Babysitter Bear Read online

  "Sorry kids, I didn't meant to leave you freezing out here."

  Austin grunted and slouched down in his seat.

  Lissy draped herself over the back of Paula's seat. "Mom, is that guy your boyfriend?"

  Austin made a choking sound.

  "He is another adult," Paula said firmly, "that I have a nice adult friendship with. I will tell you guys if that changes. Trust me, you'll be the first to know. Now put your seatbelt on."

  But she thought about him all the way home. Nice adult friendships were all well and good, but it wasn't friendship that she felt when Dan's heated gaze met hers. And there was a part of her that fervently wished she wasn't going home alone tonight. She wondered if Dan was thinking the same.

  Dan

  There was a text on Dan's phone when he got up the morning after the mini golf outing.

  Hey, just wanted to tell you I really had fun last night.

  It had been sent at 4:45 that morning.

  He looked at it before his morning shower, and after showering, and while he brushed his teeth. Then, cautiously, he texted her back.

  Me too.

  Of course he second-guessed himself right away. That was too simple, too plain. He should have said something nice. He should have mentioned her hair, or the way she looked. You looked good last night—that would make her happy, right? Because she had looked amazing, and she deserved to hear it.

  Or would that be too much?

  He could send her another text. But maybe that would be too much.

  But maybe she'd think he was dismissing her, brushing her off with two little words.

  It was ridiculous. He felt like a teenager with his first crush. He remained in an agony of indecision and doubt all through making breakfast for the kids until finally another text came in.

  OH GOOD, I really hoped I had your number right, or else I just said that to a perfect stranger.

  Followed immediately by two more texts:

  I don't text people much, at least people I haven't known my entire life.

  This IS Dan, right? I hope this is Dan and not the waitress who quit last week and is probably getting a restraining order against me right now.

  He found himself grinning stupidly. Even in texts, she was adorable.

  Yes, it's Dan, he texted back. After a moment, he added, I don't text people much either.

  Okay, wow, that was about the stupidest thing he could possibly have said there.

  "Dan!" Sandy yelled from the table, two feet away. "The eggs are burning!"

  "Damn," he muttered, and swooped in and rescued the eggs. "You don't have to scream, kid. I'm right here."

  His phone chimed, but he couldn't look at it for whole minutes because he was too busy scraping eggs and sausage onto plates and mixing up cereal for Mina. When he looked again, there was just a smiley face icon.

  But it was the start of a nonstop text flurry. It took less two days to run through his entire allotment of texts on his ultra-cheap phone plan so that he was forced to upgrade to a better plan with unlimited texts.

  They texted each other random comments throughout the day. It didn't matter if it was big or small.

  Mina just glued herself to the cat. I felt you should know.

  When Lissy was about that age, she covered the kitchen floor in baby oil so she could have sliding races with her cousin. Consider yourself lucky.

  And:

  Lissy told me a joke today. It's really terrible. Do you want to hear it?

  Sure, he texted, in between diapering Lulu and trying to stop Mina from climbing on the baby's crib like a jungle gym.

  Why is the baby strawberry crying?

  I don't know, why?

  Because her parents are in a jam.

  It took him a minute to find an adequately appalled-looking emoji on the phone's selection.

  I KNOW!!! Paula texted back. Pretty great, huh?

  Sometimes it was a little, everyday observation:

  This guy has been sitting at the corner table in the diner reading the paper & nursing one small black coffee for FOUR HOURS. I think he's a spy.

  Sometimes it was something more serious ... more or less:

  Mina drew all over herself and the floor with markers. That comes off, right?

  Use baby oil. Or any kitchen oil will work. She's quite the artist, sounds like.

  Yeah, he texted back, if the canvas is herself or the walls or one of the cats.

  Hey I bet painting on cats is a great gimmick. A big gallery in New York will probably give her a solo show.

  And sometimes it was quietly wistful.

  Go outside, she texted him late one evening.

  He was, for a change, by himself. The Rugers were watching TV in the living room. He had retreated to his room to have a little alone time, where he was lying on the bed, reading a mystery novel off their bookshelves. A heavy reading habit was something he'd picked up in the Army and had let lapse since he got out, but he had picked it back up again since he had come to stay at the Ruger farm. The isolated location and their groaning, overloaded bookshelves had made it easy to pick the habit back up as if he'd never stopped.

  He didn't usually get texts from Paula this late. She went to bed early, and evening was also her dedicated kid-time, which he tried not to interrupt.

  He rolled over and texted back, Is this the start of another of Lissy's joke?

  No, I'm serious. Go outside.

  He hesitated. He was very comfortable, enjoying the temporary solitude, and didn't really want to either interrupt the Rugers' family evening, or get the kids' attention.

  But Paula hardly ever asked for anything.

  He could have just asked why, but he decided to play along with the mystery. He got up, tucked his phone into his pocket, and quietly went through the house. Getting to his coat would have meant going through the living room and potentially resulting in everyone asking him where he was going, so instead he went to the back door and shoved his feet into a slightly too big pair of Derek's shoes.

  He stepped outside into the chill night.

  It was very cold, especially in a thin shirt. He wasn't wearing his arm, and hadn't bothered pinning up the sleeve just for lounging around in his bedroom, so the loose fabric hung limp against his side.

  Being outside at night really made him aware of how far out of town the Rugers lived. From the front porch you could see some of the neighbors' lights through the bare trees, but back here there was nothing but darkness behind the house. The moon either hadn't risen yet, or was at its darkest phase, but the snow was faintly luminous in the starlight, enough to pick out the slender trunks of the trees against a white backdrop.

  His bear stirred in him, restlessly straining with the pull of the night. It was a silent, wordless yearning, a primal urge to shift and run.

  Resisting his shifts was something he'd grown used to, but it was harder tonight. He had to push his animal back into place by force.

  Run, his bear said plaintively. Hunt. Free.

  Not tonight.

  One of these days he was going to have to figure out what it was like being a four-legged animal with only three legs. You couldn't keep your shift animal suppressed forever. No one could.

  But this night, despite his bear's restlessness, he felt a still clarity, a sense of contentment that he didn't want to ruin by disturbing his carefully sought-after mental equilibrium.

  There was a sharp burr from the phone in his pocket. He pulled it out. In the timeless stillness of the night, he had, for a moment, actually forgotten why he'd come out in the first place.

  Are you outside? the text read.

  Yes, he texted back. Why?

  Look up.

  He did.

  The sky was clear like he hadn't seen it in years. Not since deployment. In desert places, sometimes the sky was like this. He had never realized, or perhaps he had forgotten, that this many stars existed.

  Are you looking?

  I'm looking, he texted. Wow.
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br />   See that sort of blotchy stripe down the middle of the sky?

  Yeah?

  That's the Milky Way, Paula texted. You can't see it all that often. The sky has to be really, really clear.

  Are you looking at it now? he asked.

  Yes.

  It was strange, the kinship of doing the same thing at the same time in different places. He could almost feel her there beside him. Could almost see her, looking up at these exact same stars from just a few miles away.

  I could go over there, he thought.

  The possibility dangled before him, tantalizing. He could picture himself walking around to the front of the house, shivering a little in the cold—as he was starting to do now. Crunching across the trampled, frozen slush in the yard, unlocking the Subaru and warming his hand over the heat vents. Driving into town, to Paula on her porch, looking up at the stars. She could take his hand, take him inside ...

  He tingled all over at the possibilities of where that might lead.

  His hand hesitated over the buttons. Can I come over? He had only to ask.

  Then Paula's next text chimed in: Okay, I'm freezing my patootie off out here. Bed now. Early day.

  Yeah, he texted back. The disappointment was keen, but at the same time there was a pleasant anticipation, a Christmas-morning kind of eagerness. Some things were better for waiting. Not seeing her for so long made the entire idea of it desperately pleasing. Right now he felt that he could have basked for days in a single look from her clear blue eyes, drowned in the smell of her hair. He was drowning just thinking about it, in the most pleasant possible way.

  I'm really looking forward to this weekend, he texted.

  There was a pause that went on long enough for him to wonder if she'd gone to bed, but maybe she was just going inside and taking her coat off, because just when he was about to go inside himself, she texted back, Me too.

  As it turned out, even if Paula hadn't invited him to the winter carnival (although he couldn't wait to see her again), Dan wouldn't have had a choice anyway. The kids were wildly excited. There was not even a question of not going.

  Somehow it hadn't actually occurred to him that it was going to be a family outing until Gaby stamped into her boots and started bundling Mina into a puffy snowsuit.

  "I can take them, if you want a quiet afternoon to yourselves," Dan offered.

  He'd started to feel comfortable at the Ruger house to an extent that he wouldn't have thought possible just a week or two ago. He was learning the ropes of both the barn chores and the household routine. The pets had warmed up to him—there were actually four cats, though most of them lived in the barn and were half-wild, glimpsed only from a distance. And the kids had decided he was their new favorite thing, an entire adult of their very own that they could pester as much as they wanted.

  Gaby glanced up, smiling, from zipping up Mina's snowsuit. "It's fine. The Keegans will be there too, and I haven't seen Tessa in a while. Mina loves playing with Skye."

  "Skee!" Mina declared, as she looked up from fiddling with her snowsuit's dangly wrist snaps.

  "In fact," Derek said, turning around from putting ice skates in a bag, "if you want the day off, this would be a good time for it."

  "He's right," Gaby said. She fluffed Mina's hair and stood up. "You don't always have to be on duty. You could just have an evening to yourself, drink some beer, watch TV, maybe even go out to a bar or something if you want to."

  Dan laughed. "What, and miss the biggest thing to happen in Autumn Grove for the entire month of January? I'd have to be out of my mind."

  What he really would have missed, of course, was Paula's warm smile and sparkling eyes. He was wrong, the texts were no substitute. Just the idea of seeing her today was driving him out of his mind.

  "There's not going to be room in the Subaru for all of us," Derek said.

  "Dan can drive my car," Gaby suggested. "Sandy could go with him. You want that, Sandy?"

  "Yeah!" Sandy enthused.

  Driving Gaby's little hatchback on the icy winter roads was more challenging than the all-wheel-drive Subaru. Dan followed Derek and Gaby, since he had no idea where they were going, fielding Sandy's enthusiastic chatter until they turned off the main highway past a sign reading GARBER PARK.

  In the late afternoon sunshine, it was abundantly clear that this was, indeed, one of the town's big events. The small parking lot had already overflowed, and there were cars parallel parked on both sides of the winding road leading into the park. Dan shimmied into a parking spot a few cars down from the Subaru.

  He found a text from Paula on his phone. We're here! Come find us on the sled hill!

  "Where's the sled hill?" he asked Sandy as they got out.

  "Oh, man," Sandy said. "Let's go there first!"

  Gaby and Derek were still going through the complicated process of unpacking the kids from their car seats.

  "Go on in," Gaby called, waving at them. "We'll meet you later. It's not a big place."

  They walked along the edge of the road into the park. The sun was warm enough to melt the snow on the road, although snowbanks lay white and deep on either side. Dan pushed back the hood of his coat.

  A banner flapping in the clear winter sunshine read WELCOME TO THE GARBER PARK WINTERFAIR! Dan could see why Paula had told him not to get his hopes up. As far as actual events, there didn't seem to be a whole lot going on. Most of the activity was centered around an honest-to-goodness outdoor skating pond, looking like something out of a painting circa 1850. There was a bonfire crackling cheerfully, a hot cocoa and cider booth, and a couple of game booths put together out of painted plywood. There were two food trucks in the parking lot, one selling hamburgers and corn dogs, the other offering Greek food. Each had a small line.

  On the whole, it looked like people were making their own fun. Just about every family in Autumn Grove must be here: building snowmen, playing with dogs, having snowball fights. There appeared to be an enormous, grand-scale snowball fight and snow-fort building exercise going on in a wide-open field behind the skate pond; this was where it looked like most of the teens and college kids were. Dan wondered if Austin was among them.

  Sandy dragged him past the little family groups and clusters of friends chatting with each other, which seemed mostly to fall out along age and male/female lines. The sled hill was visible from a distance, through the scattered trees, at the edge of the snowball-fight field. At the bottom, there was a big pile of plastic sleds and a pink-cheeked young woman with a clipboard signing them out.

  Dan scribbled his name, and Sandy made off with a bright orange sled, scrambling up the hill across the packed-down snow. Dan lagged behind while he worked one-handed to secure a mitten over his clamps to keep the snow off. He rubber-banded it in place around what would be the wrist if he had one.

  "Dan!" cried a voice that he would have known anywhere. That voice could have awakened him out of a sound sleep. He would have known it in a crowd of a hundred thousand people, let alone the couple dozen on the sled hill.

  Paula was waving to him from halfway up the hill, pulling a sled with Lissy flopped on it.

  "Here," she said as he approached. "You can help me pull the thousand-pound weight back there."

  She was wearing a colorful knit cap pulled down over her ears, her hair springing out underneath in a profusion of wavy blonde-streaked brown curls, and the same coat she'd had on at the mini golf place. It was quilted, purple and green and red, with flowers around the collar that made Dan think of gardens and summer.

  Lissy, belly down on the sled, was dressed all in green and wearing a hat that looked like the top half of a frog's head, complete with great sewn-on googly eyes.

  "I see you caught a frog," Dan said. He took the rope Paula handed him.

  "A frog with two broken legs," Paula said cheerfully. She looked energized, her eyes reflecting the blue of the sky and her face flushed from exertion and cold.

  "I'm not a frog," Lissy yelled from the sled.
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  "Frogs are her favorite thing in the world right now," Paula explained as they climbed. "I had no idea that so many different products existed in the world with frogs on them. She has a frog backpack, a frog binder for her homework, frog shoes, a frog bedspread, a cup shaped like a frog—what are you looking for?"

  "Sandy," Dan said.

  The nine-year-old had completely vanished among the other little kids, a bunch of fast-moving splashes of color on the snowy hillside.

  "Isn't that him?" Paula asked, pointing.

  It was. Sandy had somehow, in the time it had taken Dan to get halfway up the hill, climbed all the way to the very top, past the flattish staging ground where parents were lining up toddlers on an assorted variety of sleds and up another little hill until he was just an orange dot.

  Dan knew that he would have thought nothing at all of flinging himself down a hill like this when he was Sandy's age. It wasn't even dangerous; the slope was pretty gentle and there were no trees on the hill itself. Still, it seemed a lot steeper when there was a friend's borrowed kid at the top of it.

  "He'll be fine," Paula said, seeing Dan's expression. "We used to sled on this hill all the time when I was his age. It's way safer than it looks from here, trust me. There's literally nothing to run into."

  "I'm not worried, just keeping an eye out," Dan said, and hoped that Derek and Gaby didn't pick that exact moment to show up.

  With a scream of "Look at me, Dan!" Sandy flung himself belly-first onto the sled just as they reached the flatter part of the hill. The sled launched itself like an orange rocket and shot past them, trailed by Sandy's shriek of delight. It tore down the hill, past other family groups straggling upward and one sled that had flipped over and deposited its riders (a small child and a parent) in a snowbank.

  "Okay, I changed my mind," Dan said. "That looks fun. I think we should get the next ride."

  Lissy sat up with a shocked and scandalized, "What?!"