She rolled her eyes but grabbed them and carried them toward the house. She rang the doorbell when Ryan was still only halfway up the sidewalk. As he walked up the steps, his leg aching with every movement, the door opened. His father stood silhouetted in the doorway.
“Audrey, my dear,” he exclaimed. “What a nice surprise.”
“Hi, Grandpa. Look who’s here! Uncle Ryan!”
His father looked up and some hint of emotion Ryan couldn’t identity flashed across his features but disappeared quickly.
“Son. Good to see you.” Doug smiled and held out a hand. After a pause, Ryan reached out and shook it briefly.
“How’s Diane?” he asked. While his relationship with hisfather was strained, he was fond of his stepmother. She was as warm and friendly as Doug was stiff and remote.
“Better but still in a great deal of pain. She’s being stubborn about taking her meds on a schedule.”
He could relate. He was the same. He rarely wanted to take more than the occasional ibuprofen now, even when he had a bad day, and hadn’t been thrilled at round after round of antibiotics.
“Is she up for visitors?” he asked.
“She will love it,” his father assured him. “She’s in the family room. We were watching a movie. Come through.”
Ryan scanned his memory but couldn’t remember a single time his father had relaxed enough to settle into the family room and watch a show with them.
Maybe he had blocked it out, though. Douglas hadn’t always been working. He could remember his father coming to the occasional soccer game or swimming together with the whole family at the base recreation center.
Ryan freely acknowledged that most of his memories of his father were tinged with bitterness for the hard, emotionless automaton he had become after Laura’s death.
The family room was spacious yet cozy, with a wide flat screen TV above a gas fireplace, plump, comfortable-looking furniture and floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the lake.
In a deep leather recliner, his stepmother stretched out with her leg up on a pillow. She looked as elegant and lovely as ever, though she had a wide bandage across her forehead and another across one cheek.
Still, she smiled when they walked into the room. “Oh, what a lovely surprise,” she exclaimed, her voice warm with welcome. “Hello!”
“Hi, Grandma Di.” Audrey leaned over and hugged her grandmother, careful of her arm in the sling.
Diane hugged her back with unfeigned affection. Whenever he talked to his stepmother, Ryan was struck by how different she was from the colonel. Warm where he was rigid, gentle where he was forceful.
Oddly, she reminded him of his own mother, whom he remembered as always laughing and smiling, even as cancer slowly stole away her life.
It baffled Ryan how a man as cheerless and cold as Doug somehow managed to convince two bright, bubbly women to marry him.
“These are for you,” Audrey said.
“More flowers? They’re beautiful. I would have known they were from Evergreen and Ivy without even looking at the card. Holly Moore does lovely work. Thank you so much.”
“They’re really from Uncle Ryan. I just helped him pick them out.”
Diane smiled at him. “Thank you. Doug, dear, will you set them on the table over there, where I can admire them?”
As his father stepped forward to take the flowers over to join several other arrangements on the table, Ryan leaned forward to kiss his stepmother’s unbandaged cheek.
“How are you?”
She made a face. “I’m fine. This is all a bunch of fuss over nothing.”
“It’s not nothing,” Doug said with a grunt. “You have a broken leg and a broken arm.”
“But other than that, I’m having a great week,” she said, grinning at Audrey and Ryan.
When his father married her a decade earlier, Ryan had been prepared to dislike her. Diane made that impossible.
