Unexpected Father. Carolyne Aarsen

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СКАЧАТЬ was that baby crying again. This was followed by the murmur of a woman’s voice. The crying grew louder, then stopped.

      Then he heard someone pounding on his door.

      He stepped around the last couple of boxes he had to unpack and opened the wooden door of his apartment.

      A tall, thin woman with lanky brown hair stood in the hallway with her back to him. She wore blue jeans and a discolored purple hoodie. A black bag was hooked over one arm; a suitcase lay at her feet.

      She was holding a little girl, who looked to be a year and a half old, wearing a stained, white sleeper. The toddler had sandy, curly hair, brown eyes shimmering with tears and a mustache of orange juice. She stared at him over the woman’s shoulder, her lip quivering.

      “Can I help you?” Denny asked.

      The woman turned and Denny’s heart fell like a stone as he recognized Deb.

      His sister-in-law. Ex-sister-in-law, he corrected.

      “Hey, Denny. Long time no see,” she said in her raspy, smoker’s voice. She jiggled the baby a moment, then held her up, handing her to Denny.

      “Hang on to her a minute, wouldja?”

      Not sure what else to do, Denny took the little girl, catching a whiff of cigarette smoke and old milk.

      “What is going on?” he asked just as the toddler pushed at him with sticky hands, whimpering again.

      Deb handed him the black diaper bag, then pushed the suitcase toward him with her sneakered foot. “You may as well know, and I don’t know how to tell you better than this, but Lila’s dead.”

      Denny stared at her, his grip loosening on the baby in his shocked surprise.

      The little girl whimpered and he quickly pulled her close again, trying to wrap his head around what Deb had so causally thrown at him.

      Lila? Dead? Why hadn’t anyone told him?

      “What? When?” The questions tumbled out of his shocked confusion. “How did it happen?”

      “She got sick about three months ago,” Deb said, crossing her thin arms over her chest, looking down at the floor as if still remembering. “Got some infection from a cut. Never got better. She died in the hospital a month ago.”

      All this was delivered in an emotionless monotone that beat at him like waves on sand.

      Denny’s heart slowed and then sped up as reality slowly sunk in.

      “A month? You never thought I should know this?” Denny felt a white-hot anger mingled with sorrow growing in his gut as his brain caught up with the information Deb had thrown at him so casually.

      The baby let out another whimper and he realized he’d been holding her too tight. He eased off, anger still coursing through him.

      “You were divorced,” Deb said, as if that explained everything. “Didn’t think you would care. Lila always said you two fought like cats and dogs. Besides, I didn’t have your number and Lila’s phone got stolen in the hospital. Took me this long to track you down.” Her voice grew shriller with each word and Denny struggled to stifle his own anger with her, reminding himself that Deb had also recently lost her sister.

      But at least she’d had a month to deal with it.

      As her words found a place in his mind, awareness of the weight and warmth of the sticky little girl he held worked its way through his fog of confusion.

      “And who is this?” he asked, dropping the diaper bag Deb had handed him into the hallway and looking down at the little girl.

      She stared up at him, her deep brown eyes unblinking. Cute little thing even if she looked and smelled as though she needed a bath.

      Deb only looked past him into the apartment, nodding as if she approved, then looked back at the little girl now tucked against Denny’s hip.

      “That’s Ella. Your daughter.”

      “What?” The word burst out of him as another shock jolted him. “No. That’s impossible.” Denny glanced at the little girl he was holding. His angry outburst had erased the smile and her lip quivered again.

      He jiggled her to settle her down as he looked back at Deb.

      “No way.”

      “Yes, way.” Deb continued, “Lila found out she was pregnant after you guys signed the final divorce papers.”

      “She was lying. She’s done this before.” Denny felt like he was on an amusement park ride, his head going one way, his body another, and nothing making any sense. Even in his shock he thought of the fake pregnancy that had gotten them married.

      “She wasn’t seeing anyone before or after she divorced you. Your name is on the birth certificate as the dad.”

      As Deb spoke it was as if her words barreled toward him from the far end of a tunnel. He stared at her as his mind slipped back to his last months with Lila. She had been miserable, staying away all hours, never coming home, and when she was home, all she did was yell at him and complain about being on the ranch.

      Denny had started going back to church, trying to find the strength to keep their relationship going. One night she had come home early, in tears. He had asked her if she was unhappy because she was seeing someone else, but she had vehemently denied that.

      So he’d convinced her to try again. She had agreed, and he’d believed her. After months of being apart, they had been intimate.

      The next day she’d left and the next week he’d been served with divorce papers.

      When he’d called her to find out why, she had said it was because she wasn’t happy on the ranch. Never would be and it wasn’t fair to him to stick around and prolong the agony. Those motives had started to sound pretty suspect when Denny found out how much money she’d wanted to settle the divorce.

      Denny looked back at the little girl. The girl Deb said was his daughter. “How old is she?”

      “Eighteen months.”

      “She can’t be mine,” he protested, unwilling to believe what Deb was saying.

      “The certificate is in the diaper bag if you want to check,” Deb was saying. “And so is her health care card. You’ll need that if she gets sick.”

      “Why didn’t Lila tell me about her?” he insisted as the baby squirmed. “She never said anything about this pregnancy.”

      “She said you two never talked after you split.”

      That much was true. Lila’s petition for divorce had been a shock, but at the same time a small relief. In spite of his last-ditch effort to keep the marriage going, when he’d received the papers he’d decided not to contest it. Nor had he had any desire to be in contact with her.

      The proceedings had been a financial drain. Once Denny had walked away from Lila with precious little in the bank and a bitter СКАЧАТЬ