The Comeback Mom

by Muriel Jensen

  “Well, you only have to call him ‘Daddy’ if you want to.”

  “Are you ‘Mommy’?”

  She wanted nothing more in the world than to reply with a hearty yes. But instead she had to say, at least for now, “I’m just Libby, the nanny.”

  “What is a nanny?”

  “A lady who takes care of children.”

  “But that’s what mommies do.”

  “Nannies,” Libby explained patiently as she lay Zachary on her bed so that she could quickly change her shirt, “take care of children when there isn’t a mommy around.”

  “Like ‘cause she died,” Savannah said rather matter-of-factly.

  “Yes,” Libby said, trying to sound calm, when in truth the child’s acceptance broke her heart. “But sometimes mommies who are really busy hire nannies to take care of the children when they’re at work.” She yanked an old blue sweater out of a dresser drawer, willing to sacrifice it to the cause of Savannah’s border. “Remember Dr. Brown who fixed the cut on your arm when you were in the hospital?”

  “Yeah.”

  “She has a nanny.”

  “Oh.” Apparently bored with the subject, Savannah wandered across the room to the built-in closet and drawers. “What am I gonna paint?”

  “That drawer on the bottom. The big one.”

  Savannah knelt in front of it, pulled it open and peered inside.

  Libby took advantage of the moment of quiet to pull off her good sweater. Then she turned to the foot of her bed for the old blue one, and stopped stock-still at the sight of Jared in the doorway, the baby’s carrier hanging by its handle in his hand.

  She held the sweater up to her chest, but not before she spent a full five seconds simply staring at him in stunned surprise.

  His dark eyes swept over her blush lace bra and lingered for a moment.

  Her heart thudded. His eyes lifted to hers and held. She couldn’t speak or even breathe. That timeless quality was in control again.

  He finally moved to place the carrier on the foot of the bed. Then he reached toward Libby. She leaped nimbly aside, only to redden in embarrassment when she saw that he was reaching for Zachary and not for her.

  She yanked the sweater on as he placed the baby in the carrier.

  “I did tell you I was coming back,” he said, rattling Zachary’s key toy. The baby extended a hand toward it and he let him take the toy, then straightened. His expression was indeterminate.

  She folded her arms over her chest, as though that would somehow erase the image he’d seen. “I know. That was my fault. I’m sorry I embarrassed you.”

  “Embarrassed.” He repeated the word consideringly, then growled a laugh. “That doesn’t describe what I felt at all.” He crossed the room to Savannah, who now sat in the deep drawer, her bony knees folded up as she looked about herself in anticipation.

  He rubbed the top of her head. “Be good for Libby. I’ll see you at dinner.”

  He disappeared into the hall and Libby felt air rush into her body, as if she’d been holding her breath all that time.

  Her cheeks were hot; her heart thumped erratically; and she would have been perfectly happy to have a drawer she herself could climb into and pull closed behind her.

  Chapter Five

  The weekend. Jared faced it with trepidation. He didn’t fear being unable to deal with the children. He knew their learning to coexist would be a gradual thing, and that his role as father was simply to behave as though he had the answer to everything, even if he didn’t.

  He’d been sixteen before he’d understood that that was how his father operated. His mother had had emergency gall-bladder surgery, and Jared had been completely shocked to find his father distraught in the face of her pain, and lost without her presence in the house.

  Darren had cooked, and Jared had run errands and taken care of other details until Carlie came home two weeks later.

  He remembered the impact on his own self-confidence of learning that his father was human. The man had always seemed just short of divine. For the young man who wanted to emulate him, it had come as such a relief to know that he had vulnerabilities.

  What Jared did fear that weekend was that Libby would see him being less than perfect. He had a feeling she’d be less forgiving of his vulnerabilities than he’d been of his father’s.

  He didn’t even care at that point in time what motivated her. He just wanted to get through the weekend without having to ask her for help.

  He took off in the car with the children Saturday morning, thinking a new perspective would be good for all of them. It was another crisp, cold day, and he had Savannah and Zachary bundled up accordingly and safely strapped into their car seats.

  It occurred to him when they were halfway to town that he’d forgotten Zachary’s pacifier, but the baby seemed cheerful and happy, and Jared decided to take the chance that he’d be all right without it.

  He let Savannah push Zachary’s stroller down the street as they walked the length of Cranberry Harbor’s three-block-long main street, then up the other side, stopping to admire the wares in the window.

  They checked in at ARCHI-JUNK, but Justy was helping an older gentleman who seemed to be considering the purchase of several chinoiserie panels he’d rescued from a brothel in San Francisco, so they moved on.

  They had doughnuts at the bakery, and Savannah insisted that they sit outside at a small, round table on the sidewalk.

  “Won’t you be cold?” Jared asked.

  “No.” She walked on importantly, carrying her sugar doughnut and cup of juice. “Come on!” And led the way outside.

  He sat opposite her and tucked Zachary’s blanket in a little tighter.

  Savannah’s nose and her cheeks were bright pink, and her dark bangs fluttered under the red woolen hat tied under her chin. She looked around her with interest, her little legs swinging back and forth, hitting his knee with every pass.

  She smiled happily at Jared. “We’re just like Rosie and Tux,” she said, pointing to herself and her baby brother.

  Jared wondered what Zachary would think of being considered a counterpart to a cat.

  “’Cept Rosie doesn’t got a daddy.”

  Did that mean Savannah considered that she had? He was surprised at the degree to which that thrilled him.

  “Libby says I don’t got to call you ‘Daddy.’”

  He felt instant annoyance replace the thrill.

  “Only if I want,” she added.

  Annoyance faltered in the face of fairness. It was certainly true that she didn’t have to say or feel anything that wasn’t genuine. And Libby had done nothing wrong in telling her so. Except that he was sure she’d enjoyed doing it.

  “That’s right,” he said.

  “But I forgot your name again,” she admitted.

  “Jared,” he supplied.

  “Where’s Libby?” she asked suddenly.

  Annoyance rose again. Not at the child, but at the woman the child was so fond of. The woman who seemed to make his brain stall when she got too close. The woman whose lace-covered breasts he’d dreamed about like some obsessed adolescent.

  The woman whose presence in his home he didn’t entirely trust for reasons he couldn’t quite define.

  “Today is her day off,” he answered. “She gets to play today.”

  Savannah looked stricken. “Did she go away?”

  “No,” he reassured her quickly. “She just gets to relax today. She probably went shopping or something.”

  “Will she be home when we get home?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe.”

  “When will she play with me again?”

  “On Monday.”

  “When’s Monday?”

  “Day after tomorrow.”

  She sighed, apparently willing to accept that if not entirely pleased with it.

  During the next few hours, Jared discovered the difficulty of having one child who could not be put down and another who could not be let out of his s
ight.

  In a shop filled with shiny bric-a-brac Savannah insisted on exploring, he carried Zachary in one arm and tried hard to control Savannah with the other. But the aisles were narrow and her fingers so quick that the experience was a nightmare.

  He owned a hundred-dollar clock with a broken hand before he knew what happened.

  Savannah stood glued to his side as the woman behind the counter wrapped the clock. It was made of wood in a whimsical, primitive style and shaped like a birdhouse. On top of it was a black-and-white cat reaching for a bird peering into the house. The bird had also broken off when the clock had fallen to the floor.

  “Children should be taught to keep their hands in their pockets,” the clerk said when she accepted his check.

  He resented the affront to Savannah’s innocent curiosity and his own meager but budding parenting skills. He wanted to tell her that shopkeepers who made it impossible for an adult to move through a shop had their brains in their pockets, but he resisted.

  Outside, he put Zachary back in the stroller and stuffed the clock into the carry bag behind it. Savannah looked guilty and uncertain.

  Zachary screamed at having been put down, and Jared had no pacifier with which to quiet him. So he lifted Savannah into one arm and pushed the stroller toward the car. “Next time,” he said gently, “if you want to look at something, I’ll get it down for you, okay? That way we won’t break anything. If we break it, then the lady who owns the shop can’t sell it.”

  Her expression turned from penitence to puzzlement. “She selled it to us.”

  “I know, but we didn’t really want it. We just bought it because we broke it.”

  Her puzzlement increased. “I want it.”

  Of course she did. That was why she’d wanted to look at it.

  “But we already have a clock in your room. And we wouldn’t have bought this one if we hadn’t broken it.”

  Her eyes brimmed with tears. “Do you still like me?”

  He kissed her cheek. “Of course I do.” But he didn’t like the clock.

  She wrapped an arm around his neck and leaned into him.

  Suddenly the clock didn’t matter.

  Zachary screamed all the way home, and Savannah talked nonstop over him. It was all a learning experience, Jared told himself philosophically. He’d never forget Zachary’s pacifier again.

  He opened the kitchen cupboard where he’d seen Libby find one more than once, but couldn’t spot it.

  Savannah pointed to a small plastic container on the bottom shelf. “Binkies are in that little cup thing,” she said.

  She was right.

  “She puts hot water on it first.”

  He did that, then put it in Zachary’s mouth. The baby spit it out angrily and continued to scream.

  Jared half expected to hear Libby come running down the stairs with that superior expression on her face. In fact, he hoped she would. But she didn’t. The house was quiet—except for Zachary.

  He hooked the pacifier on his finger and went into the living room. He would have liked to build a fire, but that would have involved putting Zachary down, and he was afraid that if the baby screamed any louder he’d choke.

  So he settled for turning up the thermostat for the oil furnace, and heard the comforting swell of sound as it kicked on.

  Savannah dropped her coat and hat in the middle of the floor. “Can we have cocoa?”

  “Sure,” he said. “As soon as Zachary quiets down. Pick up your stuff and take it upstairs, please.”

  “Okay.” She complied amenably.

  Now, if he could just quiet Zachary, he’d feel as though it had been a fairly productive morning. The clock thing had been relatively minor, and Savannah had seemed to have a good time at the bakery. All in all, his first morning as a solo father hadn’t gone badly.

  He sat in the rocker with the baby, who now seemed inconsolable. His mouth was wide open in acute distress. Jared tried once more to insert the pacifier, but Zachary refused to close his mouth over it.

  “I’m not giving up on you,” he told the baby, smoothing his bald head with the tips of his fingers. It was warm and downy. “We’ve got to build a relationship here, buddy, because Savannah’s pretty pushy and the nanny’s definitely got a mind of her own. I need another male vote.”

  Jared rubbed a fist across his eyes. The tone of his screeches lowered subtly.

  Jared tried anew with the pacifier. This time Zachary took it and held it. The noise stopped as though a switch had been flipped. Quiet enveloped the room. Jared closed his eyes and wondered why he’d never appreciated before how blissful stillness was.

  He opened his eyes again to see Zachary’s drift closed. He continued to rock as the baby finally fell into a deep sleep.

  He studied the little face feature by feature and thought he looked angelic, like the cherubs he’d once seen in a high-relief French mantelpiece.

  So. He hadn’t been able to have Mandy, but he had her children. There was some kind of poetic justice in that. He felt as if a rent in his life had been closed, a hollow had begun to fill.

  He listened to the quiet sounds of the furnace, the clock, cars passing on the road—then he sat up with a start. Savannah. He couldn’t hear her.

  He put the baby back in the carrier, breathed a prayer of gratitude when he remained asleep and ran lightly up the stairs, trying not to jostle him.

  “Savannah?” he called quietly from halfway up the stairs.

  She didn’t answer. He topped the stairs and turned down the hall, thinking in a panic that she could have climbed out a window, swallowed aspirin, stuck her finger in a socket!

  He found her door partially open and pushed his way in, calling her name urgently. “Savannah!”

  “Yeah?” she replied.

  He stopped in relief in the middle of her room. She sat cross-legged in the window seat, above which Libby worked at the top of a ladder.

  Libby turned at the sight of him, her brush poised in midair, her forearm braced against the wall to steady herself.

  His eyes went instantly to the seat of a pair of old sweats she wore that bagged around her taut, round buttocks, failing to diminish their curving appeal. The snug sweater he remembered from the afternoon he’d walked in on her changing into it.

  Her hair was caught back in a high, saucy ponytail, and there was a smudge of blue down the left side of her jaw.

  “Hi,” she said. “I’m sorry if we alarmed you. Savannah said you knew she was up here.”

  “It’s all right.” He placed the carrier on Savannah’s bed and moved closer to admire Libby’s work. Over the past few days she’d completed the border on two walls and was halfway along the window-seat wall with the Rosie and Tux figures. “I didn’t know you were up here. I thought you might have gone somewhere for the day.”

  “You said I didn’t have to leave.”

  “You don’t.” He walked along under the border she now worked on, and identified the Empire State Building, the Triborough Bridge and Times Square. A background of darkness and starlight alternated with rays of sunlight and little bluebirds in flight. He pointed to a large storefront he didn’t recognize that had what appeared to be animals in the windows. “What’s that?” he asked.

  “F. A. O. Shorts,” Savannah replied importantly.

  “Schwartz,” Libby corrected, enunciating. “The toy store.”

  He smiled. He couldn’t help it. Libby’s images were warm and whimsical, and though they occupied only the four or five top inches of the room, they lent it a charming fantasy that intrigued him. He could imagine what they did for Savannah.

  He suddenly saw the troublesome nanny from a new perspective. She had undeniable talent, and he wouldn’t be surprised at all if the publisher to whom she’d sent her manuscript and illustrations snapped her up and signed her to a multiple-book contract.

  Which brought him back to what she was doing in his home in the first place.

  She needed a job to keep her going while
she waited to hear from the publisher. That made sense. But it was a little curious that she’d known the children before. Her explanation of having met them at the hospital where she volunteered for story hour was reasonable, yet the whole situation somehow refused to fit together comfortably for him.

  He guessed it was her possessiveness with the children. Shouldn’t nannies who moved around and eventually moved on be trained to guard against that?

  But would a family want a nanny who didn’t care deeply about the children in her charge?

  He decided he was going in circles and dismissed the issue from his thoughts. Sunlight poured through the drapeless windows, Zachary was sound asleep and Savannah was smiling. All was well with his world for the moment.

  “You’re doing a beautiful job,” he praised. “I’ll have to compensate you for this.”

  “No, you don’t.” She turned back to her work. “This relaxes me. It’s how I choose to spend my free time.” While she talked, the brush in her hand executed a perfect little star.

  “We gots a clock!” Savannah said excitedly, standing up on the window seat and peering up, leaning on the bucket shelf on Libby’s ladder to brace herself.

  Libby’s tray of paints on the shelf tottered dangerously.

  Jared moved quickly to steady child and paints. He lifted Savannah off the seat and onto the floor.

  “No standing on the window seat,” he said. “I don’t want you to fall through the window. And if you lean on Libby’s ladder, you’ll tip her over. Come on and help me with the cocoa. You can show Libby the clock downstairs.”

  “Can she have cocoa, too?”

  “Of course.” He noticed that Libby looked uncertain. “Do you like cocoa?”

  “Well, yes. But…you know…I don’t want to intrude.”

  He studied her expression for signs of meddling or insincerity, but could find none. Perhaps she was truly concerned about not being in the way on a Saturday.

  “With or without marshmallows?” he asked.

  She smiled. That, he was sure, was genuine. It had to be. It was making his pulse thump.