Babies in the Bargain

by Victoria Pade

  She must have picked it up and put it there. Just as it had to have been Kira who had neatly folded his pants and shirt on the nearby chair and so precisely situated his single shoe and sock immediately under it.

  Thoughts of Marla again invaded at the sight of all that orderliness.

  Thoughts about the similarities between Marla and Kira.

  It left him all the more convinced of the reason Kira hadn’t been there in bed with him when he woke up.

  Damn.

  Using the cane, he hooked his clothes and dragged them to him, his spirits deflating even further as he pictured Kira going through the house like a whirling dervish, cleaning and straightening and perfecting everything in her path. The same way Marla would have been.

  He pulled on his shirt from the previous night, then his slacks and stood to bend over and grab his shoe and sock. But he didn’t put them on. He just carried them with him out of the garage apartment.

  And if what he’d felt when he first woke up had been a high high, trudging across the yard thinking that he was going to find Kira frantically whipping the house into shape to impress Betty was pretty close to a low low.

  As he went in the back door he expected to hear the vacuum or water running, or something that would give him a clue as to where Kira was. But the house was quiet and he didn’t find her anywhere on the first floor.

  She’s probably upstairs scrubbing down the walls or something, he thought as he made his way to the second level.

  Again no sounds greeted him and in search of Kira and the twins, Cutty headed for the nursery.

  The door was open and as he approached he finally spotted Kira.

  She wasn’t cleaning or folding clothes or any of what he’d assumed she’d be doing in anticipation of Betty, though. She was sitting cross-legged on the floor with Mel to her right and Mandy to her left, and they were putting the oversize pieces of a wooden puzzle together.

  Intent on what they were doing, no one noticed him and Cutty stopped in his tracks. He’d been so sure he would find Kira in a panic to spruce up the place that seeing her like that actually shocked him.

  Had she forgotten Betty was coming? That Betty would see the toys scattered in the living room? And laundry in the basket? And a baby handprint on the television screen?

  He couldn’t imagine that she had.

  Yet there she was, playing with the twins rather than scurrying to make sure everything was impeccable.

  Cutty stood there for a moment and watched the scene. Then, without letting Kira or his daughters know he was in the house, he went into his own room, closing the door quietly behind him.

  “You jumped to that conclusion, didn’t you, you jerk?” he muttered to himself.

  But he really was a jerk, he thought, when one minute he was marveling at how terrific he felt all because of Kira and the next minute he was ready to condemn her.

  And now here he was, wanting to hurry up and shower so he could be with her again.

  “Maybe you should make up your mind,” he advised himself as if he were talking to someone else.

  He tossed his shoe into the closet, dropped his sock to the floor and stripped off his dress clothes to make a pile over the stocking. Then he headed for his bathroom.

  But as he wrapped his cast to keep it dry and stepped into the shower, he started to consider that making-up-his-mind advice he’d just given himself.

  He’d already recognized that there were two sides to Kira. That there was the side of her that was like Marla and the side of her that might have fretted over leaving the housework to go to the softball game but had gone anyway.

  So if the side existed that could be persuaded to go to the softball game anyway—or sit and do a puzzle with the twins as she was right now—why had he been so quick to believe that it was the side like Marla that would prevail?

  Standing under the shower’s spray Cutty thought about it, trying to figure out whether he was being unfair to her.

  He might be.

  Because besides the softball game and finding her with the babies this morning, he also remembered this past Sunday when she’d set up the swimming pool in the backyard and ended up soaking her feet in the water with the twins rather than doing housework.

  Plus there were a lot of times he recalled now that were smaller incidences of the same thing. Times when she’d read a story to the girls to distract them from mischief. Times when she’d patiently suffered the complications of one of the twins wanting to help her sweep the floor or dust the furniture. Times when a trip upstairs to do laundry had instead had Kira standing at the nursery door watching the babies sleep.

  Times when the housework and laundry and dishes and other things left undone to vex that perfectionistic side of Kira had only been left undone because she was more likely to leave the chores in order to take care of him or the babies, to go with him when he asked her to, to play with Mel and Mandy….

  That was a very big realization for him.

  Big enough to cause him to pause for a minute to let it sink in.

  And as it did, he had to admit that while, yes, there was a side of Kira that was like Marla, Marla had never had that other, softer, more flexible side that Kira had to balance it out.

  Would Marla ever have left dishes in the sink or mud on the floor to go to a softball game with him?

  Never.

  Even during the brief month after Mel and Mandy were born, Marla had fed them, bathed them, dressed them and then handed them off to Betty to hold while she’d made sure no speck of dust was left to mar her sense of order.

  So what did that mean? Cutty asked himself as he finished his shower, turned off the water and grabbed a towel to dry off.

  For one thing, it meant that Kira was more fun.

  And for another thing, it meant that she was easier to live with—even considering the fretting and the periodic mad dashes to clean.

  That thought made him smile because it reminded him of the day Betty had come to take the twins to the park, when Cutty had spotted Kira through the living-room window stashing that soiled baby shirt under the couch cushion. That was definitely not something Marla would have done.

  So maybe Kira and Marla weren’t as much alike as Cutty had thought.

  And maybe given the fact that Kira had that softer side, that Kira could be persuaded to temporarily ignore a little debris in favor of the people in her life, made it easier to overlook those times when she was in a frenzy over a minor detail.

  Cutty unwrapped his cast and limped to the sink to shave, thinking as he did about the way he’d felt when he first woke up this morning. The way he’d felt more and more the longer Kira was around.

  Genuine, deep-rooted happiness.

  Was that feeling worth the times when Kira was a little nuts?

  It must have been, because there he was, lathering his face with shaving foam and grinning as that feeling washed through him again.

  As that feeling washed through him again at the thought of having Kira around all the time to make him continue to feel that way.

  Did he want her to be around all the time? he asked himself.

  But that was a no-brainer. He sure as hell didn’t want her to leave. He sure as hell didn’t want to lose her or this feeling.

  “So you take the good with the bad,” he told his reflection.

  But that wasn’t really fair, either. Because the bad wasn’t really bad, now that he thought about it. Sure, Kira had come across the yard at the crack of dawn in the mornings to try to get a head start on keeping an impeccable house. But she hadn’t roused him out of bed to do it, too. The way Marla would have.

  Sure, Kira had strived for perfection, but she hadn’t been so obsessed with it that she’d made things around there miserable by demanding that he meet her unreasonable standards, too. The way Marla had.

  Sure, Kira had wanted things to be tidier and more orderly, but if they weren’t she had still been capable of separating herself from it long enough to
have a good time—to sit and talk with him at the end of the day, to go to his birthday party, to go to the awards ceremony and the softball game, to play with the babies. And to let him do all those things, too. Without guilt. Without berating him and making him feel guilty for it. And that wasn’t at all like Marla, either.

  In fact, Cutty thought sadly, he didn’t think Marla had ever really found much joy in anything.

  And the truth was, she’d ridden him so hard she’d taken all the joy out of him, too.

  Joy that Kira had put back.

  So, no, the bad part that went with the good of Kira wasn’t really all that bad. It was really just a matter of her being harder on herself than on anyone else.

  And the good part? That wasn’t just good, either. It was great. It made him happy. Genuinely happy.

  Happy enough to want to hang on to her.

  Even if she did periodically freak out over how much dust there was on the coffee table and who might see it.

  Kira was what he wanted.

  Kira and that joy and genuine, deep-rooted happiness that only she brought him.

  And suddenly, as he took his cane and went back into his bedroom to put on a pair of jeans and a T-shirt, he decided he was going to do something about it.

  Kira had just gotten the twins into their high chairs for lunch when Betty arrived.

  “My aunt got here early, so I thought I’d come right away,” the older woman announced.

  For once Kira was glad for the distraction of the housekeeper and nanny. Cutty had only joined Kira and the girls about an hour earlier, but for Kira it had been an awkward hour.

  Making love the night before had changed things, and she wasn’t exactly sure how to behave. There they were, just like every other day since she’d come to Northbridge except that now she didn’t know what to expect. She didn’t know if they should talk about what had happened or pretend it hadn’t happened, or what.

  And Cutty was no help. He was being particularly quiet, and she kept catching him watching her all the while she was straightening up the living room and trying to entertain the girls.

  Betty hadn’t been in the house ten minutes when she started her usual commentary on the wonders of Marla and where Marla liked this and that, and how Marla would have done what Kira was apparently doing wrong when she gave Mel and Mandy slices of bologna to munch on rather than cutting the lunch meat into pieces for them.

  But the older woman was barely getting warmed up when Cutty came into the kitchen and said, “Think you can handle this on your own for a while, Betty?”

  “That’s what I’m here for,” Betty answered, seeming thrilled to take over for Kira, who was surprised by the request. And confused and curious about it, too.

  Cutty took her hand then—shocking her even more by the display of familiarity—and led her out the back door.

  In the direction of the garage apartment.

  But surely he couldn’t be going there, she thought. He couldn’t be thinking of repeating the lovemaking of the night before. Not in the middle of the day, with Betty only a backyard away.

  The garage apartment was just where Cutty was headed, though, and within moments Kira found herself behind closed doors.

  Where the bed hadn’t yet been made.

  Just the sight of it did two things to Kira—it gave her an instant flash of vivid memory of what they’d done there and also inspired a sharp desire to do it again.

  But if that really was what Cutty had in mind, she just couldn’t do it, so she turned her back to the bed and faced him with a questioning glance.

  Cutty was perceptive enough to catch it and even to know what was on her mind.

  He smiled a one-sided smile and said, “Do you honestly think I brought you out here to ravage you in broad daylight while Betty baby-sits?”

  “I hope not,” Kira admitted.

  “You can relax, that’s not what I have up my sleeve. Much as I wish it was.”

  Kira refrained from saying me, too. “What do you have up your sleeve?”

  “I wanted to talk to you. Without anyone overhearing. In all the birthday commotion yesterday and last night we never got into what’s going to happen now that Betty is coming back to work.”

  “No, we didn’t,” Kira agreed, although the subject had been weighing on her.

  “Well, we need to talk about it.”

  “Okay,” Kira said, waiting to hear what he had to say.

  He came to stand close in front of her, reaching a hand to her arm. A hand that sent ripples of wonderful sense memory all through her and made it difficult to concentrate on what he was saying.

  But she put some effort into it in time to hear, “I woke up this morning feeling incredible. And I realized that you’re the reason.”

  Kira couldn’t help smiling. “I’m glad.”

  “I also realized that with Betty coming back it could mean that you might not stick around much longer and the thought of you leaving was…” Cutty chuckled wryly and shook his head. “Well, I didn’t like it.”

  The man knew how to make her feel pretty darn good, too. In more ways than one.

  But she didn’t say that. Instead she made a joke. “So what do you want to do? Hire me on as your own private microbiologist?”

  “I want you here, that’s for sure,” Cutty said in answer to her jest. But he wasn’t kidding. He was serious.

  “I thought a lot about it this morning,” he went on. “I know you came to find the twins, that you only stayed to help out and to get to know them, to start to build a relationship with them. But in the meantime you’ve also built a relationship with me. A pretty terrific one, I think. And I don’t want this to be all there is to it.”

  Kira didn’t know what this entailed. But she was beginning to have nervous butterflies in her stomach and she tried to calm them as he continued.

  “You know, when you first showed up here I expected you to be just like Marla. I figured the house—and the girls and I for that matter—would be whipped into the kind of shape Tom Wentworth would have been proud of. I definitely didn’t think I’d have someone sitting with me at the end of the day, or going to the softball game, or my birthday party, or someone who would be playing with the girls.”

  Those good feelings began to fade in Kira because to her that seemed on the brink of criticism. The kind of criticism her father would have dished out—although more harshly—for slacking off when there was work to be done.

  “But I finally came to realize,” Cutty was saying, “that you’re different from Marla. That in some ways you really aren’t Tom Wentworth’s daughter. That only Marla was. And I guess it finally sank into my head that that part of my life is over. That it’s time to move on, to start fresh—all those platitudes that are making a lot of sense to me today. So I just want to know if we can work this out.”

  Kira wasn’t sure what he meant by work this out, either. But her confusion wasn’t what was uppermost in her mind. What was uppermost in her mind was what he’d said about her being different than Marla. To her, being different than Marla meant not as good as Marla….

  And suddenly it seemed very important that it had been Ad who had said Cutty and Marla’s marriage had been troubled, that it hadn’t been Cutty himself who had told her. And that maybe, looking in from the sidelines, Ad had been wrong. That the way Marla had done things was the way Cutty had liked it. Or at least what he expected.

  What had he said? she wondered suddenly when it occurred to her that her own thoughts had interrupted the course of this conversation. He wanted to know if they could work this out.

  “I’m sure we can work out when I come to Northbridge to see the girls and other times when they can come to Denver to be with me, so you can have some freedom to get on with your life,” she said, interpreting what he meant while her mind was still really on the idea that Cutty, of all people, had compared her unfavorably with her sister.

  He frowned at her, his expression confused now. “I wasn’t tal
king about visitation with the twins,” he said as if he’d thought that was perfectly clear. “I was talking about you and me. About you staying.”

  “Staying? I don’t know how I could stay,” she said, trying to ward off the hurt that was beginning inside her and wondering if there would ever be a time when she wouldn’t be in her sister’s shadow. “I have my apartment and my job teaching at the university—”

  “So give up your apartment and get a teaching job at Northbridge College. I know it wouldn’t be as prestigious as working at a university and it probably wouldn’t pay quite as well, but I have some influence with the powers that be and I’m sure I could get you onto the staff.”

  And not because of her own merits. Because of who he was and probably because the dean and the board of directors had all thought so highly of Marla that they would hire her sister…

  “I don’t want to get a job that way. I got the one I have because I’m known for my work, for my accomplishments.”

  “Then your credentials will get you on here, too,” Cutty countered as if it were inconsequential. “I’m just saying—”

  Kira cut him off with a resounding no. “I can’t stay in Northbridge.”

  “I don’t know why not,” Cutty protested, taking his hand away from her arm.

  “I just can’t, that’s all. I won’t,” Kira said firmly as she endured the regret that washed through her at losing his touch.

  Cutty frowned a confused frown. “What did I miss here? I thought…especially after last night—”

  “Last night was…nice.” And that was a vast understatement. “But it can’t change the whole course of my future. I can’t give up everything I’ve worked for and accomplished just because of it.”

  “I’m only asking you to consider making a few adjustments to have what you said you came here to find in the first place—family.”

  “The twins will still be my family.” The twins who never knew Marla, who would never compare her to Marla, who would always take her only for who she was on her own.