Father of Two

by Judith Arnold

  FATHER OF TWO

  Book Three of

  The Daddy School

  Judith Arnold

  ***

  “Judith Arnold writes beautifully and poignantly. Highly recommended!” Romance Readers Anonymous

  Copyright © 1997 by Barbara Keiler

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  To learn more about the author, and to sign up for her newsletter, please visit her website.

  ***

  Table of Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  About the Author

  About the Daddy School

  ***

  Chapter One

  “THERE’S A PLACE in France, where the naked ladies dance...”

  “Oh, gross! I hate that song!”

  “There’s a hole in the wall, and the boys can see it all...”

  “Shut up! That is so disgusting—”

  “And the cops don’t shoot, ’cuz they think it’s kind of cute...”

  “Daddy, make Sean shut up! That’s such a totally disgusting song! Daddy!”

  “When the dancers kick, every man will grab his—”

  “Okay, okay,” Dennis broke in. He hadn’t been listening too closely to the lyrics Sean had attached to the classic snake-charmer tune, but he suspected something bad was about to emerge from his son’s mouth, and if that happened, something even worse—a blood-curdling scream—would emerge from his daughter’s. “Nobody wants to know what happens when the dancers kick,” he told Sean. “What everybody wants to know is, where the hell are your pj’s?”

  The twins shrugged, not bothering to pretend they cared. The room they were supposed to be settling into was cluttered with suitcases, tote bags, packed cartons, empty cartons, and cartons lying on their side, disgorging their contents across the floor. The room measured fourteen by sixteen feet, yet only about three square inches of floor showed beneath the massive detritus of two seven-year-old lives.

  Dennis had been combing through the twins’ assorted junk for the better part of an hour, and he still hadn’t found their pajamas. “I give up,” he said with a sigh. “Your mother must have packed your pj’s somewhere, but I’ll be damned if I know where.”

  “I think you shouldn’t swear so much, Daddy,” Erin scolded, her hazel eyes round and earnest.

  “I don’t sleep in pj’s,” Sean added, poking through a pile of assorted clothing. “I sleep in my swimsuit.”

  “That’s disgusting.” Erin sent an indignant frown her father’s way. “I really don’t want to share a room with him, Daddy. He’s so gross. Did you hear the song he was singing? It has a very bad word in it. Did you hear? He was going to say—”

  “I heard, I heard. Where are your pj’s, Erin?”

  “I don’t need pj’s. I need a room of my own.”

  “Yeah, you and Virginia Woolf.” Dennis rummaged through a half-filled carton, but found only an assortment of sweatshirts featuring the logos of every Super Bowl sponsor since 1975, along with a horrifying number of unmatched socks.

  “At Mommy’s house I had my own room,” Erin reminded him. “I don’t see why I have to share a room with Sean.”

  “Mommy’s house had more bedrooms,” Dennis explained, ignoring the sting of his conscience reminding him that Erin could easily have her own bedroom in Dennis’s apartment if he were willing to vacate his study and convert it into a room for her.

  After all, it wasn’t Erin’s fault that her mother had decided, after her boyfriend took a job with a high-tech company out in Seattle, that she wanted to move there with him and get married. Nor was it Erin’s fault that Dennis had claimed he would rather accept full custody of the kids than let his ex-wife move them three thousand miles from Arlington, Connecticut, where Dennis lived. Nor was it Erin’s fault that Dennis’s ex-wife had said okay, called her lawyer, and asked him to do the paperwork that would transfer custody to Dennis.

  He’d been elated, even if he suspected that she’d agreed to give him the kids for selfish reasons. She’d said something about how she wanted to start fresh, and starting fresh didn’t mean dragging a pair of seven-year-old kids—who referred to her new life partner as Mr. Potato-Head, for some reason—across the country, away from the town where they’d been born and their father still lived.

  Whatever her motives, Dennis had been delighted to go from a weekend Daddy to the real thing, full-time, seven days a week. But now, four hours after Dennis had driven with the twins to the airport to wave their mother off, reality was kicking in. Reality was that he owned an elegant penthouse co-op high above downtown Arlington, with spectacular views of the mountains to the north and west, and with two bedrooms and a study. Reality was that if he didn’t convert his study into a third bedroom, Erin and Sean were going to have to share sleeping quarters.

  He really didn’t want to give up his study. It served as his at-home office. It was his retreat. His personal think tank. Did not wanting to give up that room mean he didn’t love his children?

  “I don’t want to sleep with him because he’s disgusting,” Erin explained with self-righteous fervor. “Plus, he belches.”

  “So do you,” Sean retorted. “Only thing is, I can belch louder. You’re just jealous.”

  “I will not share a room with him, Daddy!”

  “Sorry, sweetie,” Dennis murmured, abandoning his excavation of sweatshirts and widowed socks and straightening up. “If I could give you each your own room—” if I were willing to sacrifice my study “—I would. For now, how about if I make a dividing line down the middle of the room?” He shoved one of the cartons to the center of the room, then lined up another carton next to it, and another. “See? We could divide the room in half, and each of you can have your own half.” One of the cartons tilted slightly. Lifting it, he discovered a Hot-Wheels car underneath. He nudged the car out of the way and set the box back down. Then he gestured at the two beds, on opposite walls. “This half is yours, and the other half is Sean’s.”

  Erin contemplated the arrangement, not quite convinced. “He can peek over the top.”

  “Who’d wanna look at you?” Sean countered, then belched very loudly.

  Erin cringed. “Eeeeuw! Daddy—”

  “All right. House rule: no belching,” Dennis declared.

  “I’m a Budweiser frog,” Sean boasted, discovering a pair of swimming trunks in a suitcase. “That wasn’t a belch. That was me croaking. Bud.”

  Sean croaking Bud sounded an awful lot like a belch to Dennis. “If you’re a frog, I’m going to make you sleep in the bathroom. Now guys, come on. It’s nine o’clock, you have school tomorrow, and you should be in bed.”

  “How is the bus going to find us?” Erin demanded. “Our old bus stop was near Mommy’s house.”

  “I’ll drive you to school,” Dennis promised. His apartment building was located in a different primary-school district from the one the children used to live in, but he had decided to keep them at their old school for continuity’s sake. The least he could do to make the transition easier for them was to chauffeur them to school in the morning. He’d already hired a part-time nanny named Betty Grover to pick them up at school at three in the afternoon, b
ring them home and remain with them until he got home from work.

  “I can’t find my night gown,” Erin announced. “Can I sleep in one of your T-shirts, Daddy?”

  “My shirts will be too big,” he warned, knowing he would let her sleep in all his T-shirts at the same time if it would make it easier for her to share the bedroom with her brother. “Which one do you want?”

  “The gray one with the Blood Of Sean on it.”

  Dennis stifled a shudder. He’d been wearing that shirt a few months ago, when Sean had spouted a nosebleed. Once the nasal Red River had subsided, Dennis had tried to wash the stains left behind on his shirt, but several runs through the washing machine had failed to erase them completely. He’d intended to throw the shirt away, but the kids wouldn’t let him. “It’s important,” they’d insisted. “It’s got the Blood Of Sean on it.”

  He’d tossed it on the top shelf in his closet and hoped the kids would forget about the Blood Of Sean. Obviously, Erin hadn’t forgotten.

  Sighing at her elephantine memory, he left the chaos of their bedroom and trudged down the hall to his own room. He hadn’t yet closed the drapes, and the wall of windows framed a lovely view of the night sky above the city’s sparkling lights. He would have appreciated the scenery, except that the night sky and the lights reminded him that it was well past nine o’clock. When the kids used to come to his place on a Saturday night, it didn’t matter if they stayed up past their bedtimes—which they usually did. But on a Sunday night, with everyone’s alarm clock set for seven a.m., this wasn’t good.

  He hurried into his walk-in closet, groped around the shelf until he found the gory gray shirt, and carried it back to Erin, who slipped it over her head with a laugh that would have sounded joyful except for the cackling-witch undertone. “Look, Sean!” she gloated, nearly tripping on the hem of the shirt, which tickled her bare toes. “I’m wearing the Blood Of Sean.”

  Sean didn’t seem envious. In his electric-blue swim trunks, he looked more ready for a day at the beach than a night in dream-land.

  “Okay,” Dennis announced. “Brush your teeth, guys. Do you have your toothbrushes?”

  “No,” they chorused, barreling past him to get to the bathroom.

  He surveyed the turmoil, the cartons standing like a cardboard Wall of China down the center of the room, the Barbie with her head twisted backwards—Exorcist Barbie? he wondered—on the dresser, the glow-in-the-dark yo-yo on the chair, the Slinky slithering out from under Sean’s bed and the countless Beanie Babies scrimmaging on the floor in front of the closet. Dennis appreciated the way the bean-bag animals blocked the closet door, preventing him from opening it and going into cardiac arrest when he saw the bedlam inside. He owed those Beanie Babies his life.

  Where the hell had his ex-wife packed the twins’ toothbrushes?

  It didn’t matter; they kept spare toothbrushes at his place for their weekend visits. But still... He felt disoriented and dazed—and appallingly disorganized.

  He was a thirty-eight-year-old lawyer with a firm grip on life. He prided himself on being smart, shrewd, capable, and generally all-around brilliant. Perhaps a tad arrogant—but his arrogance had a foundation in truth. He was a Powerhouse, a Master of the Universe, the sort of attorney for whom clients gladly paid many hundreds of dollars an hour, confident that they were going to get their money’s worth out of him.

  How could acquiring full custody of his precious, beloved, adorable twin offspring overwhelm him? Just because their mother hadn’t packed their pajamas and toothbrushes in an accessible place...

  The children exploded out of the bathroom, apparently racing each other back to bed. “He belched, Daddy, he belched!” Erin reported in her loudest tattle-tale whine.

  “That wasn’t a belch. It was gag-gling.”

  “He was gagging, Daddy!”

  “I was gag-gling. You know, where you take water in your mouth and you put your head back and you spit it up like a water fountain? That’s called gag-gling.”

  “He is so disgusting! Daddy, when can I have my own room?”

  “That wasn’t belching. This is belching,” Sean clarified before ripping loose with a burp loud enough to register on the Richter scale.

  “Daddy!”

  “I was only demonstrating!”

  “Daddy, make him stop!”

  Dennis closed his eyes and cursed. Smart, shrewd and brilliant? Heaven help him if his adversaries in court ever found out that Sean and Erin Murphy, seven years old and cuter than sin, could reduce the smartest, shrewdest, most brilliant attorney in Arlington, Connecticut to a state of sheer panic.

  “Daddy, don’t curse so much,” Erin chided.

  Yeah, he added silently: sheer panic and way too much cursing. That was what his world was coming to.

  Chapter Two

  IF GAIL SAUNDERS were shorter, she might not have noticed Leo Kopoluski hovering on the other side of her desk, half hidden behind a mountain of file folders.

  It was Monday morning, which meant the mountain was higher than usual. She wasn’t sure why there were always more files on her desk Monday morning than she’d left there the previous Friday, unless they were having orgies and reproducing over the weekend. Sometimes, if she stared at the files with her head angled, her eyes squinted and her brain slightly blurred, she could almost imagine them lighting up cigarettes and murmuring among themselves: “Was it as good for you as it was for me?”

  Whatever her files were up to, it was clearly better for them than for Gail. Working as an attorney in the Public Defenders office in Arlington, Connecticut, trying her damnedest to defend the most abject, misbegotten, foolish city dwellers against charges ranging from disorderly conduct to manslaughter, wasn’t the sort of thing a woman did for fun.

  The only reason Gail managed not to be crushed under an avalanche—the files stacked on her desk bore a striking resemblance to the Sierra Nevada, so an avalanche wasn’t out of the question—was that she had nothing else going on in her life. No boyfriend, no husband, no kids. The only family she had close by was her sister Molly, and ever since Molly’s Town Hall wedding to Detective John Russo of the Arlington Police Force on Valentine’s Day, she was no longer available for spur-of-the-moment sisterly activities. Gail could easily devote twelve hours a day to her work, and she did.

  She wished she got paid more for her efforts, but if she wasn’t defending the scum of society in court for fun, she wasn’t defending them for money, either. She was defending them because she believed the system was stacked in favor of the powers that be—the police, the District Attorney, the wealthiest stratum of society—and she wanted to sneak an ace or two into the hand of the folks who got in trouble for no better reason than that they were poor and careless.

  Leo Kopoluski had qualified as poor and careless the last time Gail had seen him, two years ago. A recent immigrant from Russia, he’d been under arrest for having participated in a stolen-property enterprise which had been keeping Eastern European immigrants like him less-than-gainfully employed. Leo had gotten drawn into the crime ring only because he’d been unable to find other work and his cousin from the old country, who had sponsored his immigration, had set him up in this nefarious trade. In his garbled Slavic accent, Leo had plea-bargained and gotten off with a year’s sentence, six months suspended.

  Gail would have preferred to spare him prison—he’d been so thin and sweet and utterly naive. He’d committed the robberies only to put a roof over his head and some food on his plate. Surely the judge ought to have showed clemency.

  But Leo had wound up serving a few months behind bars. Apparently it hadn’t done him much harm. He was still thin, with a knobby face, curly black hair and a smile that said, “Who, me?” But he was dressed in a decent wool suit, a freshly ironed shirt and a dark knit tie. He no longer looked like a twenty-two-year-old kid fresh off the boat.

  For a moment, Gail wondered how he’d reached her office without having been announced by the receptionist. Then she
remembered that the receptionist was as overworked as the staff attorneys. If someone was going to sneak past the reception area, Gail was grateful it had been Leo instead of one of her less savory former clients—one who’d been charged with a violent crime. Leo had always been a teddy bear. When she’d last seen him, he still hadn’t learned the English words for gun and knife.

  “Hello, Leo,” she greeted him, closing the file she’d been perusing. “How are you?” She didn’t dare to say anything more elaborate. Two-syllable English words were about all he could handle.

  “Ah, my good lawyer,” he orated, his l’s originating somewhere deep in his throat. “You are looking very good, Miss Gosbozha Saunders.”

  “You’re looking good, too, Leo,” she said, smiling at his peculiar way of addressing her. When she’d been defending him two years ago, someone had informed her that Gosbozha was Russian for “Mrs.” and that Leo was actually calling her “Miss Mrs. Saunders.” Perhaps “Miss” plus “Mrs.” equaled “Ms.”

  She assessed his suit and her smile expanded. It always gratified her when a client on the verge of destroying his life with criminal activity instead managed to turn himself around. “What can I do for you?”

  “I come to you, Miss Gosbozha Saunders, because I am in great need of good lawyer. You are best good lawyer I have known in America.” His language skills had improved almost as much as his wardrobe.

  “What’s going on?” she asked, hoping that his desire for a best good lawyer was based on some minor problem—a hassle with a landlord, or a question about his green card, nothing more serious than that.

  “I have lost great good job,” he told her, folding his hands before him and looking somber, as if he were about to burst into prayer. “I work, after our little meeting of two years past, in very good job. I work long, hard, to make success of myself in America. I work for church doing job in settlement, for my Russian countrymen who come here and need what is called counseling.”