It was a room for a little boy, with blue-and-white striped wallpaper with a border of boats sailing a rough sea. The bed looked like a new version of a sleigh bed, but with safety bars and sides that lowered; a whole set of Winnie-the-Pooh characters were tucked into a corner. The linens of the bed were hand embroidered with tiny animals and plants, something that Jason knew Max would love to look at. To test his theory, he put Max in the bed, where he immediately pulled himself up, then began to grab at the mobile until he got a horse’s head in his mouth.
The rest of the room was filled with furniture of equal quality. There was a rocking chair, a changing table, a car seat, a high chair, a toy box that had to have been decorated by Native Americans, and in the corner was a stack of white boxes.
“More linens and a few necessities,” Parker said as she followed Jason’s eyes. “There are a few pieces of clothing, but I wasn’t sure of the size . . .” She trailed off.
“This costs more than I have,” Amy said, and there were tears in her voice.
“Two hundred and fifty dollars for the lot,” Parker said quickly.
Amy squinted her eyes at the woman. “Are these things stolen? Is this an outlet for stolen goods?”
“I would imagine that in a way, yes, they are stolen,” Jason said quickly. “If these things are still in the possession of the store owner come tax time, he’ll have to pay taxes on what they’re worth. But if he sells them at a loss, he can write off the loss and be taxed on the amount he has received, which is a pittance. Am I right?” he asked Parker.
“Perfectly,” she said, then turned back to Amy. “Perhaps you don’t like this room. We have others.”
“No, it’s perfect,” Amy said, then before she could say another word, Jason spoke up.
“We’ll take it. Have it delivered today.” As he said this, he glanced at his two executives leaning on brooms and watching the scene with smug little smiles. By tomorrow everyone is all his offices would know about this. “And I think you should throw in someone to hang the wallpaper.”
At that Amy gave a little whimper that said she was sure Jason was going to make the woman retract the deal.
“Certainly, sir,” Parker said without a hint of a smile, then turned to Max in the bed. Now he was on his back and trying to kick the sides off, the sound reverberating through the store. “What a beautiful child,” she said, then held out her arms as though she meant to pick Max up.
The baby let out a howl that shook the bed. Immediately, Amy was there, her arms out to Max. “Sorry,” she muttered. “He doesn’t take to strangers very well.” And at that Max made a leap into Jason’s arms.
Jason wasn’t going to look at his two vice presidents because he knew that they would assume that Max was his. How else to explain that Jason wasn’t a “stranger” to the child?
“I’ll pay while you look around,” Jason said as he followed Parker to a nearby counter. “The pencils are overkill,” he snapped as soon as they were out of earshot of Amy.
“Yes sir,” she said as she removed them from her hair.
“And what are those two doing here?”
“You had to buy the store in order to pull this off. I didn’t feel that I had the authority to negotiate with that much money.”
“How much could a tiny shop like this cost?”
“The man said to tell you that his name is Harry Greene and that you’d understand.”
Jason’s eyes rolled upward for a moment. In high school he had stolen Harry’s girlfriend the day before the prom. “Did you manage to buy it for under seven figures?”
“Just barely. Sir, what do we do about the people waiting outside? The newspaper ad appeared in only your paper, but somehow . . .”
“They’re friends of Amy’s.” For a moment he looked around Max, who was trying to grab the telephone off the desk, to see Amy running her hand lovingly over the baby furniture. “Give them the same deal. Give everything away at a loss. Make sure everything is given away for what they can afford. Split the rooms up so every woman out there gets something she needs.”
When he looked back, Parker was staring at him with her mouth open. “And get those two back to New York right after they hang the wallpaper.”
“Yes, sir,” Parker answered softly, looking at him as though she’d never seen him before.
Jason removed Max’s hands from around a curtain hanging from the top of a cradle. “And, Parker, add some toys to that lot when you deliver it. No,” he contradicted himself. “Don’t add anything. I’ll buy the toys myself.”
“Yes, sir,” Parker said quietly.
“Did Charles get here?”
“He came with me. He’s at your father’s house, as all of us are.” By her expression she looked to be on the verge of shock.
“Now close your mouth and go open the door to the other customers,” he said as he peeled Max’s hands off the curtain again and went back to Amy.
CHAPTER SEVEN
JASON WAS EXPERIENCING AN EMOTION HE HADN’T FELT IN a long time: jealousy.
“Isn’t it wonderful?” Amy was saying in a breathless way he hadn’t heard from a female since he’d left high school. “Isn’t it the most beautiful room you ever saw? I never thought I could love the IRS, but since it was the cause of Max getting all these beautiful things, I could grow to love them. Don’t you think so, Mr. Wilding? Don’t you think the room is beautiful?”
“Yes,” Jason said grumpily, while telling himself that it was better to give anonymously than to flaunt your gift. At least that’s what he’d heard. But he rather wished Amy would look at him with her eyes sparkling like that.
He took a deep breath. “It is nice. The room looks great. Do you think the clothes will fit?”
“If they don’t now, they will next week,” she said, laughing. “See, I told you that God would provide.”
Before Jason could give a cynical reply as he thought about how much these few pieces of furniture had actually cost him, since he’d had to buy the store, there was a loud, insistent knock on the door.
Instantly, Amy’s face went white. “They made a mistake and they want everything back.”
Jason’s bad mood left him and he couldn’t help putting a reassuring arm around Amy’s thin shoulders. “I can assure you that everything here is yours. Maybe it’s Santa Claus come early.”
When she still hesitated, Jason picked up Max from the crib, where he was trying to eat the legs off a stuffed frog, then led the way to the front door, where he was greeted by the sight of a huge evergreen tree.
“Ho ho ho,” came David’s voice as he shoved his way inside the house. “Merry Christmas. Jase, ol’ boy, you want to bring in the boxes from outside?”
“David!” came Amy’s squeal of delight. “You shouldn’t have.”
Outside in the cold, Max sitting on his arm, Jason muttered, “Oh, David, you shouldn’t have,” in a falsetto voice. “I paid heaven only knows how much for a bunch of furniture and she thanks the IRS no less. But David shows up with a twenty-dollar tree and it’s, ‘Oh, David.’ Women!”
Max laughed, raked his nails across Jason’s cheek in an attempt to pat him, then bit his other cheek in a kiss. “Why don’t you do that to the divine Dr. David?” Jason said, smiling at the boy as he hoisted a big red cardboard box under his arm and took it into the house.
“You can’t do this,” Amy was still saying but looking at David adoringly.
“Dad and I don’t want a tree. We’re just a couple of old bachelors and we don’t need the needles everywhere, so when a patient gave me this tree, I thought about the attic full of ornaments and thought Max would love the lights. Don’t you think he will?”
“Oh, yes, I’m sure he will, but I’m not sure—”
David cut her off by going toward Jason and holding out his arms to Max. “Come here, Max, and give me a hug.”
To Jason’s great satisfaction, Max let out a howl that made the tree drop quite a few needles. “Doesn’t seem to like
you, does he?” Jason said smugly. “Come on, boy, let’s go try on some of your new clothes.”
“New clothes?” David asked, frowning. “What’s this about?”
“Oh, David, you can’t believe what has happened. This morning we went to a store where the man was selling everything cheaply so he wouldn’t have to pay taxes on it and Mr. Wilding made them come and hang the wallpaper and arrange the furniture and . . . and . . . Oh, you’ll just have to see it to believe it.”
With a look at Jason, David followed Amy through the old house with its peeling paint and water-stained wallpaper, to have her open a door to a dazzling nursery. It didn’t take much of an eye to see the quality of everything inside. The linens, the furniture, the pretty little prints on the wall, the painted wardrobe that held a few pieces of fabulous baby clothes, were all the finest that could be bought.
“I see,” David said. “And how much did you have to pay for all this?”
“Two hundred and fifty dollars, sales tax included,” Amy said proudly.
David lifted a hand-embroidered sheet from the side of the crib. If he wasn’t mistaken, he’d seen these in a catalog for about three hundred dollars each. “Great,” David said. “By contrast my tree and old ornaments look like nothing.”
“How silly,” Amy said as she took his arm. “Your gift is from your heart, while this is merely from the IRS.”
At that, David shot a triumphant smile at his older brother as he led Amy back into the living room.
“And I brought dinner,” David said happily. “A grateful patient of mine gave me a free dinner for two at a restaurant in Carlton, but I persuaded the chef to make it a carryout for three. I hope it’s still hot,” he said as he looked up at his brother. “The food boxes are on the front seat of my car. Oh! and I hope you don’t mind, but I signed you and Max up as guinea pigs to try a new baby food.” At that he began to unload his pockets of baby food jars with hand-lettered labels, and Jason recognized his secretary’s neat script.
“Rack of lamb with dried cherry and green peppercorn sauce,” Amy read. “And salmon cakes with cilantro sauce. They sound a bit high fashion for a baby, and I’m not sure he should have peppercorns.”
“I think the company is trying to reach the top-end market. It’s just in the planning stages now, so if you’d rather not be one of their test babies, I could get Martha Jenkins to try them.”
“No,” Amy said, taking the jars David held out to her. “I’m sure Max will like them.” Her tone said she wasn’t sure at all. “Who is the manufacturer?”
“Charles and Company,” David said as he winked at Jason, still standing by the door, still holding Max, still scowling. “Come on, old man, don’t just stand there; let’s get everything inside so we can eat, then decorate the tree.”
Jason handed the baby to Amy, then followed his brother outside.
“What in the world is wrong with you?” David snapped as soon as they were away from the door.
“Nothing is wrong with me,” Jason snapped back.
“You hate it here, don’t you? You hate the noise and the falling-down old house, and Amy is boring compared to the women you’re used to. Didn’t you date some woman with a Ph.D. in anthropology? Didn’t she save tigers or something?”
“It was fish. She saved whales, and she smelled like seaweed. There is nothing wrong with me. So Charles made the dinners and the baby food?”
“Is that what’s bothering you? That I took credit for what you’d paid for? Look, if you want, we can tell her the truth right now. We can tell her you’re a multimillionaire, or is it a billionaire by now, and that you can afford rooms full of baby furniture from what you carry in your pocket. Is that what you want to do?”
“No,” Jason said slowly as David loaded his arms with boxes of Christmas ornaments. They were boxes he’d seen all through his childhood, and he knew everything that was inside them.
Suddenly David stopped and stared at his brother. “You’re not falling for her are you? I mean, you and I aren’t going to have to compete for a woman, are we?”
“Don’t be ridiculous. Amy isn’t my type at all. And she has no concept of the future. I don’t know how she means to support that child on the small amount of cash she has coming in. She has no work or prospect of work. She can’t do anything at all except clean things. But in spite of her situation, she has more pride than anyone I’ve ever met. If you told her who I was, she’d kick me out, and no doubt throw all the furniture into the street after me. She spent this afternoon scrubbing that car Parker gave me so she could pay me back the two fifty. If you knew . . .”
They were walking toward the house, and Jason was still talking.
“Knew what?” David asked softly.
“The women I date ask for five hundred just to tip the maid in the toilet. That fish woman. She was dating me only so I’d make a donation to her whales.”
“So what’s your problem then?” David asked. “Why are you so surly?”
“Because my little brother duped me into spending time in this one-horse town and going to baby stores and carrying old Christmas ornaments. Get the door, will you? No, the other way. You have to pull inward, then turn the knob. Is that your phone ringing or mine?”
“Mine,” David said as soon as they were in the house. “Yeah,” he said into the receiver. “Yes, yes, that’s good. I’ll be there as soon as I can get there.” As he turned the phone off, he looked up at Amy, Jason, and the baby with regret. “I can’t stay. Emergency.”
“I’m so sorry,” Amy said. “After you did all this work and now you can’t stay.”
“Yeah, it’s a shame,” Jason said as he held open the door for his younger brother. “But when work calls, you have to go.”
Frowning, David made his way to the door. “Maybe we can put up the tree tomorrow. I’d really like to see the baby’s expression when he first sees the lights.”
“We’ll make a video,” Jason said quickly. “Now, I think you’d better go before somebody dies.”
“Yeah, right,” David said after one last look of regret tossed to Amy. “I’ll see you—” He didn’t finish his sentence because Jason shut the door in his face.
“You weren’t very nice to him,” Amy said, doing her best to frown at Jason, but he could see a hint of a smile about her lips.
“Horrible,” Jason said agreeably. “But now there’s more food for the two of us. And, besides, I’m much better at tree decorating than he is.”
“Is that so? You have to go some to beat me. Why I’ve decorated trees that have made Santa weep.”
“I decorated a tree so beautiful that Santa wouldn’t leave my house and I had to push him out into the snow, and when he still wouldn’t leave, I had to drive his sleigh and deliver all his gifts.”
Amy laughed. “You win. Let’s see what’s in these boxes.”
“Nope. We eat first. I want to try this new baby food on Max and see what he thinks. Does this fireplace work?”
“Better than the furnace,” Amy replied.
“I repeat, Does this fireplace work?”
Amy giggled. “If you open the damper very wide and build the fire way back against the wall, it’s okay. Otherwise it smokes a lot.”
“Had experience with it, have you?”
“Let’s just say that I had some pork chops in the freezer and after the first time I tried to make a fire in there, they were smoke-cured hams.”
It was Jason’s turn to laugh, and when he did, Max started to laugh too, banging his hands on his legs and nearly knocking his mother down.
“You think that’s funny, do you?” Jason said, still laughing as he took the boy and tossed him into the air. Max was so delighted at this that he squealed until he got the hiccups, then Jason tickled him and he squealed some more.
When Jason stopped, hugging the sweaty baby close to him, Amy was looking at him in a way no woman had ever looked at him before. “You’re a nice man, Mr. Wilding. A very nice man.”
“No,” she said as she turned away. “I’ll heat dinner while you light the smoker.”
For some reason her refusal to call him by his first name pleased him. He set Max on the floor, then started building the fire. It took a while because every three minutes he had to pull Max away from a life-threatening situation. But at last he had the fire going without too much smoke, he had Max interested in his Breitling watch (it would never be the same again), and Amy entered the room with an enormous tray full of food. There was also a bottle of wine and two glasses.
Jason held up one of the glasses, watching the colors in the lead crystal. Waterford. “David does know how to live, doesn’t he?”
“I feel guilty eating this without him,” Amy said. “After all, it was his skill as a doctor that earned the meal.”
“We could always wrap it up, put it in the refrigerator, and he can have it tomorrow.”
Amy looked down at the beautiful meal on the tray. There was a salad of baby lettuces and vegetables, roast lamb, potatoes . . .
She looked back up at Jason. “I don’t have any plastic wrap.”
“That settles it then. We’ll just have to eat it ourselves.”
“I guess so,” Amy said seriously; then they laughed and dug in.
Max sat on Jason’s lap, a huge bib around his neck, and ate everything that was offered to him. Whatever Amy had thought about his not liking solid food was disproved by the way he downed a whole jar of lamb with peppercorns; then he started in on Jason’s mashed potatoes with garlic.
“But I thought babies liked bland food,” Amy said in amazement.
“No one likes bland food,” Jason said under his breath.
Thirty minutes later Amy had nursed Max until he fell asleep, an angelic smile on his face. “Do you think it’s the food or the new room that’s made him look like that?” Amy asked as she looked adoringly down at her son in his new crib.
The Blessing Page 6
