Kind of … comforting.
She sat in the truck, soaking up the stillness of the night, and wondered if Ben even realized what was happening to him. He was gathering moss by the bucket load now. He had fallen in love with his son, he’d asked his son’s aunt to marry him, and at the dance he had promised the town he would find the man responsible for blowing up the dam sixteen years ago.
Yup. He was definitely knee-deep in moss.
“I’d feel better if you were both coming with me.”
“You’re just worried about missing Mikey’s cooking,” Emma said patiently.
They were all seated around the kitchen table. Ben already had his bags in his truck, but he was making one last effort to get her and Mikey to go with him. Realizing she wouldn’t budge from her position, Ben had conceded that Michael probably should stay with her. Emma had rolled her eyes at his reasoning, and voted that Mikey go see the bright lights of New York. Mikey had simply folded his arms over his chest and softly said he was staying.
So they were sitting at the table, having a good-bye snack.
“Don’t feel so bad, Ben. You’re not the first man who’s had to deal with the two of us in our stubborn mode.” She looked at Mikey and winked. “Judge Bracket didn’t have any better luck.”
Mikey chuckled as he set his cup of coffee on the table. “That man didn’t know what to do with either one of us, did he?”
As she’d intended, the mention of a judge turned Ben’s attention from his sulking. “Who’s Judge Bracket?”
“He’s the judge who awarded me custody of Mikey.”
Ben gave her a curious look. “Did you have much trouble getting it? You couldn’t have been twenty or twenty-one at the time, and you were single.”
“I didn’t apply for custody until Mikey was nearly eight and I was twenty-three. After Kelly left, nothing much was said about his living with me. Everyone in town, including me, thought she would be coming back soon.”
“I was already going to school before Mom left,” Mikey added. “So Nem didn’t have to deal with enrolling me.”
“So Mike was living with you for three years without the state knowing it?”
Emma reached across the table and touched his hand. “You have to understand, Ben. People around here usually saw Mikey with me, not Kelly. When a year went by and she didn’t return, no one was willing to call the authorities. They didn’t want to see Mikey taken away from me.”
“So when did Judge Bracket become involved?” he asked.
“When Michael broke his leg and had to be taken to Bangor to have it set. The Greenville hospital thought he needed special attention, because it was a bad break. I signed the guardian papers, but I made the mistake of mentioning I was his aunt to someone in Bangor.”
“All hell broke loose then,” Mikey added, grinning in memory.
“Mikey called them the ‘kid police.’”
“I was eight,” Mike defended. “They wanted to take me away from you and put me in a foster home until custody could be legally awarded.”
“Jesus.” Ben looked appalled. “They wanted to uproot a child from his home after he’d had the trauma of an operation?”
“Don’t worry, Dad. Nem didn’t let them.”
“Darn right I didn’t. I stole him out of the hospital once he was safe to travel, and flew him to Medicine Gore. I hid him at Greta and Sable’s.”
“But they must have come after you,” Ben said, still looking horrified.
“When they arrived at my door, I gave them hell for losing my nephew.” She laughed out loud. “You should have seen their faces when they couldn’t find Mikey, and I kept raging at them that they had lost the kid.”
Ben didn’t laugh with her. “What about Judge Bracket?”
“I hired a lawyer and petitioned the state for custody. The courtroom was a zoo that day.”
“I hobbled in on my crutches with Nem on one side of me, our lawyer on the other, and the whole town of Medicine Gore behind us,” Mikey explained, grinning from ear to ear. “About ten social workers and state lawyers descended on me like vultures, asking me questions and calling for Nem’s arrest.”
Emma expected the coffee mug Ben was gripping to shatter.
“Judge Bracket just kept pounding his gavel and shouting for order,” Mikey said.
“Were you arrested?” Ben asked, looking at her.
“On what charge? No one could prove I did anything wrong.”
“That’s not the best part,” Mikey interjected. “Judge Bracket tried for over two hours to make sense of the whole mess. He wanted to know where my mother was, and we told him we didn’t know. So then he wanted to know where my father was. Again, we told him we didn’t know.”
“Then Mikey told Bracket that if he couldn’t stay with me, he would run away and disappear, just like his parents. By the time he was done with his little speech to the judge, there wasn’t a dry eye in the courtroom.”
Ben sat up straighter. “But the state would have looked for me before they awarded you custody.”
Emma shook her head. “On the birth certificate, Kelly put that the father was unknown.”
“You knew who the father was.”
“Yes,” she admitted. She turned her teacup in her hands as she looked him square in the face. “But I wasn’t about to tell them. I would have lost Mikey.”
Ben looked at his son, his face softening as he blew out a frustrated breath. “I see. And you weren’t quite ready to find me yet, either.”
“I was scared,” the boy admitted. “Nem was all I had. I didn’t want to go live with a stranger.”
Ben looked back at Emma. “Most of the town knew about me; you said Mike’s parentage wasn’t a secret. No one said anything?”
“You weren’t exactly well thought of.
