Do You Take This Baby?

Past 9:00 p.m., the General Store in Thunder Ridge was closed, so if you had a midnight hankering for a pint of mint chocolate chip or a desperate need to read the latest celebrity gossip mag, you had to drive to Hank’s Thunderbird Market on Highway 12. When Gemma’s sister Lucy phoned their parents’ house at 11:00 p.m., asking if someone could please, please, please pick up ear drops for her baby, Owen, and some teething gel—“The pink gel, not the white. The pink!”—because Owen had been crying nonstop for two hours, Gemma volunteered to make the drive.

Deciding a snack would make the late-night trip more entertaining, Gemma grabbed a package of Nutter Butters, which were the best cookies on earth, then added a bag of rippled potato chips since she was going to need to crunch on something on the way home. With her basket of support foods, she headed to the pharmaceutical aisle intending to grab the teething gel quickly and go to her sister’s. As she rounded the corner of the aisle, however, she nearly collided with another late-night shopper.

“Oh! My gosh. I didn’t expect to see you.”

“Yeah, no, me either. I’m... I had to pick up a few things.” Ethan nodded to the loaded cart in front of him and then—was it possible?—he blushed. As in, a deep red infused his gorgeous face. His gorgeous, exhausted-looking face.

Why was he blushing? Other than seeming tired, he looked great. She, on the other hand, had been wearing a T-shirt that read Eat, Sleep, Repeat and her hot-pink emoji pajama bottoms when Lucy had called, and she hadn’t seen any reason to change for the trip to the Thunderbird.

Her surprise at seeing Ethan here turned into absolute shock when she saw the contents of his shopping cart.

“Teething biscuits?” She arched a brow.

“Yeah.” He glanced around, then lifted a shoulder. “I like ’em.”

“Favorite locker-room snack?”

Ethan did not look happy. He looked, in fact, miserable. With one hand, he finger-combed the thick golden hair that appeared to have been mussed several times already. With the other hand, he retained a white-knuckle grip on the cart.

Gemma peered at the rest of the contents, which looked as if they’d been scooped up by a dump truck and piled in.

Coffee, milk, two four-packs of energy drinks, cotton balls, bandages, a thermometer (several, in fact, each a different brand), tissues, baby wipes—

Baby wipes? She looked closer. Yep, baby wipes. And formula! He had at least four different kinds of formula in that cart. And were those boxes of...

Oh, my goodness. Ethan was buying diapers. Disposable diapers, again in a few different brands. Plus, she spied the very item she was looking for—teething gel.

“You got the white kind,” she said, pointing to the small box with the picture of a tooth. “You should get the pink. My sister says it works the best.”

Frowning, Ethan followed her finger. “Really? Where is the pink one?”

Feeling as if she’d fallen asleep and was having a very weird dream, Gemma led him to the correct spot along the aisle. “This one.” She picked a box from the shelf. “Worked like a charm when my nephew Owen was cutting his first tooth.”

Looking as confused and frustrated as he was tired, Ethan scowled at the label, then tossed it into the cart along with everything else.

Selecting a box of the ointment for her sister, Gemma ventured, “So, Ethan, you have a toothache? And—” she nodded toward the diaper boxes peeking out at the bottom of the cart “—a problem with incontinence, perhaps?”

“Very funny.” He did the finger-comb again. “Can you keep a secret?” he growled, sotto voce.

“I can,” she replied, wondering at the strangeness of this meeting. “I’m not sure I’m going to want to.”

When he spoke, he looked as if even he didn’t believe the words he was about to say. “I have a baby.”

Gemma stared at him until her vision got blurry. “A baby what?”

“You know.” He made a rocking motion.

“A person? You have a baby...person?”

He nodded, and she could hardly breathe. I’m blacking out, I’m blacking out. Her heart flopped in her chest. “Wh-who-who is the mother?” Then she gasped. “Is it the redhead from the vampire cheerleader show?”

He looked at her oddly. “Who—You mean Celeste? No!” He swore. “Lord, no.” Coming around from behind the cart, he took her upper arm, glancing up and down the aisle as if this were a dark alley. “It’s not my baby,” he whispered.

She whispered back. “You said, ‘I have a baby.’”

“I do. In my house. Look,” he grumbled, “I don’t want to talk here. Are you done shopping?”

“I want to get ear drops for Lucy’s son. He’s been crying all night. She thinks he’s just teething, but you never know.”

Ethan’s attention sharpened. “Would an earache make a baby cry? A lot?”

“Yes.”

“Where are the ear drops?”

“Over here.” She showed him. He handed her a box, then added one to his cart. “Let’s go.”

The fact that he was asking her to go to his house was weird—and exciting—to say the least. “I can’t come to your house right now. I have to take these things to Luce.”

“Tonight?”

“Yes. Owen’s crying.”

“Where’s her husband? Why are you out this late?”

“Rick is out of town. I help when I’m here.”

“Aren’t you already helping with the wedding? I hear you’re driving up from Portland every weekend.”

Was she mistaken or was there a note of censure in his tone? Instantly, Gemma felt on the defensive. “I don’t mind.”

Ethan shook his head. “You have three other siblings and parents who live in Thunder Ridge. Couldn’t one of them have helped Lucy?”

“They all have families, so...” She shrugged.

“So you get dumped on in the middle of the night.”

“It’s not the middle of the night! Anyway, it’s not like that. I told you, I don’t mind.” She sounded convincing, even to her own ears, but a cold heaviness filled her chest.

Sometimes she minded. Sometimes she was envious of her siblings’ problems and their time commitments with kids and spouses and PTA meetings. Sometimes she wished it were her living room walls that needed to be repainted again, because the kids woke up early one Saturday and got creative with an indelible marker. Gemma chewed the inside of her lip.

“Sorry,” Ethan relented. “I shouldn’t have said ‘dumped.’ You’re good at fixing people’s problems. It’s natural they turn to you.”

“Yes, I’m good at fixing problems,” she murmured. Everyone’s problems but her own.

Her thirty-fourth birthday was in September. According to her friend Constance, who taught reproductive biology to premeds, 95 percent of thirty-year-old women had only 12 percent of their original ovarian follicular cells. That was a lot of cells MIA. And everyone knew that when women reached thirty-five, fertility dropped like a rock. With no man on the horizon, Gemma could feel her ovaries shrinking to the size of raisins right here in the market.

Her gaze fastened on Ethan’s face. He was even more handsome now than in high school.