The Baby Maker

by Valente, Lili

  “Yep.” I fold my arms on top of the bar, keeping my gaze out the window where the morning sun paints the vineyards hazy shades of pink and gold, determined not to give Ms. Haverford another second of my attention. “That’s the one.”

  “She doesn’t look like Satan’s little sister,” Rafe observes, clearly amused. “In fact, she’s pretty damned cute. Petite, but curvy, and those eyes…” He hums appreciatively. “I’ve never seen eyes that big and blue in real life. Almost like a cartoon, but sexy. Is that crazy?”

  I shake my head, determined to shut this down before it goes any further. “Yes. It’s crazy. Don’t even start with her. She’s the enemy. Stroker had all but signed over the deed to that property. Then she swooped in, offered ten grand over the asking price, and now suddenly he’s got to think things over.”

  Rafe shrugs. “Ten grand is a lot of money.”

  “I’ve been helping him bring in his harvest every October since I was twelve years old. I’m like a grandson to him—his words—and that’s not how you’re supposed to treat family.” I let out a long breath and drop my volume, making sure my next words are for Rafe’s ears only. “And she doesn’t date, anyway. Word through the grapevine is she’s turned down every guy who’s asked her out. Prefers staying home alone with a book.”

  A book she probably looks really hot reading in those sexy glasses…

  “That may be so,” Rafe says, a wicked grin curving his lips. “But she hasn’t had a Hunter man ask her out, has she?” His smile widens. “Or is that really why you can’t stand her, bro? Did you ask and she said no?”

  I make a just-drank-lemon-juice-straight face that I hope expresses how much offense I take to his suggestion. “Hell, no. All I want from that woman is for her to stop interfering with this deal, stop complaining when I rip out blackberry bushes along the shared property line, stop riding her bicycle through town and slowing down traffic, and quit taking up a stool at my coffee shop and ruining my favorite half hour of the day.”

  “Two coffees, extra cream and just a little sugar,” Sophie says, setting down two heavy white mugs on the scarred bar. “What else can I get you? Biscuit? Cinnamon roll? I’ve also got oatmeal with almonds and honey this morning.”

  Rafe orders a cinnamon roll, and I opt for the oatmeal. Sophie shouts the order to the two younger women working the kitchen and then turns back to Rafe with a warm smile. “What’re you doing in town so early, doll? When was the last time you were in for morning coffee? A year ago, maybe two?”

  From there, the conversation turns to the fire that consumed Rafe’s shop/apartment in downtown Santa Rosa, as well as a trendy restaurant, a tattoo parlor, and several other shops. Sophie—who has always had a soft spot for Rafe—clucks and fusses over him, repeating what everyone in our family’s said at least a dozen times since we got the call from him yesterday letting us know he was safe.

  “Well, at least you’re okay. You’re the only thing that can’t be replaced.” She lays a freckled hand on his forearm and gives it a squeeze. “And it’s good to have you back in town. Don’t be a stranger, okay?”

  “I won’t,” Rafe promises, nodding my way. “This one has to have the good stuff every morning, so I expect I’m going to be a regular.”

  Sophie nods seriously, setting the red-and-gray bun atop her head bobbing. “Good. Life’s too short to drink shitty coffee. Dylan gets it. Learn from him. He’s a smart kid.”

  Rafe laughs. “Smarter than he looks, anyway.”

  I narrow my eyes, but that only makes the bastard laugh harder. He’s in excellent spirits for a man who just lost half a million dollars in vintage Harleys and parts. But they were insured, and Rafe has never been the kind to sweat the small stuff.

  Or the big stuff. He doesn’t sweat much, in fact. He just jumps on his chopper and heads for the hills when things get hairy.

  If anyone’s going to be learning lessons around here, it should be me. Rafe would never have let himself get so tangled up in a web of obligation that it’s going to require surgical extraction to get my life back on a track of my own choosing.

  But I’ll manage. This is my year.

  Mine. And no one, certainly not a perky blonde from the city who has no idea what it’s like to work her ass off to cultivate every acre under her care, is going to get in my way.

  I shift my glare in Emma’s direction, but she’s already gone.

  Which is good. I’ve been doing my best to keep the ribbing between us light. I don’t want her to realize how much she truly gets to me, or how many hours I lie awake at night trying to figure out how to convince Stroker to choose me without my having to go deeper into debt. I could get an extra ten or fifteen grand, but it would cost me more precious months of freedom to earn it back.

  And I’m afraid if I don’t start making my aspirations reality soon, I never will. And then that brewery with my name on it will be just another dream I put aside to do what was best for the Hunter clan.

  I love my family and our farm, but it’s time my life belonged to me.

  By the time Rafe and I have finished turning the hops in the drying kiln late in the afternoon—passing back and forth from the kiln to the barn at least a dozen times, taking in the view of the orange-speckled pumpkin patch below—my mind is made up. I’ll talk to Stroker tomorrow and convince him we should put our heads together until we come up with an acceptable counteroffer that doesn’t include more cash up front. I can promise him the twins as harvest slaves for this year—my older brother, Deacon, is deployed with his unit until spring, so the boys are at my mercy until then—and maybe let Stroker stay on at his farmhouse after the sale. The man is eighty-five years old and probably not thrilled about moving at his age.

  Yes. This is going to work. I can feel it. Optimism fizzes in my bloodstream, promising that things are starting to look up.

  And then it happens.

  That life-changing thing.

  It wrenches me out of bed in the dead of night and sets me on a collision course with destiny.

  Destiny that comes in an unexpected perky blond package…

  Chapter 2

  Emma

  Critical mass: (physics) the amount of a fissionable material necessary to sustain a chain reaction at a constant rate.

  —Nuclear Chemistry Flash Cards Emma Haverford Never Threw Away After Undergrad

  Most people are familiar with critical mass. If not the physics concept, then in the figurative sense. Critical mass is when someone reaches the end of her rope, when the straw breaks the camel’s back, when she simply can’t take it anymore.

  Critical mass is when shit gets real.

  For me it started at around seven a.m. Saturday morning, when Dylan Hunter swaggered into my favorite coffee shop wearing a pair of faded jeans that hugged his muscled thighs, leaving nothing about his drool-worthy body to the imagination. The man is built like a Greek god or a superhero or one of those guys who enter lumberjack competitions for a living. He’s preposterously good looking, a head-turner no matter what your sexual preference.

  Gay, straight, bi, not-all-that-interested-in-nookie-at-this-life-juncture-thank-you—it doesn’t matter. When a man with that kind of raw animal magnetism passes by, you can’t help yourself.

  You turn, you look, maybe you drool a little if you didn’t sleep well the night before and are having trouble controlling your body’s involuntary responses.

  And even though the way he teases me like the new girl in school who swooped in to steal his Star Student award drives me up the wall, his sleepy hazel eyes and crooked smile work their dark magic the way they always do. Even as my lips are saying all the right things—sassy, confident things that prove I’m not about to let this man bully me into backing away from something I want—I know my eyes are saying something entirely different.

  My eyes are making invitations that haven’t been cleared by my brain or my heart, while tingling sensations race across my skin and something deep in my core yearns toward Dylan
like a moth to a flame.

  But we all know what happens to the moth when it finally scores a hug from fire, right?

  It burns. It suffers. And then it dies. Bye-bye moth, better luck next incarnation. Hopefully you’ll be born with a better sense of self-preservation.

  Luckily, I am not a moth.

  I am a woman who knows better than to mess with men like Dylan.

  I snuff out the yearning with another shot of espresso, get my oatmeal to go, and ignore the way the morning sun glints off Dylan’s sandy blond hair as he laughs at something the man next to him—his brother, I think, though we haven’t been introduced—is saying.

  I moved to Sonoma County to embrace the beauty of life—real life, not the virtual existence I’d been sleep-walking through for years—but some beautiful things are best observed from afar. No matter how lonely my evenings have been, the last thing I need is a fling with a commitment-phobe who thinks I’m Satan’s handmaiden and hasn’t been in a long-term relationship since his senior year of high school.

  Bless small town gossip for keeping me in the know.

  I’m sure it will come back to bite me on the butt sooner or later, but so far, I appreciate getting the scoop on my new neighbors. It’s like a map marking the safe path through a minefield of interpersonal relationships going back generations. As the new girl in a small, small town, I need all the help I can get.

  On my way out of Barn Roasters, I pause to hold the door for a young mother with a stroller, and the baby—an angel-faced little boy with oodles of dark curls—flashes me a gummy smile.

  The yearning I thought I’d smothered with espresso blazes to life again, even fiercer than before.

  It’s different than the pull toward a beautiful man, but it springs from the same source—from the need to connect, to create, to love and be loved. It springs from the river of emotion damned up deep inside of me, desperate to be set free to flow out into the world.

  Less than a year ago, I was positive a baby was in my future. My near future. I had an engagement ring on my finger and a chart on my bedside table tracking the days when I was most likely to conceive. Jeremy and I joked about being rebels, bucking tradition and going for baby-makes-three before we walked down the aisle.

  Later, he would tell me that I was already married to my job. That the seventy hours a week I spent writing code for a top Internet search engine was the reason he didn’t want to set a wedding date, the reason he wanted to get me pregnant, so I would be forced to slow down, the reason he eventually had an affair and left me for another woman.

  Now, I don’t know if I’ll ever have a husband or children.

  Though, at this point in my life, it’s the loss of those dream babies that cuts a hole in my chest the size of the prize-winning pumpkins in Farmer Stroker’s patch. I ache for them in a way I’ve never ached for anything, proving you can be haunted by something you’ve never had.

  The thought follows me back to my house on the edge of my new property’s ten-acre vineyard, making the silence I usually appreciate feel like a portent. I will always be alone, in silence. There will never be a voice calling out to welcome me home, or a child’s laughter in the garden, or any of the family sounds I remember from my early years, that golden time before my parents’ split and my sister Carrie and I became painful reminders of what they had lost.

  I shower, change into clean clothes, and grab my backpack full of worksheets and today’s lesson plan, determined to buck up and enjoy the rest of the day. But despite the early autumn sun warming my skin and the smell of squishy blackberries fermenting on the vine perfuming the air as I ride my bike to the elementary school, my worldview remains gloomy.

  My two-hour weekend class, Cool Girls Code, allows me to put my old life to use enriching my new one, helping the next generation of girls confidently take their place in the computer science field. So far, I’ve been working with ten girls, ages five through fifteen, and they are all lovely, intelligent, sweet, and curious ladies who make me feel hopeful about the future.

  But today their smiles and laughter, their victory cries and groans of frustration as a line of code that worked in the command window fails to run inside the function, don’t warm me in the usual way.

  Instead, they are fingers probing a bruise, reminding me where it hurts.

  It hurts right there, in the center of my stupidly lonely heart. And when seven-year-old Isabella gives me a hug on her way out the door—telling me that she’s going to bring me some of her abuela’s homemade tortillas next week for our lunch break—it’s all I can do not to break down and cry.

  Yes, I nearly start weeping in front of my shiny, happy students. So I do what any self-respecting woman would do—I grab a bar of gourmet dark chocolate from the farmer’s market on the way across town and eat the entire thing. Screw keeping my caffeine and sugar consumption under control.

  Desperate times call for chocolate-intense measures.

  I arrive at my two o’clock doctor’s appointment with my blood buzzing, which unfortunately does nothing to make my annual lady parts examination any less uncomfortable. Dr. Seal seems like a kind, compassionate woman, but I would swear she pulled that speculum out of the deep freeze seconds before I arrived.

  The exam room is freezing, too, so even after the worst is over, I can’t help feeling like a slab of meat prepped for the butcher.

  “Relax…deep breaths,” Dr. Seal says, gently prodding at my abdomen as I stare at the square tiles on the ceiling. “Any pain here?”

  “A little.” I clench my teeth to keep them from chattering. “But I’ve been hitting the caffeine pretty hard lately, so I’m sure that’s part of it.”

  “Not great for endometriosis,” she says mildly, repeating what I heard from my OB back in Palo Alto before I moved. “But I’m sure you know that.”

  I smile. “Yes, but I love coffee more than I hate pain.”

  She laughs, motioning for me to sit up. “Understandable. But if the cramping gets too bad, let’s talk about what you might want to eliminate from your diet, okay?”

  “Got it,” I say, smoothing my gown down over my knees.

  “So is there anything else you wanted to discuss today?” Dr. Seal asks, her brown eyes warm. “I’m assuming you have birth control in place that works for you?”

  “Um, yes. I do.” I clear my throat as I nod. Swearing off relationships until I’ve got everything at the winery and tasting room running smoothly is certainly effective birth control, but I know that’s not what she means.

  “Great. But if you decide you want to explore other options, give us a call. It can take time to get an appointment with me on busy weeks, but Nancy, our nurse practitioner, is wonderful and can always talk you through your options.”

  “Speaking of options,” I find myself saying before I realize that I’m going there.

  I didn’t plan to discuss this today—I have enough on my plate without adding another major life change into the mix—but now that I’ve started I don’t want to stop.

  “I’m wondering about…babies,” I say, pulse speeding simply from speaking the word aloud. “I’d like to have a child sooner rather than later, but my ex and I tried for nearly a year without any luck, and I know endometriosis can make conception more difficult. Do you think I should start trying soon? If I want to have a baby before thirty-six or thirty-seven?”

  I have no idea how I’m going to start “trying” at this point, but if Dr. Seal says the time is ripe, I guess I can start checking out the local sperm banks.

  The doctor’s brow furrows as she rolls her chair over to the computer screen, glancing at my chart. “You’re thirty-four?”

  “Yes,” I confirm. “Thirty-five in a few months.”

  She hums low in her throat. “Assuming there’s room in your life for a child now, I would encourage you and your partner to go ahead and start tracking your cycle and timing intercourse on your most fertile days. And if you don’t conceive within six months this time, the
n we can discuss more aggressive options. I can walk you through those myself, or refer you to a colleague of mine who specializes in pregnancy in women of advanced maternal age.”

  I laugh, but her expression assures me she’s not kidding. “Um, advanced maternal age? I…I’m not there already, am I? I mean, I thought I had time. At least a little.”

  “You absolutely have time,” she says, in a voice I can tell is meant to be reassuring, but isn’t. “But traditionally, women aged thirty-five or older are considered to be of advanced maternal age. Fertility decreases rapidly between the ages of thirty-one and thirty-seven, and then even more rapidly as you move toward forty. As long as you know you want a child, it makes sense to start as soon as possible. So I’ll give you a prescription for prenatal vitamins, instructions on how to track fertility, and hopefully we’ll be able to get you on the road to becoming a mom soon.”

  Becoming a mom…

  Oh my God. A mom…

  Tears spring into my eyes, but they aren’t sad tears this time. They’re hopeful tears. Honest tears. Tears that assure me that yes, this is what I want, what I long for more than anything, what I need to make my life complete. I need that little boy or little girl I’ve been dreaming of for so long in my arms, in my heart, where I will keep him or her forever.

  Swallowing past the lump in my throat, I nod, smiling through the mistiness blurring the edges of Dr. Seal’s face. “Yes, that sounds perfect.”

  And it does.

  But it’s also…complicated.

  As I wander out the door and make my way toward where I parked my bike near the town square, I start asking the harder questions like—do I really want to have a stranger’s baby? Some guy who spent a few minutes jerking off to porn in a windowless room in exchange for whatever sperm banks are paying for deposits these days? Sure, I’ll be able to check out his genetic history, education, and I think they even show pictures sometimes, but I won’t be able to look into the man’s eyes in real time and see if he’s one of the good guys.