The day was cloudy but dry, and Zach spent the rest of the afternoon in the back yard playing with Paws as Kara pulled weeds in the garden, keeping an eye on the pair. Craig mowed and edged the lawn, more to give himself something to work on as he thought about what they might do with Zach than because the grass needed attention.
After a while, Kara went inside to prepare dinner. Paws wore out and curled up contentedly on the patio just a minute before Kara announced that the food was ready—noodles with meatballs smothered in a Hawaiian sauce. Zach ate two full helpings with enthusiasm. After dinner, Kara had the good sense to prompt Zach to catch up on his homework, two days' worth since he had left his backpack at school yesterday. He sat at the dining table and worked on it willingly enough, though with several breaks to comment on how his day had gone.
Now, having put the finishing touches on his assignments, Zach returned his homework to his backpack. Craig strode to the hallway and opened one of the cabinets there. "Why don't you put your backpack away in the guestroom, Zach," he called to the youngster. "And then I'd like you to look at something." Zach complied and passed behind him on his way to the guestroom as Craig slid a stack of photo albums out of the cabinet. He carried the load to the dining table.
"What are you doing with those?" Kara inquired as she loaded dishes into the dishwasher.
"Checking to see if we can figure out how Zach is related to us, maybe verify the Elliott connection," Craig answered quietly.
The youngster returned to the room, and Craig pulled a chair out for him at the table. "Here, have a seat." Zach sat down, and Craig slid one of the albums in front of him. "We have a problem we need to work out, and I think these might help."
"What's the problem?" Zach asked.
"The problem," Craig explained, "is that we're pretty sure you're related to us somehow, but we haven't quite figured out how—although we did come up with a pretty good theory today."
"What's your theory?"
"I can't tell you yet," Craig answered. "We're going to test it first. If you can confirm it, we'll feel a lot better about having you here."
"Because then," Kara chimed in from the kitchen, "we'd know where you came from, maybe even why you're here." She added in a lower voice, "Not to mention what we're supposed to do with you."
"So," Craig continued, "here's the test…" He opened the album in front of Zach to the first page. "Look through these pictures and see if you recognize anybody."
Zach scanned the photos, giving a few seconds to each one. As Craig watched, he looked through pages of pictures showing Craig's sister's family. Craig had intentionally started him with these; this was the part of the family the youngster would be least likely to know. Thus they made the best test to see if he would be honest about whom he recognized. Later, he would come to the cousins' families, and eventually to Elliott.
Zach continued silently, concentrating. Craig sat down at the other end of the table.
After a minute, Kara set the dishwasher running and took a seat beside her husband. "Nothing yet?"
Zach shook his head in reply. "Who are all these people?"
"Relatives of mine," Craig answered. "If you and I are related, we ought to know some people in common, right?"
"I guess so," he said without looking up. He studied several more pages, coming into pictures of Craig's oldest cousin's family and moving through them to photographs of other cousins. "Who's this?" he asked, setting the album upright so Craig and Kara could see it. He pointed to a picture of a couple in their fifties.
"Do you know them?" Craig asked.
"No," he replied. "They're just older than the other people in these pictures."
"Oh." No recognition there. "Those are my parents."
"My grandpa and grandma?" Zach asked with interest.
"Only if you're my son, Zach," Craig responded, "which, as we've already discussed, is highly unlikely."
"Yeah, I know," Zach said in a matter-of-fact tone. "Are they nice?"
Craig grunted. "That depends on what you mean by 'nice.' My dad likes to play jokes, and my mom wishes I made more money."
"They're very nice, actually," Kara amended. "You'd like them."
Zach returned to inspecting the photos. Craig waited; Kara set her elbows on the table and propped her chin in her palms to watch. The youngster turned through several more pages, finding nothing. This was not looking good so far. He should have recognized someone by now.
Zach tipped his head to the side, studying one large photograph in particular, then looked up at Kara and Craig with excitement. "I know this person!" he announced.
Both adults dashed the six feet to Zach's end of the table and, standing on either side of him, leaned over the album together.
"That guy there." Zach indicated a man in his late twenties, wearing a blue sweatshirt and standing with some of the family outside Craig and Kara's house. "That's you, isn't it, Dad?" he asked with a wide grin.
Craig and Kara sighed together. "Yes, just me," Craig confirmed, a sudden surge of hope thwarted. "That was when we moved into this house. And hey, remember—I like it better if you call me Craig."
"Sorry, I forgot. And is that you, Mom?" Zach asked again, pointing now to a young woman at the edge of the picture.
"I go by Kara, actually. But yeah, that's me," she answered. "I think Craig meant for you to find other people you recognize, though."
"You looked younger then."
"Did I?" Kara feigned offense, arching one eyebrow.
The boy missed her teasing. "But you look better now." He studied her for a moment. "You look…smarter, like you know more. More like an adult."
"Hmm, that's…interesting," Kara responded, with a playful frown.
"I think what Zach's trying to say," Craig explained, "is that you just get better looking with age."
"Knock it off, you scoundrel," she snapped halfheartedly at him. "No flirting in front of the child."
"What's flirting?" Zach asked.
"Never mind," Kara told him. She pointed at the photo album. "Back to work."
Craig smiled broadly. "This is flirting." He took both of Kara's hands before she could pull away. "Lovely lady, your eyes caught me from afar and beckoned me here, and now I'm trapped inside them, captivated by your love…"
Zach gagged.
Kara's reaction wasn't much different. "That was genuinely awful," she said, rolling her eyes. "If you had talked like that when we were dating, I would never have married you."
Craig laughed. "I did talk like that."
Zach returned to searching through the pictures. "I am never getting married." Over his head, Kara narrowed her eyes at Craig in playful annoyance.
Zach continued on. "Who are you holding in this one, Mom?" He had come across a photo of Kara holding a baby girl, Craig standing proudly behind her.
Kara became suddenly somber. She reached out and touched the picture tenderly. "That's Tiffany. She lived with us for a little while. Fifty-one days."
Craig permitted himself a brief look at Tiffany; it warmed and stung him at the same time. He had not looked at a picture of her for ages—not that he wanted to forget her, not ever, but seeing her again brought pain. She would look very different now, much older…
Kara, beside him, sensed the tension in his silence and set a gentle hand on his back. Zach merely accepted Kara's statement and moved to other photographs.
He arrived at the end of the album and closed it. "I didn't recognize anybody but you and Mom," he told Craig.
"Me and Kara," Craig corrected.
"You and Kara," Zach repeated half-heartedly.
Craig selected another album from the pile and slid it across the table to Zach. "Try this one."
"A wedding?" he asked as he registered the first photos.
"You got it," Craig replied. "Our wedding album. There should be a lot of family in there."
"When did you get married?"
"Fourteen years ago," Kara told him. "I was the only woman who would take him."
Craig grinned. "I fell in love with her cooking, she fell in love with my good looks."
Kara smirked. "I took pity on him."
Zach turned the pages slowly, one after the next. "There's your mom and dad again," he said to Craig. "They're in a lot of these pictures." He continued on for another minute, then stopped as a new figure caught his eye. "Dad, this guy looks just like you, only different."
Craig slid over to look with the youngster.
"Someone you recognize?" Kara asked, joining them.
Zach shook his head. "He looks like he's Dad's brother or something."
"I don't have a brother, only a sister," Craig informed him. "You don't know him?"
The youngster shook his head again. "Who is he?"
"Look on the back of the picture," Kara advised.
Zach slid the photo out of its plastic sheath and turned it over. "Elliott Fleming," he read.
"Have you heard that name?"
"No."
"He's my cousin," Craig explained. "He's the main person I was hoping you'd recognize. If I had to guess, Zach, I'd say odds are pretty good he's your real dad."
"Why?"
Craig caught himself scratching the end of his nose with the tip of his thumb. He really did do that a lot, didn't he? "He's the relative who looks the most like me. Plus, I called most of my family today while you were at school. None of them knew anything about you. But Elliott—he has a son about your age somewhere. He's been out of the country for a few years—in Asia, we think. That might explain why you've never met him."
"Who do you think my mom is?" Zach asked.
"We don't know," Craig admitted. "Could be anyone."
Zach didn't look convinced. "Grandmother never told me about anyone named Elliott. And I think I look more like you than like him, anyway."
"That can happen," Craig insisted. "Sometimes cousins look more alike than brothers."
Zach still wasn't persuaded. He resumed scanning the photos. Turning to the next page, he discovered a picture of Kara in her wedding gown and Craig in a tuxedo standing together and facing the camera, smiles bright and smeared with chocolate cake. "Why did you have cake on your faces?"
Kara poked Craig in the ribs with a finger. "Because this guy stuffed cake up my nose, that's why! So of course I had to get him back."
Craig grinned at the memory.
Zach looked confused.
"See, the bride and groom feed each other the first pieces of their wedding cake," Craig explained. "I went too fast and got it in her nose instead of her mouth."
"On purpose!" Kara accused.
"Did not," he responded, his grin turning mischievous.
"Yes, he did," she assured Zach, who looked from one to the other, enjoying the game.
He turned back to the album and flipped at a leisurely pace through the last few pictures. Craig and Kara stood on either side of him, chuckling at a few of the photos, groaning at others.
"I was so scared that day," Kara confessed as Zach came to the last page.
Craig looked over at her. "Scared of marrying me?"
"No, scared you would change your mind. It was the only thing I could think about until—"
"Until I said 'I do?'"
"No, after that, actually. Until Ben said, 'Do you, Lia, take this man'…"
Craig laughed. He looked down to Zach, who was closing the wedding album. "Kara's older brother, Ben, is a preacher. He performed our wedding. It was his first one."
"He was so nervous," Kara recalled, "afraid he would mess it up. So then, when it was time to make our vows, he turned to Craig and said, 'Do you take this woman to be your lawfully wedded husband?' And Craig said, 'I do.' Some of the guests laughed, but the three of us were so nervous, we didn't even notice. So then Ben turned to me—"
"He turned to Kara," Craig picked up the tale, "and said, 'Do you, Lia, take this man'—and he just stopped… Lia is his wife. So he just froze…"
Kara resumed. "And no one knew what to do. A hundred people there in the church, and every one of them was trying not to giggle. I looked at Craig—"
"And then we just burst out laughing! And everybody in the church started laughing, too."
"And poor Ben turned bright red. I think we must have laughed for a whole minute until Ben finally looked over at Lia and said, 'Lia, as your husband, I forbid you to take this man!' And everyone laughed again, and then it was all okay." She paused a moment, reminiscing. "And after that, I wasn't afraid anymore."
Zach watched them both with bright eyes, immersed in the story. He reached for the next album and opened it up. The first few pages passed uneventfully, but then he happened upon a picture of Craig and Derek, tools in hand, standing side by side and thoroughly covered in mud. "Wow, Dad!" Zach exclaimed. "How did you get so dirty?"
"Oh, just working," Craig replied nonchalantly.
"You were not!" Kara retorted. "You were wrestling in the mud!"
Craig grinned and shrugged. "Derek and I—he's my partner, you saw him in the wedding pictures—we were trying to plant trees by a house in pouring rain. There was mud everywhere. Derek slipped and fell into me and knocked me over. I grabbed him as I fell, and suddenly we were both lying in the mud."
"They had great fun," Kara added knowingly.
"Not at first," Craig corrected. "It hurt. Derek's a big guy. But the mud was great, so I shoved him back down in it, and then he shoved me down, and so on."
"That's awesome!"
"It was pretty great," Craig said, his lips curling up at the corners. "We got so muddy that we had to put tarps on the seats of our trucks so we could drive home without ruining them."
"And then when you got home..." Kara prompted.
"I got home and parked in the garage, and I took one step inside the door—"
"Right over there," Kara said, pointing to the garage door beside the refrigerator.
"—one step, and Kara saw me—and screamed!"
"You screamed?" Zach asked her.
"Loudly," she acknowledged. "I didn't recognize him. And then when I realized it was him, I made him go back in the garage and strip all of his clothes off—"
"All of them?" the youngster asked with a look of horror.
"All of them," she said sternly.
"Are you sure you want to claim this woman as your mother?" Craig joked.
"And I brought him the garden hose," Kara continued, "and made him wash himself off in the garage before he came inside the house. And then I made him go take a real shower."
The boy was enthralled, staring at them both with wide eyes.
"But that's not the best part," Craig continued. "When I hosed off my head, you know what got washed out of my hair?"
"Mud?"
"A worm," Craig declared proudly. "A nice, long one."
"Woah… It got in your hair?"
"With all the mud, yeah."
"What did you do with it?"
"I put it in the garden. That was years ago, but I still see it out there now and then. We have this sort of bond. I'll introduce you sometime."
Kara rolled her eyes at Craig.
Zach shook his head in wonder. He worked through the next few pages of photos and paused at another one, a picture of Kara lying face-up in the snow, feet attached to skis sticking up into the air.
"Why did you take that picture?" Kara asked Craig with a look of annoyance.
"Pure artistic instinct," he quipped. "It was her first time to go skiing," he told Zach, "and she had been in her skis for about—"
"About two minutes," Kara said. "And—oh, never mind. Let's just say skiing's not my thing."
Zach grinned appreciatively.
"Oh, but you'll like this one." Kara flipped a few pages ahead to a picture of herself standing beside a lake, fishing pole in one hand and the line in the other, an unusually l
arge bass hanging from the line.
Zach took a close look at the picture. "Is that fish real?"
Kara grinned and shook her head. "Good eyes there. No, it's not. You know how Craig said his dad likes to play jokes? He took us fishing, and he and Craig were catching fish left and right, but I hardly even got a bite. So after a while I left my line in the water and walked to the car to get a book. When I came back, Craig's dad said I had gotten a bite while I was gone, and I should check my line."
"And you caught a fake fish?" Zach guessed.
"I reeled the line in, and it was pretty heavy."
"She kept saying, 'It's a big one, it's a big one!'" Craig chimed in with a grin.
"And it was," Kara said. "I pulled it out of the water, and at first I thought it was real."
"You did?" Zach asked incredulously.
"Mm-hmm. I went to take it off the line, and when I touched it, that's when I realized it was a joke." Zach grinned openly at that, and Kara chuckled at his reaction. "Craig's dad said that was the funniest fishing prank he had ever pulled."
Craig laughed, too, but inwardly he marveled at how easy it was for him and Kara to stand here beside this boy they had met so strangely just last night and laugh—just laugh together…
"Hey, Zach," he said, grabbing the last album and flipping it open, "take a look at this one of me and my sister when we were kids…"
For the next two hours, they looked at old photos together, laughing and telling Zach stories. Zach did not recognize anyone new in the pictures. But as the night wore on, none of them noticed.
*****