The Baby Beneath the Mistletoe

by Marie Ferrarella

  Without realizing it, Tony held the baby closer to him. The whimper told him he was holding Justin too tight. “For what, loitering?”

  “If you’d stop being antagonistic toward me for a minute, you’d realize that—”

  “I’m not turning him over to the police.”

  Why was he being so vehement about it? A minute ago he’d been ambivalent. The answer had to be because she’d been the one to make the recommendation. “They won’t put him in a lineup. He’ll go to social services and—”

  The very word nudged forward memories. He remembered listening with disbelief as Shad had described what life had been like for him and Dottie after their parents had died. Tony could remember how grateful he’d felt, knowing he had two parents who loved him and were always there for him.

  “And what...be shunted around from place to place until someone gives him a home? If they give him a home?” He thought of how he would have felt if this were his Justin facing these alternatives. There was no way he would allow something like that to happen to the boy.

  She had no idea why she was trying to talk sense into him. The man had a head like a rock. She doubted even a state of the art explosive could made a dent in it “He’s a foundling—”

  “Yes, and I found him.” He looked down at the small, round face. Several teeth underscored a half grin. Tony realized that he was already lost. “As you said, whoever left him thought I could take care of him.” New resolve filled him. This wasn’t about him right now. This was about a small, helpless human being. “And I’m going to.”

  He didn’t know what he was letting himself in for. And Mikky didn’t know why she didn’t just say goodbye and go. Or why she should care what he did one way or the other. Maybe because she’d always been a sucker for the underdog, she thought. Even if the underdog insisted on snapping at her every word.

  “Very noble.” She nodded at the baby. “You could start by keeping his head up a little better.”

  Frowning, Tony realized that he’d let his hand slip. That was because she got him so irritated, he couldn’t think straight. It was like hearing nails being run along a chalkboard. He was the board, she was the nails.

  “I know,” he snapped, moving his hand up. “I’m not a complete idiot.”

  “No, not a complete one,” she allowed. “More like an idiot under construction.”

  “Look—”

  “No, you look. The longer you hang on to the baby, the more attached you’re going to get.” And she could tell by the look in his eyes, he was halfway gone as it was. The little boy was nothing short of adorable.

  What did it matter to her what he did? Tony wondered. And why did he feel called upon to justify himself to her? He owed her no explanations. And he’d given her more than the measure of courtesy she deserved.

  “I’m just looking to doing the right thing,” he heard himself saying.

  “And the right thing is to turn the baby over to the police. They get cases like this all the time.”

  Tony snorted. “So they won’t miss one if I don’t hand him over to them. Look, the mother may have a change of heart—”

  The dark, somber look that slipped over Mikky’s fair features made Tony stop talking. “If she gave it up, she didn’t have a heart—”

  He was too tired to go around about this, or even wonder why her expression had hardened the way it did. “Why did you come back here, anyway?”

  Initiated at Tony’s lack of understanding, at his total pigheadedness, Mikky shouted her answer at him, momentarily forgetting that this had been his initial guess. “To apologize.”

  “Fine.” His tone matched hers as he snapped back. “Apology accepted, now get out.”

  Turning on her heel, she stormed to the door. But then she stopped. Mikky blew out a breath and silently upbraided herself. She couldn’t just leave him if he was determined to take the baby in.

  With renewed determination to hang on to her temper, she turned around again. “We certainly rub each other the wrong way, don’t we?”

  Tony didn’t even bother looking in her direction. His attention was focused on the baby, who had begun fussing at the sound of their raised voices. “Well, at least we agree on one thing.”

  She took a tentative step back toward him. “Why do you think that is?”

  “Because for once you’re right.”

  “No.” Mikky tried not to lose her temper. “I meant about rubbing each other the wrong way.”

  Now she wanted to analyze things? Tony put no faith in that kind of nonsense, even if Dottie was a psychologist. Just a lot of words flying around as far as he was concerned. And he wanted none of them flying his way. “They include psych 101 in with your architect courses?”

  “Just trying to find a way to get us to work better together.”

  Coming closer, Mikky leaned against his arm as she looked at the baby. She made a teasing face at Justin and was rewarded with a gurgle that was very close to a laugh. The sound went right through her, settling in her heart. He really was adorable, she mused.

  The unintended brush of her breast against his arm evoked memories and aroused responses that were best left shut away. “You could start by butting out of my private life.”

  She raised her eyes to his. “Is this your baby?”

  Why was she playing that same refrain over again? He’d already told her once that it wasn’t. That should have been enough. “Just for the time being.”

  She should go, Mikky thought. Get in her car and drive home. There was a weekend waiting for her and friends she could be getting together with if she wanted. And a brother to meet by a movie theater.

  But she remained where she was, held fast by a conscience that had never learned how to sleep.

  Very gently she pulled the edge of his sweater out of Justin’s mouth. The baby seemed determined to eat whatever was handy. “You know anything about babies?”

  “I know they don’t have to be in inane conversations if they don’t want to be.” He moved, murmuring something to the baby, turning so that his back was to her.

  She moved right along with him. “Neither do grouchy, stubborn men.”

  “If we, if I,” he corrected, “turn Justin over to the police, the mother, when she comes back,” he emphasized, unable to believe that any woman would willingly abandon a baby this way, “will be treated like a felon.”

  “There’s a reason for that. Leaving your baby in a construction site is a felony. It’s called abandonment.”

  He tried to think of the men who worked for him. The names and faces were still jumbled in his mind. He hadn’t made a real effort to keep them straight. Did Justin belong to one of them?

  Who could have been desperate enough to turn his back on a baby?

  “Sometimes things aren’t always cut-and-dried,” he said, more to the baby than to her. “Sometimes they’re confused.”

  Soft brown eyes turned to look up at Mikky as Justin turned his head in her direction. She could feel herself being drawn in. Feel herself growing angry at a woman she didn’t know. “That doesn’t mean you jettison a baby out of your life like extra baggage,” she said, barely suppressing her anger.

  “What makes you so hot under the collar about this? Justin wasn’t left on your doorstep.”

  No, Mikky thought, he wasn’t. And Tony hadn’t had his mother walk out on him when he was a boy, leaving him to care for a squadron of brothers and sisters while nursing a broken heart. Her mother had left, no explanations, no excuses. She’d just taken a single suitcase of clothes and disappeared one day. And scarred an entire family with her departure.

  Growing up fast hadn’t been an option for her, it had been a necessity. Her older brother had falsified his birth certificate and enlisted in the Marines at seventeen. Her older sister had run off to get married at eighteen. She’d been left to look after the five younger ones.

  Mikky shrugged carelessly. “I just don’t like to see babies given a bad break, that’s all.”
/>   There was something more to it, but Tony didn’t feel like delving into it. Unlike Mikky, he respected boundaries.

  He shifted the baby in his arms, nuzzling his neck. The sweet scent of sweat and powder nudged other memories to the fore, galvanizing his resolve.

  “That’s why I’m going to keep him with me.”

  She laughed shortly, shaking her head. “Like I said, I don’t like seeing babies given a bad break.”

  If she wasn’t going to leave, he was. He placed Justin back into the baby seat and began to redo the straps. They were worn and shredding in places. “I don’t know why I’m even talking to you about this.”

  With a quiet sigh, Mikky moved him out of the way and proceeded to tighten the straps herself. “Because you need help, and you don’t know how to ask.”

  The way she just came in and elbowed him out of the way galled him no end. Just what gave her the right to think she could take over like this? “If I needed help, I wouldn’t ask you for it.”

  “I know.” Finished, she smiled at him. “Lucky for you I can read between the lines.”

  What the hell was she talking about now? “Lady, there are no lines.”

  “What do you feed a baby?”

  The question, when he’d been expecting more barbs, caught him off guard. His mind went blank. “Stuff. Food. Milk.”

  He was just picking things out of the air, Mikky thought. Left alone long enough, even monkeys eventually typed out the encyclopedia. “Would you like to go on to iron filings?” she asked sweetly. Mikky lowered her face next to the baby. “See, he doesn’t know the first thing about feeding you.”

  Straightening, she made up her mind, knowing she was probably going to regret this. “All right, you’ve talked me into it.”

  Like a man in a cartoon, Tony felt like looking behind him to see if there was someone else there. Someone else with whom she was carrying on a conversation. Because it certainly wasn’t him. “Talked you into what?”

  She pushed the strap of her purse up on her shoulder. “Helping you.”

  “When did I say that?”

  The smile on her lips had to be upgraded just to be called patronizing, he thought darkly. “You didn’t have to, the look on your face says it all.”

  “If it did, we wouldn’t be having this conversation—Not that it’s much of a conversation, more like a monologue, and I just seem to be feeding you your cues.”

  It was getting late. If she worked this right, there still might be time to take in the last show with Johnny. She knew her brother wasn’t going to be happy about that, but it couldn’t be helped. “Let’s get going before I change my mind.”

  Did she think that was a threat? Tony wondered. Okay, maybe he wasn’t up on baby care, but how hard could it really be? “Oh, like it doesn’t rotate 365 times every minute.”

  Stopped at the door, she raised her eyes to his. “If you’re going to insult me—”

  He had to stop short to keep from walking into her. At this proximity, looking down into her eyes, he found that they were an extremely dark shade of blue. It seemed as if nothing about her was in half measures. “Yes?”

  Mikky thought of telling him off, of saying something curt in response, but where would that lead? Better that one of them kept their sense of humor, and since she seemed to be the only one who had one, it was up to her.

  “Never mind, let’s just go.” Holding the door open, she waited until he stepped through with Justin. “There’s a supermarket not too far from here. We should be able to get what we need there. At least for tonight. I’ll lead, you follow.”

  He went down the steps, his eyes on the baby he was carrying. “What do you do when you’re not being a drill sergeant?”

  “I work on compiling a directory of polite men,” she deadpanned. “So far, I’m not having any luck finding any.” He was parked on the other side of the lot. She wondered if he was actually going to wait for her to pull her car around.

  The night air was cold and the lot had an aura of isolation about it, even though Tony could see the headlights from passing cars just down the road. They were moving like tiny white jewels rolling down the road. “That’s because they probably all hide when they see you coming.”

  She stopped at his car. Without waiting to be asked, she took Justin, baby seat and all, from him and let him fish out his car keys unencumbered. “Enough foreplay. We’ll go shopping for a few essentials and then go to your place.”

  “My place?” He hadn’t thought of her coming over. He hadn’t thought that far ahead. This was getting way out of hand. “Be still my heart.”

  With the car door open, she handed Justin back to him. The next moment she was already sprinting back to her car. “To have your heart be still,” she called out over her shoulder, “you would have had to have one beating in the first place.”

  He watched her go for a second, a moth watching the flame that was destined to kill it gain breadth and depth. “Touché,” Tony murmured, fastening the baby seat in the rear passenger position. He always believed in giving the devil her due.

  Shopping with Mikky, Tony quickly discovered, was not unlike trying to find evidence of footprints in a snowstorm. Just when he thought he saw her going down one aisle, she’d be heading for another. He had half a mind to leave without her, but in his heart he knew that she probably did have more experience at this than he did. The female of the species, he grudgingly allowed, had a better feel for this kind of thing. Even wolverines.

  They went through the supermarket in record time, heading, by his watch, to the checkout line ten minutes after they’d entered the store. Feeling almost winded, Tony managed to finally catch up to her as she began to unload the basket.

  Supermarkets weren’t exactly his area of expertise. Since his world had been turned upside down, he’d done all of his food shopping at local convenience stores, dining on pop tarts, cereal that somehow managed to be perpetually stale no matter when he purchased it, and popcorn. If he wanted real food, there was always a fast-food restaurant around the corner to accommodate him.

  “Do they give you discounts if you make it to the checkout line with a full basket in under fifteen minutes?” Before she could answer, he looked down at what she’d gathered. “What is all that?”

  With an eye out for speed, Mikky grouped the goods together on the conveyor belt.

  “Basics.” She judged the baby to be under a year, but just barely. That meant he was into solids as long as it came in tiny jars. “You’re going to need food, diapers, wipes, lotion, et cetera.” To illustrate the latter, she held up a plastic toy that she’d grabbed on her way down aisle 12. It was a rabbit with an exaggerated, bewildered look on his face.

  Somehow, the expression seemed rather appropriate, Tony mused. But he had his doubts about the rest of her booty. There seemed to be enough here to feed Justin until he went off to college. “All this?”

  “All this,” Mikky assured him. The baby was going to need clothes, she thought. Even if only a change or two over the weekend. She assumed that by Monday, Tony would either come to his senses, or the mother he seemed to have so much faith in would rethink her actions and return, looking for Justin.

  She was hoping for the former, but wasn’t taking any bets on either.

  “Look, I’m not a novice at all this. But I don’t remember having to get all this stuff.”

  “That’s probably because your wife did the shopping.” She pushed the cart ahead of her as their turn came. “You got to do the good stuff—the holding and the cuddling without the cleaning up.” She cocked her head, looking at him. “Am I right?”

  When he didn’t answer her, she knew she was.

  But when she turned to look at him, the expression on his face made Mikky realize she’d inadvertently brushed up against something she’d had no intention of touching.

  “I’m sorry.” She lowered her voice so that only he could hear her clearly, “I didn’t mean to jostle any memories.”

 
; He didn’t answer. Instead Tony moved Mikky aside and took out his wallet. It vaguely occurred to him that it had been a while since he’d been to the bank. Glancing at the bills he took out of his wallet, he handed them to the cashier.

  The checker took the money, counted it and then looked at him somewhat sheepishly. “You’re short, sir.”

  Mikky realized that Tony had given the woman all he had in his wallet. “Actually, he’s very tall for his age,” she quipped, shifting attention to herself and covering for him. He’d undoubtedly be embarrassed to admit he was out of cash. “He’s only ten. How much more do you need?”

  The cashier glanced at the register, then down at her hand. “Three-fifteen.”

  Elbowing a stunned Tony out of the way, Mikky gave the woman four singles, then collected her change.

  “What the hell was all that about?” he asked, sounding annoyed as they walked away from the checkout counter.

  “Humor.” Mikky pushed the cart through the electronic doors. “I was trying to lighten the situation all around.” She raised her eyes to look at him. His expression was as somber as ever. “Obviously I failed with you.” She stopped. “Switch places with me.”

  “What?”

  “Switch places,” she repeated, indicating the cart. “You push.” Mikky nodded toward the baby. “I carry.”

  “Don’t you trust me to carry the baby?”

  Mikky began walking toward where they had parked their cars. She’d found a spot right beside his. “Just want to get in my fair share of time.” It had been a long time since she’d held a baby in her arms, and she had to admit she’d missed the warm feeling that created.

  An elderly woman walked by, pushing a moderately filled cart to her car. Entranced by Justin, she stopped to coo at him.

  “She’s adorable.” The woman beamed at Mikky.

  “He,” Tony corrected. Opening up the trunk of his automobile, he began taking the groceries out of the cart and depositing them into the car.