His Brother's Baby. Laurie Campbell
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sympathetic question caught him off guard, but Con managed to swallow the unexpected rush of feeling in his throat. He didn’t need feelings. He didn’t have feelings, no matter what the therapists said. “I’m fine,” he answered hoarsely. “Just taking some time to set up the foundation.” And even though it was frustrating to quit after twelve hours of work each day, so far he’d stuck to his self-imposed limit.
Which was a lot tougher than he’d expected.
“Oh, yeah, Mom mentioned the foundation thing.” Their mother was the clearinghouse for family messages, although Conner suspected she talked to Kenny in Asia far more often than himself in Philadelphia. “Anyway, about Lucy’s kid…I’ll come up with something. Just buy me some time, okay?”
Lucy had called this one correctly from the start, Con reflected, remembering how much easier it was to breathe when he kept his focus strictly on facts instead of feelings. She’d insisted all along that Kenny had no interest in fatherhood, but that was still no reason to ignore his own responsibility. While he wouldn’t mention this conversation to her, he wasn’t about to forget another child.
“All right,” he told his brother, “but just so you know, I’m not letting this go.”
“You haven’t changed, have you?” Kenny muttered. “Still trying to make sure everything’s fair and square.”
“Somebody has to, dammit!” Conner snapped, just as Lucy emerged from the kitchen with Emma wrapped in a fluffy towel. “Look, I’ll talk to you later.”
She made no pretense of having missed his outburst, but at least she didn’t ask who he’d been talking to before slamming down the phone. Instead she gave him a look of frank curiosity and asked, “Somebody has to what?”
Minimizing bad news had always been part of his responsibility, both while growing up and while married to Margie. “Take care of the finances,” he replied, hoping he sounded indifferent enough that she would drop the subject altogether.
Apparently the strategy worked, because Lucy rested Emma on the sofa and rubbed the baby’s damp hair with the top of her towel before turning to another topic. “I meant to tell you, Shawna called a little while ago. She said they— You still don’t need me to work weekends, right?”
The last thing he needed was more time with Lucy. “No.”
“Okay, good,” she said, rewrapping the towel around the wriggling baby. “So I’ll get Shawna’s grandmother for Saturday—her name’s Lorraine, she’s really sweet. But I’ll tell her you’re working, so she won’t distract you or anything.”
A whole platoon of sweet grandmothers would be far less distracting than a woman he couldn’t let himself want. “No problem,” Conner answered, wondering why she felt obligated to notify him of a visitor. “You don’t need to clear it with me if you want to have someone over.”
“Well, she’ll be spending the day here,” Lucy explained, picking up Emma and starting toward her bedroom, “because they won’t let her baby-sit at the senior center.”
Wait a minute, this grandmother was a baby-sitter? “How come you need a sitter?” Con asked, following her as far as the door.
She didn’t seem to notice that he’d never come this close to her vanilla-scented room before. Instead she addressed him over her shoulder as she transferred the cooing baby from her fluffy towel into some fuzzy, footed sleepers. “That’s what Shawna called about. I got a job at the same place she—”
“Lucy, you’ve got a job!”
“Not on weekends,” she said simply, fastening the sleepers over Emma’s diaper. “And I need the money.”
Oh, hell, he’d messed up. He should have called Kenny sooner, arranged for some kind of child support before she had to take a second job. “Look, if you need—” he began, and she interrupted him in a rush.
“I don’t need anything from you! I take care of myself, remember?”
From the steel in her voice, he knew this was an argument he couldn’t win. At least not yet. “So…”
“So, Lorraine will be here Saturday,” Lucy concluded, nestling Emma in what looked like a bureau drawer lined with blankets. My God, his niece was sleeping in a drawer? “But I’ll tell her you’re working, so she won’t get in your way.”
And she didn’t, Conner acknowledged on Saturday after four hours of listening for any fussing from Emma and hearing nothing at all. This pudgy, white-haired grandmother seemed like a nice lady, although he wished she had come bearing gifts…like a crib, or a car seat, or any of the other things Lucy would never accept from a Tarkington.
But the sitter did such a great job of keeping Emma out of his way that by midafternoon—with only four hours left on his workday limit—he found himself almost missing the baby. And when he moved into the kitchen for coffee and insisted that she and Emma weren’t in the way, he was pleased that Lorraine took him at his word.
She didn’t seem to realize that he had very little experience with babies, because when she shifted Emma for a better grip on Conner’s finger, she smiled at the baby’s rapt expression.
“Looks like she wants you to hold her,” Lorraine said, moving his coffee out of the way and handing him the baby as easily as if she were handing him a dinner plate. “There you go. Isn’t she just the cutest thing?”
Emma felt so incredibly fragile that he was uneasy about breathing, but she didn’t seem to mind his lack of skill at holding a baby. In fact, she nestled into his embrace so warmly that for a moment Conner let himself imagine that she felt safe, comfortable, cared for….
That Emma felt loved.
“I’m going to run to the rest room,” Lorraine told him, and he nodded without taking his eyes off the child in his arms.
He had to give her back, of course. He wasn’t capable of caring for a baby for more than two or three minutes, but it was surprisingly sweet to pretend that he knew what he was doing, and that this little bundle of life welcomed the assurance of his heartbeat against her own.
Still, he handed her back to the sitter without trying to prolong the moment, and hastily retreated to his work. It had been a fluke, that’s all, enjoying that sense of protecting a baby. But two hours later, when he heard Emma wake up from her nap with a hearty cry, he closed the lid of his computer and followed the sound.
“Somebody needs a clean diaper,” Lorraine observed, lifting the baby onto the dresser Lucy kept covered in blankets. Then, apparently taking it for granted that Conner had arrived with assistance in mind, she nodded at him. “Want to hand me the pins? We’ve got the old-fashioned kind, here.”
He could do that, Con decided. There was a pile of diaper pins right there on the dresser, and it couldn’t be that hard to offer one whenever the expert held out an expectant hand. Still, he was amazed at how deftly Lorraine folded the cloth under Emma’s squirming body and tucked it into a neat triangle shape. “You’re good at that.”
“Years of practice,” she told him, then set the baby down again and whisked off the just-applied diaper. “But anybody can do it. I’ll show you.”
Conner gulped. There was no way to refuse that offer, even though he hadn’t quite planned on learning such a skill. But within a few minutes he realized that the baby-sitter was right.
“I can do this,” he acknowledged, lifting the freshly diapered baby into his arms and marveling at the knowledge that he, Conner Tarkington, had completed the entire task himself.
Maybe he couldn’t love a child, but he could sure take care of her.
“Of course you can.” Lorraine gave him a cheerful smile as he nestled Emma into the crook of his arm. “Babies are easy as pie.”
“It’s easy,” Lucy muttered