“All doing well.” She saw no need to mention
Hayes’s unpleasant appearance at Shane’s door. “Good. And you? Are you okay?”
She looked down at the brace on her right leg. “I’m fine. Tell me about everything you’ve seen this week.”
Cassie laughed. “I couldn’t possibly do that in one phone call, but I’m taking lots of pictures.”
They chatted for a few more minutes, and then Cassie announced that she had to end the call. “I’ll see you Saturday, sweetheart. Your Daddy sends his love.”
“Give mine right back to him. And to you, too. Bye, Mom.”
She handed the receiver back to Kelly, who waited to replace it in the cradle so Molly wouldn’t have to get up. She wasn’t sure she had done a very good job of sounding entirely natural with her mother, but she was confident that she hadn’t let anything slip—about the party or the fact that since she’d last seen her parents, Molly had fallen head over heels in love.
In addition to the party, the entire family’s anniversary gift to Cassie and Jared was a new outdoor kitchen for the parties they were so fond of hosting. While most of the clan had donated financially to the cause, Shane and Memo had done the actual work, with help from the foster boys after school and on weekends.
The Walkers had always believed in the benefits of honest physical labor, Kyle reflected, wiping a film of sweat from his forehead. He and Shane had just wrestled a large, stainless steel, built-in grill into place, and now Kyle stood aside while Shane connected the gas lines.
It felt good to be useful. To be treated like an able-bodied man again. Shane cut him little slack, crediting him with enough sense to decide for himself how much he could comfortably handle.
Memo, a quiet, easygoing man who reminded Kyle a bit of his friend Mack, had left a while earlier to pick up the boys from school. While Shane finished connecting the grill, Kyle studied the kitchen, which was almost complete.
Protected from the elements by a slate-roofed, open-sided wooden structure, the kitchen consisted of a stainless steel sink, small refrigerator and the massive grill-rotisserie-gas burner unit they had just installed. Lights were strung overhead for evening entertaining, and a fire pit was surrounded by a Mexican tile floor that would hold a couple of café tables and several chairs. Certainly not enough seating for the crowd expected that weekend, but enough for smaller family dinners outdoors.
Shane had explained that Molly and Kelly would place big Mexican pots filled with hardy plants along the borders of the outdoor room. Future plans included a water garden with a small waterfall nearby, to add the soothing sounds of water to the backyard retreat.
“And more bird feeders,” Shane added, taking a step back to catch his breath and admire their handiwork. “Mom’s a nut for the birds.”
There were already several feeders and baths scattered around the yard. Kyle looked beyond the outdoor kitchen to the dormitory, the barn and the green pastures beyond. “I can see why you and Molly enjoy living here so much. It’s a great place.”
“A different view from what you see in the mountains, but this is pretty much paradise, as far as I’m concerned,” Shane murmured, his gaze following Kyle’s. “I know Dad feels the same way. This is exactly what he and I always wanted during the years we drifted around looking for a place to settle, before he met Cassie or reconnected with his brothers and sisters. I don’t know if you remember the story about Dad finding his siblings twenty-five year
s ago?”
Kyle frowned. “I remember hearing something about them all being separated as children, then coming back together years later. Your dad spent a lot of time in foster homes, himself, from what he told me.”
“He did. He was the eldest of seven kids who were separated when their parents died when Dad was eleven. My aunt Michelle was the one who brought them back together. She’d been adopted as a toddler and didn’t even remember her biological family, but she found out about them after her adoptive mother died. She hired Tony—whom she married shortly afterward—to find her siblings. He put his investigators to work, and within a couple of years, they’d located everyone except a brother who died years earlier, leaving one daughter, my cousin Brynn. The one who’s married to the orthopedic surgeon who’s going to look at Molly’s ankle.”
Following the story easily enough, Kyle nodded. “They’ve all become close since they were reunited. I remember seeing them all together at family barbecues here when I was in high school.” And envying the family bonds between them he’d never experienced for himself, he added mentally.
“They’re very close. You’d never know they weren’t raised together. But I guess that’s why they like to get together so often now—to make up for lost time. Michelle and Lindsey were the only ones adopted into new families. The others were all older, and remembered being together for a time. All of them spent a lot of years missing their family and searching for a place to call home.”
Kyle could empathize with the need to find a place to belong. That was exactly what he had faced as he’d lain in a hospital bed in Germany, his best friend dead, his military career at an abrupt end. He hadn’t had a clue where to turn—and then Mack McDooley had shown up at his bedside to assure him that he did have someplace to go.
It had touched Kyle immeasurably that Mack had gone to that effort, even in the depths of his own grief over the loss of his son. Knowing that Kyle had no family of his own, Mack and Jewel had taken him into their family, helping him find a place to live, patiently drawing him out of his depression, offering him hope for his future—much as Jared and Cassie had done a dozen years earlier.
For a guy who’d had his share of hard luck, he’d been extremely fortunate to have had the Walkers and the McDooleys in his life, he mused.
Speaking of boys who had been lucky enough to come into this family…
Kyle looked around as Memo Perez ushered the four foster boys out of the dormitory. “You got things for this crew to do, Shane?” Memo called out.
Shane grinned. “Always.”
As the boys groaned, Shane turned to Kyle. “Kyle, meet the gang. Jacob, Colin, Elias and Emilio.” He pointed to a gangly fifteen-ish redhead, a chubby towhead about the same age and a pair of dark-haired, dark-eyed boys who were obviously brothers, the older perhaps seventeen, the other five or six years younger. “Guys, meet Kyle Reeves. He lived here for a while when he was a teenager.”
“You was a foster kid?” the towhead, Colin, asked. Kyle nodded. “I was here for just over a year when
I was seventeen. I left after I finished high school.”