The Baby Notion

by Dixie Browning

“I couldn’t find a pitcher for the syrup,” she said, “so I used this.”

  This being a china vase that had been sitting on the mantel over the boarded-up fireplace ever since Pete had won it at a church bingo game. It was even uglier than the china.

  Priss was pouring the wine when he came up behind her. Jake had never been much of a wine man. Generally he stuck to Red Dog and Wild Turkey, but Pete claimed his doctor swore by the grape, saying it would add years to a man’s life.

  “I’m not sure what time it is—my watch is in the shop and I couldn’t find a clock, but dinner’s all ready, so if you want to sit down, I’ll bring it in.”

  Jake didn’t know what time it was, either. Unless he was off at a sale, he didn’t rely much on clocks. Sunup was time enough to start working. Quitting time was when everything was done, or when he was wore to a frazzle, whichever came first. His belly told him when to eat; anything else he could guess at near enough.

  Today, he didn’t know whether it was time to eat, time to go to bed, or time to go crying in his beer. He was just plum thrown off his stride. If he’d been a horse, he would have checked his shoes for rocks, his saddle for burrs, and the pasture for jimsonweed.

  As it was, he didn’t know what part to check. Leastwise, he did, but he couldn’t afford to think about it.

  She brought in what she called dinner and Jake had always called supper. First came a platterful of innertube patches. They were little, they were black, and they were thin. From the look of pride on her face, you’d have thought she was serving one of those fancy cuts of beef all gussied up in ruffled britches.

  Jake managed a sickly smile.

  Next came the sausage. It was a cake, all right. A onepound cake that had been baked in the oven until it was tan on the outside, pink on the inside, and still oozing grease onto the platter.

  “It looked sort of pale,” she said anxiously. “I started to put catsup on it, but I wasn’t sure you liked catsup on sausage.”

  “Yeah, come to think of it, some catsup would be right good. You sit, I’ll get it.”

  Judas priest, what was she trying to do, poison him? Give him the bubonic plague, or whatever the hell it was you got from eating raw pork?

  She was still sitting there, hands in her lap, an expectant look on her face when he got up nerve enough to go back. He’d forgotten the catsup, but catsup wasn’t going to salvage anything; not the meal, not his belly, not her pride.

  “Honey, tell me something—have you done much cooking before?”

  She shook her head, still smiling. “Rosalie won’t let me in her kitchen. She’s my housekeeper and probably the best friend I ever had, but she’s over eighty years old, because she was past fifty when she started working for Mama and Daddy, but she doesn’t like to admit it—she likes to think I can’t get along without her, which is mostly true, only I’ve never had a chance to find out.” That last was said sort of wistfully.

  “Hmm,” was all he could think of to say. Jake was learning a few things about Miss Pricilla Barrington, and he didn’t much like it, because what he was learning was getting him all mixed up inside.

  She was a nut. She was a screw-up and a royal pain in the behind. Every time she opened her mouth, she stuck in her pink plastic sandal. But it didn’t seem to matter. She was so damned sexy she could walk across a room and short out every circuit from here to Fort Worth. Jake had a feeling her heart was even bigger than her cup size, which made her a little too likable—which was dangerous.

  And now, dammit, he was either going to have to starve or hurt her feelings real bad.

  She held out the platter. He raked off a few of the silver-dollar-size pancakes. They couldn’t be as bad as they looked.

  “Here, have some butter and syrup while I slice the sausage. Daddy used to have a cook who made this sausage loaf for breakfast that was real good, with applesauce and breadcrumbs and raisins and everything in it. I wish I had the recipe, but I never eat sausage anymore. Rosalie says I need to watch my hips.”

  He opened his mouth and then shut it again. Wisecracks weren’t going to help here.

  “Would you rather have molasses? There’s a great big jug in the pantry, but it looked sort of moldy around the top, so I thought maple would be safer.”

  Jake was about to allow as how he took his pancakes, when he took them at all, with butter and a dusting of cinnamon and sugar. Then he put the first one into his mouth and tried to chew.

  “Well, maybe I’ll have just a drizzle of syrup,” he said when he got it chewed and swallowed.

  She handed him the vase of syrup and then the platter of sausage, which was when things really started to come apart. Jake was willing to suffer a bellyache for a good cause, but raw pork was another matter. What’s more, he couldn’t let her eat it, either.

  “Prissy,” he said. “Honey, have you ever heard about the danger of eating pork that’s not real done inside?”

  She looked at him, her eyes big as duck eggs.

  Then she looked down at the pork, which was just laying there, sort of grayish pink and white except for the edges, which were pale tan.

  “It’s not done, is it?” she whispered. “I didn’t know how long to cook it, but the outside looked done. I thought things cooked from the inside out.”

  “That’s a microwave. Pete doesn’t trust microwaves. He says they rob a man of his—well, anyhow, that’s why we don’t have one. That’s, uh, Peter J. Moss.” Damned if he wasn’t chattering the same way she did when she got nervous. “I told you about him, didn’t I? He’s this guy who works around here sometimes.”

  But Priss wasn’t interested in any Peter J. Moss, or anyone else. Instead she was remembering her birthday barbecue, when she had given the volunteer fire department nearly a hundred pounds of barbecue—pork, not beef. She’d thought barbecued pork, eastern style, which her mother had never ceased raving over, would be sort of special, so she’d had it flown in.

  It struck her then that the fireman who wouldn’t allow her back inside her own apartment might have been one of those who’d had to go to the hospital with food poisoning. Could he have been holding it against her all this time, just waiting for a chance to get even?

  “Priss? Honey, snap out of it.” Jake, a worried frown crinkling the skin around his eyes, came around the table and put his arm around her shoulders. “Are you okay?”

  Widening her eyes to accommodate the sudden excess of moisture, Priss drew in a deep breath filled with the mingled scent of horse, man and soap. She shivered, not from the cold this time. Unable to resist, she turned her face to the warm body standing by to give comfort, and found her chin resting on the rodeo buckle he wore on a sweat-stained leather belt.

  “There now, sugar, why don’t I open a couple of cans of Vienna sausage and we’ll smother those pancakes of yours in syrup and have us a feast. I’ll even make a pot of coffee—one of those fancy kinds you have to grind yourself in the grocery store. Pete’s real partial to one that tastes like Mexican chocolate.”

  Reaching down with one hand, he found her chin, which was about to drive him crazy, nuzzling his belly the way she was. He tilted it up so that he could look down into those clear, syrup-tan eyes of hers and touched a lineup of freckles on the side of her nose that put him in mind of one of those constellations whose names he could never remember. Orion—Centaurus—Vidalia—something like that. “There now, honey, everything’s gonna be just fine. You just weren’t used to cooking in a different oven, that’s all. Hell, anybody could make a little old mistake like that.”

  She sniffed, pulled back a little and wiped an arm across her face, bangles jangling like a tambourine player at a tent revival. “Um…Jake, I hope you didn’t buy that belt buckle of yours thinking it was gold.”

  He hadn’t. He’d won it. He’d won better, but his ex-wife had gone off with anything he’d had of any value at the time, including his bronc-riding and his calf-roping buckles and whatever prize money he’d managed to save up toward a n
ew secondhand horse trailer.

  “Because my tongue touched it sort of accidentally. I reckon that sounds awful, doesn’t it?”

  Her voice was still a little on the raw side, but that was the least of Jake’s worries. She’d had her tongue on his belt buckle?

  Judas priest. Here he’d gone and ridden that damned roan just about into the ground, trying to wear himself out so that he wouldn’t be thinking about what he’d been thinking about, and she had to go and lick his belt buckle?

  “Jake? It’s real pretty, anyway. Brass is a nice metal, only it tastes different. Gold doesn’t have any taste at all, but brass tastes like—”

  “Pricilla.”

  “Sort of salty and sour, you know, like grape-leaf pickles?”

  “Pricilla!” Jake backed away, wishing he still wore his hat, because he needed to adjust something, and he couldn’t very well adjust what needed adjusting while she was staring at him that way. If he’d been wearing a hat, he could have tugged the brim down far enough so that she couldn’t read what he was thinking. Because he was sure as hell thinking it.

  Thinking about how it would be to spend the next few years exploring all the many ways a man and a woman could pleasure one another, and then inventing a few more…

  Besides, he’d just as soon keep her attention focused above his belt line.

  Years? Had he thought, years? What he’d meant was a weekend. Maybe even a whole week. Jake reminded himself that where women were concerned, he had a short attention span. On purpose!

  “Would you, um—like to play a few hands of poker?” Anything, he thought, to get his mind out of the rut it was in.

  “Poker? Well…maybe, but first I’d better wash these dishes.”

  “I’ll help you,” Jake said, which was some indication of just how far around the bend he had come.

  Together, they managed to spill salt on the floor, break one saucer, and wet the front of two clean shirts. Jake did know his way around a kitchen, from years of being on his own. Priss knew about as much about dishwashing as she did about cooking.

  “Your hair smells good,” he murmured, reaching past her to drop a sudsy plate into the drainer.

  She buried her chin in the neck of her shirt and concentrated on scrubbing the trademark off the bottom of a baking dish.

  “I reckon you go to a lot of parties.”

  “Parties?”

  He shrugged. “Dances. Socials. You know, where folks eat and drink and fool around?”

  All the dishes were done, and Priss fumbled frantically around under the billowing suds for something else to wash. He was too close. She could feel his warmth, smell the outdoorsy scent of his clothing—she could even hear the rasp of his breathing. “Yes. Well, that is, I don’t go out a whole lot. I could if I wanted to, but—”

  She turned around, a look akin to panic on her face. Their eyes met, and Jake reached out a hand to steady her. It was wet. “Priss,” he said, his voice deep and slightly unsteady.

  “Mercy, would you look at the time!”

  Jake couldn’t look at anything but a pair of warm brown eyes surrounded by an unlikely thicket of navy blue lashes and a mouth that was just begging to be kissed. His own eyes growing heavy, he leaned forward just as she darted out from under his arm.

  He was left standing there like a stump, wanting her so damn bad he could taste it.

  “G’night,” Priss called out as she dashed from the kitchen. Her voice sounded about two octaves higher than usual.

  “Yeah. Right. Thanks for supper.”

  Sometime before morning another line of storms came pushing up from the southwest, bringing more thunder, more lightning, but little more rain. After one particularly loud blast, Priss sat bolt upright in bed, disoriented—sensing she wasn’t at home but unable to piece together the past few hours right at first.

  And then she did, and found it impossible to go back to sleep. Finally she crept downstairs and felt her way into the front parlor, to the old, sun-faded, brown plush couch that looked even older than the house, though it was hardly worn at all.

  She lay down and pulled a floppy, cretonne-covered pillow over her shoulders against the early morning chill, and slid her bare feet under another one. Downstairs, the thunder didn’t sound quite so loud. The drawn window shades helped block out the constant barrage of lightning.

  After a while she fell asleep, and it was there that Jake found her when he came downstairs a little later, stiff and groggy, to make coffee.

  For the longest time he just stood and stared down at her. She was lying on her side with one knee drawn up, accentuating the curve of her hips, exaggerating the smallness of her waist. With her shoulders crumpled up real small and one hand tucked under her face, she was damned near irresistible. Her hair—that bumper crop of spicy-smelling, hay-colored hair that tempted him almost as much as her body did—had tumbled free of restraint. It fell almost to the floor, and it was all he could do not to gather it up and—

  Yeah, well…

  Tiptoeing out to the hall, he retrieved a slicker from the rack behind the front door and spread it over her, taking care not to touch her any more than he had to. He lingered another moment or two and then reluctantly let himself out.

  Back to the training pen.

  Four

  While Priss slept on through the dark, dreary morning, Jake put the roan through its paces. He’d taken the stud in after it had near about killed a man up near Nocona. Jake had thought to work some of the trouble out of the roan’s system, finish him off some and sell him at the spring sale down in Dallas. That had been over a year ago. Since then, they’d come to know each other pretty well, Jake and the stud. Jake thought he’d keep the horse on for a while longer.

  As for the woman, Jake didn’t know what he thought about her. As soon as he got a handle on her, she went and moved. Lust was a lot simpler than liking. Easier to understand; easier to deal with.

  Jake’s history with women went back a long way. It included the usual number of back seat and creek bank episodes, back when he was a fool kid doing his best to live up to a reputation for wildness.

  He hadn’t exactly earned his reputation—leastwise, not right off. In the first place, there’d been his mother, Jaylene Spencer, who was the daughter of a supermarket manager in a little west Arkansas town. Her mother—not that Jake had ever met either of his grandparents—had been the Sunday school superintendent. After graduating from high school at the age of sixteen and a half—she had always been real smart—Jaylene had set out to Dallas to stay with a cousin and find herself a job.

  Her very first day at the El Rancho Beauty Salon where she had taken a position as receptionist and sweeper, she had run into Rex Baker, a stingy, hard-assed oilman from New Hope, who always had his hair and nails done at the El Rancho when he was in town on business. According to rumor, Baker had been a real ladies man back in those days.

  At any rate, after less than a week’s acquaintance he’d managed to make Jaylene forget everything her mama had taught her about not whistling in public, always wearing a petticoat, and never parting her thighs for a man until she had a wedding certificate framed and hanging over her bed.

  When Jaylene had started to get sick at the first whiff of permanent wave solution, she had gone to a doctor, which was when she’d found out she was pregnant. So she’d quit her job, because regardless of the cause, she couldn’t stand the smell of permanent wave solution, and moved to New Hope, naively expecting Baker to marry her, even though she hadn’t seen him but half a dozen times in the four months since she’d moved to Dallas.

  She had gone out to his home to tell him the news, but his gateman had had instructions not to admit any uninvited guests. To which Jaylene had said, “Well, if he doesn’t know I’m here, he can’t very well invite me inside, can he?”

  That argument hadn’t set very well with the gateman.

  She had finally caught the oilman between his office and his limousine and blurted the news right th
ere in the parking lot, with his driver standing at attention beside the open back door.

  Baker had pretended not to remember her, which had just about broken her heart. He had finished the job by telling her that hardly a week went by that some roundheeled floozy didn’t try to screw her way into his bankroll. While she was still standing there, big-eyed, slackjawed and sick to her stomach in the sizzling heat, he had peeled two hundred-dollar bills off a roll and told her she knew what to do with it, and if she ever bothered him again he’d have her picked up for soliciting.

  Jake had learned all this the week before his mama had died. She’d done a lot of talking under the influence of the heavy dose of painkillers she’d been taking, and Jake had never been quite certain how much of it was true and how much was the rambling of a dying woman.

  The way he saw it, judging from what he’d learned since then—mostly from Big Earline—about all his poor mama had had going for her in those days had been hard luck and pride. She’d headed back to Arkansas to have her baby, only her parents, embarrassed at what the neighbors might say, had sent her packing. She’d come back to New Hope, hoping and praying Tex would change his mind, only of course, he never had. Four months pregnant and still sick as a dog every morning, she had found a job waiting tables at Earline’s Kitchen that had since been replaced by Little Joe’s Café. She had told Big Earline right up front that she was pregnant, but that she didn’t mind hard work and actually welcomed it because it kept her from dwelling on her troubles, so Earline had hired her and she’d worked until she’d gone into labor.

  No, his mama hadn’t had an easy life. Jake was ashamed to admit that as a teenager he’d been embarrassed by the rusted-out mobile home they’d lived in down in Shacktown, and by the fact that sometimes his mama had stayed out all night. But she’d always called to let him know she was all right, and to be sure he’d had his supper. Earline let her bring home leftover food from the restaurant, and from the time he was old enough to remember, Jake had eaten so many meals of pinto beans, cornbread and coleslaw that to this day he got indigestion just thinking about it.