Samson and Sunset (47 page)

  Wes kept teasing through his tears.
“Another sis? I’m outnumbered now! What’s this world coming
to?”

  After thirteen years of my heart
aching, my baby was home with us where she belonged.

  “You know what we are going to do
now?” Shay asked. “Well today is June 14th. Which one of my
daughters has a birthday in two days?”

  We had totally lost track of the days.
The results had come in sooner than we’d expected.

  “I’m taking you all to lunch,” Shay
said, blinking back tears.

  At lunch Shay said, “Patty Cake, my
little girl, you’re going to have my sister, your Aunt Becky’s, old
room. From here we’re going to the paint store, and you can pick
any color you want for your walls, and a new chandelier if you’d
like. Then we’re going to the Homestead House Furniture store and
you can pick out any bedroom furniture you want. Next week you and
Mom,” Shay hesitated, then continued, “did I just say Mom?”

  Everyone giggled. “Mom and you can
pick out your bedding. Your home is with us, Patty Cake. From this
day forward, I’m no longer Shay, I’m Dad, and this is Mom,” he
squeezed my shoulder. Shay was brimming with joy. It made my heart
warm.

  Patty looked at us through eyes, puffy
and red from crying. “Mommy and Daddy, can we just go home today? I
want to go home to where I belong, my home where you really want
me. Please take me home.”

  Shay couldn’t argue with that. I saw
his eyes well up as he grabbed Patty with his gentle Shay-hug, that
just radiated love. “Everyone,” he said, “let’s go home!”

  I remember driving down the little
road toward the house. Complete, I finally felt complete. Our
little girl was home. It took thirteen years and large amounts of
pain, but my baby was home.

  When we got to the house, Kelly and
Patty changed clothes and headed out to ride the horses; Wes went
three wheeling. It was just a beautiful day.

  “Callie, I’m not going to work today,”
announced Shay to my delight. “Let’s go swimming.” And with that we
were off to the pool house to put on our swimming suits.

  When we were in the water, I wrapped
my body around Shay’s, and said, “Someday I’m going to want to know
what kind of life my child had, but I don’t think I could handle it
right now. Do you think that’s okay?”

  “Callie, when the time is right, we’ll
do some investigating, but for now, I am so happy just to have her
home. Let’s give her some time to adjust and feel secure. She’s my
little girl and I’m going to love and protect her from now on. We
need to make sure she knows how safe and secure her life is going
to be now, and that we’ll never leave her.”

  “Shay, darlin’, I think we are so
blessed,” I said making a little curl with his wet hair. “Just
think how much those three kids like each other, how well they get
along, how they accept each other—and our parents love her!”

  Shay was holding me in his arms,
swirling me gently from side to side in the water.

  “Ya know why she’s so lovable, Callie?
Because she’s so much like her mommy. I loved it when she called
you Mommy, and me, Daddy. She may be thirteen, but she is innocent,
like a newborn, she really needs her mommy and her daddy. We need
to hold her and love her, Callie. I’m sure she never got any of
that special love. We’re going to give it to her. Patty is going to
feel our love,” he said tenderly, a little sadness in his voice.
“We’re going to make up for lost time.”

  I looked at him tenderly. I just loved
that man.

  ***

Patty’s birthday landed on a Saturday. We
decided we were going to have a big family dinner. The whole family
was out in top form. Kelly invited Randy, Wes had a new little
girlfriend coming out—one of a hundred to follow, I was sure. The
aunts’ families and grandparents were there. Patty would get to
know her new extended family.

  Everyone brought Patty gifts. Hulda
baked a birthday cake and made what Patty told us was her favorite
dish for dinner: fried chicken with all the fixings. We told Patty
she could invite Levi and her grandmother if she wanted, but she
said she’d rather it was just family.

  It amazed me how easily Patty walked
away from the family that raised her. That in and of itself told me
a whole lot. She had taken to us immediately. I think she was
adjusting well to calling herself Patricia Suzanna Westover. Kelly
was thrilled to be the one to tell her that the horse she loved and
had been riding and training with Kelly’s help was now her very own
horse: her birthday gift from Kelly and Wes. Next week she’d be
redoing her room. She told me she kept pinching herself.

  “It feels like a dream! I can’t
believe I’m living in this beautiful, amazing house with parents
that love me,” she kept saying. “Parents who really love and want
me.”

  She had grandparents, aunts and
siblings now; she’d have her own room and be going to school in the
fall in Larimer. Patty Cake was truly a happy camper, as Shay would
say.

  What a wonderful dinner it was,
everyone had such a good time greeting the new family member. All
of our guests, except for the teens, left by 3:30 p.m.

  Around four, Shay decided to wash his
Impala. He brought it up the circle drive and got out his car
washing cloths and the hose. I had on my tight blue jeans, a tank
top and little white Keds. I thought I’d take my walk while Shay
washed the car.

  I usually walked the big circle drive
ten times. That was probably about a two-mile walk. I had so much
to be thankful for as I circled that driveway. With each step I
thanked God for my blessings. I picked up a small branch that had
fallen from a big oak tree. The night before it had been real
windy. I was walking and counting the leaves, looking at their
beautiful veins, and remembering that there is beauty in
everything. If you have beauty in your heart, you can find beauty
anywhere.

  How sad Dane Dalton must be, I thought
suddenly. With what he said to me, his own little own child in my
womb, he must have viewed the world with an ugly heart. Dane’s ‘I
want the best and we both know that’s not you’ statement still
echoed in my heart. But as I thought about it then, holding the oak
branch, what he had said to me reflected more on who he was than on
who I was.

  I had no idea the kids were all
watching Shay and me from the big window. It must have been about
then that Shay started watching me walk. I was to learn this from
Kelly later that day. She told me what they observed: Shay laid the
hose down, came running across the circle drive, and with one big
soft tackle had me on the grass, sitting on me with my arms pinned
outward.

  “Who’s the king?” he demanded, neither
of us knowing we had a window full of a giggling teens watching
us.

  I said, “You are! King Shay!”

  “Well, it might have taken fifteen
years, but I’m glad you finally get it,” he grinned. “Must have
finally sunk in…” he caressed my face gently. “And you’re my
beautiful queen! Only...” he bent down, nuzzling my neck, “you’ll
always be princess to me.”

  Kelly said that she and Wes had told
their friends in embarrassment, ‘They’ll never grow up.’ “But
Mother,” she continued, “nothing was more embarrassing than when
Dad carried you in through the front doors, kissing you, totally
oblivious to us!”

  I remember how Shay stopped dead in
his tracks, standing there holding me in his arms with six
teenagers standing there looking straight at us.

  “Uh, uh, Mommy hurt her ankle,” he
stammered. “So I’m going to go rub it for a while.”

  They just looked back at us with goofy
grins on their faces that said, ‘Who do you think you’re
kidding?’

  “Yeah, okay, we get the picture!” said
Wes.

  With that Shay carried me to our
master suite and closed the door. “Where did the good old days go,
Callie, when I could take you into this suite and make love to you
without an audience on the other side of the door?”

  As he let my legs loose and they went
to the floor, he pulled me close to him and whispered, “I love you
so much, Callie, my princess; I can’t understand how this love,
this excitement I have for you, just keeps growing. I hear guys say
after a few years of marriage it’s old hat. With you, Callie, every
time I touch you, it’s like I’m touching you for the first
time.”

  I looked into his beautiful brown eyes
and touched his face.

  “I look at you and I am so sexually
aroused,” he continued in a sexy voice, “I have to be careful who’s
around when I stand up. God, woman, you do it for me!”

  Shay slowly undressed me, then I him.
He picked me up, carried me to the bathroom, and turned on the
shower. When he stepped into the shower he was cradling me in his
arms like a child. I always said I was glad that shower was
big.

  He sat me down under the full stream
of warm water and put his lips on mine, and our bodies became one.
There wasn’t a spot on each other’s bodies that we didn’t know by
heart, knowing exactly where to touch each other, kiss each other.
We were engulfed in love right there in the shower.

  Teens today may experience sex; anyone
can experience sex. But to experience sex with immense love, that’s
real sex! That’s what our teens are missing out on. It seems it’s
been forgotten that sometimes an extremely gentle touch to the face
is far more sensual than a kiss.

  Shay took us to the bed, still wet
from the shower. He didn’t even dry us off, he was so aroused. He
had me right there with him. I held my head back as he kissed my
neck, moving his soft lips downward, kissing my breasts. I knew
this was going to be a loud, uncontrollable climax for me. Shay
sensed it before it happened, because as I cried out in ecstasy, he
was right there to put his hand over my mouth, and it was a good
thing. He became as carried away as I was, burying his face in my
shoulder to muffle his own sounds.

  We had reached the fullest of
contentment.

  Shay sank down right next to me.
“Callie, you fill me completely. I love coming inside of your
life,” he paused, “and oh gosh, I hope the kids didn’t hear us.”
Then he smiled. “Never thought I’d be saying that to you the first
time I made love to you in this suite, princess… when we had the
whole house to ourselves.”

  We lay there, basking in the afterglow
of the erotic experience we had so completely shared. After a
while, we finally made our way back into the shower. Shay and I
made sure we put our same clothes back on for the sake of the
children. We didn’t want them thinking we had had our clothes off.
(Yeah, right!)

  When we left our suite, the kids were
gone. The house was emptied of teens.

  “Listen, Callie, the house is so
quiet,” Shay paused, “they all went somewhere.”

  “Shay, I don’t like the silence. I
don’t like it quiet, I love the hustle and bustle of the
children.”

  Shay took my hand and we walked out on
the big front porch.

  “Let’s go see Samson and Sunset,” Shay
said.

  We walked slowly together, each with
an arm around the other, to the new white corral fence Shay had
just finished building. We stood there watching Samson and Sunset
in the field. They were still as beautiful as ever, and as soon as
they saw us they trotted over to the fence. Their foals, from
weanlings to two-year-olds, were galloping behind them in the grass
with all the vim and vigor of youth.

  “Shay,” I said, “Kelly’s going to
college next year. Wes will be a senior in high school, and our
little Patty Cake is growing up right behind them. I don’t know
what I’m going to do without a child in my arms. I feel so
incomplete without a baby to love and care for. I’m just not whole
without a child. Every night I pray and ask God how I’m going to
survive when my children grow up and leave. I ask Him for His help
and blessings.”

  Soft tears were forming in my eyes.
“Shay, you have given me more love than I ever thought existed. I
want you to know how much I have appreciated all of your love. It’s
more love than I could ever have anticipated in this lifetime.” The
tears were starting to slowly work their way out of my eyes and
down my cheeks.

  Shay turned me toward him and put one
arm on my back, the other cradling my neck, his sensuous fingers in
my hair. He bent down and placed his gorgeous lips on mine, kissing
me gently for a long time. Then he lifted his hands and brushed the
tears from my eyes and off my cheeks. I stood there looking up at
him and saw that Shay-grin I’d seen but twice before. “Princess,
you know, your body was extra warm and twingey tonight when we made
love. I felt it when I came inside of your life.”

  My eyes widened. Dared I hope? “Tell
me, Shay, please tell me!”

  Shay held me in his arms, looking down
into my eyes with those big beautiful brown eyes I’d first seen in
King’s Drive-Thru.

  “Well, princess,” he said, “I don’t
think you should be giving away those baby clothes right now.
Because, darlin’, I, Shay Westover, am telling you, Callie
Westover, that you are headed for a delivery table.”

Starling Darling

  Patty Cake's Home

  Shay and I decided not to tell the
children that I was pregnant until we knew for sure. We wanted
Patty to feel secure and adjust to her new family.

  How fun it was having our little girl
home after thirteen years of thinking she was lost to us. I would
just look at her and my heart would melt. But every day, I had this
nagging feeling that I wanted to know more about her childhood and
all that we'd missed out on. Shay was as concerned as I was, but as
always, he seemed to know when the timing was right to deal with
matters at hand. He told me that her past was not something he
wanted me delving into right now, especially since he was sure I
was pregnant. That Shay, what a man, he always knew the exact time
in our lovemaking that I conceived. Well, he was always right, so
who was I to dispute him?