Texas Vows: A McCabe Family Saga. Cathy Thacker Gillen

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СКАЧАТЬ hands. As Kate suspected, it didn’t take her father long to get to the point.

      “I don’t want to hurt your feelings, honey, but this is the dumbest idea you’ve ever had.”

      Out of respect, Kate tried to not roll her eyes as she continued moving around her apartment, packing up a few of her things. “Thanks for being so supportive, Dad.”

      Mike sighed, lifting his burnt orange coach’s cap off his head and running his hand through his short salt-and-pepper hair. “You’re a professional woman,” Mike declared, replacing the cap low across his forehead, “not a domestic hire.”

      “Meaning what?” Kate interrupted, not about to let her dad talk her out of doing what she knew in her gut had to be done. “I can’t help out a friend?”

      Mike Marten looked at her steadily. “Sam’s not your friend.”

      Leave it to Dad to hit the nail on the head in two seconds flat, Kate thought. “Ellie was, when we were kids.”

      “But you rarely saw each other,” Mike pointed out.

      “Only because she was so much older than I was and she moved to Dallas after she married and then I went off to college. That doesn’t erase all the kindness she showed me both before and after Pete died.” At the mention of her brother, her father’s face turned to stone. “Is it really so wrong of me to want to return the kindness?”

      Silence fell between the three of them as Mike looked to Joyce for help. Joyce nervously wrung her hands together. There was nothing she hated more than family discord of any kind. She would do or say whatever she had to do to try to keep the peace. “I think what your father is trying to say, sweetheart, is that we don’t understand why you have to move in there in order to help Sam McCabe and his boys.”

      Even as Kate had rued telling her parents where she could be reached for the next few weeks, she’d known there had been no avoiding it. It would have been worse had they found out any other way, and in a town as small as Laramie, they would have found out. “There are a lot of reasons. Number one, the boys are too much for Sam to handle on his own. Kevin’s accident proved that.”

      “So let him hire a housekeeper,” Mike interrupted.

      “He’s hired ten,” Kate spouted back, beginning to resent her father’s protectiveness as much as she loved him as a parent and a man. “They’ve all quit within a matter of weeks.”

      “And what makes you think you’re going to do any better?” Mike demanded impatiently, peeling another antacid tablet off the role and popping it into his mouth.

      Kate grinned and offered her father a disarming smile. “The fact that I’m your daughter and you taught me to never be a quitter.”

      Mike’s brows knit together. “Don’t try to charm your way out of this, Kate. I have serious concerns here.”

      Kate sobered immediately. She sat on the edge of her bed. “So do I, Dad. Sam’s boys are in trouble.” So was Sam for that matter, but Kate figured it was best to not get into that just yet. One thing at a time, and Sam’s boys were first on the priority list.

      Mike shrugged, not unsympathetic to Sam’s plight, just more realistic—in his view, anyway. “So let ’em come to the hospital for your help like everyone else who can’t handle things on their own.”

      Kate ignored the faint hint of derision in her father’s voice. Mike, not only one of the premiere football coaches in the state with more state championship experience than anyone else in the Triple A division, was a staunch believer in survival-of-the-fittest theories. He approached every life situation as though it were a game to be strategized, played and won. In his view, there was no room for failure of any kind, and only the weak needed counseling. Unfortunately his “survivor strategies” very possibly cost Kate’s older brother his life, which was something her own family was still trying to come to grips with.

      “Sam doesn’t believe in any kind of therapy or grief counseling for the kids,” Kate said quietly, putting her own hurts aside.

      “Well, I can’t say I blame Sam there,” Mike Marten muttered.

      “Mike.” Joyce gasped.

      “Oh.” Mike looked sheepish. “You know what I mean.”

      Kate surely did. If her mom and dad had only believed in counseling, her brother might have talked out his feelings instead of acted them out. If only her parents had gotten help at the first sign of trouble with Pete, instead of trying to ignore his problems, maybe Pete wouldn’t have felt so misunderstood and behaved so recklessly. And maybe the three of them wouldn’t have suffered for years after Pete died. Knowing there was no way to change the past, only ways to deal with it honestly and openly and move on, Kate had eventually resolved her feelings about her family’s tragedy. She wasn’t sure her parents had yet, or ever would without the appropriate help, which they were determined not to get.

      Watching as Kate closed the suitcase containing her clothes Joyce said gently, “I know you feel like you owe John and Lilah McCabe a lot for helping you start your grief and crisis counseling program over at the hospital.”

      Not to mention what she owed Ellie, Kate thought, for all the times she had cried on Ellie’s shoulder the year after Pete died.

      “But can’t you just help them out in some other way?” Joyce continued.

      “Such as?” Kate asked impatiently, wishing her parents were not so difficult about this.

      “Maybe you and I could just act as general coordinators for them, to help get them through this emergency. We could enlist other women to cook dinner for them. Find someone else to clean the house on a regular basis. Teenagers to baby-sit the little one in Sam’s absence.”

      Kate wasn’t surprised by her mother’s suggestion. Joyce believed in community service, though she would avoid becoming too involved in anything that might turn out to be emotionally painful or difficult. Mike was the same way. Even when Kate’s brother had died, her mom and dad had simply toughed it out and expected her to do the same. They’d never talked about the accident, except to declare Pete innocent and apportion blame for Pete’s bad judgment on others. They’d never shown or talked about their feelings, or allowed Kate to do so with them, either. Grief, uncertainty, despair, angst, sadness were not allowed in her family. In her family you moved on, period. And you avoided like mad anything that might tempt you to do otherwise. In her family, you were part of the team or you had no place there. And Kate was perilously close to getting benched. At least temporarily.

      But she couldn’t worry about that. She had to concentrate on Sam’s boys. She had only to look at them to know they were suffering exactly the way she had suffered for years after Pete’s death. Everyone was telling them everything was going to be fine—when it wasn’t. Everyone was pretending things were fine—when they weren’t. If it continued, the boys would start to think the problem wasn’t the tragic situation they’d found themselves in, or their unresolved feelings about their mom’s death. They’d begin to believe there was something wrong with them because they weren’t dealing with their grief. They had enough to contend with, just losing their mother and their previously happy family life, without adding the burden of low self-esteem, anxiety and depression, too. Sam and his boys needed her and the help she could provide—whether they realized it or not. What they didn’t need was another temporary solution like her mother’s, which was no solution at all.

      “Assume СКАЧАТЬ