Nobody's Baby but Mine (20 page)

Jane was appalled. “No, really—”

“Please. You don’t need to say another word.” Turning her back on Jane, she hugged Cal. “I have to get to a meeting at church. Being the minister’s mother is becoming a full-time job; I wish Ethan would get married.” She glanced over at Jane, her eyes cool. “I hope you can spare some time for us on Saturday night.”

Jane felt the rebuke. “I wouldn’t miss it.”

Cal escorted his mother to the door, where they spoke for a few moments. Afterward, he returned to the kitchen.

“How could you do that?” she said. “You made me seem like a snob to your mother?”

“What difference does it make?” He straightened his leg to pull his car keys from the right pocket of his jeans.

“Difference? It was a direct insult to her.”

“So?”

“I can’t believe you’re being so obtuse.”

“Now I get it.” He set his keys on the counter. “You want to be the dearly beloved daughter-in-law. That’s it, isn’t it?”

“I simply want to be courteous.”

“Why? So they can start to like you, and then have their guts ripped out when they find out we’re getting a divorce?”

Uneasiness settled in the pit of her stomach. “Exactly what are you saying?”

“They’ve already mourned one daughter-in-law,” he replied quietly. “I’m not going to have them mourn another. When they find out about our divorce, I want them cracking a bottle of champagne and celebrating their oldest son’s narrow escape from a bad marriage.”

“I don’t understand.” Even though she did.

“Then let me spell it out. I’d appreciate it very much if you made sure that my parents can’t stand the sight of you.”

Her hands began to tremble, and she clasped them together in front of her. Until that moment, she hadn’t realized that she’d been entertaining a subtle, but nonetheless powerful, fantasy of being made to feel part of Cal’s family. For someone who had always wanted to belong, this was the final irony. “I’m the designated bad guy.”

“Don’t look at me like that. You came into my life uninvited and turned everything upside down. I don’t want to be a father right now; I sure as hell don’t want to be a husband. But you took away my choice, and now you have to make some of that up to me. If you’ve got an ounce of compassion in that heart of yours, you won’t hurt my parents.”

She turned away and blinked her eyes. He couldn’t have asked anything that would disturb her more. Once again she would be the outsider, and she wondered if this was always to be her role in life? Would she always stand on the fringes gazing in at other people’s families, at the bonds that seemed to come so easily to everyone else? But this time, if Cal had his way, she would be more than an oddity. This time she was to be loathed.

“A big chunk of my life is here in Salvation,” he said. “My friends. My family. You’ll just be around for a couple of months and then disappear.”

“Leaving behind nothing but bad memories.”

“You owe me,” he said softly.

There was a sense of justice in what he was asking that was almost eerie in its perfection. What she had done to Cal was immoral, which was why she’d been dogged by guilt for months, and now she had a chance to serve penance. He was right. She hadn’t done anything to deserve a place in his family. And she owed him.

He fiddled with his keys on the counter, and she realized he was uncomfortable. It was rare to see him looking anything but self-confident, and it took her a moment to understand. He was afraid she wouldn’t go along with his wishes, and he wanted a way to convince her.

“You might have noticed my parents are a little tense with each other right now. That weren’t like this before Cherry and Jamie died.”

“I know they married when they were teenagers, but they’re even younger than I expected.”

“I was my dad’s high school graduation present. Mom was fifteen when she got pregnant, sixteen when I was born.”

“Oh.”

“They kicked her out of school, but Annie told us that mom stood under the stadium during his graduation ceremony, wearing her best dress even though nobody could see her, just so she could hear him give the valedictory address.”

Jane considered the thirty-year-old injustice. Amber Lynn Glide, the poor mountain girl, had been kicked out of school for being pregnant while the rich boy who’d gotten her that way stood at the podium and received the community’s accolades.

“I know what you’re thinking,” Cal said, “but he didn’t get off scot-free. He had it plenty rough. Nobody expected him to marry her, but he did, and he had to support a family while he went through college and med school.”

“With help from his parents, I’ll bet.”

“Not at first. They hated my mom, and they told him if he married her, they wouldn’t give him a penny. They kept their word for the first year or so, but then Gabe came along, and they finally kicked in for tuition.”

“Your parents seem very troubled.”

He immediately grew defensive. She realized it was one thing for him to comment on the problem, but quite another for her to. “They’re just upset, that’s all. They’ve never been very demonstrative, but there’s nothing wrong with their marriage, if that’s what you’re getting at.”

“I’m not getting at anything.”

He snatched up his keys from the counter and made his way toward the door that led to the garage. She stopped him before he got there.

“Cal, I’ll do what you want with your parents—I’ll be as obnoxious to them as I can—but not with Annie. She’s halfway to the truth, anyway.” Jane felt a kinship with the old woman, and she had to have at least one friend or she’d go crazy.

He turned to look at her.

She squared her shoulders and lifted her head. “That’s the deal. Take it or leave it.”

He slowly nodded. “All right. I’ll take it.”

She smiled as she folded her jeans and put them away in the closet, then pulled out her nightshirt. Usually she bristled around dictatorial people, but she loved having Annie boss her around.

Annie had bossed Cal, too. On Wednesday morning he’d insisted on driving Jane to Heartache Mountain. When they’d gotten there, Jane had pointed out the front step and suggested he stop hiring other people to do what he should do himself. He’d set to work with a great deal of grumbling, but it wasn’t long before she’d heard him whistling. He’d done a good job on the step and then made some other needed repairs. Today he’d bought several gallons of paint at the hardware store and begun scraping the exterior of the house.

She slipped into a short-sleeved gray nightshirt with an appliqué of Goofy on the pocket. Tomorrow night she would be dining with Cal’s parents. He hadn’t mentioned her promise to distance them, but she knew he hadn’t forgotten.

Although she was tired, it was barely eleven o’clock, and she felt too restless to go to bed. She began to tidy her work area and found herself once again wondering where Cal went at night. She suspected he was seeing other women, and she remembered the reference Lynn had made to the Mountaineer. She’d asked Annie about it today and learned that it was a private club of some sort. Was that where he met his women?

Even though this wasn’t a real marriage, the idea hurt. She didn’t want him sleeping with anyone else. She wanted him sleeping with her!

Her hands stilled on the stack of printouts she’d been straightening. What was she thinking of? Sex would only make an already complex situation impossible. But even as she told herself that, she remembered the way Cal had looked today with his shirt off while he’d stood on the ladder and scraped the side of Annie’s house. Watching those muscles bunch and flex every time he moved had made her so crazy she’d finally grabbed his shirt, thrown it at him, and delivered a stern lecture on the depletion of the ozone layer and skin cancer.

Lust. That’s what she was dealing with. Pure, unadulterated lust. And she wasn’t going to give in to it.

She needed something to do that would distract her, so she carried her overflowing trash can downstairs and emptied it in the garage. Afterward, she gazed out the kitchen bay window at the moon and found herself contemplating the ancient scientists—Ptolemy, Copernicus, Galileo—who’d tried to unravel the mysteries of the universe with only the most primitive of instruments. Even Newton couldn’t have envisioned the tools she used, from the powerful computer on her desk to the world’s giant particle accelerators.

She jumped as the door behind her opened, and Cal walked in from the garage. As he moved across the kitchen, it occurred to her that she had never seen a man so at home in his body. Along with his jeans, he wore a wine red hen-ley, the kind made out of waffle-knit underwear fabric, and a black nylon parka. Tiny needle-points of sensation prickled at her skin.

“I thought you’d be in bed,” he said, and she wondered if she imagined the slight huskiness she heard in his voice.

“Just thinking.”

“Dreaming about all those potatoes you planted?”

She smiled. “As a matter of fact, I was thinking about Newton. Isaac,” she added.

“I’ve heard the name,” he said dryly. The hem of his parka flopped over his wrists as he pushed his hands into his jeans pockets. “I thought you modern-day physicists had forgotten all about old Isaac in your passion for the Big Guy.”

Hearing Einstein referred to in that way amused her. “Believe me, the Big Guy had a lot of respect for his predecessor. He just didn’t let Newton’s laws limit his thinking.”

“I still think that’s disrespectful. Isaac did all that work, then old Albert had to come along and upset it.”

She smiled again. “The best scientists have always been rebels. Thank God they still don’t execute us for our theories.”

He tossed his parka over one of the counter stools. “How’s the search for the top quark coming?”

“We found it in 1995. And how do you know what kind of work I’m doing?”

He shrugged. “I make it my business to know things.”

“I’m investigating the
characteristics
of the top quark, not looking for it.”

“So how many top quarks fit on the head of a pin?”

“More than you can imagine.” She was still surprised that he knew anything about her research.

“I’m asking you about your work, Professor. I promise you that I can at least grasp the concept, if not the particulars.”

Once again she’d let herself forget how bright he was. Easy to do with that muscular jock’s body standing in front of her. She pulled her thoughts up short before they could move any farther in
that
direction. “What do you know about quarks?”

“Not much. They’re a basic subatomic particle, and all matter is made up of them. There are—what?—six kinds of quarks?”

It was more than most people knew, and she nodded. “Top and bottom quarks, up and down, strange and charm. They got their names from a song that’s in James Joyce’s
Finnegans Wake
.”

“See, that’s part of the problem with you scientific types. If you’d take your names from Tom Clancy books—things people actually read—then the general public would understand what you do better.”

She laughed. “I promise if I discover something important, I’ll name it Red October.”

“You do that.” He looped his leg over a stool, then regarded her expectantly. She realized he was waiting for her to tell him more about her work.

She walked to the corner of the counter and rested one hand on the granite top. “What we know about the top quark is quite surprising. For example, it’s forty times heavier than the bottom quark, but we don’t know why. The more we understand about the top quark’s characteristics, the closer we come to exposing the cracks in the standard model of particle physics. Ultimately, of course, we’re looking for the final theory that will lead us to a new physics.”

“The Theory of Everything?”

“The name is facetious. It’s more accurately called the Grand Unification Theory, but, yes, the Theory of Everything. Some of us think the top quark will unlock a small part of it.”

“And you want to be the Einstein of this new physics.”

She busied herself wiping a speck from the granite with the tip of her finger. “There are brilliant physicists all over the world doing the same work.”

“And you’re not intimidated by any one of them, are you?”

She grinned. “Not a bit.”

He laughed. “Good luck, Professor. I wish you well.”

“Thank you.” She waited for him to change the subject—most people’s eyes began to glaze over when she talked about her work—but instead, he got up, grabbed a bag of taco chips from the pantry, and slouched down into the red velvet banquette in the alcove, where he began questioning her about the way the supercolliders worked.

Before long, she found herself sitting across from him munching on taco chips as she described the Tevatron collider at Fermilab as well as the new collider being built by CERN in Geneva, Switzerland. Her explanations merely induced more of his questions.