Father Found

by Judith Arnold

  CHAPTER THREE

  THE ARLINGTON YM-YWCA was located in the heart of the city’s old downtown district. A great deal of the commercial traffic had detoured to strip malls on the outskirts of town, but Arlington’s downtown hadn’t quite died yet. Across the street from the YM-YWCA stood the editorial offices of the Arlington Gazette. Down the block to the east, the Connecticut Bank and Trust Company occupied a six-story office building—a veritable skyscraper by Arlington standards—and down the block to the west reigned the city library, a grand domed building with a remarkably ugly modern wing tacked on.

  Nestled into the northwest corner of Connecticut, Arlington was close enough to New York City to attract weekend yuppies with money to spend on vacation homes. It also boasted a sizable native population, a mishmash of rich and poor and in-between. Allison had lived her entire life in Arlington, and she loved the city the way a mother loved a child, in spite of its flaws. She’d visited bigger cities, newer cities, cleaner, hipper cities, but none of them had ever made her long to pull up her roots and settle elsewhere.

  She wasn’t sure which whether Jamie McCoy was rich or working class, whether he was a local or a yuppie invader. She wasn’t sure why his name sounded vaguely familiar. It had nagged at her ever since she’d gotten his call at the hospital that morning. Was there a not-so-famous actor named Jamie McCoy? Someone from a now defunct TV show, perhaps?

  When the streetlight turned green, she crossed the road, Jamie dragging behind her with that unwieldy car seat and his backpack. She’d offered to take the pack for him, or even the baby, but he’d insisted he could manage. He would have managed much better if he’d left the car seat in his car and carried Samantha in his arms. But like so many men, he seemed skittish about holding his baby.

  The coffee shop she entered was, like the neighborhood surrounding it, a bit shabby but hanging on. Allison frequently dropped in for a snack after swimming laps at the Y, and she knew the place stayed open late into the evening to accommodate the night staff at the newspaper. At seven-thirty, she and Jamie had their choice of booths. The dining room was nearly empty.

  Allison tossed her canvas tote onto one of the empty seats, then slid in after it. She tried not to laugh as Jamie wrestled with his assorted gear, wedging the bulky car seat onto the narrow banquette, shrugging out of his backpack, searching for a place to stash it and finally shoving it under the table. He sat, then eyed the baby apprehensively, as if certain she would awaken at any moment

  If she did, Allison wouldn’t be surprised. Babies had an instinct for sensing the most inconvenient times to fuss.

  A waitress dropped two laminated menus onto the table and eyed the baby. “Wow, that’s a young one,” she said in a loud, nasal voice.

  Jamie cringed and shot the baby another anxious look. She continued to sleep, her face angelic, her lips puckering as if she were dreaming of food.

  The waitress eyed Allison, sighed and shook her head. “Jeez. Took me a year to lose all the weight, and look at you. Less than a month and you’ve got the figure of a teenager. Some gals have all the luck. We’ve got some specials tonight—a roast half chicken with bread pudding, linguine with clam sauce, and moussaka.”

  “Thanks.” Allison smiled at the garrulous waitress, not bothering to correct her about Samantha’s parentage. “Could you bring us some coffee while we look at the menu?” She realized she was starving, not having eaten anything since a salad and a granola bar at noon. She doubted Jamie would mind if she ordered a sandwich, too. If he didn’t want to keep her company while she ate, he could leave.

  She hoped he wouldn’t want to, though. She assured herself she wanted him to stay only because she was curious about him. Her curiosity had nothing to do with his incredible eyes, gray and blue and green and amber all mixed up together, his strong, hard chin and his athletic build, tall and solid without an ounce of excess bulk. He had the sort of body that filled clothes well, and he held himself proudly, almost defiantly, shoulders squared and jaw angled. He struck her as the sort of man who was comfortable inside his skin.

  But it wasn’t his physique or his glittering eyes or his quirky smile that intrigued her. It was the combination of him and his baby. He wasn’t like the other Daddy School students. She’d been completely wrong to assume, when he’d telephoned her at the hospital that morning, that he was an irresponsible kid.

  He was an irresponsible adult, a man who shouldn’t be in the predicament he was in. He was old enough to know better. Allison would be wise to remind herself of that whenever she found herself becoming enchanted by his beautiful eyes. She didn’t need a man in her life—and she definitely didn’t need an unwed father with a confoundedly familiar name.

  “I’m going to order a hamburger,” she told him. “I hope you don’t mind, but I’m hungry.”

  “So am I,” he said, skimming the menu. “Are the hamburgers good here?”

  “They’re hot and greasy and way too big.”

  He lowered the menu and grinned. “That’s the way I like them.” When the waitress returned with two cups of coffee and a pitcher of cream, he ordered hamburger platters for both of them.

  Allison studied him warily. She wondered if his ordering for her meant he intended to pay. She supposed that if he did, it was only his way of thanking her for her time. Given what she was paid to impart knowledge on child raising to her students in the Daddy School, she wasn’t averse to being treated to a hamburger.

  She felt his gaze on her as she added some cream to her coffee and stirred. He’d better not give her a lecture on cholesterol consumption. She got enough ragging at the hospital when she chose cream over skim milk in her coffee or ordered a burger instead of a cup of nonfat yogurt. She knew everything there was to know about proper nutrition, but sometimes a person simply needed to add a dose of fat to her diet.

  He said nothing, only watched her stir in the cream and take a sip. When she lowered the mug, he was smiling enigmatically. His eyes dazzled her with their multitude of colors.

  His constant gaze made her…well, not quite uncomfortable, but a little uneasy. Just because he was her own age, give or take a couple of years, shouldn’t shift the balance of power so much. She was the teacher, after all, the wise woman, the guru. He was the ignorant turkey with the unplanned baby. She shouldn’t be daunted by his sex appeal.

  She shouldn’t even consider him in the context of sex appeal.

  She decided to invent a new context, pronto. “All right, I give up,” she said. “Who are you?”

  His smile deepened as he perused her across the table. “Who am I? Jamie McCoy.”

  “I know I’ve heard your name before, but I can’t recall where. It’s been driving me crazy all day.”

  “James McCoy,” he told her.

  “James McCoy?” She blinked in shock. “The guy who writes that hilarious column in the newspaper about why men are so goofy?”

  “That’s me.”

  “You’re kidding! No way!”

  Laughing, he held up his hands in mock surrender. “You’re too clever. I can’t fool you. I’m actually the reincarnation of Napoleon.”

  “You can’t be,” she said, playing along. “You’re much too tall.”

  “I took growth hormones between incarnations.”

  She chuckled and took another sip of coffee. “You’re really James McCoy?”

  “I really am.”

  “I read your column every Sunday in the Gazette. I’ve learned more about men from you than from anyone else.”

  “Is that so?” When he smiled, little creases fanned, out from the corners of his eyes. “What have you learned?”

  “That men are idiots.”

  He joined her laughter. “Ah, the power of the pen. I’m obviously getting my message across.” He cocked his head slightly, the hint of a challenge coloring his smile. “I take it you haven’t learned this great truth from experience?”

  “My experience with men, you mean?” she asked, then shut her mo
uth and fought against a blush. Her words had come out all wrong. She wasn’t going to discuss her experience with the opposite sex, either generally or specifically.

  If Jamie was fishing for information about her personal life, she supposed she ought to be flattered. It happened that she had no time for a social life these days, particularly given that when a woman reached her late twenties, establishing connections with eligible men tended to get more complicated. Sometimes she and her best friend, Molly, would read the personals out loud for a laugh. Just last week, they’d found the perfect man in the back pages of the Gazette: “DWM, bald, paunchy, late forties, looking for kinky sex, no commitment.” Apparently there was, indeed, an honest man on the planet.

  Allison would like to find a man that honest for herself, one willing to give as much to the relationship as he took from it. But while the man seated across the Formica-topped table was obviously neither bald nor paunchy, the last thing she wanted was to encourage the interest of the father of a newborn conceived with a woman whose identity he wasn’t even sure of. Just because Jamie McCoy was the author of a series of brilliantly funny newspaper essays about men and their foibles didn’t mean she approved of him.

  He was clearly awaiting a response from her. Once she’d felt her cheeks cool off, she said, “My experience with men has taught me how to be tolerant.”

  Her answer seemed to please him. “Thank God for that. If women weren’t tolerant of men, the human race would become extinct.” His smile faded as he glimpsed the next generation, slumbering in her car seat next to him. Whoever the baby’s mother was, she must have tolerated Jamie at least once, nine months ago. When he lifted his gaze to Allison, his smile was gone.

  She tried to convince herself that was good. He had a delicious smile, a naughty, subtly erotic smile. When he wasn’t smiling, she could remind herself of what a goof this chronicler of goofy men really was.

  He drank some coffee, his eyes never leaving her. “The class was interesting tonight,” he said, and once more she reminded herself not to be flattered. “I was expecting you to teach things like how to heat formula.”

  “I taught you how to heat formula this morning on the phone.”

  “You know what I mean. Practical stuff. Nuts and bolts. I didn’t know we were going to be talking about our fears.”

  “That’s at least as important as the nuts and bolts. Men don’t like to admit they can’t handle anything. They refuse to ask for directions when they’re driving, and they’re just as afraid to ask for directions when it comes to child care. They see it as losing face if they have to admit they don’t know everything about everything.”

  “Gee, maybe I should be taking notes,” he muttered, his grin returning. “It sounds like a good idea for my next column. ‘News Flash: Men Don’t Know Everything About Everything!’”

  She smiled. “I like to get expectant fathers to address their fears early on. Once they can admit they’re scared, they won’t worry about asking any question they want. The nuts and bolts are easy once all the defensiveness gets cleared away.”

  “Well, then, I’ll try not to be too defensive.” He drank some more coffee. “So, what do you think, Teach? Am I going to flunk the course?”

  “No.” She glanced at his tranquil baby, then back at him. “Have you made an appointment with a pediatrician?”

  He nodded. “Tomorrow at nine-thirty.”

  “How about the police?”

  He lowered his gaze to the steam rising from his mug. Her comments about male defensiveness, idiocy and tolerance hadn’t ruffled him, but this question obviously did. A muscle ticked in his jaw; he stilled it by taking a long drink of coffee. “No,” he finally said. “I haven’t called the police.”

  “Why not?”

  “They’re going to ask a lot of questions I don’t feel like answering. Some things are none of their business, you know?”

  She searched his face, wondering how best to open his mind to all the options, all the odds…all the legalities. “I think it is their business when a baby is abandoned,” she argued delicately.

  “Samantha wasn’t abandoned. She was left in the custody of her father—which happens to be me.”

  “She was left on a porch. What if you’d been out of town for a week? What if you’d moved and some other family was living in your house? What Samantha’s mother did was a criminal act.”

  “All right, well, whatever. I do live there, and I was home and Samantha is fine.”

  “But the mother shouldn’t have done what she did.”

  “Who am I to cast stones? Maybe I shouldn’t have done what I did nine months ago. It’s too late to worry about that now. It doesn’t matter anymore.”

  “It could,” she said, observing him closely, prepared to measure the impact of what she was about to suggest. Already he didn’t look terribly happy. Shadows were gathering in his eyes, dulling their natural sparkle, and the muscle in his jaw started ticking again. But Allison was never one to shy from the truth. “Are you sure Samantha is yours?” she asked, softening the question with a sympathetic smile.

  His reaction proved that he’d never considered any other possibility. His eyes opened wider and he fell back in his seat. He raked a hand impatiently through his hair. She could see the tension in his fingers, the harsh angles of his knuckles as he shoved back the thick waves. “Of course Samantha’s mine,” he declared uncertainly.

  “How can you be sure?”

  He opened his mouth and then shut it. His eyes narrowed. He glanced at Samantha, then shook his head and pressed his lips into a grim line. “I don’t have to be sure. I mean, why would anyone leave a baby who wasn’t mine on my porch with a note saying it was?”

  “Why would anyone leave a baby on your porch, period? Whoever left Samantha obviously wasn’t thinking clearly.”

  “Yeah, but…but the note said Eleuthera.”

  “Eleuthera?”

  He sighed. “We met in Eleuthera, in the Bahamas, nine months and a couple of weeks ago—the woman who…the woman whom I think we’re talking about. It was a resort. We hit it off. I thought I was being careful, but hell, even when you’re careful something can go wrong.”

  “Yes, but how do you know Samantha is the product of that liaison?”

  “Because the note said…” He drifted off, looking even more troubled. Allison had almost expected him to be relieved by the possibility that Samantha might not be his. He hadn’t wanted this baby. He hadn’t planned on it. He was a single man who’d had to be taught the proper way to hold an infant. Shouldn’t he be thrilled by the chance that he could hand the child over to the authorities and be done with fatherhood until he was ready for it?

  He shook his head again, dismissing her implications. “All right, look,” he enunciated slowly, as if she were dim-witted and needed to be walked through the process. “I was with a woman, okay? I met her, I liked her, I had sex with her. I thought we would see each other again once we left Eleuthera, because she told me she lived in Manhattan and I told her I lived in Arlington. When I got home, it turned out she didn’t want to see me. So that was the end of it. At least I thought that was the end of it,” he added, eyeing Samantha cautiously.

  “But how can you be sure that was the woman who left the baby?”

  “I just am. No one else would have done this to me. And besides, the note…It said Eleuthera. Who else would have left that note?”

  “I see.” He seemed awfully touchy, unwilling to entertain any other theories, even when those theories, if proven true, could save his butt. “Assuming that this woman you liked and exchanged numbers with nine months ago is in fact the mother of Samantha, how do you know the woman wasn’t involved with somebody else? Sure, she remembered you from Eleuthera. But it’s just possible—” again she kept her gaze steady on him, gauging his reaction “—that she could have become pregnant by someone else. How do you know for sure that this baby is yours?”

  If he’d been standing, she imagined he wou
ld have had to sit. He looked weak, dazed, even more overwhelmed than before. He turned to observe the baby in the seat next to him. His frown deepened. “She’s got to be mine. Look at her. She looks exactly like me.”

  Allison rose and leaned across the table to study the baby. Newborns’ faces were undefined, their bones still growing. For a very young infant, Samantha was certainly prettier than average. Other than that, though…“I really can’t see the resemblance.”

  “Look how blond she is! I was blond when I was a baby.”

  “Jamie.” She smiled at his obstinacy. Surely once he thought about it he would realize that not being the father of a newborn, a virtually motherless refugee who’d appeared uninvited and unexplained on his doorstep, wasn’t such a bad thing. “Lots of babies have blond hair. It doesn’t mean you’re blood relations.”

  He shifted in his seat. He stared at Allison, then past her, then at her again. “What would it take to find out?” he asked, his voice low and taut. “A blood test?”

  “A simple blood test might prove it, especially if you have a rare blood type. If the blood test didn’t rule out your paternity, you could have a DNA test done.”

  She saw the cartilage in his throat move as he swallowed. His gaze drifted back to the baby beside him. As if on cue, she issued a heartbreakingly sweet sigh.

  “What would happen then?” he asked, his tone even more muted. “To her, I mean. What if I had this DNA test and it turned out she wasn’t mine? What would happen to her?”

  “She would enter the foster care system. Social services would take over. And of course the police would try to track down her mother, which they should be doing in any case.”

  “Foster care? Samantha would be placed with total strangers?”

  “Well, Jamie, what are you? I mean, you’re a total stranger to her, too.”

  “Maybe this morning I was.” He fell silent as the waitress arrived with their hamburger platters and a bottle of ketchup. Once she departed, he ignored his food and leaned forward, his elbows on the table and his face just inches from Allison’s. “I’ve had this baby living with me all day. What would be the purpose of sending her to live with strangers? What could they do for her that I can’t?”