Bachelor Father

by Jean C. Gordon

  Molly went to the master bedroom of the condo and began removing the last items from her dresser. She probably should have brought her things out to Brett’s house last weekend, but she hadn’t wanted to miss the two-day conference on Russian adoptions. She’d signed up for it months ago.

  Then, too, since she hadn’t found anyone to sublease the condo, she’d expected to be able to move her stuff gradually, stopping after work every day to pick up a few things. But that was before Brett decided to help. On Wednesday, he’d called and announced that he had someone to take the condo off her hands for three months, a couple he’d done some surveying work for. Their new house wasn’t ready to move into yet, and they had to be out of their old house. The catch was, they had to move in this week.

  When she’d protested next week was too soon, he’d thrown her own words back at her. She was the one who had insisted on splitting the mortgage, food, and utilities while they were married. She was the one who had insisted on renting out the condo.

  A movement in the mirror caught her eye. Brett leaned in the doorway. He’d taken off his flannel shirt. She couldn’t help noticing how his crossed arms and well-fitted T-shirt emphasized his biceps and broad chest.

  Averting her eyes, Molly folded the dresser scarf and placed in the box, smoothing and tucking it fastidiously around the packed items. Even without looking, she knew Brett’s was watching on her. She checked her image in the mirror, baggy sweatpants, oversized sweater, hair back in a ponytail with tendrils falling down around her face. Whatever was he seeing to cause that goofy smile?

  His gaze caught hers in the mirror and held it for a moment. “So, are you all done?” he asked.

  “I think so.” She scanned the room. It looked positively sterile with the empty shelves and bare off-white walls. “I’ve got this one last box to go out.”

  “Then, what?”

  “The bed has to be dismantled.”

  “I’ll grab my tools from the Jeep.” Brett said.

  “No, I’ve got a wrench here.” She waved it at him. “I put the bed together. I can take it apart.”

  His skeptical look irritated her. “Here.” She pointed at the box by her feet. “This can go out, and if Charles has arrived with his brother’s step van, you and he can start loading the living room furniture.” Molly was putting most of her furniture in storage. She felt uncomfortable with the idea of other people using her things.

  “Aye, aye, Captain.” He took the box and left.

  Molly went to work on the bolts holding the headboard. The first one came off easily. She started on the second.

  “Ouch!” The wrench slipped and her knuckles grazed the sharp wood edge. She dropped the wrench and curled her fingers, clasping the scraped fist in her left hand. That smarted.

  “You okay?” Brett called from the other room as he shut the door.

  “Yes.” Molly rocked back and forth on her knees, still clasping her hand.

  He held out his hand. “Let me see.”

  When Molly lifted her left hand, she saw a smear of blood on her palm. She hated the sight of blood, particularly her own.

  Brett gingerly took her hurt hand in his and grasped her elbow with his other hand. Her head started to spin when he helped her to her feet.

  “Come on,” she heard through the haze. “I’ll fix you up.” Brett guided her to the bathroom.

  “You look like you’d better sit down,” Brett said, directing her to the toilet seat.

  She sat head down and placed her hand on the side of the sink. The room spun as it had the time she passed out in high school biology lab making a slide smear to determine her blood type.

  Brett gently washed her knuckle with soap and warm water. “Nice work. You gashed yourself good.”

  Molly waited for him to say, “I told you so.” But she thought defensively, she had put the bedstead together and figured she could take it apart.

  “Do you have any antiseptic, and bandages?” he asked, instead.

  Good thing she’d left the bathroom for last. Keeping her head down, she lifted her wounded hand from the sink edge and gestured toward a wall cabinet. If he needed bandages, she still must be bleeding.

  Brett chuckled. “The bleeding has stopped.” He dabbed some mercurochrome on the cuts. “Are you always this bad? What would you do if Jake fell and cut himself?”

  Molly lifted her head and glared at Brett. “I’d do fine. It only bothers me when it’s my blood.”

  Brett smiled and wrapped bandaged around her three fingers.

  “Really,” she said, somehow compelled to convince him she could handle an emergency with Jake.

  Brett continued to smile, humoring her.

  “It’s only my blood that affects me this way,” she insisted, hating the whine that had crept into her voice.

  “Then, you’d better give me your other hand,” Brett said, “so I can clean it off. I can’t have you passing out on me. We have work to do.”

  “The bleeding’s stopped. I won’t pass out.”

  “Your hand.” He waited.

  His superior attitude irritated her. Brett was treating her as if she were Jake’s age. Refusing to let him bait her, she extended her hand palm up.

  He squeezed a dab of liquid soap on her hand, wrapped his finger in the washcloth and began making a circular motion in her palm. Lavender filled the room.

  She leaned her head back against the wall and closed her eyes to counteract the warm wooziness that flowed over her. Strange, she’d never gone woozy a second time when she’d cut herself before. Molly sensed Brett hovering over her, leaning closer.

  Bzzzzz.

  Her eyes opened. “The . . . door,” she said slowly.

  “Yeah, the door,” Brett repeated, his voice sounding miles away.

  Bzzzzz.

  “I’ll get it.” Molly stood, forcing Brett to take a step back. “Why don’t you go ahead and finish the bed.”

  “Um, sure.” Brett let her pass.

  Molly crossed the distance to the front door languidly, trying to get her bearings. The cut wasn’t that bad. Maybe she ought to have her iron checked or something.

  Bzzzzzzz.

  “I’m coming,” she said, reaching the door and pushing the intercom button.

  “Hello.”

  “Molly, it’s Tina. Brett said you needed help moving.”

  Molly punched the button again to unlock the entrance door downstairs. When Brett had said some of his friends would be by to help, she’d figured on his guy friends, not Tina. A lot of help she’d be hauling furniture.

  Molly opened the door on the first knock and Tina glided in, looking model perfect in her wide bell jeans and bomber jacket.

  “Hi.” Tina gazed around the room. “Nice place.”

  “Thanks.” Molly hated the feeling of validation she got from Tina’s approval.

  Tina slipped off her jacket. “Where’s Brett?”

  “In the bedroom.” Molly pointed across the room.

  A little smirk crossed Tina’s face as she took in Molly’s disheveled appearance. Molly could almost hear Tina ticking off the time it had taken Molly to answer the door.

  “I see,” Tina said, her eyes twinkling in a knowing way.

  Just how knowing, Molly wondered.

  “Is it safe for me to go in?” Tina asked, raising a brow.

  “Yeah, it’s safe, unless that bolt on the bedstead is giving Brett as hard of a time as it gave me,” Molly answered, not bothering to hide her irritation.

  “Oookay, if you’re sure.” Tina’s voice rose suggestively.

  Molly clenched her hands at her side as she watched Tina slither across the room. What did Brett see in that woman to make them such close friends?

  The door buzzer sounded again.

  “Yes,” she called, louder than necessary.

  “Hey, it’s Charles. Open up. It’s cold out here.”

  A minute later, Brett’s other friends arrived. The guys surprised Molly with what quick order
they made of moving the furniture out and loading it in the truck, despite Tina’s slinking around giving unnecessary directions.

  “You coming, Molly?” Brett called as he slammed the back door to the step van.”

  “I need to check my mailbox. Go ahead and ride back with Charles. I’ll follow.”

  Brett shrugged. “All right. See you in a while.”

  Molly stood in the parking lot and stared up at the dark window. Someone would be living in her house. But not for long. She reached in her pocket and fingered the letter from Donahue & Donahue, Esq., the letter that verified the release of her trust funds as soon as her stepbrother Scott received a certified copy of her marriage certificate.

  Chapter Nine

  “Nah, not this time. You know, Molly and the kid.” Brett’s voice carried from the kitchen through the hall.

  Molly closed the front door and hung her jacket in the hall closet. Walking to the kitchen, she noticed Brett’s and Jake’s jackets tossed over the back of the couch. She reached to pick them up, but changed her mind. No, their house, their housekeeping rules.

  The crackle and smell of something frying with onions assailed her as she hit the kitchen doorway. Her eyes watered at the pungent aroma. Brett’s culinary skills ranged from no-cooking-required to fast, fried, and spicy. She’d never before met anyone who fried Span, or for that matter, ate Spam. But who was she to complain? She didn’t have to cook—or do the dishes.

  “Yeah, sure.” Brett lounged against the wall and smiled at her over the phone receiver.

  Molly lifted the frying pan lid. Stir-fry hamburger. Well, at least Brett was taking her suggestion to add more vegetables to his and Jake’s diet—if not her suggestion to cut out some of the fat.

  “Later.” Brett hung up the phone.

  “Hi,” Molly said.

  Brett pushed himself away from the wall. “Hi, yourself. That was Josh.”

  Molly stirred the hamburger concoction. “Mmm hmmm.” Josh had helped move her furniture. She turned the burner down to low.

  “He wanted me to come over to the Sportsman and watch the game tonight.” Brett turned and straddled one of the ladderback chairs, his forearms resting on the top rung.

  Placing the lid back on the pan, Molly turned to Brett. His face had the same aren’t-I-a-good-boy look Jake used.

  “So, what time are you meeting him?” It would be kind of fun having Jake all to herself this evening. She could let her guard down. Brett had a tendency to try and draw them into happy family time after dinner—unreal scenes that wouldn’t last and weren’t fair to Jake.

  “I’m not.” Brett went to the refrigerator and pulled out a beer. “You want a glass of wine? I got some of that dry white you like at the package store when Jake and I walked up to the post office this morning.”

  “Thanks, but not right now. Maybe later. How come you’re not going to watch the game with the guys?”

  Brett put his beer on the table and took three plates from the cupboard. Molly reached in the drawer for silverware.

  Avoiding eye contact with Molly, Brett said, “You know. I thought I should stay here with you and Jake.”

  “Brett, you haven’t gone out once the entire month I’ve been here. From what I hear, that’s quite a change from your usual routine.” Tina had been quick to fill Molly in on Brett’s pre-marriage activities.

  Brett took a swig of his beer and straddled the chair again. “Being, um, a family man now, maybe I need a new routine.”

  “Well, yeah, but you don’t need to chain yourself to me—I mean Jake. She wanted to kick herself for the slip. Brett needed no encouragement.

  “You need to get out and away from him sometimes.” Even after seeing Brett day in and day out with Jake over the past few weeks, she still had trouble accepting a parent, especially a father, who wanted to be with his family so much. Her friend Charles was like that, but Molly had figured Charles’ work with children had influenced his “aberrant” behavior.

  “Once spring gets here and more surveying jobs start coming in I’ll be away from Jake all day.”

  Molly placed the silverware on the table and went to the cupboard for glasses, making sure she chose Jake’s new Pooh bear sippy cup for him. She’d gotten such a kick out of Jake’s excitement when she’d brought the cup home and showed him it matched her pillow and the new storybook she’d bought him the week before.

  “Surely, your mother didn’t stay home with you and Kate all the time.”

  “Yes, she did. Pretty much. I told you she taught right here in New Chatham, so she had all the same school holidays as Kate and I did.”

  “But,” Molly pressed. “She must have belonged to clubs, or organizations, had friends she liked to meet for dinner every so often.”

  “Not really.” Brett studied her face for a moment. “She did belong to the garden club at church. And she chaperoned all the dances and stuff at school. We got to go whether we wanted to or not,” he added with a grimace.

  “Come on, you’re telling me she didn’t have any friends?” Molly asked, certain Brett was deifying his mother.

  “I didn’t say that.” Brett took another swallow of his beer. “She had her teaching friends.”

  Molly surveyed the table to check if they needed anything else, her perusal ending with Brett. No one spent all of his or her free time with their kids. Looking directly into his liquid brown eyes, she continued to push, “You mean she never went out with friends, never dated.”

  Brett scowled back. “No. I don’t know. Maybe she went out when we were small. I was only about a year-and-a-half old when my father was declared missing in action. Kate hadn’t been born yet.”

  This information was new to Molly. All Brett had told her before was that they’d lived here with his grandmother and grandfather, while his mother finished her teaching degree.

  “The Service declared my father dead a couple of years later.”

  Molly’s eyes teared at the thought of Brett’s mother left alone with a toddler and an infant, not knowing if her husband were dead or alive. She couldn’t have been any older than Molly.

  “Grandpa always thought Mom harbored hopes that my dad was alive. That’s why she didn’t go out. As I got older, I decided she never met anyone she could love as much as she loved my dad.”

  Memories flooded Molly. Memories of her mother all dressed up for another big date, searching for love and money. Faced with similar situations, Brett’s mother and hers had certainly taken different directions.

  Molly placed her hand on his shoulder. “Brett, you’re not your mother.” How many times had Charles used exactly those words to her? “Being a parent—or being married for that matter—doesn’t mean being constantly tied to the other person.”

  Brett continued to frown. “You learn that in one of your sociology classes?” he asked.

  “No.” She winced; she’d deserved that. She’d sounded sanctimonious, even to herself. “I think that if you change your lifestyle completely, never leaving time for yourself, you might start feeling resentful of Jake, of the responsibility.”

  He looked at her skeptically. “Jake needs me.”

  “Of course, he does and you need him, but not constantly. Believe me. I know a lot about resentful parents and how it makes a kid feel.”

  “Oh, yeah?”

  Molly reached for her cross. Why did she say that? She didn’t want to talk about her childhood.

  “Unca!” Jake called from upstairs where he’d been napping.

  Saved by the kid. Molly sighed with relief as Brett swung out of the chair to go check on Jake.

  “Unca!” Jake’s voice was more urgent.

  Brett smiled at Molly. “You’re right, it is kind of intense being with him all the time. Maybe I’ll call Josh back after dinner, if you don’t mind watching Jake.”

  “I don’t mind.” She could use a break from Brett’s watchful eye. For some reason, she couldn’t totally relax with Jake when Brett was around. She was too co
nscious of his presence, of his expectations of her professional abilities to handle children.

  “Unca.” Jake’s voice sounded from the living room now.

  “I’m here,” Brett reassured him.

  Jake charged into the kitchen. “Boo!” He hurled himself at Molly.

  She still couldn’t get over the way the boy radiated exuberance, his welcome as enthusiastic today as it had been the Monday after the wedding when she surprised him by returning after work. Swinging him into her arms, she let him plaster her face with wet kisses as he had in his after-work greeting every day since she’d moved in. She squeezed him. “How’s the big boy today?”

  “Boo’s big boy.” He beamed.

  Molly’s heart filled with a sense of belonging. She really shouldn’t let Jake think of himself as hers. “Do you have any kisses left for Uncle Brett?”

  Jake squirmed to get down. He hit the floor running and raced over to plaster Brett with kisses. Brett tickled Jake and lifted him high above his head, making the child squeal with delight.

  The warm glow of their affection encompassed Molly. Brett and Jake looked so right together—Brett’s hard chiseled features contrasting with the roundness of the toddler’s.

  A stab of guilt dimmed the glow. This morning she’d received a memo from the director of adoptions, reminding her that she hadn’t finished putting together the International Adoption Program’s Waiting Children Book for this month. She’d put off the job to avoid listing Jake as available. Until Brett received approval on his application and a referral could be made, Korean Child Welfare required Jake to be included in the book. By doing her job, Molly could pave the way for someone else to adopt Jake.

  “Boo, now.” Jake’s voice cleared Molly’s thoughts.

  “What, Jake?”

  “Kiss Unca.”

  Not again. Molly had hoped Jake would lose this part of the welcome-home routine; she’d asked Brett to discourage it. She looked at Brett. He held out his arms and grinned. No help from that direction. She had to put a stop to this. They were giving Jake the wrong idea. It couldn’t be good for the little guy to see them as a couple, not when she’d be gone in a couple of months.