“What in hell are you doing?” he shouted at her as she put the crowbar away. She could hardly hear him through the workers jack-hammering the floor in the kitchen. “You’re going to have the baby right here, if you don’t stop it!”
“I’m sorry,” she apologized, but she didn’t look sorry at all. She couldn’t wait for him to leave so she could go on working and do more.
“You know, this may come as a shock to you, but they can do this without you. Women in their ninth month of pregnancy are not usually considered part of the workforce on this kind of project. Maybe you should join the union.” She took the hard hat off and wiped her face as she grinned at him. The truth was she was enjoying helping with the work, and he knew it. Nothing would have slowed her down or kept her away. April was only happy when she was working. She sat down on a stack of bricks as he sat down next to her, and handed her the sandwich he had brought her.
“Thanks, I was starving,” she said, as a truck arrived and the driver walked toward her. They were expecting more electrical fixtures, and she hoped this delivery was them.
“I have baby furniture for April Wyatt,” the driver said, pointing at the truck. “From Valerie Wyatt.” April had forgotten all about it. Her mother had mentioned it before she left.
“I don’t live here anymore,” she said, indicating the shambles around her. “Could you deliver it somewhere else?”
“In the city?” The driver didn’t look pleased.
“Yeah. Uptown.” He nodded. He could see that there was no way she could accept it here.
“Someone should have called us,” he grumbled, but wrote down Mike’s address. “Is there anyone there to accept it?” And of course there wasn’t. Mike was going back to work and she was busy here.
“How about four o’clock?” she asked him, and he grudgingly agreed, and walked back to his truck and drove away. April knew she could be back at Mike’s by then, and she would be exhausted before that anyway, so ready to go home. She had been at the restaurant since eight o’clock that morning.
“How much is there?” Mike asked her as she finished her sandwich. He had a small living room and bedroom, a tiny office, and a kitchen the size of a closet. There was no room for a lot of additional furniture there, in fact none at all. But she didn’t want to hurt her mother’s feelings. And the baby needed a place to sleep. She knew her mother had bought a crib and “a few other things” before she left for Europe. April had borrowed almost everything she needed from friends, and her mother had bought the rest, even a fancy layette from Saks that was due to be delivered any minute too. She was all set now. And in her own empty, nearly unfurnished quarters above the restaurant, it wouldn’t have been a problem to house the furniture her mother had bought. At Mike’s, it could be.
“I’m not sure, but we’ll move it back over here, as soon as we can move back in.” He had decided to give up his apartment, since he’d never see her otherwise. She was always at the restaurant, and she wanted the baby there with her. There didn’t seem to be much point to his keeping his old place. As soon as the apartment upstairs was cleaned up, and the remodel was down to a dull roar, they were planning to move in. “Don’t worry about it. I’ll make room for it,” she promised him. “How much room can stuff for a baby take?”
But she was in no way prepared for the full set of nursery furniture her mother had ordered. When the driver showed up at Mike’s at four o’clock, he brought up a crib, a chest of drawers, some kind of table with a place to change diapers on top, a toy chest, a rocking chair for her, and half a dozen framed watercolors of Winnie the Pooh to decorate the walls. Valerie had thought of everything, and knew April wouldn’t buy it. She was afraid she’d get it at Goodwill.
“Holy shit,” April whispered, as he brought the last of it in, and the crib had to be assembled. She asked the driver if he could do it for her, and he wouldn’t. He was sweating profusely from dragging it all up the stairs, and it took up every inch of Mike’s apartment. He had had to put the rocking chair and the toy box in the kitchen. Mike was going to kill her. She had no idea what to do with it, or how to make it fit, and she hadn’t wanted to hurt her mother’s feelings by sending it back. In her own apartment, it would be fine. In his, it was a disaster.
She managed to wrestle the parts of the crib into the bedroom after the driver left, and then dragged the rocking chair in. If she squeezed the crib in next to the bed, there was a possibility it might fit. The rest was a problem.
She shoved the white chest of drawers with scalloped edges into a corner of the living room, and the changing table next to it. He didn’t have a coffee table, so she put the toy box in front of the couch, and she stashed the Winnie the Pooh drawings behind it, for lack of anywhere else to put them. She didn’t think Mike was ready to have her put Winnie the Pooh on the walls instead of his collection of photographs by Ansel Adams. She looked around the room after that, and had to admit that the living room looked terrible. The white baby furniture was cute, or would have been in a nursery, but it stuck out like a sore thumb, and they’d have to climb across the rocking chair to get into the bed. It was an obstacle course of babydom, but there was nothing else she could do.
Mike wasn’t prepared for it when he got home that night, and he looked like he was going to have a stroke when he walked in. He had imagined a little basket in a corner somewhere, or maybe a miniature crib. Instead there were boxes all over his bedroom, waiting for him to assemble the crib, and baby furniture everywhere. He looked like he was going to hyperventilate and nearly did.
“How can a baby need so much stuff?” She didn’t tell him that friends were going to drop off the rest of what they needed in the next few weeks, a sterilizer, pajamas, diapers, a stroller Ellen was lending her, a high chair from one of the waitresses, a car seat one of the busboys didn’t need, and things she didn’t even know about yet and had no idea how to use. And Ellen had told her she’d need a plastic tub with a sponge insert to bathe the baby. April hadn’t thought of that. Mike sat down on the couch staring at the toy box, and feeling sick.
“I’m sorry.” April looked at him apologetically. “I know it’s a mess. We’ll be back at my place soon.” In a single afternoon, the baby had moved in. For the first time, he felt the way he had after the sonogram, and he looked it, which worried April more than a little.
“We can’t live like this. For chrissake, April, the baby will weigh five or six pounds. Why does it need all this furniture?” Her mother had bought what she would have for a magazine layout, and it was lovely stuff, but it had taken over Mike’s postage-stamp-sized apartment, and was a warning to him that this seemingly tiny being was about to take over his life, in ways he hadn’t understood till now, even in his panic.
“Why don’t we put the crib together? And then the bedroom won’t look so crowded,” April suggested. As it was now, they couldn’t even go to bed that night until they assembled the crib, because the bumpers and mattress and a white eyelet canopy were lying on their bed. “I’ll help you.”
“Do you realize that I have no mechanical skills?” he said miserably. “I don’t know a screwdriver from a hammer and I can never read instructions. Whenever I get something that has to be assembled, I wind up throwing it out. I can never figure out what to do with the nuts and bolts. You need an engineering degree to put this shit together.”
“We’ll figure it out,” she said soothingly. “We’ll do it together.”
“I need a drink,” he announced, and went to the kitchen to pour himself a glass of wine. “What’s that thing?” he asked, pointing at the changing table as he came back into the room. He looked extremely crabby and completely panicked.
“It’s to change the baby on,” she said, embarrassed.
“Why can’t you change the baby on your lap, or on the floor or something? Do you realize the Olympic equestrian team doesn’t use this much equipment?” April herself was living out of one small bag, and had three dresses in his closet. All she wore now were jeans, T-shirts
, and rubber boots.
April went into the bedroom then to get started on the crib. She tore the cardboard away, looked at the instructions, and realized that Mike was right. Putting it together was more complicated than it appeared, and Mike came in a few minutes later and set down his glass of wine. He didn’t mention the rocking chair or the mess in the room. He just walked over to her and put his arms around her as she wrestled with the boxes.
“I’m sorry. I wasn’t prepared for this. And neither were you. You’ve got enough on your mind with the restaurant. You don’t need me making it worse.” He knew she had met with insurance adjusters the day before, and they had been a pain in the neck. “Give me the instructions,” he said, looking at them, and then went to get his tools.
It took them two hours of hit and miss, and several false starts, but they finally got it together. The mattress was in, the bumpers were attached, with little lambs on them, and the canopy was even on the crib. They both looked as though they’d run a marathon as they collapsed next to each other on the bed.
“Childbirth must be a snap compared to this,” he remarked, and then was sorry the minute he said it. He looked at her mournfully, missing the restaurant for exactly the reason he had written about in his review. “I need comfort food,” he said unhappily. April smiled at him and got off the bed.
“That’s the easy part,” she said, as she kissed him and left. Mike lay in bed watching TV, and fifteen minutes later she appeared in the doorway. “We may not have the restaurant. But you have me. Monsieur est servi,” she said, bowing as low as she could given the beachball at her middle.
He followed her into the living room where she had set the small round table they ate on, and a stack of her delicious pancakes were on a plate with warm maple syrup beside it. She had even made a plate of them for herself—the menu sounded good to her too.
“Ohmigod,” he said, like a man dying of thirst in the desert. “That’s just what I needed.” He sat down without another word and devoured them, and then sat back in his chair with a profoundly satisfied look. “Thank you,” he said, looking peaceful finally. “Maybe everything will be okay.” And then he shook his head as he looked around. “I had no idea babies needed all this stuff.”
“Neither did I,” she said honestly. Neither of them had thought about it, they were too busy dealing with everything else.
“I guess it doesn’t matter,” Mike said sensibly. “We’re moving out anyway, and thank God your place is bigger than this.” She was relieved by that fact too. Living as tightly as this long-term would have been miserable for them. She hoped to be back in her apartment by July, after the worst of the reconstruction was done and they wouldn’t be breathing plaster dust day and night, which wouldn’t be good for the baby either. Too much furniture in a cramped apartment had never hurt a child, even if it unnerved Mike.
He helped her do the dishes after dinner, and they went back to their bedroom. They brushed their teeth and got into bed, and lay looking at the rocking chair at the foot of the bed, and the elaborate crib beside it. Valerie had bought them beautiful things, just too many of them.
“It’ll be weird when there’s someone sleeping in that crib,” he said softly, and looked at her in the moonlight streaming into the room. They could no longer get to the window to pull down the shades, unless they stood in the crib to do it.
“Yes, it will,” she agreed, nodding, but their baby was a very real presence to her now. It was bouncing all over the place at the moment, probably from the pancakes and the sugar from the syrup. She had noticed that whenever she ate sweets, the baby hopped around for hours.
And then without another word, he reached for her, still shocked that he could want her so much even though she was so extremely pregnant. There was something so tender about her now, and so womanly, he couldn’t keep his hands off her. He wasn’t sure if that was normal or not, and he worried that it was uncomfortable for her, but she was touched by it, and always responded to him. They made love in the moonlight and forgot about the baby for a little while, and clung to each other, swept away by their passion.
Chapter 21
When Valerie and Jack got back from Europe, they were busy with a mountain of things they had to do. She had decisions to make about some of her licensing agreements, shows to plan, and an offer from her publisher to do another book. And she had to attend to the last details of April’s wedding, and still had to pick the wedding cake. And Jack was just as busy.
She spoke to April the night they arrived, who said that the reconstruction of the restaurant was off to a good start, although it looked a mess, but she sounded happy. She was excited about the wedding. Valerie told her that Dawn had done a great job handling the details before her return. She had talked her through them in dozens of calls from Europe.
Their schedules that week were relentless, but by Friday night, Valerie felt as though she had a grip on things and that all was under control. Her first days back from a trip were always a nightmare. She managed to order April’s cake on Friday afternoon, since April had explained exactly what she wanted. She wanted a delicate almond-paste icing and a chocolate and mocha filling with a hint of orange. The baker wasn’t happy about it but he agreed to do it to April’s specifications. She would have made it herself if she had time, but she had no kitchen to do it, and Valerie assured her it would be fine.
When she left her office on Friday, Valerie went back to Jack’s apartment. They were spending the weekend there. Their back-and-forth life between the two still seemed to be working, although their lives were hectic. There had been a photograph of them together in Paris, and People magazine had called her office that afternoon to find out what was going on. Dawn had cleverly acted like it was no big deal, and explained nothing. They would find out on their own anyway.
Valerie got to Jack’s apartment before he did, and she thought he looked serious when he walked in. She was taking a bath, and he sat down on the edge of the tub with a somber expression. He didn’t say anything at first, and then he kissed her. She thought he looked depressed, which was unlike him.
“Bad day?” she asked sympathetically, and touched his hand.
“Yeah. Kind of. Just the usual hassles after a trip. You have to pay the penalty for all that fun, I guess.” He smiled at her, but it was wintry. She didn’t press him about it, and figured he would tell her what was bothering him eventually.
It wasn’t until Saturday afternoon, as they walked in Central Park on a beautiful warm May day, that he did. He had been quiet for a long time as they walked along, and then they sat down on a bench and he looked at her and spat it out.
“The network wants to move me to Miami.” He looked devastated, and they both knew what it meant for them. Her show was here, and she couldn’t move with him. They could commute on weekends if they wanted to badly enough, but it wouldn’t be the same.
“Why?”
“God knows. They think it makes more sense. It’s a bigger job attached to the network there. I’d be commentating more stuff, not just football. I’m happy with what I’m doing, and I guess I should be flattered. It’s more money, more prestige.” He hesitated then. “But I don’t want to leave you. I love what we have, and I love you. Long-distance relationships are hard and most of the time they don’t work. I don’t want to be commuting at my age. And I don’t want to live in Miami.” He looked desperately unhappy.
“Did you turn it down?” Valerie asked quietly, hoping that he had. She had no right to influence him, or interfere with his career, and she wouldn’t, but she knew that it would not be good for them if he moved. And she couldn’t move with him, she wasn’t about to leave her show for him. Nor did she expect him to retire from broadcasting for her, or negatively impact his job. She couldn’t do that to him. This was a big and very unhappy news flash for them, and she didn’t see how he could refuse it, or why he would, even if he didn’t love Miami.
“I told them I’d think about it,” he answered. “And I will
. I guess our ‘what if’ games in Paris about what would happen if one of us had a job opportunity that required giving up the other, or hurting them, weren’t so imaginary after all. I guess this happens. They made it very clear that they expect me to do this. I can say no, but they won’t thank me for it. Valerie,” he said slowly, “how do you feel about it? What would you do?” He really wanted her input and guidance to help him make the decision.
“Those are two separate questions,” she said quietly. “How do I feel about it? Sad. I don’t want you to move away. I love our life together. Maybe it was too easy and we were too lucky for it to last. Maybe life just isn’t that simple. What would I do? Honestly, I don’t know. I wouldn’t want to screw up my career, but I wouldn’t want to leave you either. I’m glad I don’t have to make that choice. And I don’t love Miami either. It’s fun for a weekend, but I wouldn’t want to live there. But you have to go where the job takes you, and where the big bucks are for you, and the important promotions. You’re too young to retire.” And she felt that she was too. “Just know that whatever you do, I’ll understand and we’ll make the best of it. I could come to Miami on Friday nights, and take an early flight back on Monday. Others do it. Politicians do it all the time, commuting from Washington, D.C., to their home states in California or the West. CEOs do it to work in one city and join their families in another. It’s not easy, but if we want to, we can do it.” She meant it, and he looked profoundly touched as she said it. “Just do what’s right for you. We’ll figure it out for us later.” But she was worried that living in Miami, he’d go back to the bimbos and young girls. He would be alone a lot of the time, and maybe eventually the old temptations would reclaim him. She felt very insecure, but she didn’t share that with him. She thought it would be unfair to do so. He had enough pressure on him already from the network. He had made that clear. They weren’t threatening to hurt his career if he didn’t go, but it wouldn’t help it either. No matter who you were, they expected you to go where you were sent. Even a big star like him. He felt it like a physical blow. Everything had been going so smoothly for them, and now this.
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