Father Found

by Judith Arnold

  Twenty minutes passed. Twenty minutes of Jamie’s skimming articles about the virtues of natural-bristle brushes and the benefits of rinsing one’s hair in ion-free water, whatever the hell that was. Twenty minutes of a high-pitched babble rising like champagne bubbles from the little mirror-topped table in the corner of the room. Of all the voices he heard, none was his daughter’s. Not a wail, not a roar, not a hiccoughy bout of weeping. Evidently she liked being surrounded by women. Or else she just liked having her nails done.

  He was going to have to find Samantha’s mother. A girl needed her mother at times like this. Cripes, Samantha’s first manicure! What was Jamie doing here?

  Where was Luanne Hackett? Who was Luanne Hackett? Why had she stranded him without a hint of how one took care of a baby’s nails?

  Why could he not even remember what she looked like? They’d enjoyed each other just fine in Eleuthera. If only she hadn’t gotten pregnant. If only he’d been a little more careful with the twentieth or thirtieth condom. If only she’d stuck around when she did get pregnant and given Jamie the chance to make things right….

  If Luanne hadn’t run away, Jamie would never have met Allison. He would never have taken that solemn, statuesque woman in his arms and kissed her. He would never have wound up becoming obsessed with her and berating himself for his failure to live up to her too high standards.

  Sheesh. Who gave a rap about her standards?

  Jamie did, unfortunately. Somewhere, in a remote corner of his brain, he harbored the suspicion that Samantha was fate’s revenge on him for having had too much fun in Eleuthera. Samantha, and Allison’s condemnation. His double whammy punishment.

  The woman with green hair materialized before him like a nightmarish weed. “We just wanted to tell you,” she said in a husky contralto that surprised him after all the shrill giggling and jabbering, “that you have the best-behaved little baby any of us has ever seen.”

  “You’re kidding!” he blurted out, wondering whether adding compliments to the manicure would jack up the price even further.

  “Oh, no.” Green Hair shook her head earnestly. “She’s adorable. And I understand you’re unattached?” Either she had a tic or she was winking at him.

  “Uh…well, actually, I am attached.”

  “To that adorable little girl. Of course. I understand.” The way she said “I understand” sounded like the come-on of a hooker.

  “No,” he insisted, assuring himself he was speaking only in self-defense and not because there was any truth to it. “I’m actually involved with someone. A nurse,” he added, as if to clarify for Green Hair that his tastes ran to wholesome Norman Rockwell type women. Allison, however, made him think of anyone but Norman Rockwell, and he wanted to believe she wasn’t too wholesome—on the chance that she ever decided to forgive him for being human.

  “Oh.” Green Hair smiled and shrugged, apparently giving herself a few points for effort. “Well, the other woman in your life, that little sweetheart over there, is almost done.”

  “She hasn’t spit up on anyone, has she?” he asked nervously.

  With a flourish, the other stylists swept across the room, bearing Sam like a princess on a litter. She looked stunned, her mouth open, her hands doing their usual reflexive furling and unfurling. A preliminary inspection informed him she had her full complement of fingers. Obviously he’d been right to entrust this hazardous task to people who knew what they were doing.

  At least they knew what they were doing with nail scissors. As far as taste, they were operating in another galaxy from Jamie. Samantha’s nails had been painted a ghastly pink, the color of raspberry sherbet. They were short, thank God, and smooth…but purplish pink?

  The worst part was that she seemed pleased by the garish effect. She kept flinging her hands in front of her eyes and blinking, startled but not upset. None of her usual fretting, no bawling, no emissions of bodily fluids. Just a narcissistic fascination with her digital extremities.

  Paternal dread nipped at him. “She does suck her fingers sometimes,” he told Martina. “Is that stuff going to make her sick?”

  “Oh, no, no, no,” the receptionist interjected. “We use only organic products here. There’s nothing toxic in the polish.”

  “Plus, I softened her cuticle areas with a little baby oil,” said Martina. “What could be more apropos? Now, she’s probably going to want a little touch-up in a week, so you just keep bringing her to me and I’ll make sure she’s got hands to die for. And if you have any questions, anything you want to talk about—” batting her eyes coquettishly, she stuffed a piece of paper into the chest pocket of his shirt “—here’s my home phone number. Just in case.”

  “I’ve really got to go,” Jamie said, removing Samantha from her entourage. She gave him one of her who-the-heck-are-you? stares, making him feel totally inadequate. No, he couldn’t trim and polish her nails. No, he didn’t know how to get together with a bunch of ladies and do cosmetic things. No, he didn’t feel comfortable in beauty salons like Maison Christophe, reading magazines about fifteen different ways to make a French braid work for you.

  He was always doomed to fall short in his daughter’s eyes. Fool that he was, he gave her helicopter mobiles, not pink nail polish. What did he know?

  What he knew, he thought after forking over twenty-five dollars to the receptionist and a five-dollar tip to Martina, was that he was going to have to find Luanne Hackett. Samantha needed a mother—a better one than Luanne, but at least if he could track her down, he’d be moving in the right direction. He’d be proving to Allison that he did take his predicament very seriously, and that he was responsible, and that he was doing everything within his power to settle his daughter’s life.

  Sighing as he strapped his elegantly manicured daughter into her seat in the car, he resolved to pay a call on Detective John Russo. Given how much Jamie paid in municipal taxes every year—taxes that went to support the police department, among other things—Russo had better have dug up some information about Samantha’s reckless, feckless mother.

  If not for Sam’s sake, then for Jamie’s, Russo just better have tracked that woman down.

  ALLISON HAD BEEN positive Jamie would come to class. She’d been sure.that, no matter what had gone so abysmally wrong on Saturday night, he cared enough about his baby that he wouldn’t just drop out of the Daddy School. No one else in Arlington offered a class so perfectly suited to his needs, and Allison couldn’t believe he would quit the class when he still had so much to learn.

  But as the clock in the YMCA community room inched from 6:00 p.m. to 6:05, and from there to 6:10 with no sign of Jamie, she was forced to accept that he was less of a man than she’d hoped.

  The room’s bland decor grated on her. The scuffed linoleum floor, the wooden chairs carved with a generation’s worth of initials, and the buzzing overhead lights irked her. The full day shift she’d already put in at Arlington Memorial fatigued her. If her students—the diligent ones, the ones who cared enough about being good fathers to show up, the ones who would have gotten A’s from her if the Daddy School gave out report cards—hadn’t been seated in their usual semicircle, staring with curiosity at the carton of baby dolls and disposable diapers she’d brought for them to practice on, she would have driven home and spent a quiet, sulky evening with Grammy, eating a spinach salad and watching reruns on TV while Grammy criticized her anemic social life.

  But her good students were there, talking about how Damien’s lady had had false labor over the weekend and, man, it was spooky. “She’s, like, screaming her effin’ head off,” Damien related, playing to his audience, who gazed at him with the sort of awe the privates back at base camp might bestow upon a soldier who’d just returned to camp after engaging in hand-to-hand combat. “She’s like, ‘Oh, Damie, Damie, it hurts!’ I had to spoon-feed her rocky road ice cream to keep her from freaking.”

  Damien’s woman was no fool, Allison pondered, choosing not to inform him that Braxton-Hicks labor w
asn’t anywhere near as painful as the real thing and that ice cream had no analgesic power when it came to labor pain. It sounded as if the woman had figured out how to get the most from Damien. Allison had to give her credit.

  “False labor can occur on and off throughout the entire ninth month of pregnancy,” she lectured the class. “It’s fairly common. It isn’t a sign that anything’s wrong. But it does mean a baby is on its way. And when that baby comes, you are going to have to be ready for it. So I’ve brought some dolls for you to practice on.”

  “Dolls!” one of the guys hooted. “Oh, wow. And after we’re done with them, let’s go outside and play hopscotch!”

  The class hooted with laughter. Allison smiled to show she was a good sport. And then her smile waned when the door squeaked open and Jamie entered, pushing Samantha in her stroller.

  “Oh, man!” one of the others bellowed. “Check out those wheels, man! My car’s got fewer options than that carriage!”

  “What kind of mpg you get on that thing?” another one shouted, while a third one said, “Power steering, power brakes—that baby’s loaded.”

  “Sorry I’m late,” Jamie mumbled into the air. Allison could hardly hear him, and she wasn’t in the mood to forgive him.

  She waited with barely contained patience while he wheeled the stroller across the center of the room to the only empty chair in the circle. He looked haggard, his eyes dark with shadow. Samantha, on the other hand, looked effervescent. As the stroller glided by, Allison caught a glimpse of pink—several teardrop-size dots of it speckling her fingers.

  Nail polish? What on earth…?

  As if he could read her thoughts, Jamie sent her a glower that seemed to say, “Don’t ask.” She nodded slightly to show she understood, but her imagination quivered with possibilities. Had Jamie, in his rage at having failed to get Allison into bed, gone berserk and attacked his child with a bottle of nail enamel? Or had he invited another female friend to his house to quell the flames of passion Allison had ignited, and this other woman had just happened to have a bottle of polish in her overnight bag? Or had Jamie taken Samantha to a street fair where they had a clown doing face painting and the like?

  Or was he just a bit…odd?

  “All right, class,” she said, refusing to let Jamie, his late entrance and her memories of Saturday night distract her. “Let’s get started on diaper practice. Jamie, since you’ve already had plenty of practice with this, why don’t you demonstrate for us?”

  “Sam’s dry,” he said. The admiring comments of his classmates had done nothing to leaven his mood. He was still glowering, still looking melancholy and angry and mildly ill.

  “I meant you could demonstrate on one of the dolls.” She handed him a life-size doll and a small disposable diaper. As he took the doll from her, his hand accidentally brushed hers. She accepted the contact stoically, refusing to let her body react the way it had when he’d touched her Saturday night.

  He touched her again when he took the diaper from her—only this time it didn’t seem accidental. His gaze met hers as his fingers brushed her palm. She read a question in his eyes, a pleading, a panic different from the new-baby panic she’d read there when he’d attended his first class.

  Allison knew her soft spots. She was a sucker for anyone who needed help, whether it was her grandmother, her friends or her patients. Or her students, she supposed. If Jamie needed help, she would help him.

  She just wouldn’t kiss him. Or let him stroke his fingers against her skin and gaze at her with an intimacy that turned her innards into warm, sweet syrup. She wouldn’t laugh at his jokes or sympathize with him over his problems or agree to have dinner with him ever again.

  She would help him in her capacity as his teacher. Period.

  He demonstrated his diapering technique well enough to convince her that he’d been performing the task an average of ten times a day, which meant Samantha’s bottom was being properly attended. The baby’s manicured fingernails still mystified Allison, though. Why in God’s name was a three-week-old baby wearing nail polish?

  “Remember,” she instructed the class, supplementing Jamie’s demonstration, “there are differences between diapering boys and girls—because, of course, there are differences between boys and girls.”

  “You said it,” one of the students murmured, inviting a chorus of snickers.

  “When it comes to diapering a boy, you have to work fast. Boys can spray in all directions.”

  “That doesn’t make sense,” Damien commented. “You change the kid’s diaper because the kid’s just taken a leak. So when the diaper’s off, the kid ought to be empty, you know? How can some little guy be spraying you when he’s just taken a whiz?”

  “Babies are funny that way,” Allison explained. “You think they’re empty, and then they surprise you by proving they aren’t.”

  “Allison’s right,” Jamie grumbled. “The minute you put a dry diaper on them, they wet it. It’s their sadistic idea of a joke.”

  “Yeah? But then, you must be paying a fortune in diapers. I mean, you put a diaper on, the kid pees, you put another diaper on, the kid pees….”

  Allison saw this as a good way to introduce the subject of diaper economics. She discussed diaper services, the pros and cons of laundering one’s own cloth diapers, the strategies of bargain hunting and coupon clipping when it came to disposables. The class seemed intrigued by this aspect—but then, money seemed to fascinate them more than the nitty-gritty of how to clean a baby’s bottom and treat diaper rash.

  As Allison moved around the room, watching as her students practiced on their dolls—not just changing diapers but holding them, supporting the dolls’ wobbly necks, feeding the dolls with bottles and practicing burping strategies—Allison felt the hour stampede past her. The second fifty minutes of the class went faster than the first ten minutes. Something happened to time when Jamie was around. Her perception of it—like her perception of him—got skewed.

  Why did she find him so irresistibly sexy? Why did he so appeal to her? Why did his eyes, roiling with weariness and worry, tweak responses deep inside her? Why, whenever she passed within his orbit, did she wish she could go back to Saturday night, back to their kisses on the porch? Why did she wish she could pretend the details of Samantha’s conception were irrelevant to her?

  Maybe Gail and Molly were right. Maybe she was just horny, her body crying out for a little amorous exercise.

  But she could get that exercise any time she wanted. The hospital was teeming with young, handsome residents looking for a good time but allergic to commitment. If a fling was all she was after, she could have had dozens of them.

  She wasn’t after Jamie, that was for sure. And yet…

  And yet her pulse tripped in double time whenever she glanced his way, whenever she got close to him. Apparently, being in the same room with him was as close as she needed to be, because by the end of the hour she felt overheated, as if too much blood were rushing through her veins.

  “Okay, guys, that’s it,” she said as the big hand crossed the twelve, marking the end of the class. “Bring your babies back up here. Gently,” she warned Harold, who had tucked his doll under his arm as if it were a newspaper. “Always support the baby’s head.” Her cautions seemed a little silly as the fathers-to-be carefully carried their “babies” to the front of the room and dumped them into the carton. She would have to return the dolls to the hospital that night. As if having them back on the shelf in the childbirth class closet before tomorrow morning would make any difference in the hospital’s decision.

  Margaret had told her earlier today that the hospital had made its decision based on budget constraints, that although everyone believed Allison had come up with a great idea, it was more important to train mothers than fathers. “Face it,” Margaret had observed. “Some of those daddy students of yours are going to light out for the territories first chance they get. If they were stick-around types, they’d be married and making arrangem
ents for the christening, not hanging out at the Y. And the older ones are going to be out the door and at their desks the minute they realize how much work child rearing is. They’ll be dumping the babies on their wives and screaming for nannies. You’re wasting your time and the hospital’s money trying to turn sows’ ears into silk purses.”

  Allison believed quite the opposite—that by teaching fathering skills and imbuing her students with confidence in their own abilities, she could transform even the most reluctant father into an involved, caring parent. But with Margaret and the rest of the hospital’s senior staff denying her the support she needed, the Daddy School students were all doomed to end up sow’s ears.

  Except for Jamie. He might end up resembling some part of an animal. But it wouldn’t be a sow. And it certainly wouldn’t be an ear.

  While the rest of the class filed out of the room, joshing and nudging each other and making uneasy jokes about labor pains and dirty diapers, Jamie remained behind, pretending to be extremely busy adjusting the seat belt that held Samantha in her stroller. Allison knew the baby didn’t need his ministrations. He was lingering in the room for another reason—and Allison had a strong sense of foreboding about what that reason might be. He wanted to talk to her, rehash Saturday night, make her feel even worse than she already felt, about herself as well as him. She honestly didn’t want to have that talk. But as his teacher she had to make herself available on the minuscule chance he might have a legitimate child care question for her.

  Not likely, she thought, bracing herself as he approached her at the front of the room, where she was cramming her folder of lecture notes into her canvas tote.