Right by Her Side

by Christie Ridgway

  “Oh, surely not, surely—”

  “Can we bring the meeting to order?”

  Rebecca shot Sydney another sympathetic glance, but didn’t continue as the chatter in the room ceased. Morgan, wearing that big smile again, took his place at the front of the room near the fancy cake.

  “Are you trying to break our diets?” one of the male PAN members called from the back of the room. “I promised my wife I’d lose my spare tire by the time our baby arrives and you’re not helping, Morgan.”

  The crowd laughed. Morgan, too. “Today is not the day for diets,” he said. “Today is a day to celebrate, because one of our own is home, safe and sound.”

  Rebecca looked around, noting that everyone else was doing the same. Then, from the hallway outside the room, came the plaintive cry of a baby who had been jostled out of sleep. All heads whipped toward the door.

  In walked a smiling couple, a baby in the woman’s arms. The man turned to grasp the elbow of a teenage girl following behind them, then he brought her forward so he could wrap one arm around the teen and the other around his wife.

  “Here they are!” Morgan’s voice was jubilant. “Brian and Carrie Summers and Lisa Sanders. And this little guy is Timothy Jacob who was recovered this past week, safe and unharmed!”

  The room erupted in sound. Rebecca and Sydney looked at each other, then jumped up to share an exuberant hug. It was unbelievable. It was uplifting. Rebecca knew the entire staff at Portland General would be celebrating today.

  With very good reason. At the end of January, Lisa Sanders had given birth early in the morning to the baby boy she’d agreed to let the Summerses adopt. But then, a little over twelve hours later, the infant had been kidnapped from the hospital nursery, despite rigorous procedures and security codes. While cameras had caught the perpetrator on tape, he had likely been disguised. No one had recognized the man. No one had called in about ransom or even a legitimate tip about where the baby could be. No one had said it out loud, but everyone had doubted that the baby would be found. Until now.

  Both Rebecca and Sydney rushed over to join the others thronging the newcomers. Shouts of excitement and congratulations rang throughout the room, along with the startled cry of the baby. Rebecca noted that Carrie Summers was trying to comfort the sleepy, fussing child as well as take in all the congratulatory hugs and kisses. Catching her eye, Rebecca made a little “gimme” gesture. “I’ll stay right beside you,” she said, moving closer to the other woman. She knew the Summerses wouldn’t want the baby out of their sight.

  After a brief hesitation, Carrie gave her a grateful smile and then passed over the bundle of warm, agitated baby. Rebecca tucked the child’s head beneath her chin, holding him close to her chest, and began to rock with slow movements. The baby let out another cry, dug his forehead against her neck, then snuffled into quiet as his thumb found his mouth.

  Rebecca kept her breathing calm and even, in time with her side-to-side movement. Timothy pushed his head one more time against her throat, then settled into sleep.

  Carrie Summers looked over and rubbed the baby’s back with one hand while reaching for the teenager with the other. “We’re going to be okay now,” she told the group. Her gaze met her husband’s. “Our family is going to be okay.”

  Rebecca continued holding the child as Brian sketched out the goings-on of the past few days. A man had turned himself in to the police and subsequently told them where they could find Timothy—at the home of a woman who lived in the countryside outside of Portland. At that remote location, the baby had been found in the care of a woman who had other children of her own. Timothy, thank God, had been well cared for and was in excellent health. The few details Brian was at liberty to share were quickly wrapped up as big squares of cake were being passed about the room.

  “Lisa will continue living with us for as long as she likes,” Brian said. “She’s enrolled in the summer session of college right now, and we’d like her always to be as much a part of our family as Timothy.”

  Now even Lisa managed to address the smiling crowd. “Thank you, thank you all for your support and belief that the baby would be found and returned to Brian and Carrie. To us.”

  Brian reached for the baby, and as Rebecca handed him over she stepped back to appreciate the view of the reunited family. Brian and Carrie finally together with the child they had longed for and thought lost. Lisa, who now had people to love her, a family who wanted to take her as well as her baby into their lives.

  It wasn’t the traditional family setup, but it looked like a happy ending to Rebecca.

  Later, she walked out of the meeting room and down the corridor with Sydney. They glanced at each other and grinned. “A good day,” Sydney said.

  “A very good day,” Rebecca replied. “I feel as if I’ve hitched a ride on an ascending balloon.”

  Sydney nodded. “Families can begin many different ways, but the happiness always feels the same, doesn’t it?”

  Those words didn’t leave Rebecca’s mind as she headed for Trent’s home. After today’s PAN meeting, optimism and joy filled her heart. She refused to let her doubts hold her back any longer. It was time to start her life as Trent’s wife.

  Trent spent his first day as a newly married man not thinking about being newly married. Every time it crept into his thoughts, he booted it out with a kick worthy of David Beckham. At some point he was going to have to mention the change in his marital status to his coworkers and family members, but he decided that giving himself and Rebecca a few days to settle into the idea themselves was fair.

  By the time he drove home, it was after seven o’clock. A mix of pride and relief coursed through him as he realized that, though his schedule had been full, newlywed or not, he’d accomplished everything on it and more. As he pulled into his driveway and caught sight of Rebecca’s car, it was good to know that being married to her hadn’t affected him at all. And that was the way it was going to stay, he decided.

  The notion of sleeping with her had been a natural one, but he would put that on the back burner. The crucial step had been to get her married to him so that their baby was cemented into his life. He’d get through the next indefinite period of time the same way he’d gotten through today—by not letting this change in his marital situation affect his life or his routine.

  Meanwhile, Rebecca was totally moved in—in one of the spare bedrooms.

  He locked up the car, contemplating the evening ahead. A cold beer, and then he’d call the restaurant on 16th Street that knew his standing takeout dinner order—medium-rare T-bone steak, baked potato, hold anything the least bit green. There was the latest Sports Illustrated in his briefcase and he’d peruse that over his meal.

  The smell was the first thing he noticed when he unlocked the front door. It seemed to grab him by the tie and tug him through the pristine dining room and into the kitchen.

  Which wasn’t the least bit pristine. He stared about the granite countertops—what he could see of them, anyway—taking in all the items scattered about. The least surprising item in the kitchen was Rebecca herself, who had one foot on a chair and one knee beside the sink as she reached for something on the upper shelf of a cabinet.

  “Good evening.” Looking down at him from her perch, her face was flushed and her waist was wrapped in one of those thin towels used to dry dishes. “How was your day?”

  “My day was…” He shook his head. “What do I smell?”

  “Apple cobbler.”

  “Apple cobbler.” He repeated the words to himself. “And what’s that?” He pointed to a covered pan atop the stove.

  “Chicken casserole.”

  “And that? And that? And what about that?” His finger roamed around the room.

  “Parsley. Broccoli. Green beans. The remains of them, anyway. They all went into the casserole.” Her face flushed deeper. “I’m not one of those clean-as-you-go cooks.”

  “You made yourself dinner.”

  She climbed down f
rom the counter holding a clear glass pitcher in her hand. “I made us dinner. I, uh, wasn’t sure when you’d be home, so I made something that I could warm when you arrived.”

  “You didn’t need to cook for me. I was going to order a takeout steak from DeLuce’s.”

  “Oh. Well.” She turned her back and hustled toward the refrigerator. “If you’d prefer that—”

  “No, no. It’s just that I didn’t expect—I didn’t think—” Apple cobbler. Chicken casserole. He’d died and gone to Leave-it-to-Beaver heaven.

  “I’ve been thinking a lot today. About our marriage.”

  His gustatory delight slipped down a notch. She’d been thinking a lot about their marriage, while he’d been working on not thinking about it at all. “Listen, Rebecca, I’ve been giving it some thought, too.” About two seconds’ worth. “I don’t want our…arrangement to, uh, overly impinge on either one of our lives or routines.”

  “Exactly!” She beamed a smile that had him thinking about heaven again. “Why don’t you wash up for dinner and we can discuss it over our meal?”

  So much for Sports Illustrated. When he made it back to the place that she’d set for him at the kitchen table, he realized that she poured him a glass of ice water instead of the cold beer he’d been dreaming of.

  “Does everything look okay?” she asked.

  What was he supposed to do—complain? “Everything looks great,” he assured her, pulling out her chair so that she could sit down. The green stuff in the casserole he could pick around, right? Plus, he would say anything to get cobbler at the end of the day.

  They ate the first few bites in silence, except for his effusive compliments to the cook. This marriage thing might affect his life, after all, he conceded, but a woman making him good meals was nothing to worry about.

  He was enjoying his second helping of chicken casserole when she reached beneath her place mat and pulled out some notebook paper. “So, as I said, I did a lot of thinking today and here’s what I came up with.”

  “Hmm?” He cocked his head to try and read her handwriting upside down.

  Laundry, grocery shopping, meal preparation and housekeeping duties,” she said.

  She did laundry, too? He’d cheerfully forego making his weekly haul to Hagan’s Dry Cleaning and Laundry, though he supposed expecting her to starch and iron his shirts was too much to ask. “This sounds—”

  “I’ve written it all up. I thought you could make dinner on Mondays, Wednesdays and Thursdays. I’ll take Tuesdays, Fridays and Sundays. That leaves Saturdays for whatever.”

  He just stared at her, so she continued.

  “On to laundry. I’ll wash all my personal things, but I can put both of our other stuff, jeans and that sort, through the washer and dryer if you’ll fold them and put them away. Sundays are good for that.”

  Sundays are good for the morning newspaper and ball games on TV.

  “I’ve posted a grocery list on the refrigerator and I stocked up on a lot of things today, so I think we’ll make it until we can get back to the store on Saturday. Now, I don’t mind getting the trash into the can if you don’t mind getting the can onto the street. What day does the garbage truck come? And would you prefer to dust or vacuum? I think we can each take care of our own bathrooms, right?”

  The garbage truck? Dusting? Vacuuming? Cleaning bathrooms? “I, uh…Rebecca, I think you don’t understand the, um, setup here. I have a housekeeper who comes in three times a week. I, uh, we, don’t need to worry about any of the cleaning. She’ll do the laundry, too, if you leave it out—though most of the time I forget and end up dropping it over at Hagan’s.”

  “Oh.” She looked down at the paper in front of her, then crumpled it up. “I see.”

  “As for grocery shopping and the whole meal thing, I do takeout unless I have a business dinner. I don’t think a schedule like you’re suggesting would work out.”

  “Oh,” she said again, as she balled another piece of paper in her hand. She stood up. “I think I’ll go to my room for a while. I’ll take care of the dishes in a little bit. Don’t touch a thing.”

  He supposed that included the apple cobbler, Trent thought with a sigh, watching her rush from the room. Not that he felt much like eating it anymore, not with those emotions he felt bubbling off the surface of her.

  A door snicked shut upstairs and Trent took that as his signal to head up after her. He’d done something wrong, said something wrong, definitely screwed up somehow, and if he didn’t rectify it, then this marriage would most certainly affect him and his routine.

  He wouldn’t be able to live with himself.

  Six

  Rebecca surprised Trent by answering his knock on her bedroom door with a composed, “Come in.”

  He pushed the door open to find her sitting against the pillows of the double bed with needles and yarn in her lap. “What do you have there?”

  Her gaze was trained on the small bundle of fuzzy yellow fiber. “Most likely, a mess. But I’m trying to learn how to knit.”

  He shook his head in admiration. “Is there anything you can’t do?”

  She looked up and caught his gaze. “Maybe I can’t be Trent Crosby’s wife.”

  There she went again, damn it, thinking this was a mistake. “Rebecca…”

  “Really, Trent. Housekeepers, business dinners. I don’t come from that world. I don’t belong in it.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Remember Dr. Ray?”

  Thinking about the jackass made Trent’s teeth clench. “I remember him just fine.”

  “We broke up because I didn’t fit in with his life.”

  “You’re a nurse, for God’s sake. He’s a doctor. That sounds like a fit to me.” Not that he even liked saying it.

  “I didn’t fit in with his social life. The group that he associated with after hours, people who’d attended prep schools and prestigious colleges like he had. He told me I wasn’t polished enough. He told me the problem was I didn’t have anything in common with them, so I didn’t know what to say to them. He was right.”

  “Maybe you should have said, ‘My husband’s an idiot of the first degree and he’s trying to make his shallowness all my fault.’ If they weren’t superficial ass-holes like him, then you’d probably have found plenty to talk about after that.”

  Rebecca laughed. “How do you do that?”

  “What?”

  “Make me feel better.”

  He crossed the room and sat on the edge of the bed so his hip was against her thigh. She was wearing more baggy clothes again, so all he could appreciate about her was that fair skin, rose mouth and big eyes that had compelled him to make promises he intended to keep for the rest of his life. “You’re dangerous, lady,” he said, shaking his head.

  She laughed again. “You just want my cobbler.”

  He wanted more than that, he realized. He wanted her to be content. He wanted her to feel as if this marriage didn’t drag her down the way her first one had. But he’d been the responsible type all his life. So that wasn’t so strange, was it?

  He’d married the woman so he wouldn’t lose his child, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t care about the woman herself. If that meant letting her further into his life, letting her affect him and his routine a bit more, well, he wasn’t going to mind it.

  “Speaking of food,” he said, keeping it casual, “we have a dinner tomorrow night. Does it count as my cooking night if I pick up the check?”

  Her pretty eyes narrowed. “What kind of dinner?”

  “A business dinner.” He hadn’t planned on taking her, to tell the truth, but he would have to include her in some of his social business occasions eventually. Marriage was going to affect him at least that much. And it would give him a chance to prove to her he was right about Dr. SOB being wrong about her. “But there will be other spouses there, and…well, you’re mine.”

  “Am I?” Rebecca whispered.

  “Yes.” He leaned forward, despite
those sharp knitting needles that were between them, because something said that the moment called for a kiss. That something was shouting at him, urging him to take her mouth and prove to her that he could make her feel better in lots of ways. That it wasn’t a mistake to let each other get a little bit closer.

  Rebecca shivered as she slid into the white and black satin dress. The June night was warm, but her hands were icy and there was a cold ball where her stomach was supposed to be. Maybe she should tell Trent she was ill and couldn’t attend the business dinner with him.

  He’d assume it was because of the pregnancy and she wouldn’t have to tell him what was really making her sick—nerves.

  She slid her palms down her thighs, and the light caught on the simple platinum band on her left hand. Nerves or not, she was married to him. That meant something to her—despite her bad first attempt at the institution and despite the particular circumstances of this try.

  She owed it to Trent, to herself and to their baby, to give her best shot at doing right by him tonight.

  Balancing against the dresser top with one hand, she slipped into the black patent-leather sandals she’d purchased that day. The clerk who’d helped her select the dress had specified nothing less than three-inch heels and a matching purse no larger than a three-by-five index card. A novice at this kind of shopping, she’d obeyed.

  Now she took a deep breath and, closing her eyes, spun around to face the full-length mirror on the closet door. Okay, Eisenhower, let’s see if your mom can pull this off.

  Her stomach jittered as her lashes lifted. She swallowed hard. “Oh boy,” she whispered. “Oh boy, oh boy, oh boy.”

  White satin strips covered her breasts but left enough skin showing that she’d had to buy a special low-cut bra to wear under the dress. Beneath her breasts was a band of black satin, and then more white fell in an A-line to skim her knees. If there was any pregnancy change to her midriff, this dress didn’t show it. The clerk had pointed out to an indecisive Rebecca that the garment wasn’t skimpy or clingy, but now on a second look, she saw that the dress did nothing to hide the one area of her body that had begun to change.