First Lady

by Philips, Susan Elizabeth

  Maybe he'd died without realizing it and gone straight to hell.

  “Don't say that.” Lucy took her sister's arms and drew her away, then knelt down and caught her small face between her hands to get her attention. “Say jerk, Butt. Jerk. Jerk. Jerk.”

  Nell didn't even have the decency to hide her amusement as she gingerly picked up the baby and carried her over to the couch for a diaper change. “You've got quite a fan club.”

  He needed some fresh air. “I'll be back in a few minutes, but don't hesitate to take off without me.”

  When he returned, the Demon was safely fastened in her car seat and Nell sat behind the wheel.

  “I'll drive,” he said.

  She pulled back onto the road. “Soon. Right now I'm looking for a place to stop for dinner.”

  “It's not even six.”

  “Lucy's hungry.”

  He tilted his head toward the teenager. “Eat potato chips.”

  “I'm hungry, too,” Nell said. “And Marigold needs a decent meal.”

  “Stop calling her that!” Lucy exclaimed. “She hates it! She really does.”

  “Pull over,” he ordered.

  “Right up ahead. The sign says one-point-five miles. Grannie Peg's Good Eats.”

  “I just bet that'll be four-star cuisine.”

  “What does a steelworker know about four-star cuisine?”

  “Don't stereotype.”

  “I don't type at all. That's why I'm unemployed.”

  She looked awfully pleased with herself for someone who was supposed to be desperate. He wondered how she'd react if he told her the truth about what he did for a living. He used to love telling people he was a journalist, but during the past year, he'd grown evasive. That alone had been a good reason for quitting. A man should be proud of his work.

  “Oh, look! They're having a picnic!” Nell slowed to gaze at a family of four that had stopped by the side of the road to eat sandwiches off the tailgate of an old station wagon. Her blue eyes danced with delight. “It looks like so much fun. That's what we can do for dinner! We can have a roadside picnic.”

  “No way. I've got my heart set on Grannie Peg's fine cuisine.”

  “Picnics blow,” Lucy grumbled.

  “Both of you could use a happy pill,” Nell said firmly.

  “I feel sorry for your kid if you're going to make it eat dirt sandwiches off the back of some ghitty station wagon.”

  Nell fixed her gaze on the road. “I can't hear you. I can't hear anything but happy words.”

  Mat smiled. The pregnant lady sure was good for entertainment.

  * * *

  Grannie Peg's flamingo-pink T-shirt, black leggings, and gleaming silver earrings delighted Nealy. All that on a plump, brassy-haired woman just past forty. Her restaurant had fake pine paneling, plastic flowers in a wall divider that separated the restaurant entrance from the dining area, and a long Formica counter with black vinyl stools. Exactly the sort of place she never got to see.

  She was glad she'd been able to maneuver Lucy into carrying the baby. Feeling that healthy, vigorous wiggling beneath her hands as she'd changed Marigold's diaper had been difficult enough. She'd been terrified she'd somehow bring harm to her.

  Grannie Peg stepped out from behind the register and nodded at them as they entered. “Hey, there folks. Smoking or non?”

  “Smoking,” Lucy said.

  “Non,” Mat said.

  Lucy's look indicated how pathetic she thought he was.

  Nealy watched Mat studying the restaurant's counter, a purposeful gleam in his eyes. “Don't even think about it,” she said quickly. “You're sitting with us unless you want Marigold strapped on the stool next to you.”

  The baby squealed in delight. “Da da Da!”

  “Will you make her stop doing that?” Mat growled.

  “Jerk. Jerk. Jerk!” Lucy said to the top of the baby's head.

  Mat sighed.

  Nealy laughed. Considering how unpleasant her traveling companions were, she shouldn't be having such a good time, but being with them felt like being with a real American family. They were all so gloriously dysfunctional. Except for Marigold. She was gloriously functional.

  Mat sniffed. “Didn't you just change her?”

  “I guess she enjoyed it so much, she decided to do it again.”

  One look at Lucy's face told Nealy she didn't have a chance of convincing the teenager to handle this diaper change. Reluctantly, she carried the baby back to the motor home.

  When she returned, she found Mat and Lucy in a booth, with Lucy glaring at him. She had no intention of asking what was wrong, but Lucy told her anyway.

  “He won't let me order a beer.”

  “The depth of his cruelty leaves me speechless.” Nealy frowned at the high chair that had been placed at the end of the table. Who knew how many children had sat in that chair and what diseases they might have had? She looked aroand for a waitress to ask for disinfectant.

  “What's wrong?” Mat asked.

  “The high chair doesn't look too clean.”

  “It's clean,” he said. “Put her in.”

  Nealy hesitated, then forced herself to gently lower the squirming baby into the seat. Don't get sick, sweetheart. Please don't get sick.

  Nealy fumbled around trying to fasten the tray in place until Lucy pushed her out of the way and did it herself. “You're so pathetic. I feel sorry for your kid. I really do.”

  “Shut up.” Although she hadn't put much heat behind her words, Nealy still enjoyed them. “Just shut up,” she repeated for good measure.

  “You're rude.”

  “Like you've got room to criticize,” Nealy countered. Oh, this was too much fun.

  Mat looked amused. Marigold slapped her hands on the high chair tray, demanding her sister's attention. “Ma ma Ma!”

  Lucy's face crumpled. “I'm not your mother. She's dead!”

  Nealy glanced over at Mat, but he'd begun studying the menu. “Lucy, I'm really sorry about your mother. I lost my mother, too, when I was very young. Anytime you want to talk about her—”

  “Why would I want to talk to you?” Lucy scowled. “I don't even know you.”

  “She's got you there,” Mat said.

  A gray-haired waitress appeared, pencil and pad poised for action. “Are you folks ready to order? Hey, sweetie. What a cute baby. How old is she?”

  Nealy had no idea.

  “Forty-seven,” Lucy retorted. “She's a dwarf.”

  “Ignore her,” Mat said to the waitress. “She's annoyed because we're getting ready to lock her up in an institution for the criminally bad-mannered.”

  The waitress nodded knowingly. “Teenage years are hard on parents.”

  Mat began to correct her, then seemed to decide it wasn't worth the effort. “I'll have a cheeseburger and fries. And whatever you've got on draft.”

  “That's so not fair!” Lucy sputtered. “How's come you can have a beer and I can't?”

  “Because you're too old to drink.” He discarded his menu.

  Nealy smiled, then turned her attention to her own order. She realized she was famished. “I'll have the fried chicken, mashed potatoes, and green beans. Blue cheese dressing on the salad.”

  “Bacon sandwich,” Lucy said. “No lettuce. No tomato. No mayonnaise. And white bread. And red Jell-O.”

  “We only have lime.”

  “That blows.”

  The baby slapped the tray and let out a demanding shriek. Clearly liking the sound of her own voice she did it again.

  The waitress nodded indulgently. “What's the little angel going to have?”

  Mat snorted.

  Nealy didn't know what the baby ate other than jarred food, and she was once again forced to look to Lucy for help.

  “You can mash up some of your green beans and chicken real small with a fork. Don't put butter on the beans,” she told the waitress. “And bring her some crackers to keep her busy until the food gets here then some applesauce
.”

  “How about scrambled eggs or something easy to eat like that?” Nealy said, trying to be helpful.

  “Babies can't have egg whites until they're a year old. Don't you know anything?”

  The waitress stared at Nealy for a long time—obviously pegging her as the worst mother of the century— then she turned away.

  “Buh-buh-buh!” the baby shouted at the top of her small lungs. “Gah!”

  Mat looked longingly toward the counter with its row of stools.

  “Don't even think about it,” Nealy said.

  “She's so loud,” he grumbled. “Why does she have to be so loud?”

  “Maybe she's imitating you.” Mat's voice wasn't really loud, but it was big, just like the rest of him.

  Lucy smiled slyly and handed the baby a spoon, which she immediately began whacking on the high chair. A young couple in a neighboring booth looked over and frowned at the noise. Nealy gently took the spoon away.

  Big mistake.

  Marigold screamed.

  Mat groaned.

  Lucy looked pleased with herself.

  Nealy hurriedly returned the spoon to the baby.

  “Gah!”

  “Don't cuss, Butt,” Lucy said. “It upsets Jorik.”

  “Would you hurry up with that beer?” Mat called out to the waitress.

  It didn't take long for the food to arrive. Nealy dug in, refusing to let the children spoil her enjoyment of Grannie Peg's. She'd eaten at the most famous restaurants in the world, from Tour L'Argent to the Rainbow Room, but not a single one of them was as atmospheric as this. Only when the check arrived did she remember she had a problem.

  “Mat, I'd appreciate it if you could lend me some money. Just for a little while. I want to pay for my own food, and I'm going to need some clothes, a few incidentals. I could probably manage with five hundred.”

  He stared at her. “You want me to lend you five hundred dollars?”

  “I'll pay you back. I promise.”

  “Yeah, sure.”

  Imagine anyone doubting Cornelia Case's word. Except she wasn't Cornelia Case. She was a pregnant drifter named Nell Kelly, and she could see his point. “Really I will. I have the money. I just can't get my hands on it right now.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  This was going to present a problem. She had no credit cards with her, since she couldn't have used them without blowing her cover, but she needed to get her hands on some money.

  “I can loan you fifty,” Lucy said.

  Nealy was surprised by Lucy's generosity. “Really? Thanks.”

  “No problem.” Too late, she saw the calculating look in the teenager's eyes. “All you have to do is whatever I tell you.”

  So much for the fifty dollars.

  “I'll lend you fifty,” Mat said begrudgingly.

  Lucy sneered. “You should borrow from me. I won't make you take off your clothes.”

  “Did anybody ever mention that you're boring?” Mat said.

  “I saw the way you were watching her today when she didn't know you were looking,” Lucy countered.

  “I was watching her because she looks like Cornelia Case.”

  “She does not.”

  A devil prodded Nealy. “A lot of people think I do.”

  “You wish,” Lucy said.

  “I hate to put an end to the good time we're all having.” Mat stood. “But we need to hit the road.”

  “Butt just ate,” Lucy reminded him.

  “We'll take our chances,” he snapped.

  Easy for him to say, Nealy thought less than half an hour later as she tried to clean up the mess from the baby's latest episode of motion sickness. For the first time since her escape, she yearned for the efficient White House staff that took care of every kind of domestic unpleasantness.

  By the time the baby was bathed, her car seat was swabbed down, and they'd found a discount store where Nealy could buy a few clothes to replace those she'd lost, it was dark, Marigold was screaming again, and Nealy had begun to feel as frantic as the baby. “We need to find a doctor! There's something wrong with her.”

  Lucy gave up trying to distract her sister with a Beanie Baby walrus. “Butt doesn't need a doctor; she's scared of doctors. She's hungry and she's tired, and she wants out of her car seat, and she needs her bottle. That's all.”

  Marigold held out her arms toward her sister and sobbed with frustration.

  Nealy sat down in the empty passenger seat. “I think we should stop at the campground we saw advertised on those billboards.”

  “I'm not stopping,” Mat said. “We're driving through the night. One of us can sleep while the other takes the wheel.”

  Although he sounded determined, she suspected he knew his plan wouldn't work but hadn't gotten around to accepting it. “We won't be able to sleep with the baby screaming,” she said reasonably. “If we stop now, we'll get plenty of rest and we can make an early start.”

  His sigh was as long-suffering as Lucy's. “We should be halfway through Ohio by now. We've barely crossed the West Virginia border.”

  “But we're having such a good time.”

  The corner of that steelworker's mouth quirked. “All right, we'll stop. But we're pulling out at daybreak.”

  Hoolihan's Campgrounds was a small RV park, with not more than a dozen vehicles angled in among the trees. Mat backed into the spot they'd been directed to, turned off the ignition, then got up to retrieve another can of root beer from the refrigerator. Within seconds, he'd left her alone with the children. Even though she knew that was why he'd let her come along, she resented his hasty exit.

  Lucy gave Nealy the frantic baby. Nealy waited for her to follow Mat outside, only to watch the teenager make her way to the sink and fix her sister's bottle. When she was done, she took the baby back.

  “I'll give it to her. She doesn't like you. You'll make her get sick all over again.”

  And then she 'II die. . . . The awful, illogical thought flew through Nealy's mind. “I'll—I'm just going to take a little walk.”

  Lucy was feeding the baby and she didn't respond.

  The night air felt like velvet as Nealy stepped outside. She gazed around and saw that the campground was set in a small clearing beneath a rim of foothills faintly visible in the moonlight. She heard the muted sound of a radio coming from the next campsite, smelled an old charcoal fire. Dim yellow bug lights mounted on crude poles threw spots of weak illumination over the gravel road. She walked toward it only to hesitate. Something was wrong, and it left her feeling unbalanced and disoriented.

  Then she realized what it was. There were no soft footsteps behind her, no quiet murmur of voices whispering her whereabouts into a two-way radio. For the first time in years, she was by herself. Contentment seeped through her, right down to her bones.

  She'd barely gone ten yards, however, before a familiar voice intruded on her solitude. “Already running away from our happy home?”

  She turned to see a dark figure sprawled at a picnic table set into the trees. He was sitting backward on the bench, leaning against the table with those long legs stretched out and the root beer can in his hand.

  Even as she felt herself drawn to him, she realized she knew nothing about him other than the fact that he disliked children and worked in a steel mill. There were questions she needed to ask, ones she hadn't been able to pose around Lucy.

  “Am I likely to get myself arrested for being with you?”

  He rose and began to walk beside her.

  With his height and muscular build, he might have been Secret Service, but he didn't feel safe like the agents she was used to. Instead, he felt like danger.

  “What makes you ask that?”

  “For a man who wants to travel quickly, you did a good job of keeping us off the turnpike.”

  “I don't like turnpikes.”

  “You love them. You're a turnpike kind of guy. Be honest, Mat. What's going on with you and those kids?”

  “I'm not kidnapping
them, if that's what you want to know.”

  She'd been fairly certain of that. Lucy complained about bumpy roads and warm Coke—she'd hardly keep quiet about being kidnapped. “So what are you doing with them?”

  He took a sip, looked off into the distance, shrugged. “A long time ago, I was married to their mother. Sandy put my name on both girls' birth certificates, even though neither one of them is mine.”

  “So you are the girls' father.”

  “Aren't you listening? It's only on paper. I didn't even know Butt existed until a few days ago.”

  “Please stop calling her that.”

  “Anybody who screams like she does deserves a crummy name.”

  “She may scream, but she looks like a cherub.”

  He was clearly unimpressed.

  In the distance, an owl hooted. “I still don't understand. You obviously don't want them, so why do you have them? It shouldn't be hard to prove you're not their father.”

  “You try getting Lucy to a lab for a blood test.” He slid one hand into the pocket of his jeans. “You're right, though. It won't be hard, and as soon as we get to Grandma's house, I'll take care of it.”

  “You still haven't explained why you dodged the turnpike.”

  “Sandy's mother isn't due back in the country till the end of the week, and child services was getting ready to take them. The baby'd probably be all right, but can you imagine Lucy in a foster home, even if it was only for a little while? She'd end up in a juvenile detention center before she ever made it to Iowa.”

  “I know she's awful, but there's something about her I like. And I'm sure she could have survived.”

  “Maybe, but... I don't know ... it seemed safer to get them to their grandmother.”

  As he told her about Joanne Pressman, the letter she'd sent, the red tape involved in turning the girls over, Nealy realized there was a lot more to Mat Jorik than that crusty macho exterior. “So you decided to sidestep the local authorities.”

  “Not from any affection for the little brats,” he said dryly. “But despite what Sandy did to me, I have some good memories of her, and I figured I owed her a favor. At the same time, I didn't think the local authorities would be too happy about having me take them out of state before this was cleared up.”

  “So you did kidnap the girls.”

  “Let's just say I didn't have the patience to wait around until somebody got the legalities figured out. Originally I'd planned to fly, but Lucy took strong exception to that.”