Aurora 06 - A Fool And His Honey (11 page)

Angel seemed to want to remain standing, so I tried not to fuss over her. I put a bottle in the microwave, and Angel said, “That’s not a safe way to heat bottles.”

“What?”

“Sometimes they have hot spots if you heat them that way. That’s what the baby book said.”

Everyone’s a critic. “So far, we haven’t had any problem,” I said. “I’m testing it before I give it to him.”

Angel shrugged, as if she’d done her best and it wasn’t her fault if I was misguided. I shook the bottle vigorously, tested the formula on my arm, and sat down to feed Hayden, who had just let out a few preliminary “eh” noises.

Angel did the face-clenching routine again. This time she propped herself against the wall.

“Are they getting worse?” I asked, while Martin looked as if he wished he were on the moon.

“Maybe I should call the ambulance,” he suggested.

I noticed he didn’t suggest taking Angel into town himself. I had a sneaking suspicion he was worried Angel’s water would break in his Mercedes.

“No,” she said, shaking her head. Martin tried not to look relieved. “I know this is going to take hours. I’m just trying to get used to the feeling. It’s like a clamp. Then there’s the release.

Then, along after a while comes the next clamp.”

“Does it hurt?”

“Not yet, but it’s on a roll downhill,” Angel said. “I hope Shelby doesn’t pass out in the labor room. He got sick when I broke my leg a few years ago.”

A battered car sped up our driveway, and Shelby, tall and pockmarked and burly with muscle, was out of the vehicle and in our kitchen door before you could say “Having a baby.” His dark hair, liberally streaked with gray, was dented all around where his hard hat had rested, and his Fu Manchu mustache was going in all directions, as if he’d rubbed his hands over it.

Wordlessly, Shelby shook hands with Martin, kissed me on the forehead with nary a glance at the baby I was holding, and took his wife by the elbow to hustle her out the door. Angel gave us a nod and they were on their way, Shelby shepherding Angel as though she were the only woman who’d ever given birth. “Jason said he’d get one of the guys to drive him out here to pick up Angel’s car; I gave him a spare key,” Shelby called over his shoulder at the last minute. Then he buckled up and headed back into town to the Lawrenceton hospital.

Rory came out of the den when Shelby had turned out of the driveway. He was looking amused.

“So, she’s gonna have a baby really soon,” he said agreeably. Listening at doors did not seem to present a moral dilemma for Rory Brown. “Craig took Regina to a midwife.” Then the reminiscent smile faded from the boy’s face as he remembered that his friend Craig was now dead. “He told me it was a lot cheaper,” Rory added, with no smile at all.

“I have to pack,” I said, and both the men looked at me.

“Okay,” Rory said, after what I could only think of as a pregnant pause, “I’ll feed the little fella.”

I transferred baby and bottle to the young man, and spent a blessed hour alone upstairs trying to assemble clothes suitable for an Ohio winter. A number of important questions bobbed to the surface of my mind as I folded and figured. Where would we stay in Corinth? The Holiday Inn I’d used before would certainly be cramped with a baby sharing the room. I wondered about the farmhouse Martin owned up there, the one in which he’d grown up. He’d had it restored from its near-derelict condition, he’d mentioned in passing.

“We could stay in the farmhouse,” Martin said from the doorway, and I jumped in my skin. “I didn’t mean to scare you,” he said.

“I was just thinking about the farmhouse,” I said, when my heart had stopped trying to make tracks out of my chest. “You had it repaired?”

“Yes. . . and to confess something to you, Regina and Craig were living in it.”

“Why should you say ‘confess’?” I asked. I sat down on the end of the bed, two unopened packages of panty hose in my hands.

“I didn’t tell you,” he said. He wandered across the room to stand looking out the window.

His shoulders had an uncharacteristic slump. The bleak view of winter fields couldn’t have helped his state of mind much. It was a gray day, and the clouds were full of rain . . . Pregnant with it, in fact, my brain told me chirpily. I dropped the hose on the floor and clutched my head with both hands.

“Why didn’t you tell me, Martin? Why did that have to be such a big secret?”

He sat beside me on the foot of the bed. He put one arm around me, carefully, as though he realized there was a good chance I’d sock him in the nose.

“Cindy told me you would always keep secrets,” I said. “She said you couldn’t help it.” I’d never told Martin about the conversation I’d had with his first wife, before Martin and I were married. I’d been convinced he’d learned his lesson during his first marriage, that with me he would not repeat the same mistake.

“I’ve never lied to you about anything,” Martin said now, and that was something else Cindy had told me.

I
hated
her being right.

“Martin, if there’s something you know about this that you haven’t told me, if there’s anything about Craig and Regina and Rory and Cindy or your sister . . .
anything
you haven’t told me, this is your last free pass.”

“After this I get penalized?” His face fell into more familiar lines, the uncertainty fading to be replaced with the intelligence and command he normally wore like his suit coat.

“After this, you get thrown out of the game.” I looked him straight in his pale brown eyes.

“But I’m still in?”

I nodded.

His mouth only had to move an inch to cover mine.

It was different, this time; we’d always been perfect together in bed, and this morning he still had the magic to make me lost in the act of love; but now he was rougher, more demanding. It was as if he was reasserting his exclusive right to me, daring some cosmic force to just try to separate us. You woman, me man, his body said: and mine gasped, Hoo boy.

We started out in the dark early the next morning. We didn’t want anyone to see Rory in the car with us. He was sitting in back with the baby for now, though I planned on switching seats with him later, at least for a little while. Martin would do the driving: He much preferred to be in the driver’s seat. What a shock, right?

We didn’t even go through a drive-through to get coffee until we’d been on the road an hour.

Rory was asleep, and after a sip or two I woke up enough to want to talk to Martin.

“What did you do about Shelby and Angel?” he asked.

“I left a message on the answering machine at Buds ‘N Blooms,” I said. I inhaled the coffee vapor. “They’ll take her a huge pink bouquet today.” Shelby had called at midnight to tell us that Angel had had a baby girl, a seven-pounder. He had been exhausted and elated; I could never have imagined hearing Shelby sound so
grateful.

“Gift?” Martin asked tentatively, aware he was on shaky ground here.

“I gave her a baby shower,” I reminded him, noticing a warning edge in my voice. “Mother and I gave her a playpen.”

“And how is John?”

“Mother called at ten last night to tell me John would be in the hospital for a day or two more.

The doctors are sure he had a heart attack, and they’re still talking about treatment options.”

“How’s he feeling?”

“Scared.”

“And Aida?”

“She’s scared, too, but you would find it hard to tell.”

Martin was closer to my mother’s age than mine, but it still felt strange to hear him call her by her first name.

“I know how hard this is on you.” In the lightening gloom, I could tell Martin had turned briefly to look at me, before refocusing on the highway. “I expected you to tell me any minute to take Hayden back up to Ohio myself, that you were staying with your mother.”

“Martin,” I said, “it never occurred to me to do that.”

We rode in silence for at least half an hour after that.

A long car trip in the winter with a baby . . . when you’ve never had a baby . . . the formula for disaster, right?

The best I can say is, it could’ve been worse. For example, someone could have pulled out my eyelashes one by one.

We stopped to feed and change the baby . . . well, we stopped so I could feed and change the baby. Oddly enough, it wasn’t the physical work of caring for Hayden that was so exhausting, though that was tough, too. What was most difficult was an unexpected aspect of traveling with a child: the observations of strangers. I hadn’t realized every mother learns to discuss her child with every waitress, restroom customer, and Tom, Dick, and Harry that walks by. The restaurant where we stopped for lunch gave me my first sampling. I carried Hayden in his infant seat, found it was impossible to fit it anywhere on the table or on one chair, and finally discovered that if Martin and Rory sat on one side of a booth, I could put the infant seat and myself on the other side. This did not make Martin happy, but at that point, making Martin happy was low on my priority list.

The waitress, a plump black woman with gorgeous up-slanted eyes, gave me my first taste of what was to come. “Oh, he so cute!” she said, with apparent sincerity. “How old is he?”

“A month,” I said, as Rory said, “Two and a half weeks.”

She laughed as Rory and I glared at each other. “He a big baby,” she said admiringly. “How much was he?”

I stared at her blankly. Cost-wise?

“He weighed eight pounds, five ounces,” Rory said firmly.

So the correct answer was his birth weight. I’d try to remember that. I smiled at Rory.

“Oh, that’s sweet,” the woman (“Candra” her name tag read) commented, handing us menus.

“The daddy knows the birth weight!”

“Oh, he’s a great father,” I assured her, suddenly feeling quite giddy. “He was there the whole time.”

As Candra absorbed the age difference between me and Rory, her eyes widened. “Can I get you something to drink?” she asked in a subdued voice.

When we’d all ordered, I fished a bottle out of the cooler and asked Candra if she’d heat it up for us. That was another thing I learned on that trip: how to ask favors, some of them outrageous, of complete strangers. When you’re functioning as a mom you have to. Would you heat this bottle? Bring extra napkins? Throw away this dirty diaper? Pretend not to hear my child screaming his head off?

My most humiliating moment came in Kentucky at a rest stop, when I carried Hayden into the ladies’ room to change his diaper. I had the baby, the diaper bag, and my purse. I changed him somehow—at least that particular freezing rest room had a foldout tray to do the job on—

but then I found I had to use the facilities myself quite urgently, and I had nowhere to put him and no time to carry him out to Martin. I don’t think I’ve done anything as complicated in my life as try to pull down my slacks and underwear in a cubicle the size of a phone booth, while holding a baby, a bulky diaper bag, and a purse, and wearing a coat.

It was humiliating. And though it probably would’ve made
America’s Funniest Home Videos,
at the time it wasn’t at all amusing to me. As a matter of fact, as I began wearily to reverse the process, I decided I’d
never
think it was funny.

And I knew for a fact that Martin would never get over being called “Grandpa” by one well-meaning cashier. It was lucky for Rory that Martin hadn’t noticed his suppressed smile, and lucky for me that my own face was too tired to form the grin I felt rising to my lips.

Most of our conversation on this trip consisted of Martin trying to get Rory to give us more specifics about Craig and the baby, Regina and the baby, the baby’s birth, why Regina had driven down to Lawrenceton without Craig.

“Oh, well, she didn’t expect us to get out of jail when we did,” Rory explained, when he saw he couldn’t get away with waffling anymore. “I expect she just wanted to show off the baby to you, since her mom is out of the country.”

“Does my sister know she’s a grandmother?”

“Huh?”

“Does Regina’s mother know Regina has had a baby?”

“Well, not to say so. Not really.”

Rory was sitting in front with Martin now, and I was buckled in the back with Hayden, whom I was amusing by dangling a toy for him to focus on. I considered flattening the receiving blanket that lay in my lap, twirling the ends until it formed a long rope, then looping it around Rory’s narrow neck. He’d spit out the truth then! I told myself truculently, realizing I was somewhere beyond tired.

“Is this baby really Regina’s?” I asked sharply. “Or did she steal Hayden from someone?”

Martin closed his eyes briefly, then refocused on the road.

“Of course this baby is Regina’s!” our companion said, as indignant as he could manage to be.

“How do you know?”

“Craig drove her to the midwife’s!”

“And you watched the baby being born?”

“Hell, no!”

“But you were at the midwife’s?”

“Well. . .” Rory seemed to be thinking deeply, and that seemed to be difficult for him. “Not exactly, not me. So much as Craig. I think I was in jail.”

I looped the ends of the receiving blanket around each hand so I’d have a good grip, just waiting for a nod from Martin to choke this goofball.

Martin glanced back to see what I was doing, then looked forward hastily, his face convulsing with suppressed laughter.

“Say the word,” I told him.

“Rory,” Martin tried again. “Which one of you took Regina to the midwife’s office?”

“Maybe I went part of the way,” Rory improvised. “They dropped me off at the house on their way.”

“And this baby, Hayden, the one in the backseat, is the child of Regina and Craig?”

“Gosh, I don’t know. They all look alike, don’t they?” Martin turned a little and directed his next words at me. “You know, I’m actually tempted,” he said. “Keep it handy.”