Evergreen Tidings from the Baumgartners

by Gretchen Anthony

  “Kyle,” she interceded, “I’ve been wondering if you could shed some light on a subject about which I am a complete novice.”

  He looked up from his inventory studies and, after a brief, blank-faced pause, blinked at her, coming to.

  “Sure,” he said. “Shoot.”

  “Sperm donation,” said Violet. “How does it work, exactly?”

  Kyle dropped his sandwich and stared at her as if she’d just stripped naked and asked him to tea.

  “Excuse me?” he said.

  “Well, as you know, Cerise and her partner, Barb, are expecting their first baby. And we all know that they needed assistance. Simple human biology. So naturally, I’m curious about the process. The sperm. Its origins.”

  Kyle stuttered and shook his head. Just like his mother. Violet hadn’t ever seen that trait in him before. Genetics were amazing.

  “I’m certain he doesn’t know anything about that, Violet,” said Eldris, who, for the first time all morning, finally stopped moving.

  “Oh, I’m not implying as much,” said Violet. “But certainly—as a man—he’s more informed about the process in general than either of us?”

  Kyle finally shook himself loose of his shock and answered her question, sputtering his way through a flurry of speculative and less-than-descriptive descriptions of the process.

  “Well, from what I’ve heard...” He must have equivocated a hundred times. For heaven’s sake, she hadn’t asked for a first-person narrative. She simply wanted a man’s knowledge of where one would donate quality sperm—the Bergdorf’s of DNA, so to speak.

  “Well, there was a clinic near the medical school when I was at the university. Rumor had it that’s where the male med students went when they needed rent money.”

  But again, he didn’t know from experience.

  Of course he didn’t. His profession didn’t require an MD.

  But he did give her what she needed: a name. A name attached to an address, which, it turned out, was more serendipitous than she could have dreamed.

  22

  Richard

  SO, NEWS OF their group had spread all the way to the Philippines. How goddamn crazy was that?

  Richard would’ve been tempted to think the email was one of “Phil the Filipino’s” jokes, an I’ll-try-anything guy he used to work with who once dropped a half-dozen raw eggs into a pint of beer and drank them down in exchange for one month of Richard’s executive parking space. Only these days, Phil had taken a job with the Peace Corps and traveled the backwaters of the globe meeting with warlords and dignitaries and all sorts of greedy sons of bitches. So it definitely wasn’t Phil.

  He wrote back and took the meeting. “I’ll bring one of the guys, too.”

  They pulled into the parking lot of River City Brews and found a spot next to the door. Good thing, since whoever the restaurant hired to plow their snow hadn’t done more than a half-assed job.

  The guy on the other end of the email was just inside, waving at them through the window from a table near the door.

  The guy was Gus Severson, about two heads taller than Richard and pale enough to burn under a high-voltage lamp bulb. He had the gray hair gone white typical of Minnesota Scandinavian transplants and it was thinning just enough Richard could see his pink scalp beneath.

  “Knew you two as soon as I saw you. You guys are getting a reputation,” he said, pulling a beefy hand from thick gloves and extending it.

  Richard shook it, and then introduced his colleague.

  “This is Ted.” They shook hands. “Our third guy, Julian, has a real life, which means, unlike us, he can’t drop everything for an 11 a.m. lunch on a Thursday.”

  Gus nodded. “Understand. Anyway, I’m really just here because I’ve been asked to find out if you’re interested in hitting the road.”

  He and Ted had spent the last two hours talking about nothing else. Because, really, it wasn’t just the road, it was the other side of the world.

  “How long is the flight to the Philippines?” he’d said. “Twelve, fourteen hours?”

  Ted didn’t know. He’d only been as far west as Hawaii, when he took his wife along to a medical sales conference and called it their twentieth anniversary trip. That flight had been six hours out of LA and they still spoke English in Hawaii. This trip had to be a hell of a lot farther.

  “Gotta be honest, Gus,” said Richard. “At our age, it feels like a long shot.”

  Julian was just now able to sit for ten minutes at a time, a result of some quack surgeon clipping the wrong nerve endings while grabbing for his swollen prostate. And Ted, his knees were so shot he couldn’t carry any of his own equipment. They’d have to hire a crew for his things, alone.

  “Sorry, Richard,” he’d said about a half-dozen times on the trip up. “The last thing I want is to slow down the momentum we’ve got going.”

  “Nah,” Richard assured him. “None of us expected this to be a long-term gig.”

  For his part, Richard would probably handle the travel just fine. His back flared like an angry pisser every once in a while, but he could manage that with a few decent muscle relaxants and two fingers of Jameson. Ultimately, though, the decision about whether or not to hit the road came down to one question for him: Was this what he wanted?

  He’d only agreed to the first outing for the cash. Their band of aging misfits had needed one more person and he’d needed a reason to escape Eldris’s suffocating brooding. Not to mention, it was only supposed to be a few nights, a few places. Then people started to notice and they got more calls, more emails, more requests. And more money. Cash in hand at the end of the night.

  Goddamn intoxicating.

  So, not bad, right? A hell of a long way from the life he’d expected, but not so bad. Anyway, how were men like him supposed to spend their final decades? Old age used to be so black-and-white. His father worked until his joints gave out. Then he took his pension and parked on the couch for ball games, in the pew on Sundays. He took his wife on a one-week vacation every summer and played nice when the grandkids came over at Thanksgiving and Christmas.

  This, though. Richard didn’t have enough cash to retire, but his months spent pounding the pavement only proved with high-def precision that he lacked the hipster cool of today’s ad exec. Still, he wasn’t ready to put his life into Park like his father had. But neither was he eager to let go of the luxuries he’d earned—a man his age deserved a beer fridge and a monster hot water heater, environmentalists be damned.

  Was he up for red-eye flights and crap-hole hotels? There was a time when the idea of the international jet set would have sung to him to him like a circle of flight attendants humming the Pan Am tune. Now he wasn’t so sure.

  And what would Eldris say? If she were upset with him now, she’d shake her brain loose with worry once he started leaving for weeks at a time. Nah, it wouldn’t be fair to either one of them.

  He had done one thing right recently, though. Last week he’d taken Eldris’s pleading to heart and called Kyle about all the trouble with EyeShine.

  “Your mom’s pretty worked up. Says she’s worried you’re not sleeping.”

  “I’m not. Whatever time I’m not at the office I’m spending answering Rhonda’s wedding emails, and whatever time I’m not online I’m spending trying to work through this EyeShine donations mess.”

  “You know, we’re around if you need us.”

  “Yeah, I know.”

  “All you gotta do is ask.”

  “I know, Dad.”

  Neither of them said anything more.

  “Well, kiddo, I’ll see you soon, then.”

  “See you soon, Dad.”

  So he’d said his piece. The kid knew he was in his corner. Knew he had people looking out for him. He and his mom both. And his fiancée, Rhonda, too, of course. Hell of a catch, that o
ne. At least, he hoped she was. Sometimes Richard wondered, got a zing in his gut like he’d eaten too fast and needed a Zantac—maybe it was something Rhonda said, maybe it was the look in her eye. He didn’t know, and he sure as hell wasn’t going to bring it up. If his dad had warned him about all the hours he’d lose trying to talk Eldris off a ledge, it wouldn’t have made one goddamn difference. He would have married her anyway—call it love, call it spite—either way, he would have walked that aisle and not looked back.

  “So, what about families? Enough cash for them to come along? You could say I’m newly retired, and my wife’s been waiting twenty years to travel.”

  Gus said he’d look into it.

  Ted said, “I don’t know. Doesn’t seem like this would translate internationally. And anyway, I’d wanna know who’s paying us first. I’m not about to take it on the chin for some mysterious dude across the Pacific.”

  Richard nodded. The cash would have to be pretty darn fantastic for the kind of deal Gus was talking.

  “We’ll get back to you after we discuss it, the three of us,” Richard said. “Anyway, regardless of how it shakes out, thanks for getting in touch.”

  He stood to go and Ted followed his lead, though slower, giving his battered knees time to adjust.

  “It’s the cold,” he explained. “Maybe a trip to the tropics would do me good.”

  Ted and Gus said their final goodbyes. As for Richard, he was distracted. He could have sworn he’d just seen Ed Baumgartner get into his car and pull away.

  Maybe the world was smaller than it seemed.

  23

  Violet

  “WE’RE RIGHT HERE, ED. Why on earth wouldn’t we go in?”

  Violet and Ed stood outside a dark wood-paneled door, the words NextGen Cryolabs the only identifiers on its small, discreet nameplate.

  “Your checkup is in twenty minutes. We’ll be late if we stop.”

  When Kyle had given Violet the name and location of the sperm bank yesterday, she’d immediately recognized it to be in the same building as her nasal-toned neurologist. She didn’t believe in signs, but if she did—well, no. She didn’t believe in signs.

  “For heaven’s sake, Ed. When was the last time it took an elevator twenty minutes to go up two floors?” She reached for the doorknob, but he stopped her, his hand on hers.

  “What’s going on, Violet?”

  He didn’t know, of course, because she hadn’t told him. She was making the plan up as she went along. Her first excuse had come as soon as they stepped on the elevator.

  “You pushed the button for seven,” he’d said. “Dr. Hartz is located on the ninth floor.”

  She thought fast. “Oh, didn’t I tell you? Kyle Endres told me to check out a practice on seven. Said it was highly recommended by the medical students when he was in school.” She shot out of the elevator as soon as its doors opened, knowing Ed would have no choice but to follow.

  “Yes, but what is it, Violet?”

  She could hear him struggling to catch his breath behind her and she made a mental note: Explore couples’ yoga.

  “Just what I told you.” She glanced over her shoulder. He was several paces behind. “Kyle said it was very popular. The least we can do is stop by.”

  Ed finally caught up as she slowed to read the office numbers. Suite 710. She’d found it.

  Ed read the nameplate aloud. “NextGen Cryolabs. NextGen—why on earth would Kyle be sending you to—” Ed turned to look at her, and she watched as the gears of his mind turned and caught.

  “Explain,” he said.

  Oh, for heaven’s sake. “Cerise may have said she would no longer answer my questions about baby’s father, but she specifically did not prohibit me from finding the answers on my own.”

  She reached again for the doorknob, but Ed inserted himself in front of the door.

  “Violet, this is madness.”

  “Oh, madness, is it? And do you suppose it’s mad of me to wish to proactively protect my grandchild from a host of genetically derived health risks?”

  She felt the bees begin to stir in her head but she pushed them away, forced them quiet.

  “My father was dead and gone by the time we discovered his secrets. But they come out. And when they do, they take innocent lives with them.”

  She’d said these words before, but they burned just as much today as they had the first time they’d exploded from her lips.

  Ed sighed and dropped his head. He used to be her champion, her stalwart against this awful pain. But somewhere over the years, he’d grown tired. Looking at him now, he was nearly exhausted.

  Violet had learned this awful truth—that her father hadn’t been nearly the man they’d believed him to be—years after becoming a mother herself. Cerise was in third grade, meaning Violet was well on her way to raising a happy, successful child of her own. His failure shouldn’t have rattled her so badly. But it did. Nothing could ever remain unquestioned.

  “Edward,” she said, squaring her hips so she could meet him eye to eye, “this is a mystery I cannot abide.”

  He didn’t move an inch. “They’re not going to be able to tell you a thing. All that will come of this is further upset.”

  “Oh, really?” She saw a man turn the corner at the end of the hallway and head in their direction. She smelled opportunity.

  “Are you sure, dear?” Violet raised the volume on their conversation several notches, ensuring the man approaching could hear them clearly. “I’m certain this is exactly where we need to be.”

  Ed shot her a furious look and growled under his breath, “Violet...”

  The young man was upon them now and he paused, edgy like a fawn, eyeing the door.

  Without so much as a breath, Violet turned to the man and asked, “Are you going in?”

  “Well, um.” He seemed barely able to lift his eyes from the carpet. “Yes.”

  “Wonderful.” She nodded and stepped aside, pulling Ed along with her by the elbow. “We’ll follow you.”

  Ed held back but she answered his retreat with a look that said, Follow me or not, I’m going in.

  He followed.

  In the waiting area—a lovely modern Danish design, all right angles and blond wood—they queued, waiting their turn for the receptionist. From Violet’s estimation, the young man must have been a regular, as it took no more than a nod and a friendly Hello before he was invited to take a seat. Expediency was such a lovely thing.

  “Good morning. I’m Violet Baumgartner and this is my husband, Edward.”

  The woman’s smile was warm and welcoming. She wore a trim suit jacket over a neatly pressed shirt and Violet spotted the pale pink blush on her fingernails. Oh, yes. This was the place.

  “You know, I bet you’re looking for Suite 720. This is Suite 710. You want the office just around the corner.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Midwest Urology Specialists. Suite 720—around the corner. Happens all the time.”

  Oh, dear.

  “No. You see, we are, in fact, in the right place. This is NextGen Cryolabs, is it not?”

  The woman flustered and began knocking her fingers about on her computer’s keyboard.

  “Do you have an appointment? I’m sorry—tell me your name again?”

  Violet did not have time or patience to waste; their twenty minutes were dwindling.

  “Our daughter used your—” she paused, realizing that she’d never actually said the words aloud in public before “—your sperm bank. She’s now expecting her first child and we would like to know more.”

  The woman began just where Violet expected she would.

  “Oh, I’m sorry but all of our donor information is kept strictly confidential. I can’t possibly share—”

  Again with the wasting time.

  “I’m aware.
I simply need to know more.”

  Ed, she saw out of the corner of her eye, had wandered and was now behaving conspicuously innocent, scanning the rack of magazines on the wall. As if there was time for reading material.

  “More what, exactly?”

  “We’ve been advised that this is a premier bank. Your donors are of the highest caliber in education and profession, are they not?”

  The woman nodded silently, her mouth slightly agape. Violet fought the urge to reach across the desk and nudge it closed.

  “A phalanx of doctors and scientists among your ranks?” said Violet.

  Again with the nodding.

  “Then what I’m here for is a sampling of your most prominent donors.”

  “A sampling?” said the woman.

  “That’s what I said, yes. A sampling. A selection. A small taste.”

  “A small taste?”

  Ed was back. “Please. You must be right. We have the wrong office. So sorry to have bothered you.”

  He reached for Violet’s elbow but she was too quick for him, pasting it to her side.

  “Well, of course,” Violet said, “we could make an appointment, if that would help.”

  “You have an appointment?” Then again with the punching at her keyboard and the flustered questioning about names and were they sure they weren’t looking for Suite 720?

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake,” said Violet. “We’re not here to donate. Like I told you, we simply would like to get a look at the men our daughter may have chosen with which to impregnate herself.”

  What language was she going to have to use to make herself clear? She made a mental note of the girl’s name so as to include it in the letter of complaint she was going to be forced to write to NextGen Cryolabs management.

  Violet continued her attempts to clarify. “Don’t you have a library? Flip books? A computer database? Anything?”

  As she spoke, a door just beyond the reception desk opened and a man emerged, fiddling with the tuck of his shirt.

  “Peter?” Ed stopped tugging at her elbow and stepped toward the stranger.