The Father Factor

Frowning, he stepped over to the breakfront and moved the Sore Loser trophy to a more prominent position on the shelf, right next to his favorite golfing photo of Grandpa Abe, himself and Dad.

Chapter Three

“L innie, oh, no, what is it?” Shallis gasped out as soon as she saw her sister. “What’s happened?”

It was five-thirty in the evening, and Linnie had just opened the front door of her modest ranch house for Shallis, her pretty gray eyes reddened and swollen, and tears streaming down her cheeks. Her shoulders shook with suppressed sobbing.

“Oh, it’s just the usual,” she said, trying to smile. “Not pregnant. Again. Come in.” Her voice cracked into a high-pitched squeak as she struggled for normality. She looked down at the decorative wicker basket in Shallis’s hands. “Oh. Nice. You’ve brought fruit.”

“Left from a conference at the hotel on the weekend.”

“You’re good. It looks l-lovely, with the r-ribbons and all.” Her shoulders shook some more. “Ryan’s not in from the barn yet, thank goodness.”

The house was plain and small, but it was situated on a beautiful piece of land, part of the infrastructure of the horse-breeding business Ryan had been building for several years. He’d recently renovated a couple of old cabins on the property, also, and they would be open for paying guests this summer, with optional breakfast and dinner included in the package.

Ryan worked very hard, as did Linnie, and Shallis wasn’t surprised to hear that he wasn’t yet back at the house. She’d been counting on his absence because she wanted a sister-to-sister talk, but she didn’t understand why Linnie would be feeling the same.

Linnie stepped to the side and Shallis crossed the threshold. “You don’t want to see Ryan?” she asked carefully.

“I don’t want him to see me. Like this.” Linnie flapped her hands at her blotchy face and attempted another smile. It looked heartbreaking. She kicked the door closed behind her.

“Oh, Linnie.” Shallis put down the fruit basket and hugged her sister, burning with love and empathy that just had no place to go, no way to translate into the right words.

“I’m sorry,” Linnie whispered in her ear, her voice tight and harsh with a continuing effort not to cry. “It’s so stupid. It usually only lasts around twenty minutes, so I’ll be okay again soon.”

“Twenty minutes? What does, Lin?”

“The sobbing.” Her body shuddered suddenly, and went still. “There. See? It just stops. And then I sometimes laugh at myself a little bit, because it shouldn’t feel so…so…tragic, you know? Ryan and I love each other, we love the farm and the horses, I love my teaching job, we have great families, plans to extend the house, we have so much going for us. And still I’m sobbing like a maniac every month just because I don’t have a baby. What more do I want out of life? The moon and stars on a big silver plate?”

She threw the words over her shoulder at Shallis on their way down the short corridor toward the kitchen. Her golden-brown hair looked limp and tired, and so did her green-toned skirt and top.

“Of course you want a baby,” Shallis said, following her with the fruit basket. “Of course it’s hard. You had an appointment with the specialist last week. Weren’t there some test results coming in?”

“His nurse called today, just after I got in from school. Which is why I guess I was already a little upset, even before…you know. Nothing conclusive, she said.”

“But that’s good news, isn’t it?” Shallis felt so far out of her depth.

She’d been on the pill for six months. A doctor had prescribed it in Los Angeles when the stress she’d been under there had led to painful and wildly irregular cycles. She had no idea how it must feel to be so desperate to conceive.

“Oh, sure,” Linnie answered. “I mean, it’s better than, ‘Guess what, you don’t have any ovaries,’ or something. But it leaves us still in the dark, nowhere to go. Technically there seems to be no reason why, in more than three years, I haven’t conceived. And if there’s no reason, then there’s no action you can take to correct it, you know?”

“I get it. Oh, Linnie…”

“Hey, want a big, stiff drink? Please say yes, because I’m having one.”

“What’re you having?”

“Bourbon and Coke, nice and strong. Two weeks every cycle I don’t touch a drop of alcohol. You know. Just in case I’m— Then on this day each month, I pretend to myself that getting a little tipsy is just what I’ve been looking forward to. Woo-hoo!”

She sounded so cynical and self-mocking, so not like the sunny, caring, capable Linnie that Shallis knew Ryan had fallen in love with. It scared her a little. Until three months ago, she’d been caught up in her life in Los Angeles, and she’d had no idea.

She’d known Linnie had some kind of fertility problem, of course, but she’d never suspected her sister felt that badly about it. Linnie was only thirty-two. She had time, didn’t she? And modern reproductive medicine could do so much.

In her e-mails and phone calls, Linnie just hadn’t let on the full truth, and neither had anyone else. Protecting Shallis’s important career, as usual. The PR career she hadn’t even liked, in the end, which was one of the reasons she’d come home.

“Does—could—does the specialist think that tying yourself in knots about it might be making it worse?” she asked carefully.

“That’s the myth, isn’t it? Just relax, and you’ll conceive. If I had a dollar for everyone who’s told us to take a cruise or a trip to Paris and just do what comes naturally… I’m telling you, Shallis, it doesn’t come naturally, any more. It’s like an Olympic event, with training and warm-ups and electronic timing. Ryan is getting—” She stopped suddenly. “So, want that drink?”

With scary efficiency, she reached into the fridge, the freezer, and a couple of cabinets just above her head. Slosh went the bourbon, fizz went the Coke, crack went the ice cubes. She pushed one brimming glass in Shallis’s direction and took a huge gulp from the other. Then she stopped with the glass and her hand in midair.

“Don’t worry,” she said. “It’s one day a month that I do this, and it’s one drink. But boy, do I need the effect!”

Shallis nodded slowly and took a much more cautious sip of her own. She’d had a stomach upset over the weekend and was still eating and drinking carefully. “You were, um, saying something about Ryan.”

“Oh. Yeah. But I rethought.”

“Rethink again. I’m your sister. And I care about you. So much, Linnie.” Oh-oh. Foggy voice alert. They’d both cried enough in the past couple of weeks, about Gram’s death. She swallowed.

“Oh, it’s just… He hates this,” Linnie said. “In a different way than I do, but he hates it just as much. He hates that I’m a mess. He hates the Olympic event mechanical sex. We’ve had a couple of—” she stopped again.

“Arguments,” Shallis suggested.

“Fights.”

“Fights?”

“Yelling. Ryan never yells. It reminds me of his dad.” Who was a difficult man, Shallis knew. “I don’t like it.”

“No, of course you don’t.”

“And I don’t think he does, either. He’s always hated the thought of getting like his father.” She took another gulp of her drink, let it roll around her mouth for a moment, then swallowed and squared her shoulders. “Okay, can we close this subject for the moment?”

“Well, if you want, but—”

“What I want is to hear about your appointment with Mr. Starke today.”

She only said Mr. Starke, ran Shallis’s thoughts. If she’d said Abraham, I would have been obligated to say, no, it was Jared. This way, I can let her think it was his grandfather, if I want.

Yeah.

Right.

That level of honesty between sisters? After Linnie had just more or less admitted to a serious fear that her marriage was in trouble, on top of everything else? When Shallis had come out here pretty much on purpose to tell her about seeing Jared?

No.

“Well, I convinced Mom not to come, in the end,” Shallis began. “She really didn’t need to. And that was good, as it turned out, because it wasn’t Mr. Starke, senior, it was his grandson, who’s taking over the practice for a while. Jared.”