Look What The Stork Brought In?. Dixie Browning
“Euphoria.”
“I beg your pardon?” But before he could explain that sometimes, even in the midst of a crisis, a feeling of well-being could overcome a body and make him think everything was all right when it wasn’t, she was already headed down the hall.
“Can you do it in three minutes?” he asked, going after her.
“Not if I shampoo my hair. Give me five.”
“Lady, they’re not mine to give. If you get into trouble in there, I’m the one who’s going to have to bail you out, and I’ve got a bad knee, so don’t push your luck, all right?”
She beamed at him. Positively beamed. Joe forgot all about her big, gravid belly and her dirty, green-stained, onion-scented hands. And the fact that she was trying to sell off a trinket belonging to his grandmother that was valued at eighteen grand.
Euphoria. By the time he snapped out of his version, she was barricaded behind the bathroom door. He could hear her humming something that sounded suspiciously like a lullaby.
“Hand me that bottle of lotion from my dresser, will you? Second door to the left,” she called over the sound of rushing water.
Well...not exactly rushing. Trickling would be more like it. He’d already noticed that up close, the house lost some of its bucolic charm and was just an old house, with worn floorboards, rattling windowpanes and a couple of wheezing window units fighting a losing battle to overcome the heat and humidity.
He fetched her lotion, and while he was at it, he glanced around the bedroom. Just in case. Joe, after all, was a man with a mission.
Seven hours later he was on his fifth cup of black coffee, which was the last thing he needed, when a nurse wearing scrubs came through to the waiting room. He stood, thinking it was about time, and she came on over.
“Are you Joe?”
“Has she had anything yet?”
“Not yet. She’s asking for you again.”
As frustrating as it was, Joe had figured it was only common decency to let her have her kid and catch her breath before he got down to business. Not that he’d had much option. Back at the house she’d been too distracted. While she’d timed her pains, he’d asked if she’d ever heard of a Ch’ien Lung vase, and she’d said, oh, that reminded her—she needed to feed her fish.
She had a goldfish. Women were wacky, and broody women were worse than that. He’d given up on getting any reasonable answers and asked if there was anybody he could call for her.
She’d said, yes, he could call her a cab because she might as well go in and stay instead of waiting until the last minute. So he’d made up his mind to stick it out. It wasn’t like she could run out on him, not in her condition.
He’d stuck by her, and when the pains were eight minutes apart, he’d helped her climb into his truck, gone back and gotten her suitcase and driven her to the county hospital.
After she was settled in her room and a string of folks wearing white or green had pulled the curtains shut and done whatever it was they had to do, he’d dragged a chair up beside her bed and helped her wait.
He could’ve questioned her then, but he hadn’t. They’d talked about nothing in particular. Her goldfish. He was called Darryl. The weather. It was hot. Her garden—it needed rain. And then the pains started piling in on her, and he’d let her crush his fingers and wished there was more he could do.
Not that it was any of his business, but she needed someone, and nobody else had showed up.
“It won’t be long now,” he’d told her, hoping to hell he was right. He didn’t know how much more of this he could take.
“I think I...left the...back door unlocked,” she’d said through clenched teeth.
“I checked. It’s locked.” She had nice teeth. Not perfect, just nice and white and square. Joe tried to convince himself that she couldn’t possibly be involved. In the hospital gown, in spite of a few fine lines at the outer corners of her eyes and a few more across her forehead, she looked more like an overgrown kid than a woman in the process of having a baby.
But she had the goods. She was fencing the stuff. None of the other women he’d talked to had been left with anything. The jerk had seduced them, promised them marriage, cleaned them out and left them, every last one Joe had interviewed, flat broke and either mad as hell or brokenhearted. Or both.
This one was still in possession of the J. J. Dana jade collection. A collection that had been valued at a million and a half nine years ago when the old man had passed away and was probably worth a lot more now. And if she was carrying either a grudge or a torch for the jerk, she covered pretty well.
Once they’d rolled her into the delivery room, Joe had returned to the waiting area. He’d considered going out and finding himself a hotel, figuring he could come back in a day or so, talk to her once she’d had time to settle down and wind things up. There was time. She wasn’t going anywhere.
But he hadn’t. Instead he’d hung around some more. Waiting.
“Are you the father?” Roughly an hour and forty-five minutes had passed. The woman in scrubs was back.
Not about to get himself thrown out on a technicality, Joe cleared his throat and said, “He couldn’t be here. I’m standing in for him. Is she okay? Has she had it yet?”
The nurse shoved a lank chunk of hair back up under her paper hat. “It’s a girl. Mother and daughter doing fine. She’s been moved to Room 211 and is resting now, but you can see the baby if you want to.”
Joe didn’t know what to say. It seemed pretty callous to tell her he had no interest in babies, but the truth was, he didn’t. He’d delivered a few. Cops occasionally did. Sometimes he’d followed up with a visit, sometimes a donation, but it wasn’t his nature to get involved with the people he came into contact with through his work. Not that this case was work, exactly. It was more in the nature of a family obligation. Still...
“Sure,” he heard himself saying. “Might as well.”
Well, hell—somebody had to welcome the little tyke into the world. Once he’d done his duty he would check into that hotel and get something to eat. He’d had enough of machine food to last him a while. Candy bars. Peanuts. Barbecued pork rinds. One of these days he was going to have to get started on a health food and exercise regimen. Maybe after he wound up this business for his grandmother, Miss Emma, and returned home.
Two
She was no beauty, he’d say that for her. Practically bald, with a red face, fat cheeks and a sour expression, she looked like a bird that had fallen out of the nest about a week too soon. You had to feel sorry for something like that.
“Hi there, Fatcheeks,” Joe whispered, after checking around to be sure no one was close enough to see him making a fool of himself. There was an elderly couple ogling the runt on the end and a man with his necktie dangling from his shirt pocket making googoo noises at the bundle in the crib three rows down. Assured that no one was paying him any mind, he relaxed. “You gave your mama a pretty rough time, you know that?”
It occurred to him that looking after a newborn infant wasn’t going to be any cinch for the Bayard woman. Did she have any friends? Any family? What would she have done if he hadn’t happened along when he had?
She’d have gotten along just fine, he told himself quickly, because he needed to believe it. She didn’t strike him as the helpless type. She wasn’t neurotic. She wasn’t sleeping under a bridge out on I-40. He’d learned a lot about her while she talked her way through labor. She’d grown up in an orphanage. Still—if things got tough, there were agencies she could call on. She was bound to have somebody. Nobody was completely alone.
So he’d wait