The Daddy Salute

by Maureen Child

  But she didn’t seem to mind that he’d been struck dumb.

  “In the bag there are a few diapers, a bottle of apple juice and some teething biscuits.”

  “Teething biscuits?” Oh, man, he was in deep trouble here.

  “Something like a hard cookie.”

  “Uh-huh.” He nodded, and in an effort to sound at least halfway knowledgeable said, “It looks like she’s got all her teeth.” He knew this because the baby was baring said teeth at him.

  “Oh, most of them, yes,” the woman said. “but those back teeth are tough little beggars.”

  Swell.

  “Anyway,” Mrs. Norbert went on, “you’ll have to do some shopping right away, but at least you don’t have to worry about formula.”

  “Formula?”

  “Yes.” She looked up at him and shook her head slightly. “Maegan drinks regular milk now, and she can eat people food.”

  Well that worked out well, but then he hadn’t planned on feeding her cat chow.

  “Although, you might want to go easy on regular food and stockpile some jarred toddler foods.”

  “Uh-huh.” Numb. Completely numb. And the baby didn’t look too happy about the situation, either.

  “So! If you’ll just sign these…” The woman dipped a hand into her large black purse and pulled out a sheaf of legal papers.

  Brian took them and stared down at the words, watching as they blurred and fuzzed. He was about to sign his life away, and for some reason his eyes were refusing to focus.

  “A pen. Do you have a pen?” she asked.

  “No.” A bayonet maybe. A gun. But no pen. “No, I don’t.”

  “Never mind, I do,” Mrs. Norbert told him, digging into the bowels of that purse again. “Here, you just take the baby and I’ll find it.”

  With that, she plopped Maegan into her daddy’s arms, and man and child stared at each other warily. Brian studied her, noting the heart-shaped face, the string of drool hanging from her pouting mouth and the butterfly hair clip attached to impossibly fine, light-brown hair. She wore a frilly blue dress, shiny black shoes and white tights straining over a well-padded behind.

  Brian held her exactly as he would a live grenade—with extreme caution, at arm’s length.

  Maegan looked him over, and he was pretty sure she didn’t approve of him. Of course, how could he blame her? Some strange woman had just loaded her onto a plane, flown across the country and dropped her into the arms of another stranger. What did she have to be happy about?

  As if to prove him right, Maegan started kicking her little feet wildly, then screwed her face up into a mask of displeasure just before howling like some crazed hound on the scent of fresh meat.

  “Geez!” he choked out. “Hey, hey stop that,” he told her, and jiggled her slightly.

  The only effect that move had was to make the sound of her cries go up and down like a talentless kid playing scales on the piano.

  “Oh, pay no attention,” Mrs. Norbert said as she came up with the long-sought-for pen. “She’s just tired and cranky.”

  “I know how she feels,” he muttered. In fact, he was getting crankier by the minute.

  “Excellent,” she said, taking the baby from him so he could sign the papers that would make him solely responsible for one tiny, loud scrap of humanity. “I’m sure you’ll get along wonderfully well. It will just take some time.”

  Yeah, he thought, as his daughter calmed down and glared at him. About thirty years ought to do it.

  But Brian Haley was a man of honor. So he signed those papers, taking custody of the child he’d made, and with every stroke of the pen felt the last of his world crumble.

  “Right,” Mrs Norbert exclaimed, then tore the top sheet of paper off and tucked it into her purse. Then she gave Maegan a resounding kiss on the cheek, a final squeeze and handed her over to Brian. “Now if you two will excuse me, I’ve got to run. My sister’s flown in from Portland to meet me, and we’re going to have a few days holiday at Disneyland.”

  As the social worker bustled off, Brian’s gaze followed her until she was lost in the crowd. “Sure, she’s going to Disneyland.” He turned then to look into his baby girl’s accusatory glare. “And you and I, we’re headed for the Black Lagoon.”

  Kathy leaned in close and put her ear to her front door, straining to hear what was going on in the hallway.

  Of course, she could just simply open her door and ask Brian Haley what the heck he was up to. But, as she kept reminding herself, she was avoiding the man.

  Still, he wasn’t making it easy on her. For the past couple of hours, she’d heard him coming and going and the sounds of heavy items being dragged along the hall. She peered out of the peephole, but even with the light he’d fixed, she couldn’t see much. Just his open apartment door and the broad expanse of his back as he carried something into the apartment. Then he shut his door and even that view was lost to her.

  She came down off her tiptoes and frowned to herself. What in the heck was he up to, anyway? But the moment that thought shot through her mind, she reminded herself she didn’t care. Brian Haley was no business of hers.

  But her hand strayed to the spot on her arm where he’d touched her a few days ago. It was almost as if she could still feel the heat of his flesh on hers.

  “Ridiculous,” she muttered, and determinedly walked away from her front door toward the desk she’d been sidestepping all day. Time to get to work. Those résumés weren’t going to type themselves. But the minute she sat down, she thought she heard something.

  Cocking her head, she listened again, then when the sound came, she stood up and moved to the front window. Opening it, she stuck her head out and craned her neck, looking for the source of that tiny wail.

  But there was nothing.

  With twilight deepening, the street was nearly deserted, her neighbors no doubt seated around their dinner tables. A soft summer breeze slipped into the room, ruffling the papers stacked on her desk. Automatically she reached over and set a small, rose quartz crystal atop the pile to hold them in place.

  Shaking her head, she turned away from the window, telling herself that she was imagining things. There was no baby crying. Her building held four apartments. On the ground floor there was Mrs. Cassidy in one and Mrs. Steinberg in the other. Both ladies were well into their sixties and neither one of them had grandchildren come to visit, as they would be happy to tell you with any encouragement at all. Upstairs there was only her and Brian Haley. Since she didn’t have a baby and the very notion of Brian with one was laughable, Kathy decided she’d either imagined that cry or she was experiencing hallucinations due to a severe caffeine deprivation. Opting for the latter explanation, she headed for the kitchen and her coffeepot.

  “Give me a break, kid,” Brian pleaded, jiggling the baby on his hip as he held the phone to his ear and waited for his mother’s monologue to wind down.

  Mary Haley, while surprised and delighted to find out she was a grandma again, had had several dozen things to say to her son on the subject of fatherhood.

  Maegan sniffed, rubbed both eyes with her fists and shook her head until the butterfly clip went sailing off her hair.

  “Should have left you with Jack and Donna a while longer,” he muttered as he started swaying. Somewhere in the back of his mind he remembered one of his nephews being calmed by the whole swinging motion. He hoped to hell it would work on Maegan, too.

  “What do you mean?” his mother demanded. “Leave her with whom? For how long?”

  He rolled his eyes. “Friends. A couple of hours.” He closed his eyes against the memory of Jack’s shocked face when he’d seen Brian Haley with a baby. No doubt there’d be lots of questions coming from that quarter really soon. But thankfully, Donna had taken one look at Brian’s frantic expression and had cut her husband off at the knees when he’d started an interrogation. Knowing Jack, Donna’s maneuver was only a delaying tactic.

  Taking a deep breath, Brian reminded himself t
o stay calm. It wouldn’t do him a damn bit of good to irritate his mother—the one woman he’d been sure would be willing to help him out. The woman lived for her grandchildren and adored babies. “I had to go to the store. Got enough stuff to outfit the Third Battalion. Didn’t want to drag her through the shopping.”

  Didn’t want to put himself through it, really, but it amounted to the same thing, didn’t it?

  “So you left that poor baby with more strangers?” his mother demanded.

  “She didn’t seem to mind,” he said. In fact, the little girl had seemed more than willing to be out of her daddy’s presence. Maybe babies could smell fear.

  “So what’s she like, my new granddaughter?” his mother asked.

  As Maegan opened her mouth to howl again, Brian sighed and said, “She has great tonsils.”

  “So I hear,” Mary Haley said on a laugh.

  “Look, Ma,” he said, speaking loudly enough to be heard over the din of his daughter, “you’ve got to help me, here. I’ll pay your ticket out. Stay a couple of days…weeks.” Years, he thought helplessly.

  “No can do, sweetie,” she said and didn’t sound the least bit sorry, damn it.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, I raised my babies. Now it’s your turn.”

  Raise her? Hell, he was just trying to find a way to survive the night.

  “Honey,” his mother said, “you’ll do fine.”

  “I don’t know what I’m doing.”

  “And whose fault is that?” his mother asked. “If you’d come home for visits more often, you’d have been around your nieces and nephews enough to learn a few things.”

  Exactly why he’d stayed away, he wanted to say, but he restrained himself.

  “It won’t be easy, Brian,” she said, “but you can do this. She’s just a baby. She needs you.”

  That hit him hard.

  Maegan quieted, sniffed again, then laid her head down on his shoulder. A stab of something warm and completely foreign sliced through him, right down to his bones.

  She did need him.

  This tiny little girl needed him to be brave and strong and sure. He owed her that. Hell, he owed her mother that. No one had ever really needed him before. Not the way she did. Completely. Her survival, her future, depended solely on him.

  “Brian?”

  “Yeah,” he said, and cleared his throat to get rid of the gruffness in his voice. “I’m here.”

  “Look, honey, I’d like to help you, but I’m going on a cruise the end of this week.”

  “A cruise?” he repeated, though he did vaguely remember her mentioning a trip the last time he’d spoken to her.

  “Yes. You remember? A sight-seeing cruise to Alaska? I’m going with that nice Edith Turner? You remember her? Her daughter was the one with the big wart on her forehead?”

  His chin hit his chest. Typical. Edith Turner’s daughter had grown up to be a district attorney and yet she would always be “the girl with the wart on her forehead.”

  “Yeah, I remember.”

  She must have been able to hear the weariness in his voice, because a moment later her tone softened and she said, “Brian, honey, you’ve been given a great gift.”

  His gift drooled all over his uniform shirt.

  “I know it seems scary right now—”

  “I never said I was scared,” he protested.

  “Of course not,” his mother agreed. “But if you were a little nervous about this, it would be understandable.”

  Okay, nervous he could admit to without feeling like a wimp.

  “I suppose.” Maegan was asleep, and Brian was afraid to move for fear of waking her and setting her off again.

  “I’ve always thought you’d be a wonderful father, Brian,” his mom said, surprising him. “And this little girl will be your ticket into a fabulous world.”

  Remembering the social worker, he muttered, “Yeah. Disneyland.”

  “Oh, better, honey,” his mother promised him. “Much better.” Then briskly she said, “As soon as you get leave, you fly home and show me my granddaughter, all right? Good night.”

  “Sure, Mom,” he said. “Bye.”

  When he hung up, he had the oddest sensation of having cut off his last lifeline to the outside world. Now it was just him and a baby girl who hated him.

  Five

  His responsibility.

  Hell, he knew that. And he wasn’t a man to shirk his duty, either, he thought, gently easing the baby into a more comfortable position on his shoulder. All he’d wanted was a little help. A sort of guide to walk him through the minefield of motherhood. And, Brian thought with a pang of something he refused to identify, a little sympathy wouldn’t have been out of line.

  At that thought his heart twisted and he winced at the feeling.

  “Yeah, right,” he muttered. Like he deserved the sympathy? If he thought he was having a bad day, what about Maegan? She’d lost her mother and then been flown across the country and tossed into the arms of a big man she’d never seen before. If anyone deserved sympathy around here, it had to be her. “Poor kid,” he whispered, and blew the wisps of her hair out of his face before they made him sneeze. “It’s not your fault you got stuck with me, is it?”

  She sniffled in her sleep and shifted her head around restlessly.

  Instantly he stiffened as if he’d been shot. Hell, if she woke up, he’d be in real trouble. His gaze swept the apartment, noting the boxes of baby stuff and the unpacked bags of groceries. Packages of disposable diapers, for God’s sake, were piled high on his coffee table, and there were enough jars of baby food spilled across his kitchen counter to open a day care nursery.

  He had to put all that stuff away somewhere, then he had to assemble the baby’s bed and somehow, some way, decide what to do with her tomorrow while he was on base, and yet he couldn’t do any of that because if he moved, she’d wake up and start screeching again.

  Mentally he took a long, slow count to ten, hoping for some kind of control. Some kind of miraculous wisdom to float down from the cosmos and infiltrate his fried brain.

  Nothing.

  His glance fell on the phone again. There had to be someone he could call for—not help, he told himself—advice. Dana? Brian shook his head. Nope. He was pretty sure she wasn’t speaking to him. Besides, Dana, like all the other women he’d ever dated, would be even more lost around a baby than he was.

  He’d never been drawn to the home-and-hearth type of female until, of course, he’d moved in across the hall from Kathy.

  “Kathy!” In his relief he nearly shouted her name and instantly paid the price for it.

  Startled into wakefulness, Maegan pushed away from his chest, opened that sweet mouth of hers and bellowed as loud as any general he’d ever heard.

  “Oh, man…” Bouncing her up and down in his arms, Brian tried reasoning with her. “C’mon, kiddo,” he said as he patted one big hand against her back gently. “Crying leads to wrinkles, didn’t you hear?”

  She frowned at him, took a deep breath and let out another howl.

  “Okay, so you’re not worried about your looks yet,” he said, swaying wildly from side to side. “How about, if you stop crying, I’ll buy you a car when you turn sixteen?”

  Her little fists curled into his uniform shirt and somehow managed to grab hold of a few chest hairs to boot. When she yanked, he wanted to howl right along with her.

  “All right, so you’re too young to be bribed.” He eased her fists open and sighed at the relief. Then, looking into her tear-streaked face and red-rimmed blue eyes, he said, “You realize you’re leaving me with no choice.”

  She didn’t seem to care.

  Helplessness rolled around inside him and he didn’t like it one damned bit. He’d spent his entire adult life ordering others around. He wasn’t a man to stand back and wring his hands. Glancing down into those tear-filled eyes, though, Brian knew he was beaten. At least for tonight he needed help. And though it went agai
nst the grain to have to crawl to the woman who’d been so pointedly ignoring him for weeks, he really didn’t have much choice.

  “Okay—Kathy it is,” he muttered, and headed for the door. “I only hope she’ll take pity on you, if not me.”

  Kathy was already moving toward her door, drawn by an infant’s cries, when she heard the frantic knocking.

  She threw the door open and came face-to-face with a harried looking Brian Haley, cradling a furious baby girl.

  “What on earth?”

  “Look,” he said quickly, and stuck one foot in front of her open door as if afraid she’d slam it shut on him. “I didn’t want to bother you, but, lady, I am out of options.”

  The sergeant? Don Juan Haley himself? With a baby?

  What next? Space aliens landing in her front yard?

  The baby’s cry broke into her thoughts, and she looked up at Brian before asking, “Whose…?”

  “Long story,” he said briefly.

  “Later,” she told him as briefly, reacting to both the unhappy child and the wild-eyed look in Brian’s blue eyes.

  It was the first time since he’d moved in that Sergeant Brian Haley had looked anything but in complete control. But she didn’t have the luxury of enjoying his frustrated confusion. Her heart ached for the baby crying so miserably, and instinctively Kathy reached for her.

  “What’s wrong with her?” she asked, stepping back into her apartment as she soothed and whispered to the trembling child. At the moment she didn’t care if Brian followed her in or not. All she was interested in was easing the poor baby in her arms.

  “I don’t know,” he said, and stepped in behind her.

  Kathy looked over her shoulder at him in time to see him scrape both palms along the sides of his head in an age-old sign of helplessness.

  “Every time she’s awake, she cries,” he said. “I don’t know how to stop her.”

  Frowning, Kathy felt the little girl’s bottom, then stared at the man watching her. “You might try changing her diaper,” she said. “The poor thing’s soaked.”

  His head fell forward as if he was just too tired to hold it upright any longer. A moment later, though, he lifted his gaze to hers. Shaking his head, he said, “You’re right. I didn’t even think of that.”