night,” she said as though everything were normal when in fact it wasn’t. She wasn’t. Many years earlier, while visiting her grandmother in California, a six-year-old Reba had been awakened by a violent earthquake. The experience had been traumatic. She’d clung to her grandmother, shaken both emotionally and physically. One date with Seth and Reba felt six years old all over again.

All because of Seth’s kisses. She felt renewed. Reawakened. Alive. And frightened. Terribly frightened. So much so that she was trembling almost uncontrollably by the time she walked inside her home.

Not turning on the light, she moved into her living room and sank onto the sofa. The darkness closed in around her, hiding her, letting her hide. From what, she wasn’t sure. Herself. Her feelings. The future.

The future?

She wondered if she dared trust another man again. Expose herself to another bout of pain.

Gradually a smile came into place. Seth wouldn’t hurt her, not when he’d been so deeply hurt himself. Her heart was safe with Seth Webster. Of that she was confident. Safe and secure.

“D
addy, wake up!” Judd bounced onto Seth’s bed with all the energy of a Saint Bernard puppy.

Seth longed to bury his head beneath his pillow and possibly would have if Jason hadn’t hurled himself into the bed after his brother. Whatever chance he had of returning to sleep was forever lost. This was what he got for letting the kids crawl in bed with him on weekends.

“Is Miss Maxwell going to be our new mommy?”

“Ah…” Seth groaned. He needed coffee and a shower before facing an inquisition from his two children. The word “mommy” implied marriage,
and he wasn’t anywhere close to considering a step that drastic. Sure, he’d enjoyed Reba’s company, but that was a hell of a long way from taking the proverbial plunge into matrimony. The mere word put the fear of God into him.

“Mrs. Miracle showed us Mommy’s picture last night,” Jason announced.

Seth’s head reared back with shocked surprise. He didn’t keep out any pictures of Pamela. Like the piano, they’d all been removed and stored carefully in the attic. It’d been a rash thing to do, perhaps even unreasonable, but at the time it had seemed necessary.

One evening, several weeks after he’d sent the boys to live with their grandparents, Seth had gone on a rampage through the house, collecting every snapshot, every photograph, he could lay his hands on. His shoulders had shaken with emotion as he’d gathered them together. Sometime later he’d tucked them away in the storage space in the attic.

No longer would he be blindsided by the pain. It wasn’t until much later that Seth realized that out of sight didn’t mean out of mind. Pamela’s picture didn’t rest on the piano any longer, but she was with him. Every time he walked in the house she was there to greet him. To welcome him. To tell him she was pleased he was home. Not with words, naturally. But with memories.

After time, when the pain of losing her wasn’t
as sharp, he found comfort in those small remembrances. At his loneliest moments, he sat in the living room and wrapped them around himself the way one did a winter coat in the dead of a snowstorm. He closed his eyes and pretended.

Imagination was a powerful thing, and it didn’t take more than a small dose to conjure what his life would have been like had Pamela lived. Even with the solace he’d received from those visions, he’d never crawled back into the attic and retrieved the pictures.

“I’d almost forgotten what Mommy looked like,” Jason said, “until Mrs. Miracle gave me the photograph.”

“Which photograph?” Seth demanded, and Jason flinched with surprise. He didn’t mean to shout. His anger certainly wasn’t directed at them. The incident with
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe
was one thing, but Pamela’s picture was another in a long list of the unexplainable.

“The one in my room,” Jason answered. “I’ll get it.”

He was gone in an instant, flying off the bed with an agility and speed reserved for children. Before Seth could think to call him back, he returned, holding an eight-by-ten-inch frame against his chest.

“This one,” he announced breathlessly.

The photograph was of Pamela soon after the birth of the twins, the very one he’d loved the
most. Pamela radiantly happy, a newborn infant on each arm, smiling at him, smiling at the camera.

Seth was furious, so angry that he couldn’t speak.

“What’s wrong, Daddy?” Judd asked, cocking his head to get a better look at his father.

“I need to talk to Mrs. Merkle.”

“She’s in the kitchen.”

Seth climbed out of bed and reached for his robe. As he walked past Jason he took the picture frame out of his hands.

“Where’d you get this?” he demanded before he was all the way into the kitchen.

Mrs. Merkle was standing at the kitchen counter, stirring eggs. She looked up at him, her eyes wide. “I beg your pardon?”

“This photograph of my wife. Where’d you get it?”

“Oh, Mr. Webster, I do hope you don’t mind. The children were filled with questions about their mother. I assume it had something to do with you going out with Miss Maxwell and all.”

“Where did you get this picture?” he repeated between gritted teeth.

“Yes, well…” She hesitated and dried her hands on her apron. “I found it in the bookcase when I dusted the other morning. Someone had stuck it in between two volumes. Apparently it’s been there for some time. Of course I wasn’t sure it was your wife, but with the babies in her arms, I felt it must have been. Judd has her eyes.”

Seth’s gaze traveled to his son, and he recognized that what the older woman said was true. Judd’s dark brown eyes were the precise shape and color Pamela’s had been. Funny he’d never noticed that before.

“In the bookcase, you say?”

“I apologize if I did something I shouldn’t have.” She certainly looked contrite. “I bought the frame the other day. It seems to go rather nicely, don’t you think?”

Seth sighed. He hadn’t meant to make a federal case out of a silly thing like a photograph. Although he’d been in the bookcase himself more times than he could count, he could easily have overlooked the picture. Who was to know how it came to be there in the first place? Perhaps Pamela stuck it there herself. Perhaps he’d been the one to do it. Not that it mattered.

“Mommy had brown eyes like me, too, didn’t she?” Jason asked, looking at him expectantly.

“Yes, partner.”

“Will my new mommy?”

It was all Seth could do to keep from groaning aloud. He looked to Mrs. Merkle to rescue him, but she was back stirring eggs, humming softly to herself.

“Dad?” Judd pulled at his sleeve. “Will she?”

He squatted down so that his gaze was level with that of his children. “There isn’t going to be another mommy, kids.”

They both looked stunned. He might as well
have announced there was no such thing as Santa Claus from the shock he read in their expressive faces.

“But—”

“Mrs. Miracle said there would be.”

Irritated, Seth shot a glance toward his housekeeper, but she was busy with breakfast and either didn’t hear or was pretending not to. He wasn’t about to have the woman telling the children something like that. When he had a private moment, he’d mention it to her.

“I even drew my new mommy’s picture,” Judd told him. The lad raced out of the kitchen and was back a few moments later with a crayon drawing. Seth barely glanced at it and wouldn’t have given it a second’s notice if it wasn’t for two small matters. The woman Judd pictured had short curly hair and was wearing a shiny red dress.

Reba’s hair was short and curly and she’d been wearing a bright red dress. Coincidence. Pure coincidence.

“She’s real pretty, isn’t she?” Judd asked, proud of his efforts.

“She sure is,” Seth muttered with no real enthusiasm.

“You like Miss Maxwell, don’t you?” This came from Jason.

“Yes,” he admitted, “but that doesn’t mean I’m going to marry her.”

Both of his children had that same woebegone look of bitter disappointment. “You’ll look for a new mommy, won’t you?”

“Look for someone with brown eyes and curly hair and a red dress,” Judd advised, and waved the picture under his nose once more.

Seth was saved from having to answer when the housekeeper called them to the table.

He bided his time and waited until after breakfast before he confronted Mrs. Merkle. It didn’t take a genius to figure out where the children were getting the notion that he was about to remarry, and he wouldn’t have it.

“Do you have a moment?” he asked her as he carried the dirty dishes from the table to the sink.

“Of course.”

Ill at ease, and disliking confrontation, he hesitated. “I was wondering if you’d said anything to the children about me remarrying.”

She didn’t answer him right away, which was an answer in itself. “I don’t mean to complain,” he continued. “The kids call you Mrs. Miracle, and frankly, I’ve come to think of you that way. I don’t know what we would have done without you, but I’d prefer it if you didn’t fill the children’s heads with this talk about another mother.”

“So you don’t plan to remarry?” She looked as disappointed as the children.

“No,” he returned emphatically.

If his words discouraged her, it didn’t last long. Her eyes rounded with a hint of mischief. “Not ever, Mr. Webster? Forever is a long, long time.”

“Not ever,” he assured her, raising his voice slightly.

She laughed once, shortly, as if his answer had amused her and she wasn’t able to contain it. “Time will tell, won’t it?”

“Time most certainly will.” He turned and stalked out of the kitchen and into the garage. He opened his car door before he realized he still had on his pajamas and robe. Not to mention that this was Saturday morning.

Mrs. Merkle left the house an hour later, and Seth was alone with the children. Although he was grateful to have a housekeeper, he couldn’t help being curious about Emily Merkle. She certainly had a way about her. She’d taken his restless, spirited children under her wing and within a matter of days had made a marked difference in their behavior and attitude. Not once since her arrival had he received a call from the school or a note from their teacher.

He found it curious, however, the way she’d arrived, without notice. It was almost as if she’d descended from the clouds, using an umbrella as a parachute. Not that she resembled Mary Poppins. No, he definitely viewed her as a Mother Goose.

Once he’d showered and shaved, Seth moved into his den. It certainly wouldn’t hurt to contact the employment agency and make a few inquiries
about her. It wouldn’t hurt to check on her references, either.

Luckily the agency was staffed on Saturdays.

“Hello, this is Seth Webster,” he said when Mrs. Ackerman, the agency owner, answered herself.

“Oh, Mr. Webster, I’m so very sorry. I can’t imagine what you must think of me.”

“Mrs. Ackerman?” Seth couldn’t fathom why she should apologize.

“Yes, yes, I realize that you’ve been waiting several weeks to hear back from me. I can’t imagine how you’ve managed all this time.”

“I don’t believe I understand.”

“A housekeeper. You do still need one, don’t you?”

“Ah…” Seth was too stunned to respond.

“I want you to know that I’ve made inquiries each and every day, but a full-time housekeeper, willing to live in and care for two small children, why, they’re few and far between these days.”

“But—”

“Not to mention the fact that you’ve gone through every domestic I have in short order.”

“What about Emily Merkle?” he asked. “Didn’t you send her?”

“Emily Merkle.”

He could hear the rustle of papers in the background. “We don’t have anyone by that name listed here. Let me check the computer data file.”

He waited a moment. The sound of fingers typ
ing against the computer keys echoed over the telephone line.

“I’m afraid we don’t have anyone by that name listed with the agency. Are you sure her name is Merkle?”

“Yes.” All of a sudden Seth was sure of nothing.

Exactly who was this woman who’d insinuated herself into his and the children’s lives?