Surprise Dad

by Daly Thompson

  She had him, and they all knew it. He looked at Daniel, his brother with the most knowledge of children.

  Before he could even start to ask, Daniel laughed. “No way. I’ve got patients three deep at the clinic.”

  Mike glanced at Ian, who said, “You’ve got to be kidding.”

  “I hate to bother Allie again,” Mike said. “She’s already taken on too much since Barney’s attack.”

  “Maybe you should pay her,” Ian muttered.

  “I am paying her. You think I’d ask her to work for free?”

  “No, pay her for helping with Brian. You know, like a nanny.”

  “That’s a separate topic,” Mike said. “We were talking about baby equipment.”

  “Just looking ahead,” Ian said. “You’re going to need help.”

  “Ask her,” Lilah said. “She might say no, but you can always ask.”

  “I’ll ask her if she’ll help me shop, but I’m not going to ask her to be a nanny.”

  At the very moment he needed Daniel’s mediation tactics, Daniel was digging through the toys, frowning when he found one that had a lot of small pieces.

  Ian shrugged and started going through a box of books. He held up one of them. “While you’re shopping, get the kid some books besides leather-bound gift sets of Kidnapped and Treasure Island.”

  “And clothes,” Lilah called out from Mike’s bedroom, where she’d gone to change Brian.

  “You brought up four boxes of clothes last night,” Mike protested.

  “Right, and most of them have to be ironed. Or dry-cleaned.” She emerged from the bedroom with Brian, whom she’d changed into navy trousers and a wool sweater.

  Mike blew out a sigh. He needed help. Lots of it. So maybe asking Allie to go shopping with him was an imposition, but it would be just one afternoon. “Okay, I’ll ask her,” he said, more to himself than to anyone else in the room.

  “Of course you will.” Ian stood up and started down the stairs.

  Mike frowned. Was Ian going to ask her himself? Or bring her up here?

  Lilah handed Brian back to Mike. “I have to go, and so does Daniel. But we’re as close as the phone if you have an emergency.”

  What was she talking about? His whole life was an emergency.

  “I appreciate what you’ve already done,” he said, leaning his head away from Brian, who’d latched on to his earlobes, “more than I can tell you.” Good thing the kid was so cute.

  Ian shoved open the front door. “Here she is.”

  An obviously confused Allie followed him into the small living room. Her gaze landed on Mike and Brian.

  “Ian said you needed to talk to me immediately.”

  Mike shot Ian a frown, which his brother ignored, then back at Allie. “Um…I was wondering…I mean if you wouldn’t mind…could you—”

  “The man needs a nanny,” Ian said bluntly. “He wants you. He’ll pay big bucks. Okay?”

  “Ian!”

  Ian just shrugged at the chorus of voices. “Needs to be said.”

  “I was only going to ask her to go shopping,” Mike said, really irritated at Ian. But at the same time, he suddenly saw himself in the kitchen without Brian on his left hip, saw himself cooking with both hands while Brian was up here in the apartment, happily playing with Allie. The thought was nearly irresistible.

  He looked back at her. She’d gone completely still, her eyes round and unfocused. He felt an edge of anger, not at her because she was going to say no, but at himself for wishing she’d say yes.

  THE VOICE in Allie’s head was her mother’s. “Allie, you’ll get attached to that baby and you won’t want to go back to school.” Realizing everyone was staring at her, she finally found her own voice.

  “You can’t imagine how much I’d like to take care of Brian,” she said slowly. Her eyes dropped to the floor. She couldn’t look at any of them, especially Mike. “But I’ll only be here until January, and I’m supposed to be doing whatever it takes to decide on a new course of education.”

  “Of course,” Mike said swiftly. “You can’t take on a full-time job, especially one that…that…”

  “That takes so much emotional energy,” Lilah said quietly. “I’m sorry. We weren’t thinking.”

  Now Allie could face Mike. “I hope you can understand. Maybe I could help in some other ways, like keeping him out of the way in the restaurant, and I know a lot about babies from all those years of taking care of them at church, so I could offer you advice…” She trailed off. Mike was giving her an embarrassed smile.

  “All advice welcomed,” he said.

  To Allie’s relief, the room came to life again, the three brothers talking about Barney and hiring more help, Lilah making funny faces at Brian and saying, “We could easily keep him for you from five to ten, Mike…”

  Allie felt tears welling up. “I’m sorry,” she said one more time. “I guess I’d better get back to work.” And she fled down the stairs.

  She felt horrible, but she’d done what she had to do. “You’ll settle right back into the valley,” her mother had said. “You’ll be a waitress the rest of your life.”

  Or a nanny for the next twelve years. She knew herself too well. Establish an emotional attachment to Brian, and she’d never leave.

  And then there was the fact that Brian looked enough like Mike that they could be father and son. No. She wouldn’t think about that. It was impossible.

  At the foot of the stairs, she paused. The restaurant wasn’t all that busy. They didn’t really need her.

  She went back up the stairs, where Mike looked surprised to see her. “I could help for a few minutes right now,” she told him. “I could take Brian for a walk.”

  “He doesn’t walk yet,” Mike said.

  Allie gave him a “how dumb can you get” look. “In a stroller,” she said.

  Mike looked at Lilah. “He doesn’t have a stroller.”

  The way the whole crew fell silent and began to stare at her made Allie nervous. After a long moment, Lilah said, “If you wouldn’t mind going with Mike to Baby Heaven in Rutland this afternoon, he could outfit Brian a lot faster.”

  “Lilah…” Mike said in a warning tone.

  “Sure.” Allie smiled, feeling much better. “I’d be happy to do that. What about two o’clock, when the diner quiets down? You’d be back in time for dinner.”

  “I can’t,” Mike protested. “I have pot-au-feu to cook.”

  “You don’t have a stroller,” Ian said. “Or a high chair or that thing you were talking about, a chair that rocks and rolls, or whatever, so Brian can watch you shave.”

  “For a man who was scared to hold a baby, you’re all of a sudden an expert?”

  “Time out,” Daniel said. “If you don’t get the stuff you need, the next few days will be a nightmare. So figure out something simpler for dinner, and then go shopping.”

  Allie waited for the verdict.

  “Okay,” Mike said, looking like a man sentenced to death, “I guess that’s what I have to do. After I check in on Barney.”

  “HOW DOES he look today?” Allie asked Mike when he joined her in the hospital lobby after he’d spent a few minutes with Barney.

  Mike sighed, worry etched on his face. “Better. More color in his face. He just needs to take it easy for a while. Which isn’t what he wants to do. Hey, Brian, did you shake up the place while I was gone?” He held out his arms for the baby.

  “He was an angel,” Allie said. “He smiled and waved at everybody who walked by. He’s a real charmer.” He was charming, and warm and soft while she’d held him in her arms. She steeled herself against falling in love with him.

  “This was Barney’s wakeup call,” she told Mike. “He’ll have to change his lifestyle, get some exercise…”

  Mike simply nodded as they went to the car. Agreeing with her? Or not interested in what she had to say? And why should she even care? At the moment, she was along for the ride, a bizarre ride with an unprepared fa
ther to a baby warehouse.

  It was so unreal that she didn’t dare analyze it. Best just to do it and examine her motives later.

  On the drive to Rutland, Mike’s cell phone rang. “Steve,” he exclaimed. “Speak of the devil. I was going to call you tomorrow.” As he listened, Allie saw his face brighten. “You couldn’t have asked at a better time,” he said finally. “Send them down, the sooner the better. I’ve been saved,” he told Allie. “The Vermont culinary school needs a couple of spots for their second-year students to have hands-on experience.”

  “What great luck.” He sounded so excited it made her smile. “You’ll make it, Mike,” Allie said. “You and the restaurant both will get through it with five stars.”

  He fell silent for a while. Allie considered drawing him out, but decided it was best to leave him alone. The man had been through so much in the past few days. He’d lost a friend, brought home a baby and had his right-hand man felled by a heart attack. That kind of stress would get to anyone. If the story of the friend’s bequest wasn’t true, he was under even more stress. She couldn’t believe Mike would lie, but in a situation like the one she was imagining…

  Baby Heaven was a huge warehouse-type store that was guaranteed to carry everything any child could need. Mike looked shell-shocked when they got inside.

  “Where do we start?” he said.

  “Clothes. What’s our budget?”

  “Nearly infinite,” Mike said. “If I run out of money, this kid’s rich. My friend left him a ton of money in trust. I can draw on it if I need to, but I’m planning not to need to.”

  “Your friend must have been very successful in the restaurant business.”

  He gave her a blank look. It only lasted a second or two before he said, “Yeah, I guess he was. Okay, let’s get going.”

  There was more to Brian’s story than Mike had told her.

  Again she felt the lump of worry growing in her stomach. It would hurt to know that Mike had fathered a child with another woman. Why it would hurt so much she wasn’t sure. But it would hurt worse to know that Mike hadn’t brought the woman home, helped her get the child off to a good start in life. It would shake her faith in a man she’d thought of as responsible, caring, even heroic.

  Maybe there were other reasons. She was a wealthy woman who didn’t want to marry a small-town restaurateur…

  Baby clothes, she told herself firmly. We’re shopping, not speculating.

  The clothing aisles were splashed with color. She and Mike wandered around for some time before she found what they needed. She selected a few outfits, then Mike added a few more. When she glanced at him, he shrugged. “He’s been changed twice today already. No matter how much we buy, it won’t be enough.”

  When Allie laughed, Brian joined in, smiling and bouncing in the shopping-cart seat. He looked at Mike, then raised his arms, the universal sign that he wanted to be held, and Mike complied, picking up Brian and settling him on his hip.

  “You know, I think Brian loves you already,” she said.

  Mike stopped in his tracks. For a moment, he looked down at Brian, and then he looked at Allie. A flash of all the confusion and stress he must be feeling flitted across his face, only to disappear and be replaced by his usual smile.

  “I think he just wants to see better.”

  “Sure,” Allie said, and then, when Brian immediately started grabbing at all those colors, added, “Hmm. Maybe you’re right.”

  Two aisles over, they found the strollers. Allie suggested one. Mike pushed it back and forth a few times and said, “Fine.”

  Next they went to the crib-bedding shelves. Allie stood back and let the guys handle this one on their own. She couldn’t remember ever seeing anything as interesting as Mike and Brian picking out crib sheets. She didn’t bother to point out to Mike that Brian was too young to understand what they were doing.

  The pair gave their choices thorough consideration. When Mike held up sheets covered with fast racing cars, Brian giggled and bounced with great excitement. Allie realized the baby was reacting to the excitement in Mike’s voice and the vivid primary colors of the cars, but still, you could imagine the two of them were having a conversation.

  “Yeah? These?” Mike studied the sheets, then pronounced, “Good choice, buddy.” He walked over to Allie and tossed the package of sheets into the cart. “He likes cars.”

  She bit back a smile. “Was there ever a man who didn’t?”

  As Mike and Brian headed down the next aisle toward bouncing, rocking baby chairs, something Mike seemed fixed on, she spied a display of stuffed animals and spent a few minutes squishing them before she picked out a rabbit she couldn’t resist and tossed it into the cart.

  When she caught up with Mike and Brian, she paused just to look at them for a minute. Watching Mike with Brian was really getting to her. He was kind and patient with the baby, and she admired the way he’d taken on this responsibility.

  If she wasn’t careful, Brian wasn’t the only one she was going to fall for.

  Chapter Six

  Brian snoozed happily in his crib, but Mike felt unsettled. Restlessly he paced the apartment, always pausing at Brian’s open door to listen to his breathing.

  He knew a glass of good wine or a simple over-the-counter pain reliever would help him relax enough to sleep, but he didn’t know if a new father was allowed to drink even one glass of wine or take even one pain reliever until his child was old enough to scream, “I have pneumonia!”

  In the path of his pacing, he saw a purple folder buried in a towering stack of papers. They had once been in his office-now-Brian’s-bedroom and Allie had moved them onto a bookshelf in order to make space on his desk for the equipment Brian would need.

  He pulled out the folder. It was his Abernathy file. He’d almost forgotten about his trip to New York. How could he honor the commitment he’d made to Richard Stein?

  His first thought was the money Abernathy had spent in order to get him to New York: drivers, plane tickets, hotel and more. So he had to go.

  His next thought was what to do about Brian. There he drew a blank.

  If he called Daniel, he’d get the full You-can’t-go routine. So he called Ian, who stayed up late, and not because he had a baby whose breathing had to be monitored.

  He reached a wide-awake Ian and explained the situation. Ian’s analysis, because Ian was the analytical one of the three of them, shocked him.

  “He just lost his parents—and his nanny. You’re all he has. You can’t leave him this soon.”

  “He gets along great with Allie. Maybe she’d keep him—just this one time, of course.”

  “You and he need to bond.”

  Bond? Where had Ian learned about bonding? And what exactly did it mean?

  “So to bond with him, you’d have to take him to New York,” Ian went on, “You’ve just moved him to a new place. If you take him to New York, you’re taking him to another new place, also the wrong thing to do.”

  Mike was suddenly irritated, depressed, he didn’t know which. “I thought I could count on you for unbiased advice, but you’re sounding just like Daniel.”

  “Because that’s the kind of thing that happened to you and Daniel and me,” Ian snapped.

  His words hit Mike right in the gut. He’d never felt close to his parents. Daniel had felt only fear and loathing for his father. Ian’s mother had bonded with a liquor bottle, not with him.

  “I see your point.” He heard Ian’s whoosh of breath. “I’ll cancel the trip. And, Ian, thanks.”

  He left the folder on top of the stack to deal with first thing in the morning, then checked on Brian again. He’d never go to sleep now. He gave up, turned on the lamp in Brian’s bedroom—its base was a bright-red Mini Cooper—and settled into the biggest rocking chair for sale at Baby Heaven, and still not quite big enough.

  Brian made him nervous. No, nervous was too mild a word. Brian scared him to death. He knew nothing about babies. Heck, he didn’t reall
y know much about kids. Sure he hung around with Daniel’s foster kids, but those boys were older.

  Brian couldn’t talk, couldn’t walk and, most importantly, couldn’t tell Mike when something was wrong or if he was in pain. Mike would have to figure it out all by himself.

  Fortunately, he had the information at hand. He opened the baby-care book Allie had insisted he buy. “A user manual?” he’d quipped when she put it firmly into his shopping cart. In fact, it was just what he needed. The book was helping him understand more about Brian. What stage he’d reached, what he needed from Mike, and what Mike could expect in the near future.

  The book had a short section on the fear new parents felt. Mike thought that part should have been much longer. He’d never been the type to give up on anything, but Brian hadn’t been one of his goals. A baby had been thrust on him, a complete surprise, a global change in his life.

  He wondered again why his father had left Brian to him. Lilah’s he-trusted-you theory was pure Lilah, kind and positive, but he didn’t believe it for a second. Mike would stick with his own hypothesis, that his father had thought this day would never come, that Brian would be an adult before Evan died, that Celine would outlive him by thirty years, so he’d thought of it as a joke. A cruel joke.

  Well, the day had come. Brian was entirely dependent on Mike. And Mike would not be like his father. But how? He had so much to learn.

  Brian made a murmuring sound. Mike was on his feet in an instant, adrenaline racing through his body like fire. When he leaned over the crib, Brian moaned. Mike reached out and touched his forehead.

  Hot. The baby felt hot.

  It was not the time to look up fever in the baby book. He had touched Brian only a couple of hours ago, and he’d felt cool and normal. Now he was hot, and he was waking up.

  Forcing himself to stay calm, Mike went to the bathroom and got the basket of medical supplies Allie had put together. Inside was a thermometer, the kind you stuck in the baby’s ear. He went back to the room and now Brian was whimpering. “It’s okay, buddy,” he said, trying not to let his anxiety show. Carefully, he took Brian’s temperature, and then he freaked. A hundred-two.