Daddy To Be Determined

“Poor thing!” his mother exclaimed as Ben scanned the story. “She goes to a sperm lab for help getting pregnant and learns that she’s been defrauded. But she had the courage to play out the story and bring the man to trial. Fortunately for her, the procedure didn’t work.”

It was a sad story. He suddenly understood her insistence about getting pregnant.

“And knowing that,” Ben said, “you can throw her out in the cold?”

“No,” Lulu said, dropping the paper into a pretty trash basket. “I can let you take her home with you.”

Ben glared at her. “Mom…”

“What else am I going to do? I have guests arriving in less than two hours.”

“You can find her a room at another—”

“The Buckley Arms is full—the crafters convention. And I’m it for B-and-Bs.”

He struggled to hold on to his good humor. “I’m not a B-and-B, Mom. I’m a working man with two little—”

“I know, I know,” she said, patting his cheek. “But she’s clearly in a state that requires she be looked after, and I can’t do that with an inn filled with guests. You, on the other hand, always manage to look after everyone in your life very well.”

“But she’s not in my life,” he insisted, “she’s in yours.”

“But I’m in yours, sweetie. See? It’s logical. Scientific, even. Mathematical, sort of. She’s in mine and I’m in yours, therefore she’s in yours, too.”

“God.”

Chapter Two

Vanessa and Roxie skipped after him as he carried a still-sleeping Natalie Browning, wrapped in a blanket, out to the van. His mother followed with the suitcase.

“She’s so pretty!” Vanessa exclaimed as he placed Natalie on the front passenger seat, tilting it back to help keep her in place.

“Like Sleeping Beauty!” Roxie said.

His mother slid the side door open and put the suitcase into the back seat.

Vanessa tucked Natalie’s feet in.

“If you kiss her, Daddy, she’ll wake up!” Roxie added.

His mother smiled at him and said under her breath, “And maybe you will, too, Ben.”

He sent her a dark look. “You’re already on dangerous ground, Mom. She can stay on the sofa tonight, but first thing in the morning she’s on her own.”

“Of course.” She reached up to kiss his cheek as he closed the door on his unexpected houseguest. Lulu blew kisses to the girls and hurried back inside.

Roxie stood between the two front seats when he climbed in behind the wheel. She looked down at the young woman, patting the disheveled blond hair with a pudgy little hand.

“I wish my hair was this color,” she said.

Vanessa, leaning over the back of the front seat, handed the seat belt to Roxie, who clicked it into place.

“Yeah, me too,” Vanessa replied. “I’d wear it long with lots of curls.”

“Can we keep her, Daddy?” Roxie asked promptly.

“She’s not a puppy, Rox,” he said patiently. “When she wakes up, I’m sure she’s going to want to go home.”

Actually, she might not, he thought as he backed the van out onto the street. Judging by the newspaper article, things must have been difficult for her there. The article had included a rude comment from an old boyfriend of hers and his suggestion that she wasn’t the beautiful, sweet woman she appeared to be on television.

“Can we keep her till she wakes up?”

“She’ll be awake in the morning,” Ben assured his daughter.

“If you don’t kiss her, she won’t.”

“She’s not Sleeping Beauty,” Vanessa told Roxie. “She’s just a lady that’s asleep. Grandma said she’s on television.”

“Right.” Ben took the turn that would lead them home. “She does the news at night. Like Peter Jennings.”

In the rearview mirror he saw Roxie wrinkle her nose. “The news!”

“It’s an important job,” Vanessa informed her. “Daddy watches it all the time. That’s how you learn what’s going on in other places.”

To Roxie, who cared mostly about her room, her house and Marianne’s Day Care, that seemed irrelevant.

“She can sleep in the other twin bed in my room, Daddy,” Vanessa offered. “So she isn’t afraid when she wakes up.”

He’d told his mother that he intended to put Natalie on the sofa, but he’d just repainted the fourth bedroom upstairs and put the futon from the family room in it. She’d be comfortable there, and he’d be more likely to hear her if she woke up in the middle of the night, wondering what had happened and where she was.

He turned into their driveway, which was lit by floodlights at the front of the house. He hit the garage door opener and pulled into the dimly lit interior.

The girls scrambled out and went ahead of him to open doors.

He scooped Natalie Browning out of the front seat and into his arms. She lay limply against him, the scent of gardenias intermingled with the smell of a mentholated rub.

He remembered her looking into his eyes and telling him that he was “the one.” The one her dream had sent to give her a baby.

He walked into the house with her, as Vanessa held the kitchen door open. He couldn’t help wondering why a beautiful young woman would have gone to a sperm bank in the first place. Unless the boyfriend quoted in the article was right and she was cold and forbidding.

It was hard to tell when he’d spoken to her only while she’d been incoherent. But she didn’t look like a cold-hearted woman.

Roxie held open the door to the fourth bedroom upstairs. Vanessa, running along behind him, asked him to wait while she got a sheet and blankets out of the linen closet.

She and Roxie spread a flannel sheet over the plain red futon.

“I’ll get one of my pillows,” Vanessa said, and ran off.

“She should have something to sleep with,” Roxie said. She took Betsy out of her pocket, studied the doll with a worried frown, then placed it beside Natalie. But before she could even remove her hands from it, she reconsidered and pressed Betsy to her chest.