The Baby Notion

by Dixie Browning

  “Prenatal Nutrition? Yeah, I guess. Little beauty looks healthy enough to me.”

  “You’ve got a daughter,” Jake said, and Priss thought, amazed, that he sounded almost envious. “Better take one of these, then.” He selected a soft, fuzzy baby seal and set it on the counter.

  “And these,” Priss said, not to be outdone. Her contribution was three boxes of disposable diapers.

  “How old is she?” Faith, always practical, was holding up a tiny knit romper suit of blue-and-yellow striped cotton with an orange sailboat on the bib.

  “How old?” A flash of panic appeared in Mitch’s eyes, which Jake seemed to find amusing and Priss found touching.

  “Jake, stop teasing,” Priss said. “Mitch—can she sit up alone? Does she say anything? Ma-ma? Da-da?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. Mostly, she just drools and wets her diapers. I left her with Jenny next door while I made a supply run.”

  Priss, busy selecting clothes for Mitch’s baby girl, but with her own unborn child in mind, said absently, “Jenny Stevens? I know her. We met at the engagement party Faith gave Mike and Michelle last February. Jenny said she had some mulberry seedlings I could have, but the super wouldn’t let me plant them at the apartment. You remember meeting Jenny at the engagement party, don’t you, Faith?”

  Glass scattered everywhere as Faith dropped a lamp in the shape of a blue dinosaur. She just stood there, a stricken look on her face. After a startled moment of surprise, Mitch picked up a piece of broken lamp. Jake took Faith by the arm and led her over to the wicker settee, telling her to sit tight while he cleaned up the broken glass. Priss headed for the back room after a broom and dustpan, and Faith sat, her face as red as a West Texas sunset.

  It didn’t take more than a few minutes to restore order, and by then, Faith seemed to have recovered from whatever ailed her. Priss thought it might have something to do with Faith’s being pregnant. “That reminds me,” Priss said in a surprised tone. “The Russo wedding is set for November—the same month your baby is due, Faith. Two blessed events in one month, isn’t that wonderful?”

  Faith paled, then hurried out of her chair and practically ran toward the back room. “If you’ll excuse me for just a moment. Mitch, gather up everything and I’ll be right back to ring it up.”

  Jake picked up Priss’s hand and laced his fingers through hers. “Ready to shove off?” he said, as if they had parted only yesterday on the best of terms.

  Nothing had changed. His touch still set off fireworks.

  She tried and failed to extract her fingers from his deceptively gentle grip. “Maybe I’d better stay,” she murmured. “Faith might need me.”

  Faith came back into the room and waved off the idea. “Beth’s coming in at one. Go ahead, I’ll talk to you in a few days.”

  “You heard the lady,” Jake said. He was smiling, but his eyes had that stainless-steel look she had learned to dread. “See you around town, McCord. Good luck with little whatshername.”

  Outside, the heat slammed up from the sidewalk. There wasn’t a hint of cloud in the sky. “Your friend could probably have used some moral support,” Priss said, trying to sound cross, succeeding only in sounding breathless. She tugged at her hand, and he released it.

  “Maybe I’m not in a supportive mood.”

  “In that case, why don’t you go back out to your horse farm? You don’t need to see me to my car.”

  “I didn’t plan to. I told you we needed to talk.”

  “If you’d had anything to say, you could have said it before I left.”

  “You were barricaded in the bathroom, remember?”

  Barricaded was the right word for it. And dammit, it was just as bad as ever. One look from those clear, cool eyes of his and Priss sizzled right down to her toes. One word and she started scrambling around in her mind, trying to remember all the reasons why she didn’t really love him.

  One touch and it all came back to her. Instant recall. His body—the scars. The thicket of black hair on his chest, and the other one at his groin, not to mention the fascinating expanse of tautly muscled flesh in between.

  And the way his body made her body feel…

  His truck was parked outside the boutique in the blazing sun. Her car was parked down the street behind the bank, in what little shade there was to be found downtown in the middle of the day in August. Her personal banker always saved her a parking place in the shade on Fridays. It was just one of those little courtesies that went along with being who she was.

  They sat in Jake’s truck with the engine running and the air conditioner going full-blast. It was several minutes before either of them spoke a word.

  Priss could have waited all day. She hadn’t the least idea what he wanted to talk about, but she suspected it was something she’d just as soon not hear. If he’d had anything important to say to her, he would have said it that day down by the creek.

  “Town’s got more wagging tongues than a kennelful of hounds,” he muttered, leaning back against the corner of the metallic-gray cab.

  “Is that what you wanted to talk about? Miss Agnes, Miss Minny and Miss Ethel’s latest bulletins?”

  “You got that right. I reckon Miss Agnes started it, seein’ as how she works there, but now the whole town’s chewing on it. Rico’s wife came home from taking her kid to the dentist and said she heard you’d gone and got yourself a baby from the sperm bank.”

  As a mere receptionist, Miss Agnes wasn’t privy to all that went on at the sperm bank. Even so, Priss should have known what would happen. A body couldn’t change brands of toothpaste without the whole town’s being in on it, even if they got the brand names mixed up.

  Priss had always assumed that Jake would find out someday, only it was too soon. Too close to what had happened between them, and besides, she wasn’t nearly as immune to him as she’d hoped. These things took time.

  “So?” It was the best she could come up with. It wasn’t much, but then, she’d always fallen back on attitude in an emergency.

  “So.” That single, tight-lipped word tipped her off to the fact that he was mad as hornets and trying hard to hang on to his temper.

  Priss was tempted to repeat it again, but didn’t quite dare. They were already beginning to sound like a couple of school kids starting a shoving match.

  With one sweep of his hand, Jake knocked his hat back into the jump seat. Glaring at her, he said, “So why the devil didn’t you let me give you a baby if you wanted one all that much?”

  Eleven

  Jake, still talking about talking, headed out toward the park, stopping off at Little Joe’s to buy four chili dogs, a beer and half a pint of milk. The milk was for Priss For some reason she’d ordered milk, rather than a diet cola.

  Priss wanted to tell him she was in no mood for a picnic, much less any lectures, but the odor of food reminded her that she had skipped breakfast again, and last night’s dinner had consisted of a stack of Oreo cookies spread with peanut butter.

  She was debating the size of the lie she could get away with when he made a U-turn in the middle of Burrus Boulevard and headed out of town at a high rate of speed. “What are you doing?” she demanded.

  “I wish to hell I knew,” he muttered.

  It’s the heat, Priss thought. Either that or he was undergoing an early midlife crisis. Was that only a male thing? Because it occurred to her that she might be having one, too.

  Not until they passed Buck’s Texaco and Barbecue did she know for certain where they were headed. And then she wondered why.

  “Is Pete all right?” It was the first thing that popped into her mind—that Pete might be sick and Jake needed someone to look after him, and he’d heard about her being a volunteer at the hospital. “Because if he’s sick, I’m real good with children, but I’m not so sure about adults.”

  The look he gave her defied description. It wasn’t the first time he’d looked at her that way. “Pete’s fine. He’s visiting up Denton way. He’ll be back
sometime tomorrow.”

  A few miles down the road she said, “You mentioned talking?”

  “Yeah.”

  Half a mile later she added, “So?”

  “I reckon Faith told you I’m a bastard.”

  Priss’s mouth fell open. “She did no such thing! Faith thinks you’re real nice.”

  Jake began to chuckle, and although she hadn’t a clue as to what he found amusing, Priss thought it was just about the most satisfying sound she’d ever heard. He said, “I don’t go around pulling little girls’ pigtails anymore, if that’s what you mean by nice. What I mean is, my old man never got around to marrying my mama. Didn’t even come close.”

  His left arm was resting on the open window, his right one on the steering wheel. Priss just had to touch something, because at heart, she was a hands-on kind of person. Since his hands were either occupied or out of reach, she settled for his thigh. “Oh, Jake, I’m so sorry,” she said, squeezing hard. “Fathers can come in real handy, but to tell you the truth, they’re not always what they’re cracked up to be. Mine wanted a son. Instead, he only got me, and Mama said, no way would she go thought that miserable business again. Having a baby, I mean. And being pregnant. I think she was sick a lot, and Daddy never did have much patience with sickness.”

  Somehow, without quite knowing how it came about, Priss was telling him all about the gardener who had nurtured her interest in plants, and Miss Agnes, who had tattled on her the time she snuck into the Methodist Vacation Bible School when everybody in town knew Barringtons had always been Presbyterians, and she’d got another good talking to about who she was and her kind of people, and other italic things.

  Which led to Jake’s telling her about his brief marriage, and how he’d been in debt from the time he was fifteen years old and had dropped out of school to look after his mama, and about the running account he had with a florist for the flowers he put on her grave every week. “She always liked roses a lot. There was one kind, sort of pink and yellow—she was hog-wild over those.”

  “Peace,” Priss told him, and he sent her a perplexed look but said Peace right back at her.

  “It’s the name of the rose. I saw some once at the botanical gardens in Dallas. Did she ever go there? It’s out on Garland Road.”

  “I don’t know,” he said simply, and from the hollow sound of his voice, she suspected he was thinking about all the other things he would never know about his mother, and the things he’d never been able to do for her and wished now that he had. Priss had felt that way, herself, since her parents died, and she hadn’t even been all that close to them.

  “It’s always that way when it’s too late, isn’t it? I used to try so hard to be pale and slender and beautiful,” she said to make him feel better. “For my mama,” she explained when he asked her what the devil she was talking about. “All Mama’s people were good-looking. I used to think everybody in Virginia must be beautiful, to hear Mama talk about her cousins and all, but I took after Daddy’s side of the family, and whatever else he was, nobody ever called him good-looking.”

  Jake gripped the steering wheel so hard his hands hurt. He was furious with her parents for not appreciating what they had, and furious with Priss for caring too much.

  It struck him that in some ways, they weren’t all that different. Both of them were misfits, although he’d always preferred to think of himself as a loner.

  The first thing Priss noticed when they turned off the main road was that the Bar Nothing sign had been given a new coat of paint. Dark green on pale yellow, with a barred zero between the two words. She still thought the name was kind of silly, but the sign looked neat and attractive.

  “You’ve resurfaced the driveway,” she exclaimed.

  They were rattling toward the house at a pretty good clip—fast enough to send small chunks of gravel pinging against the underside of the fenders. Jake always drove too fast, but then, so did she.

  And then she saw it. Her chin crumpled. The tip of her nose turned bright pink, and tears began to leak through the navy blue hedge of her eyelashes.

  Jake, who’d been watching anxiously for her reaction, began to swear. “God, don’t tell me. Marching bands, airplanes, buses…and yellow houses, right?”

  “It’s so b-b-beatiful,” she wailed. Clutching his right arm, she fanned her wet lashes to clear her vision and gazed at him as if he were Santa Claus and Clint Black all rolled into one magnificent package. “Jake, how did you know? I mean, why? And the sign and all…”

  She almost thought he was blushing, but it had to be her mascara clouding up her vision again, because grown men didn’t blush. Especially not men like Jake Spencer, who were all gristle and rawhide. She blinked, sniffed and smeared a streak of navy blue across her cheek, then tried to wipe it off her arm between the bangles with a little bitty lace-edged handkerchief, which her mama had always preferred over tissues, and she did, too. At least they’d had that much in common.

  “You like it? You don’t think it’s too gaudy?”

  She laughed, squeezing out a few more mascara-stained tears. “Honestly, Jake, do you think anything’s too gaudy for me? I like gaudy. I adore gaudy. Plain is so boring.”

  The house was the color of scrambled eggs, the shutters a dark, boxwood green with the panels picked out in a paler shade. It reminded her of new growth on an old evergreen. The front door, the swing and the table she’d dragged outside were all painted salsa red.

  “I thought maybe a few bushes and things might set it off, but down at the plant store, they said I’d do better to wait a few months if I wanted them to live.”

  Jake pulled under the shed roof, out of the sun. Together, they sat and admired the house for several companionable minutes. Jake thought it stuck out like a sore thumb. Priss thought that with a little landscaping, it would be fit for a spread in Southern Living.

  “You really like it?” he asked hesitantly, and she started to tear up again because her insides were too full for her outside.

  “I really like it,” she whispered. “Oh, Lordy, I wish I wasn’t allergic to waterproof mascara. I can’t wear bottle tans, either. They make me itch, and you don’t even want to know what mangoes do to the skin around my mouth.”

  Jake wasn’t exactly sure what she was talking about, but then, that was nothing new. She’d said that sometimes she went off somewhere inside her head. He reckoned he was just going to have to learn to follow her there. Either that or go quietly crazy trying to figure out where she was coming from.

  “I haven’t done much to the inside yet,” he said, opening his door and easing his long legs out. He hadn’t had much time for the roan stud lately, he’d been working so damned hard to get the house finished, but ladder work was tough on legs that had been busted a few too many times. Almost as tough as rodeoing.

  The inside was cold as January, with the air conditioner roaring full-blast. The gray floor was still gray, the parlor furniture still as grim as ever. But there was a new feeling about the house. Priss put it down as cautiously optimistic. She peered into every room, her mind swiftly rearranging furniture, painting walls, upholstering this, replacing that. Peach, she was thinking, but then, trying to picture Jake against a peach-colored background, she settled for celery green.

  “That fireplace—” she was saying when he took her by the arm and led her back out into the hall, toward the stairs.

  “Later. First, see what you think about upstairs.”

  Her breath caught somewhere m the vicinity of her squash blossom necklace. Air-conditioning or not, she suddenly felt warm all over.

  The upstairs hall was as dismal as ever, with the same gray floors, dingy white walls and curtainless dormers. Instead of stopping at the first door, Jake led her to the southeast corner room, which was his.

  With one big, callused hand on the doorknob, he hesitated. “Priss—honey. Maybe I’m jumping the gun. I figured—that is, I thought maybe—what I’m getting at is, if you aren’t interested, why then, al
l you have to do is say so, and I’ll drive you straight back to town.”

  He was sweating. He took off his hat and held it over his heart. His hair needed another trim, and the mark of his hatband was clearly visible on his high, broad forehead. Already there was a shadow of stubble on his square jaw, but it was the look in his eyes that purely made her heart turn over in her breast.

  “Jake, are you fixin’ to take me to bed again?”

  Even as she watched, his pale gray eyes turned black as sin. He lowered his hat from his chest to the front of his jeans, which she recognized as his best ones, which were slightly less faded than the rest.

  “I’m most sincerely hoping to.”

  “Is this what you wanted to talk to me about?”

  “Part of it. Yeah, I reckon so, but it’s not the most important thing on my mind.”

  Her eyes widened. They were standing toe to toe, yet not touching. Priss could feel his heat, smell the faint aroma of laundry soap, musk and horse that was so much a part of him. “It’s not?”

  “No, it’s not. Now, listen—I’ve got it all laid out in my mind what I want to say, but if you keep on interrupting me, I’m gonna get all screwed up and make a mess of it.” He lifted his brows as if to offer her one last chance to speak or forever hold her peace.

  She had to speak. If he was leading up to what she suspected he was leading up to, it was only fair. “Jake, before you say anything else, I need to tell you something.”

  A look of pain crossed his face and was gone so quickly she thought she might have imagined it. “I reckon maybe I jumped the gun, huh? Sorry. I’ll drive you back to town.”

  “No, wait! I mean, not that I hold you responsible—at least, not entirely—but Jake, I’m going to have a baby.”

  All the color drained right out of his face, leaving him pale as putty. “A baby. You’re going to—? You and that damned sperm bank?“

  He sounded almost incoherent. Priss reached for his hand and began to chaff it between hers, in case he was feeling faint. “Not me and the sperm bank. I was planning to, but it turned out that I didn’t need to, because…”