Baby Under The Mistletoe

by Jamie Sobrato

  To the left the study, which had always been his father’s domain, had barely changed in all the years he’d owned the house. Same imposing desk, same shelves of books, same military awards and prints covering the walls, same air of severity that had always dominated his father’s life…until recently.

  “He’s in the kitchen,” West said, leading his mom down the hallway, toward the sound of his father muttering.

  “Was that his cat I saw on the front lawn?”

  “Yeah, he’s banished from the house right now because Dad doesn’t remember having a cat,” West whispered.

  His mother’s expression turned even darker. “I’ll be sure and pick up some allergy medicine today,” she said, her light tone sounding forced.

  “Who’s there?” his father called as they entered the kitchen.

  West held out a hand to keep his mom from stepping in the spilled cereal.

  “Dad, it’s Mom. She stopped in to say hi.”

  His father turned, scowling, toward them. “Julia, where the hell have you been?” he demanded, as if she’d stepped out for groceries and had stayed gone for ten years.

  She looked from the General to West, bewildered, but she answered, “Oh, here and there. How have you been, John?”

  “Awful,” he muttered, taking out a pan now and putting it on the stove.

  He cranked up the knob on the front of the stove and a flame burst up around the pan.

  “Hey, Dad, why don’t you let me do that.” West made a move for the knob to turn it down, but his father waved him away.

  “Leave me the hell alone and let me cook my own eggs.” He turned down the flame, put a pat of butter in the pan and fumbled with the egg carton on the counter.

  West looked over at his mother, and they winced at each other.

  “I remember how much you loved my omelets,” Julia said. “Sure you wouldn’t like me to whip one up for you?”

  For the first time since West had been back home, his father smiled.

  “Now that you mention it, that sounds perfect.”

  She went to the refrigerator and brought out the mushrooms and cheddar cheese West had bought yesterday. West sat and watched a disconcerting time warp occur right in front of him.

  All of a sudden, he was transported back over a decade and a half. His parents hadn’t divorced. They’d just aged. Two more marriages and years of bitterness didn’t lie between them.

  His father, for the first time in ages, looked sort of…content.

  It was heartbreaking.

  And he wondered if any woman would ever love him enough to show up and take care of him when he’d become too impossible to care for. Or vice versa.

  Could he love Soleil this way?

  Or was this even love he was witnessing?

  It resembled it, but it also resembled something his parents were far more familiar with: duty.

  And right now, he wasn’t so sure there was much difference between the two.

  He hadn’t gotten in touch with Soleil since she’d told him about the baby, partly because he was terrified, and partly because he was trying to take his mother’s advice and give the matter time and space, take things slowly, try not to force a resolution.

  Everything in him wanted to force a resolution, and he knew if he called Soleil, he’d find it nearly impossible not to start steering the situation in the right direction. Marriage, harmony, family.

  Leaving it alone hadn’t been so hard, thanks to his father, who’d kept him busy. Margie, the temporary attendant, had bailed yesterday when his father had groped her then an hour later tried to hit her for attempting to help him in the bathroom.

  And now here was his mother, the latest candidate for the attendant job, and by far the most experienced.

  Did the idea make sense, or was it crazy?

  “So, has West told you his big news?” she asked the General, interrupting West’s brooding.

  Oh, God.

  What was she thinking? Of course he hadn’t told his dad.

  “What? What’s she talking about?” His father gave him a confused look.

  “Oh, actually, I haven’t mentioned it yet.” He gave his mother a little glare when she glanced at him from the stove, and she raised her eyebrows in silent reproach.

  “Well?” she nudged. “I think he deserves to hear the good news.”

  “Dad, my, um, girlfriend and I are going to be having a baby in May.”

  “What girlfriend?”

  “You haven’t met her. I’ll have to introduce you soon.”

  “You got some girl pregnant, and you’re not even married? Who is this girl? Why the hell haven’t I met her yet?” His father banged his fist on the kitchen table to punctuate the rant.

  “I don’t really want to get into it right now, Dad. I’ll introduce you soon.”

  “Since when is it okay for an air force officer to go around having babies out of wedlock? In my day, an officer didn’t do that kind of thing.”

  “I know, Dad. But things happen. Soleil and I haven’t worked out how we’re going to handle things.”

  “What the hell’s a So-lay?”

  “Soleil is my girlfriend’s name. It’s a French word. It means sun.”

  His father still looked perplexed, then, predictably, angry. “What is she, some kind of hippie?”

  West ignored that. He glanced at his mom, whose expression was worried now. She turned her gaze from West to the omelet she was watching in the pan. She knew better than to jump into the middle of things.

  “You mean to tell me, you got some girl pregnant, and you’re not even marrying her?” He slammed his fist on the table again, causing the salt and pepper shakers to jump this time. “What kind of man are you, anyway? You’re not a man I raised, that’s for damn sure.”

  Before West could react, his father pushed himself to his feet and walked out of the room, down the hall to his study. It wouldn’t do any good to follow him, so West simply let out a ragged breath.

  “Mom,” he said. “Why…”

  He didn’t even have the energy to say the question out loud. But she knew what he wanted to know-why’d she have to go and tell the General?

  “Better to get it out in the open now, rather than later. It would only get harder to explain.”

  “You could have let me do it in my own time.”

  She eased the omelet off the hot pan and onto a plate. “West, dear, I’m sorry. I think I saved you some trouble, though. If you’d tried to tell him on your own, he’d have been worse. With me here as a buffer-”

  “Yeah, okay, you’re right.”

  And she was. Since childhood, her presence had been the buffer between himself and his father. When she was near, the General was slightly less hostile, slightly more tolerable. Some things never changed, apparently.

  As he watched his mother carry the plate to the study, he recognized he definitely didn’t belong here. He didn’t want to be in the middle of this family drama anymore.

  Maybe his mother was crazy, too, showing up out of the blue, whipping up an omelet as if she’d never left the place-a mad Betty Crocker bent on reconciliation. Had loneliness finally gotten to her? Was this the first sign of her own mental decay?

  He craved an escape from this place. He was tired of trying to please his father, and he wasn’t going to do it anymore.

  What that would mean, though, he couldn’t say.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  SOLEIL COULDN’T KEEP excluding West. She’d avoided the inevitable all weekend, taking long naps and wrapping up loose ends around the farm’s operation and finances before the end of the year. Today was going to be the first day she did things right.

  She found his number in her cell-phone address book and hit the Call button. A moment later, his voice was on the other end of the line, sounding clear, as if he’d already been up for a while.

  “West,” she said tentatively. “I know it’s early, but I’m calling because I have an ultrasound appointment today, a
nd I thought you might like to join me for it.”

  Silence.

  “I mean, you know, because you’d get to see the baby on the ultrasound screen.”

  “Oh, um…of course,” he finally said, sounding strange. “I’d love to go. What time?”

  “It’s at noon in Santa Rosa. Sorry for the short notice.”

  “So, an hour to get there…” A pause. “I’ll pick you up at ten-thirty, if that works for you.”

  She blinked, stunned. “Uh, sure. That would be great.”

  “I’ll see you in two hours then.”

  She hung up. In two hours, she’d be driving to the city with West, just like a real couple on their way to see their real baby on an ultrasound screen.

  Maybe he’d also want to join her for her Bradley childbirth classes at the community center. Of course he would, and he’d have some definite ideas about what to name the baby-something traditional like Elizabeth or Michael, or maybe even after his own parents…

  She had always dreamed of having a normal name that people could spell, instead of the bizarre hippie name her mother had actually chosen. As a girl, she’d dreamed of being a Melissa or a Jennifer. Probably the kind of name West would like.

  Okay, stop. You need to calm down and get a grip. Quit getting so far ahead of yourself.

  The two hours zipped by as she got ready, answered a few phone calls and made a list of things she needed to buy. Most important, she needed to find a crib. Her father had sent her a check-his way of apologizing for being at a conference in Europe instead of anywhere accessible for the holidays-and intended to use that money to start outfitting the nursery.

  When she finally heard West’s car in the gravel driveway outside, she was seized by a moment of terror. This wasn’t just any trip to the doctor they were embarking on. This was something huge. This was the thing Soleil had been avoiding ever since she’d first learned she was pregnant.

  She’d been lying to herself all this time, convinced that somehow the pregnancy, and the baby, belonged to her alone. Now she had to face the truth-West was going to be a big part of her life from here on out, whether she liked it or not.

  She heard the vehicle stop out front and a door shut. She barely had time to check herself in the mirror before hurrying out the door. West was a few feet from the SUV.

  He smiled and said hello.

  “I could drive if you want,” she said.

  He patted the hood of the Toyota Highlander. “Great gas mileage. I’ll drive.”

  He opened the passenger door for her. She climbed in, then dug a package of saltines out of her purse for emergency motion-sickness use.

  “Cracker?” She offered the package to West as he got in the driver’s side.

  “No, thanks. You still get morning sickness?”

  “No, but I do get carsick sometimes. I probably won’t, but crackers seem to head it off at the pass.”

  He drove toward the main road. “So have you seen an ultrasound of the baby before?”

  “Once, at twelve weeks. It looked like a tiny alien with a heartbeat.”

  “Do they give you a photo or anything to keep?”

  “Sure,” she said. “I bet they’ll give a copy to each of us.”

  Their baby now. Not hers alone, but theirs.

  She watched him sideways, a little surprised how quickly he’d gone from shock and awe to asking for baby pictures.

  “So…um, do we get to find out the sex of the baby?”

  “If we want to.”

  “Do we want to?”

  We?

  Do we want to?

  She popped a cracker into her mouth and chewed furiously as her freak-out quotient shot through the roof of the vehicle.

  “I’m not really sure what I want to do. I mean, a surprise is fun, I guess, but part of me is dying to know.”

  “Okay, well, it’s up to you. I’ll go with whatever you want.”

  Awfully diplomatic of him.

  “Have you thought about names at all?” he asked.

  Soleil recalled her earlier fear about his naming preferences and popped a second cracker in her mouth. Why hadn’t she thought to bring some seltzer water, too?

  “I have a few ideas.”

  He glanced over at her. “Care to share them?”

  “Maybe later. I’m feeling a little carsick right now.”

  “Should I pull over?”

  “No, no, that’s okay. The crackers are helping.”

  “If it’s a girl, I’ve always liked my mom’s name, Julia.”

  Of course he did.

  She tried not to visibly wince at how right her fears had been. West was doing exactly what she thought he’d do-barging right in and taking over the whole baby-preparation process as if gearing up for battle. Leaving no detail to chance.

  Julia was a lovely name. And a lovely woman. But Soleil wasn’t exactly ready to have this kind of lovey-dovey-couple discussion with a man she didn’t love.

  “Not that I’m saying we should use that name. I really haven’t ever thought about what I’d name a kid, frankly.”

  “Okay,” she said with another stab of guilt over her lateness in telling him he was about to be a father.

  “How about your mom? What’s her name?”

  “My mom?”

  Naming a baby girl after Soleil’s mother wouldn’t be so different from naming her after a barracuda.

  “Anne,” she finally said. “Her name is Anne.”

  “You know, you’ve never told me about your mother, or any of your family.”

  Yeah, it hadn’t exactly come up when they were sweating and rolling around in bed together.

  Ahead, the road curved through a valley between pale yellow hills that bulged like pregnant bellies against the horizon. The sky had mercifully turned blue again today, a clear crystalline blue that promised warm weather. So much easier to focus on than the circumstances of her life.

  “Hello? Don’t want to talk about your family?”

  “Not really,” she said, staring at a herd of cattle on a distant hillside.

  “I understand. But it might be weird if I don’t know anything about my own kid’s grandparents.”

  “Anne Bishop,” Soleil said. “That’s my mom. She’s a poet.”

  “Wait, you mean like the Anne Bishop? The one I had to study in college?”

  “That would be her.”

  “Wow. I didn’t realize.”

  “When I went to school at Berkeley, there was a whole class devoted to her work.”

  “Did you take it?”

  “Hell, no.”

  “Are you close to her?”

  “Close…isn’t exactly what I’d call us. I mean, we tend to butt heads a lot. We’re frighteningly similar people, both way too headstrong and stubborn.”

  “You? Headstrong and stubborn? No way.” His wry smile betrayed his earnest tone, and Soleil chuckled.

  “I know it’s hard to believe.”

  “What about your father? Were your parents married?”

  “My dad is a civil-rights attorney. My mom cheated on him when I was a kid, and they split up. But they were so different, I don’t think they’d have survived even without the affair.”

  “Different how?”

  Soleil laughed at the absurdity of her parents together. “My dad was a Black Panther for a while in the seventies. Having a white wife didn’t exactly fit with his radical leanings back then.”

  “Oh.”

  “Oddly enough, my parents gave me plenty of reason to swear off interracial relationships.”

  West’s eyebrows shot up. “I don’t understand…If you’re half black and half white, which race are you swearing off?”

  She couldn’t help but laugh. “Touché. My experience going through the world with light brown skin is, people tend to classify me as black, African-American, whatever you want to call me, and that’s how I identify myself.”

  “I guess that makes sense.”

  “No, it d
oesn’t totally make sense, but it’s the way the world works.”

  And the one time she broke her own rule and let herself fall hard, she’d gotten her heart shattered by a guy who didn’t have the balls to defy his ass-backward white family and stay with her.

  “So where does that leave us?”

  She shrugged. “I guess the universe has a few lessons to teach me about how we’re all a rainbow of people or some crap like that.”

  “Are you close to your father at all?”

  “Sadly, no. He moved to Chicago after the split. He’s the type who lives and breathes his work. So it’s hard to develop the distance father-daughter thing.”

  “Sorry to hear that.”

  “It’s okay. If he’d stuck around, my mom probably would have killed him. So he saved her a prison sentence. He’s a good guy, if absorbed in his life.”

  Soleil’s motion sickness hadn’t completely disappeared, so she fixed her eyes forward on the horizon as she ate another cracker.

  She normally reserved discussing the family for guys she was really serious about…which was why she’d never talked to West about her parents before. And yet, whether she’d intended to be serious about him or not, they were on their way to see their baby together for the first time.

  Just like a real couple.

  Wasn’t this about as real as it got?

  The truth of their situation struck Soleil again, and a cold sweat broke out on her face. She dug another cracker out of the package and ate it as if it would save her life.

  WEST TOOK ONE LOOK around the waiting room of the doctor’s office and swallowed hard. Pink walls decorated with black-and-white photos of naked babies surrounded them. He fit in this place about as well as a foot fit into a glove.

  Three pregnant women besides Soleil occupied the chairs, each one looking more ready to pop than the next. A tired-looking woman with a brand-new baby-so new it was still kind of red and wrinkled-sat closest to the door. The baby was in one of those big plastic car-seat things that had a handle, making the baby more convenient to carry around, apparently.

  West was the only guy in the room-possibly the only guy in the entire building-and the estrogen in the air was enough to make him want to go do something manly like check under the hood of his car, or maybe hunt for wild boar.