At some point, he had to fight back against the tyrannical hold Faith’s fears had over her. He figured forcing her to lose the training wheels was as good a place to start as any and had removed them a week earlier, much to her dismay.
“Hey, Dad! Look! Here I go!”
Carter, still a month away from six, rolled past on his two-wheeler like Lance freaking Armstrong—but without the steroid abuse.
Carter seemed on the other side of the spectrum from Faith, totally without fear. He had begged Brendan to take off his training wheels the previous fall and he had done it with a great deal of trepidation, certain a five-year-old didn’t have the balance or coordination yet. Training wheels existed for a reason, right?
At the same time, he had hoped maybe seeing Carter make the effort might spur Faith to try a little harder.
Instead, as she watched her brother master the bike in just an hour, Faith only seemed to cling tenaciously to her conviction that she wasn’t ready.
“You’re doing great, Car,” he called. “Keep going.”
“I loooove my bike,” Carter sang out at the top of his lungs in one of his spur-of-the-moment song compositions as he rode past. “I love love love my bike.”
He had to smile at the sheer exuberance Carter brought to everything he did. What would he have done the past two years without both of his kids?
Probably wandered into the wilderness and became a hermit or something, growing a four-foot-long beard and living off beef jerky.
“Riding bikes is awesome and cool. I want to ride my bike to school,” Carter sang.
Even Faith smiled at her little brother.
Brendan took that as an encouraging sign. “Okay, let’s try one more time.”
Her smile slid away. “I don’t want to. Please don’t make me, Daddy.”
“You can do it, Faith. You just have to believe in yourself,” he urged, feeling like the worst parent on earth for pushing her out of her comfort zone. On the other hand, wouldn’t catering to her unreasonable fears be more harmful in the long run?
“I don’t want to!” she protested.
“One more, that’s all. I promise. And then we can put the bikes away and go for a walk.”
“I want to ride a bike,” she said, with traces of her mother’s stubbornness—okay, and his, as well—in her voice. “I just want to ride a bike that still has training wheels. Why can’t you put them back on?”
If the kid spent as much time trying to focus on her balance as she did arguing about why she couldn’t, they would all be better off.
“One more time, Faith. Come on, kiddo. You’ve got this.”
She glared at him but apparently accepted that he wasn’t about to back down. With him holding on to the seat for balance, she started her wobbly way down the ride.
“Don’t let go,” she said. “Promise!”
He didn’t answer. Instead, when she seemed to have sufficient speed and had reduced the wobble, he enacted one of those difficult parental betrayals and released his hold on her.
She rode about six feet before she realized he wasn’t holding on anymore...and promptly fell over.
“Owwww,” she wailed, not quite crying but close to it. “You let go! You promised you wouldn’t let go!”
“I never promised I wouldn’t let go.”
“Yes, you did! You did!”
She wouldn’t listen to him in this state, and he wasn’t going to stand here arguing with her. Close to the end of his patience, he was about to tell her so when an unwelcome voice intruded.
“Wow, Faith! You’re riding a two-wheeler? That’s wonderful!”
Both of them turned around swiftly to find Lucy walking down the sidewalk toward them.
She looked lovely and bright and more casually dressed than he had seen her in a long time, in jeans and a plain green tailored cotton shirt that matched her eyes. With her hair pulled up into a loose hairstyle on top of her head, she looked pretty and sweet and far too young to have been the marketing director at a major software company until recently.
He was supposed to make arrangements with her to drop off a few things for Faith and Carter. He hadn’t precisely forgotten; he had just done his best to put it out of his head so he didn’t have to dwell on more thoughts of her that seemed to have intruded far too frequently since she returned to town.
“Aunt Lucy!” Faith exclaimed, her voice overflowing with joy.
Her father’s minor treachery forgotten, she jumped up from the toppled bike and raced to Lucy, throwing her arms around her waist with an exuberant delight he rarely saw in his quiet, serious oldest child.
Lucy closed her eyes as she returned Faith’s embrace with a soft expression on her features that brought a weird lump to his throat.
He and Lucy might not get along for a dozen different reasons, but he couldn’t deny that she loved his children.
“What are you doing here?” Faith burst out. “I didn’t even know you were coming! How long are you staying? Where are you staying? Will you be here for my baseball game next week?”
Lucy laughed at the barrage of questions hurled at her like a broken pitching machine spewing balls at the new batting cages in town.
“Whoa. Slow down. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you myself. I made a really quick decision to come back to Hope’s Crossing, and here I am. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you. I didn’t tell anybody. And I can’t tell you how long I’m staying but I think it will be at least a month.”
Faith’s eyes widened. “A month? Really?” she whispered in a reverent sort of voice, as if someone had just handed her all her dreams on a shiny platter. Which Lucy apparently had just done.
“Yes. I’ll be staying at Iris House. Just up the hill, right? I hope we have a chance to spend a lot of time together while I’m here.”
“We can! Oh, we can,” Faith said, at the same moment Carter came zooming past again on his bike.
Unlike his sister, Carter didn’t seem at all fazed to see his usually absent honorary aunt. He acted like it was no big deal to encounter her walking down the street.
“Lucy! Hey, Lucy! Look at me!”
“Wow, Carter! You’re doing great. Both of you riding without training wheels. That’s so terrific. It’s only a matter of time before you’ll both be driving.”
Faith giggled and grinned at Brendan, apparently forgetting for the moment that she was mad at him.
“I’m not really very good at riding a two-wheeler,” Faith confessed after a moment.
“It takes a lot of practice. I bet you’re terrific. Why don’t you show me?”
Brendan worried she might start up her litany of excuses again. Instead, after a wary look at Lucy, she picked her bike off the pavement and climbed on with a determined expression.
He moved forward to hold on to the seat again, but before he could reach it, Faith pushed one pedal down and then the other. The effort was wobbly and unsteady and he thought for sure she would fall but after a few more feet, something clicked. She caught the rhythm or found her balance or something. By the time she made it to the next driveway, she was actually riding.
Faith gave a half excited, half terrified shriek.
“You’re doing it, sweetheart,” he called.
“That’s fantastic! You’re amazing,”