His Baby (12 page)

She had been taking care of them, taking care of all the
family. It was a tough job, but she was good at it. She liked it. Now she
wondered about that time but it was more than she could deal with at the
moment.

When she’d turned out the lights, closed the parlor door and
climbed the stairs to her room, she turned instead and went into the closed
room that had been Robin's room and stood for a moment at the foot of the bed,
staring at the empty feeling room. There was a blanket folded on the foot of
the bed.

Diana pulled it off the bed and took it with her into her
room, hoping she would warm up with the extra blanket but fearful she would not
be really warm again all night.

The Stonehouse Sunday barbecues had transformed themselves
into late afternoon Sunday dinner at Diana's house given the cool weather that
came with Fall. Driving home after her weekend at the White's house near
Chicago, Diana decided dining rooms were a Good Thing. On Saturday, the very
next Saturday after the visit, she had told Zack firmly they weren't going
anywhere that day. She wanted to make the change before Mrs. Johnson got done
with the house cleaning. They were, she announced over coffee, going to restore
the dining room to the house.

At the end of her life when she couldn't climb stairs
anymore, the back room off the kitchen, behind the parlor, had been transformed
from a formal dining room to Grandmother Stonehouse's bedroom. They had
purchased a new overstuffed modern couch, Diana's choice, for the living room. The
big kitchen had been rearranged a little to have a table for meals. Diana had
hired someone to come and close in the porch and make storm windows, and they'd
moved some of the older furniture out there. Most of the year, the uninsulated room
wasn't really comfortable, but the change had extended the kitchen a little,
made the good-sized room feel almost big.

Since then, Grandmother and Robin had died and Carl had
moved out.  Now just Diana and Lark lived in the big old place, one adult woman
and a young baby. When Robin had moved back into the house and for those months
after she had died, they went to Carl's house for family occasions. Zack's
appearance in their lives, complicated by Mary's pregnancy, had changed all the
patterns.

Grandmother Stonehouse's room, that is, the old dining room,
was closed up now and what furniture there was had been covered in dust covers.
Carl and Mary took the bed frame and two big dressers at one point, but there
were a miscellany of chairs and tables in the room. The tough move was going to
be getting the larger dining room table down from the attic.

"Why don't we wait until tomorrow and get Carl's
help?" Zack was saying.

"We can call Carl today if you want to. He's only working
half day at the plant. But I don't know what's in the room. We have to make
some decisions," Diana told him. Zack had just studied her for a few
heartbeats, then nodded and agreed.

She didn't know why she felt so strongly that Zack be a part
of this, but she wanted him to be there, wanted him to help her make decisions.
She wanted to drag him into the attic, up the narrow stairs and into the dusty
memory of the house. She wanted him to study the rolled up rugs and help decide
which rug they should haul down and to encourage her or laugh at her if she
decided to bring the old dishes down. There was a whole set of dishes, a
pattern that Grandmother's mother had hauled across the Midwest in a big trunk
when she moved to Indiana from Philadelphia to marry.

Diana didn't know exactly how she felt about any of these
changes she was proposing, but going to Chicago had stirred up something in her.

They left Lark playing in her crib in her room and stood
before the narrow door at the dim end of the hall. They were standing one
behind the other, Diana first.

"Are you sure about this?" Zack asked her. "I
just figured this was a closet. Never occurred to me there was an attic."

"There's an attic. Not as big as you think, because the
roof has such a steep slant, but someone put a plank floor down and wired up
electricity. Years ago when I was a little girl, Dad put a couple of fans in to
cool down the attic in the summer."

"I don't know how I feel about learning the mysteries
of this house," Zack said. "All I know about the second floor is
Lark's room and the bathroom."

She stopped then, and turned around to face him.

"Really?"

"Really," he said. "You've had a detailed
tour of my ancestral home and seen all the paintings."

"You said you didn't grow up there."
And they
weren't your ancestors in the dining room
, she continued silently.

He grinned at her. "True enough."

"All right, Zack, although I don't know why you're
stalling," she said.

He didn't answer, but blinked, a slow, lazy gesture that got
her pulse racing.

She shooed him down the hall again, so that he paused in
front of Lark's door and peered in to check on the baby.

"Lark's room you know. The stairs for the attic are
there," she gestured back towards the back of the house. "On the
other side of this hall is a bedroom. It was Robin's before she died. She and I
shared it when we were growing up."

Diana opened the door slowly and revealed the small bedroom,
a little larger than Lark's room, with its twin beds and tall dressers. There
was a small desk in front of a window that looked out over the back yard. She
had studied there as a child. It had been her childhood desk by default. Robin
never studied, although her grades never revealed that secret.

They were quiet for a minute, looking inside the darkened, cool
room. There was a blanket folded over the foot of one bed but Diana still had
the blanket she had pulled from Robin's bed a couple of nights ago. Zack walked
into the room and opened the drapes to stare out the back window into the
chilly yard. From here you could see that the big pine tree was being tossed
around by the wind. She had cleared out all their paraphernalia after Robin
died, moving most everything she wanted to keep up to the attic, or like
Robin's photo album, down to the parlor.

It looked cold out there, Diana decided. The emptiness of
this room made her feel cold in here as well. Zack left the room after a minute
and headed for the front of the house without making any comment.

"You know about the bathroom," she said as they
walked by. The bathroom was between her room and Lark's. The stairwell to
downstairs was between Robin's room and the room that had been her parents. After
a breath, she opened that door, hesitating, always feeling like she should
knock first.

"This was my parent's bedroom," she said. There
was still a big double bed in here, and a low, long dresser. At one end of the
room, in front of a wide door to a walk in closet, there were two battered old
reading chairs, a floor lamp and a small table. She had given their clothing
away a long time ago, but there was still a collection of books in the built-in
bookcase behind the door. Zack spotted them and paused, studying the titles. She
looked around while he did that, remembering the various stages of clutter the
room had gone through, progressing from her parent's bedroom and private
retreat to a sickroom for Mother to a sickroom for Dad. When Robin had gone
away to college, Carl had moved in here, but he hadn't disturbed the collection
of books much and he'd cleared out his things when he left.

She started to tell Zack about that, about Carl's move in
here, but he was reading a book he had pulled down from the shelf.

"This book is pretty recent," he commented showing
her the cover of a military thriller that had been popular a couple of years
ago. "I thought your parents died several years ago."

"That one was Carl's. This was his room for a while. He
read his way through Dad's books and added a few more."

"Your Dad was interested in science?"

"More as a hobby than anything. He was a tool and die
maker out at the plant, but on his own, he read about science. Hard science. Physics,
astronomy, that kind of thing." Diana smiled at a related memory. "Mother
read novels, light ones, romance mostly, but she always ended up giving them to
the county library. She said Dad never left her any room on the shelves
anyway."

When they left the room, she closed the door behind her. Closing
doors was a habit, she realized, but practical as well this time of year. She
had closed the heating vents as they abandoned each room, so she kept doors
shut to heat only the parts of the house they were using.

With a quick breath to calm herself, Diana crossed the hall
and went into her room. This door was ajar, the way she had left it. Her room
was different, she realized, as Lark's room was different. Lark's room was
painted in bright, primary colors and had decorations all over it. She had
painted her room, when it became her room, a soft peach color that faded away
in the right light.

At one point a couple of years ago, she bought a new bed and
dresser despite her guilt about buying new furniture, but left Grandmother's
old armoire along the wall at the foot of the bed. At the front of the room, at
the front of the house, she had placed her desk, a heavy oak thing of
indeterminate age she had polished and refinished as a project years ago. Her
room was full of clutter, the bed half made, clothes leaking out of the closet,
pictures of Lark tucked into the corner of the dresser mirror, a framed picture
of the three of them, Robin, Carl and her, on her bedside table.

She turned, realizing she had led Zack directly into her
room, and started to explain.

"This was Grandmother's room when I was growing up and
it was my favorite room in the house."

"Now this is your room," he said, smiling faintly,
"and a very nice room it is. Very female, very comfortable. Like
you," he said.

She felt heat rush up her cheeks and retreated towards the
windows, the ones that overlooked the fields of the farm next door.

"I'm sorry, Diana," he said. She turned to face
him. "I didn't mean to embarrass you." He was starting to back up. "This
feels like a private place," he said.

"I'm just not used to anyone else coming in," she
said after a minute. He paused in his retreat, waiting by the door. "Even
Robin didn't come in here. She never did much to her room when she moved back. Maybe
it was all those years living in dorms, I don't know, but she didn't seem to
care much about how things were arranged or decorated."

He nodded, then turned to walk into the hall. She followed
him and stepped out, closing the door gently behind her. They went down the
hall again, glancing in to check on Lark, pausing at the attic door. After a
look back at her as if verifying that it was all right, Zack opened the attic
door and started up the steep stairs. There was a small window at the top of
the stairs, spilling pale bright light into the narrow passage, brightness that
made the dim environment of the attic room even more so.

Diana nearly walked into Zack, who had paused a few steps in.
There were windows at the far end of the attic, in the front of the house,
which offered enough light to find the light switch on a beam at the top of the
stairs. Diana reached back to flip the switch.

"Wow," Zack said softly. The light was faded, but
it revealed what the attic stored.

There was furniture everywhere, tables of every size,
several types of chairs, bed frames, small cabinets, dressers, mirrors, rugs,
and a couple of desks. There were a number of trunks, including the one
great-grandmother had brought the china in, although the china was now packed
in heavyweight cardboard boxes that a moving company sold. On one side of the
attic, someone had made a sort of informal closet, a casually enclosed space
with a couple of poles, to hold the clothing that somehow was too important to
get rid of, like Mother's wedding dress, although Diana wasn't sure anyone
would ever wear the stuff again.

Everywhere else, there were boxes and cases and trunks,
various peoples' accumulations over the years, the things that someone had
decided not to throw away. They carried them up the narrow stairs and left
them, safely stored away. From time to time, on top of furniture or next to
trunks, there were small items that should have been stored away, but weren't,
items that she or Robin or Carl had played with and never put away, things that
people brought up and meant to put away, but didn't.

Of course, in the area closest to the stairs, there were the
seasonal things that every family stores: Christmas decorations, extra folding
chairs and a card table, portable fans, a small canvas covered rack of coats
and other out-of-season clothing that someone actually did wear at least one
part of the year, and other oddball items like a picnic basket, some baseball
and soccer gear, and a few boxes of books that Diana vaguely remembered
bringing up a couple of years ago.

She turned back to look at Zack and found him still staring.

"Do you actually know what's up here?" he asked.

She smiled faintly, enjoying his reaction.

"In general," she said. "Part of the problem
is that the family got so small. Grandmother Stonehouse had eleven children but
all of them but Pa and two of his brothers died before they were adults. The
two brothers, my uncles, moved north to farm in Illinois and never came back. They
left things here, but Grandmother wouldn't throw them away."

"Was all of this left to you? Or is this yours and
Carl's?"

He had never asked, she realized.

"Grandmother left it all to me. She left some money to
Carl, money from the sale of the fields, and to Robin, money she had inherited
from great grandmother, but she left me the house and all of its contents. Before
she died she told me if I ever needed money -- or got tired of the place -- to
have antique dealers from Chicago or St. Louis come up here and bid on the
furniture. It was her informal bank account."

"You could open an antique store with what's up
here."

"I doubt if anything is that valuable," Diana
said, "but some of the little things are old enough to be valuable just
because they still exist, and are in pretty good shape."

Zack sighed, a big breath.

"So, can I look around or shall we just dig out the
dining room table?"

"And the rugs, and I think there's some china. But look
around if you want."

"I'm going to be sore tomorrow," he complained
mildly.

She started across the room, walking carefully towards the
spot she and Carl had stashed the dining room table. It was in pieces, three
pieces of the top and two big frames for the legs. They were each heavy pieces,
but if they took their time, it shouldn't be too bad.