Drive-By Daddy: Drive-By Daddy / Calamity Jo

“I know. It’s all there. On page one. Look at it.”

Against her better judgment, Darcy finally looked. Yep, there she was. On the front page. Atop a gurney and being wheeled into surgery for stitching. The look on her face was probably the same one she’d have if she’d just escaped an alien abduction. But the accompanying picture was of her proud and grinning mother, fresh from the beauty shop, holding her new grand-baby, whose tiny little face was scrunched up in a scream. Darcy flopped the daily paper down. “Lovely. You look great, Mother.”

Margie patted her silver-gray hair. “You think? Let me see that.” She reached for the paper, and Darcy gave it to her, lovingly watching her mother scan the photo. “Well, I do, don’t I?” Then she began turning pages, perusing them carefully. “But I’m going to get after that Vernon Fredericks. After all, he’s the editor. And there’s not one picture in here of your hero.”

“My hero? You mean the Lone Ranger?”

Margie looked up from today’s copy of the Buckeye Bugle. “Is that what you call him? The Lone Ranger?”

Darcy shrugged, seeing again, in her mind’s eye, the man’s blue eyes and hearing his calm voice. “I have to call him something. In all the excitement, I forgot to ask him his name. And then, once we got here, he just drove off.”

Margie folded the paper and tossed it on the floor. “Well, who do you think he is?”

“Just some turned-around cowboy from Montana. At least, that’s what he said.”

Her mother pulled her chair closer. “I hope you at least thanked the man, honey. He did save your life. And your baby’s.”

“I know, Mother. And I did thank him.”

“What’d he say to that?”

Darcy exhaled her frustration sharply. The woman wanted all the details. “He said it was nothing, as I recall.”

Her mother sighed romantically. “Cowboys. They’re just the most polite breed of man around.”

Darcy shrugged. “I suppose.”

Her mother’s raised eyebrow said she’d detected something in Darcy’s shrug that she didn’t like. “Now, don’t go blaming him for what that stupid old professor of yours did to you.”

Darcy crossed her arms defensively. “Oh, you mean ask me to marry him, get me pregnant and then run off…for a second honeymoon with his wife?”

“I told you he was a married man.”

“You told me nothing of the sort. You didn’t even know him.”

“I know his big-city kind.”

“You do not. Buckeye’s the only place you’ve ever lived. And Dad was the only man you’d ever known.”

Her mother’s chin rose a notch. “That may be. But I read a lot. And I watch those talk shows on TV. I’ve learned a few things.”

What a sweet, confined little world her mother lived in—one Darcy had hated to intrude on, last Christmas at semester’s end, with her own harsh reality. “I’ll bet you have.”

“I have. Now I’ve been thinking about something else, too.”

“Dear God.”

“Don’t be disrespectful, Darcy Jean Alcott. I’ve been thinking about your cowboy. I think this whole thing—him being there when you needed him—is not just chance or luck. No, he was supposed to be here at that time for you. That’s all there is to it. After all, his home state is off the beaten path.”

Darcy remembered him saying the same thing yesterday. But she wasn’t about to tell her mother that. “Off the beaten path? Like Buckeye, Arizona isn’t? We’re fifty miles southwest of nowhere, Mother.”

“Hardly. Phoenix is just down the road. I swear, Darcy, you act like you left civilization when you came here from Baltimore. But anyway, what was I talking about?”

Darcy sighed. It was pointless to fight. “My screwed-up life.”

“That’s right.” With that, Margie Alcott opened her sack lunch, arranging everything atop Darcy’s bedside tray. She pulled a roast beef sandwich from a plastic bag. Darcy had to grin. It was ten-thirty in the morning. Volunteering was a hungry business.

“So. What was he doing down here? That cowboy, I mean.”

Relentless, the woman was. Darcy could only stare at her sweet mother in her pink hospital uniform as she bit into her early lunch. “You mean besides delivering your granddaughter?”

“I do,” she said, chewing. “I can’t imagine.” She swallowed, grabbed her soda, held it out for Darcy to pop the top, and then slurped from the can. Finally, she pointed at her daughter. “And don’t you ever go off again without that cell phone, you hear me? It scared me to death yesterday when you were brought in. I don’t think I could go through that again.”

“I think you came through just fine, Mother. After all, you were front-page news.” Darcy didn’t have to be told how the Buckeye Bugle was there to get its headline. Who didn’t know that Barb Fredericks’s son, Vernon, was the editor? The same Barb who weekly played bridge with Darcy’s mother and their two other partners in crime, Jeanette Tomlinson and Freda Smith. The bane of Buckeye. All four of them.

“Don’t be silly,” Margie Alcott said, crunching now on potato chips. “That cowboy is the star. And, of course, my new granddaughter.”

“And me,” Darcy reminded her.

“Of course, you. I was just mentioned because I’m the one who called Barb and got Vernon on the story. It’s not every day something like this happens.”

“Well, certainly not to me.” Darcy decided to try one last time to change the subject before her mother started her speech on how 50-year-old Vernon would make a great husband and father…if he could ever move out of his mother’s house. “Have you seen the baby today?”

“Have I seen her? Is my name Margie Alcott? Of course I’ve seen her. I’ve all but conducted tours by the window that looks into the nursery. Why, she’s the most beautiful child on the face of this earth. Everyone says so.”

Everyone better. Darcy knew that much, knowing her mother—the social ringleader, as well as the resident bridge champ, of her group of lady friends.

Just then, her mother set down her soda and pursed her lips. This was never good. “Well? Have you named her yet? You’ve known for months you’d have a girl. And yet my grandchild is a day old and doesn’t even have a name. ‘Baby Alcott, female’ it says on her little wrist ID. That’s just plain awful. Everyone’s calling her Louisa May. I just won’t have that, Darcy. Louisa May Alcott. Why, the very idea…naming her after some dead romance writer.”

Sighing, Darcy the English Lit professor reached over to the bedside table and picked up the form the nurse had left her to fill out, hoping her mother wouldn’t obsess on the still-empty box marked “Father.” She just couldn’t bring herself to write Hank’s name in the space. The very married Hank Erickson wanted nothing to do with her or his new daughter. He had two of his own with his wife, Darcy now knew. “Relax. I named her. See for yourself.”

Her mother took the clipboard Darcy offered her…and read aloud. “Montana Skye Alcott.” She looked up, a tremulous smile on her lips. “That’s beautiful, honey. Really pretty. Little Montana.” Then a knowing look claimed her grandmotherly features. “Something to do with the Montana cowboy who helped bring her into this world?”

Darcy shrugged. “I suppose. It seemed like the right thing to do, don’t you think?”

“Well, I’ll say I do.” Margie handed back the form and looked down, swiping at some crumbs on her uniform. “Too bad you don’t know what that cowboy’s name is,” she said with oh-so-much innocence in her voice. “Otherwise, you could put his name here in the blank place for a father.”

Darcy slowly pulled herself up in her bed. “Look at me, Mother. He’s not the father. Not. Even if I knew his name, I wouldn’t do that. It’s not right. Or legal.”

Her mother fingered a bedside flower arrangement—one of about twenty in the room—and played with the card. “Well, we wouldn’t want to do anything against the law, now would we?”

“Mother.” Margie looked at Darcy, her brown eyes wide and guileless. Darcy wasn’t going to fall for that. The last time she had, she’d ended up going to the senior prom with her nerdy, pimply-faced cousin Mel when her own date had stood her up—the start of a definite trend in her life, it seemed. Darcy shook her head for added emphasis. “No. We. Wouldn’t. Say it with me.”

Instead, Marge said, “You know, we could find out who he is.”

“No, we can’t.”

“Yes, we can. Ask me how.”