THANKSGIVING DADDY

by Rachel Lee

  “I’m basically a gypsy,” he admitted with a shrug. “Too many years of not knowing where my boots would be next week or next month. Always on the move. Probably about the same for you.”

  “I always had a base.”

  “So did I. Not the same thing.”

  “I guess not.” She closed her eyes briefly then looked at him again. “The future’s all cloudy right now. But I keep worrying anyway, probably about a lot of things that aren’t in my control. I can’t resign. The air force is all I know. Flying helicopters is all I know, and anyway, I love it. But even without helos, what would I do? I’m not sure I’d like anything else anywhere near as much. So any way I stack it up, I’m likely to raise a rootless baby.” She hesitated. “I’m not sure that’s a good thing.”

  “Who can be? But the love moves with you, right?”

  “That’s the theory.” She gave a long sigh. “But that’s not the sum anyway, and I keep gnawing the same problems over and over and getting nowhere, really. Maybe I’m just worrying too damn much.”

  “Maybe. I can’t say. I’m in a better position than you. I’ve retired. I can do whatever I damn well please now, and whatever we decide is best for our son. You have a whole lot of other things to deal with.”

  “Does it bother you?” she asked suddenly. “Don’t you miss it? All that action and adrenaline?”

  “Sometimes,” he admitted. “And there was an undeniable sense of purpose to it that I’ve been missing, but my body wasn’t up to it anymore. I didn’t want to be the weak link. And I didn’t want a desk job. That would drive me nuts.”

  “So the decision wasn’t easy?”

  “Hell no. Took me a couple of years to settle on it. I know I’d promised Maria that I’d take a hike at twenty years, but once she was gone...” He shrugged a shoulder. “It wasn’t easy. But it was right.”

  “I’ve been living alone a long time. I’m still not sure how I’d adapt to sharing space all the time.”

  He waited, tension growing in him as he wondered where she was heading.

  “But this time with you has been easy. You’re not difficult to get along with, usually.”

  “My training,” he answered simply. “I worked with a team, often in very close quarters. You learn not to step on other people’s toes pretty quickly.”

  “I guess.”

  “You have the same skills.”

  “I’m not sure about that. When I was off duty, I had the Bachelor Officers’ Quarters. Have I been driving you nuts?”

  “Not a bit. Not one little bit. Of course, I suspect most of you is still packed in your duffel. Where are you going with this?”

  She eyed him and sighed. “Marriage. You hold it out like it’s a perfect answer. Maybe it is, or at least as perfect as one can be in this situation, but it remains, I don’t know if I can live with another person. And what if we chafe each other with time? How do we deal with that?”

  “By behaving like adults. Like colleagues. Look, I’ve been married. I was sure as hell head over heels in love with Maria, and when she died I didn’t want to live. They even took me off active operations for a while until they were positive I wouldn’t do something stupid.”

  Her entire face seemed to droop. “I’m so sorry, Seth.”

  “Thanks.” He shrugged away the melancholy that tried to rise in him. “Anyway, I had a point to that. I was crazy in love with that woman, but that didn’t mean it was always easy. No relationship, whatever kind, is always easy. The question is whether you deal with the problems or throw your hands up, or do something one of you will regret. The question is, can we be reasonable adults?”

  One corner of her mouth quirked up. “I’ve never met anyone who is reasonable all the time, no matter how adult.”

  “True,” he admitted. “I’m not saying we’ll never have a spat. That’s human nature. It’s what we do about it, it’s the places we choose not to go when we have one, that matter.”

  She ate another mouthful of Danish, took another sip of coffee, then leaned back a little, holding her mug in both hands, staring up at the ceiling. Thinking. He let her be.

  It wasn’t easy, considering the things that were roiling in him. The longer he was with her, the harder he knew any so-called marriage of convenience was going to be. He wanted her with every cell in his being, and for all his talk about how enduring relationships were built on other things, he knew damn well what a strain it was going to be for him to be constantly around Edie without ever making love to her.

  He’d already tried it on for size, and desire was hammering at him more than he wanted to admit. Her scent, the sound of her voice, the sight of her smile, all of it carried him back to that one night, a huge reminder of a conflagration that he suspected might just have barely begun.

  To live with her for years and never pursue the promise of that? He’d be a fool not to admit he’d be signing on for a tour in hell, at least in that regard. But he’d spent much of the past twenty years frequently visiting hell, and he supposed he could do it for another twenty, if that’s how she wanted it. Because he was going to have a son.

  That child loomed huge in his perspective. No sacrifice too great. A son. Beginning, middle and end to any and all arguments.

  “I can do this by myself,” she said.

  He felt his stomach sink, but didn’t argue. Her independence was at her very core, and that was one thing he would not argue with. “You can,” he agreed, much as it pained him.

  “But given the way I live...” She sighed. “If I had a routine job it would be different. If I wasn’t looking at another eight or ten years of being bounced around like a ping-pong ball, I could do it.”

  He remained silent, letting her work it through, glad that she was talking more about it. At least he knew where she was on the field of play. Somewhat, anyway.

  “Hell,” she said, “I could do it anyway. I know I could. But I’m not sure it would be good for...our son. Not with only one parent.”

  He spoke carefully. “If there was no choice, I have no doubt you’d do an excellent job. But there’s a choice now. A number of them, actually. Everything from leaving the boy with me when you have to be away, to us getting it together on a permanent basis.”

  “You did kind of open a can of worms with that,” she said. He was relieved that she sounded wry, not angry.

  Then her eyelids started to droop. He waited until he was sure she had dozed off, then rose, carefully removing the mug from her hands.

  Damn, he thought as he walked softly into the kitchen, this woman was taking him on a whirlwind ride into utterly unknown territory. Both of his wives had been fascinating women to him, but Edie was in a class by herself when it came to complexity. And she really wanted a fully detailed mission plan, which, like all mission plans, was impossible. The unexpected always happened.

  He returned to the living room to watch her sleep. She was so damn beautiful. He liked to look at her, and he liked her, just that simple. And she was carrying his child.

  He smiled to himself. A better bomb couldn’t have dropped into his life.

  * * *

  “Are you sure you aren’t just looking for a new sense of purpose?”

  Edie challenged him with the question over breakfast.

  “If I am, I’ve already found it. Too late.”

  “Oh. Well, what if the baby didn’t exist? What if it was just me?”

  He put down his utensils and looked at her. “If it were just you, I’d have already carried you upstairs to my bed and done all the things with you I couldn’t do that morning in Afghanistan. If it were just you, I’d be making love to you right now. I want you every bit as much as I did then, and even more now that I’m getting to know you.”

  Then he stood up and walked out.

  Wow, she thought. Just
wow. “That’s no marriage of convenience,” she called after him.

  “Depends on the ground rules,” he called back. Then she heard the front door close behind him.

  She slapped her palm on the table, angry with herself, then put her face in her hands. Was she losing her mind? Why had she brought that up? It was ridiculous given that there was no way to change the facts.

  No, she’d brought it up because she was beginning to realize she wanted him around, all right, but not just for the sake of the baby. Their son. She wanted more than that.

  And apparently he was willing to give it to her, at least the sex part. But what about the rest? God, this was so messy sometimes she couldn’t believe it.

  Then a thought hit her so hard she almost felt punched. Nobody went into something like this, for whatever reason, knowing how it would all turn out. Nobody. She ought to know that. You could plan a mission down to the last detail and the unexpected still happened.

  When it came to having a child, when it came to marriage, everyone was flying on hope. It was impossible to predict, impossible to tie up into neat little packages and be sure that absolutely nothing would happen to change anything.

  Every time she climbed into the cockpit, she was being the ultimate optimist. Absolutely certain she wouldn’t have a mechanical failure, or that if she did she could deal with it. Absolutely certain she wouldn’t crash. Absolutely certain she’d evade gunfire and RPGs and all the rest of it. Absolutely certain she could come down on the lip of a mountain cliff and not bang her rotors into rocks.

  But none of that was an absolute certainty, and on many of her missions, the odds hadn’t been good at all.

  But she forged ahead optimistically. Being cautious and careful insofar as she could, but taking huge risks at the same time in the confidence that she would handle them.

  Was this so damn different?

  Was all this constant worrying simply another way of trying not to face the future? Like playing with puzzle pieces to try to figure out the picture without putting them together because then she’d have to see it, like it or not?

  All her training hammered on preparedness. The air force devised every possible problem it could so its pilots would be prepared to deal with them, but even so the impossible and unexpected happened. She’d buried a few friends because of that. Cascade failures. RPGs. Miscalculations. Whole bunches of things could escape your control, so you just didn’t think about them.

  Well, this really wasn’t so very different. It was time to take a risk. To move forward instead of hanging back because she wanted every detail planned out. Life just didn’t allow that, no matter how hard you tried. It happened, often with unintended consequences, like the baby she carried inside of her.

  What, after all, was the likelihood that she’d have sex just once in her life, with a man using a condom, and still get pregnant? Probably not very likely over the span of a lifetime, but over the span of one night, the odds had gone from 2 or 3 percent failure rate to 100 percent.

  Yes, there were some things she had to be sure of, like the fact that she was going to keep this baby. Some idea of the changes she’d need to make to her career and lifestyle. But by and large it was going to remain a huge unknown until it happened. Whatever it was.

  Just like going on a mission in enemy territory.

  Except this probably wouldn’t be nearly as deadly. It might prove painful, but not deadly.

  “Crap,” she said to the empty kitchen. Playing games with herself. Denial in so many forms a psychologist probably couldn’t name them all.

  Not very cute, not very smart. There was a cliff she needed to deal with, laden with risks, but it had to be climbed because in four months she was going to be a mother.

  What she ought to be doing was counting herself lucky that her baby’s father wanted to be part of all this. She wouldn’t have blamed him for heading for the hills.

  But that wasn’t Seth, and there was a steadiness and constant determination in him that she had come to appreciate. She wanted that in her child’s life. Maybe even in her own.

  Forget love. Many years ago, she’d dreamed about it, but over the years she’d come to count it as a problem. How many marriages had she seen fail? Too many. How many friends had she nursed through breakups? Too many.

  So maybe love wasn’t the best reason for an undertaking like this. Maybe there were other reasons, better ones, as long as your expectations matched reality.

  The idea of marriage still made her uncomfortable, but when she remembered how Seth had been cut out during her short hospital stay, she knew they were going to have to deal with that somehow. She knew how she would have felt in his shoes: frantic and furious.

  The easy way or the expensive way, that had to be dealt with. She had to make arrangements so that if anything happened to her he would get their child.

  As for her career...well, if he was willing to step in, that might get back on track.

  But oddly, as she sat there in the morning light, she wondered if that was really what she wanted anymore.

  * * *

  Three days later, Seth drove her out to a small airport to fly the Huey with Yuma. Excitement was building in her, the itch to take the stick again and fly around in the air. She’d been grounded for months now, and she hated it. She missed flying. For her it was a deep-rooted passion, never just a job.

  They met Yuma and Wendy in the small office of the emergency response unit. This morning it was just the two of them and a bored-looking young man who was evidently the dispatcher.

  “Everybody else is resting up,” Yuma said as he shook their hands. “We had a big pileup out on the state highway last night and had to fly three patients to a trauma center. I hope it’s a quiet morning.” He looked at Edie. “Wendy’s coming with, in case we get a call.” Then he turned to Seth. “You stay here, man. If we have to race to a scene, you’d be excess baggage.”

  “No problem,” Seth said. “I didn’t expect to go. I brought my own entertainment.” He pulled a paperback from his hip pocket.

  Wendy laughed. “You guys. Always prepared.”

  Yuma positioned Edie in the left-hand seat, the pilot’s seat, and refreshed her about the controls. “We can’t stay out long, sorry to say. We have a tight fuel budget.”

  Edie hesitated. “Then maybe I shouldn’t fly at all.”

  Yuma shook his head. “We have a certain allowance for training. I don’t have to tell you we can’t go too long without flying. Never wise.”

  “It’s been a couple of months for me, and even longer since I took the stick in a Huey.”

  He flashed a smile. “I’m right here, Edie. You’ll do fine.”

  At last she hit the ignition and listened to the rotors wind up, that unforgettable whop-whop that was so distinctive to Hueys. Her excitement mounted, and behind the microphone she felt a smile stretch her face until it couldn’t get any wider. Flying again!

  Takeoff was a breeze, but once she started flying forward, she wobbled a bit as she got used to the dynamics of the metal monster around her.

  “Doing great,” Yuma said in her earphone.

  “Like a baby learning to walk all over again.” She heard him laugh.

  “I’m belted in,” Wendy said from the rear. “Have at it.”

  It didn’t take long. So much of flying was feel, and she got the feel for this bird quickly. “She’s a solid girl,” she said to Yuma.

  “One of the best ever built,” he agreed. “You ought to think about flying one more often.”

  “Not likely. I’ll be teaching others how to fly Pave Hawks when I get back on status.”

  “I was talking about here.”

  Her hand jerked infinitesimally on the stick, and the helo juddered a tiny bit. “What are you talking about?”

  “I w
ant to cut back on my hours. We’ve been kicking the idea around for some time. I know you probably won’t even consider it, but I’m just mentioning it. It’s pretty much the same job you do right now, without any flak. I like the no-flak part.”

  He let the subject drop, and she, too, let go of it. It didn’t fit. But damn, she was enjoying flying again. She headed them toward the mountains, laughed when they hit some turbulence, passed low over some trees, then sighed and headed back, talking to a rather lackadaisical tower control. Returning made her sad. She’d have loved to be up here for hours and really put the Huey through her paces.

  But at last she hovered over the landing pad and set them down. There was more of a bump than she was used to, but only because she wasn’t accustomed to landing this bird.

  It killed her to pull off the headset, killed her to listen to the rotors wind down. But at last she had to climb out and return to life on the ground.

  That was when the exhilaration hit her. Standing on the pavement under the shadow of the slowly turning rotors, she threw out her arms, spun around and cried, “That was great!”

  Wendy and Yuma both laughed. Wendy took her hand and Yuma patted her back. Seth emerged from the office and came toward her with a grin. “Great?” he asked.

  “Absolutely great! God, I’ve missed that.” She turned to Yuma and gave him an unexpected hug. “Thanks so much for that.”

  His smile turned crooked. “Hey, I was just a passenger.”

  They had just started making plans once again for the dinner that hadn’t happened yet when a call came in. Time to transport a critical patient from the local hospital to a bigger medical center. Seth and Edie hung around to watch Wendy and Yuma take off, headed for the local hospital.

  She didn’t say a word to Seth about the suggestion Yuma had made. She still didn’t know whether she even wanted to consider it.

  “The ERT also does mountain rescue,” Seth remarked as they walked to the car. “It’s not all about emergency transport. We’ve got some good ground teams in this county.”

  “Are you thinking about it?”