Daughter on His Doorstep

by Janis Reams Hudson

  What was it she’d said to him with that smug look on her face when she’d been showing him the baby books and the pile of typewritten instructions she’d prepared for him? Something about, “I know it goes against your genetic code, but you simply must read this material. It’s full of instructions you’re going to need.”

  Okay, great. It was about time babies started coming with instructions. But the little booger was really tuning up now, and she looked so miserable that Trey wanted to cry right along with her. He couldn’t bear to leave her alone in her crib while he went to the kitchen and heated a bottle. She would think he had abandoned her.

  He got the carrier/car seat thing, put her in and carried her with him to the kitchen.

  Instructions be damned. Any idiot could put a pouch of formula into a nurser and heat it up. He placed it in the microwave just as Katy tuned up and started wailing again.

  “Ah, come on, sweet pea.” He punched numbers and started the microwave, then turned away instantly and picked up the baby. “I’m hurrying, honest I am.”

  Young Katy was not impressed. Her eyes scrunched shut and leaked tears, while her mouth opened wide with a pitiful cry.

  “Give a guy a break, huh? I’m new at this.”

  A new thought struck him. Still holding Katy, he turned and glared at the microwave. What if the nutcases were right? What if microwaves really did put deadly rays in the food?

  He swore.

  As if to let him know exactly what she thought of his cussing, Katy made a terrible face and filled her diaper with some of the most foul-smelling stuff it had ever been Trey’s displeasure to encounter. Then she screamed louder.

  He laid her on the table and tried to get the diaper off, but Katy’s little legs slipped from his grasp and she plopped right back down into the stinking mess in her diaper, getting it all over herself and splattering some onto his shirt.

  Trey stared down at himself, stunned. One small blob of baby poop rolled off his shirt and landed on the toe of his boot.

  The phone started ringing.

  Katy cried harder.

  The formula pouch in the microwave exploded.

  Help!

  It was only Monday.

  Chapter Two

  Salt Lake City, Utah

  Heaven help her, it was only June. Laurie Oliver didn’t see how she was going to survive the rest of the summer living with her parents. At least, not with her sanity intact.

  The wall between the living room and the front bedroom vibrated to the deep bass beat of her youngest brother’s stereo. The opposite wall, separating the living room from the single-car garage, shook in time with the shouting match going on in the garage between Laurie’s parents.

  On the sofa, Laurie’s youngest daughter, five-year-old Amy, huddled in on herself in defense against hearing her grandparents go at each other. Next to her, Amy’s six-year-old sister, Carrie, wasn’t quite as sensitive about the argument in the garage as she was mad at her uncle Billy’s rudeness in turning up his stereo. With a mutinous expression on her normally serene face, Carrie held out the TV remote and pressed the up arrow on the volume control.

  Laurie and the girls had been at her parents’ house barely a week, and it had been the same scene every day. Pouting brother, fighting parents. She was only grateful that the girls were asleep when David, her other brother, came in late every night reeking of whisky.

  Laurie closed her eyes and prayed for patience. If it hadn’t rained all morning, leaving the backyard a boggy mess, she could send the girls outside to play. Having a yard to play in was a new concept to them; they would have enjoyed themselves. But it was too close to dinner, and Carrie detested mud, so that particular diversion was out.

  The good news was there was only one more week left in June. Then it would be July, then August, and she and her girls would be leaving. If she didn’t commit murder in the meantime.

  Squaring her shoulders, Laurie marched to her brothers’ bedroom door and knocked.

  When they were kids, Laurie had had a room to herself, while Billy and David had shared. When Laurie married and moved out, Billy had taken over her old room. Now, with her and the girls moving in for the summer, Billy had been forced to move back in with David, and neither of her brothers were happy about it.

  Laurie might have felt a twinge more guilt over disrupting the household, except that everyone was acting like such snots about being inconvenienced. She just couldn’t find any more guilt in her. Billy was acting like a pouty two-year-old.

  She knocked again on the bedroom door.

  Naturally, Billy wouldn’t have heard a dozen stampeding buffalo outside his door, his music was so loud, so Laurie got no response.

  This time she pounded. When that got her nothing, she turned the knob and pushed the door open.

  Her eighteen-year-old brother, Lord love him, lay sprawled on his back on his bed, sound asleep. Until she hit the off button on his stereo.

  Billy popped straight up and blinked. “Hey.” His protest came from a scratchy-sounding throat. “Leave that alone. I was listening to it.”

  “You were asleep, and it was so loud the girls couldn’t hear the television in the living room. After I asked you twice to turn it down.”

  “I don’t see what the big deal is.” He sneered as only a put-upon eighteen-year-old could. “Besides, you’re not the boss of me.”

  Laurie resisted the urge to bang her head against the wall. She didn’t figure the poor wall could take any more trauma after being blasted with hard rock music for the better part of the day. Besides, it wouldn’t get her anything but a bruise. Instead, she prayed again for patience and sat on the edge of Billy’s bed.

  “Look,” she said. “I’m sorry that my moving back home for the summer has put you out of your room. I know you don’t want to share with David again, but you’re doing it anyway, and I love you for it.”

  Billy stared at the ceiling, completely unimpressed.

  Laurie fought the urge to shake him. “This isn’t all fun and games for me, either, you know.”

  “Yeah, sure.”

  “You think I like moving back here and sharing a room and a bed with both of my daughters? You think I like having my eardrums assaulted day and night with your music? You think I like hearing Mom and Dad go at each other all the time?”

  “So move out. It’s not my fault you couldn’t keep a husband.”

  The pain of Billy’s barb surprised her with its sharpness. Mostly, she thought, hoped, because her little brother knew it would hurt and said it anyway. That the little boy she’d loved and coddled all his life would be so intentionally cruel sliced deep.

  “You’ve gotten mean,” she managed.

  Flushed, Billy had the good grace to look away. “Sorry,” he mumbled.

  “You should be. It was a cheap shot. Besides, what makes you think I wanted to keep him?”

  Billy looked at her and cocked his head, interest lighting his eyes. “Why wouldn’t you? I thought that’s what all women wanted, a husband.”

  “Not when he’s immature, irresponsible and unfaithful.” She had to admit that that last one still hurt. She knew she wasn’t to blame for Jimmy’s immaturity or his inability to accept responsibility for his own actions, but had she somehow driven him into the arms of another woman?

  No. She’d been over and over it. She was not responsible for Jimmy’s behavior. Not any more so than she was for her apartment owner’s decision to sell the complex she’d lived in for five years to a developer who planned to level it and put up a parking garage, forcing her and everyone else to move right at the start of summer.

  “Jimmy was a jerk,” Billy said.

  “He was,” Laurie agreed. “But I won’t have you saying that or anything else bad about him around the girls. He’s still their father and they love him, and that’s as it should be.”

  Billy’s only response was a shrug.

  “I’ll have your word on that,” she said.

  He ga
ve her another shrug.

  “I mean it, Billy. Your word.”

  “Yeah, yeah.”

  She would have pressed the point further, but she heard the phone ring in the kitchen. She preferred to answer it herself before one of the girls got it. The last time Amy answered the phone, she had ordered seven magazines before Laurie got there.

  It wasn’t a magazine salesman this time. Laurie felt relief and pleasure at hearing the voice of her father’s sister. Aunt Donna was the one sane and steady member of the entire family. “How are you? How is Wyoming?”

  “I’m fine. Wyoming’s fine. How are things there?”

  “Don’t ask,” Laurie said, unwilling to even think about the tension and unhappiness in the house, now that she was talking with one of her very favorite people. “What’s that I hear in the background? It sounds like a baby.”

  Donna chuckled. “That’s little Katy, our newest Wilder.”

  For the past couple of years Donna had worked on a ranch, the Flying Ace, somewhere in southwestern Wyoming. The ranch was owned by the three Wilder brothers and their sister; Donna served as housekeeper and nanny for the oldest brother and his wife and children. Aunt Donna always had a funny story to tell about one Wilder or another. Laurie had heard so much about them since Donna had gone to work for them that she felt as if she knew them herself. “The Wilders have a new baby?”

  “And what a little sweetheart she is,” Donna said.

  Laurie could hear the smile in her aunt’s voice. “How old is she? I don’t remember you mentioning your boss was expecting.”

  “She wasn’t. This is Trey’s baby.”

  “Trey? He’s the youngest brother, right?”

  “You’ve got a good memory.”

  “It’s easy. There’s Ace, then Jack, then Trey. And Rachel, of course.”

  “That’s them, all right.”

  “Wasn’t Trey the carefree bachelor of the family? I don’t remember you saying anything about him getting married.”

  “Well,” Donna said, drawing the word out. “No, I didn’t, because he didn’t. But he’s got himself the prettiest little baby girl you ever did see. Next to you, when you were born, that is. And your babies.”

  “Ah.” Laurie laughed. “Nice save. So, since Trey doesn’t have a wife, does this mean you’re taking care of the baby for him? How is that working out?”

  Donna sighed loudly enough for Laurie to hear it plainly over the phone. “It’s not working out well. At least not for Trey. And frankly, we’re all running out of steam around here, what with spring roundup and Ace’s three hellions out of school for the summer and now the baby. Trey’s been trying to hire somebody to live in at his place and take care of Katy for him, but so far no takers.”

  “Why can’t he just leave her with you during the day? Or is that not workable?”

  “It could work,” Donna said. “In fact it’s working now. But Trey feels as though he’s asking too much of me and the family. He’s determined to raise this baby, and he wants her raised in his home. Plus, even when he leaves her here with us all day, he doesn’t get much sleep when he takes her home at night. He needs help at home.”

  Laurie smiled. “Too bad he doesn’t live around here. I might take the job myself. It would be nice to hold a baby again.”

  Donna chuckled in sympathy. “Are your girls growing up on you?”

  “Yes. Too fast. Anyway, I wish him luck. And you, too, until he hires someone. Do you want to talk to Dad?”

  “Are he and your mother still…”

  “Raising the roof? Yes,” Laurie said darkly. “I’m surprised you can’t hear them.”

  “All I hear is the television.”

  “That’s the girls. They have to turn it up full-blast to hear it over Billy’s stereo and Mom and Dad’s yelling.”

  “Oh, good grief,” Donna said with disgust. “That’s ridiculous.”

  “You’re telling me. If I had the money and a place, I’d get the girls out of here in a hurry.”

  “Oh, honey, is it that bad?”

  “Aunt Donna, I’ve never seen the family like this before. I think our staying here is only making things worse, and I don’t know what to do about it.”

  “When is your house supposed to be ready for you to move into?”

  Laurie closed her eyes and brought a picture to mind. Her house. Fresh white paint, dark-green trim, lots of sparkling windows. It would be her first home of her own. The first house her daughters would ever have lived in. No thin apartment walls with noisy neighbors on the other side. No clomping footsteps overhead at all hours of the day and night. A nice fenced yard instead of a concrete parking lot. And located less than two blocks from the school the girls were going to attend and where Laurie would start her new teaching job in the fall.

  Oh, she couldn’t wait.

  “The middle of August,” she told Donna. “That’s when the seller’s new house is scheduled to be finished so they can move.”

  “Are you counting the days?”

  “I’m counting the minutes. It’ll be a miracle if I don’t grab the girls and run away from this madhouse long before then.”

  “Well,” Donna said, “if you get the urge, come on up here to the ranch. You can stay here at the main house and you and I can have a good visit. And I’ll get to spend time with my two beautiful grandnieces.”

  For a minute, a short one, Laurie was more than tempted. But reality and common sense reeled her in quickly. “Oh, Aunt Donna, don’t think I wouldn’t love to see you. But we can’t freeload on the Wilders.”

  “What freeload? You’re invited. They’ve been telling me since I came here that I’m free to have visitors come stay with us.”

  There came that temptation again, but Laurie resisted. It just wouldn’t be right to live off her aunt’s employers.

  “You think about it,” Donna told her. “You could help us take care of sweet little Katy, and Carrie and Amy could learn to ride horses.”

  “I think I’d better go now,” Laurie said with a laugh. “Before I give in when I know I shouldn’t. Here comes Dad. Do you want to talk to him?”

  “As a matter-of-fact, I do. Put him on.”

  When Donna Harris hung up the phone, she was shaking her head. “Where did I go wrong?”

  Her employer and friend, Belinda Wilder, shifted little Katy on her shoulder. To the baby she said, “There, there, sweetheart.” To Donna she asked, “Problems back home?”

  Donna shook her head again, at herself. “Somewhere during the course of taking care of my four younger brothers after Mama died, I managed to let at least one of them, Tom, turn out to be an imbecile.”

  “If he’s an imbecile, I doubt that’s your fault,” Belinda said, swaying back and forth because the motion quieted the baby.

  “You’re right. I raised him better than that. I raised all of them better than that. But right now I want to pinch Tom’s head off and tell the good Lord he died.”

  “That bad, huh?” Belinda asked.

  Because they were more than employer and employee—in fact, they were close friends—Donna told Belinda about the situation at Tom’s house. About the arguments between Tom and his wife, Susan, about Billy’s belligerence and David’s drinking. About Laurie and her daughters being forced to move back in with them because her apartment complex was being torn down.

  “Poor girl’s divorce hasn’t been final hardly more than a year. By the way, that jerk of an ex of hers forgot how to make out a child support check months ago. Now she’s lost her apartment and can’t find another one because prices for everything in Salt Lake City have gone sky high because of the Olympics, and she has to put up with idiots at home. The tension is so tight in that house you could bounce a quarter off it. It’s the last thing Laurie and her daughters need.”

  Belinda continued walking the baby around the kitchen while Donna started dinner. “What’s she going to do?” Belinda asked. “It doesn’t sound like she’s going to want to stay there f
or long.”

  “I guess she’s going to grit her teeth and wait for her house to be ready in August.”

  “Why don’t you invite her up here?”

  Donna paused with a potato in one hand and a peeler in the other. “I did.”

  “Good.”

  “She turned me down. Thinks she’d be freeloading off my employers.”

  “Well, that’s just nonsense,” Belinda said.

  Donna smiled and started peeling the potato in her hand. She dearly loved Belinda Wilder, she surely did. All the Wilders, in fact. “I told her that,” she said. “But she’s got her fair share of pride.”

  “Maybe if you give her a few days and ask again, she might change her mind.”

  Considering the atmosphere in Tom and Susan’s house, Donna thought that might be a distinct possibility.

  After Donna’s phone call that night, things changed in the Harris household. Whatever Donna said to Laurie’s father had an immediate effect. The yelling stopped at once.

  That wasn’t to say that the tension eased or the atmosphere lightened, but suddenly Laurie’s parents were all smiles. As long as you didn’t catch one of them looking at the other when they thought no one was watching.

  Despite the change, Laurie and her daughters were more miserable by the day. There was no help for it: Laurie was going to have to try to find a summer job. If she couldn’t find an affordable place to rent, at least she could pay for day care and get Carrie and Amy out of the house for a few hours each day.

  A sad state of affairs, indeed, when day care became preferable to grandparents.

  After spending the most ho-hum Fourth of July imaginable—at least her daughters had enjoyed the commercial fireworks extravaganza—Laurie knew she couldn’t put it off any longer. The next morning after breakfast, while the girls were watching cartoons, Laurie snatched that morning’s edition of the Salt Lake Tribune and a cup of coffee and settled at the kitchen table to peruse the classifieds.

  The paper was not helpful. By her second cup of coffee she knew she was going to have to go to the unemployment office or drive to the area fast-food restaurants and look for Help Wanted signs in the windows.