A Baby in the Bargain

by Victoria Pade

  “Believe me, after four years of frustration and then being scared to death thanks to Reggie, I don’t have any doubt that I was right to finally call it off with him. And the last thing I’m interested in is starting all over again with another guy and putting off what I really want. Again. So I’m telling you, tonight is a dinner meeting and that’s it!”

  “So is there going to be a baby?” Livi asked, conceding the point and getting to the subject that made Jani happier. What her cousins had come tonight to ask about in the first place.

  “With any luck, yes, there will be a baby,” Jani confirmed. “My tests and blood work were all good, so I have the go-ahead. The next step is to pick a donor, then I’ll start the hormones and—”

  “We could have a baby by this time next year!” Lindie finished for her.

  “Fingers crossed...” Jani said, thankful that her cousins were supportive.

  Lindie, Livi and their brother, Lang, were the Camden triplets. The triplets had been born the same year as Jani—they were the youngest of the Camden grandchildren. They’d lived together with GiGi from the time they were six. And while all ten of the cousins were as close as siblings, since Jani, Livi and Lindie were the only girls, they were particularly close. Her female cousins felt like sisters to Jani, and what they thought of her plan to have a baby on her own was important to her. Vital to her, actually.

  And they were in favor of it.

  “How do you pick a donor?” Lindie asked. “Do you go to a sperm bank or something?”

  “The doctor has an affiliation with one he trusts—not only because of the donors they use and their screening process, but also because of the way the sperm is handled. He says viability can depend on things like that. So yes, the sperm comes from a sperm bank, but I do it through the doctor. I’ll go into the office to read profiles next Wednesday and choose.”

  “Pick a dad, any dad...” Lindie joked, sounding like a carnival hustler. Then her eyes widened and she said, “Oh, that probably sounded bad! I’m sorry!”

  Jani didn’t take offense. She knew that what she was planning to do was uncharted territory—it was for her, and it certainly was for her family. They were all just feeling their way, so she didn’t hold it against anyone if they said something awkward.

  Instead she held up two different outfit options to give her cousins something else to talk about. “The blue dress or the sweater and slacks?”

  “The blue dress if it’s a date. The sweater and slacks if it’s just a casual dinner meeting,” Lindie said.

  “So the sweater and slacks,” Jani decreed, regretting that she hadn’t just put on the blue dress without asking for their opinion.

  “GiGi said this guy is giving you a hard time?” Livi commented as Jani pulled on the white cowl-necked angora sweater and the gray pinstripe pants.

  “It was a little better when I saw him on Wednesday, but like I said, he’s definitely in the hate-the-Camdens camp.”

  She’d put on blush and mascara already, and now took the soup cans out of her hair. After brushing it, it did fall in softer waves around her shoulders, so the technique had worked the way she remembered it.

  “Hey, the soup cans really do work!” Livi marveled.

  All of the Camden grandchildren bore a striking resemblance to one another but that was particularly true of the girls—something that had made it difficult for their classmates in elementary school to believe that Lang was the other triplet and not Jani.

  “Can I borrow them?” Lindie asked. “I have a blind date tomorrow night and no time to run to the store for soup.”

  “Sure,” Jani said, thinking that if there was a chance she might be seeing Gideon again soon she might not want to part with them. But she could hardly say that!

  “We should take off or we’ll be late for the movie,” Livi said.

  “Let me get a bag to carry the soup cans,” Jani offered, and they all left her bedroom.

  “You look great, by the way,” Lindie said as they went to the kitchen. “Wear those new black heels you bought when we were shopping last Saturday... Oh, or is this guy short? You don’t want to tower above him, that’ll only make him more intimidated.”

  “He’s not short or intimidated, believe me,” Jani said of Gideon.

  “He’s not short and has green eyes...” Livi said as if she’d heard something in Jani’s tone to provoke a return to the initial suspicion that tonight’s dinner was a date. “Is it possible that even though this guy is in the hate-the-Camdens camp, you aren’t so much in the hate-the-guy camp?”

  “I don’t hate him. Why would I hate him?” Jani said, hearing the overcompensation in her own tone.

  “Do you like him?” Lindie asked, suspicious again, too.

  “I don’t have any personal opinion about him one way or another. This is just my turn up to bat on one of these missions and I’m trying to get it over and done with so I can just concentrate on the baby. I’m not letting anything keep me from having a baby anymore—tall with green eyes or not,” she said firmly.

  “And you shouldn’t,” Livi agreed.

  “I can’t wait to be able to start buying baby clothes!” Lindie added, obviously trying to compensate for her earlier insensitivity.

  “And to decorate the nursery,” Livi put in.

  “What do we need men for?” Lindie again.

  “Yeah, they’re nice, but they’re like jewelry—accessories, not necessities,” Livi said.

  Jani put the soup cans in a sack and kept quiet, knowing that neither of her cousins actually believed what they were saying about men and that they were both just trying to put a good face on things for Jani’s sake.

  It wasn’t that she didn’t want a man in her life or that she thought they were nothing more than accessories. But she’d done everything she could with Reggie to stick it out, to make it work, so she could arrive at the point of having a baby with him. With a husband.

  But that had failed. And this was what she was left needing to do. Or risk never having a baby of her own.

  So no, no man.

  Sure, she preferred to have a family the old-fashioned way. The traditional way.

  And if Gideon Thatcher came to mind at that very moment?

  It wasn’t as if there was a connection.

  Regardless of what her traitorous brain might be throwing out at her, she was done fostering any kind of illusions.

  And that’s exactly what it would be to so much as entertain the idea that—even if she had the time to wait for something to develop between them—Gideon Thatcher would ever be inclined to father a Camden baby.

  * * *

  “Uh... Are they giving those away in there?”

  After eating their meal of luscious lasagna and going over paperwork, Jani had left Gideon to go to the ladies’ room. She’d gone in with only her purse, but now she emerged carrying a tiny, sleeping baby boy in her arms.

  Just then the baby’s mother came out of the ladies’ room holding a crying three-year-old, and Jani nodded in her direction. “I’m just helping out,” she said to Gideon, waiting for the woman to catch up to her so she could follow her to her table and hand the baby over to the father.

  When Jani was done, she sat back down, replaced her napkin in her lap and explained. “While Mom was changing the baby’s diaper the three-year-old tried to climb onto the sink to wash her hands and fell. The three-year-old insisted she was too hurt to walk and Mom couldn’t carry the baby and the three-year-old out at once. I was just helping, so no, unfortunately, they weren’t handing out babies in there. If they had been, I would have taken one. Or two or three...”

  “Wow, you really do want kids,” he muttered as their waiter arrived with the leather folder containing the bill and, it turned out, Gideon’s credit card.

  “This was
supposed to be my treat,” Jani protested when it became obvious that he’d paid the bill.

  “You can treat me to the community center,” he said as he signed and took his copy of the credit card slip. “I feel like a walk—are you up for it?”

  That surprised Jani. As always, he’d been cool and aloof at the start of this evening, then all-business during the meal they’d eaten while going over the proposal and the cost estimates for the community center. It truly had been nothing more than the business dinner she’d claimed it was to her cousins.

  But an after-dinner walk? That seemed to go beyond business.

  “It’s not too cold but there’s that light snow that just started falling.” Gideon pointed at the window beside their table. “Seems like a perfect night for a short winter stroll, but if that doesn’t appeal to you...”

  It definitely appealed to her...

  “No, that does sound good,” she insisted, glad now that she’d opted for the slacks and sweater. And shoes that she could easily walk in.

  Jani slid the file folder with the paperwork into her large purse. While she did, Gideon put on his coat—a dressy leather jacket that he wore over a fisherman’s turtleneck sweater and cocoa-colored slacks.

  Then he took Jani’s knee-length, red wool coat before she could reach it and held it open for her to slip into.

  As she did, a sense of the power of this big man standing so close came over her. She had the image of resting her back against his chest and having his arms envelop her the way the red wool did.

  Where did that come from?

  She yanked herself out of that bit of involuntary and unwanted reverie, muttered a simple “Thanks” and stepped away from him to button the coat from top to bottom as she commanded her fickle mind to behave.

  She wrapped an angora scarf that went with her sweater twice around her neck—nearly strangling herself as punishment—then took matching gloves from her coat pockets and put them on.

  When they got outside, Gideon seemed to have something in mind because he guided her across First Avenue down Milwaukee, and then turned right.

  They passed by small boutique shops that were all closed at that hour, and a few restaurants and bars. But then they wandered away from the upscale section into a quieter, less affluent area.

  When Colorado Boulevard came into sight a few blocks ahead of them Gideon stopped and pointed to the end where traffic was racing by.

  “See that place down on the corner?”

  “The dive that just seems to be named Bar?” Jani asked of the old, run-down white building with nothing more than a neon sign flashing the word.

  “Uh-huh. That’s where my great-grandfather ended up after Lakeview chased him out as their mayor.”

  Uh-oh. Apparently this wasn’t merely an after-dinner stroll....

  Jani could tell even from a distance that the bar wasn’t anywhere she’d want to spend time.

  “You mentioned that Lakeview ran your great-grandfather out of town but you didn’t say how...”

  “He became a pariah in Lakeview when it was clear that the promises he’d made on H.J.’s behalf weren’t coming through. The way Lakeview’s government was set up at the time, the city council had the power. The mayor was the head of the city council but had only one vote—”

  “Like it is on the Camden board.”

  “Right. The mayor presided over the council, had some other minor responsibilities, and of course he was the ceremonial head of the community, but it didn’t take much to shut him out—”

  “Which was what happened?”

  “Which was what happened. No one on the council would speak to him, or listen to anything he had to say. They made sure his vote was always overridden. He was told not to attend the ceremonial things that were the mayor’s usual duties. And for all intents and purposes, he became the invisible mayor until he was finally forced to resign—basically in shame.”

  “That’s not good...” Jani said quietly, unsure what else to say. “Is that when he ‘ended up’ at the bar? And did he buy it or work there or...” She feared the worst, that maybe his great-grandfather had ended up a drunken fixture there.

  “While he was struggling as the invisible mayor and trying to convince people that he was not in H. J. Camden’s pocket, his business in the private sector also went under—”

  “What was his business?” Jani asked, hating what she was hearing even though Gideon was telling her this matter-of-factly and without the animosity he’d exhibited before.

  “He owned Franklin Thatcher Insurance. He’d built it from the ground up, and it was doing well—he was a leading businessman, which was part of what helped him win his mayor’s seat in the first place. But a majority of his clients were in Lakeview and after the Camden warehouses and factories were all that came of the deal with H. J. Camden, there was a boycott on Franklin Thatcher Insurance. The agency went under. Then his house was torched—”

  “No...” Jani said, flinching from that thought. She dug her hands into her pockets and shrugged deeper into her coat and scarf as it suddenly seemed to get colder.

  “Yep, somebody burned down his house. At least they made sure my great-grandparents and my grandfather weren’t in it at the time, but they lost everything. Literally. They ended up with the clothes on their backs and a car that had been smashed all to hell with baseball bats during an attack of vandals a couple of nights earlier. There wasn’t a lot of effort put into finding out who did it all.”

  “Oh, Gideon...” Jani said with heartfelt sympathy.

  “That was when they ended up here—my great-grandfather got a job mopping up, emptying the trash, general maintenance. My great-grandmother made sandwiches to sell with her pickles and deviled eggs as bar food, and the owner let my great-grandparents and my grandfather live in the two-room apartment above the bar because he felt sorry for them.”

  It just got worse and worse; Jani was huddled inside of her coat as much from the cold as from shame.

  But when Gideon noticed, he only thought that she was cold and suggested they head back.

  “So your grandfather grew up in two rooms over that bar?” Jani asked as they retraced their steps. She didn’t want to hear any more but she knew she had to and, since Gideon seemed to be in a talkative mood, she also knew she had to pursue it. Plus, despite the subject matter, he wasn’t displaying any hostility and that helped.

  “On the first round, my grandfather was here for only four years—he was twelve when they left Lakeview. It was tough on him, too. He’d had his friends turn on him, literally throw rocks at him, beat him up—the stuff of twelve-year-olds taking out their parents’ frustrations on the son of the man they held responsible for misleading them. My grandfather didn’t adjust well to his new school, he didn’t try to make new friends, and when he was sixteen he dropped out, and lied about his age to join the army.”

  “How did that work out for him?” Jani asked, hoping for the best but not expecting it.

  “He didn’t rise through the ranks. He apparently had a chip on his shoulder and was in trouble quite a bit for insubordination.”

  “He had a lot of anger,” Jani guessed. Then she added quickly, “Not that he didn’t have reason...”

  But this time Gideon didn’t jump on that the way he might have in previous encounters. Instead he merely confirmed that, yes, his grandfather had been an angry man his entire life.

  Then he said, “When my grandfather got out of the service he ended up right back at the bar again, tending bar rather than sweeping up—I guess that was an improvement.”

  “But it’s where he spent his life, too?”

  “My whole family had trouble getting away from that place. It was like it had a hold on them. Or maybe, after Lakeview, they just didn’t have the courage to move too far from the hole they’d hidd
en in,” Gideon mused. “The anger and hatred that drove my great-grandparents and my grandfather out of Lakeview followed them for a few years, but they were still so beaten down by it long after the Thatcher name didn’t mean anything to anyone outside of Lakeview.”

  “Did you know your great-grandparents?”

  “I was little when they were around, I only remember them as frail, fearful old people. Furious really is what my grandfather was, right to his grave, furious and unhappy, and yeah, so beaten down by what had happened to him as a kid in Lakeview that he even passed on his defeatist attitude to my father—”

  “Was your father raised around the bar, too?”

  “Yeah. My grandmother was a regular patron—that’s how she and my grandfather got together. It didn’t make for the best connection. My grandfather married her when she got pregnant with my father but by the time my father was two, my grandmother had run off with some other guy and was never heard from again. My great-grandmother had died, there was just my great-grandfather, my grandfather, my two-year-old father and the bar—”

  “Were they all still living in the apartment over it?” Jani asked, afraid of the answer.

  “Yeah. My great-grandparents never left it. For my grandfather and my father there were a couple of moves into other places, but then money would get bad and they’d end up back there. It’s where my father grew up.”

  Jani didn’t know what to say about that but Gideon’s tone let her know it wasn’t something he was happy to report.

  “Did your dad make it through school?” she asked.

  “He got his high school diploma, but it didn’t really matter. He was drinking before he ever graduated. He went to work bartending as soon as he was old enough, too. His greatest ambition was for him and my grandfather to buy the bar—”

  “Did they?”

  “Nah. They could never scrape up the money. My dad just stayed tending bar, doing it the same way his father did—pour a drink for the customer, pour one for themselves if they could get the customer to buy. My grandfather weathered the boozing better than my old man—my grandfather made it into his sixties before liver disease brought on by alcoholism killed him. My father only made it to forty-seven.”