Mad For The Dad

Rachel continued to stare at him. “Excuse me?” she finally said while absently rubbing Todd’s little back. His body already felt half limp. Another minute or two and he’d be conked out cold.

“I said—”

“Shh, not so loud. He’s almost asleep.”

It was comical how quickly Daniel lowered his voice. Now she could barely hear him. “You know the old saying about God always opening a window when he closes a door?” he whispered.

Warily Rachel nodded.

“Well, when Sarah and Michael died, that was a heavy-duty door to get slammed in poor Todd’s face.” Daniel leaned against the nursery door frame and raked his hand through his hair. “I’m sure not the open window. I’m trying as hard as I can, but all I remember of parenting is that my dad used to play ball with me. Todd’s too little to throw a baseball let alone catch one. It was a disaster when I tried the other day. The ball kept going right through his legs.”

Rachel arched a brow at him in disbelief. He hadn’t really pitched a baseball ata toddler, had he?

Daniel continued, “The thing is, right before this all happened I’d just quit the accounting firm I’d been with since graduating from college. I was all set to go out on a limb and out on my own. Do you know how much work that entails? The time commitment? I’ve got to get this thing set up and going—make it viable or Todd and I are cooked geese. There’ll be no income. I want to save the insurance money for his college fund. Even if I could take a crash course in child raising and was instantly expert at it, I haven’t got the time to lavish on him the way he needs and deserves, do you understand what I mean? I can’t stick him in day-care now. For crying out loud, as far as he’s concerned both his parents just deserted him. What does he understand about death? So what am I supposed to do? I’m no Mr. Mom.”

Todd snored gently in her ear. Rachel slowly rose and walked quietly over to the crib. She eased the boy off her shoulder and laid him in his bed. She picked the blanket with the satin binding to lightly cover him and made sure he’d be able to feel that comforting edging against his cheek and hand while he slept. Daniel followed right behind as she crept from the room. He spoke his next words as softly as the rest, but he might as well have shouted, they jarred her so.

“If God’s trying to open a window for Todd, it sure as all heck ain’t me. I barely constitute a crack in the glass or a missing piece of weather stripping. So I have to ask myself, Where’s the open window?” Then he sort of studied her out of the corner of his eye.

Oh, no. Oh, no. The last time she’d let some fasttalking male open her window, it had been eighteen years before she’d managed to get it shut again, and even then it hadn’t been without a kick start from her supposed loving husband—the very one who’d insisted on opening the damn thing in the first place. Uh-uh. No way was she going to go through any of that again, although he was absolutely right about one thing, Rachel thought as she walked as quickly as possible back down the hallway. Daniel Van Scott was definitely cracked.

Daniel followed her closely. “Don’t you think it’s a little bit odd you picked that exact moment to look out your window? You could have just as easily been, I don’t know, in the kitchen or the bathroom. Even in the living room, for crying out loud, but with your back to the window. You fit into this equation somehow, I just know it.”

“No,” Rachel stated emphatically, knowing she needed to be firm here. She did not like the way this conversation was headed. She was done with being dutiful. It was now officially her turn to play in the sun. Being footloose and fancy-free was supposed to be one of the few advantages of the empty nest stage. “I hate to be the stereotypical female, but I was never much good at math. Especially quadratic equations. They always threw me for a loop.”

Daniel caught Rachel’s arm and halted her flight. He thought fast. “All right. Okay. You probably work and can’t help me out yourself. But you’ve got a real way with little kids. Maybe you know somebody else with your knack?”

Rachel stopped and looked up at him. Those blue eyes of his were killers, especially the way they appeared now, both serious and sincere. She was in big-time trouble here and she was just bright enough to know it. She was not about to disabuse him of his faulty notion that she worked. “Daniel, what is it that you want from me?”

“Help,” he stated simply. “Either yours or somebody you could recommend. I know I haven’t known you long, but somehow I feel like I can trust you. I’m dying here.”

Her arm tingled where he touched it. Rachel knew it without a shadow of a doubt. That spark she felt was plain old sexual attraction, no getting around it. You’d have thought that by thirty-seven her body would have forgotten all about that special tingle. It was discouraging, downright undignified that it hadn’t. Imagine, at her age she was being suckered in by a pair of broad shoulders, blue eyes and a sob story that had absolutely nothing to do with her. If she didn’t get out of there, she’d do something stupid—like agreeing to do what he wanted whether it was in her own best interest or not. Shades of the past! This was ridiculous. It was mortifying. It was an insult to her intelligence. Hadn’t she learned anything over the past eighteen years? “Daniel, no one comes to mind off the top of my head, but I’ll think about it and call you if I come up with a name. But for now, I’ve got to get going. All those boxes aren’t going to unpack themselves, you know.” There was a hint of desperation in her voice and she hoped Daniel didn’t pick up on it.

He ran his hand up her arm and her arm broke out in goose pimples. Eighty degrees outside, and she had goose bumps, oh, puh-leeze!

“Rachel, don’t leave yet. Let me at least give you lunch. Come on, have a hot dog with me. It’s the least I can do.”

Rachel thought about those hot dogs with the bite marks she’d fixed for Todd. He was right. It was the very least he could do. “I don’t know—”

“Please?”

Oh well, what did she have at home? Low fat peanut butter and reduced sugar strawberry jam. Yummy. “Oh, all right.”

“Great! Good! Come on back to the kitchen.”

Daniel’s smile lit his face and Rachel knew without a doubt she’d just made a grave tactical error. She hadn’t agreed to anything other than lunch, darn it. Daniel’s problems were his. Rachel had enough of her own without borrowing more. She’d just have to keep telling herself that until she’d choked down her premasticated hot dog. Maybe she could still get out of there relatively unscathed.

Daniel steered her back into the kitchen and pulled out a chair at the round oak kitchen table. “Here. You sit down. I’ll handle this.”

Rachel refused to feel badly about letting him. For too many years she’d had meals waiting on the table and clean socks and underwear in her men’s drawers. For what? Her son had eagerly left for college without even a backward glance and shortly thereafter her husband had just plain left. Besides, anybody could boil a hot dog.

Even Daniel. Within a very few minutes he served her up a plate with not only the promised main course, but apple sauce and potato chips. Then he really went all out and dug the mustard and pickle relish out of the refrigerator as well. He poured her a glass of milk. Rachel couldn’t remember the last time she’d drunk milk. Oh well, at her age wasn’t osteoporosis just around the corner? Maybe the milk would hold it at bay a little while longer. Surprisingly Rachel enjoyed the meal. “This is good,” she told him, touched that he’d taken the trouble to find her a hot dog Todd hadn’t sampled in the store.

“Thank you.” Daniel said, and smiled at her praise.

His grin almost blinded her. Rachel quickly lowered her head and studied the mustard smear on her plate. So much for that conversational gambit. “Well, I guess I ought to—”

Daniel jumped up and grabbed the plates off the table, startling her. “No need to rush,” he said. He suddenly realized he was starving for a little adult conversation. How did young mothers do this all day every day? He glanced at the watch bound to his wrist. “Rachel, how long do you think Todd will be out?”

“What? Oh, if he’s anything like Mark, maybe two hours.”

“Two hours,” he repeated after her and his face assumed an expression similar to the one she wore when she came face-to-face with a piece of maple fudge with her name on it. “That’s fantastic, two whole hours. I can get a lot done in one hundred and twenty uninterrupted minutes. Let’s see, first I’ll dump in a load of laundry real quick like. Let’s say, oh, ten minutes for that, another fifteen for these dishes. That leaves—hey, I just might have enough time to get my computer and maybe even the printer set up before Todd rejoins the land of the living. I can’t do it when he’s up, you know. That kid is murder on floppy disks.”

She believed it. Rachel remembered this stage all too well. “I really should be going. I’ve got boxes of my own—”

“Oh, that’s right. I wish you could stick around. It would be nice to talk to another adult for a while.” Daniel shrugged philosophically. “But if you can’t, you can’t. I really appreciate everything you did do for me this afternoon, though, Rachel. I want to be sure you know that.”

Rachel had never realized it before, but evidently she really was a sucker for blue eyes. Ron had had blue eyes, but not like Daniel’s blue eyes. It would be very easy to make a fool of herself with this man. It would be no hardship at all to talk herself into spending the afternoon talking to Daniel while he set up his office. Heck, she’d probably even pitch in and help. When would she learn?

Rachel told herself she was simply in the middle of a major empty nest syndrome crisis in her own life. That’s why she wanted to adopt these two. Fill the nest back up. She was just a natural born caretaker, a nurturer.

Natural born masochist was more like it.

But no, she’d get through this thing on her own, without any placebos. It was simply a case of hardening her heart and walking out his front door. She’d already done more than any other woman who’d come across that scene she’d witnessed out on her front sidewalk would have—well, maybe not, considering Daniel’s shoulders and butt—but still, she’d done her corporal work of mercy. “You’re more than welcome,” she said. “But now I’ve really got to go.”

With that, Rachel made her escape. There wasn’t a shadow of doubt in her mind that it had been a close one, too.

Rachel spent her afternoon organizing her cupboards. She unpacked her silverware and placed it all neatly in a new silver separator she’d bought for the drawer closest to the sink drain board. Then she stacked the dishes in the cabinet up above the silverware and the pots and pans—what few she needed to cook for one— in the cabinet below the rangetop.

By the time she broke for dinner, Rachel was out in the hall and mostly done with unwrapping the new linens she’d bought for her fresh start in life. The linen closet looked good, she decided as she stepped back and examined it. Towels that actually coordinated not only with each other but the bathroom as well, sat folded in the same direction and in neat piles on the shelf in front of her. Combined with the sheets, blankets and pillows she’d bought, it looked like a well-done department store display, Rachel thought.

She took another step back. It appeared just the way she’d always wanted her old linen closet to look and the way it would have looked if she’d ever gotten any cooperation from her son and former husband. But no, they’d always rooted through her neat piles and then walked off, leaving the disaster behind them. Well, no more. This closet would win homemaking awards—only there was nobody left to make a home for. Again Rachel lectured herself. “Buck up. You can’t win any homemaking awards if there are people living in the house. It’s just one of life’s poorer jokes. Oh well, maybe Mark will come home for winter and spring break. Possibly even part of the summer. He can mess up the towels then.” She hoped so, but basically Rachel just had to recognize she was all alone now. That was simply the way it was. Her stack of towels would remain neat forevermore.

On that rather melancholy note, Rachel returned to her small kitchen and baked a frozen, premade chicken potpie and pulled a handful of salad out of a pretossed bag of greens.

She ate it all by herself with nothing but the radio for company. Rachel wondered what Daniel and Todd were eating for dinner. More hot dogs?

Rachel washed her plate and fork and set them on the drain board. Her days of needing a dishwasher were over, she mused as she contemplated the lonely utensils. The phone rang as she turned away from the sink.

“Mom? It’s me, Mark.”

Alarm bells rang in Rachel’s maternal mind. “Mark? What’s wrong?”

“Chill out, Mom. Nothing’s wrong. I just wanted to see what was going down on the maternal home front. You know, see how you were doing and stuff.”

Rachel barely controlled her snort of disbelief. Yeah, right. In other words, her best beloved son wanted something from her. “I’m fine, Mark, just fine. I spent the day organizing my new apartment and guess what?”

“What?”