Anne Peters - My Baby, Your Son

But who knew better than he that, in the long run—or even in the short—friendship and affection were poor sub- stitutes for what his younger brother Sean called the “Big L”?

“It’d be kinda neat, havin’ a brother,” Tyler said wist- fully.

“I can see how you’d feel that way.” Being the middle child of a mixed bunch of six, Jared certainly could sym- pathize. “Having brothers and sisters is a lot o’ fun. Most of the time. On the other hand—”

“Tommy’d really like a brother, too,” Tyler interrupted Jared’s attempt at rationalization through platitudes. “An’ he says his dad wouldn’t mind if you married his mom on account of he divorced her to go farmin’.”

“Farming?” Jared frowned. Last he’d heard, Thomas Mansfield, Sr., was a traveling salesman out of Seattle. “You sure?”

“Yup.” Tyler’s nod was emphatic. “Miz Mansfield even said. She said, ‘That man’s always lookin’ for greener pas- tures.’”

“Oh. I see…” Jared cleared his throat. He briefly de- bated setting Tyler straight on those “greener pastures,” but decided to leave well enough alone. “You guys sure’ve been talking, haven’t you?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Trouble is—” Jared cleared his throat once again “—people don’t just up and marry somebody just because their kids think it would be a good idea. I mean, I like Tommy’s mom a whole lot, but—”

“Tommy says she really likes you, too.”

Jared acknowledged the interjection with a smile and a nod, but continued to make his point as though Tyler hadn’t interrupted. “Like I said, it takes a heck of a lot more than liking each other for two people to get married.”

“Oh,” Tyler said dejectedly. “You mean like you gotta be in love, right?”

“That’s right.” Jared affectionately rubbed his son’s bristly short fair hair. “How’d you get so smart, anyway?”

But Tyler wasn’t to be diverted. He ducked away from his father’s hand, angling around in the seat and facing Jared with arms folded across his chest and his chin stuck out. “I know that Mom wasn’t my real mom.”

“So?” Puzzled as to where this unexpected turn of the conversation was leading, and unaccountably wary, too, Jared sent his son a frowning glance. “That’s never been a secret in our family, so what’s your point?”

Tyler returned the frown in spades. “I heard Grammy and Auntie Colleen talkin’ in the kitchen a while ago and Grammy said how sad it was that you weren’t ever really in love with Mom. So how come now you say people oughta be?”

“What?” The shock of what he’d just heard from his son made Jared almost put the truck into the ditch. What in the hell had his mother been thinking of, making a state- ment like that? Even though it was true, he damned well didn’t appreciate having his private life bandied about by a couple of gossip hens like his mother and sister. Within earshot of his son, yet.

Struggling to control the swerving pickup, he eased it to a stop on the shoulder. He rammed the gear into Park, draped an arm across the steering wheel and turned to his son. “Now listen, Tyler…”

“No, Dad,” Tyler shocked him by obstinately interrupt- ing. “I wanna know why can’t you just be with Miz Mans- field like you were with Mom?”

“Because it’s not that simple.” And one marriage with- out passion is enough in any man’s lifetime.

Engaging in a weighty exchange of glances with his tru- culent offspring, Jared wondered how he could ever have imagined he’d be able to raise this boy to manhood without ending up in a corker of a discussion like this at one time or another.

But…damn it. Jared wiped a hand across his mouth, then kept it there as he continued to contemplate his son and thought of how he never would have dreamed of tackling one or the other of his parents on issues like love, or sex, or any of the other off-the-cuff debates he suspected he and Tyler would engage in over the years.

Jared supposed it was because there’d been no need somehow when he was growing up. Things were as they were, as they always had been. Mom was Mom. Dad was Dad. Both of them had always been solid as the earth, and had been expected to be. Period.

Tyler’s young life on the other hand, for all Jared had done his damnedest to maintain a stable environment, had lately been a series of uncertainties and change. Inevitably, they had shaped the boy’s perceptions, made him wary. And while he, Jared, would do his utmost to shield him from further upheaval….

“Were you in love with my real mom, Dad?”

“Huh?” Involved in his own dark ruminations, Tyler’s softly voiced question completely blindsided Jared. He was still fumbling to regain his emotional equilibrium and for- mulate a response when Tyler’s next words knocked the pins out from under him again.

“I got a picture of her.”

Though Tyler whispered the words, had he yelled them at the top of his lungs, Jared could not have heard them more clearly. Nor been more staggered.

“Of my real mother, I mean,” Tyler added. “Mom gave it to me before she died. An’ she told me it’d be okay if I looked at it. An’ I do now, sometimes.”

Big and somber, Tyler’s brown eyes—so like April’s, Jared grudgingly conceded—met his own thoughtfully nar- rowed ones. “She’s real pretty.”

“Yes, she is.” What had Regina been thinking of, giving Tyler that photo? Which photo? Jared couldn’t remember keeping one around for her to find, never mind pass on to his son. “What kind of picture is it?”

“A real nice one. From outa a magazine.”

“Oh.” Jared was perplexed. Regina had obviously clipped the picture—she had known about April, of course. But what he couldn’t figure out was why she would have wanted Tyler to have it. For all intents and purposes she had always been Tyler’s mother.

“She’s never coming back here, is she?” Tyler said.

“Who, Mom?” Jared’s mind was still on Regina. “Re- member we talked about that. I thought you understood—”

“No,” Tyler interrupted with querulous impatience. “I don’t mean that. I mean the other one, the real one. The one in the picture….”

“Oh.” Jared heaved a sigh, thinking, That one is out here now, but you’ll never see her if I can help it.

“Well, son, it’s like this.” He stalled, furiously wracking his brain for an answer that resembled the truth but wouldn’t devastate his son. “And maybe Mom already told you—”

“That she’s famous,” Tyler interrupted glumly. “Yeah, I know.” His motions listless, he plucked at a loose thread on his shirt. His voice, usually so full of swagger and chal- lenge, grew small enough to break his father’s heart “Didn’t she wanna be my mom, Dad?”

“Yes, of course, she did.” Damn April Bingham to hell for causing all this grief. “It’s just that, well, she plays the piano way better than most anybody else and so people all over the world want to hear her play and that takes up all of her time. See, that’s what being famous is.”

“Is it better’n being a mom, Dad. Do you think?”

“No.” Almost violently, Jared reached across the seat and hauled the boy into his arms. “No way,” he said fiercely, willing conviction into his voice even as he damned the woman who had chosen fame over mother- hood.

And who’d better not have come back here to try to make up for lost time.

“Never,” he said, clenching his teeth to keep from giv- ing voice to the wave of protective tenderness and love that flooded him because he knew it would embarrass this tough little guy. But he hugged him hard. After all, in spite of his sometime swaggering ways, Tyler was just a grieving little boy who, less than a year ago, had lost the only mother he had ever known. And his grandfather, too.

“Being a mom or a dad is the very best thing in the world to be,” Jared declared in a voice rough with emotion. “And don’t you let anybody tell you different. You hear?”

“Okay.” The word was little more than a soggy snuffle.

Jared rubbed his chin on his son’s cropped head. “And about Tommy’s mom…” he murmured. “She’s a great friend and that’s exactly the way I’d like to keep things. Besides…” He tightened his embrace around the wiry little body, relishing the closeness while poignantly aware that soon adolescent pride wouldn’t allow him to hold his son like this anymore. “Aren’t we okay, you’n me and Grammy? Huh? Don’t we have lots of good times, the three of us?”

“I g-guess so.”

“Damn straight,” Jared enthused in a voice that even to him sounded just a shade too hearty. “And things can only get better.”

Two days later Jared wanted to eat those words. He and Tyler had spent one of those days—Sunday—in Portland visiting Regina’s mother as well as seeing to a few things at their house, which as yet was unsold. Which was no wonder since Jared had not yet been able to bring himself to put it on the market. In fact, everything in it had been left exactly as it was when he, Regina and Tyler had made their home there.

Walking through it, watching Tyler rejoice in rediscov- ering this or that treasured toy, Jared fleetingly debated if the most effective way to avoid April Bingham might not be to move back there. But he just as quickly nixed the notion for two reasons. One, the house was like a monu- ment to the bittersweet sterility of his marriage to Regina. And two, it had never been his way to run from a problem.

Or at least, it was not anymore—courtesy of the painful lesson he had learned ten years ago.

His busy Monday had been punctuated by bouts of anx- iety. In fact, it got to the point where he’d been on the verge of dropping everything and tearing over to Cliff House to demand… what? That April Bingham explain her reasons for coming to her own house?

Ridiculous. You’re getting paranoid, Jared, m’boy. Lu- dicrous, to be obsessing over a problem that, for all he knew, existed only in his mind! The woman had a house here. She was on vacation.

And still he didn’t believe it.

So now it was Tuesday, and somewhere in the course of his morning rounds to the neighboring farms he had man- aged to convince himself that April would have contacted him by now if she was going to. In this somewhat improved state of mind, he stopped at the post office, which was actually no more than a large cubicle partitioned off from Mulrooney’s Supermarket.

He was collecting his mail, or trying to. Jean Ivers, Cap- stan’s aged postmistress and gossip queen, was making it difficult Little got by old Jean, who had made it her business to eyeball every piece of mail, coming or going, for as long as Jared could remember.

“Your Popular Mechanics came today,” she was saying as she handed Jared the magazine. “And you might want to take a look at this here big white envelope right off.”

“It’s from a lawyer,” she added after an expectant pause during which Jared said nothing as he turned the envelope over. “Out of New York City.”

“So I see.” Jared pocketed the letter, ignoring Jean’s visible disappointment with a flash of amusement that was quickly replaced by a rekindled feeling of unease. What the hell could a New York City lawyer want from a small-fry country veterinarian like himself?

Whatever it was, Jared’s gut told him he wasn’t going to like it.

He was not about to share his apprehensions with Jean Ivers, however. “How’s old Mouser handling that thyroid medication I prescribed?” he asked, directing a pointed glance at the huge tabby snoozing on a shelf by the back wall. “Any side effects?”