Father Found

by Judith Arnold

  “They’d have experience with young children,” Allison explained. “They would be screened by social workers. They’d know all about heating formula.”

  “I can learn that. I’ve already learned it I’m not a moron.”

  “The social workers would place her with a family that included a stay-at-home mom.”

  “I work in an office in my house. I’m a stay-at-home dad.”

  “Yes, but you do work. You’d have to hire someone to look after her while you worked.”

  “If I have to, I will. I’m just saying, Allison, I don’t see the point in tearing her away from a man who’s probably her father and passing her along to someone she isn’t even related to. If she’s going to stay anywhere, it may as well be with me.”

  “If you want to be a foster father, you could certainly ask for consideration from the caseworker assigned to her.”

  “There wouldn’t be a caseworker assigned to her if she was really my daughter, right?”

  He no longer sounded uncertain. He seemed to be questioning her more to learn the legal procedures than to figure out whether—and how—to unload the baby. In some strange way, he could be ready for fatherhood.

  “There still might be a caseworker assigned to her,” she told him. “Not to remove the baby from your home but to make sure the baby is safe. But it’s possible social workers wouldn’t have to be brought into it. Either way, the police still need to be notified. The mother committed a criminal act. They need to find her.”

  “But in the meantime…” He relaxed at last, settling back against the banquette and reaching for the ketchup. “In the meantime, I don’t see any reason to stick Samantha with someone else. Foster parents wouldn’t know the mother. I would. If the police have to find her, maybe I could help them track her down.”

  “I’m sure they’d welcome your help.”

  “And then what? If they found Luanne, they’d toss her in jail?”

  Hearing the woman’s name jolted Allison. She hadn’t minded thinking of the mother in the abstract, but now that the woman had an actual name, Allison inched closer to believing that Samantha was the result of Jamie’s brief acquaintance with the woman.

  “If they found her, it would be up to them to work everything out. Up to them, and to you. I’m not a lawyer, Jamie, or a social worker. I’m a nurse. I can help you take care of Samantha. Beyond that, you’d have to speak to the police.”

  “All right.” He concentrated on squeezing ketchup onto his burger instead of fathoming the intricacies of the foster care system. He seemed resigned to the prospect of taking care of a newborn, but she sensed a glimmer of excitement in him, too, as if he welcomed the challenge.

  “Which brings us back to where we started. If you’re going to keep Samantha, even if only temporarily, you’ll need to buy supplies.”

  “Right.” He pulled a napkin from the dispenser on the table and plucked a pen from his shirt pocket. “What should I get?”

  She suppressed a grin. How could a man who used a napkin to write a shopping list actually think he could handle the titanic job of caring for a newborn? “Here, write on this,” she said, removing a lined notepad from her tote. “You’ll need a crib—a Portacrib would work for now. It’s small and flexible. Some sheets for the crib, and blankets.”

  “I’ve got a blanket,” he said. “And anyway, it’s summertime.”

  “Babies still need to be kept warm. Get a couple of spare blankets. If she wets one of them, you can use the other while you do the laundry.”

  “Oh, God, the laundry. I need more detergent.” He scribbled a note to himself. “I’ve been washing clothes all day.”

  “Get some bibs. It’ll help make her outfits last a little longer. You’ll need lots of bottles. And of course the stroller.”

  He diligently recorded everything she listed in a broad, scrawling script. He might ace her course, after all. Any student who took such comprehensive notes—who cared so deeply about doing the right thing—was destined to graduate at the top of his class.

  “What else?” he asked, awaiting further instructions.

  She continued her list, rummaging through her memory, naming the necessities. She’d begun her day contemplating inventory, and it appeared that she was ending it the same way: reviewing supplies.

  Telling Jamie McCoy what to get was more fun than battling the pencil pushers in the hospital’s administrative offices. If budgeting was a problem for him, he didn’t let on. He simply wrote whatever she said, earnestly and somberly, as if he believed that Allison was handing down gospel from on high.

  After he’d covered the sheet with a list that ran from alphabet blocks to zinc oxide ointment, she added one final item, something he wouldn’t find in any store. “A baby-sitter.”

  “I’ll work on it,” he said.

  “I’m serious, Jamie. If you intend to keep writing your column, you’re going to have to hire a nanny, or at least a part-time caregiver. Someone who can be on call while you’re buried in your work.”

  “I’m sure I’ll be able to get my work done.”

  “It won’t be easy with Samantha around,” Allison warned.

  Jamie shot a quick look at the baby, then clicked his pen shut and gave Allison an unjustifiably confident grin. “Writing the column,” he boasted, “will be a piece of cake.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  GUY STUFF by James McCoy—

  If anyone ever decided to compile an encyclopedia on babies, the P volume would be the largest. Everything to do with babies seems to start with P…or should I say, pee.

  Consider all the other P-words that go along with babies: Puke. Pat-a-cake. Pacifier. Pablum.

  Who invented the term pablum, anyway? Granted, what babies eat is disgusting—which is probably where puke comes in. But pablum, the soft, icky stuff they devour—also known by the P-word pap—might strike us as more appetizing if it had a nicer name. “Potage of cereal with a soupçon of banana,” for example. Potage starts with a P.

  So does pizza, but babies need teeth to eat that And how do babies get teeth? With yet another P-word: pain.

  JAMIE READ what he’d written and wrinkled his nose. One thing he’d learned in the past couple of days was that humor didn’t come easily when you were running on an average of two hours’ sleep a night.

  A certain little lady was driving him nuts. At the pediatrician’s office, she’d barely tipped the scales at eight pounds, but as best Jamie could figure, seven and a half of those pounds were vocal cords. All she seemed to do was wail, eat, burp, puke, pee and wail again, with occasional lapses into slumber.

  He had never before known such a demanding female.

  When panic about his infant-size blond bombshell wasn’t tearing him apart from the inside out, he was haunted by thoughts of another woman. A woman more mature, less fussy, more sensible but somehow just as demanding. Merely thinking about Allison Winslow kept him from falling asleep. Merely recalling the combination of sympathy and steel in her gaze as she insinuated that Samantha might not be his own genetic offspring made Jamie toss and turn at night. Merely reminiscing about the lush, dense tumble of her hair made him hard.

  And that made him feel guilty. Jamie’s attitude toward sex had always been supremely healthy. But now that he was a daddy, with a sweet, defenseless, howling banshee of a baby in his house, it seemed inappropriate for him to entertain erotic thoughts about a woman.

  Spending a fortune on Samantha did nothing to assuage his guilt. Yesterday, armed with the shopping list Allison had dictated to him at the diner, he had journeyed with Samantha to the mall. He’d bought Samantha a crib—polished oak with a curving Deco-style shape. That hadn’t seemed sufficient, so he’d also bought, to hang from the ceiling above the crib, a mobile constructed of little helicopters whose rotors spun when they picked up a current of air. He’d bought crib sheets and a blanket featuring a pattern of rainbows and stars, and a matching set of what the saleswoman called bumpers, though they certainly
wouldn’t have fit on any car he’d ever seen. He’d bought every style of pacifier he could find and a menagerie of stuffed animals that would put the Bronx Zoo to shame. He’d bought a few more teenytiny outfits—why they couldn’t make baby clothing with man-size snaps instead of fasteners the size of dried lentils he didn’t know—and a stroller sporting a price tag that rivaled that of a Mercedes Benz. “This stroller is imported,” the saleswoman had explained while he’d kicked the tires and tested the steering. “It’s made in Denmark. All the welleducated parents buy this model. You certainly wouldn’t want to put your daughter in a lesser product.”

  He certainly wouldn’t Hell, he’d graduated from an Ivy League university with a gentleman’s C. He’d be damned if he put his daughter in anything less than the Danish model.

  But none of his expenditures quelled her chronic fussing. He began to wonder whether she would calm down if he presented her with a tennis bracelet or maybe sprang for a weekend for two at Canyon Ranch.

  Not likely. She was obviously playing hard to get, hoping to milk him for all he was worth. Yesterday evening, he’d attempted to finish his column on turning thirty, but every few minutes he’d been interrupted by Her Royal Highness, Princess Snit. Desperate to fax out the column by deadline, he’d arranged her in the crib with all the rainbow linens and watched as she systematically shoved every single pacifier away and shrieked. Eventually she managed to stuff enough of her hand into her mouth to silence herself. He’d raced back to his office, reread his column and decided it made no sense. Now that he’d spent a few days taking care of Samantha, he had even less understanding of why women were concerned with having babies before their biological clocks ticked their last tock. Such women ought to spend a few minutes with Samantha. It would cure them in a jiffy.

  During rare moments of peace, when the kid actually shut up to suck a bottle or sleep one off, Jamie’s thoughts drifted back to Allison Winslow. He wondered if she wanted kids of her own. She knew what she was doing when it came to managing infants. He couldn’t help assuming that Samantha wouldn’t be performing her air-raid-siren routine if Allison were around to keep her in line, to hold her and stare at her and talk to her.

  Recalling her instructions, Jamie kept trying to talk to Samantha. But he felt like a bloody fool every time he did. “Hey, Sam, how’s tricks?” he would say, and she would blink at him and pout. “Tell me, does this formula stuff taste better from a clear bottle or a pastel one? I’ve got pink, I’ve got yellow, I’ve got blue. What do you say?”

  What she said was unprintable. She clearly thought he was a first-class imbecile. He didn’t blame her.

  Allison knew the secret, though. She knew how to relate to babies, how to make casual conversation with them, how to gaze into their faces in such a way that they didn’t cross their eyes trying to gaze back.

  Maybe it was a woman thing. Maybe all women were born knowing exactly what to say to newborns. It was probably some sort of sisterhood, a coven, a secret knowledge girls started sharing at pajama parties when they were twelve. It was what they whispered about in high school when they trooped en masse to the ladies’ room. Jamie had always wondered why no teenage girl ever went to the bathroom alone. He used to think they traveled in a group so they could fix each other’s hair and gossip about boys. But probably they were teaching each other the secret woman-baby communication code.

  If Allison was with Samantha, would she tell the baby to pipe down so she could have a few uninterrupted minutes with Jamie? If she won those few uninterrupted minutes, would Allison be receptive to a romantic overture? Would she slap his cheek and gather up his baby and storm off to the police, believing that even if he was Samantha’s father, he was unfit to raise her?

  Well, she would go to the police. And Jamie knew he was going to have to do that, too. The pediatrician had pronounced Samantha strong and healthy, but he’d also asserted that Jamie was going to have to get her a social security number, and to do that he would need documentation—preferably a birth certificate. Luanne had left enough clothing, formula and diapers to last two days—Jamie had learned this as day two wound down—but neither the suitcase nor the shopping bag had contained Samantha’s birth certificate.

  Jamie had to find Luanne.

  If he did, he damned well might tell her to take the kid back. Parenthood was too much for him to handle, really. If he were able to experience about seventy hours of continuous sleep, he might be willing to share custody. But whatever the ultimate custody arrangement was, he had to get hold of Samantha’s birth certificate.

  Gritting his teeth and praying for his editor to be too rushed to read the thirtieth-birthday column carefully, he faxed it to his syndication company. Then he turned from his computer and reached for the Arlington telephone directory, to look up the police department’s nonemergency number.

  The idea of baring his soul to a cop about the circumstances of Samantha’s arrival on his doorstep didn’t sit well with him. His past experiences with police officers hadn’t been particularly pleasant: a speeding ticket; the time in high school when he was one of about twenty kids partying noisily at Sue Potter’s house when her parents had gone out of town; the time he and Mike Rauer got caught trying to liberate a stop sign when they were eleven and the patrolman had driven them home in his cruiser—which had actually been pretty cool—and presented them to their long-suffering mothers with the prediction that they were destined for bad things.

  Maybe he could avoid the police by working with a private investigator. Some up-to-date Sam Spade might be able to track down a hard-bitten dame like Luanne.

  The yellow pages included half a column of private investigators. Jamie wasn’t sure how to go about selecting one. It wasn’t the sort of thing he could ask a neighbor about the way he might ask which lawn service or dentist they used. “Hi, Gloria? You and Stan wouldn’t have a P.I. you could recommend, would you?”

  At a loss, he ran his index finger down the list until he found an honest-sounding name. Tom Bland, private investigator, answered his own phone, which made Jamie think he might be a one-man operation. But so was Sam Spade, wasn’t he?

  By the time he’d finished talking to Tom Bland, Jamie realized that the detective’s integrity was a serious flaw. Bland had told him that if a woman abandoned an infant it was a criminal matter, and Jamie really was going to have to take his problem to the police.

  Pretty much what Allison had told him. Perhaps, once the dust had cleared and Samantha had learned how to sleep through the night, Jamie could introduce Allison to Tom Bland. They’d probably hit it off.

  He didn’t want to introduce Allison to another man, though. He wanted to transform Samantha so that she was no longer a problem. And then he wanted to make a play for the tall, stern nurse with the elegant bone structure and the phenomenal hair, the woman who knew how to hold Samantha and talk to her and soothe her. The beautiful Daddy School headmistress who had told him to go to the police.

  “YOU FOUND HER on your porch?”

  Jamie tried not to squirm beneath the stark gaze of Detective John Russo of the Arlington Police Department. Russo was a lean, angular guy not much older than Jamie, with dark hair a few inches longer than Jamie expected to see on an officer of the law. He also had a framed photograph of a little dark-haired boy on his desk. This Jamie interpreted as proof that Russo was a family man who would no doubt condemn Jamie for his failure to use a condom correctly while in the presence of a crackpot lady..

  Jamie had been assigned to Russo by chance. He’d walked into the police station, interrupted the receptionist’s exuberant burbling about how adorable his little baby was and said he needed to talk to a detective. Russo had been available, and now he was taking Jamie’s statement, clacking the information on a typewriter, which seemed awfully anachronistic. Jamie had performed well on questions like, “What is your name?” and “What is your address?” In fact, Russo had displayed a glimmer of respect when he’d realized that Jamie was the author of
“Guy Stuff,” the weekly column run in the Arlington Gazette and sixty-seven other major city newspapers.

  But now they’d dug a little deeper into the situation, and Russo suddenly didn’t seem quite so respectful.

  “All right, look,” Jamie said, attempting the same ingratiating smile that used to work when he got sent to the principal’s office. “I thought Luanne Hackett was a decent human being. She had me fooled. I admit it, I was a poor judge of character, to say nothing of a jerk—”

  Russo held up his hand to silence him. “This isn’t about your being a jerk,” he said, implying that he agreed with Jamie’s self-assessment and didn’t think it warranted discussion. “You said you found the baby on your porch on Monday. Today is Thursday. Why didn’t you report this sooner?”

  Jamie groped for an explanation. It wasn’t that he wanted to redeem himself—Russo probably considered him beyond redemption. It was that, frankly, Jamie wasn’t sure why he hadn’t gone to the police. sooner. He recalled his reaction when Allison had first suggested that he involve the police—genuine ambivalence.

  Russo’s expression grew less critical, more quizzical. Jamie sighed. “I wish I could give you a nice, easy answer, but I can’t. I don’t know. I guess part of it was embarrassment. Maybe part of it was denial. I couldn’t believe I got into such a scrape. I mean, I’m a Boy Scout, always prepared. In this day and age, you’d be insane not to protect yourself. I might have legal grounds for a suit against the manufacturer of the condoms I was using. What do you think? Could a criminal case be made?”

  Russo smiled faintly. “Why didn’t you report the baby on Monday?” he repeated, his fingers resting against the typewriter keys.

  Samantha chose that moment to shriek. She’d been dozing in her state-of-the-art stroller, but something had apparently spooked her, and she instantaneously announced her new state of awareness with a topdecibel howl.