The new parents chuckled. “He likes to eat. Took right to the breast—just like his old man.”
Everyone laughed.
Nathan carried the large bouquet that he’d purchased at the hospital gift shop to the extra wide casement window. A perky blue balloon with the words It’s a boy! bounced along in the air behind him.
“Thank you, Nathan. That was really sweet of you,” Sarah said.
“You’re welcome. I’m really happy for you both. Um, all three of you.”
“Maybe you and Case will be next,” Jimmy said, his gaze never leaving his new son.
Casey looked down. Maybe sooner than you think, she thought, hoping her blush didn’t show. She’d felt different lately. Tempting though it was to blame the myriad pressures and changes in her life, more and more she was beginning to think she and Nathan might have gotten lucky.
Casey hadn’t used the EPT test yet. A part of her was afraid to jinx the outcome. Silly, she knew, but Sarah would have understood if Casey had confided in her.
The reason she hadn’t was simple. First, she needed to discuss the matter with her husband. And she made up her mind to do that as soon as they got back to the ranch. When he’d mentioned attending the hearing, she’d asked him to stay over in her new little house. He’d agreed.
“He’s a cute little tyke, but we’ve probably been here long enough,” Red said, looking uncomfortable. Casey wasn’t sure if his uneasiness came from being in a hospital or from the birth. Losing your wife and unborn son could probably leave a pretty deep scar.
“Red’s right. I’ll be back on Saturday. Nathan and I are bringing the daughters of his colleague who had a heart attack down to the ranch for the weekend. The girls would love to see the baby, if you’re up to it. I’ll call first.”
They left a few minutes later—Red in his truck, Nathan and Casey in their SUV. Nathan was driving.
“So, does this make you an aunt?”
She smiled. “I guess so. In a way. Dad certainly treats Jimmy like a son.”
“Does that bother you?”
“It did. For years. Seemed patently unfair that I got sent away and the boy I was in the hayloft with moved into my rightful place in my father’s life, but…”
“But what?”
She let out a long sigh. “I don’t care anymore. Being jealous of Jimmy seems so pointless. There’s enough of Red to share.” She laughed. “Sometimes I think there’s too much of him. And if you think about it, Dad really did deserve a son. If not for…well, he should have had one.”
They didn’t speak for a few miles, then Nathan said, “I never really thought about what that must have been like for your dad. To be up in the mountains with a six-year-old. No cell phones. His very-pregnant wife suddenly collapsing. I don’t know if I could have recovered from that.”
Casey closed her eyes, returning to that pivotal moment in her young life. A perfect day, really. The spring sun had been so bright and warm, unlike the fog-shrouded house they’d left behind. She’d been on her favorite horse, Katie, an older, sure-footed mare that loved kids. Her mother had planned a picnic.
“We won’t go far,” she’d told Red as they saddled the horses. “This might be the last time I ride for who knows how long, so don’t be a spoilsport.”
Her father, who could deny her mother nothing, had agreed to lead the way. Casey was in the middle. They’d barely covered half the distance to the waterfall that her mother had had in mind for their picnic when Casey’s mother had stopped singing.
Casey and her father had both turned to see what was wrong. Abigail had one hand—the one not holding the reins—to her head and had let out a little peep. As if confused by something. Then she’d slumped forward in the saddle.
Casey didn’t know how her father got to her mother before she fell, but somehow he’d caught her and pulled her limp, very pregnant body onto the saddle with him. His horse, a big, powerful gray named Shadow, wasn’t used to carrying twice the load and wasn’t particularly people-friendly in the first place.
Red kept calling her mother’s name, but there was no answer. Casey couldn’t tell if she was breathing or not. She could barely see through her tears, and her heart had been beating so fast and hard, her chest hurt.
“We gotta ride fast, little girl,” Red said, turning back the way they’d come. “You keep up, you hear. If you don’t keep up, your momma might die.”
Casey had tried her best, but her horse was old. Every time he’d disappear out of sight, she’d scream in panic and he’d have to wait. Once he tried taking her reins to lead Katie, but neither horse would cooperate. Shadow didn’t like another horse at his flank and Katie just didn’t have the speed Red needed.
Prior to that day, Casey had never seen her father cry. She hadn’t understood at first that his wet face was the product of tears until they reached the cabin. He’d carried Casey’s mother to the truck then dashed back for Casey. As he carried her to the truck, she touched his cheek. Hot. She remembered the tears had almost scalded her fingers.
“For a long time. Years, actually. I thought I was the reason my baby brother died,” Casey admitted.
The vehicle swerved slightly. “What do you mean?”
“Red told me if I didn’t keep up Mom might die. I…I slowed him down. I was only six, and not that good a rider. He had to wait for me. Mom was still breathing when we got to the cabin, but then she stopped. I can still remember him calling her name. Over and over as we raced down the road.”
She swallowed and opened her eyes. “When we got to the hospital, I was sitting on a chair not far from where they were working on her. They took the baby out and gave him CPR. I was sure he was going to live, but then the doctor shook his head and closed the curtain so I couldn’t see any more. A few minutes later, he told Red that they might have had a chance to save the child if we’d gotten there even ten minutes sooner.” She sighed. “Ten minutes. If it hadn’t been for me, Red could have made that easy.”
Nathan turned on the blinker.
Once they were off the highway, he slowed to a stop and undid his seat belt so he could reach for her. “Oh, sweetheart, I’m so sorry. How come you’ve never talked about this?”
She shrugged. “I guess I put it out of my head, but seeing Sarah…little Riley…I don’t know. The memories just came flooding back.”
“Oh, honey. You were six. You were a little bitty girl on a big horse in the middle of nowhere. What happened was just bad luck.”
His words weren’t new. She’d told herself the same thing, but hearing them from a third party seemed to make all the difference. “Do you think that deep down I’ve had a psychological fear of getting pregnant? Maybe the real reason it didn’t happen for us was me, not your sperm.”
“You’re too kind. But I had a long talk with my sperm and they told me they’ve been working out. Any time you’re ready, they’d like to give it another go.”
His playful tone was just what she needed to take away the residual horror of the past. She almost told him about her suspicion, but at the last second she didn’t. Why get his hopes up until she knew for sure, right?
AS NATHAN WANDERED around the small, neatly appointed house he felt a bit like Alice falling through the rabbit hole. The furniture was familiar but everything looked different.
They’d barely walked in the door when Jimmy called to ask Casey if she’d go to his place and pick up their infant car seat. A small but critical oversight. She’d changed clothes and raced out the door leaving Nathan alone.
The house itself was perfect—for Casey. He felt that truth and it made him a little sick. How did they get to the point where they had two homes? What would that kind of separation mean to them as a couple?
He didn’t know the answers to his questions, but he didn’t like the possibilities they presented. And the only way Nathan knew to deal with frustration was to sweat it out. If he were back in the city, he’d find a gym. Here, he didn’t even know where to find a city,
but on the floor of Casey’s closet, he found his old running shoes, which must have gotten stuffed in one of her boxes by mistake.
He knew where to look for socks—Casey always liked to wear his to sleep in on chilly nights when he wasn’t around to warm her toes.
He opened the top right bureau drawer. Sure enough. Two size-ten athletic socks rolled into a neat ball. As he grabbed one, his hand brushed a box. The simple oddity of the shape made him look at the label.
His breath caught in his throat. A pregnancy test. He’d seen more than his share over the past year and a half.
Maybe it was left over from before.
But when he picked it up, he spotted a sticker from a local pharmacy. His hand was shaking as he put it back in its partially hidden spot.
Secrets. Not with Casey. She was upfront, direct, honest. Or was she?
He sat down to put on his shoes and socks. He couldn’t do anything about the Dockers, but at least he’d worn a white undershirt that morning. He tossed his coat, tie and dress shirt on the bed Casey’s aunt had given them as a wedding gift.
He bolted from the house, making the fluffy puppy behind the gate jump up and start barking. He ignored the animal as he looked around, debating which way to go. His tendency was to take to the road, but a path leading into the orchard promised some shade. The road meant blacktop, traffic and exhaust fumes. He started off.
The infantile howl made him stop. Grinning, he turned around. “Okay, dog, you can go, but if you can’t keep up I’m not carrying you. Got it?”
He could have sworn she nodded. Her whole tricolor body shook with delight when he opened the gate.
She shot off toward the trees without pause, making him regret his impetuous decision, but when she looked back and realized he wasn’t with her, she skidded to a stop, raising a small cloud of dust.
Chuckling, he jogged to her. “Let’s get the rules straight. I lead. You follow.” Then he set out at a moderate pace.
The weather was a heck of a lot hotter than what he’d come to expect in the city. The breeze had a glass-blower’s forge edge to it but he actually liked the way his blood seemed to quicken and stimulate his senses.
He had to keep a watchful eye on the pup because it didn’t seem to have perfect depth perception and crossed into his path every few yards. But he was glad for the company. He didn’t think he could get lost—the trees had to end sometime, right?
Right. If the map in his head was correct, he and the pup would eventually run into Red’s property line and the utility road, beyond which turkey growers planned to build their megahatcheries. His inner GPS kicked in and he turned, startling his canine shadow into giving a sharp bark. An echoing call came from some distance off.
Red’s place. And the wild bunch he’d been introduced to the last time he was down. He could do without a close encounter of the dog kind.
“Hush. We don’t want to bring out the great thundering horde.”
The yipping stopped. With luck, the other dogs would find something else to distract them.
He ran until he came to a fence. When he stopped, his shoes were pale mocha, his socks and the bottom of his Dockers a similar color. Pausing to catch his breath, he stared at the sprawling vista before him. Flat, but not even. Small hillocks covered in knee-high grasses that waved back and forth in the breeze looked friendly and unprepossessing. The kind of Dr. Seuss-like tuft a child might play on.
His and Casey’s child, he wondered?
He couldn’t make the picture come into focus. A baby on top of all his other responsibilities just seemed too much to ask of him. “I can’t do it,” he muttered. “Not now.”
“But you don’t have any choice,” a voice said in his head. “You’re the man of the family.”
Some days he hated that voice. He remembered when he’d become conscious of it. His baby brother had just been born, and Nathan had been left home to care for Christine while their father went to the hospital to pick up their mother and new sibling.
Before leaving the house, Nathan’s father had taken him aside and said, “You know, Nathan, your mother and I are counting on you to take care of things.”
And when his father had passed away, Nathan hadn’t hesitated to do whatever was asked of him. He might have resented his mother’s neediness, his siblings’ demands at times, but he’d filled the role he’d been groomed to handle. Just like in the corporate world. Only now, he felt himself sinking beneath the Titanic weight of his obligations: to the staff in his office, to Gwyneth, Eric, Roz and her daughters, to Casey and Red, to his mother and siblings. Enough already, he wanted to cry.
The puppy, who was sitting patiently at his feet, gave a yip.
He realized he had spoken out loud. And it felt good. He looked around. Nobody here but a dog.
He took a breath then shouted, “Enough already.”
The puppy cocked her head and looked at him as if he was truly mad. Maybe he was. If his life was spiraling out of control, he had nobody but himself to blame. He’d set this play in action by accepting the position in San Francisco. The scenario had made sense at the time. Coming full circle. Close enough to take care of his mother, his brother and sister. Just like his father had instructed.
The problem was he wasn’t a little boy trying to fill too big a pair of shoes anymore. He wasn’t his father.
Casey’s soliloquy at the meeting that morning had made it clear that her goals, her choices, had changed since returning home to the Valley. Nathan had already suspected as much, but hearing her say the words out loud had rocked him. He’d wanted to talk to her about what that change meant to them as a couple, but she’d rushed off.
Nathan refused to believe that she was giving up on their marriage. Casey wasn’t a quitter. Look how she’d stood by Red even after years of masking her hurt by distancing herself from the man, the ranch, this way of life.
Distancing herself to mask her hurt. Is that what she’s doing now? With us?
He grabbed the closest fence post for support as his sudden epiphany rushed through him like a chill from a fever. Their inability to get pregnant had been humiliating to him but really devastating to Casey. She’d put on a brave face and made jokes about wasting money on years and years of birth control products. But deep down he’d known how badly she was hurting.
And what had he done to ease her pain? Nothing. He’d immersed himself in his work, accepted a job that took even more of his time, moved them to a new apartment she hated and asked a woman she disliked to work for him.
He looked down at the puppy sitting patiently by his feet. “I didn’t even want her to have you.”
The dog didn’t have a tail to wag, so her whole backside moved with vigor when she looked at him. His heart squeezed in a way that made him think of Eric. “Life is precarious,” he’d told Nathan when they brought the girls to visit their father. “You just never know, man. You’re going along doing what’s expected of you, then…blink. It’s over. And you realize all those things you put off till you had more time just aren’t gonna happen.”
Like making your wife happy. Watching her wake up beside you every morning. Seeing her give birth.
Something had to change if he and Casey were going to pull out of this nosedive. He had to change.
He reached into the pocket of his slacks where he’d stashed his phone. He didn’t expect to have service, but to his surprise, he had a clear signal. Four bars.
Sitting under the wispy shade of a full-grown pistachio tree, he said, “Kirby’s cell.”
“Kirby’s cell,” the mechanical voice answered. “Calling.”
Two rings, then, “Hey, Nathan, Mom and I were just talking about you. We got the laundry issue ironed out,” he added in a low whisper, then chuckled at his obviously unintentional pun. “Anyway. Today was Casey’s big hearing, right? How’d it go?”
“She…we…got a reprieve. And I need a favor.”
Nathan kept it short and simple. His brother was a grad student, h
e didn’t need things spelled out.
“No problem. I’ve got your back, man.”
Nathan mumbled a gruff goodbye, finding his throat suspiciously tight. He tried to attribute the prickly sensation across the top of his nose to dust, but when the pup launched herself into his arms and started licking his face, he had to admit that he was choked up by his brother’s unequivocal support.
Maybe his family would have been there for him all along if he hadn’t been so set on filling his father’s shoes. He could picture Christine at age five, furious over some power struggle they’d been involved in at the time, yelling, “You’re not the boss of me.”
She was right. It had just taken a while for that truth to sink in. He was sick and tired of being the boss, but it wasn’t too late to change. At least, he hoped it wasn’t.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
NATHAN HAD just started back to the house when a mechanical roar filled the air. He picked up the puppy, just in case, and looked around. Seconds later, a green farm vehicle that looked like it should be carting luggage to and from planes roared to a stop at the end of his row.
Red, in a dusty white cowboy hat, was at the helm. Perched behind him on the open bed sat six dogs. The motley crew of unarmed banditos sent up a noisy, fearsome chorus of barks. The puppy in his arms tried clawing her way under his arm.
“Shut the heck up, you dumb an-i-mules,” Red roared.
The dogs obeyed. All except Betsy. The grand dame had the last say with one mighty “Woof.”
Nathan couldn’t help but grin.
He walked toward the odd vehicle.
“Hop aboard my Gator,” Red said. “You look a little winded. I got just the thing.”
Thirty minutes later, the pair was sitting under Red’s shady veranda staring at the hazy outline of the Sierra foothills in the distance. Nathan and Casey had shared a similar view the afternoon they’d spent at the old homestead. The afternoon they’d made love….
“So, things look pretty crappy for our side, huh?” Red asked, handing him a highball glass filled to the brim with a frothy white liquid that resembled something Nathan might order at Jamba Juice.
A Baby on the Way Page 20