Baby Blues and Wedding Bells

by Patricia McLinn

  “I remember you.” Zach made a motion as if to extend his hand then thought better of it.

  “Indeed, you are related by marriage now that Steve and Annette are husband and wife,” Miss Trudi said.

  Tension rose as if someone had turned the knob on a gas burner, sending the flames higher. Miss Trudi smiled benignly at all of them as if she didn’t have a clue her hand had been the one twisting that knob.

  Fran introduced Zach to Suz, then quickly added, “Max’s company has done all the work here. Max and Suz’s company, I should say, now that she’s a partner.” Fran had found exactly the right antidote to ease Max’s tension—mention Suz Grant’s name and the man practically melted.

  “Looks like great work.” Zach scanned Bliss House’s facade.

  “Trevetti Building always does good work. But this has been some project. Everybody’s working flat out. Including this one.” Max tipped his head toward Fran. “She’s been working on those gardens hard enough to put my two best men combined to shame.”

  “Your men have been great. And with the Garden Club—”

  “Nice ladies,” Max said. “Not quite the muscle to lean into a shovel as Zach here.”

  A voice from inside called Max and Suz. They nodded and went into the house.

  Miss Trudi smiled at Zach. “Have you talked to your mother?”

  Fran wanted to close her eyes, tap her heels together three times and return those words to Miss Trudi’s mouth.

  In fairness, Miss Trudi didn’t know Zach had gone to talk to Steve and Annette today, didn’t know Lana had entered into the discussion, too, somehow, and didn’t know that Zach had emerged with his blue eyes suddenly haggard, even as he’d stiffly kept her at a distance—until that one short sentence before he got in the car.

  We didn’t settle a damned thing.

  How did she know it was a concession for him to tell her even that?

  “Why should I talk to Lana?” Zach’s low tone should have been a warning.

  Miss Trudi tipped her head, studying him. “At what point did you begin to refer to your mother as Lana?”

  “When I lived under her roof. Better to use her name than a description, don’t you think?”

  “What I think is—”

  “Sorry, Miss Trudi,” Fran interrupted. “We’d love to chat, but with the work I have lined up for Zach, we need to get busy. I’m sure you understand. It’s for the good of Bliss House.” Miss Trudi turned to study her now, but Fran wasn’t waiting around for a report card. “C’mon, Zach. Let’s get the supplies.”

  She started off, sensing Zach at her right shoulder.

  “Oh, yes, Fran, dear,” Miss Trudi’s voice came from behind them, “I do understand.”

  “You go ahead and get a shower first,” Fran told him as they crossed the darkened back porch. “That hot water heater isn’t up to two showers at the same time. I’ll start dinner.”

  But first she greeted the dog, let it out, gave it food and water, and checked each puppy.

  As if she hadn’t worked hard enough as it was today, Zach thought sourly. She had matched him nearly shovelful for shovelful. They’d finished what she’d called the Grandmother’s Garden, but had barely broken ground on the kitchen garden, which as far as he could see had produced only weeds for decades.

  “Let’s get takeout.”

  She looked over her shoulder from where she sat on the porch floor brushing Chester. “If you want. Pizza or Chinese?”

  “Your choice, my treat.”

  “You’re working for your board as well as the bed, Zach, so—”

  “I told you I’d take care of that myself. Tomorrow I’ll get groceries. You don’t have much.”

  “I do, too. There’s plenty—”

  “Just place the order so it’ll be ready when you are.”

  He walked inside. He heard her mutter something, apparently to the dog, about arrogant males.

  When he came downstairs she was on the phone in the kitchen.

  She must have taken a shower while he’d called work, because the smudges were gone from her face and neck and she wore clean sweats.

  Was this another call like the one that had drawn her stiff “No comment” this morning? He could say a few choice things to anyone who made Fran react like that.

  But Zach knew this call was different when Fran looked over her shoulder at him and said, “Yes, he is.”

  She made no move to give him the receiver. After a few innocuous phrases she hung up and said, “Steve’s on his way over. I’ll go upstairs so you can talk here.”

  She picked up two folders then flipped through a stack in apparent pursuit of more material.

  “No. You stay here. We can talk on the porch.”

  “It’s getting cool.”

  “Maybe that’s good.” He gave her a dry grin.

  “You’re family. You love each other. You’ll work it out.”

  “More family than I expected when I came back.”

  “Surely it occurred to you Steve might have children by now?”

  “If it did, it never occurred to me that he’d have my kid.”

  Her lips parted, then closed on a firm line, holding in captivity the words he saw brewing in her eyes.

  “I know, I know,” he said to the message he saw there. “But…”

  She glanced out the window that had a view of the steps. “He’s here.”

  Zach came out of the house at the same time Steve stepped into the porch.

  “Shall we sit.” Steve made it neither invitation nor question. Zach had dealt with enough people accustomed to leading to know it was the voice of a man who expected what he said to happen.

  In that way, his brother was exactly the man Zach had expected him to become.

  They took seats in chairs at right angles and divided by a corner table. Zach noticed Steve looked older than he had yesterday in Corbett House’s entry hall. Did his own face have fresh lines and new grooves?

  “Seems like the last time we had an important talk it was on a porch, too,” he said.

  His position in the Corbett family was like a building that had come crashing down and the issue now was finding out if anything buried under the rubble had survived. Only a fool tried to yank from the bottom layers first. You had to de-layer, one level at a time, checking where you were after each one. That was the only way to get to what might be trapped underneath.

  Steve inclined his head. “When you told me to get out—”

  “To get away.”

  “—and leave Tobias and the Corbett name behind. You gave no indication you intended to do that. But even if you had, I couldn’t do it. Even though I’m not really a Corbett.”

  Zach released a breath through his teeth. So Steve knew that Lana had been pregnant by another man when she married Ambrose Corbett.

  “I wanted to tell you,” Zach said.

  “How did you know?”

  “Bits and pieces over the years. Things Lana said to me that she never said to you. And then when she had to accept that you were going to marry Annette, that you had a different future in mind than she’d planned, she said…more. Enough that it couldn’t be explained away, couldn’t be anything else. How long have you known?”

  “That summer after you left,” Steve said. “You’d given me a shove in that direction, and after it was clear you weren’t coming back anytime soon—another important talk on a porch—”

  He meant Zach’s final, shouting declaration to Lana more than eight years ago that he was getting out. Zach didn’t remember much of it. Just flashes. The scent of lilacs from the bush by the corner of the porch. A freeze-frame view of Steve and Annette side by side in the swing at the far end. The angry tap-tap of his mother’s heels as she came after him, adamant that he would live the life she wanted him to live. Finally, the burst of power under him as he got on the bike, the defiance of the tires gashing the lawn as he rode across it, and then only sound and motion, blotting out everything else.


  “—and I followed the trail,” Steve concluded. “Got confirmation.”

  “At least you got Lana to face reality.”

  “Confirmation didn’t come from Mother. She didn’t know that I knew until this past spring when…I made some changes.”

  “You were more his son than I was.”

  Ambrose Corbett, who had married beautiful Lana when he was more than fifty and she barely twenty, was a nebulous presence in Zach’s memory. A vaguely benign but distant figure. It was mostly in retrospect, after Ambrose died and Lana was free to enforce her ideas of what a Corbett should be, that he’d realized how benign.

  “He loved us both,” Steve said.

  “More than you can say for Lana.” Zach was certain the words held no heat but only a recognition of the reality of their mother.

  “I’m not sure that’s fair to Mother,” his older brother said. “She’s not an easy woman, but Annette’s helped me see these past months that maybe Mother can change. And she’s been better—more open.”

  They were talking around the core issue, circling it.

  But that was okay with Zach.

  “Annette must be a damned saint to see good in Lana, especially considering the way she fought you two getting married, and when she couldn’t win that one, taking over your wedding.”

  “Not our second wedding,” Steve said with a small smile.

  “Second wedding?”

  “Fran didn’t tell you?”

  “Fran seems to feel I should get my information from you.”

  Steve didn’t respond to that. At least not directly. “Annette and I didn’t get married eight years ago. We did get married in June.”

  Zach knew this feeling. It was what happened when you arrived on site after an earthquake. As you took in the devastation and tried to imagine what it had felt like for the people who’d lived through it—or those who hadn’t. You felt the earth give and shake with an aftershock, and you knew it was only a tiny echo of the main event, but it didn’t make the ground feel any more solid under your feet.

  “Why? You called off your wedding with Annette? But—”

  “No, we didn’t call it off. But Lily…” Steve drove his hands through his hair. “Lily came to me after you left. First she wanted to know when you’d be back. When she realized I didn’t know where you were any more than anyone else, she said she was pregnant with your baby. It fit. I’d seen you together, and you’d said—”

  “I remember.”

  Steve had waited up for him that night in early spring, opening the door to his room when Zach would have passed by. Zach hadn’t waited for him to speak.

  I thought I recognized your car passing the motel. So what are you going to do? Tell me the facts of life?

  Steve had looked pained. But all he’d said was, Be careful.

  Zach didn’t remember everything he’d said. Something about it being too late for the warning. And he’d told Steve he knew Lily had gone after him only because she’d hoped to make Steve jealous. But he remembered his final words.

  Oh, I know, Saint Steven would have resisted temptation. But nobody’s ever accused me of being a saint. There are benefits to being the fallen Corbett. Definite benefits.

  After he’d left he’d thought about those words. Thought about how he’d pursued the benefits of being the fallen Corbett. Thought about how he’d taunted his brother with that Saint Steven title.

  “I said I’d make sure she and the baby were taken care of,” Steve said, “but…I guess she had doubts. Wanted a sure thing. Lily burst into our wedding and said Annette and I couldn’t get married because she was carrying my child.”

  “Your—?! Christ! She always wanted to snag you, be Mrs. Steven Corbett. But Annette must have known…”

  He didn’t bother to finish as Steve shook his head.

  “There were problems between us. And that—that was like the tap of the hammer hitting the flaw just right so the diamond shatters.” The lines on his older brother’s face eased, then reformed into a smile. “At least that’s what I thought, what both of us thought, until Annette came back to Tobias last March. First time we’d talked since the wedding.”

  “You patched it up?”

  Steve shook his head. “We made something better.”

  “I’m glad, Steve,” he said.

  “Thank you.”

  But that simple moment couldn’t withstand the flood of complicated emotions dividing them.

  Steve sat back, straight and in charge.

  “After things fell apart with Annette, the fiasco at the wedding, Lily said if I didn’t marry her, she’d make sure no Corbett ever saw the baby. So I married her.”

  Zach felt curses rise in his throat, along with bile. “You let her blackmail you into marrying her?”

  “It didn’t much matter to me at that point, not with Annette gone. And there was the baby. Being married gave me legal rights. It was the right decision. Lily hardly even looked at Nell. A few months after Nell was born, Lily left. The divorce was generous enough that she was happy to sign, so it was quick and painless. Nell wasn’t quite two when Lily died in a car accident. She was high.”

  Zach tried to absorb this. Steve had married a woman he didn’t love, had cared for an infant on his own, had taken on single parenthood. “Why, Steve? Why did you do it?”

  “Because through Annette I know what it means not to have a father. Because Ambrose Corbett was a father to me when I didn’t have one. Because the baby was yours. But you’ve got to understand, we’re a family—Annette, Nell and me. We’re the family Nell knows, the family she loves.”

  “She’s never had a chance to love me.”

  “Whose fault is that?”

  “How could I have known?”

  “Would it have mattered?”

  Before Zach could recover from that blow, Steve continued. “You’re my brother. Nothing will ever change that. But I won’t let you hurt Nell.”

  “I’m going to know her, Steve.”

  “That’s up to her. As my brother, as her uncle—I would never deny you that…if she wants it. But I’m her father, Zach. I have been for almost eight years and I always will be.”

  What does that make me?

  Zach didn’t say the words—maybe he didn’t want to hear the answer.

  Steve continued immediately. “Annette and I decided. If there’s going to be any contact, it’ll be because Nell initiates it. You don’t go to her. If Nell wants to see you, okay. But not alone. You only see her if I’m there or Annette or Fran or Miss Trudi, someone Nell knows and trusts completely.”

  “God, Steve—you think I’d snatch her? You think I’d terrorize a kid?”

  “We don’t know, Zach. We don’t know you.”

  Chapter Five

  Fran emptied leftovers from the last cardboard box of Chinese food into a plastic container. Ordinarily, she would have taken the containers right to the fridge. But with Zach pacing erratically, she opted to stay put.

  He’d been silent while they ate in front of the TV. In fact, she couldn’t remember him even looking at the screen except for a short report about a building bombed in Malaysia. He showed no interest in the sitcom that followed the news.

  As soon as she stood to clear their empty dishes from the coffee table, he rose and helped her. Then it was as if moving had released something in him, as if he couldn’t stop moving.

  Zach Corbett prowling her kitchen shrank the space to an eighth of its size.

  She put the last utensil in the dishwasher, gave the sink a final wipe, then turned and leaned back against it.

  “Do you want to talk? Or would you rather I leave it alone?”

  “The hell if I know,” he said, not breaking stride. He pivoted and started back. “A daughter. My God, I’ve got a daughter, Fran.”

  “Not what you expected when you came back, I know.”

  “It wasn’t like I expected everything to hold still while I was gone, but…” He pushed his hands throug
h his hair. “I thought everyone would be okay—better—without me here. Steve, especially. Instead, my leaving screwed up his wedding to Annette, and he got tangled up with Lily and then raised a baby—my baby—alone. Christ.”

  “You didn’t screw up his wedding to Annette. Lily did that. Don’t try to take on responsibility for everything, only what you’re responsible for. And, actually, it wasn’t just Lily. Your mother contributed, and Steve and Annette ultimately were responsible for how they reacted.”

  “Lana? What did she have to do with it?”

  “Apparently she told Lily right before the wedding that Lily wouldn’t get a cent of Corbett money. That contradicted Steve’s promises. Lily was afraid she’d be left on her own, so she interrupted the wedding and declared the baby was Steve’s. She told Steve later that she’d expected him to deny it by saying the baby was actually yours—that’s what she wanted, a public statement that the Corbetts had a responsibility to her. When Annette walked out, Lily saw a better opportunity, and she went for it. She pressured Steve to give her and the baby the Corbett name. I wasn’t aware of all this then, but even I could see that Steve was in no shape to resist Lily. It was like he’d come unplugged from the universe.”

  “God, and all this is supposed to make me feel less like I screwed up my brother’s life?”

  “Steve would be the first one to tell you Nell has made his life, not screwed it up.”

  “I’ll never know, because Steve has a wall up.” He waved that off, as if he hadn’t meant to say it. Too late. She’d heard the hurt. “None of that makes me less responsible for what happened.”

  “As I said, they’re responsible for how they reacted to what happened. And when Nell was born…well, Steve plugged back in. Besides, Annette says they wouldn’t have lasted together then. They needed the years apart to become the people they are now, adults who totally love each other…and who totally love Nell.”

  “And who totally want me to disappear.”

  “That’s the worst thing you could do now.”

  He gave her a narrow-eyed look that nearly hid the blue but at the same time concentrated the intensity.