Baby Christmas

by Pamela Browning

  She treated him to a measuring glance. He wasn’t sure what it meant. “Don’t you have girlfriends?”

  He shook his head. “Not lately. The women I meet aren’t usually willing to wait around while I rescue some condo’s swimming-pool pump or track down the only repairman in town who knows how to fix a certain kind of card-system entry gate.”

  “You must have a terrific business,” she said.

  He warmed to this topic. “It’s growing,” he said. “I have three offices now along the coast.”

  “So many! How’d you get into this line of work?”

  “I started from scratch when I realized that these big buildings on the beach had a real need for someone they could call when things break, as they inevitably do. We handle plumbing failures like the one tonight as well as electrical problems and air-conditioning malfunctions and, well, almost anything that can go wrong. Usually it happens on holidays. Like Christmas Eve.” He didn’t tell her that he planned to be a millionaire before he was forty. And would be, barring unforeseen circumstances.

  “Wouldn’t you rather be with your family tonight?” she asked. He couldn’t help noticing that she had a way of cocking her head to one side when she listened, her eyes fixed on his with an intensity that signified total interest. It made him want to talk to her for a long time, to bask in her approval.

  “I’m not leaving until after the baby’s gone.” And hopefully much later, he added to himself.

  “But—”

  “There’ll be time for my family later.”

  Rachel caught her lower lip between her teeth, clearly unsure what to make of this. Of him. At that moment the baby stirred in her arms, restlessly tossing her head from side to side. “Is anything wrong, little Chrissy?” Looking grateful for the distraction, Rachel pressed her lips to the fuzz on top of the baby’s head.

  “You and the baby,” Joe said suddenly. “You’re a lovely picture. You look like a composite of every Madonna and child painting I’ve ever seen.”

  Rachel’s eyes, startled now, focused on him. They held his for an endless moment before she glanced away in confusion. She didn’t seem to know what to say.

  Joe was afraid he’d made her uncomfortable. He cleared his throat. “What I mean is, you’re beautiful when you look at the baby the way you do.”

  Rachel started to shake her head in denial.

  “No, I mean it,” he said. “If I’ve offended you in some way—” Perhaps he was pushing too hard.

  She flushed, whether with pleasure or not he wasn’t sure. “I don’t hear many compliments,” she said. Her features seemed softly etched in the dim light from the lamp on the other side of the room.

  “I can’t imagine why not.”

  “Are you always this nice?”

  He hadn’t expected a blunt question. He smiled at her. “Am I nice?” he said.

  “Very.”

  “Let’s just say I’m glad to help.” Their eyes held for a long moment of understanding, and Joe thought, Where did that come from? And he knew that it didn’t matter why they could reach out to each other in these unusual circumstances. It only mattered that they had.

  The delivery girl from Fat Choy’s brought the food, and Rachel refused to put the baby down even to eat. She held Chrissy carefully in her lap and brandished a plate off to one side so that moo goo gai pan wouldn’t fall on the sleeping child, and when she couldn’t open the little packet of hot mustard for her egg roll because her hands were full, Joe opened it for her.

  “This is good,” she said. “Really good.”

  “I’m glad to see you chowing down.”

  “I haven’t had Chinese food in a long time. I didn’t know the best place to get it here.”

  “Fat Choy’s has the best take-out, but if you want a restaurant, then we should go to the Oriental Garden,” he said without thinking. He realized too late that this implied a continuing relationship with her, but she had given him no signal that she would want to see him again.

  She glanced at her watch. “I wonder what happened to that social worker,” she said.

  Chrissy opened her eyes.

  “There, there,” Rachel said in that solicitous tone of hers. “We’re not trying to get rid of you. No, we’re not. We’re not, I promise.”

  Chrissy sighed, brought her knees up, screwed up her face and began to wail.

  “Shh,” Rachel said. “Hush now.” She offered the pacifier, but the baby spit it out.

  Joe bent over them. “Could she be hungry again?”

  “She only ate an hour ago.”

  “Maybe she needs water,” Joe said.

  “Would you mind getting it?”

  Joe went into the kitchen and after a while came back with a bottleful of water, which they tried to give to the still-screaming infant, who only thrashed her head back and forth and screamed with even more gusto.

  “Maybe she needs to lie on her stomach,” said Rachel, looking worried. She eased the baby onto her lap, stomach down, but the baby cried harder than ever.

  “She must have colic,” Joe said bleakly. Not that he thought Rachel could hear, the baby had a marvelous set of vocal chords that seemed to be stuck on high volume.

  “I’d better try calling the HSS people again,” Joe muttered. He picked up the phone and stalked into the bedroom. If he hadn’t closed the door, he wouldn’t have been able to hear the number on the other end ringing.

  He was forced to listen to HSS’s full recorded announcement in order to leave a message of his own.

  “This is Joe Marzinski again,” he bellowed into the recorder without much patience. “I called earlier. We’ve still got the baby we found in the manger, and we’re waiting for the social worker who said she’d come and get her. The baby is crying.” He opened the door to the living room and held the phone out so that the cries would be recorded. “Hear that? The baby is crying! hardy A thought occurred to him. “You can hear the baby crying, right? So you know this isn’t a sick joke. Uh, goodbye.” He hung up, wishing that social worker would show up now. Or a minute ago. Or a half hour ago.

  “Any luck with the HSS?” Rachel asked when he returned.

  “The recorded message again.”

  They exchanged a look of pure futility.

  “Well, Rachel, do you happen to know what we need to do for colic?” He balanced his hands on his hips and stood looking down at the two of them, Rachel and the baby. The neckline of Rachel’s shirt had slipped sideways, revealing a seductive bit of cleavage. He realized with a start that she wasn’t wearing a bra.

  “I always—” Rachel began, then clamped her lips together. It was a long moment before she spoke again. “In Mimi’s linen closet is a hot water bottle. We could try that.”

  Joe was barely paying attention to what she was saying. No bra. Why wasn’t she wearing one? Maybe she hadn’t had time to put one on when the phone rang earlier. He imagined her shrugging into the sweatshirt, yanking it down over her bare breasts as she grabbed the phone. He was tantalized by the thought of her loose breasts shifting under the fabric, rubbing against the soft nap of the sweatshirt.

  “The linen closet is the door next to the bathroom,” Rachel said.

  Linen closet. Bathroom. Hot water bottle. Right. Joe hurried to get the hot water bottle as he willed his anatomy to calm down.

  Joe had just filled the hot water bottle with water from the bathroom sink when Rachel called, over the sound of the baby’s wails, “I love holding her, but maybe Chrissy would be more comfortable in a crib. I wish we had one.”

  Joe looked around the apartment, eager for something, anything to do. There was nothing that could be pressed into service as a baby crib. “How about a dresser drawer?” he asked with sudden inspiration.

  Rachel waved him toward the bedroom, with which he was becoming very familiar. Although not in the way he would like, he thought to himself.

  “Will any drawer do?” he called toward the living room, but Rachel was cooing to the baby
and the baby was still screaming, so in the end he pulled out the top drawer of the dresser and dumped everything in it on the floor. Out rolled skimpy bikini panties in rainbow colors and bras to match and panty hose in unopened packages and a fragrant sachet packet. Jasmine. Just as he’d thought.

  A folded blanket from the closet made a cushion for the bottom of the drawer, and he grabbed a pillowcase out of the linen closet for a sheet. He would have liked to add something waterproof between sheet and blanket, but he couldn’t find anything that would do, so he carried the drawer out into the living room where Rachel was now pacing back and forth with the squalling child draped over her shoulder. He set the hot water bottle on top of the makeshift mattress.

  Together they eased the baby onto the hot water bottle, and she settled down to an occasional whimper. Joe brought an afghan from the foot of the bed to cover her, but it turned out to be too big. Rachel produced a crocheted shawl of Mimi’s and tucked it around the now-sleeping infant. They were sharing a smile of triumph when the phone rang.

  “Get that, will you, Joe?” Rachel said.

  He clicked the phone on and crooked it between his neck and shoulder as he smoothed the shawl down over the baby’s feet. He listened while the person on the other end talked.

  “Oh. I see,” he said, his hopes for a romantic evening fading.

  Rachel glanced up at him as he hung up. One hand rested on the baby’s back, and the other was gathering her hair back from her face, exposing the smooth and delectable line of her jaw.

  “Who was it, Joe?”

  “A police officer. She says that the only social worker on duty has been in an automobile accident and has been taken to the hospital emergency room. They don’t think it’s a serious injury, but she won’t be here tonight. Police headquarters is going to send a policeman over to talk to you about how you found the baby as soon as they get a chance. They’ll probably take the child into custody.” He glanced at his watch. It was a few minutes before midnight.

  “Well,” he said, a little too heavy on the irony. “Merry Christmas, Rachel.”

  “Merry Christmas,” she replied faintly. But her voice held a sense of wonder, and there was nothing ironic in the way she said the words at all.

  Chapter Three

  Joe’s hands, Rachel thought dispassionately, were huge.

  The two of them sat at Mimi’s tiny kitchen table, their knees bumping occasionally because they were in such close quarters. Rachel had cut the brownies into nine squares, and they had eaten six of them. Well, Joe had eaten five. She’d only had one.

  Her own hands were folded demurely in her lap, whereas his were wrapped around one of Mimi’s coffee mugs. This one said, The Hurrier I Go, The Behinder I Get Rachel tried not to think about getting behind in her work; this was an emergency.

  No. The baby was an emergency. Joe was not. But all the same it was fun sitting across from him, looking into his eyes and developing an intimate knowledge of his kneecaps. She could tell that Joe was deliberately keeping his gaze above her neckline, which amused her slightly. She already knew that he thought she was pretty. Did he also think she was sexy?

  “So,” he was saying, “after my old man raised six kids on a machinist’s salary, I figure he has a right to do whatever he wants. He’s got the greenest yard on the east coast of Florida, works in it all the time, loves gardening.

  And my mom, well, she’s busy with her grandchildren and her charity work. You’d like my mom.”

  “I’m sure I would,” Rachel said. She paused, wondering about him. “Did you grow up here in Coquina Beach?”

  Joe flashed a grin. “Around here, you don’t grow up on the wrong side of the tracks. You grow up on the wrong side of the Intracoastal, like me. We had a big stucco house near the church on the mainland. Come on, I’ll show you.” He stood up and rinsed his coffee mug in the sink; he seemed at home in a kitchen.

  He took Rachel’s hand—it surprised her, this contact, but she didn’t pull away—and led her to the sliding-glass doors. “See the church steeple? No, we’ll have to go out on the balcony.”

  Rachel cast a glance toward Chrissy. She was sleeping peacefully. Joe slid the door open quietly and they stepped out into the cool night air.

  Joe gestured toward the mainland. “The steeple of St. Marina’s is to the left of the docks over there, see how it’s lit up red and green for Christmas? Okay, count over four rooftops, and that’s our house. The one with a banyan tree to the side.”

  Rachel could just make out the lights in the windows of a house that appeared to be white stucco with a red Spanish-tile roof. “Do you think your parents are up this late? It’s after midnight.”

  “Oh, sure, they’re probably wrapping presents, and Mom’s doing something in the kitchen, baking maybe.”

  “You’ll be having Christmas dinner there tomorrow then.” For a moment she felt a pang of nostalgia for all the Christmas dinners she’d eaten in the past—roast goose, with her mother’s special wild rice stuffing, fresh cranberry-and-orange relish, mince and pumpkin and apple pie with a slice of cheddar cheese melted on top.

  “I may not have time for dinner tomorrow,” he said. “I’ve got to make sure this job downstairs gets done.”

  Rachel wrapped her arms around herself and leaned on the concrete railing. The lights across the water were a spectacle of red, green, yellow and blue. Maybe because there wasn’t snow on the ground to lend a Christmasy atmosphere, Floridians went wild with colored and lighted decorations. On one of the boats alongside the municipal dock, a cheery Santa Claus figure bobbed on top of the tuna tower, his hand raised in greeting. Eight blinking reindeer danced across the roof of an insurance office nearby. Reflections of the colored lights mingled with the reflections of the stars and rippled merrily across the dark water.

  “The lights are prettier than snow for Christmas,” Rachel said almost to herself. “Snow only stays perfectly white long enough for someone to take its picture for next year’s Christmas card.”

  ‘To me, a warm climate is right for celebrating Christ’s birth,” Joe said. “After all, the first Christmas took place in a place a lot like this. And it’s not as if we don’t have most of the trappings. Every mall has a Santa to take orders from the kids, and we even have more than our share of Salvation Army bell ringers.”

  They smiled at each other in easy agreement. Suddenly self-conscious, Rachel looked away first. “It’s certainly lucky for Chrissy that it’s warm,” she said. True, this was a convenient change of subject, but all the same, she didn’t like to think about the baby’s lying abandoned in the Nativity scene. In fact, she shivered at the thought.

  Joe noticed. “Let me get a wrap for you,” he said.

  Rachel wasn’t cold at all, but she said nothing to correct his misunderstanding. Instead she said, “Why don’t we go back in.”

  Joe hurried inside, anyway, and came back with the afghan that they hadn’t needed for the baby.

  “Is Chrissy—”

  “Sleeping soundly.” He draped the afghan around Rachel’s shoulders. “Better?” he asked.

  Joe seemed to want to make her more comfortable, which touched her, so Rachel only nodded and tilted her face slightly until she was looking at him. The moon above was flat and shining with a silvery light; it cast his features into sharp relief. Rachel thought how strong Joe’s profile was and yet how tender he could be. She warmed toward him as he moved closer and slid his arm around her shoulders.

  “I like looking at the Christmas lights from this side of the water,” Joe said quietly. “It’s pretty, isn’t it? Kind of gets me in a holiday mood.” Up here the traffic sounds were muted, but they could still hear the crash of breakers upon the beach.

  “We really should go back in. What if the baby cries?”

  Joe laughed. “If that baby cries, we’ll hear her. Everybody will hear her. Still cold?”

  Rachel shook her head. She didn’t know where this was going. On the one hand, she thought she sh
ould put a stop to it—right now, before any expectations developed. On the other hand, the expectations that were developing might be only hers. She sneaked a look at Joe. He looked quiet, contemplative, and if he noticed that she was looking at him, he gave no sign.

  “Someday,” he said suddenly, “I’ll have a house on Coquina Island. A big one on the ocean.”

  “Seriously?” she said.

  “Sure. Why not? I can’t go on living in a two-bedroom apartment the rest of my life. Besides, I find the ocean soothing and restful, not only to look at but to listen to. To get up in the morning and take my coffee out on a deck overlooking the beach instead of grabbing it on the run would be heaven.”

  “Hmm,” Rachel said, picturing it. He would be wearing shorts, she thought, in the morning as he walked out to survey the beach, and his big hands would be wrapped around a mug much as they had been earlier in the kitchen, and for a moment she had a vision of those hands doing something much more exciting than raising a mug to his lips. His lips. For a moment she imagined how soft they would feel. Oh, God, she must be losing it.

  “And then,” he was saying, “every morning after I call my office and check on the jobs we’ve got going, I’ll go for a swim. Maybe about twenty minutes of swimming and then I’ll call my office again and then,” and here he stopped.

  “And then?” she said.

  He slid a glance in her direction. “Well, I was just thinking how lonely it would be without kids. A big house like the one I want should have kids hanging out every window and falling off every deck.” He looked sheepish.

  “These, um, children,” she said, trying to picture them. “Are you planning to start an orphanage or something? Because we may have found your first candidate tonight”

  “No, I’ll only start an orphanage as a last resort. Hopefully they’ll be my kids. My sisters are all having conniption fits because I’m the only Marzinski who hasn’t reproduced.”

  “Failing to conform to the family standards, huh?”

  “Afraid so. My business has taken a lot of time up until now. I’ve recently hired an administrative assistant and a new receptionist, which should free me up to have more of a life, but now that I’ve got time to think about it, I haven’t decided which should come first—the kids or the big house.”