His Cinderella Next Door Read online

  It seemed to Oscar that Molly worked the same magic on him as she was working on that house. Inch by inch, day by day, she was uncovering him, showing him what was underneath, revealing who he really was, loving what was underneath the layers he had built up over the years.

  From the first day they had come back here, Molly had thrown open the doors to anyone who wanted to come. And so, on any given day, members of the old swim team might drop by—or the new one that swam now, in the swim pavilion named after his brother.

  James lived in one of the little cottages behind the house, and acted as their caretaker when they weren’t here. The neighbors came by, and old friends from school. The grill was fired up. The campfire was lit in the pit behind the house. Sometimes, guitars came out and the music and laughter and conversation went deep into the night.

  They were forming a community.

  That’s what family really was.

  As he watched, from his perch high up on the hill, Oscar saw Molly and Harriet come out of the house. Harriet was carrying a basket of carrots for Walter in one hand and skipping ahead of her mother. Today, she was wearing a pink princess dress and wielding a plastic pirate’s sword in her other hand. Her hair was dark like his but her springy curls were just like her mother’s and made attaching the toy tiara nearly impossible. It sat on her head crookedly.

  Walter’s braying increased in volume, hysteria and intensity when he spotted the little girl skipping toward him.

  And then out of the corner of Oscar’s eye, he saw his mother coming down the well-worn path between the two properties.

  There was a spring in her step, as if she were moving eagerly toward all that chaos. Not that she would ever admit it. No, she would get there and complain about the noise the donkey made, and remove the crooked tiara, and run a disapproving hand through Harriet’s tangled curls. She would get a pinched expression on her face when she noticed the flowerbeds were now almost completely taken over with weeds.

  After his mother’s treachery toward Molly, Oscar would have been just as happy to keep her at a distance.

  But Molly wasn’t having it.

  She paved the way to forgiveness even as she came into herself, or maybe it was because she came into herself so completely that Molly was able to extend such grace to others.

  After he had told his mother he and Molly were going to get married, Mrs. Clark had tried to take over the wedding.

  “It can’t be trusted to a girl who doesn’t even know how to use the right fork,” she’d said, and thrown herself into choosing guests and a posh venue that specialized in the weddings “of anybody who was anybody.”

  Gently and firmly, Molly, the girl who didn’t even know how to use the right fork, had vetoed that. They had been married in that falling down barn right over there.

  He still could not think of the merriment, the utter joy of that day, without smiling. Molly, the one who had hated dancing, had danced until dawn.

  “Your poor mom,” she had told him. “Something made her life that. So rigid, so bound by rules, so worried about what everything looks like. She’s afraid of being real. But she’s also very, very brave.”

  Slowly, he had watched Molly’s love transform his mother.

  Just as it transformed everything around her. She had started doing photo shoots here. With chickens and the donkey, with falling down fences, and overgrown pastures as the backdrop. Georgie loved to stalk out of the house and photobomb the sessions.

  Celebrities had discovered her and flocked to her with their children, and always, she gave them what they wanted.

  Her gift was capturing the perfect against the backdrop of imperfection. She captured the light inside of people.

  And it didn’t really matter if it was a celebrity shoot, or the new Special Games swim team, or a single mom with a new baby.

  This was Molly’s gift. She no longer had to face a charging elephant to get the perfect shot, or edge too close to the cliff, or hang from her knees from the tallest tree branch.

  She no longer had to do those death-defying things to feel. She had faced a greater fear—that love would let her down—and she had won, and now she brought that out in others.

  She found the love that lit people up from within. It didn’t matter how deeply they had buried it, or how hard they tried to hide it.

  She found it.

  And for being the recipient of that, of Molly’s spectacular gift, Oscar would be forever grateful.

  Ralph, suddenly aware the walk had stopped, woke up with a roar. Oscar got to his feet, swaying back and forth with the baby.

  It was time to go join whatever was going on down there today. Were they painting a picket fence, or weeding a garden, or taking a picnic into the woods?

  The baby, Ralphie’s namesake, often made Oscar feel as if his brother were close to him. Right now, it felt as though the wind had whispered to him in his brother’s voice.

  Go for it.

  He said the words out loud.

  It felt so good, he shouted them from the top of that hill, listened to them roll down the landscape around him.

  Startled, the baby quieted, arched his back, and looked at his father as if he recognized something in him for the first time.

  He gurgled. It sounded, well, approving.

  Go for it.

  It didn’t mean win a medal, or make a million dollars.

  It meant embrace whatever the day put in front of you.

  Completely.

  It meant, live well. Love well.

  And as he headed back down the hill toward his farm, toward his family, that was exactly what Oscar intended to do.

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