Child by Chance

by Tara Taylor Quinn

  “I don’t.” Kent sat at the table, already dressed in jeans, a button-down shirt and a sweater—green today—with his hands in his lap. Awaiting the cold cereal and toast Sherman was in the process of getting for him.

  The butter dropped from his knife to the toast, catching the side of his hand, as well. Sherman spread quickly, dropped the toast to the counter and licked the side of his hand.

  He poured milk. Added a spoon to the bowl of Kent’s latest choice in sugared cereal, took that and the toast to the table, a smile on his face. “Why not?”

  “Where’s your cereal?”

  “I’m not having any this morning.” He’d pulled off at a twenty-four-hour diner on his way home from the city and wasn’t hungry.

  “What time did you get home?”

  “Sometime after midnight.”

  “Way after midnight. I got up at 2:00 a.m. to pee and Ben and Sandy were still here, sleeping in the recliners.”

  The love seat portion of the leather sectional he and Brooke had purchased the year before she...

  Yes, well, he was glad that Ben and Sandy made use of the love seat.

  “I was with a client.”

  “I don’t care if you’re out screwing someone, Dad.”

  Anger burst through him. He very carefully took the space between stimulus and response, to make certain that, for his son’s sake, he didn’t say something he’d regret.

  Then he sat. Crossed his hands. Leaned over. And looked his son square in the eyeballs. “There are many things wrong with that comment,” he said slowly, but with no doubt to his seriousness. “First, screwing is an inappropriate way to describe any relationship I might have with a woman. Second, if I was making love with a woman it would be absolutely none of your business. And third, I was with a sixty-year-old man at a basketball game and then we went to a restaurant, where I had a glass of sparkling water and he had a whiskey sour while we discussed Sadie Bishop’s county auditor campaign, after which I got in the BMW and drove home, stopping only for a plate of greasy scrambled eggs, hash browns and toast. I have done nothing to deserve your disrespect.”

  Kent chewed. Crunching his cereal as if he was set to win a contest. His throat bulged when he swallowed.

  “Yes, sir,” he said then. “You’re right. On all three counts. I’m sorry.”

  “Apology accepted.”

  Kent crunched some more. And Sherman sought to understand the boy.

  Patience was the key. He was certain of that. He just wished he knew what to say sometimes, while he was waiting for patience to work its magic.

  “So...how about that trip to the driving range?” he asked, back to his cheery self, when no other words presented themselves. Clark Vanderpohl and his son were meeting them at the course in less than an hour.

  “Uh-uh.”

  Patience.

  “Why not?” His tone was right on cue. Easy and nonthreatening.

  “You’re only taking me because you have business to do,” he said.

  “That’s not true, son.” He was completely sure about that.

  “So we’re not meeting someone who has something to do with one of your precious campaigns?”

  Kent’s tone wasn’t easy. Or in any way upbeat or even particularly kind. But then, he was only ten.

  Sherman was the adult here. Didn’t matter how much he hurt, too, he had to maintain the order in their lives.

  “I didn’t say that,” he said after giving himself the few seconds pause he needed to choose his response.

  “Ha! See, I knew it.” Kent slurped his milk.

  Brooke would have said something about that. Sherman started to. But pulled himself back.

  “What I said,” Sherman continued, his tone as even as ever, “was that I’m not just taking you because I have business to do. It’s the complete opposite, in fact. I invited Mr. Vanderpohl and his son to join us because I’d already planned to take you to the driving range, as I promised last weekend, and I wasn’t going to disappoint you.”

  Kent came first. He always had.

  “Cole’s going to be there?” Kent’s face lit up as he mentioned the banker’s son.

  “Yes.”

  “Cool!” Picking up his bowl, Kent put it to his lips, emptied it, licked the spoon and then very carefully wiped his mouth with his napkin, put the spoon in the bowl and carried the ensemble over to the sink.

  Some moments he was still pretty much a perfect kid.

  * * *

  HER PALMS WERE SWEATING. Tanner had said she’d be fine. She’d believed him. He was wrong.

  Making a beeline for the teacher’s lounge, Talia made it to the bathroom in time to throw up. And then sat there shaking. She must have the flu.

  Her forehead was cool to her touch.

  But she definitely felt off.

  Emotionally, she was a rock. Could count the number of times she’d cried since she was five.

  Maybe it was something she ate.

  Did that make you shake?

  She could call someone. Sedona.

  Pulling out her cell phone she pictured her new sister-in-law in her legal office, all capable and smart, answering her phone. Asking Talia questions that she wouldn’t want to answer.

  No, calling wasn’t a good idea.

  Kent Paulson, Sherman Paulson’s son, was sitting in the principal’s office, working on his assignments for the week. She was permitted to work with him at any time over the next hour.

  The hour was ticking past.

  He didn’t need her.

  This was about her. Because she wanted to meet him.

  No, that wasn’t right. She just needed to make sure he was okay.

  And if he wasn’t, she’d do what she could to see that he got the help he needed. From someone else.

  As if his artwork was somehow going to give her a glimpse into his little-boy soul and she’d magically know what he needed?

  Or maybe she’d know something instinctively because of who he was?

  Did a woman still get maternal instincts when she gave up her baby for adoption?

  Her stomach roiled and she almost puked again.

  God, what was the matter with her? Nothing scared her.

  Nothing.

  Except maybe when Tatum had been missing. She’d been scared then.

  Because she loved that kid.

  She didn’t love Kent. She couldn’t. She didn’t even know him.

  He wasn’t hers to love.

  It was just going to be art.

  Pictures in old magazines that she’d thought would be suited to a ten-year-old kid. Okay, magazines that Tatum and Sedona and Tanner had gone with her to buy Sunday night when she’d stopped by their place on the way home from work.

  But still, just some pictures. He might not even cooperate.

  Or like her.

  So, fine. If he didn’t like her, that was fine. He didn’t have to like her.

  He just had to pick some damned pictures so she could be sure he was fine.

  She gagged again. But didn’t have any stomach contents to lose.

  This was ridiculous.

  With a good long look at herself in the mirror, Talia bent, rinsed her mouth, pulled a stick of gum out of her mouth and opened the door.

  Maybe he’d like her if she gave him a stick of her gum?

  CHAPTER FOUR

  THE FIRST TIME he’d seen Brooke, Sherman had been walking across campus, mentally rehearsing the debate he was about to win. She’d been in the middle of the lush green quad, in shorts and a tank top, lying on a blanket reading a book.

  He’d stumbled. And damned near missed the competition that had ultimately, four years and many debates later, won him a scholarship
to graduate school.

  A lot had happened between then and now. Running into her at a concert on campus. Being inseparable for the remainder of their four years of undergraduate studies. Convincing her to put her marketing skills to work in his field and joining him as he signed on with one of the nation’s top campaign management firms.

  Years of miscarriages. Thousands of dollars spent on failed in vitro attempts.

  Seeing Kent for the first time, less than an hour after his birth. They’d decided, long before he was born, to wait until his tenth birthday to tell him he was adopted. They’d wanted him to have grown to take their loving him for granted, to feel a part of them and to make the telling part of the celebration. They were going to tell him about his birth. And about how long they’d waited for him to come into their lives.

  If he were the boy’s biological father, would he know what to do with him? How to reach him? Help him? Was there some “fatherly” instinct that he was missing?

  He and Brooke had talked it over a lot before his birth. The whole time they’d been preparing his nursery. Their ability to instinctively know what was right for their child even though they didn’t birth him. Like knowing that he shouldn’t know he was adopted. They’d made considered choices, based on weighing all sides of the situation.

  Until he was ten, they’d decided not to tell anyone he was adopted. There were a few who knew, of course. People they worked with. But anyone who hadn’t seen them in a while, anyone new to them, just assumed that they’d had him biologically. Kent was all theirs. That was all that mattered. Sherman had no family close enough to know that Brooke hadn’t been pregnant. No one who would care one way or the other about his son’s biological parentage.

  Brooke was really the driving force behind the decision. She’d been adopted. To a couple who’d had a biological child a couple of years later. They made such a big deal of finally having a biological daughter. They told everyone about their miracle. By the time she was a teenager she’d been consumed with the need to find her own biological connection—filled with a need to be someone’s miracle.

  Her adopted parents had seemed almost relieved to have her do so, as though they were all right with being done with her. Or so it had seemed to the teenage Brooke. They’d continued to support her, both financially and otherwise, after her birth mother had refused to meet her.

  Sherman had met them a few times, but with them in New York and him and Brooke in California, the visits had been infrequent. They’d appeared to him to love their daughters equally. But after she’d died, he’d never heard from them again.

  Regardless of the fact that Brooke had never told them that Kent wasn’t her biological child. Bottom line to them, he supposed, was that he wasn’t theirs.

  With Brooke gone, with Kent being so emotionally vulnerable all of a sudden, he hadn’t known what to do regarding his adoptive status. Logic told him the boy would have to know at some point. You just didn’t keep something like that from a person for their whole life. Shortly before Kent’s tenth birthday he’d talked to Kent’s therapist, Neil Jordon, about telling the boy the truth about his parentage, and had been quite relieved when Dr. Jordon had adamantly advised against breaking the news to him anytime in the near future. Kent was in no state to have his security, his foundation, further rocked.

  Of course the fact that Dr. Jordon thought it would have been far easier on all of them to make the adoption a part of their family story from the beginning hadn’t been as welcome a pronouncement.

  It was lunchtime on Monday. Or rather, sixty minutes past the lunch hour, but the time that he and Brooke had set aside as sacred. Even if one or the other could only spare fifteen minutes, or five, out of a busy day, assuming they were both in the office, they used to meet at 1:30 p.m. every single day. If neither of them had had a lunch appointment, they’d share whatever they’d brought from home to eat. Sometimes, they’d just fill each other in on the fact that they’d catch up at home that night. More than once they’d locked his office door and made love.

  Occasionally, they’d fought.

  That last day, the fatal day, they’d fought. She’d made plans to have dinner in north LA with a nationally known reporter, Alan Klasky, from a not-so-reputable online news source—part of a plan the marketing team had come up with for damage control for a candidate who’d been caught on film at a strip club. The plan was to promise the rag exclusives from their office for the remainder of the campaign.

  Brooke hadn’t been fond of the plan. Sherman had hated it, preferring to handle the blow they’d been dealt by the man’s penchant for lap dances by flooding the press with the candidate’s good deeds, of which there were hundreds. By getting good family press for him. From reputable sources.

  Marketing had preferred to get in bed with a group that wasn’t going to go away. They gave in to the blackmail.

  Brooke was the bait. Chosen by their CEO because of her professionalism, her intelligence, her ability to create on a dime and because she was female.

  She’d been honored by the recognition. Felt herself up to the task.

  Sherman watched the fifteen minutes tick by that he still set aside, every single day that he was in the office, to close his office door and give his heart, mind and soul over to the woman he’d vowed to love forever.

  Even though he’d stopped making love to her more than a year before her death.

  It was a fine line between honor, decency, integrity—and justification. A line upon which he had to balance every single day of his life.

  * * *

  “HI.”

  In the end, that was all there was. One word. No grand introduction. Nothing at all remarkable.

  The little boy looked up at her, and Talia’s throat closed as she recognized not only the blue-gray eyes studying her, but their intensity even more. He was a few years older than Tatum had been when Talia had left home, but that look was very similar.

  “Hi,” he said, turning back to the workbook in front of him, the neat rows of pencil-written numbers in the three-digit multiplication problems he’d been solving.

  “I’m Ms. Malone.”

  The words won her another of those glances. He nodded.

  Looking around for a chair, Talia prayed that she wouldn’t throw up again.

  Snagging a chair and pulling it close enough to reach his desk, she sat down. Kent pulled back, his eyebrows drawing together and up.

  “I’m going to be working with you all week,” she said, wishing she’d taken Mrs. Barbour’s offer to introduce them, after all. The principal had been busy. And she’d wanted the moment to herself.

  “What, you’re, like, my monitor or something?” Belligerence, or derision, entered his tone as he gave a half scoff. As though he was too cool for words.

  Or too old to need a babysitter.

  “No.” I’m your mother. The words flew, unwelcome and without permission into her brain. “I’m working with the sixth-grade art classes and have an hour break each day, and since everyone else here already has jobs to do, I’ll be spending my break time with you.”

  “Got stuck with me, you mean.”

  “That’s funny, and here I was thinking you were going to figure you were being stuck with me.”

  That gave him pause. And then, “So, what, you’re just going to sit there and watch me do my math?”

  He eyed the thick satchel she’d set on the floor by her feet. And sounded as if he kind of hoped she had more in store for him.

  He was bored. She figured that out quickly enough.

  “Nope. I’m here to work, not babysit,” she said, wondering where the words were coming from. Surprised by the ease with which they slid off her tongue. The battered women hadn’t been such a leap for her, but she was still a bit stiff with the kids. Until she pretended they were all little Tatums. Or until they
got going on their collages and then she got so engrossed in reading their picture messages, in helping them compose those messages, express themselves, that she forgot to worry about anything else.

  But this was...a ten-year-old boy who just happened to have shared her belly for nine months.

  Oh, God. She was going to throw up again.

  “What, you brought papers to grade?” he asked, his nose scrunched as he glanced at her bag again and then frowned at her.

  He wasn’t rejecting her presence beside him. Didn’t seem to dislike her being there.

  “No,” she said, reaching down to her bag, thinking about putting her head between her knees while she was at it.

  There was a trash can not far off. There if she needed it.

  She wasn’t going to need it.

  “We’re going to do an art project,” she said instead, and pulled out the stack of magazines. A motorcycle and car one. Travel. Surfing. Boating. Sports—but not the famous one with pictures of girls. Home and Garden. Tatum had laughed at that one, but Talia would bet a week’s groceries that Kent would use it. Maybe he’d home in on some brownies on a plate or a basketball hoop in a backyard display...

  “What about my math and sentences for English?” There was no sign of the tough guy as Kent glanced down into her open satchel to see colored papers, markers, glue and a couple of plastic containers of assorted embellishments. She had his attention.

  “What you don’t finish at school today you have to do as homework,” she told him.

  “Cool.” Closing his book, he turned to her with eagerness in his smile. And Talia had the strangest urge to give him a hug.

  * * *

  MONDAY’S DINNER PRETTY much summed up Sherman’s day.

  He’d had errands to run—a case of flyers to drop off at a candidate’s office, shirts and pants to pick up from the cleaners, and they were out of toothpaste—after picking Kent up from school and was still in his creased gray pants, white button-down and gray-and-white silk tie as his son dropped into his seat at the kitchen table and announced that he was starving.

  “You never did tell me how school went today,” Sherman said as he dumped salad from a bag, tossed it with the chicken nuggets he’d just pulled from the oven, added some dressing and put it on plates for him and Kent.