The Heart's Voice by Arlene James

naked, raw. Whatever he expected her to say, it wasn’t what he read on her lips.
    “The cabinets look wonderful.”
    He nodded and pulled away before she could say more, moving quickly through the house and out to his truck. He didn’t stop moving until he was once more safely behind the door of his own home. Just him. And the silence.

Chapter Six
    B ecca settled the baby more comfortably on her hip and sighed as she stared through the screen door at the level new floor of her porch and the empty road beyond. It had been days since she’d laid eyes on Dan. He was invariably gone when she got home in the evenings. Obviously he was avoiding her, and she didn’t know why. She suspected that it had to do with the kids, even though that didn’t make much sense to her.
    Right up until Monday he’d been patient to the point of indulgence with them, but she was beginning to wonder if it didn’t have more to do with his natural politeness and his circumstances than with Jemmy and CJ themselves. When Dan gave you his attention, it was necessarily intense. The lack of hearing and his dependence upon lipreading required him to lock his gaze on you, and the piercing blue of his eyes made the contact almost tangible. Unfortunately, a child wouldn’t understand that such focus might not be personal. From Jemmy’s and CJ’s ends, the connection went right down to the core of their own need.
    She hadn’t realized how much they wanted a daddy. Even now Jemmy’s memories of her father were pale, like a movie on a fuzzy TV. CJ had no memories of him at all. He was born into a world without daddies, at least as far as he knew. Yet he worked as hard for Dan’s attention as Jemmy did, driven by some innate craving for a father figure.
    Though while they both naturally gravitated to Dan, he continued to hold some part of himself aloof. From everyone. Oh, at times she’d sensed the possibility of more between Dan and herself, a deeper knowing, a magnificent sort of emotional connection, but circumstance had made him an artist at pulling back into himself, and he had definitely pulled back from her and the kids.
    Maybe she’d read him all wrong. Maybe he just didn’t like kids and was too polite to say so. And maybe it had more to do with the shock and self-condemnation she’d seen in his eyes when he’d realized that CJ had gotten into that box of screws.
    She sighed again and turned away from the door. The half-finished porch depressed her.
    Oh, it was lovely how he’d squared it up with the front of the house. For the first time the floorboards were neat and level. The corner posts restednot on the ground itself but on a foundation of cement blocks, which had in turn been set on footings of gravel laid into a trench hardened with lime. He’d even built a skirt around the lower edge of the floor so critters couldn’t set up housekeeping underneath. Once a skunk had gotten in there and made the house unlivable for nearly a month. She wouldn’t have to worry about that happening again. But without the shelter of the roof, the incomplete porch made the house feel abandoned and hopeless in a way that the old, rickety one never had. It made her feel abandoned and hopeless.
    Foolish notions, she told herself. No child of God was ever hopeless. She was proof of that, and Dan Holden was part of it. He’d come just when she’d needed him most, just when her faith in her ability to provide a stable, comfortable home for her children had begun to waver. She couldn’t shake the notion that the timing had been as right for him as for them. Hadn’t he said that he’d needed to be needed, to know that his life had purpose and value?
    He had more purpose and value than he knew, because the fact was that she missed him. She missed his steady, pleasant manner, even his terse conversation and that air of wounded pride, for if Dan Holden had anything in abundance it was pride. Considering that fact, she wondered how he managed to cope with