Risky Baby Business

by Debra Salonen

  And some stranger—a very angry man with blue eyes and an artificially black mustache was pounding on the window. His words were muffled, but she wasn’t about to open the window while he had a hoe in his hand. “What do you want?”

  He gestured toward the road. “You ran over a hedgehog cactus.”

  “A hedgehog?” She turned to look where he was pointing. “We have hedgehogs in Nevada?”

  The idea made tears rush to her eyes. She wasn’t exactly sure what a hedgehog was, but she pictured a little animal. Brown and furry. Maybe some relation to the groundhog?

  The man made a sound of pure disgust and stormed away.

  Liz watched him march to the rattletrap truck and toss his hoe in the back. He paused a moment and pulled a navy cotton handkerchief out of the back pocket of his one-piece jumpsuit and used it to mop the sweat from his neck and brow.

  “You’re too young to wear jumpsuits,” she wanted to say. But she didn’t. As her sisters would attest, Liz was no arbiter of fashion. If clothes fit and were clean, she was happy. But still, the guy was in his early forties or late thirties. Tall, lean and—from the parts she could see, namely his arms—well muscled.

  And he was also still worked up. She could tell by his body language, which, odd as it seemed, intrigued her. He was a living, breathing contradiction. She couldn’t see his hair because of the hat, but his skin coloring belied the dark mustache. Liz was of Romani, or Gypsy, descent. She was surrounded by swarthy men with Mediterranean complexions. This guy’s mustache didn’t go with the rest of him.

  Liz loved puzzles.

  After stacking her papers neatly on the seat, she picked up her cell phone and got out of the car. She kept her thumb poised to call for help if he tried anything, but daylight and the peace and quiet of her neighborhood gave her the courage to approach him—from a distance.

  “Hey. What was that all about? What did I do?”

  He ignored her.

  “Excuse me, sir, but didn’t anyone ever tell you it’s ridiculously impolite to pound on a woman’s window then stalk off without any explanation.”

  “I told you.”

  His voice was deep. Liz didn’t think she’d ever heard that rich a bass before. The lush tone drew her closer.

  “Well, I was too freakin’ scared to understand the words. I thought you were attacking me.”

  He made another sound of irritation and stuffed his hanky back in his pocket. “Just forget it. You wouldn’t understand.”

  Now that was one charge Liz didn’t take lightly. In her family, Liz was considered the empathic one. The person most likely to give a damn. Didn’t two tours to Iraq count for anything? Hadn’t she opened her home to Lydia and Reezira, the two young Romanian prostitutes who’d been caught in an immigration nightmare after their “sponsor,” the deceitful snake, Charles Harmon, was arrested?

  “You’re wrong. You don’t know me, and you sure as hell don’t have any right to condemn me without giving me a chance to defend myself. Where’s the justice in that?”

  “Justice.” The mocking tone came through his laugh. “There’s no such thing as justice.”

  He hesitated a moment then pivoted and started toward her. Liz tightened her grip on her phone. It wasn’t much of a defense, but it was more than she’d had the last time a man attacked her.

  He stopped a foot away. Without a car window separating them, Liz had a better look at his face. And it confused her. Mustache aside, the rest of the pieces were quite ordinary. Masculine nose—not too big, not too small. Nicely shaped eyes with pronounced crinkles that were tanned from his job, she guessed. A good-sized mouth and really excellent teeth. He was a decent-looking man, but, again, she had a sense that all of the features were slightly off. As if she were looking at one of those children’s books in which the reader turns a section of the page to change the facial features and create a different character.

  He gestured toward the street, impatiently. She looked where he was pointing.

  “There. Do you see that flattened lump of muck? A minute ago that squished piece of debris was a living thing. A cactus. The word triglochidiatus defines it as a three-barbed variety. Its common name is the hedgehog cactus because early Europeans thought it resembled the little animal they remembered from home. Others call it a claret-cup cactus because of the beautiful ruby-red flowers that this one will never bear.”

  She studied the triangle-shaped planter at the corner of her driveway and the communal sidewalk. It hadn’t been there when she left the house that morning. Two other plants—neither of which she could name—had survived, but bits of shredded bark and some greenish splotch led straight to her tire. Proof of her vicious, although unintentional, assault.

  She honestly didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. So she did both. She laughed until she tears started running down her cheeks. “I’m sorry. I really am,” she sputtered, trying to explain that she wasn’t laughing at the man or his dead plant. “It’s just that this is so typical of the way my life has been going lately. I’m running around like a crazy person trying to keep all these balls in the air. And why? I can’t even be trusted to keep a hedgehog cactus safe—how could I possibly think I…”

  She didn’t finish the thought. Adopting Prisha—the goal she’d returned from India with—had never left her, but it seemed further out of reach than ever. And maybe there was a reason for that. Maybe the universe was trying to tell her something.

  “It’s telling you you’re a lousy driver.”

  She startled. Did I really say that thought out loud?

  “I’m usually a good driver. Unlike my sister Grace,” she added, mostly out of habit.

  “Tell that to my cactus.”

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake, I’m sorry. It was an accident. I’ll pay you for the damn thing.”

  He drew himself up proudly. Too proudly for a person who drives such a rickety truck. “Keep your money. Use it for driving lessons.”

  Then he left. Not a backward look. Not a by-your-leave, as her mother was fond of saying.

  But Liz was not without resources of her own. She could probably get the man’s name and number from Crissy, but that meant knocking on the door and actually talking to her neighbor—something Liz preferred to avoid. If there was another way to find out where he lived, she’d send him a check.

  She used the pen clipped to the stack of papers and quickly scratched out the guy’s license plate number. On the first page of her loan application, she realized too late.

  Yep, it was just one of those days.

  David Baines only made it six blocks before he had to stop, get out of his truck and re-hook the chain that kept the right side of his tailgate from working loose. He used his shoulder to shove the worthless piece of metal in place then hooked two links between the grooved notches that he’d rigged up.

  His head was pounding, but at least his temper was starting to cool. He couldn’t believe he’d actually yelled at a woman for running over a plant. Yes, he cared about his cactus and other seedlings, but only a madman—a crazy demented fool—would place a higher priority on cacti than people. What the hell is wrong with me?

  So many things he couldn’t begin to count, but he knew when this change in his personality had begun. Four years ago. On August 21, to be exact. The day he’d died.

  He reached over the side of his truck bed and made sure the rest of his tools were accounted for. Shovels, rakes, edger. No mower. He did landscaping, not yards. He grew the plants that he transferred to people’s raised beds and patios. He didn’t call himself a landscaper, though. That sounded too presumptuous. He was a handyman/gardener. He felt the combination sounded innocuous enough. Certainly not the kind of job a person with three postgraduate degrees would be doing.

  Once he’d started his new life, he’d had no choice but to learn a new trade. He’d ceased to be a scientist with credentials up the wazoo and had become a man who worked with plants. He grew them in his makeshift greenhouse at the rear of the
oversize lot behind the house he rented from his elderly and slightly whacko landlady. Mimi Simms lived in the double-wide mobile home on the adjoining lot. Her late husband had spent his final years in the shack she euphemistically called the “guesthouse.”

  The rent was reasonable, so David couldn’t complain even though the one-bedroom, one-bath residence was impossible to heat or cool. And in the four years that he’d been renting from her, he’d managed to grow a wall of hardy and unforgiving thorn bushes that gave him privacy and some illusionary sense of safety.

  He realized that he was hiding behind the hedge. Like an ogre in some children’s fable, he’d distanced himself from polite society, only venturing forth to fulfill his private vow to do good. He’d done enough bad to last a lifetime.

  He no longer made “better living through chemicals.” He made a better world through plants. This time, on a very small, humbling scale.

  Which partly explained why he lost it when someone destroyed one of his plants. Or so he wanted to believe, but he was too honest to place the blame for his temper tantrum on the lovely shoulders of the woman he’d just yelled at. He’d been in a funk for over a week. Happened every year around his daughter’s birthday. Memories would slip past his defenses. Despair would fill the hole in his heart like air in a balloon—until he blew up.

  This time, at a woman. He’d terrified her. And made her cry.

  But she’d laughed, too. As if his attack had been that of a crazy person. And she was right. Sane people didn’t explode over little things. He owed that poor woman an apology. It wasn’t her fault she’d smashed his cactus on a bad day. A day when the past couldn’t be denied.

  Today was Ariel’s birthday. Number nine. No doubt she would celebrate with a party, friends and gifts galore. She was probably four or five inches taller than the last time he’d seen her. Maybe she had a retainer or braces. From what he’d gleaned from his clients with young children, orthodontists were starting earlier these days.

  He tried not to think about Ariel.

  She wasn’t really his child, after all. He’d married her mother when Ariel was a toddler. Ariel’s real father was a rat-bastard who had abused Kay and neglected their baby daughter and twins Jordie and Randall who were two years older than their sister. The man’s only response to his wife’s request for a divorce was his fierce refusal to pay child support.

  David hadn’t wanted his new love to be tied to a man like that in any way. He had a high-paying job with a billion-dollar pharmaceutical company. He could certainly provide for his new family. And he had—until Kay, the children’s mother, left him for another man. A neighbor who was home when David hadn’t been.

  The timing, it turned out, had been providential. Kay and the children were safe from the fallout created by David’s losing favor with his boss, a megalomaniac named V. A. “Ray” Cross. Born Vincente Aurelio Conejo, Ray went from being the first kid in his family to graduate from high school to the boardroom of one of the largest privately owned pharmaceutical labs in the country. His staff had often speculated about the number of bodies buried along Ray’s remarkable climb to the top, and the closer David got to the man he’d at one time considered his mentor, the better he understood Ray’s maxim for life. In Ray’s world, only Ray mattered. The bodies, David feared, were real. And, in a way, included his.

  He got back in the truck and drove carefully, never exceeding the speed limit. Faster cars passed him impatiently, but David was a follower of rules. Most of them, anyway.

  “Thou shalt not kill”—unless you count poisoning thousands of unsuspecting consumers.

  “Thou shalt not lie”—unless the truth means losing profits in any given year.

  “Thou shalt not covet your neighbor’s wife”—well, he could honestly say he’d never done that. His neighbor’s life, maybe. All he’d ever wanted was a home and a family of his own. The kind he’d known as a child, before his parents were killed in a car accident and he was told he had to stay with his grandmother, who had considered her work over and done when the daughter she raised got married.

  June, as his grandmother preferred to be called, did her duty. She even sent her grandson to the best college his inheritance money could buy, but it hadn’t occurred to her to try to replace the love he’d known in his parents’ arms.

  He’d tried to find that as an adult, and thought he’d succeeded with Kay and the children. Until, fate ripped that family out of his hands, too. And seldom a night went by that he didn’t think about the pain his “death” must have caused the children he’d called his own.

  As he pulled into his driveway, he caught a glimpse of his landlady. Mimi Simms was eighty if she was a day. Her red hair was brighter than a poinsettia in bloom. She was an odd combination of nosy and antisocial. David preferred the latter. Once he’d made up his mind to speak out, to become a high-profile whistleblower, he’d had no choice but to leave the past behind and disappear.

  For four years, he’d been lucky. He’d also never once had an altercation with a customer or drawn attention to himself. He could only hope that the beautiful lady with the kind eyes would shrug off his embarrassing faux pas and forget about him.

  “What a fool,” he muttered as he pulled the truck to a stop in front of his little shack. “I had my chance at a normal life, but I chose to work for Ray Cross, instead. Now, I can’t ever go back.”

  Nor could he start a new life with someone else. He’d made a vow never to put anyone through that kind of torture and distress again. His decision to give up his old life and enter the federal Witness Protection Program had been relatively easy—it was either that or wake up some morning with Ray Cross’s gun in his face. The deputy U.S. marshals who had been assigned to his case had come up with an elaborate plan that included an inferno at the lab where David had spent most of his time. No body. No funeral. No fuss. Or so David had assumed. But apparently no one had informed his ex-wife.

  Dying had been difficult, but it had been a lot easier on him than on his loved ones. He would regret that for the rest of his life.

  Chapter 2

  “Okay. Who wants to go first?” Alexa asked, looking around their mother’s table.

  Alexa, who was a year and four months older than Liz, often acted as the CEO of the Parlier family. But beneath the businesslike facade was a gentle heart that made nearly every child at her Dancing Hippo Day Care and Preschool fall in love with her.

  Neither Liz nor Kate volunteered. These weekly breakfast meetings just weren’t the same without Grace, the youngest of the Parlier sisters. She’d always shown up bubbly and full of topics for discussion. Sometimes Alexa and Kate would share their problems, too, but nobody really expected Liz to contribute. She didn’t dump. She preferred to keep her problems to herself. Things seemed to sort themselves out eventually without her sisters’ help.

  “Has anyone heard from Grace?” she asked.

  Newly engaged, Grace had followed her fiancé, Nick Lightner, to Detroit, where she was settling in and planning a wedding. But, in typical Grace fashion, she couldn’t resist being an active part of Kate’s recently decided upon nuptials, as well. “Practice makes perfect, right?” she’d told Liz on the phone a few days ago. “By helping to plan Kate’s wedding, I’ll know what mistakes to avoid.”

  Liz missed her—everyone did. Especially Kate.

  “Here’s her flight information,” Kate said, handing Alexa and Liz copies printed from the Internet. “Did I tell you she’s having a costume made for Maya? Just like ours. Grace insists Maya will be ready to dance at my wedding. How? Are you teaching her, Alexa? Because I sure as heck don’t have time. And I know Liz is too busy.”

  “Liz is always too busy, aren’t you, Liz?” Alexa asked. “Too busy for anything fun.”

  Liz looked across the table at her older sister. As kids they’d shared a special bond. But the past few years had been difficult. So much had happened in both their lives that neither seemed able to talk about.

  �
��I wouldn’t make much of a teacher, even if I had the time,” she said. “Do either of you want to try my new tea? I’m calling it Woman Power. It’s better than coffee, Alexa. And a heck of a lot better for you than soda, Kate.”

  Kate made a face. “I gave up sodas weeks ago, remember?” Kate’s life had turned upside down when her ex-husband was released from prison on parole—just in time for his ex-wife’s engagement to another man.

  “Good for you. But you should try this. It has maté in it. A little pick-me-up without coffee’s acid.”

  She poured them two cups and added a squeeze of honey from a bear-shaped vessel. “Where’s Mom?”

  “Airing out Claude’s place. She hired a cleaning crew. Same people who did Romantique after the county boys got done with it,” Kate answered.

  Their paternal uncle had lived next door until Grace’s hubby-to-be busted Claude and several other family members for their illicit business dealings with old family friend Charles Harmon. The house was now empty, but with family coming to town for Kate’s wedding, every bed would be needed.

  “So, it’s official? The Sisters of the Silver Dollar are dancing at your wedding?” Alexa asked Kate.

  Liz and her sisters had danced for their father as children, scampering after the coins he’d tossed their way. As they grew up, they’d taken the craft more seriously, incorporating the old steps into their routines. The name stuck, but the girls hadn’t danced together since their father, Kingston “King” Parlier, passed away. Until recently.

  “Well, you know Grace,” Kate said, sipping her tea. “Um, this is good, Liz. I told you your mint tea is a huge success at the restaurant. Maybe not being able to do physical therapy for a living is a good thing. Herbal remedies might be your true calling in life.”

  “I appreciate your support, but I haven’t given up on physical therapy completely. P.T. might not be my first love, but it pays well. And any kind of start-up is risky.”