His Twin Baby Surprise Page 14

  He sat at the table, looked around at the ultra-neat room and compared it to his own shabby kitchen. He didn’t have a big interest in living spaces, but it was obvious that Lisa did. He wondered if that was why she’d pursued a career in real estate. He was pretty sure it had something to do with the way she’d grown up.

  She had made this house into a beautiful home. He was glad that his child would have a clean, safe environment like this one. His child. Lisa was right when she’d said it hadn’t seemed like a real person until she’d felt the baby move. Until he’d felt it move. Before that point, the child was an obligation, a mistake he would own up to and for which he would take responsibility. Now it was a person.

  “Ben.” Gemma spoke from the doorway and he stood. “Thanks for making her call me. She’s fine. It’s like she said, she had too much sun and too much standing around today out at the lake.” She glanced over her shoulder and raised her voice. “And she hasn’t eaten nearly enough today so her blood sugar is low.”

  Ben followed Gemma into the living room, where Lisa reclined on the couch, her feet propped up. She wrinkled her nose at him and he grinned.

  “Don’t forget your ultrasound appointment tomorrow at eleven.” Gemma said, leaning down to give Lisa a hug. “It probably won’t show anything out of the ordinary, but you’ll be able to find out the baby’s sex if you want to.”

  “You know I want to,” Lisa said, resting her hands on her belly.

  “Call me if you feel sick or have any problems, and be sure to call me after your appointment.”

  “I will.”

  Ben saw Gemma out the door, then turned back to Lisa. “So,” he said, giving her an assessing look. “You’re okay, then?”

  “Obviously.”

  “Good.” He paused, knowing she wanted him out of her hair, but not quite ready to go. “If you think you’ll be all right, I’ll leave that paper for you to look over and then I’ll call you when I get back from Arizona.”

  “Fine.” When he didn’t immediately move to open the door, she asked, “Is something wrong?”

  “Nah, but I’m wondering why you thought you had to be out at the lake with those developers. Couldn’t somebody else handle that?”

  “Yes, Bunky and Roland.”

  “Oh.” He stepped away from the door, stuck his hands in his back pockets and took a turn around the room.

  “Why do you ask?”

  “I get that you feel obligated to be the acting mayor until Harley gets well, but don’t you think you’re doing too much?”

  She raised an eyebrow at him. “You mean, for a woman, right?”

  “For anyone, but especially for a pregnant woman.” He frowned. “You know that song about the woman ‘bringing home the bacon and frying it up in a pan’ is a crock of bunk, don’t you?”

  Now she really stared at him. “That is a remarkably enlightened outlook.”

  He cleared his throat and looked away. “Well, my mom might have been lecturing me a little bit.”

  “Your mom, who thought I should give up my career and marry you?”

  “That’s the one.”

  “Hmm.” Lisa turned onto her side and rested her chin on her hand thoughtfully. “Your mom didn’t tell me she’s been lecturing you.”

  “You talked to her?”

  “I talk to either your mother or your father, or both of them, every day.” Lisa smiled softly. “They’re very excited about the baby.”

  “I know.” Ben didn’t know what to say to them. They had always wanted grandchildren, which he’d assured them he wouldn’t provide. Now that one was coming, it felt awkward. What he saw as an obligation, they viewed with unbridled joy. “And their excitement grows every day,” he added. “Nobody’s ever had a happiness-induced stroke, have they?”

  Lisa laughed. “I don’t think so. And, by the way, you’re under no obligation to pass your mom’s lecture on to me. I know how much I can take on.”

  “I wonder.”

  “I wonder why this matters to you.” She shifted on the couch and sat up a little, pushing a cushion down behind her back. “It’s not as though I expect anything from you. Not as though we have any kind of relationship, other than one shared night, which was a mistake.”

  “In spite of that, I’m...I’m glad this has brought you back into my life,” he said.

  “You...you are?”

  “Sure. When I saw you at the airport in Chicago, I couldn’t believe it was someone from home, someone who knew me before football and fame. You seemed happy to see me, too.”

  “I was,” she admitted with a smile that made him feel a soft glow in the pit of his stomach.

  He couldn’t recall ever experiencing that with her.

  “I’d had an awful day,” Lisa said. “Seeing you, having you rescue me in that storm...well, it was...wonderful.” She paused. “I admit that since I was embarrassed about that night, I thought the baby was a terrible mistake.”

  “You did?” Hearing her say it made him feel a little less like a jerk.

  “I was beside myself, didn’t know what to think, how to respond. Up until a couple of weeks ago, I couldn’t seem to get my thoughts together, at least until I felt him move. Then everything seemed to clarify.” She smiled. “Gemma tells me that’s a common reaction.”

  Ben knew exactly what she meant, but her reality was different than his. He had obligations all around the world. He had spent years establishing his place in a network of charities that mattered to him, ones that involved people in education and sports. They were important, far-reaching and fun. But so was raising a child, if a person did it right.

  Unwilling to give in to the circling thoughts that had consumed him for a week, he looked around. “Gemma said you’re feeling faint because you haven’t eaten enough today. Can I at least fry some bacon up in a pan for you?”

  If Lisa was surprised at his change of subject, she didn’t show it—probably because she didn’t need for him to agree with her. “Don’t think I have any, but check the refrigerator. There’s plenty of other food.”

  She said it with a laugh in her voice, so he returned to the kitchen and pulled open the refrigerator. “Wow! Are you expecting a famine?”

  “Look in the freezer.”

  He pulled that door open, too, and stood, open-mouthed at the neat stacks of filled containers, top to bottom, right to left, all labeled and dated. “You couldn’t get so much as a business card in here.”

  “I know. Baby and I are well-stocked for the next six months. Help yourself. I’m not picky.”

  “You can be if you want. There’s plenty of choices.” From the fridge, Ben took out a container marked “mac and cheese” and one labeled “coleslaw.”

  “With all you do, how did you have time to prepare all this?”

  “I didn’t.”

  While he heated the mac and cheese in the microwave and prepared two plates, she told him about her mother’s visit. “But she...felt like it was time to go, so she...went. Weeks ago.”

  There was an echo of sadness in her voice, along with something else that it took him a minute to pinpoint. Loneliness, maybe? She was certainly alone now. He didn’t like the pinpricks of guilt that caused, so he finished the dinner preparations and set the table. Time for him to eat and run, he decided.

  * * *

  “HMM. HOME FRIES are just French fries with the spice kicked up. What is this?” Clive asked. “Chile? Garlic? Onion?”

  Maureen smiled. “I’d think you’d be able to figure it out by now, Clive. That’s your third plate of them. You do realize you’re eating up all your own profits, right?”

  “It’s called quality control. I can’t serve them to my customers if they’re less than perfect.” He squirted ketchup on his mound of fries. “And, besides, these are left
overs, and they are perfect.”

  “We aim to please.” When he looked at her again she said, “And, no, I won’t share my spice recipe. I keep all my recipes secret.”

  “Even though I’m paying for the ingredients?”

  “That’s right. What good would having the recipe do you, since you don’t cook?”

  She had him there, and they both knew it. Clive wouldn’t plan to keep her recipes and pass them on to his next cook. He was too honest for that. Anyway, given his past experience, he would never find another cook like her.

  Maureen hadn’t told him so yet, but she felt as if she would like to stick around for a while. To her surprise, she had discovered she liked Peachdale. She’d thought she’d had enough of small-town life after growing up in Reston, but it was different here. Peachdale was much smaller than Reston, and no one knew her. No one knew about her hoarder parents or the daughter she’d left behind. Twice now. No one judged her on anything other than her cooking—and she knew she was really good at that.

  She had met many, maybe most, of the residents. The high-schoolers trouped in before school started, devouring mountains of pancakes and rafts of eggs and bacon. She knew they had food at home, or could get breakfast at school, but they liked the café. Clive didn’t let them linger, though. The Marine shooed them out in plenty of time to make their first class and he wasn’t above calling the high school, in case the administration wanted to know why they were tardy, and giving the names of students who didn’t move out at a double quick time.

  The kids didn’t argue with him. It was obvious they had respect for the Marine who employed several of them in after-school jobs.

  She had learned right away that there was no such thing as an ex-Marine. “Once in the corps, always in the corps” was Clive’s motto. She wondered if that was where he had learned his housekeeping skills or if he’d been schooled by his wife. He liked everything shipshape and sparkling clean.

  Maureen still tired easily, so she was glad for the shorter work day. Fewer hours meant less pay, but Clive refused to charge her rent for her tiny apartment. He was so thrilled to have a competent cook.

  Every afternoon she took a walk, receiving the same two-fingered wave so popular around Reston from every driver she met along the way. It always made her smile because it confirmed her feeling of being at home. It made her think she was fitting in.

  She worked from six in the morning until two in the afternoon, stopping for a short lunch break whenever business slowed down. But slow-downs were rare. The café had a steady stream of customers and Clive was mostly happy to leave the running of the kitchen to her. He’d managed to hire two people to help her with food prep and cleanup, and someone to act as hostess and cashier. He told her he thought she had broken the jinx that had bedeviled the place since his wife’s death. She was flattered.

  Clive dropped by the kitchen several times a day, most often to see if she’d cooked up anything new and to try it out for himself. He had given up on keeping the menu updated and had installed an old-fashioned chalkboard he’d rescued from the elementary school garbage. On it, she wrote the day’s offerings. She knew a number of customers came in specifically to see what new dish she created each day. They didn’t have to know that every one of them was something she’d created years ago. They were new to Peachdale.

  Now the café was closed and scrubbed spotless the way Carol had always kept it, according to her fond husband. Maureen was doing prep work for the next day and Clive was making sure none of the home fries suffered the indignity of remaining uneaten.

  “If we’d had chow like this in the Marines, I never would have retired.”

  “You would also weigh six hundred pounds,” Maureen pointed out drily. “Why did you and your wife decide to retire here?”

  “Carol was from this area. The kids were grown and on their own. We planned to run this place, then hire a good manager or two and see the sights in the country we’d missed while I was in the corps. I thought she and I would have longer together.”

  “I guess that’s the way it always is, when someone goes too soon.” Maureen thought about all the people she’d lost over the years. The most painful was the one she’d walked away from. Her mind skittered away from thoughts of Lisa, whose calls she had yet to return. “Tell me about your kids.”

  “Todd and Blake. They’re both cops in Tulsa. I see them about once a month. I go up there for the day when I’ve got someone to cover this place for me, or they come here with their wives and kids.”

  Clive told her about his three grandchildren, which sparked longing in Maureen to see Lisa’s child. She wanted to make things right, but she wasn’t sure how. It would take time. For now, it was easier to focus on work, on her new home, on someone else’s grandchildren—anything other than how she had failed her own daughter.

  “Police work can be dangerous and underappreciated. Do they like their jobs?”

  “Yeah, mostly. Blake is a patrol officer and Todd made detective, works missing persons cases. Had one a couple of months ago, a man who disappeared. Turned out he had another entire family in Kansas that his Oklahoma family knew nothing about. He’d decided to stay with them permanently but hadn’t bothered to let his Tulsa wife and kids know.”

  “How did your son track him down?”

  “Social security number. You only get one, you know—at least a real one, and this guy wasn’t a crook, just a philanderer. Amazing how he kept each family from finding out about the other.” Clive savored a few more French fries before asking, “How about you, Maureen? Do you have a family?”

  “No. I—” She broke off, thinking that she had ducked her responsibilities for so long, wallowed in the shame of having left her infant daughter in a home she could no longer live in, it had become second nature to her to hide the truth. And look where that had taken her—straight into an estrangement she’d never intended to have. Really, that didn’t make her any different from the man with two families. He had ducked responsibility, and Maureen admitted that she had, too.

  She couldn’t face Lisa again yet, but she could make another change.

  Her lips wobbled in a smile. “I have a daughter, although I haven’t been a good mother by any means.”

  “Oh, why is that?”

  “Long story. Let’s just say, she grew up without me. I’ve been trying to make amends, but I went about it all wrong.”

  “So try something different,” Clive suggested.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Do something you haven’t tried before. You don’t know what might work.”

  Maureen met his gaze. In the short time she’d known him, Clive had always been honest. At first, she had thought his taciturn nature meant he was withdrawn, but he was actually thoughtful, spending his time considering a problem before tackling it. Once he had a plan in mind, he was quite chatty.

  Maureen knew she had avoided dealing with her abandonment of Lisa because it was simply too painful to face, a deeply ingrained habit she had yet to break. “I don’t think I’m ready. I know I’m not ready.”

  Clive smiled. “An old Marine said, ‘Being ready is not what matters. What matters is winning after you get there.’”

  Maureen stared at him for a moment, then nodded and went back to chopping vegetables for the creamy vegetable soup she had planned for tomorrow. Clive finished his fries, washed his plate and utensils and left.

  What was something different that she could offer her daughter? She had tried being there, taking care of her, but had ended up smothering her. She had shared the reasons why she’d left but the conversation had been too emotional for both of them. She hadn’t showed Lisa the depth of her shame and sorrow for what she’d done. She’d never asked for forgiveness. Going back now, without something new to offer, might bring a rejection she couldn’t face, something from which the two of the
m could never recover.

  What else was there?

  Maureen raised her knife onto its tip, slipped a celery stalk under the blade and brought the sharp edge down over and over until she had reduced the stalk into perfectly even little comma-shaped slices. She paused as she reached for the next stalk.

  She could give Lisa answers about her father. It might not make any difference in their troubled relationship, but it was up to her to find him.

  She glanced at the door through which Clive had disappeared. She’d never been involved with a man like him. A straight-up, honest man. She had never felt worthy of the few really good men who had come across her path, so she had kept to herself.

  Maureen pressed her palms together as she stared anxiously around the kitchen. It was time for a change in that area, too. She didn’t see Clive in a romantic light, but she did think they could be friends. There was something so completely bone-deep honest about him that she felt she could trust him, tell him about her shameful past, and he wouldn’t come down with ironclad pronouncements.

  Because of her shame and because she had been so young when she’d started working, Maureen never felt she could open up to people, tell them about herself. She felt she could talk to Clive, though, and maybe his son Todd was the same way. Perhaps he could give her advice on how to locate John Jackson, if that was his real name. Even if she didn’t succeed in finding the man who had fathered Lisa, she would have proof that she had tried.

  It was possible that was all Lisa wanted—a mother who tried.

  * * *

  LISA EMERGED FROM the mayor’s office and hurried toward her car, but she was brought up short by the sight of Ben leaning up against it in his customary pose, legs stretched out in front of him, arms crossed over his chest.

  She rocked to a stop and threw her hands into the air. “Ben, what are you doing here? Don’t you have mustangs to feed or... I know.” She snapped her fingers as she remembered. “I thought you had to go to Phoenix or somewhere for a big, important board meeting and then to a big, important golf tournament.”

  “Sweet of you to remember the details.” He shrugged. “Yeah, I was supposed to go, but it can wait. I’m going to take you to your ultrasound appointment.”