Free The Heart's Voice by Arlene James Page A

around the house in time to catch him before he left. She crooked her tiny finger at him, and he dutifully bent low to read her words, but to his surprise, she just wrapped her thin little arms around his neck and hugged him tight.
    For a moment he couldn’t breathe, but it had nothing to do with the stranglehold Jemmy had on him. For an instant he knew what it would be like to have a child of his own, a fragile little person who loved without reserve. He felt a sharp pang of regret, and then she pulled free and ran back to her beloved turtle. Dan blinked, put properly in his place—one rung below Buddy. Then he stood and caught the look in Becca’s soft green eyes.
    Suddenly he knew that his feelings for Becca were becoming complicated, even more so because they seemed to be reciprocated. Surely she wasn’t looking at him as a new daddy for her children. That wouldn’t do. He could never do the things that real fathers did, or even fit husbands, for that matter.
    Troubled, he turned and went on his way.
     
    Dan woke before the sun and fought back the impulse to dash straight out to Becca’s. He dressed in lightly starched jeans and a soft, drab green, military-issue T-shirt, the tail neatly tucked in, and tugged on his comfortable lace-up work boots, no longer shined to a spit-polish gleam. After taking his time shaving, he scrambled some eggs and made a pot of coffee for breakfast. Even after that, it was still too early to go out to Becca’s, so he thumbed through the local, county-wide newspaper.
    Increasingly restless, he prowled the house after he finished the paper, but the emptiness and silence seemed unusually oppressive. He’d almost forgotten what a lonely world it was without sound to fill it: the tick of a clock, the hum of a ceiling fan lazily circling overhead, the ring of a telephone or doorbell… Funny he should think of those things now after all these months.
    Desperate to keep busy, he turned on the TV set, but morning television couldn’t hold his interest, and he couldn’t seem to settle down to serious reading. He decided to go through the toolbox in the bed of his truck, reorganize things a bit. That was good for a long while, at the conclusion of which Dan figured he had the neatest toolbox for miles around. He glanced at his wristwatch. Eight o’clock. Still too early to show up for work on Becca’s day off.
    He opened the hood of the truck and checked all the fluids, then he checked the air pressure in all the tires and even swept out the floorboard and shook the mats. Finally he stacked the carefully painted cabinet doors in the bed of the truck, making sure to cushion them with an old quilt, and climbed behind the wheel.
    It was just after nine when he pulled up in front of Becca’s house. Barely had his feet touched the ground when the screen door flew open and Jemmy tore out of the house wearing a flowered cotton nightgown with a ruffle around the hem. She barreled straight into him, threw her arms around his legs in an exuberant hug and began jumping up and down, talking all the while. She caught his hand and pulled him toward the house. Surprised, he could only wonder if something had happened to Becca or CJ. Scooping Jemmy up into his arms, he literally ran toward the house, only to see Becca calmly step out onto the porch in cutoff jeans and a faded yellow blouse with the tail tied at her waist.
    “What’s going on?” he asked, hoping his panic didn’t show.
    She sipped from the glass of orange juice in her hand, smiled and told him, “You’ve been invited to breakfast with Jemmy and her dolls. She was worried you wouldn’t get here in time.”
    He smiled with relief, though he had reservations. Jemmy had adopted him into the family, but she didn’t understand what problems came withhim. Framing his face in her small hands, she turned it so he could see her speak.
    “It’s a breakfast party in my bedroom and we got strawberries with cereal and juice.”
    He thought of