Father Found

by Judith Arnold

  Table of Contents

  Cover Page

  Excerpt

  Dear Reader

  Title Page

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Copyright

  “I—well, I found this baby on my back porch.”

  “What?” Allison jerked to full attention. “Have you contacted the police? If someone abandoned a baby on your porch, the police need to know. The baby must belong to someone.”

  Jamie paused. “I think—actually, she belongs to me. I mean, if you count backward nine months…” He let out a long breath. “I just…I don’t know what I’m supposed to do.”

  “How old is the baby?”

  “I would guess about two weeks.”

  Sbeesh. “Here’s what you need to do, Mr. McCoy. Call your health care provider and have the baby examined. Then go to the police and see if they can help you track down the mother. Child abandonment is a crime.”

  “She didn’t abandon the child,” he retorted. “She gave the child to me. I just need to know what temperature the formula’s supposed to be.”

  Allison gave him directions. Could this loser last until evening? Could his baby? “I teach a course in child care for new fathers, Mr. McCoy. I call it the Daddy School. Be there tonight.”

  Dear Reader,

  I remember the first time I left my husband alone with our first child. The baby was one week old, and an order I’d placed at the maternity shop had finally arrived. I asked my husband if he could handle our precious newborn by himself during the half hour it would take for me to drive to the store and back. “Of course I can,” my husband boasted. “He’s my son. I’m his daddy.”

  So off I went—and came home to quite a scene: my husband and the baby on the dining-room floor, surrounded by diapers, wet-wipes, wadded-up tissues, waterproof pads, cotton balls and a damp undershirt or two. My husband was out of breath and glistening with perspiration, but he’d never looked more proud of himself. Drowsy and content, the baby was nestled in his lap. “I had to change his diaper five times while you were gone,” my husband told me. “By the third diaper I knew what I was doing. I’m his dad, after all.”

  My husband has always been my hero, but that afternoon fourteen years ago, when he valiantly changed five diapers in thirty minutes, his hero rating rose about a hundred points. To me, fathers—devoted, loving fathers—are the greatest heroes of all.

  Father Found is dedicated to my husband and all the heroic fathers in the world.

  Judith Arnold

  Father Found

  Judith Arnold

  CHAPTER ONE

  GUY STUFF by James McCoy—

  Women love to whine about their biological clocks. They think they’re the only ones under pressure to do certain things before they lose the chance. Don’t they realize that men measure their lives by the biological clock, too? Come on, guys: it’s our turn to whine.

  Granted, we don’t have our alarms set for babies. But we do have to race the clock trying to get certain stuff accomplished before we’re no longer able. This, in case you were wondering, is why men are so resistant to the concept of growing up.

  Take, for instance, basketball. When men hit the big three-oh, they lose their jump shot. Oh, they might be able to score a layup here and there, just as women in their middle years still manage to get pregnant. But by and large, attempting a jump shot past the age of thirty isn’t safe. The percentages aren’t with us. That’s why you see so many guys in their late twenties elbowing their way toward hoops in gyms, schoolyards and driveways across the land. We’ve got to get as many jump shots in as we can before the clock strikes thirty.

  Or beer. Until a man blows out thirty candles on a cake, he can drink all the beer he wants without having to pay the price. He might find himself emptying his bladder in inappropriate places and saying things he’ll regret once he regains full consciousness, but his gut will remain a thing of beauty…until the dreaded biological timepiece declares otherwise. The minute a man crosses the thirty-year mark, abs abruptly turn into flabs, steel into jelly—and the prime culprit is beer. This is why you see so many twenty-something fellows chugging brewskie after brewskie. They know Father Time is gaining on them. Gotta drink now, while “six-pack stomach” still refers to said organ’s shape and not its contents.

  Women like to whimper about how if they don’t get preggers by their thirtieth birthday, a horrific time bomb is going to explode. Their priorities are pretty skewed if you ask me. Sure, I’d like to have a baby someday, maybe, if I ever choose to make an acquaintance with maturity. But right now, folks, I’m recovering from my thirtieth birthday. And I’m in mourning for that beautiful, smooth-as-silk layup I used to have. I guess I’ll just drown my sorrows in a glass of mineral water. Beer? Not hardly. Tick tock, tick tock.

  AS IT WAS, Jamie McCoy was drinking coffee—a double-size mug of java, black and strong. Leaning back in his hinged chair, he skimmed the text on his computer monitor and sighed. He needed four hundred more words for the column, but he wasn’t going to come up with even four more until he drugged himself with a bit more caffeine.

  It was only 10:00 a.m., a bit early for him to be awake and at his desk. Maybe he was feeling his age, after all. Maybe the fact that he was at work before noon meant that, at long last, he was ready to behave like a responsible adult.

  He’d spent the weekend celebrating his thirtieth birthday at his buddy Steve’s cabin on Lake Waramaug in the northwest corner of Connecticut. They’d rowed around the lake in Steve’s dinghy, pretending to fish but catching nothing and not really caring. They’d dined on charred red meat off the grill, washed down with a bottle of vintage Bordeaux. They’d lounged on the porch into the wee hours, reminiscing about their Dartmouth days and arguing over which one of them had the lower grade-point average, which one of them had the prettier girlfriends and which one scored more goals in lacrosse. In all cases, it was Jamie, but Steve didn’t want to admit the truth.

  Jamie was admitting the truth now: his glorious male-bonding weekend was over and he was going to have to squeeze out a thousand words for his weekly column if he wanted to continue living in the style to which he’d grown accustomed. He lifted his mug to his lips, realized it was empty, and shoved away from the desk.

  His office occupied a wing off the kitchen. Both rooms shared a glorious view of the woods behind his house. He’d planned it that way. On those rare occasions he actually ate at his kitchen table, as opposed to at his desk, or on the screened porch attached to the rear of the house, or in front of the jumbo TV in his den, he liked to gaze out at the untamed forest that extended north of the sprawling ranch house he and an architect had created by tacking rooms and extensions onto the ugly little cottage he’d bought five years ago, before he’d gone into national syndication and gotten rich.

  There wasn’t much logic to the layout of Jamie’s house, but that was fine. There wasn’t much logic to the layout of Jamie’s life, either. And despite that lack of logic—or maybe because of it—he was having a blast. Things happened to him serendipitously, jumbled, unplanned but usually welcome and always manageable. He rolled with the punches, and so far, the punches had sent him staggering in the right direction.

  He pushed himself to his feet, stretched and glanced at the Monday morning Arlington Gazette, which lay open on the desk beside his computer. Somewhere wit
hin its pages might lie inspiration. Frequently when he was stuck for a column idea, he found fodder in the pages of the local daily newspaper. There were always weird occurrences, silly todo’s, items of greater interest than Jamie’s thirtieth birthday.

  He’d already read the sports pages, but he would need more coffee in his bloodstream before he tackled the other sections of the paper. He carried his mug down the short hall to the kitchen, moving directly to the coffeemaker, which stood on one of the clean white counters rimming the room. People entering the stainless-steel-and-tile kitchen would probably get the mistaken impression that Jamie was neat and serious about cooking. In truth, he was neither. His kitchen was always neat because he never cooked.

  He filled his mug, inhaled the aromatic steam rising from the hot brew and heard the mew of a kitten. Frowning, he glanced around the room, searching for the source of the sound. He didn’t own a kitten. Pets were nice, but they required care. Jamie was still too new at being thirty to want to take on that kind of responsibility. And if he suddenly became softheaded enough to get a pet, he’d get a dog. Cats were so girlish.

  He heard the mewing again. Somewhere in the immediate vicinity, a small animal was whimpering. Perhaps the critter had gotten lost in the woods and emerged into his yard. If it belonged to someone, it should be wearing a tag and Jamie would be able to return it.

  Tracing the sound to the rear of the house, he surveyed the screened porch through the glass door before opening it. If there happened to be a sickly animal on the porch, he didn’t want to let it indoors. It could be a bat or a rabid raccoon. Did bats and raccoons mew?

  Other than his deck furniture—cushioned chairs, a glass-topped table and a lounge chair—he saw nothing. Cautiously, he pushed open the door and stepped onto the porch. The screened walls let in the scent of an early summer morning, dewy grass and flowers from the late-blooming rhododendrons bordering the house.

  The cries sounded louder, filtering through the screens. He padded barefoot across the porch to the door that opened onto an unscreened deck and the backyard. An animal was definitely out there—only it wasn’t a cat or a bat or a raccoon. He heard a feeble wail, thread-thin yet anguished. His frown deepening, he shoved open the door and stepped outside.

  There, on his deck, was a baby.

  He stared for a long, stupefied minute. A baby. On his deck. Crying.

  It was tucked into a boat-shaped plastic seat framed with hefty metal struts and lined with padded plastic cushioning in a pastel yellow pattern. The seat cradled the baby, who was strapped in with a belt and covered with a downy yellow blanket. Without stripping the baby naked, Jamie couldn’t say whether it was a girl or boy.

  What he could say was that it was tiny. It must be incredibly young. Golden hair lay in gossamer wisps on its head, its nose was a shapeless little button of flesh, its lips were puckered and its skin was ruddy. Its hands, smaller than the top joint of Jamie’s thumb, clenched and splayed, clenched and splayed.

  “Hey,” Jamie murmured, hunkering down next to the baby. Its eyes were so glassy with tears, he couldn’t tell what color they were. On the far side of the seat stood a large suitcase and a shopping bag filled with packages of disposable diapers.

  As if Jamie McCoy knew how to put a diaper on a baby.

  “Who left you here?” he asked, feeling like an idiot. The baby wasn’t going to answer his question.

  He was afraid to pick up the baby. If he touched it, it might bond with him or something. Or he might leave fingerprints all over it. Or hurt it. He had no idea how to hold an infant.

  Scowling, he circled the plastic seat to the suitcase, hoping to find a luggage tag fastened to the handle. No tag, but he discovered a sealed white envelope taped to the side of the suitcase. Jamie had to resist the urge to tear the envelope apart. It could be evidence. He would have to open it carefully.

  He did, peeling the flap back along its edge, managing to avoid ripping it. A folded, lined sheet of stationery fell out. “Dear Jamie,” it said, “Remember Eleuthera? Well, guess what Her name is Samantha and she’s yours.”

  Jamie sank onto the step next to the baby. Eleuthera. He’d gone there for a wild vacation week last September. The Bahamian resort had been hopping with hot-to-trot studs and studettes. One studette, a breathtakingly gorgeous New Yorker named Luanne Hackett, had found her way into Jamie’s hotel room. They’d spent nearly the entire week trying out a generous number of Kama Sutra positions.

  Jamie had liked Luanne. More than lust had been involved, for him at least. He’d asked for Luanne’s phone number back in the real world, and she’d given it to him. A few days after he’d returned to Connecticut, he’d dialed the number and wound up having a bizarre conversation with a confused woman with a Spanish accent. She’d told him that he’d dialed correctly but that no one named Luanne Hackett had ever lived there.

  Jamie had been ticked off. If Luanne hadn’t wanted to hear from him once their vacation had ended, she should have said so. Jamie wouldn’t have had anything to do with her in Eleuthera if he hadn’t thought she was worth his time back home, too. Much as he loved sex, he didn’t make a habit of getting involved with women he didn’t like.

  But so much for that. She’d been a pleasant memory until he’d found out she’d given him a bogus phone number, whereupon she’d become a somewhat less pleasant memory. And then he’d pretty much forgotten about her.

  Until this Monday morning in late June, nine months and two weeks later.

  Could this little baby be two weeks old?

  Wait a minute! He’d used precautions with Luanne. Even though he’d been a mere child of twenty-nine last September, he had been responsible enough to protect himself and Luanne. If memory served, they’d burned through quite a few boxes of condoms. Condoms were supposed to be, what, ninety-nine percent effective?

  Damn. He’d never really thought about that other one percent. Not until now.

  He stared at the baby on his porch, fussing and squirming and swatting the air with her miniature hands. “Samantha,” he said aloud, and then terror seized him, tightening his throat and making him feel as if he were going to throw up. Fortunately, all he’d consumed so far that morning was coffee—not enough to fuel his brain at maximum function, but at least it didn’t make him nauseous.

  Samantha did.

  No, not Samantha. The situation. The realization that Luanne Hackett, a woman who hadn’t even had the courtesy to give him her real phone number, had somehow found Jamie and dumped this baby on him.

  Oh, God. Oh-God-oh-God-oh-God. He was in major deep trouble.

  “ALLISON? It’s for you.”

  Allison Winslow looked up from the inventory list she’d entered on her clipboard. As usual, supplies were running low. The reigning bureaucrats of Arlington Memorial believed that new supplies should never be reordered until the shelves were nearly bare. It was a stupid way to run a hospital, but there wasn’t much Allison could do about it. She was only a nurse on one of the lowest rungs of the ladder. The higherups weren’t eager for her opinion regarding supplies.

  She didn’t care about her place in the hospital’s hierarchy, though. She would rather be a nurse than a paper pusher or a number cruncher—and she would rather work in neonatal pediatrics than in any other specialty. Except for her daily battle to get more cotton swabs, more antiseptic soap, more sterile receiving blankets, diapers and ointment into the supply closet—not to mention more money into the department for programs to prepare new parents for the challenges that would face them once they left the maternity floor with their precious babies—she really couldn’t complain.

  Smiling at Margaret, the senior nurse who’d summoned her to the station, she reached across the counter and lifted the receiver. “Allison Winslow,” she identified herself.

  “Um…hello?” The voice on the other end of the line belonged to a man. A tense, even panic-stricken man, judging by the way his husky baritone caught in his throat and wavered as it rose in a questi
on.

  A rookie father, no doubt. He was probably frantic because he’d just spent a half hour attempting to burp his baby but failed. Or perhaps he was minutes from summoning paramedics to his house because his child had developed a heat rash under its chin. If new mothers were riddled with anxiety, new fathers were a thousand times worse. Anything that didn’t go by the book threw them into a tizzy. Being informed that there was no book threw them into an even bigger tizzy.

  Allison was the hospital’s expert on new fathers. She had a genuine talent for untizzying them. “Hi,” she said gently. “This is Allison Winslow. What can I do for you?”

  “Um…” He sucked in a shaky breath. “I have this baby?” he half asked.

  “Yes,” she encouraged him, trying not to laugh out loud at his earnest apprehension.

  “See, I don’t—I don’t know any pediatricians. I mean, I haven’t got any idea how to find one, and—”

  “You have a baby and you haven’t got a pediatrician?” She always advised patients to line up a pediatrician before the baby was born. Nowadays, most health-maintenance organizations had a pediatrics staff to choose from. Maybe this man was new in town and needed a recommendation.

  “I was hoping you might help me. I called the hospital and they told me you were the lady to talk to.”

  “Yes.” She kept her tone calm and reassuring.

  “You see, I—Well, I found the baby on my back porch.”

  “What?” She jerked to full attention, her amusement dissolving in the blue-white glare of the fluorescent overhead lights. “What do you mean, you found a baby?” Hearing her end of the call, Margaret perked up, too, her eyebrows quirking with surprise.

  “I was just going to get some coffee, and I heard this sound, and I thought it was a sick animal. Only it turned out to be a baby.”