Heart Stealers

by Patricia McLinn

  Brett would find it easier hiking to Patagonia than going the extra mile for her. Yet here he was, searching for additional training in order to deal with to Max.

  “Well, there’s a Daddy School class that meets Wednesday evenings at the YMCA,” Levi told him, “if you want to go twice a week. That one’s for fathers of babies. It’s taught by a nurse from Arlington Memorial.”

  “I don’t care who teaches it, or who it’s for. I’m not a father, anyway.”

  “But you want to take the course.”

  “Not really.” He’d rather spend his free time playing tennis or reading a good book. But what choice did he have? One night with Sharon convinced him his heart had already made the choice for him. “I don’t want to be this kid’s daddy. I just want to be his mommy’s friend. If there was a Friend-of-Mommy School, I’d sign up.”

  “These things aren’t always so clear-cut,” Levi remarked. “There are a lot of different ways to be a father. The Daddy School was helpful to me.”

  Brett didn’t want to be Max’s father in any possible way. But if he studied hard in Daddy School, he might eventually reach a point where he could get through a Sunday morning with the kid. And given that he hoped to spend lots of Saturday nights in Sharon’s bed, learning some strategies for surviving Max’s Sunday-morning pancake histrionics would be worth the effort.

  “I’m pretty sure Allison still teaches the class at the Y on Wednesday,” Levi was saying. “For a while it was meeting Mondays, but—”

  “I’ll call the Y and find out,” Brett cut him off. If Levi went on too long about it, Brett might find an excuse to avoid the class.

  He really, really didn’t want to have to do this. For Sharon, though... For her, he’d bite the bullet.

  “Just as long as it doesn’t meet Tuesday nights,” Levi said. “Poker takes precedence.”

  “Absolutely.” Brett thanked Levi, promised to pick his pockets clean at the card table the following evening, and hung up.

  Silence wrapped around him like fog, cushioning him. Outside his window the world was rolling along, hectic and cacophonous. Car engines roared and purred, faulty mufflers rumbled, people shouted. Children acted up and parents scolded. But the window was insulated to contain the air conditioning, and he could pretend that noise, those acting-up children and their remonstrative parents—didn’t exist.

  No. He couldn’t pretend. Once he’d let Sharon into his soul, it was like a crack spreading through the window’s glass, allowing the world entry. As long as he held onto Sharon, he couldn’t escape the noise, the anger, the frenzy.

  His phone chirped, making him nostalgic for the days when phones just rang instead of producing polite flute-like signals. He lifted the receiver and heard Janet’s piercing voice: “Evelyn and Bill are waiting for you in the conference room. Do you want me to get Leo on the line?” Leo was a trader affiliated with the firm who worked on Wall Street, and Evelyn and Bill were Brett’s senior fund managers. Every Monday morning, they had a conference call with Leo.

  “Yeah, get Leo,” Brett said, annoyed that he’d needed Janet to remind him of this week’s meeting. He ought to know his own schedule—and if he didn’t have every last appointment memorized, one click of his computer mouse would produce his schedule on the monitor, listing his obligations minute by minute. But as soon as he let Sharon’s kid hijack a piece of his brain, his memory about everything else crumbled. Meetings and talks with Wall Street traders took a back seat to panic about tykes and relationships and age-old wounds.

  How did fathers do it? Maybe they were more emotionally stable than Brett. Or so deranged nothing bothered them. Maybe attending Daddy School classes would drive him so insane nothing would bother him, either.

  What the hell—his decision to stick around and see what developed with Sharon proved that his mental health was already compromised. Maybe if he let go of his sanity, he’d be a lot happier.

  He couldn’t be more miserable, he thought as he shoved away from his desk and trudged to the door, wondering why poets and romantics claimed that love was such a great thing. He wasn’t even prepared to consider himself in love, and already he was suffering from a sense of impending doom in the form of a small boy with golden hair, dimples and a teeth-rattling voice capable of shrieking, “No!

  Chapter Twelve

  “It’s bed time,” Sharon told Max.

  “No bed time,” he said. If he were less engrossed in finding the piece that would complete the brontosaurus’s head in his jigsaw puzzle, he might have argued more vehemently, but he was too deeply involved in the puzzle.

  She glanced at her watch. Nearly eight. She still had to get his teeth cleaned, tuck him into bed, and read to him—and she wanted him asleep before Brett arrived.

  He was planning to come over after his Daddy School class, a midweek class he’d enrolled in to augment his Saturday morning class. Sharon was so touched by his effort to learn fathering techniques, she was willing to do anything to make things easier for him—including getting Max into bed before Brett arrived at her home. After two hours of Daddy School, she imagined that the last person he’d want to see was Max.

  Max picked up a piece and walked around his half-done puzzle on the floor, an illustration of dinosaurs with large, squiggle-shaped gaps in it where pieces were missing. There was a pterodactyl’s wing, a partial triceratops’s horn with a patch of carpet peeking through, and in the lower left corner the trunk of a palm that as yet had no fronds.

  “It’s definitely bed time,” she said, wishing she had as much energy as her son did. She was exhausted, though. Her schedule at the studio was intense. As the summer wound down, more and more high school seniors had been setting up appointments to have their yearbook photos taken. Every day since Monday, she’d been inundated by teenagers anxious about their hair and their pimples—”Don’t worry, they can be Photoshopped out,” she assured them over and over—and arrogant about their alleged sophistication—”This is my good side,” they’d boast, or, “Make sure my eyebrow stud shows.” She liked photographing them, and the money was great. But they drained her.

  Given how much Max already drained her when he wasn’t yet three years old, she dreaded what he’d be like as an adolescent. By then, who knew what sort of body piercing would be in style?

  She tried to picture her cherub with a nose ring and laughed. He didn’t even have a real nose yet, just a bridgeless little bump of flesh above his lips.

  “You can leave the puzzle out and finish it tomorrow,” she offered, reaching down and lifting Max off the floor.

  He gave a shriek and clung to the puzzle piece in his fist. “No! No bed time!” he screeched.

  “Yes bed time.”

  “I’m not done!”

  “You can finish tomorrow.”

  “No, no! I have to put this piece!” He wriggled out of her grip and hovered above the half-finished puzzle, searching for where the piece in his hand belonged. Hunkering down and breathing heavily, he studied the picture.

  The doorbell rang.

  Sharon breathed a bit heavily herself—partly from frustration that Max was still up and about and partly from anticipation. She hadn’t seen Brett since he’d left her townhouse Sunday afternoon. He’d phoned her Monday and Tuesday evenings and then asked if he could come over after his Daddy School class today, but she hadn’t seen him.

  Two days, and she’d missed him as if he were already a part of her life.

  He was.

  “Brett is here,” she told Max, who ignored her. He was much too young to be probed for his opinion concerning his mother’s boyfriend, but so far he’d accepted Brett without any noticeable balking. Brett concealed his opinions of Max well, thank goodness. Max seemed unaware of Brett’s antipathy toward children.

  Maybe today’s Daddy School class had eroded that antipathy. Maybe after a few more classes Brett would be swearing he adored children.

  She could dream, couldn’t she?

  She climbed the s
tairs, hurried to the front door and swung it open. The sight of Brett standing on her porch was enough to banish her weariness for a moment. Seeing him made her forget all the potential problems they faced, all the warning signs that flashed through her mind whenever she tried to envision herself in a long-term relationship with him. He had a wonderful way of making her live only in the present. It was irresponsible, reckless, probably idiotic—but when she was with him she couldn’t think about what might go sour tomorrow. She could think only about what was so sweet right now.

  He stepped inside and closed the door behind him. And then they were kissing—as if Max didn’t exist, as if it wasn’t bedtime, as if pieces of the dinosaur puzzle didn’t lay scattered across the playroom floor. She sank as deeply into the present as she could for one lovely instant.

  “Found it!” Max bellowed.

  Sharon drew back, but Brett didn’t release her. “What did he find?”

  “The place where the piece was supposed to go. He’s doing a jigsaw puzzle.”

  “Found it, Mommy!” Max summoned her. Evidently, he wanted her to witness his triumph.

  “I’ll be right back,” she said, but Brett still didn’t release her. He only gazed into her face, his eyes a wildflower blue, his smile unbearably seductive. It took all her willpower to pull out of his embrace, to turn her back on him and trudge down the stairs to Max.

  Were Brett’s sentiments contagious? Was hanging around with him going to make her resent her son, too?

  No, she vowed. Absolutely not. Max was still numero uno in her life. He was her reality. Brett was... her magic.

  “Good job,” she praised Max, who had indeed inserted his puzzle piece into the right place, completing the T-Rex’s leg. “Now it’s bed time.”

  “Bed time,” Max confirmed, lifting his arms to her and giving her such an angelic smile she felt guilty for having allowed Brett, however briefly, to take precedence over him.

  Guilt. Just one more complication she had to contend with as this new phase of her life took shape.

  She hugged Max tightly and carried him up the stairs, savoring the wholesome scent of his baby shampoo, the soft cotton knit of his pajamas. “I wanna go potty,” he announced just as she reached the top step.

  “Good boy! I’m glad you told me. Let’s try the potty right now,” she said, then caught Brett’s eye. He lounged in the doorway between the living room and the kitchen, and his smile was utterly unreadable. Was he grossed out by Max’s potty training? Or perhaps by her gushing encouragement of him? Or had he learned in Daddy School that praising a child who took an active interest in toilet training was a good thing?

  Or did he simply not care? Was he just going to humor her and pretend Max’s well-being mattered to him, because he knew that was the quickest way to Sharon’s heart?

  He didn’t have to pretend. He was already in her heart. “I’ll be back soon,” she called over her shoulder as she continued up the stairs to the second floor, where Max’s bedroom and the potty were located.

  She unsnapped his pj’s, pulled down his bottoms, removed his diaper and planted him onto the colorful plastic seat. He reached for the toilet paper and tore off a square, which he seemed content just to hold. She smiled optimistically. He fluttered the thin sheet of toilet paper through the air and ignored her.

  Her phone rang. “I’ll be right back,” she said, scowling when she realized that was the same promise she’d made to Brett. She wondered if her caller was going to be someone else she loved, someone else who was waiting for her, yearning for her full attention.

  It was. “Hi,” Deborah said. “How are you?”

  She hadn’t spoken to Deborah since she’d returned Olivia to her on Saturday afternoon. And though it hadn’t been at the forefront of her mind—not with everything else that had occurred over the weekend—she’d been wondering how Deborah’s meeting with Raymond had gone. “Hi, Deb! I’m fine. I’ve got Max on the potty, so I can’t talk long.”

  “Are you on your cordless?”

  “No.” Sharon had answered the phone in her bedroom. The cordless was downstairs. “It’s all right. Max can sit by himself for a few minutes.”

  “Or else Mr. Wrong can keep him company. That’s his car outside your house, isn’t it?”

  Sharon smiled, not minding her friend’s nosiness. If she’d had a spare moment to call Deborah before now, she would have told her how things had been going with Brett. “Yes, that’s his car.”

  “On a weeknight? What’s going on?”

  “He’s visiting. We need to talk, Deb, but now probably isn’t the best time.”

  “Indeed. I tried you on Sunday, but your line was busy and then Livie and I went out. And I haven’t had ten minutes to myself since then.”

  “I know the feeling.” Sharon sat on her bed, swung up her legs and leaned back against the headboard. Would Brett be sharing this bed with her tonight? Could they do that on a weeknight? Would it be as wonderful as Saturday night had been? “How did things go with Raymond last Saturday? You never told me.”

  “Oh, Sharon.” Deborah sighed brokenly. “My life’s a mess. But you can’t talk with Max on the potty.”

  “Of course I can talk.” Sharon straightened up and pressed the phone to her ear, as if that could bring her closer to Deborah. “What happened?”

  “Well, we just... we made love.”

  “Ah.” Was that really so terrible? They were married, after all. But estranged. On the way to a divorce. “How was it?”

  “Honey, don’t ask.”

  “That good, huh.”

  Deborah sighed again. “What am I going to do? I can’t believe we did such a stupid thing. We were both so—I mean, first we were angry, and then we both started crying. And we’ve got this history of comforting each other when we’re sad, you know? It’s not like hugging each other was the most unnatural thing in the world. It was practically a reflex.”

  “So you hugged.”

  “And one thing led to another. I don’t know what to do, Sharon. I miss him. He’s a son of a bitch, and we’ve got lawyers, and I can’t count on him to be around when I need him... and I miss him. Like I said, my life’s a mess.”

  “Do you want to come over?”

  “I just got Livie into bed. And you’ve got Max on the toilet. And What’s-His-Name cooling his heels.”

  “His name is Brett.”

  “That’s right, Brett. You introduced us on Saturday, but I was a little distracted at the time.”

  “I noticed.” And now Sharon knew why.

  “So, what should I do?” Deborah asked. “Should I call off the lawyers or dig in my heels? For all I know, he was just using the oldest trick in the book to soften me up.”

  “I think he really loves you,” Sharon said. “And I know he loves Olivia. The rest is just details.” She wasn’t sure she believed that. If love could solve every problem and iron out every detail, Brett wouldn’t be taking father classes and she wouldn’t be worrying about whether she had a future with him.

  “I shouldn’t take your time up with my problems now.” Deborah issued one final sigh. “I’m sorry, laying a number on you like this. We’ve got to get together and talk, though. Sounds as if you’ve got more news than I do. You think you’ll have a free minute at work tomorrow?”

  “Not a chance. It’s yearbook time.”

  “Right. Well, we’ll have to connect soon. I need you to talk me out of getting together with Raymond again—at least not until I’ve got my head on straight. Raymond and I are supposed to see the marriage counselor tomorrow. God knows what I’m going to say to her.”

  “Tell her your life’s a mess,” Sharon suggested, then laughed. “Just kidding. Tell her what you told me—that you aren’t sure whether Raymond really loves you or he’s just manipulating you. See what he has to say for himself.”

  “But you think he loves me.”

  “As if I’m any kind of an expert. I’d better go, Deb. I haven’t heard a sound from the
bathroom in the past few minutes. That’s generally a bad sign.” When Max got quiet, it was usually because he was doing something naughty, destructive or dangerous.

  “We’ll talk later.” Deborah said a quick good-bye and hung up the phone.

  Sharon swung off the bed and strode down the hall to the bathroom. At the open door she froze. Brett was kneeling on the tile floor in front of Max, fastening the tapes of a clean diaper around the child’s waist. His back was to her, his head bowed, his hands moving with a speed and intensity that amazed her.

  He’d diapered babies before—a long time ago, but apparently he hadn’t lost his touch. Max watched him, his eyes round with curiosity. He held his pajama top up, out of Brett’s way.

  “There,” Brett said, smoothing the tapes. “Pull up your bottoms.”

  “You pull them up,” Max demanded, although his voice was soft and awed.

  “If you’re big enough to use the potty, you’re big enough to pull up your own bottoms.”

  Max looked uncertain, but he bent over and tugged at the elastic waistband. The front of his pajama bottoms rose higher than the back, which got caught on the bulk of his diaper. He struggled to get the pants all the way up.

  Brett didn’t help him. He simply moved to the sink and scrubbed his hands. When he glanced up, his eyes met Sharon’s in the mirrored door of the medicine cabinet. He shrugged, as if to ward off any comments from her. “You can clean out the potty,” he said.