A Baby in the Bargain

by Victoria Pade

  Jani laughed, stepped back from the doorway and said, “Come in. But as you can see, I’m not dressed for entertaining.” She was, however, glad that the T-shirt had a sort of built-in bra in the form of a second layer of fabric across the bust, because she wasn’t wearing one.

  “I’m not dressed for company, either. I worked alone from home today, got a little cabin fever and decided I could use some air so I ordered a pizza for pick-up. Then I hated the thought of going back home to eat it alone and since I wanted to say thanks, I thought I’d see if I could do it with a pie. It’s from Kaos over on South Pearl. Have you had it?”

  “I love Kaos!” she said, laughing at how that sounded as she closed the door behind him.

  Kaos was an eclectic little place that made delectable thin-crust pizza.

  “Fresh tomato sauce, mozzarella that I guess they make there, and everything else that sounded good,” he said, raising the box. “You can take off anything you don’t like.”

  “I like everything,” Jani assured him, thinking that what she liked most was him and that it felt much, much too right to be with him again. “I also have a bottle of wine I can contribute—” That she’d bought as her last hurrah, to enjoy before she got pregnant.

  “Why don’t you take the pizza to the coffee table while I get the wine, and we’ll really do this casual,” she suggested.

  In the kitchen, she quickly opened the wine and gathered glasses and napkins, and was back just as Gideon was taking off his leather jacket.

  He was right—he wasn’t dressed up. He was wearing a pair of old jeans that were threadbare in spots and a V-neck sweater with a white crewneck T-shirt showing underneath it.

  Jani was glad that she wasn’t the only one in lie-around-the-house clothes but it didn’t change the fact that he looked terrific. And apparently he’d shaved in order to pick up his pizza. He also smelled of a woodsy cologne that made her want to just close her eyes and breathe him in.

  But she resisted the urge.

  They each sat down on the floor at opposite ends of her oval coffee table, with the pizza box in the center. Then Gideon opened the lid and Jani surveyed the fully loaded pie.

  “Yum! I’m starving!”

  They each chose slices from their respective sides and bit off the points, judging the pizza fantastic when they’d savored their bites. A little discussion about the wine followed before they settled into just enjoying the meal.

  That was when Gideon said, “The Lakeview Monthly reporter emailed me his article. Apparently he talked to you yesterday?”

  “He did,” Jani said.

  “I read what he wrote and wanted to say thanks. You, uh... You really cleared my great-grandfather’s name.”

  “I just told the truth,” Jani said between bites.

  “More of it than I expected—”

  She hadn’t indicted H.J. in any way. Instead, she’d explained that the reason the original redevelopment of Lakeview had fallen through had nothing whatsoever to do with Franklin Thatcher. That it had been a result of an altercation between H.J. and the people H.J. had lined up to do the work.

  “You said something about Franklin falling under the wheels of Camden progress,” Gideon continued. “I didn’t think I wanted him to look like a victim but—”

  “He was,” Jani said. “He was a victim who unfairly got the blame.”

  “Which you are also quoted saying in the article.” Gideon paused a moment to drink his wine and seemed to consider his next words. “I don’t know if this is crazy or weird or what, but I read the things you said, the way you said them, and it so openly set the record straight that it felt like a huge weight had been lifted off my shoulders.”

  Jani didn’t take the bite of pizza crust she was about to take and instead stared at him. “It was such a small thing...”

  “I can’t explain it. It was just that seeing it in writing, knowing it will be out there—in print, on the internet, everywhere... I don’t know. I just think that anyone left who ever associated the name Franklin Thatcher with lies and deceit, really will know now that it’s unfounded. It’s like my great-grandfather finally received his pardon from the governor. And it was a relief to me that I hadn’t expected.”

  Gideon raised his wineglass to her in mock toast. “So I wanted to say thanks.”

  “None necessary,” Jani said quietly. All the Camden grandchildren agreed with GiGi that some sort of restitution should be made to the people H.J. had wronged, but until that moment Jani hadn’t realized just how important this mission was. Or how gratifying it might be.

  But her own gratification wasn’t the point and she thought it better to accept Gideon’s thanks without making a big deal out of it. So she went back to talking about how much she liked the food even though she couldn’t eat any more.

  Gideon said he’d had his fill, too, and after allotting Jani the leftovers and disposing of the box for her while she wrapped the last two slices, they refilled their wineglasses and returned to the living room, sitting on the sofa rather than the floor this time.

  They both sat close to the center of the couch, facing each other.

  “The pizza was a treat. I hate to order it for myself when I’m alone so I almost never do,” Jani said.

  “The downfall of the single life,” Gideon said melodramatically.

  “Is that the only one for you?” Jani asked, joking in return but also hoping she might get him to open up a little more about that part of himself. “Did divorce leave you a confirmed bachelor?”

  “No,” he answered without hesitation. “I’d like to get married again.”

  “Really,” Jani said.

  Gideon laughed. “Why does that shock you?”

  She shrugged. “I just thought... I don’t know, you seem so against having kids, I assumed the two go together.”

  “But they don’t have to—aren’t your plans proof of that?”

  “Sure,” she said. But he was making her all the more curious. “You liked being married but you didn’t like having kids?”

  His laugh was more melancholy this time. “I liked them both.”

  “Then you’re just confusing me... You liked being married and having kids, you want to remarry, but there’s absolutely no way you’re ever having kids again?”

  “That pretty much sums it up.”

  “I need to know the story that goes with this,” she said bluntly. Then she regretted her words because she recalled wondering before if he’d lost a child tragically. She was afraid she’d been insensitive, so she added in a hurry, “If it’s something you can talk about...”

  But Gideon took a turn at shrugging. “There’s no reason I can’t talk about it. It just... You know how it is—divorce is not the highlight of my life.”

  “Is it worse than having creeps barge into your home and threaten you?”

  He stretched an arm along the sofa back and used the knuckle of his index finger to brush her cheekbone consolingly. Then he said, “There was somebody I consider a lowlife involved but there weren’t threats of bodily harm, no.”

  “So tell me,” Jani urged.

  He hesitated but then took a drink of his wine and said, “I reconnected with my high school sweetheart at our ten-year class reunion and she was fresh out of a rocky on-again-off-again marriage to a jerk.”

  “A lowlife jerk,” Jani qualified.

  Gideon laughed. “Definitely a lowlife jerk. Whom she’d divorced the week before the reunion. I figured it was really over and there wasn’t any reason we couldn’t pick up where we’d left off when we’d first gone our separate ways to college.”

  “You’d been serious before?”

  “Yeah, reasonably. But not enough to trade a college education for marriage at eighteen—there was no way I was risking ending up like my fath
er and my grandfather, in that damn bar... Anyway, Shelly had gone out of state to college and we’d kept in touch for a while, but you know how those things go, eventually it just fizzled and—”

  “Ten years later you met up again.”

  “And things moved fast—that happens when you already knew each other and cared for each other and didn’t have any kind of ugly breakup. Things moved so fast that by the time she realized she was pregnant with Trent’s baby, she and I were engaged.”

  “Oh,” Jani said.

  “Yeah. Nothing’s ever easy, is it?” he asked wryly. “But her ex was a lying, cheating jerk who had left her high and dry for other women three times, and fooled around on her in between those splits, so when she said she was through with him, that not even a baby could make her go back to him, I believed her.” Another shrug. “And I was willing to be a father to her baby—”

  “You were?”

  “I was. I loved Shelly, and the baby seemed... I don’t know, we’d already been together a month when she realized she hadn’t just missed cycles out of stress—what she’d thought after an earlier home pregnancy test had been negative. Instead she found out late that she actually was pregnant. It wasn’t such a stretch to think about the baby as sort of my own, so I just thought, okay, let’s do this...”

  Jani suffered a pang of regret that she hadn’t met him when his thinking had been along those lines. But she ignored it.

  “And the birth father?”

  “When she told him she was pregnant—and showed him the doctor’s report to prove through the timing that it was his—he said he didn’t want anything to do with it, that the kid was her problem. Shelly swore that didn’t bother her. She even seemed a little relieved that she wouldn’t have to deal with the jerk about visitation or custody or anything, and I thought the whole thing was over and done with. So we got married,” Gideon continued. “Shelly was five months pregnant at our wedding, and she and the baby were just going to be mine.”

  “Simple as that.”

  “That’s how it seemed. And four months later we had a baby girl—Jillie—and it was all good....”

  Something about the way he said that made it hard for Jani to believe. “Only it wasn’t?”

  “No, it really was. I told you, I liked being married, having a kid.” But he turned his head away as if he were seeing into the past, and the expression on his oh-so-handsome face wasn’t joyful—he was frowning.

  Then his green eyes came back to her and he said, “I never thought of myself as a kid person. I’m a guy—kids, babies, so what? I thought that someday I’d have some, but...I don’t know...I just didn’t really have a concept of what it was to be a parent.”

  “A lot of work...”

  “Sure. But that didn’t bother me. What I didn’t realize was how you feel about a kid....” He shook his head and returned to staring at the coffee table as if a part of him was reliving what he was talking about.

  “I loved that kid like I didn’t think it was possible to love anyone,” he confessed. “She’d go to bed with sniffles, I’d get up in the middle of the night to make sure she wasn’t sick. I’d hear on the news about something bad happening to a child, and I’d have to double-check our locks. All the plans for the future were with Jillie in mind, what would be best for her. I opened a college fund for her when she was six months old. We only took vacations to places where Jillie could come, too, so we didn’t have to leave her behind. I’d take her to the park and watch her like a hawk.”

  “Sounds like being a parent.”

  “But it wasn’t anything like what I thought. I lived and breathed for that kid...”

  Jani could see that he’d tapped into amazing emotions as a parent, and again she had the fear that something awful had happened to the child.

  But then he said, “Jillie was three when Shelly’s ex popped up again. He said he changed his mind. He claimed he hadn’t been able to shake knowing that he had a kid out in the world. He swore up and down that he’d be faithful if only Shelly would give him another chance because he wanted both Shelly and Jillie after all.”

  “Three years later?” Jani said incredulously.

  “Yeah, it seemed too ridiculous to matter to me, too.”

  “But it wasn’t ridiculous?”

  The frown that creased his brow was almost answer enough. “She went back to him,” he said flatly. “She said that she felt obligated, that Jillie should be raised by her real father. That they were the real family. But I think the truth was that the guy was like a drug to her. It was like drinking had been to my father. Or like your ex’s gambling—”

  “Demons,” Jani said, referring to a comment Gideon had made when she’d told him about Reggie—that there was no fighting other people’s demons.

  “Shelly apologized and cried—there was genuine guilt there, I think. She said she honestly had thought he was out of her system. She thought she could be done with him, but—”

  “She couldn’t help herself,” Jani finished for Gideon with the words she’d heard Reggie say too often.

  “And when she left, she took Jillie.”

  And that was where his real pain had come from—Jani could see it, she could hear it in his voice.

  “I wasn’t the biological father, so I had no rights. It didn’t make any difference that I’d been there when Jillie was born, that I’d fed her and changed her diapers, helped teach her to roll over and sit up and eat with a spoon. It didn’t make any difference that I’d read to her every single damn night before bed—”

  “The bear book...” Jani said.

  “It didn’t make any difference that Jillie was ninety-nine percent mine. Because of that one percent that made her biologically not mine, I was out and Trent was back in. Just that easy, and without my having a leg to stand on to fight it. Shelly and Trent decided to move to Arkansas where Trent was from, and I haven’t seen Jillie since.”

  So that explained how he didn’t have any kids even though he had had one.

  “That was it for me,” he went on, the strain coming through in spite of the lighter tone he was trying to take. “I loved Shelly. Wholeheartedly. But it wasn’t the same as what I felt for Jillie. You love a kid unconditionally. It digs the kind of roots in you that you never knew anything could—”

  “And you don’t ever want that again?” Jani said in disbelief, thinking that having loved one child so much, he would want another.

  “When a marriage ends—it’s tough. It hurts. But you can talk yourself through it. But losing a kid you love? A kid who’s nothing but pure joy to you? That’s... There’s no consolation.”

  “But you’ve sworn never to have any kids—a child who’s biologically yours—”

  He shook his head adamantly. “There aren’t any buts for me. I’ve seen friends separated from their kids, reduced to being half-time parents or long-distance parents—my best friend is having to adjust to that particular form of hell right now—and if you think he’s feeling any less than I felt, you’re wrong. On whatever level, it’s still losing your kid. And I won’t ever risk going through that again. No kids, no chance for that kind of heartache. So, yeah, I’d get married again. But there won’t ever be kids for me.”

  And once more it was glaringly evident that they were on different tracks in life.

  But somehow, at that moment, that just wasn’t how it felt to Jani. Especially when he smoothed her hair over her shoulder with his palm and smiled a lazy sort of smile at her.

  “There you have it. And you’re probably thinking that at least that tale of woe in my life isn’t H. J. Camden’s fault,” he joked.

  He really was making an effort to lighten the tone and Jani thought it better to go with that, so she half joked in return. “Actually it’s because of him—in a roundabout way—that you were determined to get your e
ducation. Maybe he should get a little credit.”

  Gideon’s response was very different from what it would have been when they’d first met. Now he laughed. “I’ll give you that one because you pulled my great-grandfather out of the fire in that article.”

  “And because it’s true,” she challenged.

  “Okay, yeah, in a roundabout—and not very admirable—way, H. J. Camden can have some credit for my getting an education.”

  “I’ll take it even with the qualification,” Jani decreed.

  The tension from discussing his divorce seemed to be dissolving and for a moment neither of them said anything, letting go of it.

  It occurred to Jani then to refill their empty wineglasses. It was just too nice to be sitting there with him—despite what they’d been talking about—and she didn’t want to break the spell.

  But just as she lifted the bottle, Gideon said, “I should probably go and let you get back to whatever you had planned tonight.”

  Talk about a spell-breaker!

  “Or we could have another glass of wine...” Jani suggested.

  “We could...” he said as if that didn’t interest him at all.

  What did seem to hold his attention, though, was gazing into her eyes. And brushing featherlight strokes along the side of her face with his index finger, lulling her too much for her to move...

  He took a deep breath and sighed. “I came here tonight to say thanks for the article but...I really sort of needed to see you.”

  “Is there a problem with the community center?”

  “Nah. The problem is with me... I just couldn’t go any longer... Sunday night feels like years ago and I can’t focus on work, I can’t sleep, I can’t... You’re in my head all the time...”

  “Yeah,” Jani whispered. “You’re causing me that same problem.”

  She couldn’t tell whether that pleased him or not. But she didn’t really care. She was too lost in looking at him, at that impressive collection of features and those penetrating iridescent sea-green eyes.

  And there was something undeniable and irresistible happening at that moment between them that she just couldn’t fight.