His Best Friend's Baby (11 page)

Mindy giggled. “It didn’t make you eager to be a father?”

He shuddered again.

“They showed us a film at the Lamaze class last week.” She wrinkled her nose. “It was pretty graphic. I couldn’t help thinking yuck.”

“Yeah, but you should have seen the look on those parents’ faces when I wrapped the baby and laid it on her chest.” Funny, he’d forgotten that, but the scene came back to him as if it had taken place a few months ago instead of ten years ago: the father hyperventilating and making strangled sounds of joy, and the young mother smiling so softly, with such awe.

“Do you suppose he’ll look like Dean?” Mindy laid her hands over the mound of her stomach and looked at it. “Maybe with freckles?”

Wow. A little Dean. The idea made something twist uncomfortably in Quinn’s chest. To compensate, he joked, “If it’s a girl, let’s hope she looks like you. Dean’s nose. Not so good.”

Mindy giggled again, color back in her cheeks. “You didn’t have any sisters or brothers, did you?”

He shook his head. “Just me.” Until Dean came along. “You?”

She shook her head, too. “I don’t think Mom was crazy about pregnancy, childbirth or motherhood.”

“What about your dad?”

Her smile trembled. “He was great. He’d get down on the floor and play board games with me. I have this picture of him playing Twister. You know. One foot on the blue spot, one on the red, a hand behind him on the yellow...”

Quinn nodded. He’d seen ads.

“His hairline was receding even then, and he wore glasses with thick lenses. I think he was a geek. Big surprise, since he was a software designer. I don’t know why my mother married him.” She tried to smile again. “I...really missed him when he died.”

“I never knew my father.” Quinn was startled to realize the words had come from him.

Quinn didn’t look at Mindy. He didn’t want to see her pity.

“Do you have any pictures of your mother?”

“No.” His voice sounded harsh now. “I doubt anyone ever took one.”

“I’ll bet you could find a high-school yearbook, or something like that.”

Now he did meet her eyes, his own hard. “Why would I want to?”

She didn’t back down. “Curiosity? Don’t you wonder sometimes if the way you remember her is really the way she looked?”

“I don’t think about her.” He still sounded cold, but he knew he was lying. And he could see that she knew it, too.

“Dean didn’t tell me very much about what happened to you. He said I should ask you sometime.”

“There’s not much to tell.” Quinn managed a shrug. “She was a drug addict. Sometimes she fought it, but she always lost.”

Mindy asked tentatively, “Did she try to be a good mother?”

Had she tried? Quinn gave a sharp, painful nod. “Yeah, in her own way. She never shot up in front of me, and she didn’t have parties at our place. I don’t think she left me alone until I was—I don’t know—maybe five. Not for long enough to really scare me, anyway. She put me in school, even went to a few open houses. But, she got skinnier and skinnier and her hair lank and her eyes...” Dead. They’d been dead, long before she was. He’d looked into his mommy’s eyes and known.

“She really did that? Just left you alone?”

“She’d disappear. At first it was just overnight, but then she’d go for a couple of days. Sometimes a week, or even two weeks. She’d say, ‘Now you be good and go to school,’ but I wouldn’t. I’d just...huddle.”

Why was he telling her this? Quinn had no idea. Nonetheless, he finished the story, voice raw. “The last time, the police came instead.”

“Oh, Quinn,” Mindy whispered.

“Not what you’d call a stable childhood.”

“And I complained about my mother!”

“With good reason. Didn’t she understand that you might lose the baby if you didn’t have some help?”

“I don’t know if she
wanted
to understand.” Mindy bit her lip. “Because taking care of me would have been inconvenient.”

Quinn growled.

“I wish...”

When she didn’t finish, Quinn prodded. “Wish what?”

“Oh...” Her eyes shimmered. “Just that we’d been friends sooner, I guess. It bothered Dean that we weren’t.”

Yeah, it had. Quinn had known at the time how much Dean wanted his best friend and his wife to like each other, but Quinn hadn’t really tried. He hadn’t figured out yet why.

“I’m sorry, too.”

Both were silent for a long moment. Then Mindy said, “Maybe he knows. I mean, now. That...you’re doing what you can, and that we’re talking.”

“Talking?”

“Instead of just being polite.”

That’s what they’d done. They’d been civil for Dean’s sake to hide...what? He’d always believed it was disdain on his part, but now he wasn’t so sure. And for the first time, it occurred to him that she had never, even from the get-go, been as easy with him as she was with other people. He wondered why.

“You didn’t like me, did you?”

Her gaze shied from his. “I wouldn’t say...”

“Come on. We’re being honest.”

She took a deep breath and met his eyes again. Her cheeks were flushed. “Okay. No, I guess I didn’t like you.” Her forehead furrowed. “Although it wasn’t quite that. I mean, I didn’t, because you looked at me like... like I was a hooker Dean had brought home.”

Quinn winced.

Absorbed in untangling her recollections, Mindy didn’t seem to notice. “Somehow you always made me uncomfortable. I’m not sure that was your fault. Maybe—I don’t know—you reminded me of someone.” She gave a fake-sounding laugh. “Maybe you gave me a traffic ticket. I was actually a little scared of you, which I resented. So I suppose I was snippy to hide it.” She stirred. “We blew it, didn’t we?”

“Yeah, we did.” He gave her a wry smile.

“Why
did
you look at me that way?” she asked unexpectedly. “Did you think I was out for his money or something?”

He rolled his shoulders, feeling tension he hadn’t known was there. “No, it wasn’t that.”
Then what
had
it been?
he asked himself. “Dean always had a woman around,” he explained. “I hardly paid attention. They came and went.”

“Isn’t that normal for a bachelor his age?”

“Well, sure, but...” Quinn struggled for the right words. “He had a pattern. Until you came along. He’d fall in love. I mean, everyone around him would be rolling their eyes. She was all he’d talk about. There’d be this escalation as he courted her, and then maybe a couple of months of contentment once he had her. Then...” He shrugged. “His interest would wander. She wasn’t exciting anymore. Suddenly, someone else would be. The last woman was gone, he was in love again. It was as if he needed that first excitement.”

“The way he always wanted new things,” Mindy said slowly. “He’d only had his pickup truck a year when he decided he had to have a new one. He needed an extended cab, he claimed. He lost so much money when he traded the last one in. I tried to argue, but it was like he didn’t even hear me. He
wanted
that truck. He spent weeks doing nothing but reading reviews of pickups.”

So she’d noticed. “With women, it was pretty much the same. He coveted, he was flushed with triumph when he got whatever it was he wanted, and then he was bored with it. Or her. After a while, I quit taking him seriously when he claimed to be in love. Then, out of the blue, he announced that he was marrying you.”

“And you thought...”

“That you were holding out for a ring,” Quinn said bluntly.

“Thus the scathing way you’d look me over.”

For the second time in this conversation, he winced. “I didn’t realize I was that obvious.”

“It never occurred to you that he might really be in love?”

“I guess in a way I wasn’t sure he was capable of it. Not the ‘till death do us part’ kind.”

She challenged, “So you would have looked at any woman he married the same way.”

What did she want him to say?
I didn’t think you were up to his weight?

“I thought you were too young.”

“You mean too shallow, don’t you?” Eyes spitting fire, she struggled to sit up again.

There she was, shaped like a pygmy goat, in her flannel pajama bottoms, a white T-shirt cut like a tent and decorated with a spot of pizza sauce, her hair disheveled, and she was fighting mad.

Before he could answer, she snapped, “Well, did it ever occur to you that
Dean
was shallow? I loved him, but, honestly, the man didn’t even read the newspaper! He didn’t care about world events, or politics, or ideas. He didn’t
want
a wife with any depth! I didn’t know...”

With a small gasp she stopped, as if she’d said something she hadn’t even known she was thinking.

“Are you saying you fit the bill?” Quinn paused, then finished with quiet intensity, “Or that you didn’t?”

She struggled the rest of the way upright. “I loved him! I did!”

But maybe, Quinn diagnosed, she wouldn’t have
kept
loving Dean. Maybe
she
would have gotten bored. And right now, she didn’t want to believe that.

“It’s okay,” he said.

“No, it’s not!” Using the arm of the couch, Mindy pushed herself to her feet. “I shouldn’t have said something I didn’t mean. It’s you,” she said with venom. “You always goad me. I don’t know why.” Tears sparkled in her eyes. “Good night.”

“Mindy...” Feeling sick, he rose, too.

“I don’t want to talk about it anymore.” She gave him a last look, full of grief and knowledge she couldn’t evade and hatred because
he
was the one to trigger unwelcome awareness. Then she walked out and a moment later he heard the bathroom door open and close.

Alone in the living room, he closed his eyes and let the wave of self-revulsion crash over him.

CHAPTER TEN

M
INDY
LAY
AWAKE
staring at the dark square of window. She napped in snatches all day, making it harder and harder to fall asleep at night.

And tonight... Oh, she’d been awful to Quinn! Mindy punched her pillow. He hadn’t said anything, only asked a simple question.

Are you saying that you fit the bill?
Or that you didn’t?

Squeezing her eyes shut, she saw her big, lanky husband with his easy grin and disarming freckles. He was strong, funny, gentle and ambitious. So, okay, she’d begun to notice that his interests were pretty limited, that he just didn’t care about anything outside his immediate sphere. Well, so what?

She moaned and turned her face into the pillow. Quinn hadn’t implied a thing.
She
was the one to freak when she heard what she’d said. She hated knowing she had started to get bored when Dean had gone on and on about the riding lawn mower he’d decided he needed despite the fact that their yard wasn’t big enough to justify it, or the fishing trip she’d skipped, or which player’s RBI was awful this year. She’d give anything now to go back and really listen instead of going, “Uh-huh,” while continuing to read the newspaper out of the corner of her eye.

She’d never thought Dean was dumb, or less than her intellectual equal. Look at the business he’d started! How many small businesses succeeded on the scale Fenton Security had?

But his tastes had been so different from hers. He’d liked shoot-’em-up movies with flashy special effects or long chase scenes. Sports.
Any
sport. Whatever was on TV was okay. He could get excited about curling if that was all that happened to be on.

From the time she was little, her dad had taken her to exhibits at the Seattle Art Museum or funny little foreign films, or they’d gone for the whole day down to the Seattle waterfront, visiting the aquarium and then spending two hours at the Elliott Bay Bookstore. She’d loved climbing in the castle in the children’s room at the bookstore when she was really young, and then reading in it when she got older. Her dad had bought her books, subscribed to magazines for her. Dean hadn’t read anything but
Sports
Illustrated
and the sports page.

Her mother hadn’t been much of a reader either—another of the mysteries of why her parents had gotten married in the first place and then had stayed together. Mindy had loved college, where she had friends to talk to about books and art and the odd things she sometimes wondered about. She’d kind of thought that marriage meant having somebody to talk about those things with forever.

Dean had listened to her when they were dating. In those early days, he’d seemed to enjoy arts-and-crafts fairs and prowling plant nurseries and window-shopping in Pioneer Square. But not long after they’d married, he’d started making excuses. Oh, he’d already promised Colin to go fishing. Then she’d started making excuses, too. Maybe he wasn’t the only one who’d pretended. Or maybe when you were first falling in love, you genuinely
were
fascinated by everything the other person thought and did and enjoyed. Maybe it was natural to have that fascination wear off.

It just would have been nice, she’d thought wistfully at the time, if they’d been left with more interests that they truly had in common.

What she hated to think—what had scared her tonight—was that they’d both been just a little dissatisfied with their choice. What if Dean had fallen in love again—with some other woman? What if having a child together hadn’t been enough?

But he was dead and she’d never know. So why did the whole idea upset her so much?

Maybe, she thought with disquietude, because Quinn
didn’t
bore her. Quinn’s house was filled with books. He didn’t drive the latest-model car. The music in his collection was eclectic. The house itself had charm, but it wouldn’t impress anyone. Dean had really, really loved to impress people.

Quinn mowed his small lawn with an old-fashioned push mower that had no engine at all. She’d peeked in the garage the other day and seen it, along with Dean’s Camaro and a tidy workbench and tools that made her itch to play with them.

She liked talking to Quinn, too. The other night they’d spent an hour arguing about the ethics of big business after watching the documentary The Corporation. She’d never have even gotten Dean to sit down and watch a film like that.

“Who wants to see talking heads?” he’d have said dismissively.

But the talking heads had had interesting, scary, provocative things to say. Quinn seemed to think so, too.

She’d been so sure she didn’t like him! Or so sure she didn’t
want
to like him. Mindy wasn’t sure which.

Except, a niggling feeling inside told her she
did
know. She just didn’t like the answer. She didn’t like her secret suspicion that her husband’s best friend had unsettled her because... No! Why even think it? Quinn was being nice now for Dean’s sake, not hers. He’d be horrified if he knew that, despite her ponderous body, she was having stirrings of... No, there she went again. The point was, all she’d do was confirm his initial belief that she’d been too young and...and flighty to have deserved Dean’s love and vows.

And maybe, she thought unhappily, he was even right.

* * *

S
HE
STAYED
IN
BED
the next morning until Quinn had left. His footsteps paused once in the hall outside her bedroom, but he didn’t knock and she would have pretended to be asleep if he had.

By evening, she’d decided she had just been silly the night before. All widows probably wondered whether their marriage would have endured if their husband had lived. There were a lot of “if onlys” that wandered through your mind, when you couldn’t go back and change anything or see what really would have happened.

She’d made the firm decision not to compare Quinn and Dean. It was pointless. She was lucky Quinn was being so nice and that they were able to enjoy some of the same movies and that they could have a good discussion or a rousing argument, since he was determined to take care of her for Dean’s sake. Staying here was...nicer, since he wasn’t glowering at her all the time anymore.

When she heard him arrive home, she detoured to the bathroom to peer at herself in the mirror and brush her hair before she went out to say hi.

He was already setting a bowl and casserole dish on the stove when she sat on a stool at the breakfast bar.

“Hey.”

His gaze swept unreadably over her. “How are you feeling?”

Mindy made a face. “Bored. As if I weighed three hundred pounds. How was your day?”

He grunted. “We found Marvin. Dead.”

“Oh, no! His poor mother.”

“Telling her was no picnic.”

“Does that mean he was your guy? Or not?”

“Probably was.” Quinn grabbed olive oil from a cupboard and set out spices. “He must have become a liability. Either he had a big mouth or he was panicking.”

“Oh, dear,” she said again. “Where was he found?”

“Lake Union. Marina owner spotted him.”

He talked a little more about his day as she watched him slice potatoes.

Finally she asked, “What are we having?”

“Hmm?” He glanced up. “Oh. Oven-fried potatoes, garden-burgers and a fruit salad.” Apparently satisfied with the quantity of potatoes, he sprinkled them with olive oil, rosemary and other spices. Then he spread them in the casserole dish and put them in the oven.

“Quinn.” Mindy took a deep breath. “Tomorrow’s my doctor appointment.”

“Right. I hadn’t forgotten. I plan to drive you. What time?” He was now assembling fruit and had pulled out a second cutting board.

“Ten. Um... What I was wondering is if you’d like to come in with me.”

His hands stilled. “In with you?”

“Yes. I mean...” She gripped the edge of the countertop. “To hear the baby’s heartbeat. And...well, to talk to the doctor. Since you’ll probably be driving me. When I go into labor. Or when she decides to induce.”

One brow lifted. “Probably?”

“You might be caught up at work. I could call a cab.”

She could tell he didn’t like that idea. Frowning, he mulled it over.

“You have my cell-phone number. I’ll be available.”

“Okay,” she agreed, not pointing out that he might be in the middle of, say, inspecting a body that had just been pulled from Lake Union.

After a moment, he began chopping an apple. “Sure,” he said as if he didn’t recognize how momentous her offer had been. “I’d like to hear what this doctor has to say.”

So it was that the next morning, he sat next to her in the waiting room at the women’s clinic, looking as out of place as—she tried to think of the right analogy—as a jaguar strolling by a swing set in a suburban backyard. Dangerous, and not quite domestic, she thought, stealing a look at him frowning and flipping through the notebook he invariably carried.

She tried to see him with other eyes. After all,
she
knew he wore a holster and gun under that worn black leather coat and that his reactions were, according to Dean, scary fast.

But however hard she tried, she still saw the qualities that had unsettled her when she’d first met him. To start with, he was six feet tall or maybe a little more, broad-shouldered and obviously fit and strong. Compared to him, most men looked...soft. The black slacks and jacket didn’t help, but really it wasn’t his wardrobe so much as a grimness about the set of his mouth coupled with a stillness and sense of containment, as if he was both guarded and hyperalert. His eyes, a startling blue, had a laser intensity when he looked up at an arriving couple. Mindy suspected he was very, very good at interrogation.

But he also had that air of suppressed sadness, of melancholy, that she’d found as disturbing as anything. Sometimes, when he didn’t realize she was looking, his eyes were so bleak it sent a shiver through her.

Brendan Quinn, she had always suspected, was a lonely man, but one who would never accept pity.

And now he sat next to her in the waiting room as if he were any husband or father, when the idea of him changing a baby’s diaper was impossible to bring into focus. Slamming a suspect against a wall, sure. Cooing in response to a toothless smile...probably not.

But, to his credit, he was here, and he stood promptly when the nurse appeared in the doorway and called, “Mindy Fenton?”

Mindy was no sooner through the doorway when the nurse handed her a cup.

“You know the drill!” she said cheerily.

Quinn looked at it as if it were an incendiary device. “You have to...?”

“How do you think they found protein in my urine?”

“Ah.” Then, unexpectedly, a grin tugged at his mouth. “I don’t suppose you ever have trouble producing some.”

“Smarty-pants,” Mindy muttered, turning in to the restroom. The closing door shut off his laugh.

When she was done, he waited in the hall while the nurse weighed her and then took her blood pressure. Finally, Mindy was left alone to take off her maternity pants, heave herself onto the examining table and wrap her lower half like a mummy in the white drape.

“I’m ready,” she called, and Quinn stepped in, looking cautious.

“You know, men have it easy,” she told him.

He eyed the metal stirrups on the table with thinly disguised horror. “Yeah, we do.”

At a knock on the door, he turned.

Dr. Gibbs swept in, Mindy’s chart in her hand. “Hello,” she said briskly, holding out a hand to Quinn. “You are...?”

“Brendan Quinn.” He shook. “Mindy’s husband was my best friend.”

“I’m staying with Quinn,” Mindy explained. “He was nice enough to offer, and now he’s paying the price. I’m being waited on hand and foot.”

The doctor’s assessing gaze became approving. “Good for you.”

“He even went to the Lamaze class with me the other night. I thought he might like to hear the baby’s heartbeat.”

“Good idea. Let’s have you lie back.” Dr. Gibbs supported Mindy as she lowered herself. Then she lifted her maternity shirt to expose the huge, pale mound of her belly. “You’re certainly looking pregnant.”

Despite her self-consciousness, or perhaps because of it, Mindy laughed. “You think?”

As they all looked, a knob poked up, then disappeared. Her belly shifted, as if a whale had passed under the surface of smooth water.

“I’m glad to see the baby so active.” Dr. Gibbs smiled and took her stethoscope from around her neck. “Let’s have a listen.”

After she’d located the baby’s heartbeat, she signaled for Quinn to come closer. He was staring at Mindy’s belly with something, she thought, of the same faint shock with which he’d regarded the cup. But he put the stethoscope to his ears.

“Hear anything?”

Frowning, he shook his head.

The doctor moved the diaphragm a tiny bit, then a tiny bit farther, stopping when she saw his eyes widen.

He listened raptly, his expression stunned. Mindy’s heart gave a bump at the wonder on a face she’d thought too closed, too cynical, ever to show such vulnerability or surprise.

After a long moment, he removed the stethoscope from his ears with seeming reluctance. “It’s so fast,” he said, still staring with fascination at her belly.

“Babies have a much faster heartbeat than adults.”

“I guess I knew that,” he admitted. “From CPR. But it’s really racing.”

Dr. Gibbs chuckled when Mindy’s stomach bulged and shifted again. “Well, the little guy—or gal—seems to be doing gymnastics right now. Your heart would probably race if you were doing somersaults, too.”

Quinn’s laugh had a rusty sound. “Yeah, I suppose it would.”

Dr. Gibbs sent him into the hall while she did a quick exam, then left Mindy to get dressed. Both returned to the room when Mindy was slipping on her flip-flops. It might be November, but she had no intention of putting on shoes—especially since there was no way she could get close enough to her feet to get socks on first.

“You’re looking good,” the doctor informed her. “Your blood pressure is down, I don’t see the puffiness around your ankles or face, and the baby is obviously active. I recommend we continue to wait.”