“Is the spaghetti about ready?” Allie was calling out to Maury, but when she turned toward Maury, she saw him.
“Mike! Welcome—” then she saw Brian “—home,” she said on a gasp. She came directly to him—well, not to him but to Brian. “Who is this?” She gazed up at Mike, obviously stunned.
No more stunned than he was.
And no one had ever looked more stunned than Maury.
They’d noticed, both of them, the uncanny resemblance of this baby to him. He had to distract them. “I should have called ahead, but things happened too fast,” he said, looking straight at Maury. “My friend, the one whose funeral I went to, well, he left me a little something in his will and this is the little something. Someone, I should say.” He tried to sound amused, but failed.
“Oh, Mike,” Allie said, “he’s adorable.” Shocked or not, she seemed absolutely delighted that he’d brought home this human present from Boston. “What’s his name?”
“Brian.”
Maury still stood at the grill. He studied the baby for a moment, and then said to Mike, “He looks like you.”
No point in trying to distract them now. It was only a matter of time before everybody noticed. “Amazing, isn’t it? Well, my friend looked a lot like me, too. People would ask if we were brothers.” Mike held his breath until he saw that Maury and Allie seemed satisfied with his answer.
Maury turned back to his work. “What will you do with him?”
Mike knew what the real question was—how will this interloper change things?
“I was asked to raise him. I’m his guardian, so I have to raise him. Somehow.” Almost as if he didn’t like the way Mike had explained the situation, Brian reached up and gave Mike’s collar a hard tug.
Allie saw it and smiled. “Well, it’s nice to meet you, Brian.” She did a mock curtsey, and for the first time in hours, Mike felt some of his tension ease.
He shifted Brian higher on his hip. “How’s Barney?”
Allie’s mouth twisted wryly. “Resting comfortably and doing as well as can be expected. That’s all the hospital staff will tell us.”
Mike sighed. “I’ll visit him as soon as I can. How are things going without him?”
She couldn’t seem to take her eyes off Brian. “Fine,” she said absentmindedly. “Becky is helping out in the kitchen and Colleen is covering out front,” Allie told him. “A few of their relatives,” she waved vaguely around the room, “have pitched in, too.”
“I appreciate what everybody’s done, and I’ll hire temporary help as soon as I…” Now that he had a baby to take care of, when would he find time to hire staff?
Allie stroked Brian’s cheek, and he gurgled appreciatively. “He’s so calm, when this has to be a major upheaval in his life.”
Mike looked down at Brian, who was examining the kitchen with bright, curious eyes. He was so small, so helpless. The tightness returned to Mike’s shoulders.
How was he going to take care of this child?
His panic increased when the back door swung open and Lilah, Daniel and Ian all peered through it. “We had to see him,” Lilah said.
“This is terrific,” Daniel said.
Ian raised his eyebrows.
Just the reactions Mike had predicted.
“What a precious baby,” Lilah said, rushing toward Brian with her arms outstretched.
“Well, let’s see who we’re adding to the family,” Daniel said easily. He lifted Brian off Mike’s hip. Mike stretched to the right, getting his balance back. What a relief.
“I want to hold him,” Lilah begged.
“Me, too,” Allie challenged her. “I saw him first.”
“Wait your turn, ladies,” Daniel said. “Hey, Brian,” he said, and Mike saw that Brian was smiling at Daniel and reaching out for his hair. “Meet the rest of your family. This is Maury,” and he went straight to the boy. “Maury is your new dad’s very best friend and right-hand man. You want to get on his good side.”
Mike saw Maury turn slowly from his chopping. “Hi, Brian,” he said awkwardly. Brian chuckled and reached out for Maury’s arm.
“I’m Uncle Daniel,” Daniel went on, “and this is Aunt Lilah.”
Brian gazed carefully at each face, as if there’d be a test later.
“You’ve met Allie, and this is Uncle Ian.” With a big smile, Daniel held the baby out to Ian, who accepted him with a look of horror and held him at a distance. “Hey,” Ian said, “you like sheep?”
“My turn to hold him,” Allie said swiftly as she rescued both Brian and Ian.
“Darn, you’re fast,” Lilah grumbled. “How can we help you settle in?” she asked Mike.
He’d been watching Allie tickle Brian’s stomach, giggling along with him. “I have a bunch of his things in the car. They’re shipping a lot more. Man, I had no idea babies required so much stuff. I don’t have that much stuff.”
Lilah firmly removed Brian from Allie and started her own game with him, peek-a-boo. “Your brothers can unload the car, and you can figure out where to put all that stuff.”
Mike gave Allie a helpless look, and she laughed. “I’ll give them a hand,” she said. “I’m no good in the kitchen, anyway.”
Boy, it was good to be home. The last two days had been unnerving, and the only thing that had gotten him through them had been the knowledge that soon he’d be home, surrounded by family and friends.
Backup, that’s what he needed. With some help, it would all work out.
WHEN A desperate summons from the kitchen sent Allie racing downstairs to wait tables, Daniel, Ian and Lilah surrounded Mike.
“He looks a lot like you,” Ian said. “Too much.”
“I noticed,” Mike said grimly. “Maury noticed. Everybody will notice. That’ll get the gossip going.”
“We’ll deal with that later,” Daniel said, sounding more crisp than usual. “Why would your father have left you his child to raise?”
Mike sank onto a box of books and held his chin in his hands. “I’ve been trying to figure it out. I don’t think he really meant for me to raise him,” he said. “He didn’t know he and Brian’s mother were going to die.”
“Then why did he do it?” Ian persisted.
“All I can think of,” Mike said slowly, “is that he got a kick out of imagining me, twenty-five years from now, sitting in a lawyer’s office with my tongue hanging out, hoping for a big inheritance, and finding out he’d left me nothing.”
“But as you said, he didn’t know he was going to die,” Lilah argued, looking up from a box of clothes. “You’d have to like and trust someone implicitly to leave your child to him.”
“Oh, please,” Mike said. He suddenly felt so tired, more tired than he could ever remember being. The adrenaline that had gotten him through the last two days and safely home with Brian was all used up.
“It’s getting late. If you’ll help me figure out how to get Brian through one night, I’ll start organizing for real tomorrow morning after the breakfast rush. I need to visit Barney—” He halted. “I can’t visit Barney. I have a baby.”
Lilah patted him on the arm. “I’ll keep Brian for you while you see Barney. He’s doing fine, by the way. All he needs is a lot of rest before he comes back to work.”
“I’ll go to the grocery store,” Daniel said, checking his watch. “He came equipped with everything except food.”
“Anything for him to sleep in?”
“A sleeper with feet, yes. But he doesn’t have a crib.”
“We have a crib in the attic,” Daniel said.
“I’ll take care of that,” Ian said. “Any sheets with it?”
“He has sheets,” Lilah said. “Baby-blue linen. Beautifully ironed.”
Mike’s brothers groaned along with him.
“Go see Barney,” Daniel said. “We’ll have you all set up in a couple of hours.”
Mike sent his gaze toward each of them. “How am I going to do this?” He whispered the words.
> “Nothing to it,” Daniel said, smiled at him and ran down the stairs.
“GET OUTTA HERE and go run the restaurant.”
“Hello to you, too,” Mike said, and smiled at Barney.
It was hard for him to smile. Barney might be doing “as well as could be expected,” but he sure didn’t look good. Too quiet lying there in the sterile hospital room, nothing like the whirling dervish he was in the diner kitchen. His skin was gray, and his eyelids drooped. Seeing him this way was like having a knife stabbed into his heart, but he couldn’t let Barney know he was upset.
Hiding his feelings, he sat in a chair next to the bed and got into a relaxed position. “Doctors say you’re doing great.”
“I know I’m doing great,” Barney said. “What I want to know is when I can go back to work.”
“Pretty soon,” Mike said easily. “When you’re well. Don’t worry, I’m hiring some temporary people when I can get around to it. Your job will be waiting for you.”
“Who’s doing it now?” He actually sounded jealous.
“Maury’s at the grill, and some people I don’t know are helping out. Thank God I hired Allie.”
“Nice girl. Just like her mom.”
Mike noticed that Barney’s gruff voice had softened a little. But everybody had a soft spot for Allie.
He was wondering whether to tell Barney about Brian. He didn’t want to bring on another heart attack, but on the other hand, he didn’t want Barney hearing it from anybody else. “Um, I have a surprise for you, well, a surprise for everybody.”
“Boston baked beans?” Barney said hopefully.
“I have a baby.”
Barney looked at him with such shock that for a second Mike wondered if he should call a nurse. “A baby? A baby what? Dog? Cat?”
“Human,” Mike said, then recited once again his story about his old friend and his unexpected inheritance.
“Well, I’ll be,” Barney said. “A baby.” To Mike’s surprise, he actually smiled. “That’ll perk things up.”
“To say the least.” Mike felt relieved.
“How’s Maury taking it?”
“Okay. He’s a great kid.” He hoped it was true.
“Well, good.” Barney gave Mike a sly grin. “I hope you’re taking it the same way.”
His smile faded, and he suddenly looked so tired that Mike realized even this short conversation had worn the old guy out. He said his goodbyes, and as he stepped out the door, Elaine Hendricks stepped in, carrying a bouquet of flowers. “Elaine, good to see you.”
“Allie told me about Barney,” she said, looking embarrassed. “I know how busy you all are at the diner, so I decided to check on him and sit with him awhile.”
“That’s very kind of you,” Mike said.
“Oh, he’s asleep,” she whispered. “Maybe I…”
“No, I’m not,” Barney said, sounding as if just saying the words was an effort. “Just resting my eyes.”
Mike left them there together. Elaine Hendricks was a kind woman. She’d be kind to Allie whatever Allie decided to do. He was sure of it.
At home he found Daniel and Lilah on the floor with Brian crawling back and forth between them. They’d wrecked his tiny office to put a crib into it. Baby things were strewn everywhere. “Okay, the reinforcements have arrived,” he told them. “You two get home to your own kids.”
“Are you sure you can handle it?” Lilah asked.
“Of course he can,” Daniel said. “We’ll show you a couple of things…”
Thirty minutes later Mike was a trained father. A father figure, that’s what he was. But trained was one thing. Being a good father figure was a whole different thing. And he didn’t even know where to start.
“WANT TO SEE a restaurant in action?” Mike asked Brian when they were alone.
Brian yawned deeply.
“Bedtime soon,” Mike told him, “but D-Dad,” he stumbled over the word, “has to go to work for a few minutes first.” He heaved himself up off the sofa and took Brian downstairs.
Five minutes later, he realized he’d made a terrible decision. First, Colleen and Becky zeroed in on Brian, and Allie, who was plating desserts, had to pry them away to deliver the last orders of the evening.
Allie herself looked as if she’d like him to put desserts on plates so she could hold Brian. It sounded like a good idea to him, too, so he handed the baby over to her, glanced at the order slips and started slicing the cherry pie. And what did she do? She took Brian out into the restaurant to show him off.
From the pass-through, he heard her telling his lie to the regulars, that a friend who coincidentally looked just like him had left him a baby. They neglected their perfectly cooked—he hoped—properly hot—he hoped—dishes to play kissy-face with Brian.
The lie circled around him like a shark waiting for him to make just one mistake. Brian’s resemblance to him didn’t go unnoticed, and he saw a few quizzical looks exchanged among the women.
He also saw he’d just cut up a whole cherry pie and put the wedges on plates. He checked the order and saw that everybody at the table had ordered something different.
“Oh, shoot,” he muttered. He’d had a baby for one day, and he was already falling apart. He stalked out into the restaurant and took Brian away from Allie. “Your shift in the kitchen,” he told her, smiling for the customers’ benefit, and for her ears only, “and please do something with all that cherry pie.”
MIKE WAS EXHAUSTED, but not too exhausted to get up a dozen times in the night to see if Brian was still breathing. On Saturday morning at five, he heard gurgles and coos coming from what had once been his office and was now Brian’s room. Once upon a time, as in two days ago before he went to Boston, he could wake up at five-thirty and still be in the kitchen by six. Those days were over.
Mike changed Brian, washed him off—he needed a lesson before he attempted a full bath—and after examining the supply of baby food, decided that cereal was a logical starting point. He held Brian on his lap to feed him. He’d need one of those chairs kids sat in to eat, but Brian seemed perfectly happy on his lap, gobbled down his cereal and was delighted by the pureed apricots straight from the jar.
Curious, Mike tasted them. They weren’t bad, although, personally, he might have added a pinch of mace, an eighth of a teaspoon of cinnamon. Or maybe a touch of grated fresh ginger.
After he’d fed his new baby and washed him off—again—and changed his diaper—again, he dressed him in the outfit Lilah had laid out—an overall kind of thing embroidered with seriously cute ducks and a yellow turtleneck to put under it. He had no place to put Brian while he showered, shaved and dressed except the crib. Brian complained, his babbling sounding cross and impatient, and Mike couldn’t blame him. He understood, oh, wow, did he ever understand, the frustration of being ignored. They had to have some kind of chair, or swing, something Brian could sit in and watch Mike shave.
Down to the restaurant they went. Weekend mornings were the busiest, and Maury was already there, preparing for the rush. Allie was at the stove getting a head start on the homefries.
Mike took a look at the homefries. Not your usual Mike’s Diner breakfast potatoes. Black here and there…but you can’t look a gift horse in the mouth. If you lost a few customers, so what.
“Ah,” she said brightly. “You both made it through the night alive.”
Colleen and Becky arrived with a couple of the strangers he’d seen last night, then the first wave of customers. Toast burned and over-easy eggs turned into hard-cooked ones while they all, even Maury, left their jobs to engage Brian in conversation. At last Mike grabbed a sausage, wrapped a pancake around it, moved himself and Brian to the corner of the room farthest away from the action and directed things from there.
This situation had to change, too. But how?
First, he had to hire temporary help. Real, experienced help. But before or after he bought equipment for Brian? Depressed, he ate his makeshift breakfast, then checked on h
is customers.
Everyone who’d come to dinner the night before had told everyone who might come to breakfast this morning about the baby, so he had to go out and make the rounds. Nobody complained about the eggs, the potatoes or the cold biscuits. Every customer was smiling—at Brian, who rewarded them with gurgles, waves and occasional dives at their plates.
Of course, Brian didn’t understand the lifted eyebrows, the knowing looks, the sidelong glances among the diners that went along with the smiles and coos. Mike was glad that at least they were able to separate the two issues. Brian was perfect even if he might possibly be Mike’s illegitimate child.
The breakfast crowd didn’t dissipate until almost eleven, much later than on weekdays, and he took Brian back upstairs while his motley crew cleaned up and got to work on lunch. Glumly he surveyed the boxes and bags, the piles of unpacked clothing and toys stuffed into every nook and cranny of his apartment. It was a nightmare come true.
He’d barely had time to change Brian’s diaper—was it normal to be wet as often as Brian seemed to be?—when his whole family descended on him.
“You still need a high chair and lots of other baby equipment,” Lilah announced. “Are they shipping any of those things from Boston?”
“His furniture looked like a store display,” Mike said. “I told the lawyer not to bother. I’ll need to buy all that stuff.”
Lilah took Brian from him. Mike would have liked to think he wasn’t relieved, but he was. Getting used to being a parent was not a piece of cake.
“I’d like to help with the shopping,” she went on, “but I’ve got my hands full with the kids today,” she said. “Give Allie time off to go with you.”
“Hey, he doesn’t need a woman to help him buy for this kid,” Ian protested.
Lilah laughed. “I wasn’t being sexist, just practical. I heard that Allie’s been helping out in the church’s daycare since she was twelve and was everybody’s favorite babysitter. She probably knows a few things about babies.” She looked pointedly at Mike. “Do you?”
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