No Place I'd Rather Be

  “The girls came to live with Annabelle, their grandma and my friend, about two weeks before I arrived in Portland. Annabelle said they had bruises, flea bites, cigarette burns, and scars on their fingers, face, and bottoms when they arrived at her place. I noticed they were way too skinny, and later Annabelle told me that they were two years behind in weight and height from where they should have been.”

  “That makes me sick.” Jace put his sandwich down and closed his eyes for a minute, his face drawn and tight. That man had a gangster face but a compassionate heart.

  “Me too.”

  “That’s a brutal childhood. Addicts for parents. Neglect and abuse. Mother and father in jail, and their grandma dies.”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m glad they have you.”

  “I’m glad I have them. I’m sure it was a surprise to hear that I have children.”

  “It was. I see your mother and grandma now and then. They didn’t say anything. Or your sister.”

  “Martindale Cowgirl Clan secrets,” I joked. But it was true. The Martindales stuck together. “I love them so much and I’m hoping to formally adopt them.” If I won custody. If I didn’t, which I didn’t even want to talk about, I would be crushed to the ground and would not be able to get up and live my life, because I wouldn’t be able to breathe.

  “Didn’t your being married come up with Children’s Services, with the state, when they were reviewing your request to adopt?”

  “Yes, it did.”

  “And they didn’t ask what your husband thought of it? What I thought of adopting two girls? What I thought of becoming a father to two girls?”

  My husband.

  My smart husband, my calm and reserved husband, my husband who was warm and snuggly and seductive in bed who I could hardly sleep without. Yes, the husband in front of me.

  “Olivia? You all right?”

  No. Not at all. I am not all right.

  “Olivia?”

  I need to buck up. “I’ve only been able to file a motion to adopt, but I can’t adopt because the parents’ rights haven’t been terminated, they might never be, and they haven’t signed over their rights. I was the person closest to the girls, and I wanted to take care of them, so they came to live with me. I had to get written permission from the courts, through my attorney, to come here. But in that process I told Children’s Services we were separated and would divorce.”

  He flinched, then covered it up. “I don’t like that word, babe.”

  I didn’t know what to say, so I sat there in that heavy and sad silence.

  “Even though their parents are addicts, Olivia, and were living with their young daughters with other addicts, and the girls were malnourished and too skinny and had rat and flea bites, they might go back to living with their mother when she’s out of jail?”

  “It’s ridiculous, I know. But the courts heavily favor the biological parents, almost regardless of circumstance. The father won’t get out in time to be a father to the girls—they’ll be teenagers when he’s released—but the mother will be out. She could get out of jail, go to parenting classes, stay clean, not get into trouble, find a job and a home, and then the girls could go back to her, despite how bad of a mother she was to them in the past.

  “When Annabelle wrote her will, she included a letter asking that I be the girls’ guardian, even though she had had only temporary legal custody. She knew her request in the will wasn’t legally binding—she had custody only when her daughter was in jail—but she wrote it anyhow, to be clear about where she thought the girls should go, in case it was ever needed in court. She couldn’t give the girls to me—they weren’t legally hers, though she wanted to. There are no other relatives on the mother’s or father’s side able to take them.” I sniffled and wiped my eyes with shaky hands. I am scared to death I will lose those girls to their loser mother.

  Jace put a warm hand on the side of my face and brushed my tears away. I closed my eyes and more tears fell out. I thought my heart would shatter at his touch. Crack, break, crumble. This was the pain and the love I’d run away from, all the way to Portland. This was the pain I could not handle. This was what made me feel like I was losing my mind. I had barely gotten a smidgen of my confidence back in Portland, gotten myself back, and now I could feel myself sliding back into Jace and our impossible, wrenching problem.

  If confidence was a bottle of cinnamon, I had one shake of it.

  “You are the smartest, most giving, toughest woman I have ever met.”

  I wanted to turn my face into his palm. I wanted to look up and have his mouth come down on mine. I wanted to be against that chest, warm and snug, and I wanted to hug him all night like I used to.

  Instead I pulled away and we were silent in that log cabin my grandparents built, with love, with a red door, as my grandma wanted, and a weather vane with a sun above us because grandma was the sun to my granddad. And here I was, in a broken marriage in their home, but Jace was still my sun. He would always be my sun.

  “Come back to work on the ranch, Olivia. Please.”

  “No.”

  “I need you there. I’ll give you space, I promise.” He put his palms up. “You’re the best chef in Montana.”

  “No.”

  “Why?”

  “Because, Jace.”

  “Because you like working for Larry?”

  Jace couldn’t stand Larry. “No.” I wrung my hands together. “Maybe we should talk about . . . about . . .” Could I even say it? It made me feel like splitting in half. “The divorce.”

  “The divorce?” His expression said he wanted to talk about a divorce about as much as he wanted to talk about leprosy on his cows. “No. I don’t want to talk about that at all.”

  “Okay.” Relief. Sweet relief rushed through me. He didn’t want to talk about divorce even after what I’d done to him! I smiled at him, couldn’t help it. I am a mass of confusing, confounding, crazy contradictions, I know this, I do.

  His dark gaze shifted toward the windows. My mother and grandma were dropping the girls off.

  My spirits lifted as they always did when I saw my sweet girls. “Do you want to say hello to them?”

  “Yes.”

  “They’re noisy,” I said.

  “I like noise.”

  “They say odd things sometimes.”

  “I like odd.”

  “They are blunt and honest.”

  “Always the best way to live.”

  “Now and then they’ll talk about their past. It comes from out of the blue. Most of the time it’s shocking.”

  “I had the shock of my life when you left me. I’m sure I can handle this shock, too.”

  The door flew open and my little tornadoes flew into the cabin. My mother and grandma pointed at Jace’s truck, then gave me the thumbs-up and drove to the farmhouse.

  “Are you a giant?” Stephi asked Jace while she twirled her parmesan spaghetti around her fork.

  “Yes.”

  Stephi gasped and put her fork down on my granddad’s table next to a few rocks from her rock collection. She had already shown Jace her rocks. He liked them. “You are?”

  “Yes.”

  “Wow.” Stephi whispered, awed. “I’ve never met a giant before.”

  “He’s not a real giant,” Lucy said, the older sister who knew everything. She narrowed her eyes, unsure. Jace was extremely tall. “Are you?”

  “I’m a real giant.” Jace’s hands were clasped in front of him. My! What those hands used to do to me in bed. “My last name is Giant.”

  “It is?” Lucy and Stephi said at the same time. Not surprisingly, they didn’t remember his last name from the night of the blizzard.

  He nodded. “I eat all day long to get stronger, but none of the stuff I eat is as delicious as what your aunt Olivia makes me.”

  “Yep! Aunt Olivia is super-duper at cooking,” Lucy said. “She makes the best brownies. Extra chocolate chips in them.” She pointed her finger up to make her
point. “That’s the secret. She tells us the secrets, to me and Stephi, because we keep her cooking secrets and don’t tell anyone.”

  “And another secret is,” Stephi said, “when she makes lasagna she makes her own red sauce with tomatoes and a lot of spices and that’s why it’s extra yummy in my tummy tum tum, and when she makes pancakes she puts in a cup of buttermilk. That’s another secret that we don’t tell anyone.”

  I could tell Jace was trying not to laugh as Lucy and Stephi proclaimed themselves to be such super secret keepers.

  “And she makes the best banana bread in the world,” Stephi said. “She cooks with love. She puts love in our food, that’s why it tastes so good.” Stephi said this in all seriousness. “It’s the love.”

  “If you cook with love, food tastes better,” Lucy said.

  “I agree,” Jace said. “Your aunt is the best cook in the state of Montana because of the love she puts in her food.”

  “Yep,” Stephi said. “She’s delicious!” She put her fork in the air and waved it around, the spaghetti flailing.

  “Mr. Giant, can you wrestle a cow?” Lucy asked.

  “Yes,” Jace said. “If she’s agreeable to it.”

  I tried not to laugh.

  “What do you mean?” Lucy asked.

  “If the cow wants to wrestle, I’ll wrestle it. But first she has to ask.”

  “How does she ask you?” Stephi asked, eyes wide, leaning across the table toward him.

  “She says, ‘Mr. Giant, do you want to wrestle?’ and I say, ‘Yes, I do.’ Then we wrestle.”

  “Who wins?” Stephi asked.

  “Usually me. Unless she’s an extra-large cow.”

  The girls stared at him, mouths gaping. Then Lucy giggled. Stephi did, too, finally. “You don’t wrestle cows!”

  He arched his eyebrows as in, “Maybe I do, maybe I don’t.”

  “Do you?” Stephi said.

  “I can catch bat monsters, too.”

  “What’s that?” Stephi and Lucy said at the same time. “What’s a bat monster?”

  So Jace, right in front of me, created this scary story about how there are bat monsters living in the trees. Bats with green monster faces. It was like a bat monster ghost story. The girls loved it so much, they stopped eating their parmesan spaghetti, hanging on his every word.

  “And then—” Jace abruptly raised his hands in the air, quick, like wings taking flight. Both girls startled and semi-screamed. “Those brave girls chased the bat monsters out of the woods forever.”

  “Wow,” Lucy said, panting. “That was scary! Those girls had a lot of bravery in them.”

  “That was a fright story, that’s what I call it,” Stephi whispered, clutching her rocks, still with the bat monsters. “It gave me a fright. I think I peed my pants a little bit but that’s okay, right Jace?”

  “You bet. Sometimes that happens to all of us.”

  I stood up and went to the kitchen so the girls wouldn’t see me cracking up.

  And that’s how the afternoon went. The four of us. As if we were a family, when I knew we weren’t. In fact, I didn’t even know if I’d be the girls’ mother at this time next year, which would take away the family’s children, and the father would go home to his house and eventually we’d have to sign divorce papers and end this misery in which we had an unsolvable problem.

  I swallowed all those fearsome, bone-rattling thoughts down, then brought everyone a plate full of peanut butter chocolate chip cookies.

  “See?” Lucy slid out of her chair and stood close to Jace, holding the cookie in her hand. “Aunt Olivia cooked this with love. You want a bite?” She held the cookie out toward his mouth.

  Jace winked at me.

  Seductive cowboy gangster would be an excellent cowboy gangster daddy.

  * * *

  I waved at Jace from the deck when he left, the girls beside me. They scampered back inside and I walked down the drive, then stood staring at the log cabin, the red door, the wagon wheel, the lasso, my grandparents’ cowboy hats, and the sun weather vane. They had been through so much, those two, especially my grandma. My grandparents were brave and strong.

  I needed some of that bravery, that strength. I needed to find them within myself. At the moment, it felt like my bravery and strength were hiding and cowering behind my kidneys.

  * * *

  I chopped wood on Saturday for our fireplace. I got up on the roof and replaced six more shingles on Sunday afternoon. I saw a bear in the distance and got my shotgun out. It was too early for him to be out. It was still winter, moving toward spring, but still. What in the heck? I would never try to hit or kill a bear, unless it was barreling down at me, but I don’t need bears on our property, especially with my girls around. I put two shots pretty close to him and he turned and lumbered off, back into the woods.

  Later that night the girls and I watched a Disney movie. I’ve watched it so many times with them I know all the words to the songs. The girls and I sang together.

  It’s another form of torture to go to bed and have all the Disney songs rattling around in your head when you try to sleep.

  * * *

  “Grandma Gisela, I have a question for you,” Lucy said Tuesday night at a family dinner. My grandma was kneading bread on the kitchen island in the farmhouse. Lucy was on a stool, as was Stephi. The stools had wrought iron steel backs in the shapes of cowboy hats. The girls looked pretty cute up there, as they had both decided to wear their faux raccoon hats. “Aunt Olivia is mine and Stephi’s mommy now, and Grandma Mary Beth is our grandma and you are our great-grandma, but who is your mommy and who is your grandma?”

  My mother, Chloe, Kyle, and I all stopped what we were doing.

  Kyle said, “Interesting. Out of respect for Mother and her threat to ‘box my butt,’ her words, not mine, I have refrained from asking the same queries. It’s curious that you have not been told the same thing, Lucy.” He took out his Questions Notebook and started writing.

  At the same time, Chloe said, “Holy cow and horses.”

  My mother put a hand on her mother’s hand, then said to Stephi and Lucy, “Let me tell you about the long-term effects of diabetes and amputated limbs—”

  I said, “Lucy, honey, we don’t talk about that—”

  Surprisingly, shockingly, my grandma said, “Lucy, that’s a smart question to ask. My mother’s name was Esther Gobenko, my grandmother’s name was Ida Zaslavsky, my great-grandmother’s name was Sarrah Tolstonog, and her mother was Tsilia Bezkrovny.”

  Stunned silence from my mother, whose mouth dropped. Chloe said, “I’ll be danged.” Kyle scribbled something in his Questions Notebook, then looked up. “What are their birthdays?”

  “My mother’s birthday was December 2, 1899. Her mother, Ida’s, was May 16, 1880. Sarrah was born in 1857 and Tsilia in 1836, but I don’t remember the months.”

  “I like those names,” Lucy said, adjusting her raccoon hat as it fell over her eyes. “My favorite name is Ida.”

  “They are beautiful names,” my grandma said. “They were beautiful women.”

  “What happened to them?” Stephi asked.

  “Let’s talk about that land mine another time,” my mother said. “Let me tell you what can cause arteries to clog.”

  “Lucy, Stephi—” I said.

  My grandma stopped all of us, an elegant hand raised. “It’s all right. Perhaps it’s time.” She blinked rapidly. “Yes. Perhaps it is.”

  “It is?” Chloe asked.

  “Are you sure, Mom?” my mother asked.

  “Yes.” My grandma kept kneading the bread, flour covering her hands. “I used to make bread with my mother and my grandma.”

  “Like we’re doing with you!” Stephi said, smiling.

  “Exactly.”

  “So what happened to them?” Lucy asked.

  “All of them are dead. They died a long time ago.”

  “That’s sad,” Lucy said. She reached over and patted my grandma’s hand. “I?
??m sorry, Grandma Gisela.”

  “You mean they died like Grandma Annabelle?” Stephi said, her chin quivering.

  “Yes, but they died in different ways,” Grandma said. “Some of my relatives died when they were very old.”

  Lucy’s brow furrowed. “Did some die when they were very young?”

  My grandma’s face paled around her cheeks. “Yes. Some died when they were young.”

  “Oh no!” Stephi said, and burst into tears. “Here. Have a rock, Grandma!”

  “I’m sorry, Grandma Gisela!” Lucy said.

  “I was sorry, too.” She thanked Stephi for the rock, then pushed the dough down again.

  “How did it happen?” Lucy asked.

  Whew. We all stared at my grandma. She had kept this part of her life secret for so long. Decades. Would she talk? Would she say what we always thought had happened to her family? Were we right? Were we wrong?

  “A very bad man decided that he did not like my family or millions of other families. Many more millions of people agreed with him.”

  And we were right. I didn’t want to be right. None of us wanted to be right on this one.

  “Why did he not like you, Grandma Gisela?” Stephi asked, squishing a finger into the dough.

  My grandma paused. “Because we’re Jewish.”

  My mother was not surprised, neither were my sister and I. We know history. We knew she was German. But it still felt like being kicked in the teeth. She was Jewish. Her family was Jewish. And they were nowhere to be found.

  “What’s Jewish?” Stephi said.

  “It’s like our friends Benjamin and Gabriel back home,” Lucy said. “They’re Jewish. It means you get to have all this food at dinner on Friday night, with twisted-up bread, and blessings and singing, and they don’t eat bacon, and you have eight candles on a candlestick, and it means the boys wear a little black hat.”

  “Judaism,” Kyle said, then went into a lengthy and complete description. “If you are Jewish, Grandma Gisela, and Granddad Oliver wasn’t, that makes Grandma half Jewish. It makes my mother one-quarter Jewish. I am one-eighth Jewish. This is news to be proud of. Many excellent scientists and artists were, and are, Jewish.”