Nobody's Baby but Mine (40 page)

Cal snatched the tabloid out of his father’s hand. The first thing he saw was a photograph of himself and the Professor that had been snapped at O’Hare the morning they’d left for North Carolina. He looked grim; she, dazed. But it wasn’t the photograph that made his stomach drop to the bottom of his feet. It was the headline below it.

I Trapped the NFL’s Best (And Dumbest) Quarterback into Marriage
by Dr. Jane Darlington Bonner.

“Shit.”

“You’ll have a lot more to say than that when you read this piece of crap!” Jim exclaimed. “I don’t care if she’s pregnant or not—the woman’s a compulsive liar! She says in here that she posed as a hooker and pretended to be your
birthday present
so she could get herself pregnant. How did you ever get tangled up with her?”

“It’s like I told you, Dad. We had a fling, and she got pregnant. It was just one of those things.”

“Well, apparently the truth wasn’t exciting enough, so she had to go and invent this outlandish story. And you know what? The people who read this rag are going to believe it’s the truth. They’re actually going to believe that’s the way it happened.”

Cal crumpled the tabloid in his fist. He’d wanted a good excuse to go see his wife, and now he had it.

It was blissful, this life without men, or so they told themselves. Jane and Lynn lazed like cats in the sun and didn’t comb their hair until noon. In the evening, they fed Annie her meat and potatoes, then smeared cottage cheese on ripe pears for themselves and called it supper. They stopped answering the phone, stopped wearing bras, and Lynn tacked a poster of a muscular young man in a Speedo to the kitchen wall. When Rod Stewart came on the radio, they danced with each other. Jane forgot her inhibitions, and her feet flew like dove’s wings over the carpet.

To Jane, the rickety old house was everything a home should be. She snapped beans and filled the rooms with wildflowers. She put them in carnival glass tumblers, china bud vases, and a Bagels 2 Go commuter mug Lynn found on the top shelf. She didn’t know exactly how she and Lynn had developed such an attachment to each other; maybe it was because their husbands were so much alike, and they didn’t need any words of explanation to understand the other’s pain.

They allowed Kevin into their women’s house because he entertained them. He made them laugh and feel desirable even with pear juice trickling down their chins and seedpods caught in their hair. They let Ethan in, too, because they didn’t have the heart to turn him away; but they were glad when he left since he couldn’t hide his worry.

Lynn gave up her women’s club meetings and coordinated outfits. She forgot to color her hair or do her nails, which grew ragged at the cuticle. Jane’s computer stayed in the trunk of her Escort. Instead of trying to unlock the Theory of Everything, she spent most of her hours lying on an old wicker chaise that sat in the corner of the front porch, where she did nothing but let her baby grow.

They were blissfully happy. They told each other so every day. But then the sun would set and their conversation would begin to lag. One of them would sigh while the other stared out at the gathering dusk.

Along with the night, loneliness settled over the rickety old house on Heartache Mountain. They found themselves yearning for a heavier tread, a deeper voice. During the day, they remembered that they had been betrayed by the men they’d loved too well, but at night their house of women no longer seemed quite so blissful. They got into the habit of going to bed early to make the nights shorter and then rising at dawn.

Their days developed a pattern, and there was nothing to separate that particular morning two weeks after Jane had come to stay on Heartache Mountain from any of the others. She fed Annie her breakfast, did some chores, and took a walk. Just after she got back, a particularly bouncy tune from Mariah Carey came on VH-1, and she made Lynn stop ironing the curtains she’d washed so they could dance. Then she relaxed on the porch. By the time the lunch dishes were put away, she was ready to work in the garden.

The muscles in her arms ached as she tilled the soil between the garden rows, using a hoe to uproot the weeds that threatened her precious bean plants. The day was warm, and it would have been smarter to do this in the morning, but schedules had lost their allure for her. In the morning she had been too busy lying on the chaise growing her baby.

She straightened to rest her back and propped her palm on the handle of the hoe. The breeze caught the skirt of the old-fashioned calico print housedress she wore and whipped it against her knees. It was soft and threadbare from many washings. Annie said it had once been her favorite.

Maybe she’d get Ethan or Kevin to unload her computer if either came to visit today. Or maybe she wouldn’t. What if she started to work and Rod Stewart came on the radio? She might miss a chance to dance. Or what if, while she lost herself in equations, a new crop of weeds grew up near her bean plants and threatened them with suffocation?

No. Work was not a good idea, even though Jerry Miles was almost certainly plotting behind the scenes to finish off her career. Work was definitely not a good idea when she had beans to weed, a baby to grow. Although the Theory of Everything beckoned her, she’d lost the stomach for bureaucracy. Instead, she gazed at the mountain sky and pretended it marked the boundary of her life.

That was how Cal found her. In the garden, with her palm curled over the handle of a hoe and her face lifted to the sky.

His breath caught in his throat at the sight of her standing against the sun in a faded calico housedress. Her French braid was coming undone so that blond wisps formed a corona about her head. She looked as if she were part of the sky and the earth, a joining of the elements.

Sweat and the breeze had molded the dress to her body, displaying, as clearly as if she were naked, the shape of her breasts and the hard round belly where his baby grew. She’d unfastened two of the buttons at the top of the dress’s scoopy neck, and the sides fell apart in a V over a damp, dusty chest.

She was brown as a berry: her arms and legs, her dirt-smudged face, that moist V of skin that pointed to her breasts. She looked like a mountain woman, one of those strong, stoic creatures who had eked a living out of this unforgiving soil during the depression.

With her face still lifted to the sky, she wiped the back of her arm across her forehead, leaving a dirty streak in its place. His mouth went dry as the fabric stretched tight over those small high breasts and caught just beneath her rounding belly. She had never been so beautiful to him as she was at that moment, standing without any cosmetics in his grandmother’s garden and looking every one of her thirty-four years.

The tabloid newspaper rustled against his thigh, and Annie’s voice rang out from behind him. “You get off my land, Calvin. Nobody invited you here!”

Jane’s eyes flew open, and she dropped the hoe.

He turned in time to see his father charging around the side of the house. “Put that shotgun down, you crazy old coot!”

His mother appeared on the back porch and stopped behind Annie. “Well, now, aren’t we just a picture of
Psychology Today
’s Family of the Year.”

His mother. Although he’d spoken to her over the phone, she’d ducked his dinner invitations, and he hadn’t seen her in weeks. What had happened to her? She never used sarcasm, but her voice fairly dripped with it. Shocked, he took in the other changes.

Instead of one of her expensive casual outfits, she wore a pair of black jeans unevenly cut off at mid-thigh, along with a green knit top that he seemed to remember having last seen on his wife, although there hadn’t been a dirt smudge on it at the time. Like Jane, she wore no makeup. Her hair was longer than he’d ever seen it, and untidy, with threads of gray showing up that he hadn’t known were there.

He felt a flash of panic. She looked like an earth mother, not like
his
mother.

Jane, in the meantime, had dropped the hoe and marched across the yard toward the steps. Her bare feet were tucked into dirty white Keds with slits in the sides and no shoelaces. As he watched, she silently took her place on the porch with the other women.

Annie remained in the middle with the shotgun still aimed at his gut, his mother stood on one side of her, Jane on the other. Despite the fact that none of them were exceptionally large, he felt as if he were staring at a trio of Amazons.

Annie had drawn her eyebrows on crooked that morning, giving her a decidedly malevolent look. “You want this girl back, Calvin, you’re gonna have to set yourself to a serious courtship.”

“He doesn’t want her back,” Jim snapped. “Look what she’s done.” He snatched the newspaper from Cal’s hand and shoved it toward the women.

Jane moved down onto the top step, took it from him, and bent her head to study the page.

Cal had never heard his father sound so bitter. “I hope you’re proud of yourself,” he snarled at Jane. “You set out to ruin his life, and you’ve done a damn good job of it.”

Jane had taken in the gist of the article, and her gaze flew up to meet Cal’s. He felt the impact in his chest and had to tear his eyes away. “Jane didn’t have anything to do with that newspaper story, Dad.”

“Her name’s on the damn by-line! When are you going to stop protecting her?”

“Jane’s capable of a lot of things, including being stubborn and unreasonable”—he shot her a hard-eyed look— “but she wouldn’t do that.”

He saw that she wasn’t surprised by the way he’d come to her defense, and that pleased him. At least she trusted him a little. He watched her clutch the tabloid to her chest as if she could hide its words from the world, and he made up his mind Jodie Pulanski would pay for the pain she was causing her.

His father continued to look thunderous, and he realized he was going to have to give him at least part of the truth. He’d never tell him what Jane had done—that was nobody’s business but his—but he could at least explain her behavior toward his family.

He took a protective step forward as his father closed in on her. “Are you getting regular prenatal care, or have you been too busy with your damn career to see a doctor?”

She met the old man square in the eye. “I’ve been seeing a doctor named Vogler.”

His father gave a begrudging nod. “She’s good. You just make sure you do what she tells you.”

Annie’s arm was starting to shake, and Cal could see the shotgun was getting too heavy for her. He caught his mother’s eye. She reached out and took it away. “If anybody’s going to shoot either one of them, Annie, I’ll do it.”

Great! His mother had turned crazy, too.

“If you don’t mind,” he said tightly, “I’d like to speak with my wife alone.”

“That’s up to her.” His mother looked at Jane, who shook her head. That really pissed him off.

“Anybody home?”

The female triumvirate turned in one body, and all of them began to smile like sunbeams as his backup quarterback came strolling around the corner of the house like he owned the place.

Just when he’d thought things couldn’t get worse . . .

Kevin took in the women on the porch, the two Bonner men standing below, and the shotgun. He arched his eyebrow at Cal, nodded at Jim, then moved up on the porch to join the women.

“You beautiful ladies told me I could stop by for some of that fried chicken, so I took you at your word.” He leaned against the post Cal had painted only a month earlier. “How’s the little guy doing today?” With a familiarity that indicated he’d done it before, he reached out and patted Jane’s belly.

Cal had him off the porch and flat on the ground within seconds.

The shotgun blast nearly knocked out his eardrums. Bits of dirt flew into his face and stung his bare arms. Between the noise and the fact that the dirt had temporarily blinded him, he didn’t have time to land his punch, and Kevin managed to roll out from beneath him.

“Damn, Bomber, you’ve done more damage to me this spring than happened all last season.”

Cal swabbed the dirt from his eyes and lurched to his feet. “Keep your hands off her.”

Kevin looked peeved and turned to Jane. “If he acted this way to you, it’s no wonder you left him.”

Cal gritted his teeth. “Jane, I’d like to talk to you. Now!”

His mother—his sweet, reasonable mother—stepped in front of her as if Jane were her kid instead of him! And his old man wasn’t helping any. He just stood there looking at his mom as if he didn’t understand anything.

“What are your intentions toward Jane, Cal?”

“That’s between the two of us.”

“Not exactly. Jane has family now to look after her.”

“You’re damn right she does! I’m her family.”

“You didn’t want her, so right now Annie and I are her family. That means we’re the ones looking out for her best interests.”

He saw that Jane’s eyes were glued to his mother’s face, and he took in her stunned, happy expression. He remembered the cold sonovabitch who’d raised her, and in spite of everything—the shotgun, his mother’s desertion, even Kevin Tucker—he couldn’t help but feel glad that she’d finally found herself a decent parent. If only she hadn’t found
his
decent parent.

But his warmth cooled as his mother gave him the same I-mean-business look that, twenty years earlier, had meant turning over his car keys.

“Are you going to honor those wedding vows you made to Jane, or are you still planning to get rid of her after the baby’s born?”

“Stop making it sound like I’ve got a contract out on her!” He jabbed his thumb at Tucker. “And could we discuss this in private, without Bozo here listening in?”

“He stays,” Annie interjected. “I like him. And he cares about you, Calvin. Don’t you, Kevin?”

“I sure do, Mrs. Glide. I care a lot.” Tucker shot him a Jack Nicholson smirk, then turned to Lynn. “Besides, if he doesn’t want Jane, I do.”

Jane had the gall to smile.

But his mother had always been single-minded when she needed to be. “You can’t have it both ways, Cal. Either Jane’s your wife, or she’s not. What’s it going to be?”

He’d reached the end of his rope, and his temper snapped. “All right! No divorce. We’ll stay goddamned married!” He glared at the three women. “There! Are you finally satisfied? Now I want to talk to my wife!”