Nobodys Baby But Mine

by Susan Elizabeth Phillips

  Jim got out of the car and moved toward her with that long graceful stride that had set her heart to beating for as long as she could remember. She should have expected him. Cal would have talked to him by now, and the prospect of a new grandchild would give him another excuse to browbeat her. She braced herself against one of the freshly painted posts that held up the tin roof of the porch and wished he hadn’t found her so unworthy.

  He came to a stop below the bottom step and gazed up at her. For a long time he said nothing—he merely studied her—but when he finally spoke, there was an odd formality in his voice. “I hope I didn’t scare you showing up here so late.”

  “It’s all right. As you can see, I’m still awake.”

  He dropped his gaze and for a moment she had the curious feeling he wanted to bolt, but that couldn’t be so. Jim never ran from anything.

  He looked up at her, and his eyes held that stubborn glint she knew so well. “I’m Jim Bonner.”

  She stared at him.

  “I’m a doctor in town.”

  Had he lost his mind? “Jim, what’s wrong?”

  He shifted his weight as if he were nervous, but the only time she had ever seen his confidence shaken was when Jamie and Cherry had died.

  He clasped his hands together and then immediately dropped them to his sides. “Well, to be honest, I’ve got a thirty-seven-year marriage that’s on the rocks. I’ve been pretty depressed about it, and instead of taking to the bottle, I thought it might help me if I found a little female companionship.” He drew a deep breath. “I heard in town there was a nice lady living up here with her old battle-ax of a mother, and I thought maybe I’d stop by and see if that lady’d like to go out to dinner with me some time. Or maybe catch a movie.” A flicker of amusement caught at the corner of his mouth. “That is if you don’t have any qualms about dating a married man.”

  “You’re asking me out on a date?”

  “Yes, ma’am. I’m kind of rusty at this sort of thing, so I hope I’m going about it right.”

  She pressed her fingers to her lips, and her heart swelled. During lunch on Friday she’d told him she wished they could meet as strangers so they could start all over to see if they liked each other, but he’d been so angry at the time, she hadn’t thought he’d even heard her. After all these years, she had never imagined he could surprise her, but he just had.

  She resisted the urge to throw herself in his arms and tell him all was forgiven. She didn’t hold herself so cheaply that this small bit of effort on his part, as much as she appreciated it, could erase decades of not being good enough. She wondered how far he was willing to take this.

  “We may not be compatible,” she replied, testing the waters.

  “Maybe not. I guess we won’t be able to decide unless we give it a try.”

  “I don’t know. My mother might not like it.”

  “Now you leave your mother to me. I’m real good with old ladies, even mean and crazy ones.”

  She nearly laughed. Imagine stubborn, hardheaded Jim Bonner doing something this romantic. She was charmed and touched, but not completely. Something saddened her, and it took a moment to figure out what. She’d spent most of her life feeling like a beggar for Jim’s affection—always agreeable, always the one to make concessions and appease. He’d never had to put himself out for her because she’d never made any demands. She had never put a single roadblock in his way, and now she was getting ready to run back to him just because he’d made one small effort to please her.

  She could still remember the feel of his randy teenager’s hands on her. Those first few times they’d had sex, she hadn’t liked it very much, but it had never occurred to her to say no, even though she would rather have been sitting in the back booth at the drugstore sharing a Coke and gossiping about their classmates. Suddenly that made her angry. He’d hurt her when he’d taken her virginity. Not deliberately, but it had hurt nonetheless.

  “I’ll think about it,” she said quietly. Then she gathered the sweatshirt tighter around her and went back inside.

  A moment later, a spray of gravel hit the house as he peeled away, driving for all the world like an angry eighteen-year-old.

  Chapter Twenty

  F or two weeks, Cal stayed away from Heartache Mountain. During the first week, he got drunk three times and took a swing at Kevin, who’d refused his demand to get the hell out of Dodge. During the second week, he started to go after her half a dozen times, but his pride wouldn’t let him. He wasn’t the one who’d run away! He wasn’t the one who’d screwed everything up with unreasonable demands.

  He also had to face the fact that he wasn’t absolutely sure any of those stubborn women would let him in the house. Apparently the only men welcome there were Ethan, who didn’t count because he was Ethan, and Kevin Tucker, who sure as hell did count. Cal seethed as he thought of Tucker driving up to Heartache Mountain whenever he pleased, getting fed and fussed over, of Tucker, who somehow or another seemed to have moved into Cal’s own house!

  The first night Cal had gotten drunk at the Mountaineer, Tucker had swiped his keys, as if Cal weren’t smart enough to have already figured out he wasn’t in any condition to drive. It was the same night Cal had swung at him, but his heart hadn’t been in it, and he’d missed. Next thing he knew, he was slumped in the passenger seat of Tucker’s seventy-thousand-dollar Mitsubishi Spyder while Kevin drove him home, and he hadn’t been able to get rid of the kid since.

  He was pretty sure he hadn’t told Kevin he could stay. As a matter of fact, he distinctly remembered ordering him out of his house. But Kevin had stuck around like a damned watchdog, even though he had a perfectly good rental house, not to mention Sally Terryman. The next thing Cal knew, the two of them were watching game films and he was showing Kevin how he always went to his first option instead of being patient, reading the defense, and finding the open man.

  At least watching films with Kevin kept his mind off the fact that he missed the Professor so bad his teeth ached, which didn’t mean he was any closer to figuring out what to do about it. He wasn’t ready to be married forever and ever, not when he needed all his energy focused on playing ball, and not when he had no other life’s work waiting for him. But he also wasn’t nearly ready to lose Jane. Why couldn’t she have left things as they were instead of making demands?

  Crawling on his hands and knees up Heartache Mountain so he could beg her to come back was unthinkable. He didn’t crawl for anybody. What he needed was a reason to go up there, but he couldn’t think of a single one he wanted to admit out loud.

  He still didn’t understand why she’d stayed around instead of flying back to Chicago, but he was glad it had happened, since it was giving her time to come to her senses. She’d said she loved him, and she wouldn’t have said those words if she didn’t mean them. Maybe today was the day she’d be woman enough to admit her mistake and come back to him.

  The door chimes sounded, but he wasn’t in the mood for company, and he ignored them. He hadn’t been sleeping too well or eating much more than an occasional bologna sandwich. Even Lucky Charms had lost their appeal—they held too many painful memories—so he’d been substituting coffee for breakfast. He rubbed a hand over his stubbly jaw and tried to remember how long it had been since he’d shaved; but he didn’t feel like shaving. He didn’t feel like doing anything except watching game films and yelling at Kevin.

  The door chimes rang again, and he frowned. It couldn’t be Tucker because somehow the sonovabitch had gotten a house key of his own. Maybe it was—

  His heart made a queer jolt in his chest, and he banged his elbow on the doorframe as he made a dash for the foyer. But when he yanked the door open, he saw his father standing on the other side instead of the Professor.

  Jim stormed in waving a supermarket tabloid folded open to an article. “Have you seen this? Maggie Lowell shoved it at me, right after I gave her a Pap. By God, if I were you, I’d sue that wife of yours for every penny she has, and if yo
u don’t do it, I will! I don’t care what you say about her. I had that woman’s number from the beginning, and you’re too blind to see the truth.” His tirade abruptly ended as he took in Cal’s appearance. “What the hell have you done with yourself? You look terrible.”

  Cal snatched the tabloid out of his father’s hand. The first thing he saw was a photograph of himself and the Professor that had been snapped at O’Hare the morning they’d left for North Carolina. He looked grim; she, dazed. But it wasn’t the photograph that made his stomach drop to the bottom of his feet. It was the headline below it.

  I Trapped the NFL’s Best (And Dumbest) Quarterback into Marriage by Dr. Jane Darlington Bonner.

  “Shit.”

  “You’ll have a lot more to say than that when you read this piece of crap!” Jim exclaimed. “I don’t care if she’s pregnant or not—the woman’s a compulsive liar! She says in here that she posed as a hooker and pretended to be your birthday present so she could get herself pregnant. How did you ever get tangled up with her?”

  “It’s like I told you, Dad. We had a fling, and she got pregnant. It was just one of those things.”

  “Well, apparently the truth wasn’t exciting enough, so she had to go and invent this outlandish story. And you know what? The people who read this rag are going to believe it’s the truth. They’re actually going to believe that’s the way it happened.”

  Cal crumpled the tabloid in his fist. He’d wanted a good excuse to go see his wife, and now he had it.

  It was blissful, this life without men, or so they told themselves. Jane and Lynn lazed like cats in the sun and didn’t comb their hair until noon. In the evening, they fed Annie her meat and potatoes, then smeared cottage cheese on ripe pears for themselves and called it supper. They stopped answering the phone, stopped wearing bras, and Lynn tacked a poster of a muscular young man in a Speedo to the kitchen wall. When Rod Stewart came on the radio, they danced with each other. Jane forgot her inhibitions, and her feet flew like dove’s wings over the carpet.

  To Jane, the rickety old house was everything a home should be. She snapped beans and filled the rooms with wildflowers. She put them in carnival glass tumblers, china bud vases, and a Bagels 2 Go commuter mug Lynn found on the top shelf. She didn’t know exactly how she and Lynn had developed such an attachment to each other; maybe it was because their husbands were so much alike, and they didn’t need any words of explanation to understand the other’s pain.

  They allowed Kevin into their women’s house because he entertained them. He made them laugh and feel desirable even with pear juice trickling down their chins and seedpods caught in their hair. They let Ethan in, too, because they didn’t have the heart to turn him away; but they were glad when he left since he couldn’t hide his worry.

  Lynn gave up her women’s club meetings and coordinated outfits. She forgot to color her hair or do her nails, which grew ragged at the cuticle. Jane’s computer stayed in the trunk of her Escort. Instead of trying to unlock the Theory of Everything, she spent most of her hours lying on an old wicker chaise that sat in the corner of the front porch, where she did nothing but let her baby grow.

  They were blissfully happy. They told each other so every day. But then the sun would set and their conversation would begin to lag. One of them would sigh while the other stared out at the gathering dusk.

  Along with the night, loneliness settled over the rickety old house on Heartache Mountain. They found themselves yearning for a heavier tread, a deeper voice. During the day, they remembered that they had been betrayed by the men they’d loved too well, but at night their house of women no longer seemed quite so blissful. They got into the habit of going to bed early to make the nights shorter and then rising at dawn.

  Their days developed a pattern, and there was nothing to separate that particular morning two weeks after Jane had come to stay on Heartache Mountain from any of the others. She fed Annie her breakfast, did some chores, and took a walk. Just after she got back, a particularly bouncy tune from Mariah Carey came on VH-1, and she made Lynn stop ironing the curtains she’d washed so they could dance. Then she relaxed on the porch. By the time the lunch dishes were put away, she was ready to work in the garden.

  The muscles in her arms ached as she tilled the soil between the garden rows, using a hoe to uproot the weeds that threatened her precious bean plants. The day was warm, and it would have been smarter to do this in the morning, but schedules had lost their allure for her. In the morning she had been too busy lying on the chaise growing her baby.

  She straightened to rest her back and propped her palm on the handle of the hoe. The breeze caught the skirt of the old-fashioned calico print housedress she wore and whipped it against her knees. It was soft and threadbare from many washings. Annie said it had once been her favorite.

  Maybe she’d get Ethan or Kevin to unload her computer if either came to visit today. Or maybe she wouldn’t. What if she started to work and Rod Stewart came on the radio? She might miss a chance to dance. Or what if, while she lost herself in equations, a new crop of weeds grew up near her bean plants and threatened them with suffocation?

  No. Work was not a good idea, even though Jerry Miles was almost certainly plotting behind the scenes to finish off her career. Work was definitely not a good idea when she had beans to weed, a baby to grow. Although the Theory of Everything beckoned her, she’d lost the stomach for bureaucracy. Instead, she gazed at the mountain sky and pretended it marked the boundary of her life.

  That was how Cal found her. In the garden, with her palm curled over the handle of a hoe and her face lifted to the sky.

  His breath caught in his throat at the sight of her standing against the sun in a faded calico housedress. Her French braid was coming undone so that blond wisps formed a corona about her head. She looked as if she were part of the sky and the earth, a joining of the elements.

  Sweat and the breeze had molded the dress to her body, displaying, as clearly as if she were naked, the shape of her breasts and the hard round belly where his baby grew. She’d unfastened two of the buttons at the top of the dress’s scoopy neck, and the sides fell apart in a V over a damp, dusty chest.

  She was brown as a berry: her arms and legs, her dirt-smudged face, that moist V of skin that pointed to her breasts. She looked like a mountain woman, one of those strong, stoic creatures who had eked a living out of this unforgiving soil during the depression.

  With her face still lifted to the sky, she wiped the back of her arm across her forehead, leaving a dirty streak in its place. His mouth went dry as the fabric stretched tight over those small high breasts and caught just beneath her rounding belly. She had never been so beautiful to him as she was at that moment, standing without any cosmetics in his grandmother’s garden and looking every one of her thirty-four years.

  The tabloid newspaper rustled against his thigh, and Annie’s voice rang out from behind him. “You get off my land, Calvin. Nobody invited you here!”

  Jane’s eyes flew open, and she dropped the hoe.

  He turned in time to see his father charging around the side of the house. “Put that shotgun down, you crazy old coot!”

  His mother appeared on the back porch and stopped behind Annie. “Well, now, aren’t we just a picture of Psychology Today’s Family of the Year.”

  His mother. Although he’d spoken to her over the phone, she’d ducked his dinner invitations, and he hadn’t seen her in weeks. What had happened to her? She never used sarcasm, but her voice fairly dripped with it. Shocked, he took in the other changes.

  Instead of one of her expensive casual outfits, she wore a pair of black jeans unevenly cut off at mid-thigh, along with a green knit top that he seemed to remember having last seen on his wife, although there hadn’t been a dirt smudge on it at the time. Like Jane, she wore no makeup. Her hair was longer than he’d ever seen it, and untidy, with threads of gray showing up that he hadn’t known were there.

  He felt a flash of panic. She looked l
ike an earth mother, not like his mother.

  Jane, in the meantime, had dropped the hoe and marched across the yard toward the steps. Her bare feet were tucked into dirty white Keds with slits in the sides and no shoelaces. As he watched, she silently took her place on the porch with the other women.

  Annie remained in the middle with the shotgun still aimed at his gut, his mother stood on one side of her, Jane on the other. Despite the fact that none of them were exceptionally large, he felt as if he were staring at a trio of Amazons.

  Annie had drawn her eyebrows on crooked that morning, giving her a decidedly malevolent look. “You want this girl back, Calvin, you’re gonna have to set yourself to a serious courtship.”

  “He doesn’t want her back,” Jim snapped. “Look what she’s done.” He snatched the newspaper from Cal’s hand and shoved it toward the women.

  Jane moved down onto the top step, took it from him, and bent her head to study the page.

  Cal had never heard his father sound so bitter. “I hope you’re proud of yourself,” he snarled at Jane. “You set out to ruin his life, and you’ve done a damn good job of it.”

  Jane had taken in the gist of the article, and her gaze flew up to meet Cal’s. He felt the impact in his chest and had to tear his eyes away. “Jane didn’t have anything to do with that newspaper story, Dad.”

  “Her name’s on the damn by-line! When are you going to stop protecting her?”

  “Jane’s capable of a lot of things, including being stubborn and unreasonable”—he shot her a hard-eyed look— “but she wouldn’t do that.”

  He saw that she wasn’t surprised by the way he’d come to her defense, and that pleased him. At least she trusted him a little. He watched her clutch the tabloid to her chest as if she could hide its words from the world, and he made up his mind Jodie Pulanski would pay for the pain she was causing her.