Father Found

by Judith Arnold

  If Allison could muster up the guts to ask him.

  “You’ll see him tomorrow,” Molly added, as if she knew Allison needed some help in guts mustering. “After class you could ask him. He probably has rich friends, too. He lives west of town, right? Everyone living on that side of town is rich. Plus he’s probably got buddies in the syndicatedcolumnist business, all those Pulitzer prize winners and the like. Maybe he could convince the Arlington Gazette to sponsor the Daddy School.”

  “Forget that,” Gail muttered. “The Arlington Gazette is the cheapest, most reactionary publisher in the world.”

  “I think their news coverage is fair,” Allison argued, eager to be distracted from thoughts of Jamie.

  “Their coverage of news is okay,” Gail allowed. “But the business offices are for the birds. You wouldn’t believe their salary scale—especially what they pay their secretaries, who are conveniently all women. There’s a class action suit lurking in there somewhere.”

  “If they pay low salaries, then they must have huge profits,” Molly reasoned. “So they could support the Daddy School.”

  The Saunders sisters’ bickering helped diffuse Allison’s bitterness over her evening with Jamie. She’d much rather think about the Daddy School’s financial problems.

  “I’ll just go back to the hospital and see if I can squeeze another nickel out of them,” she said, aware that a nickel wasn’t going to do her much good. Disappointed as she would be if the Daddy School had to end after its current session, she simply could not imagine herself trying to wheedle money from wealthy benefactors.

  Especially Jamie. Especially after Allison had kissed him, and fought with him and all but walked out on him.

  She couldn’t even imagine herself facing him in class tomorrow night. Asking him to support her beloved project with a nice, fat check? That would be impossible.

  CHAPTER NINE

  GUY STUFF by James McCoy—

  I got a call from my mother yesterday. “Jamie,” she said—she’s the one who tagged me with the nickname, since my father’s name is Jim and he kept getting confused during my first few weeks of life, when my mother would say, “Now, Jimmy, stop fussing and put this in your mouth like a good boy….” But I digress.

  Anyway, my mother said, “Jamie, I’ve just met the perfect girl for you.”

  Sharpen your pencils, folks, put on your thinking caps and follow along with me as I deconstruct that sentence.

  Let’s begin with “I’ve just met.” Understand, please, that my mother lives about twenty-five hundred miles away from me and she was calling me from her home. So if she says, “I’ve just met,” it means that the person she met must be located twenty-five hundred miles away. In other words, “the perfect girl for me” is currently situated in my mother’s neighborhood, not mine, which in turn means either that my mother wants me to move closer to her or else she believes that the only girl who could approach perfection in relation to me would be one who maintains a distance of several thousand miles between us.

  Moving on: “perfect.” Now, this is a loaded term. In my mother’s mind, “perfect” would have nothing to do with bra size. It would have even less to do with lifestyle. My definition of “perfect” as an adjective to describe a woman would be a professional dog walker who wears cropped T-shirts and low-slung, high-cut denim shorts and, perhaps fifty percent of the time, can string together enough words to fill a sentence.

  My mother’s definition of “perfect,” on the other hand, is someone who likes her.

  “Girl.” We’re not supposed to use that term in reference to anyone over the age of three anymore. Kindergarten females are now called “potential women,” or sometimes “very small women,” or, on occasion, “PMS apprentices.” And my mother isn’t an idiot. She knows this. She actually read The Feminine Mystique in hardcover when I was still called Jimmy and got my mouth plugged with something to suck on whenever I fussed.

  Therefore, we must deduce that my mother used the term girl deliberately. Her reason probably has something to do with her fear that describing this perfect female as a woman would scare me off.

  By the way, why didn’t anyone ever tell me it’s impossible to use a computer keyboard when you’ve got a squirming little PMS apprentice on your lap and she’s trying to suck on your mouse….

  HE PRESSED A KEY to delete the last sentence and cut loose with a string of colorful expressions he hoped he’d never hear Samantha using.

  He wished he could delete her that easily.

  No, that was a terrible thought. A brief spasm of insanity must have brought it on—or, perhaps, a brief spasm of sanity.

  He hadn’t told his mother about the baby when she’d called Sunday afternoon. Thank God Samantha had been asleep on the screened porch in her stroller where Jamie could hear her if she awakened but his mother, twenty-five hundred miles of fiber-optic cable away from him, could not.

  He should have told her. He had always gotten along with his mother, and he’d kept dishonesty to a minimum in their dealings. She was a remarkably tolerant woman. She’d had to be, to survive the nearly insurmountable task of raising Jamie. He’d been one of those kids with a knack for making messes and breaking fingers, who never got into trouble at school for failing tests but always got in trouble for clowning around. He’d been the kind of boy who had a little bit of difficulty taking things seriously. But his mother had done her best, and Jamie respected her for that. That she’d emerged from two decades of child rearing with her sense of humor intact made him actually like her.

  Still, informing her that she had become a grandmother might push her beyond the limits of her tolerance and humor, especially once she’d learned the circumstances surrounding Samantha’s birth. Jamie’s mother had been dropping hints since his twenty-ninth birthday that, as he was approaching his thirtieth, he might want to think about getting married and starting a family.

  Of course, she never put it so baldly. Instead, she found any and every excuse to mention worldwide epidemics of sexually transmitted diseases. She breezily noted in passing that one or another of her acquaintances had just become a grandparent for the third time. She mailed him articles about the high rate of infertility, dire reports clipped out of magazines called Health for Today or The Journal of Reproductive Statistics. Jamie had no idea where she found such magazines. He suspected she might be publishing them herself, just to provide her with official-looking articles, all of which coincidentally reached the same conclusion: Jamie McCoy needed to settle down and start a family immediately.

  He knew his mother would be thrilled to have a granddaughter—but not this way. Not as the result of such unfathomable irresponsibility on Jamie’s part.

  He was trying to be responsible, for gosh sake. He’d contorted himself all sorts of ways to keep his date with Allison after his baby-sitter had copped out on him. If he wasn’t responsible, he could have just left the baby home and gone off with Allison, right? But he’d done the responsible thing and brought Sam with him. And then, when Sam had flouted every law of etiquette by spitting up all over Allison at the restaurant, Jamie had done the responsible thing and brought Allison home with him, had her remove her clothing and made a pass at her.

  Okay, so he was a jerk. He deserved everything she’d given him—and everything she hadn’t given him. He was going to have to accept responsibility for everything that had gone wrong Saturday night. But at least he was more responsible than Sam’s mother. He wasn’t the one who’d abandoned a baby on someone’s back step and stolen away without even leaving the baby’s birth certificate or social security number. Responsible parents made sure the paperwork was in order.

  Samantha kicked his keyboard again. A row of Zs zipped from the left margin to the right. Jamie yanked her foot away and shoved back from his desk. Sam gurgled. Jamie cursed again. “I’m in a rotten mood, toots. Ten guesses whose fault it is.”

  She gazed up at him with her pretty gray-green eyes. Damned if her eyes weren’t exa
ctly the same color as his. Damned if he didn’t interpret her stare as some sort of answer. Or, more accurately, an indictment.

  “Yeah, it’s my fault. My fault the most exciting woman I’ve ever met walked out on me because she thinks I’m a brainless stud. How could she think such a thing just because I wanted to tear my old gray shirt off her and kiss her breasts? How could she possibly think…Ah, what do you care, anyway? Not that I’d stand quietly by if you let a guy do that sort of thing to you. Any guy even tries to get near your body, sweetheart—any guy even thinks about your body, and he answers to me and my fists. You got that?”

  She blinked. Her poochy little mouth seemed to turn up at the outer corners.

  “You think I’m kidding? Sammy, old girl, the next diaper I put on you is going to have a lock and key—and I get to keep the key in my safe-deposit box until your wedding day. Or longer if I don’t trust the guy you’re marrying.”

  She made a squeaky sound.

  “Who am I kidding?” he groaned. He couldn’t imagine defending Samantha’s honor against hordes of male jerks like him. He couldn’t imagine raising her to the age when she’d be attracting male jerks. When he projected into the future, he could see no further than perhaps a month. Beyond that, he simply could not picture Samantha being a part of his life.

  He couldn’t picture Allison being a part of his life, either.

  He wasn’t sure which of those two ideas upset him more.

  “Okay,” he said, aware that he wasn’t going to get any work done as long as Samantha was practising her backstroke on his lap. “Here’s the deal. We’re going for a drive. Think you can handle that without puking all over my Miata?”

  She reached for his nose and pinched it.

  “Ouch!” He pried her tiny fingers away. “Cripes. Look at those claws,” he muttered, examining her pale, sharp fingernails. Was he supposed to cut them? How? How could someone with big, thick guy fingers—fingers adept at wielding a screwdriver or throwing a curve ball or maybe making love to a full-grown woman with curly reddish brown hair and pale green eyes—cut a baby’s fingernails without cutting her fingers off, as well?

  He would have to have Samantha’s nails groomed by a professional. He wasn’t going to risk mutilating his daughter’s hands by trying to trim her nails himself. He supposed a trained nurse would be up to the task, but he couldn’t go to Allison. It was bad enough that he’d ruined what should have been a magnificent evening with a magnificent woman—a woman who looked a hell of a lot better in his clothing than he did, a woman who could cast spells with her kisses, who could bewitch a man merely by standing in the circle of his arms.

  He wasn’t pleased by the prospect of facing that woman tonight at Daddy School class. But to go and beg her for help in taming his daughter’s fingernails?

  Forget it.

  THE STAFF AT Maison Christophe didn’t seem particularly interested in Jamie—at least the women on the staff didn’t. They walked around the faux country decor of the beauty salon with their noses aimed skyward. One had green hair; another had short black hair glued so smoothly to her skull it looked like a patent leather bathing cap; still another had brown hair that appeared to have been shaped with a machete. All the women tended toward anorexic proportions, and none of them looked at all thrilled by the prospect of taking on Jamie as a client

  The two men, on the other hand, looked friendly. One was dressed in an orange jumpsuit that reminded Jamie of those protective coveralls worn by people who worked with nuclear waste. The other had hair as long and wild with curls as Allison’s. If one of them was Christophe, Jamie couldn’t guess which. Neither looked old enough to own a hair salon.

  A fashionably undernourished woman behind the pickled-pine desk near the entrance gazed up at Jamie superciliously. “Do you have an appointment?” she asked.

  No, he did not have an appointment. And if luck gazed kindly upon him, he never would. Although he could afford a barber expensive enough to call himself a stylist, Jamie preferred to get his mop trimmed at the West Street Barber Shop, a defiantly old-fashioned place decorated with mirrors, lit with fluorescent ceiling fixtures and carpeted in wads and tufts of unswept hair clippings. Located next door to a deli that sold the best bagels in town, the West Street Barber Shop charged twelve bucks for a haircut, politics and sports talk thrown in for free. The only woman Jamie had ever seen in there was Angie, a gum-cracking, wiseass fiend with scissors who knew more about sports than all the male barbers combined.

  He gazed about him at the stridently charming interior of Maison Christophe: hardwood floors, chintz curtains, mirrors framed in puffy floral print fabric, classical music and muted lighting that was supposed to make everyone look good but in fact made most of the people in the joint look like the living dead. Some of the women had chalky makeup on, too, and thick black gunk outlining their eyes, adding to their zombielike appearance.

  “Sir?” the receptionist prodded him with her snooty voice. “Do you have an appointment?”

  “No.”

  “I’m afraid we don’t accept walk-ins here,” she declared, sounding anything but afraid. The place wasn’t hopping with customers—more chairs were empty than occupied—but a rule was a rule, and obviously, by his presence alone, Jamie was threatening their entire appointments-only system. The receptionist glanced through thick layers of mascara at the stroller where Samantha lay dozing. Jamie was tempted to point out that, given how much he’d spent on the damned stroller, these hoity-toity stylists ought to treat him with a little more respect.

  If anyone at the West Street Barber Shop ever learned how much money he’d spent on the stroller, he’d be laughed out of the joint. Angie would squawk, “I’d sell my kid before I’d spend that kind of money on a freaking stroller.”

  “I’m not here for a haircut,” he said. The receptionist eyed his mop of hair with obvious disdain, as if she’d been absolutely certain he’d come in to be tonsorially redeemed. “I’m here to get my kid’s nails done.”

  “A manicure? For the child?” She rose from her seat and peered into the stroller. Her sepulchral face broke into a smile. “What a darling idea. Martina? This gentleman would like to have his daughter’s nails done. Can you squeeze her in?”

  The woman who responded to the name Martina had been loitering on a gingham-covered settee with a cup of coffee that smelled like one of those cloying flavored brews. She sauntered over to the stroller, peeked in and let out a squeal of delight.

  Her shriek must have somehow liberated the other salon employees, because within a second Jamie could no longer see the stroller at the center of a crowd of terminally chic beauticians. They issued a chorus of “oohs” and “aahs” and “Isn’t she adorables!” while Jamie backed away, wondering whether he ought to dive into the swarm and rescue Samantha or let her newfound fans have their way with her. “She’s gorgeous!” one stylist crooned.

  “When she gets hair, I want first crack at it!” another declared.

  The receptionist eyed Jamie curiously. “Where’s her mother?” she asked.

  Good question. “We aren’t married,” he answered vaguely.

  “Oh.” The receptionist’s meticulously tweezed eyebrows arched. “How interesting. What’s your name?”

  He opened his mouth, then shut it and assessed the situation. If he wasn’t misreading things, the receptionist’s antennae had quivered to life, searching for signals. Boy-girl-type signals. He’d just announced that he wasn’t attached to Samantha’s mother, and this anemic woman was interested.

  Jamie scrambled for a diplomatic way to squelch that interest. He wasn’t looking to strike up a flirtation with the receptionist or any of her bony colleagues. Only one woman occupied his mind, and she hated him for the very reason the employees of Maison Christophe were gurgling and gushing: Samantha.

  Martina had unstrapped Samantha and lifted her out of the stroller. “Oh, you cutie, you! What shall we do with you today, my little sweet? Should we give you French nail
s? Would you like that? Or perhaps some nice silver appliqués? Your fingers are so tiny!”

  She seemed to have that inbred female instinct for knowing how to say appropriate things to an infant. And how to hold one. With grudging admiration, Jamie observed how easily she supported Sam’s head, how securely she held the body that less than an hour ago had been squirming so crazily in his lap she’d managed to type more with her flailing feet than he had with his fingers.

  “I’d go with bright red,” the woman with the patent leather cap of hair said. “Scarlet. Give her a thrill, Martina.”

  “How much is this going to cost?” he thought to ask.

  The receptionist’s eyebrows dropped. “Twenty-five dollars for a straight manicure. French costs more.”

  “I just want her nails cut,” he said.

  “Cut? Oh, no, no, no, no,” the receptionist clucked as if he were an ignoramus, which, on the subject of manicures, he was. “Her nails will be smoothed and shaped. Some nice scent-free lotion will soften her cuticles. You want her to have nice nails, don’t you?”

  “I want her to have nails that can’t open a vein,” he muttered. “She’s dangerous enough without claws.”

  “You’re a thumb sucker, aren’t you,” Martina chattered to Samantha with a hint of reproach. “Now promise me you’ll stop that nasty habit. Can you promise me? Oh, you piece of sugar, you!” And with that, she carried the baby off, trailed by a retinue of stylists.

  Jamie pursued them with his gaze as they trooped across the hardwood floor to a small, mirrored table covered with tiny bottles of polish. “Where are they taking her?” he asked the receptionist apprehensively.

  “To have her nails done. Sit and read a magazine,” she advised him. “We’ll let you know when it’s time to pay.”

  He bet they would. With a sigh, he lowered himself onto the gingham settee, which was hard with horse-hair stuffing and obviously designed for people eight inches shorter than he was, and flipped through a copy of a magazine called Hair Styles. The entire magazine was devoted to that rather limited subject. One article discussed shampoos, another color stripping, yet another the pros and cons of relaxed permanents. A special section confronted the complex subject of hair accessories, which, Jamie learned, comprised a great deal more than bobby pins.