Excuse Me? Whose Baby?: Excuse Me? Whose Baby? / Follow That Baby!

DEX’S LEGS pumped as she cycled along University Avenue. She kept her head down and aimed for speed, trying to work off those three desserts.

Jim lived on the northeastern edge of town, where the Claire De Lune flatlands began to rise into the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains. The university was located due west of his house, also on rising ground.

Much of the land in this part of Clair De Lune remained undeveloped due to the uneven terrain, so there wasn’t much traffic for Dex to contend with. Which was a good thing, with her mind in turmoil.

Had she really agreed to move in with Jim Bonderoff? The man was maddeningly arrogant—boss of the year, indeed!—and knew less than nothing about children. He also had an endearing smile, brown eyes touched with mischief and a masculine way of moving that made her want to chuck off her clothes all over again.

The plan was insane.

Even more inexplicable was Dex’s reaction to Annie. From the moment she’d met her daughter, she’d felt as if the child were a missing part of herself.

It was ridiculous, of course. For the child’s first nine months, Dex hadn’t even known of her existence. Had Helene Saldivar not suffered an untimely death, Annie might have grown up and even wandered across Dex’s path, unrecognized and unremarked.

No. I’d have realized the moment I saw her, no matter where, that she was me. Or, at least, half me.

Rounding a bend in the curving road, Dex spotted the redbrick university dorms ahead on her right. She’d lived there for four years and still missed the camaraderie with her dorm mates.

She would miss her little apartment and her friendship with Marie Pipp, too, when she finished her dissertation and found a teaching job. There was practically no chance of landing one at De Lune U., which hired only experienced full-time teaching staff.

Her parents, on the occasions when they communicated with Dex, harped on the point that it was time to finish her dissertation and launch a stellar career in academe. They would agree, one-hundred percent, about putting Annie up for adoption.

What if I don’t want a stellar career in academe? What if what I really want is right here?

But she couldn’t have it. She was in no position to raise Annie herself, even if Jim would agree. As for the man who had breached her defenses without even trying, he was in love with someone else.

And wrong for her, anyway. Too smooth. Too rich. Too…everything.

Dex pedaled harder. She flew past the entrance to the campus and down University Avenue to Sirius Street, where she turned left into the middle-class residential area in which she lived.

She tried to focus on how good it would feel when she finished her dissertation. She could devote herself to teaching, research and writing professional articles. At last, she would make her own place in the world.

The bike zipped past a cozy bungalow. In the porch swing, a young mother rocked her baby while watching a toddler splash in a wading pool.

Dex’s heart swelled. Why did she keep torturing herself? It was inexplicable, yet since childhood, Dex had treasured forbidden dreams of domesticity.

She’d sneaked romance novels into her bedroom, and in the margins of school notes, invented elaborate baby names like Eldridge and Valeria. Isolated by the twin handicaps of insecurity and overweight, she’d found her greatest pleasure in reading and in babysitting.

But regardless of what her instincts told her, she wasn’t cut out to be a mother. And while Jim Bonderoff might make a decent enough father if he had the right wife, he didn’t, and he might never have. What kind of girlfriend hadn’t bothered to accept his proposal in three months?

What Dex wanted for her daughter was the one thing that had been denied to her: the chance to grow up loved and cherished and nurtured so she could pass those qualities on to her own children. And it was obvious that neither Jim nor his blundering staff members were equipped to give Annie this kind of upbringing.

She turned a corner and swooped down Forest Lane. Mrs. Zimpelman, who was leaning on her rake and listening on the phone, smiled when she spotted the bicycle. She began talking in animated fashion, no doubt boring a friend with the news of Dex’s arrival home.

Across the street, Dean Pipp knelt in the garden snipping herbs into a wicker basket. She wore a floppy black hat, a gingham apron over a shapeless gray dress and a pair of skaters’ pads on her knobby knees.

“Hello, there!” she called. “What did the lawyer want?”

Dex angled her bicycle around the side of the house and came to explain about Helene and Annie and Jim. By the time she finished, Marie had finished gathering her herbs and led the way into her book-filled house.

“I’ll certainly miss you.” The dean removed her apron and knee pads and hung them on a coatrack. “It’s only for a week, though, you say?”

“Or less, if I can persuade him that adoption is the best course.” Dex tried not to dwell on how difficult it was going to be to wrench her daughter away from one self-important father and a pair of no-holds-barred leathernecks.

The elderly woman frowned at a padded envelope lying on her hall table. “Oh, dear, I must have put the mail here and forgotten. What is this?”

Dex glanced at the envelope. It bore the return address of a rare books dealer. “Something you ordered?”

“Well, yes, of course,” said Dean Pipp. “Now I remember. I asked for everything they had about the Richard Grafton controversy. I’m afraid there isn’t much.”

Knowing that her landlady wrote papers about obscure literary matters, Dex tried to dredge the name Richard Grafton from her memory, but failed. “Was he a poet?”

“Oh, surely you remember Richard Grafton.” The dean rattled open a drawer, pulled out a sharp engraving knife and sliced open the envelope to reveal an aging volume. On the cover was imprinted Chronicles of England, by Richard Grafton. “He was a sixteenth-century writer.”

“Refresh my memory,” said Dex.

“It’s all in here.” Her landlady smiled and recited from memory, “‘Thirty dayes hath November, Aprill, June and September, February hath twenty-eight alone, and all the rest have thirty-one.”’

“He wrote that?” Dex asked.

“Yes, but did he write it first?” The dean cocked an eyebrow as if inviting Dex into a fascinating mystery. “There’s a similar poem by William Harrison, written at almost the same time, and rhymes of that nature pop up elsewhere in folklore.”

“I see. So there’s a controversy.” Dex regarded her landlady fondly. Hardly anyone was likely to care who really wrote that bit of doggerel, but she had no doubt that it would make a fascinating article.

“Oh!” Marie dropped the book on the table with a thump. “I nearly forgot! There’s a student in your apartment. She wanted to talk to you about something or other and insisted on waiting. Her name is, let’s see, Coreen or Cara or…”

“Cora Angle.” The student had asked to speak to Dex after receiving a D-plus on a paper. Dex had suggested she drop by so they could have some privacy, but they hadn’t specified a time. “I’d better hurry. She’s upset enough as it is.”

“See you later.” Clearly absorbed in her project, Dean Pipp wandered into the living room, reading the book out loud. She was still wearing her floppy hat.

Hoping that Cora hadn’t been waiting long, Dex let herself out of the house and loped toward the free-standing garage. From the driveway, a straight, weathered staircase led to the apartment. She clattered up and opened the door, which she left unlocked during the day.

The single room looked smaller and darker than usual, by contrast to the expansive scale of Jim’s house. Dex didn’t see anyone, but she heard a tuneless mumble coming from the tiny kitchen. She had to close the door to take a look, because the kitchen was behind it.

Cora Angle, her large frame cramped in the small space, was wiping a dish and carrying on a conversation with herself. “I shouldn’t hang around,” she muttered. “She’s obviously busy. She did promise to see you. I’ll only be in the way.”

One glance at the open cabinets showed Dex that her thrift-store dishes had been rearranged. They were stacked in an orderly manner, the plates and saucers on the lower shelf, cups and glasses on the upper one.

“Oh, hi!” The tall freshman stopped wiping and gave her a tentative smile. Pale blond hair straggled down Cora’s pudgy cheeks, and there was a dust smear on the shoulder of her tan smock.

“You’ve been working hard.” Dex decided not to point out that the new arrangement, while more efficient, put the cups too high for her to reach easily. She could always switch them back later.

“I like to organize things.” The chubby girl watched her apprehensively, as if expecting a rebuke. She reminded Dex of herself not many years ago.

“Well, thank you.” She indicated the half-full coffeemaker. “Care for something to drink?”

“Okay. Sure,” said her guest. “I’m sorry for just showing up. I mean, I know you weren’t expecting me.”

“It’s okay,” Dex assured her. “I told you to drop by, right?”