My Babies and Me

by Tara Taylor Quinn

  SHE HAD THE WALLPAPER and paint for the nursery on order, and that Saturday Seth dropped by to take her shopping for furniture. She’d spoken to Michael again, twice that week, but was no closer to resolving anything with him. Was beginning to suspect she never would be.

  “How you feeling?” Seth asked as she climbed into the Bronco beside him.

  “Great.” It wasn’t a total lie. She hadn’t had any morning sickness for almost two weeks. And the weather outside was beautiful. It was the week before Memorial Day, and the skies were shining on Cincinnati. They’d had sunshine and sixty-degree temperatures all week.

  Seth was glancing over at her, grinning, but looking kind of stupid and embarrassed, too.

  “What?” she finally asked him. If he thought she was in the mood for teasing, she’d set him straight immediately.

  “Nothing.” He held up both hands in a gesture of surrender, then started the car. “It’s just the first time I’ve seen you in maternity duds. You look kinda cute.”

  “Shut up and drive,” Susan said, but she was smiling. She’d been clothes shopping the day before and liked the denim jumper she was wearing. Even more, though, she was excited at the changes that proclaimed the lives growing inside her. Every day, the babies she carried seemed more real.

  Seth tried to be patient as Susan dragged him all over town in search of the perfect nursery, but by noon, Susan could tell he’d reached his limit. He’d looked at his watch no fewer than ten times. She almost settled for an off-white ensemble with soft roses on the headboards and changing table, just to pacify him, but she couldn’t. They weren’t quite what she wanted.

  She’d go by herself when she could take as much time as she wanted. And send Seth back later to pick up whatever she ended up buying. Or, better yet, have the whole lot delivered.

  “How about some lunch?” she asked as they left the last store.

  Seth glanced at his watch. “You mind if we take a little drive first?”

  “Fine with me.” She buckled up. “Where we going?”

  “Just driving.”

  Taciturn all of a sudden, Seth headed out of town, but this was no leisurely drive they were on. The turns Seth took were deliberate, made as surely as if he’d taken the trip a million times before.

  “Can I ask you something?” He broke the silence that had fallen between them.

  “Sure.” She was game for just about anything if it would help improve his mood.

  “Why did you decide to divorce Michael rather than give up your job and follow him to Chicago?”

  Not the question she’d been expecting. “You want the short version?” she asked, wondering how much to tell him.

  “I don’t think so, no.” He was frowning.

  “I’d been with Halliday for several years by then, Seth,” she reminded him. “I was well on my way to the top. A move would have meant starting over.”

  He continued to drive, silent as he watched the road in front of him.

  “Halliday Headgear is one of the few successful privately held companies left. My chances of attaining the same level of advancement somewhere else were slim,” she went on, choosing her words carefully. “And I loved working for Ed.”

  “More than you loved Michael?”

  That hurt. “No.”

  “But you loved your career more than you loved Michael.”

  “No, I didn’t,” she said slowly. Anyone but Seth would’ve been told to mind his own business. “My career is part of who I am.” She tried to explain what she didn’t fully understand herself, anymore. “And I had goals to meet.”

  “So you could be ready to have your baby when the time arrived,” he said. “By the age of forty or the year 2000.” He wasn’t being judgmental; rather, he sounded as though he were trying to understand.

  “That,” she said, “and other things.”

  Silent again, Seth drove on. Staring out the window, Susan wondered just where they were going. The houses weren’t very attractive here. They’d driven to a part of town Susan had never visited before.

  Pulling under a weeping willow that was so huge she could barely see past it, Seth stopped the Bronco. He settled back in his seat and looked out at a field of weeds that was occupied by a bunch of poorly dressed kids kicking a soccer ball around.

  “Do you regret the decision you made back then?” Seth asked quietly.

  “I didn’t regret it then.” Not completely. “At least, I didn’t regret not leaving Halliday’s. I never wanted the divorce. I tried to talk Michael out of it.”

  “You did?” Seth turned toward her, surprise lighting his dark features.

  “Of course I did,” she said. How could he have expected anything less? “I loved him. Our marriage was a good one. I saw no reason it couldn’t continue. We could afford to travel back and forth between Chicago and Cincinnati.”

  “So Michael was the one who wanted the divorce?”

  Susan shook her head, following Seth’s gaze out to the field. “I don’t think so. He just didn’t see any other option. Said long-distance relationships never work. He was afraid of the damage we’d do to each other if we tried to hang on.”

  “Maybe he was right.”

  “I guess I thought so at the time.”

  “You don’t now?” Seth’s eyes were following the kids around the field as though he knew something about them.

  “No. I think we’ve proven over the past three years that we could’ve made it work.”

  The kids on the field ran over to a man dressed almost as shabbily as they were, and Seth started up the Bronco.

  “Mind telling me why we were here?” she asked him as he pulled around the corner.

  He pointed out a dilapidated gray structure with dirt for a front yard. “See that house?” he asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “There’s a woman who lives there alone with two kids. Her husband left her a couple of years ago, but not before he’d beaten the life out of her.”

  “You know her?”

  “I did.”

  “And those kids back there, they’re hers?”

  “One of them is,” Seth told her. “His name’s Jeremy.”

  CHAPTER TEN

  SUSAN WATCHED her little brother, the muscle twitching at the corner of his mouth as he tried to act unaffected by what he was telling her. She had a feeling she might have stumbled on the woman. Michael thought was responsible for Seth’s sudden drinking. Michael just hadn’t figured in the kids.

  “What happened?” she asked softly.

  “I couldn’t be a proper father to the kids, being out of town as much as I am,” he said, telling her far more than he probably knew. He must really have loved those kids if he’d even considered being a father to them. “They’ve been deserted enough in their lives. They need someone who can stay around. Someone who comes home at night.”

  “Oh, Seth,” Susan said, her eyes full of empathy.

  “I’ve been thinking about quitting my job, finding something here in town,” he shocked her by admitting.

  “But...” Susan scrambled for words. “What would you do?” Seth was one of the best structural engineers in the business. He’d not only trained for years to do what he did, he loved his work. And he was in demand all over the country. Not to mention the fact that he made a damn good salary and by the looks of things those kids could use a lot of help in that area.

  “Good question,” Seth said, sullen again. “Engineering’s all I know and I have to travel if I’m going to make enough money to support the four of us.”

  The four of us. Seth was really serious here.

  Making up her mind, Susan whisked up a quick prayer for her mother’s forgiveness and decided to tell Seth something nobody but Michael had ever heard.

  “You asked me earlier why I chose my career over Michael,” she said, hoping this wasn’t a mistake.

  Seth nodded.

  “Well, in the first place, I never saw the divorce as final. I could never quite
convince myself that our marriage was over.” She grinned nervously. “I guess the past few years have proven that I was right.”

  At Seth’s pointed look, Susan continued. “Mom called me into her room before she died” She took a deep breath.

  “I remember.” Signaling a turn, Seth headed back toward the more upscale part of town. “Scott, Sean, Stephen and I were all sent to the cafeteria. I think Spencer was still in school.”

  “Right.” Susan squeezed her eyes shut, trying not to remember that day so clearly. “Anyway, she made me promise never to tell you guys what she told me.”

  “But you’re going to tell me.” Seth’s words were more a demand than a question.

  Studying her little brother, Susan wondered if she should. If her secret would help at all. “Mom wasn’t always a meek, mothering soul, Seth,” she started. “She’d wanted more than just about anything to go school to learn fashion design.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  Susan had had a hard time believing the news herself, except when she’d looked into her dying mother’s eyes and seen the broken dreams there.

  “Anyway.” She blinked the memory away. “She married Daddy and he had specific ideas about a woman’s place. She was to cook and clean, of course, but she was also the warmth, the nurturing, the mothering that every family needs. His role was the provider, the protector.”

  “Right,” Seth broke in impatiently.

  “Mom was content to live under Dad’s loving care, his protection, happy to have his children, to care for them. For us. Most of the time...”

  She stopped abruptly, swallowing back her own tears as she remembered the tears dripping slowly from her mother’s eyes that day.

  “But growing up, I hated how she always settled—how I was supposed to settle, too. It pissed me off that I had to do dishes every night while you guys got to go out and shoot hoops. I had to put away everyone’s laundry twice a week while the five of you took turns taking out the trash once in a while. I wanted to play Little League with you and instead I got to watch from the sidelines. Hell—” she laughed without humor “—Dad wouldn’t even let me have a turn when he took the five of you to the batting cages. If I got to go at all, I had to be content to watch.”

  Seth’s jaw was working while he stared out the windshield. “I never knew it bothered you so much.”

  “Mom did.”

  “Why didn’t you ever say anything?”

  “I did. All the time. Nobody listened.”

  “I—maybe you just—we didn’t...did we?” Glancing quickly at Susan, Seth muttered, “I guess maybe you’re right.”

  They fell silent, both of them lost in their own thoughts, their own memories. Not all of them bad.

  “That day, in Mom’s room...” Susan needed to finish what she’d started. “She told me she’d always understood how I felt, that she’d been rooting for me all those years.”

  “Then why didn’t she do anything about it?”

  Susan had wondered that herself. Many times. “I guess because then she’d have had to cross Dad and that wasn’t something she ever did.

  “But that day in the hospital, she spoke up. She told me she wanted more for me than she’d ever had herself, more from me than she’d ever given.” She looked over at her brother. “She said I was the part of her she’d never had the courage to be.”

  “That doesn’t even sound like Mom.”

  “I know.” Susan remembered her own shock as if she’d only heard the words yesterday. “And that’s not all. She told me that only through my courage to be more in life could she finally be complete.”

  Seth swore. “That’s a hell of a burden to place on anyone.”

  Charging on, Susan had to finish, to get it all out. “She told me to believe in myself, to be strong, to be whatever my heart told me I needed to be.” She’d also told Susan, in a breathless whisper, not to forget about the part of herself that was a woman.

  “God, sis—” Seth broke off, concentrated on the road in front of him. He was frowning, his knuckles white as he gripped the steering wheel.

  “How could she do that to you?” He seemed to be talking more to himself than to her. “To think you’ve been carrying around that burden all these years....”

  “It’s okay, Seth.” Susan placed her hand on her brother’s arm. “I survived.” She smiled over at him, showing him that she really was just fine. “If anything, Mom’s words set me free.”

  “Only you would come up with that take on it.”

  “It’s true.” She watched the trees whiz by, the fields of wildly growing weeds. “She took away the guilt I’d been feeling my whole life for bucking the system. For needing to make more of myself; for trying to be who I always knew I could be.”

  “Maybe,” Seth grunted. “And maybe she’s to blame for your divorce. And for the fact that you’re now four months pregnant with fatherless twins.”

  “Maybe.” She didn’t want to think about that. “But that’s not why I told you all this.”

  She had a feeling he knew what she was getting at, but he didn’t say so.

  “The point is, Seth, that if you quit your job—the work you love—you’ll never live life to its potential. Regrets will eat at you until you’re bitter inside, and sooner or later, they’ll explode on someone else.”

  “Like Mom’s did on you.”

  Parking at a restaurant a couple of blocks from Susan’s house, Seth stopped the Bronco, but he didn’t get out.

  “You know the old saying that if someone gives you lemons you make lemonade?” Susan asked him.

  “Yeah,” he answered grudgingly.

  “Well, the lemons Mom gave me made some really good lemonade.”

  Giving her one of his “do-we-really-have-to-do-this” looks, Seth waited for her to finish.

  “Believe in yourself, Seth,” she told him, her gaze pleading with him to take her seriously. “Be strong, not only for you, but for those around you. Don’t settle. Ever. Anyway, if this woman really loves you, she won’t expect you to give up something that’s so important to you.” She had his attention. “For God’s sake, be whoever it is you need to be, ’cause if you don’t, chances are someone else is going to pay for sit.”

  “WE WON.”

  “I’m sorry.” Michael cursed himself for not coming up with anything more useful to say. He paced his hotel room, holding the phone in his hand, hating the confinement. He’d been in Denver far longer than he’d planned.

  “When the trial was dragged out that extra week, I really thought Joe was onto something....”

  Michael had been concerned about the extra waiting, what it was doing to Susan, physically and emotionally. “You can rest assured that the boy got the best legal care.”

  “That poor little boy...”

  Frowning; he worried about the despondency he heard in her voice. He hadn’t seen her in over a month.

  “Don’t give up on him, Susan,” he said, hoping he wasn’t offering a bad suggestion. Perhaps it would be best if she just let go, went on, forgot. “You arranged for that funding for his surgery, you found Joe and there might be something else you can do.”

  “Yeah. Maybe.”

  Michael made a quick decision. “I’m finishing up here in Denver tomorrow or the next day. How would you like to take a day or two off and have some fun?”

  “What kind of fun?” His blood warmed at the sensual promise in her voice.

  She was still Susan. Thank God. “Well, that, too,” he said, sitting down on the edge of his king-size bed. “We could make reservations at The Race Book.” On the Kentucky side of the river, The Race Book was the new hot spot at Turfway Park. “Or there’s a new Trekkie collectible shop in Louisville.”

  “The Race Book would be fun.” She was sounding better already. “There’s no live racing going on this month, but I love the simulcasting. We can bet on a bunch of races at once.”

  Yep. Still Susan, all right. One race wasn’t enough for her.
She had to take on ten at a time. “Let’s plan to go Friday.”

  “Michael?”

  “Yeah?”

  “You can stay here if you like.”

  His body sprang to attention. “I like.”

  “Good.”

  Something made him push his luck. “My meetings with the Miller family are set to resume on Monday.”

  “You want to stay here for the rest of your time in town?” He noticed she was just asking, not necessarily inviting.

  And yet, he wasn’t sure he even wanted the invitation. “Maybe.”

  “Why don’t we talk about it on Friday?”

  “Fine.” He didn’t want to talk about it at all. Thing was, he didn’t know what he did want.

  Looking around his hotel room, Michael couldn’t find anything he hadn’t seen a million times before in the weeks he’d been there. Even opulence dimmed with overexposure.

  “How are you feeling?” He had to ask.

  “Good.” She paused. “Fat.”

  “Already?” He couldn’t picture it.

  “Yep.”

  “Still feeling movement? Kicking?” He hated his curiosity. Hated the constant tension pressing against his temples.

  “All the time.”

  “Well, you need your sleep.” Pinching the bridge of his nose didn’t help his headache. But he kept trying, anyway.

  “I know, Michael. Good night.”

  She hung up without even waiting for his reply.

  TOSSING OUTFIT after outfit on her bed, Susan was frantic by ten o’clock Friday morning. Michael was due anytime, she had clothes all over the room she’d be sharing with him—and she was naked. Which wouldn’t have been the problem a few months ago that it was now.

  He wasn’t going to like her body.

  The overalls made her look like a horse. The denim jumper like a cow. And the cotton slacks and knit top like a bright pink pig. Great. He’d think he was in a barn. Dating a farm. He’d probably cancel their reservations at the track and take her to the zoo.

  Frustrated tears seeped through eyelids she was squeezing tight in an effort not to cry. She didn’t have time to ruin her makeup.

  Then again, why not? She’d ruined the rest of her life.