A Hickey for Harriet & a Cradle for Caroline

by Nancy Warren

  She had to get a grip.

  They were turning into the street where she was staying. She clasped her damp palms together. She had to tell him.

  Jonathon pulled the car to the curb and cut the engine. In the sudden silence they stared at each other. He lifted a hand and touched her hair. “Well, the weekend didn’t exactly go the way I planned it, but—”

  “I had a wonderful time,” she interrupted. “It was like old times.”

  He grinned at her, that devastatingly charming grin that got to her every time. “When are you moving back home?”

  “I’m, um…” Oh, what was the matter with her? She ought to have seen this one coming. She took a deep breath. “I’d like you to come for dinner one night this week. What about Wednesday?”

  The grin faded, and he was as serious as she’d ever seen him. “I don’t want to play any more games. Let’s make it tomorrow. And if I come for dinner, I’m going to want to stay for breakfast.”

  Her breath caught on a combination sigh and sob. Without answering, she opened the car door, digging the borrowed house keys out of the cream clutch from the wedding. She had to go by feel since she could barely see.

  She made it to the door and managed to get it open before he appeared with the case of her things he’d brought along.

  “All right,” she said shakily. “Tomorrow.”

  “Why don’t we have dinner tonight?”

  She took a deep breath, making sure she was on the other side of the open door. “I’m pregnant. See you tomorrow.”

  “I NEED A CHISEL,” Jon announced.

  Bert of Bert’s Hardware, stared at him. They knew each other through the chamber of commerce, not because Jon was a frequent visitor to the store. In fact, as far as Jon could recall, he’d never crossed the threshold before.

  Places like this made Jon nervous. It was all tools he had no idea how to use, and nuts and bolts and pipes. Jon’s tools of choice were a calculator to estimate costs and a phone to call in the experts. Any job requiring more macho tools could be hired out to a macho guy who knew how to use them. He didn’t know a chisel from a planer. Which was a problem, because he needed both.

  He’d blown it and blown it good. He’d been amazingly successful in convincing Caro he didn’t want children. Now he had to make her believe the truth. That he wanted children as much as she did.

  He must have stood like a fool staring at the door Caro had shut in his face for a good ten minutes. At first he’d been numb with shock at her announcement that she was pregnant, then delighted. He’d been about to bang down the door to be with her, kidnap her a second time in as many days if necessary, but then he realized that if he’d drawn up a plan to destroy his future happiness he couldn’t have come up with a better weapon than to tell her he didn’t want kids. Getting her to believe the opposite would take some doing.

  Words wouldn’t cut it a second time. He had to convince her through an impossible feat of manly daring.

  He picked up the pages he’d photocopied from the book he’d bought earlier: How to Build Your Own Nursery.

  His airways had felt restricted as he’d leafed through the book looking for a way to show Caro with his hands how much he wanted a baby with her.

  He’d balked at the crib. He wouldn’t entrust anything so precious as a baby to any crib he would build. But the cradle was a two-hammer job, signifying minimum difficulty on the book’s handyman scale according to the authors. Minimal tools, minimum skills and he’d liked the time frame. According to the instructions, he’d have a cradle built in just over eight hours.

  Perfect.

  Jon had always been a quick study. He’d managed a four-year business degree in three; he was certain he could shave a couple of hours off the estimated cradle-building time. He figured he’d have his home-built cradle ready for occupation in under six hours.

  All he needed was the correct tools.

  “You need a chisel?” Bert repeated, looking at him as though he’d lost his mind.

  “Yes. And a coping saw.”

  Bert nodded, then paused to scratch his ear. “You want to show me what you’ve got there, Jon? Maybe I could help.”

  Oh, yeah. He’d help, all right. He’d help spread the story that Jonathon Kushner was building a cradle. Wouldn’t the good people of Pasqualie love to hear about that? He could already hear the whispers and speculation.

  He slapped the photocopied pages against his chest. “No. It’s, uh…I want to do this myself.”

  “Okay, keep your shirt on,” Bert muttered. “Shout out what you need and I’ll get it for you.”

  “Great. Excellent.” If Jon had been thinking straight he would have prepared a list and faxed it, then picked all the stuff up. But he was like a traveler in a foreign land in the do-it-yourself department. His normal rules of behavior didn’t seem to apply.

  So he called out his list of tools and materials, and Bert loaded them on a trolley. When Jon had double-checked that he had everything, including what looked like most of a butternut tree, the trolley was packed high with tools, three grades of sandpaper and something called filler-stain. He had everything right down to the nontoxic varnish.

  Bert rang up the total. “Comes to $783.08.”

  Jon pulled out his credit card, thinking he probably could have ordered a cradle from Tiffany’s that wouldn’t have cost as much. But it wouldn’t have meant as much to Caro, either. She knew he’d never built anything in his life and this was the gesture that would tell her his real feelings.

  He was counting on it for the sake of his marriage and his family. He couldn’t quite keep the grin off his face as he and Bert manhandled the dolly of stuff out to the parking lot.

  “You want me to deliver this for you?” Bert said, eyeing the Mercedes.

  “No. I want to get started right away.”

  Between them they managed to wedge everything in, lashing the butternut to the car’s roof. He drove away slowly, feeling more like the Beverly Hillbillies moving all their worldly goods than a prospective father with nothing more than the makings of a baby cradle.

  He got home and parked outside the garage, having already decided that would be the command center for Operation Cradle.

  He set up his new portable workbench, put an alarming number of tools out and hauled in the piece of wood that, within six hours or so, was going to be transformed into a cradle.

  He glanced at his watch—11:00 a.m. Good. By five he’d have the cradle done, sooner if he really focused, in plenty of time for dinner, and then he could get back to wooing his wife. He figured he had all the time in the world.

  Taking a deep breath, he rolled his shoulders, and pulled out the instructions.

  He read them thoroughly. Baffled, he frowned. Maybe the light in here wasn’t that good; he couldn’t seem to make any sense of the directions.

  He took the instructions into the house and brewed himself a pot of coffee in the bright kitchen. While he was waiting for his coffee he read the directions again, with a highlighter pen in hand so he could highlight each step in the process.

  Butternut was an open-grained hardwood, he learned, so it must be filled before staining. Right, filler-stain. He had that.

  Round all corners. Well, duh. It was a cradle. Aha, that’s where the coping saw came in. He scratched his head, trying to remember which one was the coping saw.

  Even as a drop of cold sweat rolled down his back he reminded himself that he could do this. He was an intelligent, educated man with two advanced degrees. This was a two-hammer level project for the beginning handyman. How hard could it be?

  Back into the garage. By one o’clock he was ready to take those two handyman hammers and bash the How to Build Your Own Nursery authors senseless.

  In two hours he’d managed to gouge a small well in the aptly-named hardwood. He’d also managed to injure his thumb badly enough that he was pretty sure he was going to lose the nail, to break the handle off his new chisel when he accidentally threw
it against the side of the house, and to give himself a black eye when he lost control of the block of wood that was no closer to being a cradle than it had been two hours earlier.

  He pulled out his cell phone, wincing at the pain in his thumb, and considered offering Bert a thousand bucks to come over and build the damn cradle.

  With a soft curse he shoved the phone back into his pocket knowing he had to do this himself.

  14

  CARO WATERED the plants Tuesday morning, which she’d intended to do on the weekend. “You must be female,” she said to the healthy-looking ficus. “You retain water.”

  She was up much too early to go to work and much too upset to do anything that involved concentration.

  Jonathon had stood her up last night, after she’d cooked his favorite dinner. His six o’clock phone call had been harried and bizarre. He’d sounded so strange she had a feeling he’d been drinking.

  “I hope your father’s not turning into an alcoholic,” she said to her tummy. “Is that hereditary? If it is, I apologize right now. I never knew. Honest. Seems funny to feel guilty over your father’s faulty genes, but I guess I might as well get used to guilt. It’s a mother’s burden. I’m guilty you won’t have a normal home life with a mother and father, guilty I’m not a better cook, and I should probably tell you I’m hopeless with nursery rhymes. It’s like jokes. I get so far then don’t remember the punch line.”

  She sighed at her shortcomings as a mother, thinking of her little girl growing up not knowing what happened after Rapunzel let down her golden hair.

  Was that the same story where the little guy spun straw into gold?

  And what were the names of Snow White’s seven dwarfs?

  “Sleepy, Dumpy…” No, that couldn’t be right. Humpy, maybe. Depression washed over her as she contemplated her inadequacies as a mother, and the heretofore unknown discrepancies in the Kushner gene pool. She brightened up a little, however, when she thought ahead to the fashion-doll stage.

  “If there’s one thing I know, baby, it’s fashion. Barbie will never look so good.”

  Cyclops seemed to have picked up on her anxiety and was pacing and meowing until she picked her up and cuddled her.

  With the cat purring against her neck, she heard a car pull into the driveway. It wasn’t even seven yet, who could possibly be visiting at this time of the morning? She opened the front door only to feel her jaw drop.

  There was Jon. At least, she thought it was Jon. That was certainly his car. But this guy looked as though he’d gone twelve rounds with Tyson in a very bad mood.

  “Jon?”

  He turned to her and she gasped. “What happened to your eye?”

  “Had a little accident.”

  He limped toward her and in spite of her anger, her heart twisted. “What about your leg?”

  “I dropped a—I forget what it’s called. A big metal thing on it.”

  He was bleary-eyed, his hair was a mess and her usually scrupulously neat husband didn’t smell all that good.

  Annoyance and pity warred within her. “Where have you been?”

  “I have a surprise. Go inside. I’ll bring it in.”

  She didn’t move. “Jon, have you been drinking?”

  “A few pots of coffee. Give me a break, will you? I’ve been up all night. Just go inside.”

  He’d been up all night, he appeared to have slept in his clothes, he smelled sweaty and unwashed and if he hadn’t been brawling, she’d eat her new maternity dress. She wasn’t anywhere near ready for maternity clothes, but she hadn’t been able to resist.

  Well, she wouldn’t eat her dress, of course, because she didn’t suppose designer clothes were the optimum diet for an expectant mother.

  She muttered as much to the cat, settling them both at the kitchen table. Cyclops leaped away, still restless, pacing and mewing.

  She heard Jon bash something against the front door and call her name. He sounded out of breath.

  “I’m in the kitchen.”

  He limped in, carrying something about the size of an armchair wrapped in a yellow sheet with an inexpertly tied bow around it.

  “What on earth?”

  He grunted as he placed it to the floor. “Open it.”

  She glanced up, but it was hard to read his expression through the black eye and unshaven stubble.

  For some reason her fingers trembled slightly as she undid the bow and removed it. She took a deep breath and wiped her suddenly damp palms on her slacks before flipping the sheet away.

  She had no idea what she was looking at. A piece of modern art? An incredibly strange salad bowl on a wobbly stand?

  She stared at Jon, speechless, and he dropped to his knees beside her, wincing as he hit the tile. “Do you like it?” he said, sounding so hesitant she barely recognized the self-assured man she was used to.

  “Yes,” she said politely, wondering what on earth this thing was and what she was supposed to do with it.

  Maybe it was a bird bath?

  For pterodactyls.

  “You don’t have to use it,” he said, still in that soft, diffident tone.

  Okay. A clue. It was something you used. “Oh, of course I’ll use it.” For what she had no idea. A planter? But surely the plants would topple out.

  “I’ll have to fix it so the baby doesn’t fall out,” he said.

  “Baby?” What this lumpy, strangely yellow hunk of wood with a crater gouged in it and a baby had in common, she couldn’t work out.

  “Yes. It’s a baby cradle. I made it myself.”

  It was too much of a shock. Those two statements together. He’d made her a cradle. For their baby. With his own hands. She turned to him, so choked with emotion she couldn’t form a single word.

  “I know it’s not very good. It was a lot harder than the directions indicated. And I’ve never made anything before. I planned to have it finished in time for dinner last night, but I wasn’t nearly done, that’s why I had to cancel. I worked all night. I just finished. I didn’t want to miss you before you went to work, so I didn’t stop to shower or shave.” He stopped talking long enough to sniff and grimace. “I was so scared I’d miss you. Please say you understand.”

  The tears were coming and she couldn’t stop them.

  “You made it?” She touched a finger to the odd-shaped lump and it wobbled alarmingly.

  “Yeah.” He lunged for it, settling it back in place, holding on until he was certain it wouldn’t topple.

  “Well?” he said. “What do you think?”

  She bit her bottom lip. “I think that that is the worst cradle I’ve ever seen.” She blinked rapidly, though nothing would stop the flow of tears. “And the sweetest thing you’ve ever done.”

  Even through Jon’s blurry, sleep-deprived eyes, he could see she had a point. He’d never let any child of his spend five minutes in that pathetic excuse for a cradle. “What I was trying to say is…” He glanced at her, hoping she’d finish the sentence for him, jump in and help him out, but she merely gazed at him, her eyes like rain-drenched violets.

  “I’m trying to send a message here.”

  “And that is?”

  “I love you. I told you I didn’t want kids because I love you. With children or without them, I want you. I…” It hurt to tell her this, but it was time for full and complete honesty. “I need you.”

  Another pair of tears tracked down her cheeks and he saw the hope, and her own need. He stepped forward and pulled her into his arms. “We’ll make mistakes, and we’ll fumble. We won’t be perfect parents, but I promise you here and now that I’ll be the best husband and father I know how to be. I love you.” He kissed her lips then dropped to his knees and kissed her belly, which would soon bloom with his child. “I love both of you.”

  She sniffed and wiped her streaming eyes. “I love you, too. I’m sorry I didn’t trust you. Sorry I was such a fool.”

  “There’s nothing like almost losing something precious to make you appreciate it.�
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  He rose and kissed her, a long deep kiss that promised more than words ever could. She was light-headed and short of breath when he pulled away.

  “Speaking of something precious, what are we going to do with your cradle?”

  He shrugged. “Kindling.”

  “No!” she cried. “You made it and that makes it beautiful. Although, of course, I couldn’t put our baby in there.” She sniffed. “Why don’t you take off the legs before somebody gets hurt?”

  While he did that and put the cradle on the floor in the corner of the kitchen, she said, “You look like you could use some breakfast.”

  “Thanks. I could. Are you sure it’s okay? Should you be standing? Do you feel all right?”

  She laughed. “I have never felt better.”

  “You’ve never looked better, either.” He pictured her growing round and couldn’t suppress the smug pride. They’d done it.

  They were so busy talking at once, making plans, eating breakfast and sometimes falling silent simply to stare at each other, that neither noticed Cyclops until a strange noise came from the corner, almost spookily like a crying baby, and had them both jumping to their feet.

  “Oh,” Caro cried, dropping to her knees. “Look!”

  Jon glanced over at the litter of tiny kittens snuggled in his homemade cradle against the proudest-looking cat he’d ever seen. He thought of the hours he’d worked and the injuries he’d sustained on behalf of a one-eyed tabby. Then he turned and saw Caro laughing as she helped a blind and mewling newborn kitten find a teat. And he knew he couldn’t have spent his time better.

  When she rose, he snuggled up behind her and wrapped his arms around her, resting both hands possessively on her belly. With a wry grimace he glanced at his wobbly cat cradle. “If I donated another thousand bucks to the animal shelter, would you let me burn that thing?”

  She leaned back against him in a gesture so familiar it brought an ache to his throat. “No. I want that always, to remind me that something can be imperfect and still wonderful.”

  He groaned. “Five thousand.” She turned into his arms and nuzzled his neck.