Babies in the Bargain

by Victoria Pade

  “The twins,” Cutty parroted as if that clarified something for him. Something that struck a blow.

  But Kira forced herself to stand her ground by reminding herself of all the times she’d thought Marla’s house, Marla’s things. By the idea of living with so many people like Betty and Carol the saleswoman and so many others she’d met while she’d been in Northbridge who couldn’t see her for anything but Marla’s sister. By remembering that Cutty thought she paled in comparison, too…

  Despite the ache that was rapidly wrapping around her heart, she said, “I guess really, since Betty is back and you don’t need me anymore I should probably just go ahead and pack my things to go home.”

  Cutty’s deep green eyes were piercing as he stared at her. “I can’t believe this.”

  “There’s nothing to not believe. I worked hard to get my degree, to get my teaching job. I had some free time to come here and now I’ll go back.”

  “As if your degrees and job are more important?”

  “They might not be important to you, but they are to me.”

  “More important than anything—or anyone—else? Like a true daughter of Tom Wentworth?” Cutty shook his head again. “You’ve either fooled the hell out of me since you got here or you’re fooling yourself right now.”

  Kira didn’t understand that, either. But he’d struck a blow of his own with that daughter of Tom Wentworth remark and so she merely raised her chin defiantly, leaving him to think whatever it was he was thinking while she fought to keep from breaking down and letting him know how difficult this was, how much she wished it could all be different, how much it was hurting her.

  Then she said, “I’ll pack and say goodbye to the girls and be out by the end of the day.”

  “No!” Cutty nearly shouted. “How did we go from everything being okay when I brought you in here, to you being gone by the end of the day?”

  Kira couldn’t go on looking at that handsome face, at that body she’d been so intimate with such a short time before, and stick to her guns. So she turned her back to him and said, “It’s for the best. Betty is back and can handle everything. The girls love her. I might as well get home.”

  “This doesn’t even make sense. What did I do? What didn’t I do? Or say? Or… One minute we’re going along great—better than great—and the next minute not only aren’t you staying, you’re leaving right away?”

  “I just think it’s for the best,” she said quietly, around a throat full of tears.

  “And you’re just going to let me hang, wondering what the hell went wrong in the last ten minutes?”

  “Nothing went wrong,” she said because she couldn’t tell him the truth about what she felt, about how much of a mistake it had been for her to put herself in a position where she was being compared with her sister once again. About how much of a mistake she knew it would be to put herself into that position forever. “We just see things differently.”

  “Apparently,” Cutty said sarcastically.

  For a long moment neither of them said anything at all, and in the silence Kira fought not to cry.

  Then Cutty said, “So that’s it? You’re really going?”

  Kira could only nod confirmation.

  A few more minutes of that tense silence passed and then Cutty said, “I’ll never understand this.”

  But he must have given up trying to because then Kira heard the apartment door open and he was gone.

  Chapter Nine

  It was two o’clock the next morning when a weary Kira unlocked the door to her Denver apartment. She turned on the table lamp just to the right of the threshold and carried her overfilled suitcase in before she noticed her best friend Kit on her couch.

  Kit had obviously been asleep, but with Kira’s entrance she sat up and squinted against the sudden light. “Hi,” she said simply enough, as if her being there like that wasn’t an unusual occurrence.

  “Hi,” Kira answered with a question in her tone as she closed the door behind her. “How come you’re sleeping on my couch?”

  “You sounded so bad when you called that I wanted to be here when you got home,” Kit explained.

  Kira had called from the Billings Airport early in the evening and although she hadn’t given Kit any of the details, she had told her things had taken a turn for the worse with Cutty. She also hadn’t been able to conceal how upset she was.

  “You didn’t have to do that,” she said. But she was glad Kit had. Despite the hour, Kira knew she wouldn’t be able to sleep and she really didn’t want to be alone.

  “I brought cake,” her friend said. “Chocolate fudge. Guaranteed to lift the deepest doldrums.”

  Kira made an attempt to smile. “Thanks but I don’t think I can even eat that right now.”

  Under Kit’s scrutiny, Kira turned on another lamp, kicked off her shoes and dropped into the matching plaid armchair that was positioned at a forty-five degree angle to the sofa.

  “You look awful,” Kit observed. “You cried all the way home, didn’t you?”

  “I tried not to but I couldn’t seem to help it. It was embarrassing. The woman next to me on the plane thought I must be going to a funeral.”

  “Tell me what happened.”

  First Kira told Kit how good things had gotten between herself and Cutty since she’d talked to Kit on the phone on Sunday. She told her about everything Ad had said about Marla, and about Cutty and Marla’s marriage. She told her about sleeping with Cutty after his birthday party. And then she told her about what had happened the morning after the party.

  Kit listened without saying much, letting Kira pour it all out. At one point, she did get up and go into the bathroom to bring back a box of tissues so Kira could blow her nose and mop at the tears that just kept coming, though.

  “So here I am,” Kira concluded when she’d finished. “I just left. I packed up and went back into the house to say goodbye to the twins—”

  “That couldn’t have been easy,” Kit interjected.

  Proving her friend’s point, the tears Kira had gotten under control began to run down her cheeks again. “It was horrible. I just wanted to pick them up and run with them. But at least Cutty was upstairs so I didn’t have to see him again. I don’t think I could have survived it.”

  “How about a cup of tea?” Kit offered.

  Kira nodded her agreement as she blew her nose yet again.

  Kit went around the island counter that separated the tiny studio apartment into living-sleeping space and kitchen, and made the tea. By the time she returned, Kira had managed to stop crying again.

  Kit handed her a mug and then took her own with her to sit on the couch again.

  After a few sips, Kit said, “Tell me again exactly what Cutty said about Marla.”

  “He said that he expected me to be like her,” Kira complied with a hint of anger in her voice. “He thought I’d whip everything into the kind of shape my father would have been proud of, and that he hadn’t thought I would end up sitting around or going to a softball game or a birthday party or that I’d play with the twins instead of doing the work that needed to be done.”

  Kit frowned at that. “But when we talked on Sunday didn’t you say that he kept encouraging you to leave things until the next day and not to worry about what didn’t get done?”

  “Yes. But maybe it was some kind of test or maybe he didn’t really mean it or something.”

  “You think it was a trap?” Kit asked.

  “I guess not. But I don’t know why he said that kind of thing all along and then held it against me when that’s what I did.”

  “Are you sure he was holding it against you?” Kit asked kindly.

  “What do you mean? What else could he have meant?”

  “I’m on your side, Kira. I really am. I’m behind you a hundred percent. It’s just that I’m also wondering if you took some of what he said at the end differently than he might have intended it.”

  But rather than pursuing what Kit was
suggesting, Kira seized the one word that spurred her memory. “Different—that’s the other thing he said—he said he finally realized I was different than Marla. That I wasn’t really Tom Wentworth’s daughter the way Marla was.”

  “But, Kira, isn’t that a good thing?” Kit asked somewhat cautiously. “That’s what I was getting at—what I hear in that isn’t bad. You know he didn’t care for your father. That he thought he was a tyrant—which, by the way, from what you said Cutty’s friend told you, sounds like what Marla was, too. It seems to me that it’s a compliment that Cutty thought Marla was like your father and you aren’t.”

  That was definitely a different point of view. One Kira hadn’t considered.

  But Kit continued before she had a chance to confirm or deny it.

  “And as for you thinking Cutty was criticizing you for sitting around or going out or playing with the babies rather than doing housework—maybe he was saying that was better than the way it had been with your sister who wouldn’t have even gone to a birthday party for him.”

  “Don’t forget, though, it wasn’t Cutty who said Marla had done anything wrong. It was his friend,” Kira said, defending her interpretation even as a spark of hope sprang to life that Kit might be right.

  Kit had an answer for that, too. “His friend also told you that Cutty wouldn’t say anything against her—especially to you. And unless I’m missing something, Cutty never said anything particularly positive about Marla. He also wasn’t the one who threw it up to you that she’d done things better than you were doing. That all came from that Betty person. The same as all Marla’s accolades came from people on the outside. It was also that Betty who acted the way your father did with your mother about making sure everything of Marla’s was kept just the way she left it.”

  That was actually true, Kira realized when she thought about it. It had always been Betty and outside people who had touted the glories of Marla. It hadn’t been Cutty.

  Still, she didn’t think she could have been so wrong and she tried hard to remember a time when Cutty had insisted that things be kept the way Marla had kept them, or that Kira had to do anything the way Marla had.

  The problem was, no matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t come up with a single instance.

  In fact, it suddenly occurred to her that after her first disastrous day of trying to take care of the house and the twins he’d actually told her she needed to have less concern for doing things the way Marla had. And even when she’d broken Marla’s favorite vase, Cutty had taken it in stride. It had been Betty who had made Kira feel bad about it.

  And when it came to keeping Marla’s memory alive the way Kira’s father had kept his first wife’s memory alive? Cutty couldn’t be accused of that when he hadn’t even wanted to talk about Marla.

  Which could also have been some of the reason Cutty hadn’t been the one to tell her about the way things had been in his marriage…

  Kira closed her eyes as everything Kit had brought to her attention began to sink in. “Do you think I just jumped the gun because of my own warped competition with Marla?” she asked her friend.

  “I think you heard what Cutty said and saw things with competition coloring it, yes,” Kit admitted tactfully. “I just think you’ve spent so much of your life being compared to Marla and feeling like she was the standard you had to live up to that it’s hard for you to see it any other way. I also think that this time around you might have won the competition—in Cutty’s view at least—but that you’re so used to believing you’re not as good as Marla that you didn’t recognize it.”

  Kira had opened her eyes again to look at her friend. “But that’s another thing, Kit—even if I won the competition in Cutty’s view, and even if Ad had reservations about Marla, there’s still Betty and a whole town full of people who adored Marla and never saw me for myself. Do I really want to even consider being in a place where the general consensus will be that I’m not as good?”

  “I’m not thrilled about even the possibility of you moving,” Kit qualified, “but who cares what anybody thinks? There’s a great guy who you’re crazy about and who seems crazy about you, and two babies you adore who adore you back—why would it matter what anyone else thinks? Maybe in that you are being too much like Marla and your father.”

  Kira laughed a small, humorless laugh. “So what it all boils down to is that you just think I’ve been an idiot and that I’ve completely blown something that could have been the best thing that ever happened to me?”

  “You know I don’t think you’re an idiot. I think that you just saw this from a perspective based on your own experiences. We all do that. But I also think that you should get some sleep and then call this guy and talk to him, find out if I’m right or if you are. What harm is there in that?”

  After only about two hours of sleep Kira did more than merely call Cutty the way Kit had advised. She caught a plane to Montana, rented another car and was within a few miles of Northbridge again by three o’clock the following afternoon.

  She was also wondering if she’d just gone off the deep end to be doing this.

  But she pushed that thought out of her mind and forced herself to focus only on the reason she’d done this in the first place—to see if she honestly had a chance with Cutty.

  Because once Kit had left her alone, Kira had still had trouble falling asleep and in that time before she had, she’d thought a lot about all her friend had said. She’d also thought a lot about what Ad had told her. And she’d thought a whole lot about Cutty.

  What she’d realized was that Kit really might be right and that she might have been wrong in just about everything that had caused her to make her decision to leave Northbridge and Cutty and the twins behind.

  Because despite going over and over almost every moment she’d had with Cutty she still couldn’t think of even one time when he’d criticized her. She couldn’t think of even one time when he’d compared her to Marla. One time when he’d told her she had to do anything the way Marla had done it.

  And as for the feelings the other people in Northbridge had for Marla? Sometime around four that morning Kira had decided that was something belonging to Marla. That love, that respect, that admiration her sister had worked hard to achieve shouldn’t be challenged. It should be left to Marla and Marla’s memory. Especially when it had come at what might have been a very high cost.

  And more important, for the first time in Kira’s life, she’d come to realize that she really could be free of the shadow cast by Marla if she stopped comparing herself to her sister. If she stopped expecting herself to live up to her. She’d realized that Kit was right when she’d said that what a whole lot of other people thought wasn’t the issue if she didn’t think she was somehow less than Marla. Certainly what other people thought shouldn’t have the power to influence her or her decisions when it came to Cutty or the twins.

  Because as long as it wasn’t Cutty who was determined to keep Marla alive—the way Tom Wentworth had tried to keep his first wife alive—as long as it wasn’t Cutty who was comparing Kira to Marla, then nothing else mattered.

  Except maybe if Kira’s response the day before had closed whatever door Cutty had been opening for her.

  That was definitely something that would matter…

  The gas station Kira had stopped at for directions the first time she’d arrived in Northbridge came into view just then and knowing how close she was to Cutty’s house set off butterflies in her stomach.

  What if Kit was wrong and I was right, though…

  That thought had flashed through her mind a dozen times on the return trip, and she’d dismissed it. Only suddenly it wasn’t as easy to shake.

  What if Cutty had been saying he accepted the fact that she wasn’t as good as Marla but he wanted to work things out with her anyway? And what exactly did working things out entail? Had he wanted her to just stay in Northbridge in general? Or in the garage apartment? Or had he been talking about more than that?


  “You’re here to clear everything up,” she reminded herself. “Then you’ll make a decision. If he isn’t offering what you want, you can just say no and go back to Denver.”

  That was how she’d gotten up the courage to do this at all—she’d decided she was just going to go back to Northbridge, find out exactly what Cutty had meant the previous morning, and then—and only then—would she make up her mind what she wanted to do.

  Kira pulled up to the curb in front of Cutty’s house.

  She couldn’t take her eyes off it as she fumbled to turn off the engine in the unfamiliar car.

  Betty would probably be there, she knew, and she didn’t relish facing the woman after the quick, tearful goodbye to the twins that the other woman had witnessed the day before.

  But she hadn’t come all this way to chicken out just because Betty made her nervous and so she took the key out of the ignition, slipped from behind the wheel and headed for the house with her heart beating a mile a minute.

  The front door was open, just as it had been the first time she’d climbed those porch steps. But now Cutty wasn’t at the hall table, talking on the phone. She spotted him through the picture window, sitting on the sofa with his leg propped on a pillow on the coffee table.

  She didn’t hear the sound of the television or even the radio or stereo and he seemed to be just staring into space. With a very dour expression on his handsome, clean-shaven face.

  He spied her then and the dour expression transformed instantly into one of surprise. Surprise that got him off the couch in a hurry so that he reached the front screen when she did.

  For a brief, fleeting moment Kira wondered if he was going to slam the door in her face and lock it to keep her out.

  But that wasn’t what he did.

  He pushed the screen open wide and said a tentative, questioning, “Hi.”

  “Hi,” Kira responded the same way.

  “You’re about the last person I expected to see,” Cutty informed her. “Come in.”