The baby made a soft sound, half a sigh and half a gurgle, as Allison straightened up and tucked her into the curve of her arm. “Hello, there,” she murmured, gazing directly into the baby’s face, sliding her index finger against Samantha’s palm and smiling as Samantha’s hand curled into a fist. “Hello, sweetie. What’s your name?”
“She ain’t gonna answer you,” one of the boys volunteered.
Ignoring him, Jamie said, “Samantha. Her name is Samantha.”
“What a lovely name! Hi, Samantha,” Allison cooed. “You’re a sweetheart, yes, you are. What a wonderful little girl you are!”
Jamie’s vision seemed to blur as he watched Allison cradling the baby in her arms. He wasn’t thinking about angels anymore. Madonnas, maybe. He sensed a connection between Allison and Samantha, something so pure and intimate it went beyond arousing him. Allison looked as if her arms hadn’t been complete until the moment they’d shaped themselves around Samantha. She looked as if the baby were a part of her, fulfilling her.
Why didn’t he feel fulfilled when he held his daughter? For one thing, the whole idea that he had a daughter still freaked him out. She was a person, a real, live human being, and she owed half her genes to him. He, Jamie McCoy, had a daughter.
It was just too weird.
But if Samantha was a stranger to him, she was even more a stranger to the nurse holding her. So why did Allison look as if she’d been designed for no other purpose than to hold Jamie’s baby? Was it something they taught in nursing school or did she possess some deep well of maternalism that men could never begin to understand?
Allison lifted her face and studied the males surrounding her. Jamie had expected to see rapture that matched what he was feeling when he watched her. But she was clear-eyed and poised. “See how I’m talking to her?” she lectured the class. “You should always talk to your babies—and use a soft, gentle voice so you don’t frighten them. Let your baby become familiar with your voice. Let the baby hear words. This is the baby’s introduction to language—listening to its parents.”
She moved to the center of the semicircle so they could all see her. “Always hold the baby’s head when you carry it. Babies’ necks aren’t strong enough to support their heads, so you have to support the head with your hand or your arm. By talking to a baby and cuddling it, you actually help it to thrive. ‘Failure to thrive’ is a syndrome in which babies stop eating, stop responding to their environment, stop growing. And one thing that contributes to this problem is if you don’t talk to your baby and hold it and make it feel secure and loved.” She met Jamie’s gaze and smiled. “Show us how you cuddle your baby.”
He swallowed, conscious of the class’s attention on him—and more important, Nurse Winslow’s attention. Picking up his daughter in front of witnesses, one of whom was a slender, statuesque woman with eyes the color of birch leaves in the spring, made his palms go slick with perspiration. If he blew this, if he failed to support Samantha’s head adequately or dropped the blanket or any of a number of mistakes… It was a test, and his chances of passing weren’t good.
He stood as Allison carried Samantha to him, and positioned his arms in front of his chest. Allison arranged the baby in his embrace, smoothing the blanket around her and nudging her head into the crook of his elbow. “There you go. That’s one way to hold a baby. You can also hold a baby on your shoulder, but you can’t make eye contact if you do that. This way, you can look right into her face and let her get to know you.”
Jamie wanted to look into Allison’s face, but he didn’t dare. If he let his concentration drift the slightest bit from Samantha, something ghastly would happen. He kept his gaze fixed on her pink, round visage, on that wispy pale hair, on her thin purple eyelids, the hints of two arched shadows where her eyebrows were supposed to be, the delicate notch in her upper lip.
“Talk to her,” Allison reminded him.
Talk to her? What was he supposed to say? “Hi,” he began, feeling like a first-class idiot.
Samantha clearly had no intention of holding up her end of the conversation. Instead, she moved her hands around, poking at her chin and groping upward until she managed to get a few fingers into her mouth.
“So, Sam, how about those Red Sox, huh?” If she wasn’t going to indicate what subjects interested her, she could darned well listen to his subjects. “Think they’ve got a prayer of winning the pennant this year? You’re right. They don’t. It’s the curse of the Bambino.”
“Hey, they got a chance,” the kid with the nose ring interjected. “You see the way they’re batting?”
“Forget it,” the guy in the golf shirt retorted. “Yankees all the way.”
“Okay, fellows, we’re not going to turn this into a baseball argument. We’re going to discuss the demands having a baby makes on both you and your baby’s mother. Perhaps Mr. McCoy can start things off by telling us some of the changes he’s experienced since Samantha entered his life.” Her smile as she turned to Jamie was cool and expectant—but her eyes sparkled with laughter, as if she enjoyed putting him on the spot.
He was not amused. The biggest change he’d experienced since Samantha arrived was to learn in the most abrupt way possible that he was a father—but he wasn’t going to admit to his classmates that someone had left his daughter on his porch with a note and a bag of diapers.
Allison Winslow was waiting for him to speak. So was everyone else, he realized as he scanned the room. He cleared his throat, discreetly flexed his fingers so his hand wouldn’t go numb under Samantha’s head and said, “One thing that’s changed is, I’m tired. She keeps me hopping constantly. Every time I put her down, she wails.”
Allison nodded and wrote fatigue on the blackboard. Evidently, this was a good answer. He might just graduate from Daddy School, after all.
She turned back to her students. “You will discover that spending time with an infant is very tiring. Jamie is right—may I call you Jamie?”
“Sure.”
She resumed talking. “Not only will you be tired, but the baby’s mother will be even more tired. Even if she has a normal delivery, giving birth to a baby is a physically exhausting thing to go through. If she has to undergo a C-section—remember, we discussed C-sections last week?”
The students nodded.
“If she has one of those, it’s major surgery. It will take her weeks to get her strength back. And it’s up to you as the father to help her out. You’re going to be tired, too. Even if the mother is breast-feeding so you don’t have to do the night feedings, the baby will wake you up at night. During the day, you have to feed the baby, carry the baby with you, clean up after the baby, change the baby’s diapers—”
“I ain’t doin’ that!” one of the boys shouted out.
“You certainly are,” Allison declared with finality. “And it’s going to tire both you and the mother. And what happens when everyone is tired?”
“You go to sleep,” one joker muttered.
“You get into bad moods,” Allison said. “You argue. You bicker over trivia. You yell at each other.” She wrote bad mood on the blackboard. “The mother is likely to be even more tired and moody than you. She might have sudden bouts of crying. This is called postpartum depression.” She added that term to the blackboard list.
One of the boys groaned. “Great, man. She’s on the rag, she’s depressed. She gets pregnant, she’s no longer on the rag—and she’s depressed. She has a baby and she’s depressed. I’m getting depressed just thinking about it.”
“That’s not surprising,” Allison said smoothly. “It can be depressing to realize you can’t just hang out with your friends at night. You can’t go to a movie on a whim, or go to a club. You have responsibilities now. You’ve got to spend time with your baby. How do we deal with this depression?”
“Drugs!” someone hollered.
Allison smiled indulgently. “You find the joy of having a baby,” she suggested. “You look at the world through your baby’s eyes, and
you see what a wondrous place it is. You realize that you’re one of the two most important people in that child’s life, and you make the most of it. You do not ignore the baby or run out on your responsibilities or dump all your anger and frustration on your wife or girlfriend. Instead, you revel in what’s good about being a dad. You’ve created a new life, and that baby loves you and depends on you more than on anyone else. That’s a very exciting, powerful position to be in.”
Jamie glanced down at Samantha. She had practically stuffed her entire hand into her mouth. Her eyes were closed, and she made muted snuffling noises, like a wild boar rooting around for truffles. He contemplated the position he was in—his arms growing numb, less from her weight than from his anxiety about dropping her—and decided that, while it was powerful in a way, it really wasn’t all that exciting.
“Why don’t we go around the room, now, and talk about some of your fears?”
“I thought we were going to learn how to give bottles,” the bald one said.
“We’ll discuss basic child care in our next class. Tonight we’re talking about emotions. I’m sure some of you are a little worried about what life is going to be like once you have a baby. Jamie, do you want to get us started?”
“No,” he said quickly. He had so many fears, he couldn’t begin to name them. Every time he contemplated the word daughter his blood pressure soared and his throat closed up. Jamie McCoy, Mr. Nonchalant himself, wasn’t used to feeling so inadequate, so overwhelmed. He certainly wasn’t going to reveal his soul-deep dread to a roomful of men.
She held his gaze for a prolonged second, then looked at her next victim. “All right, Ray, why don’t we start with you? Are you worried about how you’re going to feed your baby? I don’t mean just fixing bottles. I mean being able to pay for food.”
The younger guys scuffed their toes against the linoleum floor, stared at the pale green walls, nudged each other in the ribs and smirked. The older men became obsessively fascinated with their cuticles. But slowly, carefully, Allison Winslow extracted their fears from them. The kids were afraid of being chronically broke and having to spend what little money they had on their babies instead of on themselves. A couple of them were worried about finishing school. The bald guy was worried about getting ridiculed because he and his wife had decided that he would take a paternity leave while she returned to work. The golf shirt was worried about whether he and his wife were going to be able to sail to Bermuda with their baby in August. All of them were worried about getting sex on a regular basis.
Jamie relaxed in his chair, letting Samantha rest in his lap, although his arms remained snugly around her. His problems were nothing like those of his classmates. He didn’t have to worry about money. His weekly column earned him a tidy sum. The only school he had to worry about for the time being was the Daddy School—although heaven knew what college was going to cost by the time Samantha was eighteen. Sailing to Bermuda wasn’t high on his list of things to do. As far as getting sex on a regular basis…
His gaze swung back to Allison.
For God’s sake, he shouldn’t be thinking of her in that context She was a nurse, a teacher, a lady dressed in white wearing disturbingly clean sneakers. She was a woman who worked in a hospital during the day and taught classes at night and who made him feel like a fool because she’d had to teach him how to hold his own child. She was a tall woman with hair so thick and curly a person could lose small objects within the waves. She was a slender woman with a few golden freckles dancing across the bridge of her nose, with small, high breasts and a waist so narrow he couldn’t imagine her ever becoming pregnant
He wondered if she was married or involved with someone. He wondered if she ever dated her students. He wondered why on earth he was thinking about her when he had an innocent little baby in his lap, blinking her big dark eyes and sucking on her knuckles and reminding him with her mere presence that he wasn’t going to be able to go on a date until he figured out how to hire a baby-sitter.
“Okay, class. That’s it for tonight,” Allison announced, compelling him to tear his gaze from the baby on his knees. “Next week I’m going to bring some life-size dolls with me, and we’re going to do some hands-on practice with diapers and bottles. If you have any questions during the week, or anything you want to talk about privately, you all have my phone number at the hospital.”
The students stood slowly, stretching their limbs, a few of the teenagers punching each other in a typical male tribal custom. One of them hovered over Jamie and peered down at the baby. “Sixteen years from now,” he warned with an enigmatic smile, “you better make sure you keep her away from guys like me.”
Jamie cursed under his breath. He could scarcely contemplate surviving the next twenty-four hours as a father. How in God’s name was he going to survive Samantha’s adolescence? Was it too soon to have her fitted with a chastity belt? Or would it be easier to castrate any male who came within ten feet of her?
He felt overwhelmed by the enormity of his responsibility. He simply couldn’t deal with it. Yet who was going to defend his daughter’s honor if not his daughter’s father? His daughter’s mother? A woman who had abandoned her own child on a porch and fled, not even bothering to make sure someone was home?
Still pondering such weighty questions, he wasn’t aware of the departure of his classmates until the room’s silence distracted him. Looking up from his dozing daughter, he realized he and Samantha were alone in the room—except for Allison Winslow.
She leaned her hip against the desk at the front of the room, her legs crossed at the ankle and her arms folded across her chest. “You’re older than I expected,” she said.
“I think I’ve aged ten years since this morning.”
She laughed. Her laughter sounded like well-tuned wind chimes, light and lilting.
“You’ll get the hang of fatherhood,” she assured him. “Very few people are born knowing how to be a parent. They learn, either from their own parents or from a class like this or from hands-on experience. Sooner or later, you’ll be a whiz at it.”
“I can’t imagine I’ll ever be a whiz at fatherhood,” Jamie predicted glumly. “In fact, I can’t imagine putting the baby back in her seat without making her cry.”
Allison laughed again, pushed away from the desk and ambled over to his chair. He allowed himself a glimmer of hope that she would take the baby from him, but she dashed that hope by lifting the car seat instead. “Just put her in,” she ordered him. “Gently.”
“I’m telling you, she’s going to cry.”
“So she’ll cry. And then she’ll stop crying. Babies don’t have many ways to express themselves. They cry because they don’t know how to say, ‘Stop it!’ or ‘I want it!’ or ‘That seat isn’t as comfortable as your arms.’”
“Thanks,” he grumbled. He didn’t believe his arms were that comfortable, at least not for a baby. But the instant he released Samantha in the seat, she burst into tears.
“You ought to get a stroller,” Allison suggested. “It’s a lot more convenient than hauling the car seat around. They make strollers that can fold flat and fit in a trunk. The back can be positioned so the baby can lie down and sleep or sit up and view the world.”
“Stroller,” he repeated, committing the word to memory. “I have a feeling I’ve got to get lots of stuff. I just don’t know what. I was hoping I’d learn in this class.”
“We’ll be covering the subject of baby gear,” Allison confirmed, “but probably not until the fourth or fifth class. You’re a bit ahead of the rest of the students.”
“Isn’t that just like me? Way ahead of the class. Maybe you could send me to the library while the rest of them finish the math work sheet.”
She laughed again. “No extra credit for you, Mr. McCoy. You may be ahead of the class, but I have yet to see any A-plus work.”
“Okay. I’ll buy an A-plus stroller. And all the other stuff I need, if only I knew what stuff to get. Maybe we could brainstorm a
shopping list for me,” he suggested, smiling. “Have you got a minute?”
She glanced at her watch. “Sure.”
“How about let’s go get some coffee?” Asking Allison to have a cup of coffee with him wasn’t a date. It was the act of a desperate man. He knew he was going to have to put some heavy-duty mileage on his credit card for Samantha, but he didn’t know where or how to begin. Crib or cradle? Playpen or cage? Hundreds of disposable diapers or thousands?
Allison scrutinized him as if she, too, wanted to ascertain that this wasn’t a date. She must have read the near hysteria in his expression, because she relaxed and nodded. “There’s a place across the street,” she told him. “I’d kill for a cup of coffee.”
“They’ll probably give us coffee if we give them money. No bloodshed necessary,” he said, flashing her a quick, nervous grin. She responded with a cool smile that informed him she didn’t think much of him.
Ordinarily he didn’t worry about how a woman viewed him. Most women thought he was a cute scamp or a sexy devil or fun to be with, or at the very least wealthy enough to be worthy of their interest. If the chemistry fizzled, he shrugged it off— but frequently things went well. He’d had his share of romantic disappointments, but he’d had more than his share of triumphs.
Allison was seeing an entirely new side of him, however. She was seeing the inept side, the out-of-his-depth side, the slept-with-a-woman-he-shouldn’t-have side. The father side.
Whatever kind of impression he was making on her, it wasn’t stellar. If luck was with him, he would emerge from their time together with a not-too-tattered ego and a comprehensive shopping list of items for Samantha. Hoping for anything more would be a waste of time.
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