Oh, Baby!

by Judy Baer

  He looked at the darkened sky and then at me. “No way,” his expression said.

  “Oh, all right.” I opened my door and got into the car. I stuck the key into the ignition and turned it. Nothing. I wiggled the key and tried again. Nada. I pulled the key out to examine it, determined that it was indeed the right key and stuck it back into the ignition. Still nothing.

  “Trouble?” he said. It sounded more like “I told you so.”

  “I must have left my lights on. I’ve got a road service card somewhere. I’ll call for a jump.” I pawed through my billfold and came up empty. Then I recalled that I’d been cleaning my purse when Ted and Marsha called. “I left all my credit cards on the table at home. It must be with them.” I dug in my purse some more before I decided that I’d left my cell phone in the same place. “I’ll just go into the hospital and call a cab. No problem.”

  “No need. I’ll drive you home.” He was like a brooding storm cloud on my horizon, standing there, waiting for me to do something else that smacked of incompetence.

  “I don’t want to inconvenience you.”

  “You won’t be.”

  “I really don’t think…”

  “You’ll inconvenience me more if you don’t just quit arguing and get into my car.”

  I might have protested more but I’d expended all my energy on the Hatfields and the McCoys. It would be easier to have my car jumped in daylight, anyway. I gathered my things and trailed him across the parking lot to…what else? A Mercedes sedan, the dream car he’d talked about.

  He opened the passenger door and gestured me inside. It smelled of leather and musk, soap and masculine cologne. I leaned against the headrest and sighed.

  Clay rounded the car and got inside. In a smooth motion he started the car, put it in gear and wheeled out of the parking space. There he sat, tapping a fingernail on the steering wheel.

  “Well,” I said, cranky that he was wasting time. “Aren’t we leaving?”

  “I don’t know where you live. You’ll have to give me your address first.”

  Flushing, and glad the light in the car was bad, I mumbled my address.

  Chapter Fifteen

  “Turn left here.” I was relieved to see my home ahead. Riding with Clay cranked my nerves even tighter than they’d been while I was inserting myself into the face-off between Ted’s and Marsha’s mothers.

  The women had bickered in the hallway nonstop over who the baby would call Grandma and who would be referred to as Nana. Both ladies had had enough face-lifts to put their eyebrows in their hair-lines, and neither wanted the moniker Grandma quite yet—bad for one’s image on the tennis court or at the club, apparently.

  How two sweet, unworldly kids like Ted and Marsha had sprung from the loins of these people is beyond me. Fortunately they had managed to ignore the claptrap around them and focus on giving birth.

  “Here we are.” Clay pulled into my driveway. The streetlight revealed that, thanks to Hildy, there were large yellow patches of dead grass marking my lawn and that Geranium had rooted three holes in the flower bed. The place looked like it had been overrun with moles the size of small children. It was too dark to appreciate the riot of flowers in terra-cotta pots along the front porch or the swing with its newly upholstered seat.

  Not that I was out to impress Reynolds, anyway, I reminded myself. He has certainly never tried to improve my concept of him.

  “Don’t you leave a light on?” He frowned at the darkened house.

  “The porch light is burned out. I meant to ask Tony or my brother Hugh to change it, but I forgot. I’ll do it myself tomorrow.”

  He turned off the ignition. “Then I’ll walk you to your door.”

  “That’s not necessary. I’m accustomed to—”

  “I’m unaccustomed to leaving women on the street to find their own way home in the dark.” He left me no option but to be accompanied to my front door.

  He took my elbow and with a firm touch marched me to the porch.

  It’s nice to be treated like a lady. The irony is, of course, that while he’ll gallantly escort me to my door, he’ll also happily chew me up and spit me out at work. The man is a study in contradictions. What had made him such a conundrum?

  I couldn’t dwell on it, because my house key had gone missing in the bottom of my purse. I pawed through it much like Hildy digs a hole to bury a bone, tissues and pens flying into the air. No key. I handed Clay my billfold, sunglasses, a notebook and pencil, lip gloss, powder, doggie treats and hair clips as I rummaged. Still nothing. Finally I dumped the rest of the contents onto the floor. Candy, paper-clips, breath mints and pennies scattered across the floorboards before I saw the key glimmer from beneath a coupon for dog food.

  Even that wouldn’t have been so bad if there hadn’t been an escalating hullabaloo inside the house. Hildy never makes a fuss when I come home alone, but she knew that there was someone else on the front porch with me. Until she made sure I wasn’t in danger, she punctuated the guttural noises in her throat with fierce yips and barks. Then she began to run at the door and jump against it in a desperate attempt to get outside to protect me.

  “Who’s working the battering ram?” Clay muttered.

  And Hildy wasn’t the worst of it.

  Geranium had been in the sunroom when I’d left for the hospital. She usually stays there when I’m not at home, but she does occasionally venture into the rest of the house. From the sound of it, she’d joined Hildy’s noisy chorus and was making some of the most eardrum-piercing squeals in her vocabulary. If I hadn’t known better, I would have thought there were ten or twelve animals on the other side of the door, most of them man-eating.

  Clay’s deep blue eyes grew wide. “What’s going on in there?”

  He is cute when he is discomfited.

  “Oh, nothing. If I can just get my key in the lock…”

  “Is it some kind of weird alarm system?”

  “You might say that,” I said vaguely, hoping to slip through the door without having him see exactly what was inside. The Morgans and the Hendersons had worn me out and I didn’t have it in me to explain one more thing.

  No such luck.

  My door swung open and Hildy shot past me in a blur and hit Clay square in the chest with her front paws. He staggered backward and caught himself on the porch railing, barely escaping a backward tumble into one of Geri’s hollowed-out pits.

  Hildy, her lips pulled back, stared at Clay for a beat before recognizing him. Then her tail began to fan slowly and she backed off to let him recover from his precarious perch against the railing.

  “Good girl,” I assured her. “He’s okay. He’s one of the good guys, remember?”

  Regaining his footing, Clay ran his fingers through his hair as he followed me. “I guess I didn’t have to worry about you not being safe….” His words trailed off and his eyes widened to round circles as he stared past me into my house. “What’s that?”

  My sister Krissy, who lives only a few miles from me, had stopped by while I was out. An adept seam-stress, she thinks it is funny to sew outfits for Geranium. She’d been to my house with her latest creation, a bright pink garment with snaps which fit much like Geri’s little denim jacket and ended at the middle of Geri’s back. The bonus was a frill of pink nylon netting sewn around the hem. Plainly, Geranium looked as though she were wearing a tutu.

  “A pig in a tutu?” I answered, hoping to sound as if everyone in the neighborhood had one. “That’s what it looks like to me.”

  For a moment, I thought Clay might leave and go check himself into detox.

  “What’s on its face?”

  So busy was I enjoying Clay’s discomfiture, that I hadn’t noticed that Geri’s snout was streaked with a suspicious brown glop. She’d had her nose into something she shouldn’t have and I had a pretty good idea what it was.

  She snuffled happily around my legs as I leaned over and touched my fingertip to the goo. I held it to my nose, trying to detect a scen
t. Then, to Clay’s horror, I put the muck on the tip of my tongue to sample it.

  “What do you think you’re doing? That’s a pig. You can’t do a taste test on a pig’s snout!” He looked as though he might throw up.

  I smacked my lips and smiled at him. “Chocolate pudding,” I announced.

  “Wha…”

  “I had a huge bowl of the stuff in the kitchen. I evidently forgot to put it in the refrigerator before I left. Hildy must have knocked it off the counter.”

  He grabbed for the back of a chair to steady himself and stared at me in bafflement.

  I sighed at the expression on his face. “You’d better come inside. You don’t look well.”

  “What else is in there? Alligators? Opossums hanging from the light fixtures? Skunks?”

  “No, no and no. Too snappy, too lazy and too stinky. Come on in.”

  I switched on an interior light and Clay trailed me inside and shut the door behind him. Geri trotted after me, her little hooves clicking on the hardwood floor. Her tutu, which was made of a shimmering net, glimmered and twinkled in the light.

  Nothing was amiss in the living room. The kitchen, however, was a different story. A bowl lay on the floor. It and the floor had been licked clean, but the wall where the bowl had first hit had a splatter pattern on it that would have delighted a CSI detective. The pair had also managed to push my chairs into a hodgepodge and knock a centerpiece off the table. A sampled and discarded piece of plastic fruit—a banana—lay on the floor.

  “You two got into a lot of mischief, didn’t you? I left you guys alone too long today. Sorry. Hildy, do you want to go out? How about you, Geri, do you want to get out of your party clothes?”

  While Clay stood in the middle of the room, his head turning from side to side as if he’d found himself in a carnival fun house and couldn’t find the way out, I let Hildy into the fenced-in backyard for a run and began to unsnap Geranium’s tutu. She snorted and snuffled at my hand and squirmed happily as I scratched her neck. I wiped the rest of the pudding from her face and urged her through her pet door to the outside. Only then did I turn to Clay.

  He sat on a kitchen chair with a thump. His arms and hands hung limply between his knees, and his mouth was open, jaw slack. Poor fellow looked like he’d been hit in the face with a two-by-four.

  “I’ve got iced tea, coffee, sodas, pomegranate and apple juice.”

  He didn’t respond.

  “Coffee, then. Strong and black.”

  He was still staring at the pet door as if Geri would return dressed as something else—Batwoman, Marie Antoinette, perhaps, or Cruella deVil.

  He roused as I made the coffee. “What on earth is this place?”

  I glanced around. On its easel, my big, wild, thickly painted canvas dominated the living room. The Medusa hat I was making for my sister curled itself across the back of a chair. Clients’ baby pictures that I hadn’t yet organized were taped to the cupboards, and childish artwork covered the refrigerator. Pictures of my big, rowdy family were framed and positioned all over the room—Hugh in a leprechaun costume. Liam garbed in a multicolored robe for a community theater production of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, Caboose in an Elvis costume for a charity gig he’d attended. There was a picture of my parents dressed as the couple from Grant Wood’s American Gothic and a bumper sticker Lissy had recently given me, “We Can Spray for Mosquitoes—Why Can’t We Spray for Men?”

  “I like to call it home.”

  “No, really. Did I fall off the porch and hit my head? Am I unconscious? Dead?”

  “No such luck. Have a cookie. They’re my favorite, monster cookies.” I handed him a platesize cookie full of oatmeal and M&M’s.

  “Monster? Why am I not surprised?” He looked gloomily at the cookie. “I’ve been spun into an alternate universe and I’m afraid I’ll never get home again.”

  “It’s true you aren’t in Kansas anymore, Dorothy, but if you click your heels together, you’ll discover that you knew how to get home all along.”

  Naughty as it was of me, I was enjoying this. For once I had the upper hand, and the assured, self-confident Dr. Reynolds was on unstable footing.

  My family has that effect on people sometimes.

  What unnerved me was the feeling I had as Clay sat in my kitchen without that superior expression I’ve grown to dislike. I felt drawn to this Clay like a moth to a flame. Fortunately I’m smart enough not to get burned,

  “I’m beginning to understand you a little better,” he commented.

  “That’s unsettling.” I sat down on the chair across from him and curled my legs beneath me. “I still don’t understand you at all.”

  “There’s nothing to understand. I’m a doctor, a good one. I like things by the book, orderly. I’m a stickler for tradition and propriety. I’m a father and have a bright, articulate son. That’s all there is to me.” He looked around, still dazed by the bright lights and strong colors I live with. “But this…”

  “I’m a doula, a good one. I like things to be spontaneous and fun. I thrive on chaos in my personal life and order in my professional one. I’m bored by convention and am in favor of creativity and imagination. I’m not a parent but I have dozens of children in my life. I’m a Christian. And that’s all there is to me.”

  “No wonder we’ve been butting heads,” he said ruefully, rubbing his own as if it still ached from the conflict.

  “Night and day, oil and water,” I said, voicing my thoughts. “Flim and flam, up and down, in and out, black and white—”

  He held up his hand. “I get the idea.”

  “But I was on a roll.”

  “You’re always on a roll, Molly. You are a perpetual-motion machine, one of those punching dolls that you can hit but it never falls down. You bounce back and keep going.”

  Did I hear a hint of respect in his voice? Not many days ago I would have taken that as encouragement to keep trying to institute my program at Bradshaw, but not tonight. This punching doll has been knocked down one too many times. I need a rest.

  “Are you admitting to me that you are a stick-inthe-mud?” I broke my cookie into several pieces and nibbled at it daintily.

  “I didn’t say that.” His hair was tousled, and somehow just walking into my home had set his collar askew. He looked much more approachable that way.

  “But it’s what you meant. I hate to be blunt, Dr. Reynolds, but…”

  “Uh-oh, here it comes.”

  “…since henceforth I will be turning down clients who have you as their physician, I don’t need to tiptoe around your sensibilities anymore.”

  He looked up hopefully, a light in his eyes. “You’re quitting?”

  “No. I’m quitting you. I can’t cope with your negativity toward me anymore.”

  “So you’re firing me?” He appeared dumbstruck.

  It’s a look I enjoy seeing on a man once in a while.

  “You could say that. I’d advise you not to ask me for a recommendation anytime in the near future. I do have a couple of clients who see you, but they’ll give birth soon and then you’ll be out of my life.”

  “And you’ll be out of mine.” He looked far too happy about that.

  Chapter Sixteen

  He was suddenly genial, more so than I’d ever seen him. I hadn’t planned to make him quite this happy.

  I poured his coffee before going to the refrigerator to take out a carton of chocolate milk and a squeeze container of chocolate syrup. I set them, a straw and a glass on the kitchen table.

  “What are you doing?” Clay watched me like a specimen beneath a microscope.

  “Making my favorite drink.” I poured milk into the glass and then squirted a goodly portion of chocolate syrup in, as well. I stirred it with the straw and took a deep sip. “Yum. I like my chocolate thick and dark.”

  “What else do you like?” He frowned at me as he asked the question.

  “Chocolate chips mixed with coconut and eaten by the handf
ul, Mexican food made with a dash of chocolate in the sauce and most anything made by Hershey’s. Why?”

  “Those were my wife’s favorites, too.”

  “Ah, a discerning palate.” I was surprised he mentioned his wife but had the distinct sense that I was not to go there unless he took the lead.

  He swilled back a cup of coffee. “You remind me of my wife in several ways. She too, had a nice singing voice, and knew the words to ‘The Brady Bunch.’” He looked inexpressibly sad as he said it. “She loved animals, as well.”

  But you don’t have anything but cold-blooded fish at your house now.

  He shook himself like Hildy does when she comes out of a scummy pond, shaking away memories like Hildy shakes off water. “Never mind. Just an observation, that’s all.”

  Clay stood up and walked toward my painting. I’d added the greens and blues Hugh had suggested and it didn’t look nearly so psychotic as it had earlier. “Do you paint a lot?”

  “Most of the ones in this room are mine. I tend to paint out my emotions.” I let it drop but noticed him blink and stare once again at my work in progress. His diagnosis? Probably insanity, lunacy or severe psychosis.

  He looked around the room and headed for a bright piece that looked like a Monet painted on a Tilt-A-Whirl. “I like this. Did you do this one?”

  I swallowed thickly. “Not exactly.”

  “What does that mean? ‘Not exactly’?”

  “I helped a little but I’m not the artist.”

  “Who is, then?”

  At that moment Geri popped her snout through her pet door and grunted.

  A strange expression crossed Clay’s face as I tossed her a bedtime snack and shooed her back to her quarters.

  “The pig did it?”

  “I didn’t know it would turn out so well. I just kept putting washable paints, the kind that small children use in school, on her hooves and let her walk around on a piece of canvas. When my brother Hugh stretched it and put it on a frame, I was blown away by how attractive it was.” I walked close to him and pointed to the small but distinct shape in the corner. “There’s her signature, a hoofprint.”