Baby Be Mine

“Willy gets wine?”

Jace made a face at her. “He gets the grape juice next to it. But if you don’t put it in a wineglass he’ll only want what we’re having.”

“Oh,” Clair said, chagrined at overlooking the obvious.

She did the honors, surprised to find the wine he had breathing on the counter was a particularly good vintage.

He really was more than he appeared to be on the surface, she thought. Or maybe she was overlooking the obvious when it came to him, too.

She supposed it was easy enough to do. There he was, a big, rugged cowboy with an extremely handsome face and an amazing body, dressed pretty much the same each time she’d seen him—in blue jeans and, tonight, a plain tan-colored shirt.

It was difficult to look past those superficial things, and the stereotype that came with them, to think that he might be a chef who made his own pizza dough and canned his own sauce. Or that he might have the same kind of knowledge about wines that the last man she’d been involved with had after taking classes on the subject to impress his friends. Or that Jace would be as talented as he was with a small child.

But there it all was, making him a more interesting person than she had expected him to be. A more interesting person than she wanted him to be, because it made it so much harder not to be intrigued. And impressed. And affected by him.

When she had the wine and grape juice poured, she took the glasses to the table.

Jace and Willy were both spreading thick tomato sauce on their respective crusts. Willy kept an eagle eye on Jace’s every movement, mimicking him as best he could but still slopping some of the sauce over the edges of the dough, while Jace managed to spread an even layer, leaving just the right amount of plain crust around the perimeter.

On went pieces of fresh mozzarella, then sliced black olives. But Willy stopped there while Jace added roasted peppers, onions, fresh mushrooms and sausage to the main pie.

Willy occupied himself by putting olive rings on each of his fingers.

“Lookit,” he said to Jace, giggling at his innovation.

Jace laughed at him but said, “Don’t put those back in the bowl now.”

Willy didn’t. He ate each one off his fingers.

Then the pizzas went into the oven, and the two of them cleared the mess with Clair looking on.

“Have you ever thought of being a teacher?” she asked Jace when he dispatched Willy to set the table and the tiny child actually did it, apparently having been taught how before tonight.

“Now you want to coop me up in a building every day?” Jace joked, referring to their day care discussion on the drive home earlier.

“You’re pretty incredible with kids.”

He shrugged negligently as he put a salad together. “It doesn’t take more than a little time and patience. And likin’ ’em.”

“And you do like them, don’t you?”

“Yep. Maybe it comes from being the firstborn. My mom always said she taught me to walk and talk and I took over from there with all my brothers so she didn’t have to. Mainly I remember just wantin’ ’em to talk instead of cry all the time and to be able to get around on their own so we could play.”

“I was the oldest child, too. Well, obviously, since you knew Kristin, you knew she wasn’t the oldest. I think it always made me feel sort of parental toward her.”

Clair wasn’t sure why she’d told him that but she did know that she hadn’t meant to allow sadness in her voice. Yet it was there, anyway, and in response Jace seemed to sober some.

“There was just you and Kristin? No other brothers or sisters?” he asked as if he were genuinely interested.

“No, just us. I know it seems like there should have been some other kids between us—nearly ten years is quite an age span. But there weren’t any.”

“Be kind of hard not to mother a sister that much younger.”

“Mmm. Especially when there wasn’t a real mother in the picture.”

His eyebrows rose slightly. “I didn’t know that. Kristin didn’t talk much about her family. She just said that she’d shamed them and so she couldn’t have anything to do with them anymore.”

“Oh, that’s not true!” Clair lamented in pure reflex to the stab that statement unintentionally delivered.

The timer went off just then to let them know Willy’s pizza was finished baking.

Jace took it out of the oven, protecting his hands with only a dish towel.

“This has to cool until the other pizza’s done,” he told Willy, who was eager to dig into his masterpiece.

Then Jace began to dress the salad and returned to the conversation with Clair. “I didn’t mean to upset you. I was just repeatin’ what Kristin told Kim and Billy. We all assumed from what she said that her family had turned their backs on her.”

“I don’t know, maybe it seemed that way to her,” Clair said. “But it shouldn’t have. Not really. I had taken kind of a hard line with her, but—”

“You don’t have to explain. I know how problems can develop in families. There’s one in mine.”

“But that’s just it, there wasn’t a real problem. As far as I knew, anyway. There was just…I don’t know, a bump in the road that she didn’t let me have a clear understanding of.”

“A communication problem,” Jace surmised.

“I don’t even think you could call it that. Until the last time I saw her, she and I were as close as two sisters could be. We shared everything. There was no competition between us. I considered her my best friend and I thought she considered me hers. Of course, the same could hardly be said about Kristin and Dad….”

The timer rang again, signaling that the main pizza was finished. While Jace repeated the process he’d followed for Willy’s pie—raising the crust with a knife to make sure it was browned on bottom and taking it out of the oven to serve—Clair considered just how far she should go in detailing her family’s shortcomings.