Leftover Love (23 page)

“A gin and tonic will be fine for me, dear,” Colleen MacDonald replied as he walked to the small home-bar in the corner.

“Just some tonic water for me,” Layne said. “With lemon if you have it handy.”

“Tonic water?” Ice clinked in the glasses as he fixed drinks for the three of them. “When did you turn into a teetotaler? Not that you ever did drink much.”

“Just recently,” she admitted, and waited until he was on the way back to them before she continued. “I have some good news for you. At least,” Layne added to qualify her statement, “I hope you’ll ultimately regard it as good news.”

“What’s that?” Her father passed them their glasses.

“You’d better sit down, Dad,” she suggested gently. After a skeptical glance, he returned to his chair. “You see, you’re going to be grandparents.”

“What?!” said her father, fairly exploding.

“You aren’t serious, Layne.” Her mother simply stared.

“How can that be?” her father demanded irately.

“It’s very simple, Dad. I’m going to have a baby.” There was an air of serenity about her. All the soul-searching hours had already been spent. The confirmation had been made—just this afternoon by her family doctor. “I know I probably shouldn’t sound so proud of it,” Layne conceded. “But I’ve had a lot of time to think. And I want this baby. I’m going to love it, and I’m not going to be ashamed to bring it into this world.”

“Layne,” her mother murmured, moved to tears by the calm declaration.

“Who’s the father? That’s what I want to know,” her father demanded, always the more volatile.

“Creed Dawson,” Layne replied evenly.

“The man you told me about? The one who was a partner on the ranch?” her mother asked and received an answering nod.

“Just exactly what all went on at that ranch? What kind of woman is this Mattie Turner that she’d let a thing like this happen?” The drink was slammed on the round table by his chair as her father pushed out of it, ready to blame anyone but his “little girl.” “I knew I should have gone and taken you away from there the minute your mother told me you were going to stay there for a while. I knew it was a mistake!”

“Calm down, Keith,” Colleen MacDonald admonished. “You may not have high blood pressure, but at this rate you’re going to get it.” She turned again to Layne. “Does he know about the baby?”

“It was before I found out for sure. I don’t think he quite believed me,” Layne admitted and tried to shrug away that painful memory. “It doesn’t matter anyway.”

“Didn’t quite believe you, eh?” her father repeated angrily. “I’d like to get my hands on him.”

“Oh, Daddy, I don’t think so.” Layne tried to suppress the smile that tugged at the corners of her mouth as she looked at her father’s slim build. “Creed would make two of you.”

“You’ll have to tell him, Layne,” her mother inserted.

She glanced briefly at her hands. “Yes, I’ll … write him a letter.” Only because she believed he had the right to be informed, not because she thought it would change anything.

“I’ll have my attorney write him a letter,” her father stated.

“No, you won’t,” Layne countered and swung her feet to the floor to walk over to him. “Come on, Dad.” She put an arm around him and hugged him in a cajoling fashion. “I’m not upset or angry. Don’t you be.”

The anger faded reluctantly from his expression as he looked at her with grudging acceptance of her attitude. “Did you love him?”

“Yes.” She still did; nothing had changed that. “And I’m going to love his baby just as much. Try to be happy, Dad,” Layne urged gently, a smile slanting her mouth. “We’re going to have a baby.”

He shook his head in mild dismay, but there was already a faint smile showing on his face when he hugged her. “You always could wrap me around your finger,” he declared. “You’re going to move out of that apartment and come back home to live.”

“I’m going to do no such thing,” Layne said firmly even as she smiled at him.

“When’s the baby due?” her mother asked. “You can’t be very far along.”

“About a month.” She still experienced that tingling sense of awe whenever she thought about the life growing inside her. It was scary and exciting all at the same time.

“You found out so soon?” her mother said with some surprise. “But how did you know?”

“I guess I suspected because I had this vague nausea in the mornings, but mostly it was this feeling of something happening inside me.” Layne searched for a way to explain it, finally feeling free to talk about the wonder of the experience. As she looked at her mother to expound on the theme, she saw the flicker of pain and knew instant regret. “Mom, I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be,” Colleen MacDonald hastened to assure her. “I never had the privilege of knowing what it was like to have a baby grow inside me, but you’re going to experience that miracle. And I’m happy for you.”

“Now let’s don’t all start crying,” Keith MacDonald said at the sight of the tears building in the eyes of both his women.

“We won’t,” Layne promised with a sniffling laugh.

“There’s so much to do before the baby comes,” her mother declared. “I don’t know where to start.”

“Here she goes,” her father muttered, but with fond indulgence.

“Keith, there’s all those boxes of Layne’s baby things that we stored in the attic,” she recalled. “Clothes and toys and crib sheets—and I don’t know what all.”

“You still have all that?” Layne was amazed.

“And more,” her father assured her. “Your mother saved everything.”

“Well, not quite everything,” her mother protested, not too vigorously.

“In case you’ve forgotten, I’m the one who carried all those boxes up to the attic,” he reminded her.

“Let’s get them down,” Layne urged.

“There’s bound to be a lot of it that you can use once we start going through the boxes,” her mother said.

“Not tonight,” her father said with an adamant tilt of his head. “Have you forgotten dinner, Colleen?”

At the prompting question, Colleen MacDonald started backing toward the hall. “We’ll get them down this weekend, then,” she said, agreeing to the postponement.

Her father’s arm remained around her shoulders as Layne watched her mother leave to check on dinner. A silence drifted into the room. She turned her head slightly to look at this man who had cherished her and protected her from the time she’d entered his life. The shadow of pain and regret darkened the love that was in his eyes when he looked at her.

“A grandfather, huh?” His smile was tight, and a little on the crooked side.

“This isn’t the way you thought it would happen, is it?” Layne murmured softly with a twinge of pain. “You wanted
to be able to go around to all your friends, pass out cigars, and brag about the baby your little girl was going to have.” The caressing stroke of his hand on her hair lightly pressed her head to his shoulder. “That’s the way I wanted it to happen, too, Dad. I loved him so much. And I was so sure that big ugly brute was just as crazy about me. You aren’t the only one who wanted the rice and the wedding cake to come before the baby powder and formula. So did I, Daddy.”

Tears slid down her cheeks to be absorbed by his shirt. He said nothing and just held her more closely to him. Daddies don’t cry, so he hid his red-rimmed eyes in her hair.

In the early afternoon on Saturday, Layne carried the last armload of books out of the small den and dumped them on the couch in the main room of her apartment. When she had rented the apartment several years ago, the agent had referred to the small room off the living room as a second bedroom, even though it was barely large enough to accommodate a single bed and dresser. Layne had converted it into a cozy den with a desk and shelves where she could do her writing.

Now, of course, it was the perfect size for a nursery. Layne returned to the room and looked around. A bronze band was tied around her forehead, the color emphasizing the russet highlights in her hair. Her hands were perched on the hips of her snug-fitting jeans, which showed a flat stomach. The sleeves of her tawny gold sweatshirt were pushed up around her elbows while the loose bulk of the material concealed the fullness of her breasts and the slender curve of her waist.

The desk, with its side extension for a typewriter, was all that was left in the room, except for the bookshelf stands.
When her parents arrived, her father could give her a hand moving the desk into the living room, but Layne thought the shelves might be useful to hold the baby’s things.

Maybe it was premature to turn the room into a nursery when she still had nearly eight months to go before the baby was born, but it somehow made things more definite. She smiled with an exhilarated kind of satisfaction at this first step she was taking to prepare for the baby’s birth.

The doorbell to her apartment rang and Layne went to answer it at a loping jog, anticipating the arrival of all the things that would start to fill the nursery. When she opened the door, her mother peered around the cardboard boxes stacked high in her arms. Layne grabbed the top one before she moved out of the way to let her parents in.

“Good grief, what did you do? Bring everything?” She laughed when she saw the way her father was loaded down.

“I thought you might enjoy looking through some of your baby keepsakes even if you can’t use them,” her mother explained.

“We might as well just pile them all here on the floor so we can start sorting through them,” Layne instructed, picking an empty space in the middle of the room.

“I’ll go get the baby bed out of the car and be right back,” her father said, and he headed for the door as soon as he had set down his load of boxes.

Not wasting any time, Layne sat cross-legged on the floor among the boxes and started opening them. “It’s like Christmas!” She laughed to her mother as she began to drag out the baby items.

Together they sorted through the articles, setting aside the ones she could use and repacking the others. Her father’s return with the baby crib was a minor interruption that lasted no longer than it took for Layne to send him to the junk drawer in the kitchen for the tools to reassemble it.

“Look at this.” Layne held up a tiny undershirt. “I can’t believe I was ever small enough to wear this.” The doorbell rang and she scrambled to her feet to answer it, casting a puzzled glance at her mother. “Did Dad go out to the car again?” she asked on her way to the door.

Her mother frowned. “I thought he was in the nursery.”

The instant Layne opened the door, shock rooted her to the floor. A pair of hesitant green eyes looked back at her as Mattie stood solemnly in the outer corridor.

“Mattie.” She finally recovered her voice. “What are you doing here?” The question contained her dazed feeling of disbelief.

“I came mainly to apologize,” Mattie stated with her usual bluntness while a rueful smile slanted her mouth. “After I spoke to your mother on the phone the other night—”

Layne whirled about to stare at the slim blonde woman who was already gravitating toward the doorway. “You spoke to her?!” Incredulity and question ringed her voice.

“Yes,” Colleen admitted, a trifle guiltily. “After you told me how upset Mattie had been over the way you had deceived her, I realized I was partly to blame for that. I’d made such an issue about protecting her from any rude shock out of her past that I felt I had influenced you into concealing the truth from her. So I called her to explain that. And partly”—a faintly embarrassed smile crept into her expression—“to make sure she didn’t think I had raised you to be thoughtless and self-centered.”

“Oh, Mom.” Affection choked Layne’s voice as she smiled at this woman who had loved her and stood by her through everything. “You’re really something, do you know that?”

“Yes, she is,” Mattie agreed with a matter-of-fact ease. “When I got that phone call from her, I had already realized
why I had been so hurt and angry over the way you had deceived me. It was the guilt and shame that I felt. I have to be honest, Layne, and tell you that I didn’t feel guilty for giving you to a couple who would love you and provide a good home. It was the way I had deceived John all those years, never trusting his love for me enough to tell him about you. So all those hateful accusations I was saying to you were really the way I felt toward myself. So there I was when your mother called, feeling rotten for the way I’d treated you and certain you wouldn’t want to ever hear from me again after the way I practically threw you out of my home.”

“That isn’t the way I felt at all, Mattie,” Layne declared earnestly.

“Your mother managed to convince me of that.” Mattie smiled at her counterpart. “That’s why I’m here … to say I’m sorry … and to give you this.” She handed Layne the package she was holding. “It’s your baby blanket,” she explained. “I thought you might want to have it for your baby.”

Too overwhelmed by emotion to speak, Layne tightly clutched the soft package to her body. She supposed her mother had told Mattie of her pregnancy when she phoned. Before Layne had a chance to confirm that, her father came out of the new nursery.

“The crib’s up,” he announced, then noticed the third woman standing in the open doorway and smiled pleasantly. “Sorry, I didn’t realize you had company.”

“Come here, Dad.” Layne extended a hand to draw him into their circle. “I want you to meet Mattie Gray.”

No more identification than that was needed as his attitude immediately turned stiff and cool, prompted by a touching jealousy that the appearance of her natural mother might, in some way, deprive him of Layne’s love
and devotion. It was an unreasoning fear that Layne understood very well.

“How do you do, Mrs. Gray.” He shook her hand formally.

With her usual astuteness, Mattie eyed him directly. “You should be very proud of your daughter, Mr. MacDonald.” There was a hint of a smile around her mouth. “And don’t look so skeptical. If you knew me better, you’d know that I never say anything just to be tactful. Whenever I look at Layne, I have to consciously remind myself that she is the baby girl I had. She will probably always be a person I’ve grown to like first, and a daughter to me second.”

There was an almost visible relaxation of his defenses. Layne was relieved to see there was a chance that they could all get along and she wasn’t going to be caught in the middle of some tug-of-war.