Yes, Maury thought slowly, but at times like this, much too well. Mike knew he had to answer the question, and he had to answer it honestly. “They did. We all got over it in time.”
“How much time?”
“The time it took us to grow up, educate ourselves and find professions we liked. Seems like you’ve already done that. You’re a lucky guy.”
Colleen, the wiry man who had to be her Uncle Fred, Becky and Becky’s daughter rushed through the back door. “We’re late,” Becky gasped. “My son brought the car home on fumes last night and we had to get gas.”
As she spoke, Mike heard a less-than-discreet knock at the door of the diner and everybody went into action. He raced to the door and said, “Gosh, I’m sorry. I forgot to unlock it.” Behind him he heard the clatter of silverware as Becky and her daughter hurried to set the tables. The scent of coffee filled the air along with the smells of bacon and sausage Maury had just flung on the grill.
The day had begun. Just an ordinary day, except that upstairs he had a sick baby—and an all-too-enticing babysitter.
Chapter Seven
Mike stared at the phone in the kitchen, reached out for it, drew back, gritted his teeth and reached out again. He had to call Richard Stein and tell him he couldn’t come to New York Wednesday, and he was dreading it.
He also knew that when you dread something, the best thing to do is to get it over with.
He took the receiver and Stein’s number outside, pulled in a deep breath of the cool fall air, then dialed.
Stein was on the line swiftly with a hearty, “Mike! Good to hear from you!”
“It’s not good news,” Mike said.
“Oh?” Stein’s voice was filled with concern, even anxiety. “What’s the problem?”
Mike had thought carefully what to tell the man, and had decided to tell the truth, or almost the truth. “I inherited a baby.” He’d made it a mantra, that I have a baby line, hoping one day he could say it without feeling shocked.
“You—” Stein sounded nonplussed.
“Yes. An old friend died and appointed me guardian of his eight-month-old child.”
“Wow. That’s, well, a real change in your life.” Stein seemed to be gathering himself together.
“I’m supposed to stick with him for a while until he gets to know me, and the family tells me he ought to stay right here until he feels at home. So I won’t be able to come to New York this week.”
Mike waited for Stein to say, New York style, “So fuhgiddaboutid,” meaning forget about franchising the diner, but instead, he was murmuring, “Of course, of course.”
Mike rushed on to the hard part. “I feel bad about you having to cancel all the arrangements, and I want you to know I’ll be happy to pay for the expenses you’ve already incurred.”
“Nonsense, Mike! The expense is no problem. Of course you have to bond with your little one.”
Even Stein knew about bonding.
“I’ll keep in touch,” Stein said heartily. “When you think it’s okay for him to travel, let us know, and by all means, bring him along.”
With enormous relief, Mike disconnected the call. All done, no conflict, no recriminations.
He sauntered back into the kitchen, a new man. “I don’t have to leave town Wednesday,” he said cheerfully.
In the midst of a chorus of “thank goodness” from the rest of his staff, Maury just gave him a look. When the kitchen emptied out, the boy said, “You’re not going to franchise?”
“I have to think about it some more. I will talk to them in New York sometime, just to hear what they have to say. And I’ll tell you all about it.”
At ten he slipped out of the kitchen and ran upstairs to check on Brian and Allie. They were both asleep, but Allie’s eyes popped open as soon as he walked into the room, and she instantly rolled off the sofa and darted into Brian’s room. Mike joined her. “Relax,” he whispered when he’d pressed his hand lightly to Brian’s forehead. “He feels cool. Has he been in any pain?”
“No, and he’d let me know if he had been. It’s about time for another dose of medicine, but I thought I’d wait until he woke up all by himself.”
Mike gazed at her. Her hair, usually as smooth as a raven’s wing, was mussed, and her eyes drooped with sleepiness. She looked beautiful. “Go back to sleep,” he said. “I can stay a while. I’ll take care of him when he wakes up.”
“Nope,” she said firmly, forcing her eyes wide open, “you have a job to do. We’ll be fine.”
He sighed. “Promise to call if you need help?”
“I promise. Breakfast was wonderful, incidentally. It’s good to be the chef’s babysitter.” She smiled at him, and her sleepy eyes began to sparkle.
She was wide awake now. He took one more look at her, hoping his longing didn’t show, and went back to the kitchen.
ALLIE PACED the room, physically agitated and yes, tired. And worried.
She worried about the new passion she was feeling for Mike and the motherly feelings she’d had for Brian from the first time she held him in her arms. Her mother had warned her about getting too comfortable in the valley and deciding to stay, and Allie could not let that happen.
She wanted a career as badly as her mother wanted one for her. Career opportunities were slim to none in the valley. So, as she’d told Mike, whatever career she chose, she’d have to be prepared to move, and perhaps move again. To be a desirable candidate for a job, she’d have to be unencumbered. It would be different when she was firmly established in her chosen field, but not until then.
Then there was the uncertainty about Brian’s parentage. Realizing she was wringing her hands, and that she didn’t want Brian waking up to a distracted babysitter, she decided busywork was the thing to do. She put a load of Brian’s laundry into Mike’s apartment-sized washing machine, then dived into one of the bags from Baby Heaven and started cutting off price tags.
MIKE WOKE UP thinking about the nightmare yesterday had been. He’d checked on Allie and Brian twice more, but when he went up to tell her he was home for good and she could leave, she looked exhausted.
Even exhausted she was cheerful. “We had a wonderful day,” she assured him. “He needs to keep taking his medicine until it’s all gone, but he’s acting like a well baby. He’s asleep, clean and should sleep through the night.”
“What a relief,” Mike said, and yawned. “Are you awake enough to drive home?”
“Do you have to be awake to drive in LaRocque?” She gave him that mischievous smile.
“Just be careful.”
“I will,” she said more seriously. “See you in the morning.” She hesitated. “I’ll come in my waitress uniform, okay? But if I’d be more helpful staying up here with Brian, then…”
“Thanks.” He wished he could have thought of something more eloquent, but he couldn’t.
He’d checked on Brian and undressed himself, started to get into bed naked, as he usually did, then realized he wasn’t alone anymore and needed to observe a few modesty rules. Was there anything about his life that wasn’t going to change? He picked out a pair of boxers, the green ones printed with apples. He should probably buy some pajamas, maybe a robe. Or was that going overboard? He pulled up the boxers, checked on Brian one more time, left a light on in his room, slid into bed and fell asleep at once.
But not for good. It must have had to do with rem cycles, because every two hours he woke up, got out of bed and made the short trip to Brian’s room.
On the way back from one of these trips, he realized that if he told Allie, or Daniel and Lilah, maybe even Ian about his night runs, they’d assume he was driven by love for his baby brother. They’d be wrong. What drove him was a sense of responsibility, something he hadn’t learned at home, but from being brothers with Daniel and Ian.
“I CAN ONLY stay a minute,” Mike told Barney when he dropped by for a visit the next day between breakfast and lunch. “Everybody’s getting less of me right now.” He sighed.<
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“What’ve you done with Brian?” Barney asked him. “Shut him in the pantry with cans to stack? Couldn’t be that. We don’t cook outa cans.”
Barney actually did look better today, which made Mike feel better. “He’s being handed from Colleen to Becky to Allie to Maury—he’s crazy about Maury, for some reason. Think about it, Barney. The diner’s going to hell.”
“It’s worth it,” Barney cackled.
That was the last thing Mike would have expected Barney to say. It opened up something inside him, made him want to tell Barney what he’d been thinking about last night. “I know. He’s a great kid. I want to do my best for him, and one thing I do know is that a parent’s supposed to love his child.” He paused for a moment, wondering how to explain. “Well, what I’m feeling isn’t love. It’s sheer terror of not being able to meet the awesome responsibility of bringing him up right.”
“I felt that way, too, when my oldest boy was born. Like he was a new dress Midge had sprung on me, with the bill to boot. Like I had nothing to do with it. Just like you’re feeling now. Love comes later. Takes time. When they smile at you. When they say ‘dada.’ When they act like they’d like you to hold them. Stupid, ay-uh? But it happens.” He sent Mike the closest thing to a smile Barney was capable of.
Barney was, on the outside, the least sentimental person he could imagine. If Barney could feel that kind of love, maybe he could. Time and a couple of “dada” moments would turn Mike into the kind of parent Brian should have. He hoped so, but parenting was more than love and a sense of responsibility. He just wished he knew what the rest of it was. Brian was such a cute, funny, happy kid. He deserved a dad who knew.
He repeated the words in his mind, cute, funny, happy…Brian didn’t act like a neglected child. Had his father changed? He’d been in his mid-sixties. Had time mellowed him? Relaxed him? Calmed his workaholic nature? So that Brian might have had a father who played with him, cuddled him, talked to him, all the things Mike had never had? Or had Brian simply had a loving mother and a really great nanny?
If his father had changed, it hadn’t happened in time for Mike. Leaving Brian to him in the event of his death had been his last blow, and his most cruel.
“Barney,” he said, “I wish you’d been my father.”
SINCE BARNEY’S heart attack, Allie had been doing double, triple duty at the diner. The chefs in training would arrive tomorrow, and the situation should improve. Brian was doing fine, and Mike was back in full force, but still she’d arrived early.
Arrived first, in fact. She’d expected Mike to be there, but he wasn’t, so she turned on the lights, and as she was wondering what to do next, Maury dashed in, started the ovens and the grill and got to work.
She began setting tables. While she was laying out silverware, she heard a sound unlike any other in her experience, a deafening clang as if a thousand steel rods had hit the ground all at once.
Rushing outside, she saw that next door, just in front of the three-story historic building that was scheduled for restoration, someone had, indeed, dropped a thousand steel rods onto the ground.
Maybe not a thousand, but a lot. She waved at the truck driver and the men with him, and her heart stopped pounding. Scaffolding, of course, so that the workmen could painstakingly replace the original crumbling mortar between the bricks and replace broken slate tiles on the roof.
When the reverberations from the rods died down, she heard screams coming from Mike’s apartment. Darting into the foyer at the foot of the stairs, she almost ran into Mike, disheveled, barefooted and harried-looking, with Brian in his arms, wailing.
“What the hell was that?” Mike’s teeth were clenched together.
“Language,” she said, then tried to explain over Brian’s screams. At last she pointed out the foyer window.
“Scared the—daylights out of him,” Mike said.
She could only read his lips. “Do you think his ears could be hurting again?” she asked him, pulling on her own ears.
“He was just fine until the moon fell to earth,” Mike said loudly. “I have to get dressed for work. I don’t know what to do.”
At the moment, he was rubbing Brian’s back, trying to cuddle him at the same time he was fighting off punches from Brian’s fists.
“Okay,” Allie said, reaching for the baby, “go back upstairs and toss his coat and hat downstairs. Then get dressed while I take him for a walk. Maybe that’ll settle him down.”
Mike gave her a grateful look and fled. Allie waited at the foot of the stairs, deafened by Brian’s screams in the tiny space, until she was pelted by Brian’s outdoor gear and the diaper bag, followed by a leather jacket and gloves that must be for her. Allie flung on the coat, no time to think how sweet that was of Mike. Dressing Brian was like dressing an enraged cat, but she managed at last and got the stroller onto the sidewalk with Brian in it, twisting in his seat.
She tried showing him the steel rods, explaining they were the source of the noise, but wasn’t surprised when that didn’t work. So she set off with him at a swift pace. Motion might put him back to sleep. At just that moment, the workmen began to move the rods, and Brian went into high gear.
She began to sing. He screamed louder, if that were possible. Lights went on in the houses on the square. Curtains twitched. Allie gritted her teeth and marched on.
Deciding to give the residents of the square a break, she turned down a side street. In a few minutes, Brian’s wails turned into quiet sobs, even sadder than the screams. She stopped the stroller, crouched in front of him and said, “There’s nothing to be afraid of. It was just a loud sound. It won’t happen again. Want to go back and see Dad?”
She turned back toward the diner and heard a wail building up from the stroller. “I guess not,” she said, making a swift U-turn. “Then let’s go to my house,” she said. “How about that?”
“This is above and beyond the call of duty, Allie,” Mike said when she called him. “I feel guilty.”
“Don’t,” Allie said. “If he stays at the restaurant, he’ll close the place down, and then I won’t have a job.”
“That’s the truth.” Mike sighed. “Okay, thanks from the bottom of my heart, and I’ll pick him up as early as I can this evening.” As an afterthought, he said, “He doesn’t have anything to eat.”
“The grocery store is a two-block stroller ride from the house. We’ll go as soon as it opens. Everything will be fine—”
“What was that?” Mike said, sounding panicked by the deafening sound coming from her kitchen.
Allie put her hand over her other ear. “One pan being banged against another one,” she said. “I hope you see the irony here. It’s the same kind of sound that scared him this morning.”
“Except that this time, he’s making it. All the difference in the world.”
“Just get to work, Mike, and try to relax. I’ll call if we need you.”
“Okay, Brian,” she said enthusiastically when she’d hung up, “give these spoons a try.”
Soon after seven she walked him to the store, supplied herself with everything he might need during the course of the day, and congratulated herself that the crisis had passed. He was back to being his old sweet self, fascinated by every “toy” she pulled out of Mrs. Langston’s closets and cupboards, which she carefully washed before handing them to him.
When Mike’s car pulled up in front of her house at eight that evening, she was lying on the floor beside Brian, gazing at him and thinking hard while he slept in a pile of Mrs. Langston’s comforters topped by a clean sheet. She got up to let Mike in and pointed to Brian.
“You know what I’m doing here, don’t you?” she asked Mike without even saying hello.
“Saving my life,” he guessed.
“No, I’m being the nanny,” Allie said. She sighed. “So let’s give up, stop pretending I’m not. Between now and January, I’ll help you find someone permanent, but for now, I’m it.”
She expertly scooped u
p Brian and laid him across Mike’s arms, looking up into his astonished face.
“I’ll see you at six tomorrow morning,” she said. “Don’t argue with me. I’m flat-out exhausted.”
She got him onto the stoop and closed the door in his face. And then, unable to help herself, she smiled.
MIKE WAS all ready to go and obviously waiting for her when she arrived at his apartment ten minutes early. He looked cheerful enough holding Brian on his left hip, and Brian waved wildly at her and giggled.
“All quiet on the northern front,” Mike murmured.
She took Brian from him, snuggling him and blowing little kisses into his hair. He was clean and sweet-smelling, ready for another fascinating day.
“Did you rest up last night?” he asked her.
“I sat down on my bed to take off my shoes and fell asleep in my clothes,” she admitted. “I feel great now.”
And she did feel great. The sight of Mike and Brian together would make anyone feel great.
“There’s coffee in the kitchen,” Mike said.
Allie glanced up to see Mike gazing at her, his expression unfathomable. “Excellent news,” she said.
He smiled at her. “Okay, I’ll get down to the kitchen if you think you’ll be okay.”
“We’ll be okay, won’t we, Brian?” The baby giggled at her.
“Before you go,” she said to Mike, “since I’m officially the nanny now, is there anything you’re especially interested in teaching him? Or anything you’d like me to do for him that I might not think of?”
“Well…” He hesitated. “I’ve been reading The Book, and it says babies should have activities. Little League? Piano lessons? I don’t think so. Do you know what it’s talking about?”
She almost laughed. Instead, she said seriously, “I’ve heard some of the moms around here talk about swimming lessons in special indoor pools and baby gymnastics classes, and even some learning programs. I’ll do some asking around to find out where they’re located.”
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