My Baby, Your Son. Anne Peters

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      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 СКАЧАТЬ