A Baby for the Bachelor

by Victoria Pade

  “I’m glad you like Emmalina’s tamales,” Noah said once they’d found a picnic table near the gazebo that was the square’s centerpiece, amid the tall oak and pine trees that provided some shade.

  They’d settled on opposite sides of the picnic table to eat, and Marti had tasted the tamales and decreed them spicy but delicious.

  “But what did you think about what she had to say about your grandmother?” Noah asked.

  That was a more complicated subject.

  “I’m not sure,” Marti answered honestly. “Is it better or worse that Gram might have actually loved Hector?”

  Noah was unwrapping his second tamale and he raised an eyebrow in response to her question. “I’m not sure either. I guess if they loved each other, if they got carried away by their feelings but he ended up staying with his wife, it’s a little more palatable than if you think he took advantage of her age and situation and seduced her without giving a damn for her otherwise.”

  Marti grimaced at that second scenario. “Definitely more palatable. But it’s harder to believe after the things Hector said when we saw him.”

  Noah must have thought so, too, because he didn’t respond to that. Instead, he said, “And how about that coat business?”

  She knew what he was so gingerly referring to—Emmalina’s comment on the oddity of Theresa insisting on keeping a big coat wrapped around her on a warm day. “It sounded like Gram was trying to hide something. Like maybe a pregnancy of her own?”

  Noah’s well-shaped eyebrows arched and stayed that way this time to let her know that was precisely what he’d been thinking.

  “I don’t know if Wyatt told you this part, but it’s something my brothers and I had begun to wonder before now—if what was taken from Gram was a baby. A lot of what Emmalina said could have pointed to that.”

  “I thought so, too,” Noah agreed without revealing if Wyatt had let him in on their thinking. “But that just makes Hector all the bigger jerk.”

  Marti couldn’t argue with that. She also couldn’t be sure she was going to keep the tamale down suddenly.

  Wrapping up what remained uneaten, she moved it out of smelling range and then drank some of her bottled water. But rather than helping, it was as if she’d poured lighter fluid on a fire and she instantly had the worst heartburn she’d ever experienced.

  She tried to ignore it and said, “Did Hector and his wife have kids? I haven’t heard mention of any.”

  “No, Hector and Gloria never had kids.”

  “So it wasn’t as if they suddenly showed up with a baby right when Gram left Northbridge.”

  Noah shook his head. “Not that I ever heard.”

  “I don’t suppose you’d know if anyone else mysteriously became parents around that time?”

  “Sorry—that was twenty-six years before I was born.”

  When he opened his third tamale Marti’s heartburn was so bad she actually recoiled slightly just at the sight.

  “What?” he asked when he noticed it.

  “It’s nothing, just some heartburn,” she downplayed. “I guess this baby is not a lover of spicy food.”

  “Uh-oh. Are we in trouble?”

  Too much trouble to answer that. Marti tightly gripped the water bottle as if it anchored her and closed her eyes to keep from looking at the food he’d just unveiled. Thinking to try more water, she began to raise the bottle but Noah’s hand on hers stopped it.

  “Water is the last thing you want,” he said.

  How could she be in such misery and still be more aware of his touch than of the heartburn? She marveled as much at this reaction to him as she had earlier in Emmalina’s kitchen over her inability to keep from watching him move the stove.

  She opened her eyes just as he took his hand away. And somehow losing that contact with him seemed to make the heartburn even worse.

  Noah looked into the grocery sack beside him on the picnic bench and produced some soda crackers. “Try these.”

  “I wondered why you were buying these.”

  “Just in case—I know how hot Emmalina makes her tamales and I thought we’d better have something to cut the heat if you couldn’t take it.”

  Marti opened the box of crackers, took out a sleeve and began to nibble as Noah said, “Does Theresa know about our baby?”

  Why did the our give her a tiny rush?

  “No,” she answered. “I haven’t told her yet. I’m not sure how she’ll take it, if it will upset her.”

  “Maybe her reaction would be a clue to her own past.”

  “It’s impossible to say.” And Marti wasn’t comfortable yet with the idea of telling any of her family the truth about how her baby had come about and who its father was. Just thinking about it added stress and that made her feel even worse.

  Noah must have been able to tell somehow because he made quick work of packing up their meal and stood. “You know what? I don’t think talking about your grandmother and Hector Tyson is helping anything. Come on, let’s walk a little and talk about something else.”

  Marti was willing to try anything but she still had to smile weakly at the suggestion. “You aren’t really telling me to just walk this off, are you?”

  Noah laughed. “That’s not what I said. Let’s just see if some exercise can speed up digestion.”

  Marti stood, too, brushing cracker crumbs off of the brown V-neck T-shirt and tan slacks she was wearing before they went to his truck and left the grocery sack and the rest of the tamales in the back. Then they set off on the sidewalk that surrounded the Town Square.

  While Marti continued to eat crackers and barely sip water when she got too dry, Noah told her about Northbridge and the old covered bridge for which it was named. The bridge had been refurbished and the area around it turned into a park to rival the Town Square. An unveiling would be held in June.

  Little by little, Marti’s stomach began to calm down so by the time they were back at the truck, everything was under control again, and when Noah asked if she’d like to see the bridge, she agreed—primarily so the evening wouldn’t end yet.

  The bridge wasn’t far outside of town. Noah’s description hadn’t done it justice. A sharply pitched black-shingled roof topped sides that were solid on the lower half, crosshatched on the upper. It was painted a rustic red and moored by stone piers to the banks of the stream that ran below it. All around the bridge itself were freshly sodded grounds where bushes and trees had been planted.

  It was beautiful and Marti told Noah so.

  “If you need to walk some more we can get out and cross the bridge—it doesn’t actually lead anywhere anymore but we can go back and forth,” Noah offered.

  “I’m okay now and I like the look of it from here, where I can get the full picture.”

  He’d done some of the refurbishment on the bridge and pointed out his contributions to it before he angled in his seat and started to look more at Marti than at the scenery.

  And since she’d seen enough of it—and couldn’t seem to get her fill of looking at him lately—she turned slightly to face Noah.

  “So you’re feeling better?” he asked then.

  “I am.”

  “Better enough for some of this?” He took a large chocolate-covered mint patty from a compartment near the steering wheel and held it up for her to see.

  Marti laughed. “Better enough for some of that,” she confirmed.

  Noah opened the foil wrapping and they each broke off a piece of the candy. Then he said, “Can I ask you something?”

  “Sure.”

  “I’m curious. When we were first talking about your decision to have the baby you said it meant moving forward for you, that it was life-affirming—that didn’t seem like what most people say about a baby. But the comment that really made me wonder was when you said that there have only been two men on your dance card—me and the man you should be married to right now.”

  “Oh.”

  Noah picked up the sleeve of crackers she’d set
on the seat, offering it to her as if what he’d said might have been enough to bring back the heartburn.

  Marti laughed again. “That’s okay, you haven’t stressed me out that much. Yet.”

  He put the crackers back on the seat and they finished the mint instead. “So who’s the guy you should be married to right now?”

  Was there some jealousy echoing in that? Marti thought there might be and if the subject of Jack didn’t sadden her so much she might have been flattered by the possibility that Noah was jealous of the thought of another man. As it was, sad was all she could muster.

  “His name was Jack Mercer.”

  “And he was the only other guy you were ever involved with?”

  “The only one,” Marti confirmed. “We met in kindergarten, believe it or not.”

  “Around here that’s not unheard of,” he said. “Small town, remember? Any two locals who get married have known each other since they were in diapers. But sticking to that one path all the way to the altar without veering off to date someone else here and there? That’s another story.”

  “My story,” Marti said. “Jack and I were soul mates, right from the start.”

  “Your eyes met over the jar of paste in kindergarten class and that was it?” Noah joked.

  “Kind of. It was an intense case of puppy love that became more serious over the years.”

  “And neither of you ever—”

  “Never. Until you, Jack was the only non-relative I’d ever even kissed.”

  “And him?”

  “Unless something happened that I don’t know about—and I don’t have any reason to think it did—he’d never kissed anyone but me, either.”

  “On purpose?” Noah asked incredulously. “I mean, I don’t mean to sound so amazed, but was this some kind of blood-oath sworn to on the playground or what?”

  Marti smiled. “No, Jack and I just happened. Like I said, we were soul mates.”

  “Joined at the hip, never hanging out with anyone else?”

  “That would have been weird and it wasn’t. We weren’t surgically attached to each other. We had our own friends, other people we hung out with and did things with separately—I had girlfriends, Jack had guy friends, we both had brothers. But from the time Jack and I met he was who I wanted to be with—whether it was who I wanted at my birthday party or to go swimming with or who I wanted to hang out with at the mall. He was the first person I told anything to or wanted to share big news with. And I was always his choice for who to be with, who to do things with, who to talk to. It wasn’t by design, it just was what it was—”

  “Soul mates,” Noah repeated.

  Marti shrugged, wishing it didn’t hurt so much to recall just how perfect she and Jack had been together, how much it had seemed as if he were her other half, as if she were only complete when she was with him. How hard it had been to find a way since his death to feel as if she were whole without him…

  “It was just like this magical fluke,” she went on, almost more to herself than to Noah, “that as a little kid I found the one person I was meant to be with.”

  “And you’re sure there is only one person?”

  Marti shrugged again. “I guess I don’t know now.” She hoped not, but yes, she was afraid it might be true.

  “Anyway,” she began again from where she’d veered from the facts. “We lived together through college, while Jack went on to get his master’s degree. But we didn’t want to get married until Jack was completely finished. We wanted to be less busy when it came time to plan our wedding and start our marriage. But as soon as the end was in sight, he gave me an engagement ring and we put the wheels into motion.”

  “And that was how long ago?”

  “A year ago this last Valentine’s Day. We set the wedding date for July twenty-sixth of last year.”

  “Which is why you should be married to him right now,” Noah said again, making Marti wonder if that particular remark had bothered him.

  She didn’t ask, though, she just said, “Yes.”

  “Why aren’t you, then?”

  Even after all this time she still had to steel herself to say it.

  She took a breath, pulled back her shoulders and felt something at the center of her tighten…

  “Jack was killed in a car accident on his way to the church,” she said, her voice very, very quiet.

  Noah’s eyebrows arched in shock now. And for a moment he seemed to be at a loss for words.

  Then he said—also quietly but incredulously—“He was killed on the way to the wedding?”

  Marti nodded, trying hard to tell this and not relive it, not to refeel the pain. “The minister thought I’d been left at the altar but I knew—we all knew—that couldn’t be true. We were the perfect match, the couple everyone envied, what every friend I’ve ever had wanted in their own relationships. There was never anything either Jack or I wanted as much as to be together, to spend the rest of our lives together.”

  Noah’s brows reversed directions and pulled into a frown. “What did you do? Just wait? How did you find out?”

  “Of course there was a flurry of calls trying to find Jack and his older brother—who was also his best man and who was bringing Jack to the church. But we couldn’t reach either of them. Then a couple of Jack’s friends went looking for him and when they came back there were police with them…”

  Marti’s voice cracked, but she managed to keep tears from filling her eyes by peering over her shoulder, out the windshield at the bridge again so she had something emotionless to focus on.

  But from the corner of her eye she saw Noah’s hands moving toward her. She knew he wanted to reach for her, maybe pull her into his arms…

  Don’t. If you do I’ll lose it.

  Maybe he heard her thoughts because he didn’t reach for her. He ended up replacing his hand on the steering wheel and stretching his other arm along the top of the seat. But he did let that hand rest gently, comfortingly, around the back of her neck, and that much she could accept without losing control. In fact, it was nice…

  “The police told me what had happened,” Marti went on then. “Someone—probably kids—had stolen a stop sign at a bad intersection three blocks from the church. Another car hit Jack’s brother’s car broadside. His brother was hurt but lived. Jack was killed instantly.”

  The silence that followed was what usually happened so Marti knew it well. There was a moment of shock, a moment of searching for the right thing to say.

  Noah whispered, “I’m so sorry, Marti.”

  Marti nodded, the way she’d learned to accept condolences after so much practice. “It was awful,” she agreed. “I was in that same church four days later for Jack’s funeral.”

  Noah squeezed her nape, massaging it, and she was surprised by how much it helped, how much strength his touch gave her.

  Enough so that she could look at Noah again and even force a small smile and a lighter tone to ease the tension. “How’s that for satisfying your curiosity?”

  Noah shook his head for a long time as if in disbelief before he said, “Nothing like what I thought.”

  “What did you think?”

  “That you’d had a bad breakup that left you depressed or something. But this…” He shook his head again. Then he said, “So you decided to have the baby to move forward from this?”

  “At first I thought I couldn’t possibly have a baby that had come from anyone but Jack—”

  Had that sounded as bad to Noah as it had to her? She didn’t know. But just in case, she said, “I’m sorry, that was—”

  “It’s okay.”

  She hoped so, and took him at his word.

  “But then, yes,” she continued. “A baby? What could be more of an affirmation of life? And Jack was all about living life to the fullest, enjoying it, looking at it as a gift to be used well. So while this baby isn’t his, I decided to think of it as a gift and an adventure and a part of life going on. Maybe even a sign that I was supposed to
go on without Jack. On a path that truly had nothing to do with him.”

  Noah nodded, his eyebrows arched once more, his expression a bit forlorn—maybe at the thought that somehow he and his baby had gotten twisted up in so much that had nothing to do with him.

  And Marti thought he deserved a way out of at least this dark subject.

  She smiled again and said, “Okay, I’ve given you more than you bargained for.”

  The silence that fell again confirmed her impression, before Noah took the opening she’d given him to change the subject and said, “How about coming out to my place for dinner tomorrow night?”

  Marti smiled. “Okay,” she agreed, unreasonably glad that she hadn’t scared him off by revealing her past.

  Since it was late by then, they decided to call it a night, trading only small talk on the way back into town.

  Then they were standing in the glow of the porch light at her grandmother’s house, facing each other, and he was looking down at her very intently.

  “I’m sorry if I brought up bad memories tonight,” he said.

  “It’s okay,” she assured him. And it was. Because while everyone else in her life seemed to see her as all that was left of the perfect couple, with Noah it was different. With Noah, Jack and the loss she’d suffered, her past with him, were all just one facet of her—they weren’t the only things that made her up. And that was nice.

  Just as it had been nice to have him help her weather the heartburn. And to have him looking at her now in that way that let her know he was seeing only her. Appreciating her. Affected in some way himself by her and being there with her…

  He smiled a bad-boy smile then and said, “Great date, huh? I get you sick on tamales and then make you tell me about what had to have been the worst thing that ever happened to you.”

  “You do know how to show a girl a good time.”

  But she had had a good time with him despite everything else and suddenly all she was thinking about was the ending of the night before and that kiss they’d shared. About sharing another…

  Maybe he really could read her mind, because he reached up then and brushed a strand of her hair away from her face, trailing his finger over and around her ear to end with his hand cupping her cheek. He tilted her face ever so slightly upward just as he leaned in and met her mouth with his.