The Blessing Read online

  Since all Jason’s clothes were made for him, it wasn’t unusual that Parker should ask if he wanted something sent.

  “No. I want normal clothes. Denim. Blue jeans.”

  “With or without fringe?”

  For a moment Jason stared at the phone. In twelve years he had never heard Parker make a joke. Was this the first one? On the other hand, did she even have a sense of humor? “No fringe. Just normal. Country clothes but not too expensive. No Holland and Holland; no Savile Row.”

  “I see,” was Parker’s toneless reply. If she had any curiosity about any of this, she didn’t say so.

  “Now call Charles and tell him to get down here and make this kid something good to eat.”

  There was a pause on the phone, which was unusual for Parker, as she usually agreed to anything he said instantly. “I was wondering where Charles would be staying, because he’ll want proper equipment.” Considering that Jason’s private chef was a snob as well as a genius, this was an understatement.

  Max was trying to pull himself to a standing position by dragging on the faded cloth on an old end table. If he pulled it off, three flower pots were going to crash onto his head. “Just do it!” Jason snapped into the phone, then shut it off and went to retrieve Max. Was this the fifth or sixth time the baby had tried to kill himself in the space of an hour?

  “Okay, kid,” Jason said as he untangled little hands from the cloth and picked the baby up. “Let’s go see what we can do about lunch. A lunch with no sugar, no salt, no butter, no flavor at all.”

  At that Max again planted another wet raspberry against Jason’s whiskery cheek, and Jason found the feeling not unpleasant.

  CHAPTER SIX

  “GET THE JOB?” JASON ASKED AS SOON AS AMY ENTERED the house.

  “No,” she said despondently, then reached eagerly for Max. “And I’m bursting with milk.”

  To Jason’s embarrassment, she plopped down wearily on the worn-out old sofa, unfastened her dress, unsnapped her bra, and proceeded to feed Max, who eagerly began sucking.

  “How about dinner out tonight?” he asked. “My treat.”

  “Ow!” Amy said, then stuck her finger in Max’s mouth and made him release her breast for a moment before he latched on again. “Teeth,” she said. “You know, before he was born, I was in love with the whole romance of breast-feeding. I thought it would be something sweet and lovely, and it is, but it’s also . . .”

  “Painful?” he asked; then when she smiled in reply, he smiled back.

  “I think I would have known that you were gay even if David hadn’t told me. You’re very perceptive, and for all that you look hard and unfeeling, you’re really a bit of a softie, aren’t you?”

  “I’ve never been called that before,” Jason said as he glanced at a faded and cracked mirror hanging to his right. Did he actually look hard and unfeeling?

  “So what did Max get up to while I was gone?”

  At that Jason smiled and soon found himself expending a great deal of energy into making a funny story of his afternoon with Max. “I think for Christmas I’ll give him a set of knives, something he can easily hurt himself with. As it is now he has to work so hard to hit himself in the face and to try to crack his skull. I think I’ll make life easier for him.”

  Amy laughed and said, “Knives with strings attached. Don’t forget the strings, because how else can he choke?”

  “Ah, yes. The strings. And I think I’ll take him to visit a paper factory. I’ll set him down in the middle of the place and let him eat his way out.”

  Amy switched Max to the other breast, and when she did so, Jason motioned for her to lift her arm so he could slide a pillow under it so she wasn’t supporting the weight of Max’s head. “And don’t forget drawers that he can roll out then close on his fingers.”

  They were really laughing now, and Jason suddenly realized that for the first time in years a woman was genuinely laughing at his jokes.

  “How about a pizza?” Jason said abruptly. “A huge one with everything on it. And giant Cokes and garlic bread?”

  “I’m not sure I should because of my milk,” Amy said hesitantly. “I’m not sure babies should have garlic-flavored milk.”

  “Doesn’t seem to bother the Italians,” Jason answered.

  “That’s true,” Amy said, then smiled at him. “Pizza it is. But only if I can pay for my share.”

  Before he thought, Jason said, “You’re too poor to pay for anything,” then was shocked at what he’d said.

  “Too true,” Amy said good-naturedly. “Maybe over dinner we can figure out what to do with my future. Do you have any ideas?”

  “None whatever,” he said, smiling. “You could always marry some nice young doctor and never work again.”

  “Doctor? Oh, you mean David. He’s not interested in me.”

  “He’s mad about you,” Jason answered.

  “You are funny. David is in love with all the women in this town; that’s why he’s so popular. Besides, I’m not a gold digger and I don’t want to live off any man. I want to do something, but I’m not sure what I can do. If only I had a talent, like singing or playing the piano.”

  “It looks to me like you have a talent for being a mother.”

  Amy cocked her head to one side. “You’re very sweet, you know that? Can you dial for pizzas on that phone of yours?”

  “Sure,” he said, smiling.

  Later, as Max slept on the sofa, they lit candles and talked. He asked her about her life with Billy, and after an initial protest, she started talking, and he soon realized that she was hungry to talk.

  And as she talked, he began to see the town drunk in a different light. Billy Thompkins had been a joke to the people of Abernathy since he was fourteen years old and began to drink. He wrecked cars as fast as he could get into them. His parents mortgaged their house to pay Billy’s bail to get him out of jail time after time. But Amy saw something inside the man that no one else had.

  Jason had ordered a giant pizza, and while Amy talked, she didn’t notice that she ate three quarters of the thing. Long ago Jason had forgotten what it was like to be in a position that a pizza was a rare treat.

  As soon as the last bit of cheese was gone, Amy gave a great yawn, and even though it was only nine P.M., Jason told her to go to bed. Standing, she bent to pick up Max, but Jason brushed her hands away, then scooped the baby up without waking him.

  “You’re a natural daddy,” Amy said sleepily as she led the way into her bedroom.

  Smiling at Amy’s assessment, Jason put Max into the beat-up old playpen that was his bed, then quietly left the room. Oddly enough, he too felt sleepy. Usually he didn’t go to bed until one or two in the morning, but something about pulling a baby away from one danger after another had exhausted him.

  He went to his bedroom, pulled off his trousers, and fell into bed in his shirt and underwear and was aware of nothing until he heard a high-pitched scream from Max. Leaping out of bed, he ran into the kitchen, where he saw Max in his booster seat and Amy feeding him. They were both fully dressed yet it was still dark outside.

  “What time is it?” Jason asked, rubbing his eyes.

  “About six-thirty. Max slept late this morning.”

  “What was that scream?”

  “Practice, I guess. He likes to scream. Shouldn’t you get some clothes on?”

  Jason glanced down at his bare legs. “Yeah, sure.” Then he looked up at Amy’s red face. She bared her breasts before him yet was embarrassed by his wearing more than he’d wear if he went swimming? With a smile at her turned head, he felt a little rush of pleasure that she was attracted to him.

  David, he thought. David. David is in love with Amy.

  “This was stuck in the front door this morning, and there’s a car outside,” she said, nodding toward a rolled-up newspaper on the kitchen table.

  Ignoring her plea for him to get dressed, he rolled the rubber band off the newspaper and took out a note wrapped around th
e keys inside. It was a typed message saying that his clothes were in the back of the car and that the other matters had been taken care of. He would be contacted. “Sounds like a spy message,” Jason said under his breath, then looked up to see if Amy had heard him.

  But she hadn’t heard anything, for her face was so full of excitement that at first he thought something was wrong with Max. But the baby was happily smearing oatmeal in his ear, so Jason looked back at Amy.

  Looking like a mime, she was pointing speechlessly at the newspaper he had left spread on the table. There was a double-page ad about a huge sale in a baby store in a town about ten miles from Abernathy. The owner had put together entire nurseries, with furniture and bedding, and was selling the lot for two hundred and fifty dollars each. Amy was pointing at a photo of a bed, a rocking chair, a changing table, and a mobile that looked as though it had cowboys and horses on it. She was making a strangling sound that was a sort of, “Uh, uh, uh.”

  Maybe a devil got into him, but he couldn’t help teasing her. “Is there any cereal in the house or has Max eaten everything?” He picked up the paper and opened it. “Looks like gold prices are down. Maybe I should buy some.” He was holding the paper so the huge ad was right in front of Amy’s face.

  Amy finally recovered her voice. Ignoring him, she said, “Can I afford it? Can I? What do you think? Maybe I should call David and borrow the money from him. Oh, no, we have to be there when the store opens at nine. How can I get there? Maybe David—”

  At that Jason put down the paper and held the car keys in front of her nose, jingling them.

  “We’ll go see David,” she said hurriedly. “I’ll pay you back for the gas later. Look here at the bottom. I wonder if clothes are included in the outfit? ‘Everything for the baby.’ Oh, heavens, but Max has never had any clothes that haven’t been worn by someone else. May I borrow your phone to call David?”

  “I’ll lend you the money,” he said, wishing he’d included clothes in his orders to his secretary.

  “No. I can pay David back in work, but you don’t need anything.”

  Jason frowned at that, and he wasn’t sure why. Wouldn’t it be better if she did borrow from David? After all the whole idea was to get David and Amy together. And when it came to that, why hadn’t David come over to visit last night?

  “Go look at my car,” Jason said. “Then come back in here and tell me how much you’ll charge to clean it.”

  With a “Watch Max” tossed over her shoulder, she scurried out the front door. Ten minutes later she returned. “One hundred dollars,” she said grimly. “How can you be such a pig?”

  All Jason could do was give her a crooked grin. Had Parker overdone it on the car?

  “And another hundred and fifty to do something with those clothes in the back. Really, Mr. Wilding, I had no idea you were such a slob.”

  “I, uh,” he began, feeling like a little boy being bawled out by his mother.

  “Now go put some clothes on, then come and eat your breakfast. I mean to be at that store when the doors open. He says he has only eight sets to give away. You know, I bet this has to do with a divorce. That’s why he’d give this furniture away rather than let his wife have the money. Some people have no conscience. I wonder if there are children involved. Why are you standing there looking at me? Go and get dressed. Time is wasting.”

  Blinking in disbelief at the astonishing story Amy had just concocted, Jason went to his bedroom to shower and put back on his dirty, wrinkled clothes. How had Parker known to fill the car with dirty clothes that needed Amy’s attention?

  When he went into the kitchen to get his measly bowl of cereal, Amy was looking like the cat that stole the cream. She was up to something, but he had no idea what.

  “I borrowed your phone,” she said sweetly. “I hope that was all right.”

  “Sure,” he said, then looked down at his bowl. “Couldn’t wait to call David?” The words were out of his mouth before he caught them.

  “Oh, no. Just a few girlfriends. But I’m afraid a couple of the calls were long distance. I’ll pay you back . . . somehow.”

  “I have an apartment,” he said, and they both laughed when Amy groaned at the thought of cleaning the place.

  Amy made them leave the house at seven-thirty, and when Jason opened the car door, he was appalled. What in the world had been done to the vehicle? The inside was plastered in mud, which had seeped down into every crevice. He doubted if the windows would work because of the mud that had oozed down between the glass and the door. In order to clean the car, the door would have to be taken apart. In the back was a pile of clothes that had been given the same mud bath.

  Having seen the car already, Amy was prepared and she spread an old quilt over the passenger seat, then climbed in, Max on her lap. “You don’t have to tell me,” she said softly, once the door was closed, “but your lover retaliated by driving your car and your clothes into a lake, didn’t he?”

  “Something like that,” Jason muttered, thinking he was going to have a word with his secretary. When he’d said dirty, he meant, maybe, soda cans and potato chip bags.

  “It’s odd that the engine isn’t clogged with mud, though,” she said as the car started easily. “Oh, no!”

  As Jason swung the car into the street, he looked at her in question.

  “He filled the car full of mud, didn’t he?”

  “Could we not talk about my personal life?” Jason snapped. He was sick of this talk of his male lover.

  For a moment Amy didn’t say anything, and he regretted his outburst. “I hope they have a car seat,” he said as he glanced over at her, and she smiled back.

  “Do you have any cash? I don’t—”

  “Lots,” he replied, glad the moment’s discomfort was gone. “So what other jobs have you tried to get besides cleaning?” Jason asked as Amy held Max firmly on her lap. If they were spotted by the police, they’d be arrested because Max was unrestrained. And Jason refused to think what would happen to Max if they had a wreck. On impulse he reached out and gave Max’s little hand a squeeze and was rewarded with a toothy grin.

  Amy didn’t seem to notice, as she was telling Jason about all the jobs she had applied for and even been hired to do, yet had lost for one reason or another. “Twice I’ve had to quit because the boss . . . Well . . .”

  “Chased you around the desk?”

  “Exactly. And it’s just so difficult to find a job around here. I’ve thought I might be a good aromatherapist. What do you think?”

  Jason was saved from answering that question by the sight of the store just ahead. But he was shocked at what he saw. Under the sign, Baby Heaven, there were about fifteen women with baby carriages waiting for the store to open.

  “Oh, dear,” Amy said. “I only called seven friends. They must have called their friends, and, oh, no, there are more cars arriving and they have to be for Baby Heaven because the other stores don’t open until ten.”

  “You called all these people?” Jason asked.

  “I was afraid they wouldn’t see the ad and afraid they might miss the sale. You know, it’s odd that there aren’t more people here than there are. What about the other people who saw the morning paper? Maybe they know that this is just a sales gimmick and it isn’t real. Maybe the owner has done this before and there isn’t any merchandise. Maybe—”

  Before she could launch into one of her fanciful stories, Jason got out and opened the car door for her. “Come on, let’s go around the back and see if we can get in a few minutes early.”

  “Do you think that’s fair?”

  With his back to Amy, Jason rolled his eyes. “Probably not, but then this is for Max, isn’t it?” he said as he took the baby from her. “Besides, it’s too cold to wait out here and the store doesn’t open for thirty minutes yet.”

  Amy gave him a dazzling smile. “You do know how to fix things, don’t you?”

  As Jason turned away, Max snuggled comfortably in his arms, he couldn�
�t help smiling, for Amy had a way of making him feel at least ten feet tall. When he pounded on the back door and it opened, he was startled to see one of his top executives from his New York office standing there wearing a gray coverall, a broom in his hand.

  “You wanta see the stuff early?” the man asked, sounding as though he was not a graduate of Harvard Business School.

  Annoyed, Jason could only nod. He didn’t like it when his employees did things he hadn’t first sanctioned. Even when Amy briefly took his arm and squeezed it, Jason was still not appeased.

  Once they left the back storage area and walked into the store, Jason was even less pleased, for there were two of his vice presidents, both men wearing coveralls, both moving baby furniture around.

  “You are our first customer so you can have the pick of the lot,” came a feminine voice and they turned to see a striking woman standing behind them. She was, of course, Jason’s secretary, only she wasn’t dressed in her usual Chanel suit but in something he was sure she had bought at Kmart, and her long red hair was pulled into a bun on top of her head. And there were three yellow pencils stuck into the lump of hair. Even so, she couldn’t hide the fact that she was five feet ten inches tall and as stunning as any runway model.

  Parker didn’t blink at Jason’s or Amy’s speechlessness. “What would you like?” she asked. “Blue? Pink? Green? Yellow? Or would you like to see our one and only designer set?”

  “Oooohhhh.” Amy emitted a sound that came straight from her heart and out her lips, then started following Parker as though she were in a trance.

  Parker kept up a running stream of chatter as she walked. “It’s all closeout goods. Nothing is used, but it’s all discontinued merchandise. I hope you don’t mind that these are really last year’s goods.”

  “No,” Amy said in a voice unnaturally high pitched. “No, we don’t mind. Do we, Mr. Wilding?”

  She didn’t wait for Jason’s answer because before her was a sample room and even Jason had to admit that his secretary had outdone herself. He could smell wallpaper paste, so she must have worked through the night to get this done, and he must say that they’d created a fabulous room. And with his eye for merchandise, he knew that what he was seeing was the top of the top line. Parker must have bought everything in New York and brought it to Abernathy in his jet.