Pursued by the Playboy (8 page)

Never before had he been particularly interested in the thoughts of his female companions, had in fact sometimes wished they’d keep their views to themselves rather than cluttering up precious silence with chatter. 

“You’re a pig,” Emma would sometimes say, shaking her head when he expressed such chauvinistic sentiments at family dinners. 

Perhaps, but in this case he was starting to understand what his brother-in-law called “enlightened male thinking.” 

“You know it’s time to retire your little black book,” Alex told him, “when you want to get into a woman’s mind as much as you want to get into her pants.”

Emma, overhearing that remark, snorted.  “Thank you, Dr. Phil.”

Alex caught her around the waist and pulled her into an embrace that had even Marc blushing.  By the time they broke apart, Emma laughing breathlessly and Alex grinning, the rest of the family had drifted away, giving them some privacy. 

Later that evening, after the twins had been put to bed, and the women had sequestered themselves in the kitchen over chocolate and gossip, Alex offered Marc a snifter of brandy and a final piece of advice. 

“Sex is all well and good,” he said.  “But unless you have friendship and laughter and love along with it, you might as well be alone.” 

Chapter
8

The doorbell woke Kate from a dream.  She’d been running in slow motion, as if through molasses, the sound of children’s laughter echoing in her ears.  No matter how far she ran, she couldn’t seem to escape the sound. 

For a few moments, she lay blinking in the dark, heart still hammering, skin damp with sweat.  As the bell pealed again, she glanced at her bedside alarm clock.  12:17. 

She stifled the flare of anticipation at the thought that it might be Marc.  He was on call, which made it highly unlikely that he’d show up at her door—especially unannounced, past midnight. 

“No predicting
how often they page you,” he’d told her earlier, over dinner.  “Some nights it’s dead silence.  Or maybe you go in once for an urgent consult or a complication on one of your cases.  Other times it’s call after call all night long.”

“So you might not get any sleep?” she said.

“Depends on the night.”  He shrugged.  “Regardless, I’d rather it not spill over and ruin your sleep, too.”

So, if it wasn’t Marc at the door…maybe one of the neighbors?   Kate didn’t know them other than in passing:  a vague exchange of greetings when she picked up mail, or a grateful smile for holding open the exterior door when she entered with hands full of grocery shopping.   She wasn’t acquainted well enough with any of the other residents of her building to expect a middle-of-the-night visit…unless it was an emergency?  Then again, wouldn’t an emergency prompt a call to “911” rather than an appeal to some unfamiliar neighbor? 

Or maybe something more sinister was going on.  An intruder, looking for an unoccupied apartment to break into?   A serial rapist, hoping some unwary woman would open the door?

The bell rang again, followed by a flurry of knocking.  Whoever it was, he wasn’t going away.

Kate slid out of bed, grabbed a robe and cordless phone, and headed for the door.  A quick glance through the peephole had her opening the locks in alarm.  “Mom?”

Margaret Warner, mouth pinched, gray-streaked hair straggling in uncharacteristic disarray, stood with her fist raised as if to knock again.  Behind her stood two massive suitcases, a duffel bag, travel tote, and several bulging cloth shopping bags. 

“Hello,
Katherine
.”

“Mom.”  Kate blinked.  “What are you doing here?”

“I’ve left your father.  I need a place to stay.”

“What do you mean you left him?”

Margaret glanced up and down the empty corridor.  “Do we need to do this out here?”

Kate tightened the belt on her robe and tucked the phone into a pocket.  “Sorry.  Come in.” 

Margaret swept inside, leaving Kate to bring in the luggage. 
While
Kate
dumped the last of the bags just inside the door and secured the locks
, her mother
inspected the sparsely furnished living room.  It occurred to Kate that this was the first time since she’d moved back from
Berkley
that either of her parents had visited. 

She moved past her mother and cleared some space on the futon.  For a moment she hesitated, arms piled high with books.  Then she deposited everything on the floor, beside several already precariously leaning stacks of texts, journals, and notebooks.   “You want some tea?”

“Tea,” Margaret repeated, as if she’d never heard the word before.

“I’ve got chamomile and Sleepytime.”  At her mother’s continued silence, she sighed and moved toward the kitchen.  “Have a seat.  I’ll put on some water.”

Kate took her time preparing a tray. She couldn’t begin to imagine what might have prompted her mother, after twenty-some years of animosity, to pack up and leave in the middle of the night.  The kettle boiled.  She poured two steaming mugs, dunked in a couple packets of herbal tea, and added containers of milk, sugar, and one of the packages of chocolate chip cookies she’d bought to fuel her grant-writing marathon over the coming week. 

“So what happened?” she asked, after her mother took several tentative sips and set the mug aside. 

“I moved out.”

“So you said.  Why now?  Why not tomorrow—or last week, or ten years ago?”

“I gave him the best years of my life.”  Margaret paused, lips twisting as if tasting something bitter.  “What a cliché.  The best years!  For what?  You think I wanted to be at home, cooking, cleaning, ironing his shirts with just so much starch—because too much and they itch, too little and they wilt?  You think I asked to be a single parent while he traipsed up and down the coast from project to project, on this conference or that?”

“I’ve been on my own twelve years, Mom.  It’s a bit late to beat that drum.”

“Don’t you dare take that tone with me,
Katherine
.   It’s not your place to sit in judgment.  You don’t know what it’s been like, all these years.”  She took a deep breath, nostrils flaring.  “He owes me.”

“Really?  How do you figure that?”

Margaret narrowed her eyes.  “Didn’t you ever wonder why you didn’t have grandparents?”

Startled at the turn of topic, Kate set down her cup.  “I thought they were all dead.” 

“Your father’s parents were.  Mine weren’t.  At least not until you were already school.”  She lapsed into silence.

“So what happened?” Kate prompted.

“You’re a smart girl, you can do the math.  Haven’t you ever questioned why you were born just four months after your father and I got married?  Believe me, honey, in those days no preemie would have survived that young.”

“So you were pregnant w
hen you got married.  So what?”

“I’ll tell you so what.  My parents disowned me.  Kicked me out.   Nice girls didn’t get pregnant out of wedlock.  Your father and I got married
because
I was pregnant.”  She brooded for a few moments before continuing.  “Not that it helped.  My parents weren’t the forgiving type.  They cut me off completely.  I didn’t find out they were gone until I read about it in the paper.  Big car collision on the Pennsylvania Turnpike.”

“You never said anything.”  Kate softened her tone.   “I’m sorry.  It must have been a shock, finding out like that.”

“I grew up in Bryn Mawr.  You didn’t know that, did you?  A debutante.  White dress, white gloves, made my bow to society at the Philadelphia Charity Ball.  On my father’s arm.”  She searched in her pockets for a tissue.  “Then—nothing.  It’s like I never even existed.  They left everything to the hospital.  The money, the cars, the house, everything.”

Kate didn’t know how to respond.  It wasn’t clear if her mother’s bitterness stemmed from the loss of family or the loss of inheritance.   Cautiously, she said, “What happened tonight?”

Margaret’s expression hardened.  “His girlfriend showed up.  Pregnant.”

“What?”

“He was married before, did you know that?  Of course not.  Never wore a ring, didn’t advertise it.  How was I to know?  I was just some silly deb he’d flattered and knocked up.  By the time I realized what had happened, he was ready to move on:  new project, new girlfriend.  Except I wouldn’t let him.  He had a responsibility to me, and to you, damn it.  It took him a while to get his divorce—no children there, thank God—and the next day we were in front of the justice of the peace.” 

Kate shook her head.  It was too much to take in.  Her mother as the other woman?  History repeating itself?  “How do you know she was telling the truth, this woman who showed up tonight?  Maybe it has nothing to do with Dad.”

Margaret picked up her mug again, then set it down without tasting.  “I’ve been waiting for the other shoe to drop for twenty-eight years.  There were girlfriends all along.  He just couldn’t keep it zipped.  And we fought—I don’t have to tell you how we fought, you were there.  But he’d always come back.”  Her smile was grim.  “I should have made him get snipped.  But I’d always hoped…maybe another child, a brother or sister for you.  I had a couple miscarriages.  You must have been three or four.  Then nothing.  And there he was, still running around.  I guess it was just a matter of time.  Maybe he was careful, I don’t know.  I told him I’d neuter him if he passed anything on to me.  But now it’s happened.  Payback.  She just showed up at the door, looking for him, bump out to here.  Half his age.  Younger even than you.”

“What did Dad say?”

“He’s in
Arizona
.  Some conference.”  She gestured vaguely.  “I haven’t talked to him.  He was supposed to take a red-eye back tonight.”

“So he’ll be home in the morning.  Don’t you think you should discuss this with him, before making any decisions?  What if it’s not his
child?  What if she’s lying?”

Margaret sat for a moment without answering.  Outside, a police siren wailed and then faded in the distance.  The steady ticking of the clock on the wall sounded loud in the ensuing silence.  “When I came to him all those years ago,” she finally said, “he believed me.  He might be a bastard and a cheater, but he did one good thing in his life, and that was to take responsibility for you.  And now you’re all grown, and look at you.  You’re a big shot professor at an Ivy League school.  You don’t need him anymore.  You don’t need either of us.” 

“That still doesn’t answer the question,” Kate persisted.

“Leave it,
Katherine
.  It doesn’t even matter if it’s true.  I don’t want to be there when he gets back.  I don’t want to see him, I don’t want to talk to him.  We’re done.  I can’t take it anymore.  He doesn’t care about me.  I’m not sure he ever has.  You were the one who kept him coming back, the one who stroked his ego, the one he could point to and say, that’s my kid, the wunderkind.  Me, I was just some stupid girl he met at a party, once, a long time ago.  I can’t compete.  Not anymore.  Not with you, not with this woman.  And if it turns out to be a hoax, there’ll still be someone else, and someone else after that, and I’m just tired of it all, I can’t do it anymore.  Can you understand that?  I can’t do it
.  I can’t.”

Kate had never seen her mother cry.  The sight of it now alarmed her.  She grabbed a box of tissues from a nearby end table.  “Here,” she said, crouching beside Margaret, offering her the box.  “It’s OK.  Everything will be fine.  You’ll get through this.”  She patted her mother awkwardly on the back.  “You’ll get some sleep, and things will look better tomorrow.”

It was nearly four in the morning by the time Kate got her mother settled in the
guest
room
on a pull-out couch.  She felt completely drained—physically and emotionally.  Despite her exhaustion, she lay in bed awake, thoughts churning, unable to reconcile her mother’s revelations with what she had seen and believed while growing up.
Outrage over her father’s actions warred with disbelief, and pity for her mother clashed with resentment at having the fallout of her parent’s disastrous marriage dumped in her lap. 

As the first rays of sun outlined her bedroom curtains, Kate exchanged her robe for running gear.  

Given the choice, she would have gladly traded tonight’s drama for the disrupted sleep she might have gotten with Marc, even on a busy call night. 

Chapter
9

“Do you happen to know a good therapist?”  Kate asked over lunch.  They sat at what had become their usual table at the White Dog Café. 

Marc took in the dark circles beneath her eyes.  “What’s going on?”

“My parents are separating.  Maybe.”  She toyed with her salad.  “My mother showed up last night, bags in tow.  It might help if she talked to someone.  Other than me, I mean.  A psychologist or psychiatrist or something.”

“I’ll ask around.”  He set down his fork.  “How about you?  Are you okay?”