He saw her consider this and nod. “I see. So this has to do with male pride. Needing to be the first, the only, the best. The leader of the pack when it comes to your woman.” He detected more than a smidgen of bitterness in her voice. “And, thus, even an abandoned woman and her offspring are considered possessions of the original man. Leftovers, basically, from the vantage point of any other man who might come along later.”
“I’m not saying it’s a nice way of looking at it, but your inference isn’t entirely untrue.”
She released his hand. They’d arrived at the bakery, but she resisted taking a step inside. For whatever reason, she was determined to bring this conversation to its inevitable conclusion. Sooner or later he’d have to help her make the final deductive leap.
“Look,” he said, “children without fathers bring certain issues with them. A kind of emotional baggage you don’t get when you have your own kids. They’re looking for things in the new man that they dreamed about or wished for and, at the same time, they’ve got all these fears that they’ll lose primacy in their mother’s lives or that the new man will resent them for the role they used to have.”
“So, the burden of being the new man is too weighty, is that it?” she said. “It’s simply too much work to have to wade through any of these issues with the children, and the woman who was the initial attractor is probably not worth all the fuss anyway?”
In the entrance light, he could see the heightened color of her cheeks. Her eyes simmered with anger. A woman feeling solidarity toward other women, he figured.
He tilted his head to the side, taking in her slender figure and her dreadfully rigid posture. He wished she’d let him lighten things up, but the conversation wasn’t heading in that direction. Not by a long shot.
“You think I’m a real jerk for being this honest, don’t you?” He paused to let her digest his question. She narrowed her dark eyes at him but said nothing.
“I was called a jerk a few times when I was a kid,” he continued, “but mostly I was called a bastard. And that was hard to defend against when, technically, it was the truth.”
***
Beth swallowed.
Twice.
Did he really mean what she thought? “Will, are you saying your mom—”
“Yeah. Out of wedlock pregnancy. And I lived in a time and place where only a handful of kids in my whole grade school even had divorced parents. I grew up making up stories about my ‘real’ father, pretending he was a war hero who died when, really, my mom couldn’t tell me a damn thing about him. He was just a louse who promised her the moon and stars in the backseat of his car and then didn’t stick around to even find out my name a few months later.”
“Did she have any support? Did her parents—your grandparents —help her out at all?”
“Oh, no. She was tossed out of the house with just a bus ticket to get her to a bigger town. They told her good luck and not to come back there without a husband.”
She sank into a bench near the front door to the bakery, her anger at Will having dissipated like twilight’s mist in the night air. She motioned for him to join her. He squeezed into the space to her right, and she reached over and placed her hand on his.
“I’m sorry.”
He shrugged. “Not your fault, sweetheart.”
“She must have done all right for herself, though. I mean, Will, look at you. You’re a doctor. You’ve ‘made it,’ so to speak. Any mother would be very proud.”
“She is, but she didn’t have it easy.” He drew in a labored breath. “She took her parents’ last words to heart and found herself a couple of different husbands along the way. Not having money growing up or not feeling like I had a complete identity was one thing. Having two stepdads who hated me was another.”
He balled the hand beneath hers into a fist as if preparing for a battle that had long since ended.
“Albert Darcy was the name of my mom’s first husband. He legally adopted me and then ignored me for four years. Once he left for good, Mom remarried and later divorced Steve Olinger, who wouldn’t play catch with me in the yard if he hadn’t been bribed with a beer first.” He gave her a hard, direct look. “And I know that for a fact.”
She hated to think how a young boy would come to know something as awful as that. It would rip her apart to witness Charlie being treated so callously by anyone. She’d never get involved with a man who couldn’t regard her son as his own. A man who wouldn’t love him or who would treat him as if he were another man’s “mistake.”
“Will—”
“Hey, enough about all this.” Though his voice fluttered with forced lightness, steel finality was the core underneath. There would be no returning to this topic tonight. And she knew it, even before the grown man—with the little boy’s hurt still burning inside—jumped up and said, “I’m ready for my cookie now, and I want a big one.”
***
“Did you tell him your real name?” Jane asked a few hours later when Beth stepped through the door and kicked off her high heels.
“Nope.”
“Did you ask him what he thought of social workers?”
“Yep.”
“And?”
“Negative reviews.”
“Jeez. What about single mothers?”
Beth shook her head. “It’s a definite problem.”
“Well, shoot. So that probably ends it, right?” Jane gave her an expectant look.
“Probably.”
The auburn brows jerked upward as though marionette strings controlled their movements. Jane’s lips twisted into a grim line. “I don’t like the sound of this. What’s keeping you holding on to him? You can’t possibly still need more information for the project, can you?”
A sigh forced its way out of her. “Well, there’s never such a thing as having too much research on hand.” Beth unzipped the silky dress and stepped out of it, taking great care not to crease or tear anything. She put in on a hanger and slipped into her thin cotton nightgown while Jane bided her time nearby.
“I’m waiting for the real reason, Beth.”
“In a minute.” She tiptoed into Charlie’s room, kissed her sleeping baby on the cheek and turned to leave, when his voice called her back.
“Mommy?”
“Yes, darling?”
“Me and Auntie Jane had fun tonight, but I missed you.”
“I missed you, too, sweetie.”
“Can we have Worms and Rocks for lunch tomorrow?”
Charlie’s name for spaghetti and meatballs. It was a certainty that they’d stretch the last of the spaghetti through the entire weekend. And she could try to scrounge up a few meatballs for him. “Sure.”
“And can we play ball outside this weekend?”
“We’ll see. Now go to sleep.”
When Beth reemerged, Jane had her arms crossed and her forehead creased in concentration. “So?”
“So, since you’re the most persistent person on the planet, Jane, it’s because I’ve never been kissed like that. Ever.”
“He kissed you?” Her blue-gray eyes widened, and her pointy little jaw dropped.
Beth made a “V” with her index and middle fingers. “Twice.”
“That nice, huh?”
“It was so far beyond ‘nice’ I’d need a thesaurus to find a worthy adjective.”
“Stupendous? Extraordinary? Astonishing? Breathtaking? Stunning? Astounding? Surprising? Remarkable?” Jane supplied with her usual, phenomenal speed.
“Now you’re getting closer.”
Jane squinted, her expression both serious and worried. “You’d better be careful.”
Of course Beth knew she had to be careful. Charlie’s father, Pete Wickham, had been the kind of kisser who made women forget their own names. But Will…he was in a class far superior to her ex-husband. If Pete was a civilian with a stun gun, Will was a Navy SEAL Special Forces commander with an M-16.
Jane left and Beth flicked off all the lights except for the
one in her bedroom. Then she impulsively snatched a slim photo album off her bookshelf.
Oh, Pete. Where are you now? What are you doing? Do you ever think about us?
Opening it to the first page, she admired herself in a tea-length, cream-colored gown. Her wedding gown. Or, more accurately, her secret-elopement gown. The one she’d worn to Vegas in mid-June, eight days after her twentieth birthday, for her spontaneous, Chapel-of-Love marriage to Pete and subsequent conception of her beautiful son.
She flipped through about half of the book. She’d never looked happier. Then again, good things had a way of coming to an end, didn’t they?
By the time Charlie was born the following March, Pete was thoroughly spooked by fatherhood. He was a year ahead of her in school and hung around only long enough to graduate from college that May. He contributed a couple hundred dollars to help with the hospital bill, but no follow-through on child support, no interest in bonding with his newborn son and no honoring of his wedding vows. By her twenty-first birthday, Pete was already a memory, captured only by a handful of old photographs.
Beth snapped the dusty album shut and shoved it back onto the shelf. She thought of Will. For the three-hundredth time. In less than two hours.
After he’d kissed her breathless by her car, he’d asked her out again. It was to be a midday, midweek date to an undisclosed location. A “mystery date.” It was also a little tidbit of information she’d purposely neglected to tell Jane.
Why couldn’t he have been more consistently stereotypical? Then she wouldn’t have had to keep seeing him. She wouldn’t have had to admit he had any genuine reasons for his behavior. This made her work more difficult.
She snickered. Yeah, right. The more honest question would be: Why did she ever think she could fool herself? Her final report wouldn’t be academically stellar, but she knew she could muddle through it well enough now. She just enjoyed the pretense that seeing him another time was a requirement.
But it was getting ever more dangerous. Tonight, before they parted, he’d asked for her address and phone number. “I just want to call and chat some night,” he’d said, resting a casual hand on her shoulder that, nevertheless, made her pulse accelerate faster than his Ferrari.
She put him off. Told him she was rarely home, what with her many commitments and all. Said that emailing was still the quickest and easiest way to get in touch with her.
“For now, maybe,” he said smoothly. “But one of these days you’re going to be sitting on your sofa, sipping your orange juice and watching some boring TV show, wishing I were there to keep you company. It’s a time like that when I’d call…or knock on your door and surprise you in person.”
He’d be the one who’d get surprised, she thought, feeling the bleakness of their situation descend upon her. And, somehow, she doubted his reaction, once the shock wore off, would be that of overwhelming delight.
Next week, she decided. Next week she’d break things off between them.
FIVE
Will tapped the phone against his ear, distorting his cousin’s yakking voice in the process. The grating sound was the only thing that differentiated this particular conversation from the umpteen thousand preceding it. He experimented with twisting the cord, too, but that, unfortunately, altered nothing at all.
“…and the blonde, whoa, baby! You need to meet this one. She must’ve been five-foot-ten at least. She models swimwear, I’m not kidding, out in New York, and her twin sister’s a leading off-Broadway actress who—”
“How far off-Broadway?” Will broke in. “Like, are we talking Queens, or are we talking Quebec?”
“You’re really not that funny,” Bingley said, the junior-high dourness returning to his voice. “I’m only trying to help you out.”
“You’re not trying to help me. You’re trying to amuse yourself. Anyway, I told you, I’m handling it. Look, Bingley—” He gulped some air. “I’ve kind of met someone.” There. He’d said it. His cousin would jump all over him for details, but he had to lay down the groundwork immediately. He was cutting it close on time.
“Well, for goodness sake, Cuz, you could’ve told me that forty minutes ago.”
“What? And missed the weekly recitation of the personals?”
“So, what the hell are you waiting for? What’s the lucky chick like?”
Will thought of Charlotte—her warmth, her intelligence, her wise and impressive choice of profession—and smiled into the phone. “She’s an angel.” A lengthy silence greeted him on the line. “And, oh, she’s twenty-two. Finishing up her degree in child psych. About medium height. Slim. Wavy light-brown hair. Beautiful mouth.”
This stuff Bingley understood. “Well, alrighty then. Looks like you’ve got yourself a babe. How many dates into it are you?”
“Our third date’s tomorrow. I’ve kept all the receipts from the first two, and I’ve printed out every one of her emails. I’m not ready to introduce her to you yet, but with Mother’s Day weekend a month away, I figure I’ve got a while.”
“A month’s a long time, Cuz.” Bingley tittered on the other end of the line. “How ‘bout I up the ante a bit? Are you game?”
Apprehension shot through Will like an iodine injection. “Jeez, Bingley, don’t back out on me now.”
“I’m not backing out, just raising the stakes a notch. We keep the same terms as before—bring her over to my place all lovey-dovey and everything, and it better be authentic, and you get the start-up sum I promised. But with a whole month to go, I’ll add this rider onto it.” He chuckled. “Bring her in with an engagement ring, and I’ll double the money I promised.”
“An engagement ring?”
“Yeah. Yours, not some other guy’s. Got it?”
“No, Bingley, I couldn’t…” But even as he said it, his mind spun wildly. Double the money? That would be an enormous amount of funding. The supplies they could have on hand. The extra staff they could hire. They could install central air in the building immediately instead of waiting until next summer. It would be phenomenal. But phenomenal enough to propose marriage to a woman? Even a woman as remarkable as Charlotte Lucas? Too soon to tell.
“Think about it, Cuz,” Bingley said to him in his best voice of temptation.
Will just sighed.
“Your mama would treat me like Prince Bingley himself if she knew I helped lead you to the altar.”
“Crumpets may be headed your way regardless.”
“What?” Bingley asked.
“Nothing.”
After Will hung up on his ever-scheming, second-closest relative, he poured himself a strong cup of Vanilla Bean and settled in with the stacks of paper before him. All for the clinic. First Bingley and now the hospital board. Much as he despised social workers and the social services agencies he’d had the misfortune to deal with as a child and, later, as a doctor, he’d been given a not-so-subtle hint today that he needed to play nice with them.
Dr. Hans Emrick, sixty-one-year-old chief of staff and Swiss import, informed him that the hospital board would surely request a consulting social worker for the clinic when approval went through. When. That, at least, had a hopeful ring to it. Emrick gave him a number to call. Some guy Emrick said was okay. Direct line to the guy’s office.
“Might as well select your own people,” the older doctor told him, thrusting the slip of paper his way. “Otherwise, they’ll foist someone on you, like it or not.”
Will unfolded the crumpled note and glanced at the name and number. He sighed and picked up the phone.
“Chicago Social Services,” the man said when he answered. “Dan Noelen speaking.”
***
“I’m ninety-three if I’m a day,” Lynn Hammond told Beth proudly, “but, girl, I feel like I’m only eighty.”
“And you look just wonderful, too, Mrs. Hammond. How have the exercises been going?”
“Ah, the darned stroke, you know. Can’t move like I done back in the ‘50s.” She laughed, loud and hearty, th
en plunked her substantial body down in the wooden rocker across from where Beth sat. The older woman leaned forward, handing her a list written in large, somewhat wavering script. “There be the biggest problems I got. Don’t ‘spect you to solve ‘em all, but some’d help a lot. Really could use them Merry Maids. Edna raved about those gals.”
Beth scribbled the request down in her notebook and scanned the short list Mrs. Hammond gave her. The dear lady wasn’t being demanding like Anna Marie Dermott. In fact, Lynn Hammond rarely asked for much. Just enough support to help her maintain her dignity. To allow her to feel as if she were fully capable of taking care of herself and her life.
She sipped the iced tea the woman brought in when Beth first arrived. “Yum, this is delicious.”
“Well, drink up, girl. Plenty more there in the fridge for ya.”
“Thank you.” Beth finished making notes and returned the list to the woman. “Every request you made is reasonable and, I believe, easily achievable. I know you’re up for recertification this month, so my supervisor will be contacting you soon and a full-time social worker, probably Abby, will need to oversee signing the final papers. But there shouldn’t be any problem with these additions.”
“Abby? That blond, nosy one, right?”
Beth laughed. “Well…um, she is blond.”
“I thought of being blond one time.” Mrs. Hammond winked and touched her tight afro curls, gray with a few hints of black. “Tried out one of them special wash-in colors. Made me look like my head was sprouting hay. ‘Fraid some horse on my Uncle Manny’s farm might come up to me and take a nibble.” She gave a good-natured grin. “You ever try anything diff’rent, child?”
“Not with my hair,” Beth admitted. Only with my research projects.
“Well, now, s’perimenting can be a good thing. Gerald, my first husband, he always said, “Them who don’t take chances, also don’t take life’s best gifts. ‘Course when he said it he was trying to get me to marry him.” She let out a throaty laugh.
Pride, Prejudice and the Perfect Match Page 5
