Father Of The Brood

“Funny,” he said dryly, “a couple of them look like they’re in high school. You must have been about eight when you gave birth.” Ike wanted to offer the further-wry observation that Annie was in remarkably good shape for someone who had spent most of her adult life pregnant. But he refrained, fearing the comment just might put them back where they started—with him ogling, and her being ogled, and neither of them any too comfortable with the knowledge of it.

Her smile was still wistful when she said, “I may not have carried them inside me, but they still belong to me.”

“So then you don’t have any kids of your own?” Ike ventured.

She looked at him strangely for a moment. “Why do you ask? For some reason, you strike me as the kind of person who doesn’t care much for children.”

“That’s because I am the kind of person who doesn’t care much for children.”

She sounded almost disappointed when she replied, “That doesn’t surprise me. And no, I don’t have any kids that are the product of any personal biological workings. But I do have kids. Lots of kids.” Before be could ask anything more, she met his gaze again. “I’m ready to head out whenever you are.”

Ike nodded. “Good. I didn’t want to leave my car parked out here any longer than I had to.”

She glanced past him at the bright red convertible and frowned.

“What?” he asked when he saw her disapproval of the sleek car he’d coveted for years before being able to afford it. “You don’t want to drive to the coast with the top down?”

She shook her head. “Oh, I love the feel of the wind when I’m driving.”

“Then why the sour look?”

“I was just thinking you probably paid more for that car than I spent buying and refinishing and outfitting this whole building.”

This time it was Ike who frowned, wondering why he felt so damned defensive around this woman. “Yeah, I probably did. Real estate in this area isn’t exactly prime—” He eyed her building deliberately before adding, “—or safe— for commercial or residential use. You know, my partner and I are working with the city on a beautification project that’s leveling neighborhoods like this one and turning them into something useful.”

She glared at him. “Neighborhoods like this one used to be the backbone of the city.”

He smiled acidly. “Soon they’ll be parking garages.”

“And that’s supposed to beautify the city?”

Ike looked around him again. “A nice, clean parking garage will be a damned sight more attractive than this… this…”

“Look,” Annie interrupted him, “maybe you don’t see much use for neighborhoods like this, but I see it in a way you obviously don’t. Granted, the area isn’t what it used to be, and yes, a bad element has begun to thrive. But there are still a lot of good people here. Besides that, it’s affordable and suits my needs just fine.”

Ike wanted to counter that if that was the case, then she was obviously and sadly neglecting her needs. But he kept his mouth shut. For the time being, he decided, he’d just as soon not wonder about Annie Malone’s needs. She probably had way too many of them for any man to be able to satisfy her. And why he should suddenly feel a tingling— and not unpleasant—sexual awareness of her at the idea of such, Ike couldn’t begin to imagine. So he pushed the thought away and bent to retrieve her duffel.

But someone else had beaten him to it, he realized before completing the action. Clutching the bag that would be nearly as big as he was if it were full, was a young boy with hair the mixed pale yellows of chicken noodle soup and eyes so blue and large and guileless, they almost stopped Ike’s breath.

“I got it,” the boy said as he stepped past Annie. “I can carry it. Where do you want it?”

So transfixed was he still by the child’s round-eyed expression that Ike could only thrust a thumb over his shoulder. The boy looked past him at the car parked at the curb, and his huge eyes grew even larger with admiration.

“Cool!”

He slapped down the steps and stumbled down the walk, weaving first one way and then the other under the weight of the duffel. He dropped the bag by the trunk and, before Ike could stop him, hauled himself over the side of the car and into the driver’s seat. Immediately the alarm erupted, as loud and raucous as an air raid siren. And the little boy’s expression—the one that had been so utterly open and carefree—transformed into a grimace of unadulterated terror. When his gaze met Ike’s, the boy actually began to cower as if he were about to be sucked down into hell’s darkest core. Ike had never seen anyone look so scared before in his life.

“Hey, kid, it’s okay,” Ike tried to reassure him over the noise.

He started down the walk toward the car, watching in amazement as the little boy’s fear grew more tangible with every step he took. And when he rounded the front of the car toward the driver’s side and reached in to deactivate the alarm, the little boy covered his head with his hands, curled into a tiny ball and screamed.

Screamed as if his lungs were about to burst.

Ike could do nothing but stare dumbfounded as Annie calmly came up behind him, reached into the car instead and effortlessly plucked the boy out of the driver’s seat and into her arms. He curled himself over her body as if he wanted to crawl inside her forever, then buried his face in her neck and began to cry with all his might. Annie patted his back and murmured soothing sounds until the boy’s sobs abated some.

Then she looked at Ike with a perfectly normal expression and stated in matter-of-fact terms, “Mickey was badly beaten by both of his parents before he came to live with me. He thought you were going to hurt him for setting off the alarm.”

Ike shook his head dumbly and couldn’t think of a single thing to say. So he watched in silence as Annie carried the boy back up the steps and sat down on the front stoop beside him. Ike didn’t know what she said to the boy to calm him down, but within a matter of minutes, the little guy was nodding and scrubbing a finger under his nose. Not long after that, he was smiling shyly again. Ike watched as Annie kissed the crown of his head with much gusto and hugged him close one final time. Then Mickey jumped up from the stoop and raced past Ike without looking at him, and joined the other kids in their completely disorganized and unorchestrated game of street hockey.

Annie, too, stood and ambled after him, stopping to pick up her duffel bag and toss it into the back seat. “I’m ready when you are,” she said again as she opened the passenger side door and climbed inside.

Ike nodded and joined her in the car, then eased his way into the street at about a half a mile an hour to avoid the wildly scattering kids. When he braked for a stop sign at the corner, Annie looked over at him with a broad smile and asked, “If you could be any vegetable in the world, what would you be?”

As questions went, it wasn’t one Ike heard often in his line of work. “I beg your pardon?”

“If you could be any vegetable in the world,” she repeated, “what would you be?”

He turned right and headed toward the Schuylkill Expressway. “Why?”

Annie’s smile broadened. “Because it occurs to me that we know absolutely nothing about each other, other than the fact that we were both gullible enough to be sucked into going to that bachelor auction. We’ve got a long drive to the shore ahead of us, so why not use the opportunity to find out a little bit more about each other, right?”

Sounded reasonable, Ike thought. But… vegetables?

“I’d be an eggplant, myself,” she volunteered without being asked. “Eggplants seem to have it so together, don’t you think? Not to mention having a sleek design and gorgeous coloring.”

Ike drummed his fingers on the steering wheel and said nothing.

“Now you I see as more of a cauliflower kind of guy.”

He flicked his right turn signal, veered onto the entrance ramp and melded smoothly with traffic before glancing over at Annie and repeating blandly, “Cauliflower.”

She nodded. “Cauliflowers are pretty moody.” She offered the observation as if that explained everything.

Ike sighed again, slipped on his Ray·Bans and settled back in the driver’s seat. As Annie had just pointed out, it was going to be a long drive to the shore.

It was also, he admitted grudgingly some time later, a rather enjoyable drive, one that allowed him to discover a great many surprising things about his companion. In addition to wanting to be an eggplant, if Annie could be any fruit in the world, she wanted to be a kiwi. If given the choice of any animal in-the world, she would be an ocelot. Any color, she would be green. Any musical instrument, she would be a banjo. Any supermarket product, a box of Velveeta. Any mode of transportation, a streetcar.

And so it had gone across the entire width of the great state of New Jersey. Whether he’d wanted to or not, Ike had learned more about Annie Malone than he had about any other human being he’d ever met. He knew she was thirty-two years old, a Virgo, and the youngest of two children. He knew she had two degrees in social work and one in child development, and that she had kicked the smoking habit three years ago, but still craved a cigarette now and then. On the few occasions when she indulged in alcohol, she always drank vodka martinis, very dry, no olive. She had gone to her senior prom stag and had received six stitches in her knee when she was seven years old.

Oh, yeah. And she was a widow.

That bit of information, when she’d offered it, had nearly sent Ike driving off the side of the road. She was too young to have experienced such a loss. Too fresh-looking. Too nice. She hadn’t mentioned how her husband died, only that he had five years ago. And even having known her a short while, Ike could tell that Annie hadn’t surrendered the information easily. Her husband’s death was simply a part of her, like everything else she had told him, and therefore worthy of mention.

In turn, Ike had spoken little of himself, other than to oblige her with one- or two-word responses like “grapes,” “wolf,” “black,” “tenor saxophone,” “top sirloin” and “steam locomotive.” He didn’t like to talk about himself, preferred to keep private things private. He hadn’t pried into Annie’s life or asked many questions of her. She was just the type of person who revealed herself freely. Ike liked that about her. But it didn’t mean he had to unburden himself in the process.

Now as he tossed his leather weekend bag on the bed in his room, he couldn’t quite put thoughts of Annie to rest. She was, to say the least, an enigma. She was bright, attractive, and capable of doing just about anything she wanted to do. She smiled freely and spoke without inhibition. She was the kind of person one would expect to find living in sunshine and wide open spaces, amid nature’s bounty, if not an actual part of it. Yet Annie Malone had buried herself in a decaying urban landscape, and had surrounded herself with damaged children who were the victims of life’s darkest secrets.

It made no sense to Ike. He was the kind of man who put unpleasant thoughts as far from himself as he could. He’d had the most ordinary of upbringings and a very happy childhood—middle middle-class suburbs, public schools, a bicycle for Christmas when he was ten, twenty-five cents from the Tooth Fairy on a pretty regular basis, a craving for marshmallow cream on graham crackers that he’d never quite outgrown. He’d never had a reason or opportunity to suspect that other people had grown up any differently.