“I don’t think excitement is the word I’d choose.”
“Trouble in paradise?”
Kim ignored the barb and sighed. “Not exactly, it’s… oh, I don’t know. You know Nick doesn’t like change, and Jed… well, I don’t think he likesNickvery much. Things have been a little strained.”
Max refrained from pointing out that no one liked Nick very much. For reasons he’d never understand, Kim saw something in her husband no one else did. For better or worse, she loved him. Besides, he’d learned long ago that dissing him was more hassle than it was worth. “I meant to call you, actually. Jed came to see me a few days ago.”
“Yeah, he said.”
“Did he say if he was moving in or not?”
Kim hung a left. “No, but he doesn’t say much about anything. If he told anyone, it would probably be Tess. Those two are joined at the hip.”
“Really?” Max felt his eyebrows rise. Jed had seemed a cool enough guy, but he couldn’t imagine him having the patience for a kid like Tess. Even Flo didn’t have the energy to keep up with his hyperactive niece.
“Really,” Kim said. “He’s like Prozac for her or something. You know that jigsaw puzzle we’ve had half-finished for months? It’s all done. He actually got her to sit down and focus on something. I think he wanted some peace, but still. Can you believe that?”
Max couldn’t quite. He figured he’d have to see it to believe it. “What about Belle? How’s she taking to him?”
“That’s another thing,” Kim said. “I thought she’d be terrified of him, but she’s not. The sun’s barely up in the morning before she’s sneaking into his room.”
“Guess he doesn’t mind the early morning wake-up call, huh?”
Kim shot Max a sideways glance. “I don’t think he sleeps enough to care.”
“How do you know that?”
“I don’t. But he’s seemed out of sorts the past few days.”
Max held his tongue as Kim pulled into the driveway of the Cooper house. He didn’t know the details, but he knew Jed had suffered appalling injuries. Max’s short-term memory sometimes failed him, but he could recall the day Belle opened the door to two men from the Army like it was yesterday. Nick’s devastation at the news of his brother’s injuries had marked one of the rare times Max had ever considered him a fellow human being.
It hadn’t lasted. Nick left for Boston the next morning and returned a week later the same dislikable bastard he’d always been, but Max hadn’t forgotten Nick’s mysterious older brother. The military officials had been cagey about the circumstances surrounding his injuries. They’d only confirmed that Jed Cooper had been shot and caught in an explosion. Now that Max had a face for the name, he wasn’t sure he wanted to know the rest.
“You don’t have to worry about Jed, you know,” Kim said. “He doesn’t seem the type to get up in your face about things.”
Kim disappeared into the house without another word. Max rolled his eyes and got out of the car with a heavy sigh. A bundle of arms and legs collided with his body. “Hey, Tessie. How’re you doing? I’ve missed you.”
“Uncle Max! We missed you too. Come see, quick. We made Flo some doggie holiday biscuits. Come see, come see.”
Max scooped Tess up and perched her on his hip. “Hold your horses, kiddo. Let me get my stuff, okay?” He reached into the car and retrieved the packages of food he’d brought. “Bellabug, do you want to let Flo out for me?”
Tess giggled and wriggled in his arms. “Uncle Jed calls us little bugs. He says we have googly eyes.”
Max checked that Flo was shepherding Belle toward the front door and carried Tess inside. He set her down, shut the front door, and shifted the food he carried to his other arm. “Well, if Uncle Jed thinks so too, it must be true, right?”
It was a weak argument, but it didn’t seem to matter as the girls made a beeline for the garden. Flo spotted the tennis balls they retrieved from a basket by the patio door and bounded off after them.
Max made his way to the kitchen. Kim was at the counter, surrounded by a mountain of vegetables. She looked up and smiled as he took his place beside her. She didn’t enjoy cooking. Their mother had been a strong believer in child labor in the kitchen, something Kim had rebelled against in later years. These days, the Cooper house survived on convenience foods—a habit that made Max shudder—but Kim made an exception at Christmas and their relatively new tradition of Thanksgiving.
Max reached for a pile of yams and picked up a knife. “Where’s Nick?”
Kim shrugged. “Up in the office, I think. He had to take a call. Hey, can I ask you something?”
Max knew a deflection when he heard it—Nick always had something more important to do than spend time with his family—but he let it go. “Fire away.”
“Nick has a conference in Seattle next month. I was thinking of going with him. Could you watch the girls for me?”
“You want me to come and stay here for the night?” That was a new one. Max spent as much time with the girls as he could, but with his badly behaved brain to consider, his unsupervised responsibilities were limited to softball practice and walking them home from school with Carla and Flo for company.