by Abby Tyler
She headed to the closet to see if there was room for the baby’s things when Jack’s voice stopped her cold.
“I didn’t realize you would be going through everything I owned just because you’re the nanny,” he snapped.
Louisa paused, fingers on the knob. “You know what,” she said, turning slowly. “Soon this baby is going to need a crib, a place to play, and space to crawl. I’m not trying to go through your things, Jack. I’m just trying to get a handle on where I’m going to be putting things away. What space is going to belong to Ella here?”
“She’s just a baby. She doesn’t need space.”
“Not yet. But she will. And how do you know that Jenica is going to have good behavior? Anything could happen. And even when she gets out, she’s probably going to have to prove herself before they let her have a baby. They’ll want to know that she’s not going to go right back to her old habits. She might have to live here with you.”
She could tell he was clenching his jaw. But these were all things she had thought about last night as she read the baby book and realized how much care a newborn required.
Jenica, even if she did get out when Ella was six months old, would have a baby who would soon be crawling everywhere. All Louisa had to do was picture her tiny baby hand landing on a syringe embedded in the carpet, and there was no way she was going to let anybody have this baby before they were ready.
Not on her watch.
The expression on Jack’s face told her he was thinking the same thing. He might’ve convinced himself having baby Ella was a six-month gig, but unless motherhood had transformed Jenica, even while she was away from her baby, there might not be any change of circumstance when she got out.
“Do you think I need to get rid of all this equipment?” Jack asked, his voice stony. “I use it every day.”
“Have you used it every day since Ella came?
“No. But I’d like to think that I will eventually get into a routine again.”
That was fair enough. He really should be able to do some of the things he enjoyed, particularly at home.
She looked around. “Well, eventually the stuff will have to go if this is going to be Ella’s bedroom. But for now, while she’s little, we could probably just move the smaller things to your bedroom, and keep this big contraption here.” She waved toward an empty corner. A crib will go there when Ella outgrows the bassinet.”
“When will that be?”
“As soon as she can roll over. We still have three months.”
“Should I just put the crib in my room like her bassinet?”
They seemed to have gotten past their argument and were talking like civilized people again. “Well, there are several schools of thought on that. You might want to read up on it. But I would personally have the crib in a separate room for when the baby is ready for it. That way you can put her down and have use of your bedroom.”
As soon as she said the words, her face bloomed hot.
But Jack only nodded. “I guess we don’t have to decide that right now.”
“Exactly. I was just trying to figure out where her space will be. And where mine will be, when I’m here all night.”
“Oh.”
So he hadn’t thought of it.
“I guess I can sleep on the sofa. That just puts me a little far away from her if the bassinet is in your room.”
“I guess we do need a place for you to sleep. I’ll need it anyway if Jenica ends up here like you said.”
Jack rubbed his forehead. “We’ll get a twin bed or daybed or something for you. The bassinet is light and easy to switch between rooms. As we get to the point where she needs a crib, I’ll think about what to do with this big weight set.”
“Now you sound like you’re planning.” Louisa walked away from the closet. She didn’t have to look in it now. “Normally new parents have months to prepare a nursery.”
He glanced at his watch. “I should get going. I want to review a bunch of things before my shift starts. There are several casseroles in the fridge. And you know where Ella’s things are already.” He hesitated. “Thank you, Louisa. I would be really stuck without you.”
Heck yes, he would, but Louisa didn’t say it. She simply answered, “You’re welcome. We’ll see you at the end of your shift.”
With a quick nod, Jack strode out of the room. Louisa remained behind, going over the potential positions of the bed, the changing table, and all the things the baby would eventually need.
The front door opened and closed. Jack was gone.
Back in the living room, Ella had awakened, quietly looking up at the ceiling fan whirring above their heads. Louisa sat on the floor next to her. “You just watch, baby girl. We’ll make a father out of him yet.”
Chapter 9
When Jack got off his shift the next morning, he felt an exhilaration that he hadn’t experienced in weeks. Maybe years.
He had done the impossible. He’d taken in his sister’s baby, hired a nanny, and managed to return to work. This had been no small feat.
He sat down at the break table for a moment, savoring his victory. This was working out. He hadn’t figured himself to be a family man. It just hadn’t seemed in the cards. But here he was.
Jeremy entered the break room, unscrewing the lid of his coffee thermos. “Hey, chief,” he said. “How is fatherhood treating you?”
“Louisa has it well in hand,” he said. He’d grown a little weary of explaining the situation over and over again as he patrolled. But better to have it come from him than some other source, or worse, idle speculation.
Jeremy filled his thermos and leaned against the counter. “From what I hear, anybody who went to school with the two of you would fall over dead to hear those words coming out of your mouth.”
“We didn’t exactly pal around in those days.” Jack grimaced. He always frowned when he thought of that horrible passing of the captain’s football. There had been other pranks, but that one had been by far the worst, directed only at him. And so public.
Jeremy sipped his coffee. “Well, I guess I’m glad it’s working out for you. You don’t seem the baby type.”
What did that mean? Sure, he wasn’t the friendliest Joe in town, but he had nothing against kids. He was just hardly ever around them.
But he didn’t want to ask what Jeremy meant. It didn’t matter what people thought. Ella was his, at least for the time being.
Jeremy pushed away from the counter. “I’m headed out. Anything I should be apprised of?”
“Quiet as a mouse. Might want to see if the mud on the dirt road to the ridge has dried up. It might be passable now, and you could move the barricade.”
Jeremy nodded. “Will do, boss.”
It was time to head home and see how Louisa had fared with the baby. He laughed a little to himself. She couldn’t have done any worse than he had. And even if Louisa wasn’t his favorite person in the world, at least she was local. He’d known her his whole life.
That was considerably better than leaving a perfect stranger in his house. He knew as well as anybody that people could be far different from what they seemed. He’d certainly never guessed his sister would fall so far.
When he opened the door to his house, Louisa was sitting on his sofa, the baby lying on a cushion in front of her. She was moving the baby’s legs back and forth to the rhythm of some little tune she was singing.
“There’s Uncle Jack,” she sing-songed. “Back from work. He’s probably hungry. And happy to see you.”
Jack sat in the chair next to them. “Are you making that up as you go along?”
Louisa continued to sing her words, now moving the baby’s arms to the beat. “Yes, I am. It’s good for her. How was your first day back?”
“Long. I thought about stopping by.”
Louisa picked up the baby and spoke normally. “You could have. We only slept for a long stretch from about one to four a.m.”
“You got three hours in a row?”
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br /> “We did! I think this latest formula might be a keeper. I don’t remember what it’s called. The pink one.”
“Really? She’s not spitting up as much?”
“She did early in the evening, I guess when she still had the old one in her system. But after the four a.m. feeding, she was fine. And she hasn’t really spit up since then.”
“That sounds promising.”
Louisa lifted Ella and started talking in a singsong again. “Yes, it is! Isn’t it, baby girl?”
She peered around the baby at Jack. “Which brings me to my next question. I know you’re hiring me for when you’re on shift, but don’t you need to sleep?”
“I’m fine,” he said, waving her off. “I’ll try to sleep every time she does. My next shift isn’t for twenty-four hours.”
“Good luck with that, she’s wide-awake. I’ve probably had more sleep than you. So I recommend that I stay on an extra, say, four or five hours, while you get some shut-eye. And then I will still have a good eighteen hours before I’m back here to help you with your next shift.”
“But that makes long shifts for you,” he said.
“Would you rather be awake for a while and have me come back? That actually throws my schedule off even more.”
She wasn’t going to give in on this. “Okay. I’ll go sleep a while. I guess we’ll figure this out as we go along.”
Louisa nodded. “It’s going to be an adjustment for all three of us, no doubt. Have you figured out the paperwork for me as the nanny? The taxes and all that?”
“The easiest thing is for you to sign up for one of the services where the payroll and all that is handled. I’ll send you the link.”
“That sounds good,” she said. “Now you go get some sleep. Ella and I will sit here and keep singing.”
Jack headed to the kitchen to grab some breakfast before he went to bed. As he heated up a bit of ham left by one of the town’s women, he watched Louisa play with the baby on the sofa.
She seemed transformed. Gone were all the ways he had pictured her for so many years. Devilish, opinionated, her language and gestures always communicating disdain for anyone who didn’t agree with her.
Sitting there with Ella, she was all maternity and care, giggles and light. He certainly didn’t remember his own mother acting this way, and perhaps he didn’t know any other women well enough to have witnessed it.
His life as a police officer had been pretty short on quiet moments like this. He arrived on the scene when things were hard or frightening. The tranquility of watching a woman take care of an infant was wholly unfamiliar.
The old Louisa would have ridiculed him, saying, “Jack, you need to get out more.”
But as he watched his niece and his old enemy, together in his living room, he realized that the real solution was quite the opposite.
He needed to stay in.
Chapter 10
Over the next few weeks, Louisa did manage to find a rhythm inside Jack’s schedule. When he came home from night shifts, she would stay on and let him sleep for a while, only leaving when he was awake and the two of them were settled. At the end of day shifts, they often spent a little time talking about the plans for Ella’s nursery. They figured out which formulas worked well for the baby’s tummy, and which ones brought on the monstrous spit-up.
They both noticed when Ella outgrew her tiniest newborn clothes and moved into the zero-to-three-month size. It all seemed to be happening so fast.
When Jack decided to look at cribs, Louisa went along. He’d asked for input. She had been happy to provide it.
This trip felt completely different from the one before. The two of them spoke easily about the upcoming alteration to the baby’s room, her progress in sleeping as many as five hours at a time, and how she was starting to track objects with her eyes.
“She seems pretty on-target for her developmental stages so far,” Louisa said as Jack crossed the lake to Branson.
Ella let out a little cry, and Louisa twisted in her seat to look at the tiny mirror that showed a reflection of the baby’s face, since she was faced away from them.
“She has another doctor visit before too long,” Jack said. “The six-week one.”
“I’ll be anxious to hear what he says.” And she was. She felt invested in little Ella, even if she was just the nanny.
“If we’re lucky, maybe Jenica wasn’t too far off the rails while she was pregnant. Surely she knew what could happen.”
Louisa’s tummy turned over at the thought. Addicted mothers gave birth all the time. Their need for the drug was stronger than the concern for the baby. Jenica might have been the same.
Ella waved her arms in her car seat as if she were trying to reach the toys dangling from the canopy of the seat. The baby books Louisa had read didn’t really touch on the problems of infants born to addicted mothers. It wasn’t their target market. The articles she’d found online had scared her, so she’d given up on that avenue for information.
The only thing that really mattered was Ella herself. And only the doctor who examined her could really tell them if she had drug exposure, and what the chemicals might have done.
Louisa tried to put all that from her mind. Right now they were a strange little put-together family, headed into the city to shop.
She realized she felt light, more than she’d ever felt in her life. She had a job that paid her well enough to live. She liked it, often carrying Ella to Town Square so that the shop owners could fuss over her.
It was almost as if every time someone remarked upon Ella’s sweetness, a little of that happiness rubbed off on Louisa herself. She’d never lived anything quite like it. Despite having put her own plans on hold, Louisa was pleased with her decision.
And Jack hadn’t been so bad.
The inside of the baby superstore was quiet on a Wednesday afternoon, one of the perks of Jack’s schedule. Only a few other mothers with babies pushed their carts down the colorful aisles.
The center of the store was devoted to nurseries, six complete setups assembled with rugs and décor to show what a finished room could look like.
Jack studied the specifications of every single set, breaking out a measuring tape to double-check the length and width of the pieces. Louisa smiled inwardly at his thoroughness and waved a rattle at Ella. Every once in a while, the baby wrapped her fingers around the end of it just right, and she was able to hold it for a brief second.
This excited her intensely, so much that she would wave her arms and legs furiously, often knocking the rattle out of her hands again.
After Louisa picked up the errant rattle for the third time, she tapped it lightly against Ella’s nose. “One day, when you’re in college, I’m gonna remind you about how you couldn’t even hold a rattle in a baby store.”
For just the briefest moment, she swore she caught the baby smile.
“Jack!” she cried. “Come look!’
He hurried over to them. “Is she okay?”
“I think she just made her first smile! And not the gas kind. A real one!”
“Really?” Jack stood there, peering down at the baby.
“Come on, Ella, do it again!” Louisa pressed the rattle into the baby’s hand.
At first, Ella could not make her fingers wrap around the plastic, either closing too quickly for it to fit inside her fingers, or accidentally pushing it away with her flailing arm.
Jack was patient. On about the tenth try, Ella’s fingers successfully grasped the rattle, and she shook it, making its little clicking sound.
Ella caught sight of the toy in her own hand, and it happened again. Her face lit up, and her mouth curved into a smile.
“Right there!” Louisa said. “Did you see it?”
Jack laughed. “I did. Look at that.”
He turned to her with a smile as genuine and broad as she’d ever seen on him. Her breath caught as their eyes locked, and Louisa felt her heart flutter.
What was that?
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bsp; She broke his gaze to look down at the baby again, her insides flipping over. “What a precious moment. We need a baby book. We should be writing these things down!”
“We can look for one after we figure out the crib,” Jack said. He tweaked the baby’s little sock and returned to where he’d left his measuring tape on one of the dressers.
Louisa focused on the baby, still uncomfortable with the flood of emotions she’d just experienced. Something about the intense joy of watching the baby hit an early milestone had created a weird euphoria. It had nothing to do with Jack. Just the baby.
Nothing else made sense. They had a decent working relationship as long as they focused on Ella. But the mutual disdain from high school was never going to completely fade away. They were two very different people.
Jack stood in the center of the cribs with his arms crossed. His face was super serious, and something about it made Louisa wash over with her signature sense of mischief.
She pushed the cart closer to him. “You’re thinking awfully hard,” she said.
“Of course I am. It’s a major purchase.”
“Well, I think you should get the white one.”
“Why? Does it have the best reviews? Does it optimize the floor space of the room? Does it have better features?”
Louisa laughed. “I just like it.”
“You just like it.”
“That’s a real thing,” Louisa said. “Don’t you ever just walk up to something and decide that you like it or don’t like it based on a feeling you have?”
Jack raised his eyebrows skeptically. “A feeling. You’re going to base your entire decision on a feeling.”
“I think that’s what normal people do. Sure, you look at how much it costs. You make sure it’s not too big to get in the door. But beyond that, it’s what appeals to you.”
He shook his head. “That’s ridiculous. We have all these objective facts about the sets. The only rational way to make a decision is to review all the information and make a solid choice based on whichever option fits the most criteria.”