A New Lu (18 page)

When we resume our respective chairs, he's smiling again. “I would have called, but I didn't know what to say.”

I do. “Jacob's not an issue. He thinks I shouldn't have the child, doesn't want to know about it. I've not given him much thought since.”

“Your children?”

I grimace and tuck a graham-cracker-crust crumb into my mouth with a finger. Dallas called first thing this morning to demand that I tell her everything about “this man I was seeing” today. I refused. She threatened to call her father. I asked her if she really wanted to be responsible for what might happen then. “The short version is, no one, not
one
person who cares about me, thinks this is a really stellar idea. Cy and Curran are at least excited.”

“Do you blame them?” William's expression is so gentle I could kiss him again. But I fight the urge as if his lips were laced with arsenic. After forty, pride counts for more than sex—some of the time.

“Yes—No, it's really none of their business. Not Jacob's, and certainly not my children's problem to solve. It's my decision.”

“You put a lot of heat into that reply.”

“Can I see your medical ID?”

“Sure. Why?”

“Because I don't remember seeing a doctor-of-psychiatry degree on your wall.”

William sits back and crosses his arms, taking his lips out of temptation's way. “I'm an interested party, that's all.”

“You're trying to figure me out. To see beneath the curtain of the half truths and bogus hopes I've erected to shield myself from the truth that, in about five months, I'm going to be sitting in this very kitchen, looking down into the eyes of a new life, wondering what I could have been thinking at this very moment five months earlier.”

There's a new light in his eyes, but his serious expression hasn't changed. “Do you always bite the helping hand?”

“Do you always assume the high ground?”

A corner of his mouth twitches. “Are we having our first fight?”

“Sounds like it.”

“Good. If we've gotten past being polite then we can deal with the truth.”

“Such as?”

He drops his crossed arms and leans on the table toward me. “Since I met you, I'm suddenly afraid to die.”

25

This is not your standard seduction line. At twenty, perhaps, it would be Swoon City. At this point in my life, it sounds suspiciously like it's still the best line I ever heard.

William looks to me to say something, but I wouldn't speak now under anything less than pain of death. He takes my hand and leans forward until his elbows rest on the table as he studies my face. “You're an unusual woman.”

“You have no idea.”

He laughs. “And I sound like an idiot.”

I smile, “No. But if you need your heart jump-started, you should pick up a younger version of me, one who's life and space is not literally already spoken for.”

“There. That's what I'm talking about. After seeing so many paths to death I'd begun to think, it's not so bad. On the whole, I'm ready to go. I've lived enough, seen enough, done enough.” He pauses. “And then you walked into my office with all that drama and—and—”

“Wit?”

“No.”

“Beauty?”

“That's not…”

“Tears?”

He grins. “You are just really
alive.
It never crosses your mind that it could at any minute all come to an end.”

When men do get in touch with their emotions, they often don't know when to quit.

“William, I do love talking with you. I do. But if we're going to discuss the end of life, could we schedule an appointment for it?”

But the man has warmed to his subject. “Imagine my arrogance, thinking I was prepared to go.”

“Is there something I should know?” Seems I just asked Cy a similar question.

“Only that I have been living half a life. Being with you has made me take a look around at my own situation. I have a grandchild on the way. A practice going full tilt. Hell, I haven't even cracked the half-century mark.”

Uh,
what?
My eyes narrow in on his silver-tipped temples. “Just how old are you?”

“Forty-eight…next November.”

He's got some nerve to sit there grinning at me. “You're a younger man.”

“Not that much. Forty-seven, forty nine—”

“Fifty, next week.”

“The French say an older woman makes the best lover.”

I wish he wouldn't keep making it so easy to like him. “So then, you are here because you think you're going to get lucky again?”
I
should get so lucky again!

“Don't get the wrong idea, Lu. I just came to spend a little time with you. And, I admit, to ask your advice.”

“About senior citizen benefits?”

“No.” He sighs. “I'm a lousy mother.” That sounds like my line. “Jolie needs someone to listen to her. She thinks I should be better at it. I try. But I only seem to get her back up. I don't understand. Patients love my bedside manner.”

“They are mostly widows, and mostly senile.”

He laughs as though it's forced out of him. “I wish that were the answer.”

“You want to talk about it?”

I can see the change take place in his expression. “It's serious. Do you mind?”

I shake my head and settle back. I think I can handle daughter stuff—at least, someone else's daughter's stuff.

Spina bifida.

I hear William talking but it's taking my mind a few seconds to catch up. Oh, God. Poor Jolie!

He reaches for a paper napkin and pulls a pen out of his jacket pocket, and begins to draw a fetus's physiology. I try to adjust my layman's eyes to his deft strokes. He's good at explanations. But I have to admit the Latin terms mean nothing to me other than as signals that an unborn child's life could be in serious jeopardy.

Finally he sits back and rubs a palm across his mouth. “She should have been tested months ago. She and Jon don't have insurance so Jon vetoed any optional testing as an unnecessary expense. She was too proud to tell me until she left him. I was angry, of course. Didn't she know that I would have gladly paid? I convinced her that testing was still a good idea, although I was certain she had nothing to worry about.” I can tell by the way that his voice has emptied of emotion that there's more.

His head dips a little. “She got back positive results the day we saw you in the Paradise.”

I remember Jolie's red eyes and pinched expression when she saw my baby's sonogram picture, and I wished her well with her pregnancy. My heart feels tight as I think about it. My test results have been fine.

“Not that AFPs are definitive. There is a high potential for false positives. I told Jolie more than ninety-five percent turn out to be wrong.” He doesn't make eye contact.
“I should have said positive results indicate only one thing, the need for more testing. She had a level-two sonogram last week. It, too, was inconclusive.”

“So now what?”

“The next step is an amniocentesis. I told her Jon should be included in the decision. The procedure poses some risk to both mother and fetus.”

I look for the bright spot. “Isn't it a good sign that she agreed to talk it over with Jon?”

William looks at me. “I called him. He sounded so relieved to hear from me that I wanted to throttle him. Why the hell hadn't he come to see her?”

“Maybe because he thought you'd kill him.” I smile, but William is having none of it. “And guilt. Guilt stuns the young.”

“He's her husband, dammit!” He stands up. “Not that she's going to listen to him, after what he's done.”

“Unless he's a complete idiot, Jon knows he made a huge mistake and is focused on his wife and baby. He's there to convince Jolie to have the tests, isn't he?”

William shrugs. “If the tests come back indicting severe defects, Jolie will have to make more choices. If it is spina bifida, she could be a candidate for an in utero surgery on the fetus. If not, she'll need a Caesarian delivery. There'll be specialists ready to start special care and reconstruction immediately after.”

I can't help it. I shiver and wrap my arms protectively across Sweet Tum.

“There's another possibility. If she and Jon should decide on divorce, she'd be a single mother, with a child with terrible health problems….” The words seem to be moving out of him without the effort of his breath. “There are several private facilities where she can go where they ask no questions and assign no blame.”

I get up and put my arms about him, but I can't tell him it's going to be okay. About halfway through this
speech he turned to look at me, and I suspect he wasn't only talking just about Jolie.

“I don't need a choice, William. This is how life is sometimes. There's what you want and what you need. And then, occasionally, there's just what you have to do. A high risk pregnancy isn't what Jolie or I wanted. But we're both grown women. It's what we've got to deal with.” I put my hand across my middle. “Her choice may be understandably different. I'm having my baby.”

He nods and even smiles a little. “I knew you'd say that. I just wanted you to know, if you thought…I would disapprove of you ending the pregnancy, that I wouldn't.” He lifts a hand as if flicking a thought away. “But I'm glad you want to have the child.”

“So then, while you're being the absent parent, Jon will help Jolie understand the importance of the test. She's just scared. You hear stories about things that can go wrong with amnios. She needs to see it as a resolution to her fears. Or a way to take action to rectify the problem her child may have.”

William looks at me. “You see why she needs a mother? You word things better than I can.”

“I think Dad's doing pretty well. He hasn't murdered the wayward father, or even stayed to referee their first meeting.”

For a moment, he looks grim. “You know what that cost me?”

“Tickets on Long Island Railroad and the New Jersey Transit?”

He smiles now. “I can't believe I'm here.”

“I know. We sort of had a one-night stand. Those are by definition one-time things.” I rise and head for the sink to put my glass in it.

He comes up to me. “Maybe it was something else.” He puts his hands on my shoulders. “I think maybe we needed each other.”

“And now? What are we doing?”

He pulls me in until we meet chest to chest. “We're being together for another while.”

I lift my arms to his shoulders. “To keep from thinking about our real lives?”

“This is my real life.” He leans a little away to better see my face. “Do you have another, with Doc and Dopey, perhaps?”

“Perhaps.”

He kisses me softly. “You lead a busy life, for a woman your age.”

“You should know by now that men can get into serious trouble when they try to talk about a woman's age.”

“I guess you'll have to find a way to shut me up.”

Half an hour later, I'm lying in William's arms, in my bed. I bought a new mattress the day the divorce became final. I steal a glance at the clock. He's been back in my life less than six hours and we've been through more emotional changes than many couples cover in a year. We're speed-reading through one another's lives. No need to be coy at this stage.

“What are you thinking?”

“That younger men have their uses.”

His laughter jiggles my breasts under the sheet pulled over us.

“I've been little more than a doctor these last years.” He reaches up and pats my stomach. “I'm just beginning to realize what I've been missing as a man.”

“Enjoying rolling around in bed with women pregnant by other men makes you freaky, you do know that?”

He kisses the top of my head. “What if there's just one pregnant woman I want to roll around with?”

“I suppose then you only qualify as odd.”

“Would it be odd if I said I could use another couple of those lemon bars?”

“A man needs his strength.” I rise up to go get them, but he pulls me back against him and begins nibbling my ear. “I'll get them…in a minute…or five.”

We are content just to touch and kiss and squeeze, learning the texture and feeling the limits of each other. I like his thighs. They are hard and nearly hairless, like the rest of him. Jacob had a lot of body hair. I didn't mind that, either. If William finds me too much or too little or too anything, he doesn't say, just seems to be enjoying sensation, as much as I am.

Yet I admit to a certain vanity. It's small of me and I despise myself for it. I have living proof that he likes me. So why am I even doubting…? While he says looks don't matter…what does? Maybe I can just do a little casual inquiry.

“I'm doing research for a piece for
Five-O
on what men find attractive in older women. The answers are sometimes refreshingly honest.”

He takes my hand and licks the palm. “So now you want to know what I think?” Got to give him points for seeing through me. “Yes. I care what a woman looks like. Generally. The details, no.”

And that's all I should need to know. But… “I did some research when Tai was pushing my column toward an extreme makeover byline. There are procedures for things I would never in a million years have thought of. What sort of woman feels she needs hand rejuvenation, toe shortening or—this I couldn't even believe!—a labia lift to attract a man's attention?”

William laughs. “Any woman showing her labia already has the man's attention.”

I slap my hand across his middle. “You know what I mean.”

He cups one of my breasts and kind of holds on, as if he really likes the feel of it. “A woman needs a good attitude, that's all. Everything else is gravy.”

Must be the sexual energy, I can't keep my mouth shut. “Don't be disingenuous. Men judge women every day by how they look. I can practically give you the date men stopped looking at me.”

He rises up and cranes his neck around so he can catch my eye. “I'm looking at you. And touching you. What else do you need?”

What else, indeed! I kiss him hard because he makes my heart pound, and that scares me a bit.

It's just that no one in her right mind would think this has any staying power. We're comforting each other in our need. Oh, boy, do we do that! Yet, my emotions, raging with the need to nest and cuddle, can't be trusted.

As for him, he admitted he'd been celibate since his wife died. Poor man! He's probably just forgotten what a young woman looks like with her clothes off. In his line of work, a woman my age must look pretty good by comparison.

And then I want to slap myself for all the snide, unnecessary conditions I'm putting on what is in actual fact one of the best things in my life.

I put a hand on either side of his face to stop his kisses. He doesn't give in easily. He licks the tip of my nose, and then each lip separately, before he lays his head back against my pillows.

“So what are you writing about in your column these days?”

He had to ask.

“Oh, midlife. Changes. Difficulties.”

“You could publish a journal about your pregnancy, if you weren't too classy to peddle yourself in print.”

“You think so?” There are still some topics we need to steer clear of today. “Say, weren't you hungry?”

A man's stomach is always ready for food. He hops out of bed, pulls on his boxers and walks out of my bedroom.

I follow him, after snatching a filmy floral wrapper with lace trim out of my closet. I stop to fluff my hair a bit,
and run a finger under each eye to wipe away the mascara smudge beneath.

By the time I reach the kitchen, his mouth is covered in powdered sugar and cookie crumbs, and he's reaching for another lemon bar.

“Would you like some herbal tea?”

He nods, jaws locked in lemon-sugar delight.

I pick up the kettle from the stove and walk toward the sink. His eyes follow. I exaggerate my hip movements a bit to see what he'll do. The rest of him follows me to the sink, that's what.