Mary McBride – Baby, Baby, Baby (страница 2)

Although Melanie hadn’t seen the actual paperwork, the first Cop on the Block loan had been approved just this week, so that had been part of the celebration at her surprise party this afternoon in addition to her leave of absence and imminent motherhood.

Speaking of which, she told herself, she should probably get out of here before one more person asked when the baby was due and then stood counting fingers and looking perplexed when she answered early next January, a full nine months away, or before Claude Davis of the parks department came up with another joke about sperm banks.

Melanie took one last glance around her office. It looked so aimless without her planner open on the desk and so bleak without her collection of Pop’s watercolors on the walls. There were only rectangular outlines now to show where they had hung. She hoped Cleo wouldn’t paint the walls some horrible shade of green or make any permanent changes that would surely drive her crazy when she returned next September.

Most of all, she hoped things didn’t go completely to hell in a handbasket the minute she left city hall.

Well, maybe just a little.

It was nice to be appreciated.

On the way to her car, as always, Melanie slowed her pace to admire the flower beds that surrounded city hall. Since it was April, the grounds were awash in tulips—stately red ones, so perfect they almost looked fake, and smaller yellow ones with waxy leaves and frilly petals. In a few months they’d be replaced by a profusion of daisies and purple salvia. Come autumn, the old limestone building would look gorgeous as it rose from beds of bronze chrysanthemums. Claude Davis of the parks department might have told lousy jokes about sperm banks, but he was a hell of a planner when it came to gardens. Maybe she’d call him next week to give her some ideas for the little space she wanted to plant in her backyard now that she’d have ample time to tend it.

She was pulling her little planner from her handbag to make a note to herself about Claude when she heard the clack of high heels on the sidewalk just behind her and turned to see Peg Harrel, the mayor’s longtime secretary, rushing to catch up.

“Are you really sure this is what you want to do, Melanie?” Peg bent her platinum-colored, pixie-haircut head to light what was probably the first cigarette she’d had since her lunch break at noon. “Single parenthood isn’t any bed of roses, you know. It’s a bummer, actually. My kids would be the first to tell you.”

“I’m really, really sure, Peg.” If she’d said it once, she’d said it a million times lately. Maybe she shouldn’t have been so honest and forthcoming about her plan to get pregnant, but she was so thrilled about this baby and had wanted to share the news with everyone at city hall if not the entire city.

Melanie closed her planner with a little thump and continued in the direction of the parking lot with Peg smoking up a storm at her side. “The party was fun, Peg. Thanks for putting it together. I never suspected a thing.”

“I’ll bet you did.”

“No. Not for a second. Honest,” Melanie lied.

“What did you think of the mime?” The woman nudged her arm. “Wasn’t he a riot?”

Melanie nodded politely although she thought cloying would have been a better description. She wondered vaguely if the world was divided into people who enjoyed mimes and people who ran the other way—screaming—when they saw one coming.

A few yards from her spiffy little yellow Miata, soon to be traded in on a sensible minivan, Melanie reached into her bag for her keys and then sighed. “Leaving isn’t going to be quite as easy at I thought it would be. I’ll really miss everybody. Plus, I’m not used to not working.”

“Oh, you’ll be working, kiddo.” Peg laughed and rolled her eyes. “Trust me. You’ll be working. You just won’t be getting paid for it.”

“Well, that’s true, I guess.”

“You’ll be working twenty times harder than you ever did here. So, when’s the big day?”

“Monday. My appointment is at eleven, so by noon I ought to be one slightly and happily pregnant lady.”

“No kidding. Does it always work the first time?”

“It will with me,” Melanie said, her voice infused with every bit of the confidence she felt. Even though her OB-GYN had cautioned her that three, sometimes four artificial inseminations were the norm before a pregnancy “took,” she was positive that Monday would be her day and that her baby’s birthday would be in the first week of January. It was just too perfectly planned to go wrong.

Peg wrapped her cigarette-free arm around Melanie’s shoulders and gave her a hug. “Well, good luck, kiddo. We’ll try to hold it together while you’re gone. Keep us posted.”

“I will. Thanks again, Peg.”

The woman started to walk away, then stopped. “Oh, with all of the excitement of the party, I almost forgot to tell you. You know that cop who was shot last week? The one who got blown through the plate-glass window?”

“What about him?” As she asked, she could feel that tiny fault line in her heart begin to quiver the way it always did whenever she heard the words “cop” and “shot” in the same sentence.

In this particular case, the officer had been hit during a raid on a crack house in the Bienville neighborhood, one of the highest crime areas in the city. He’d been wearing a bulletproof vest, thank God, but the direct hit had still managed to propel him backward ten or fifteen feet, through a window and out onto the sidewalk. His name was still being withheld from the press, and Melanie had found the whole incident so disturbing that she’d avoided all the memos that referenced it. Even now, having asked, “What about him?” she really didn’t want to know.

“Guess who it was?” Peg asked.

From the way the woman’s eyebrows climbed halfway up her forehead and her mouth kind of oozed to the side, Melanie didn’t have to guess. But before she could prevent the answer she didn’t want to hear, Peg exclaimed, “Your ex!”

“Oh.” While the fault line inside her slipped another tiny notch, she struggled to come up with some sort of appropriate comment. “Well, I’m glad he wasn’t hurt.”

“Me, too. Sonny hasn’t stopped by city hall in quite a while now, has he? Two or three months at least.”

Melanie nodded. It had been two months and two weeks, to be exact, and she didn’t even have to consult her calendar to remember. Her ex-husband’s entrances and exits were always indelible.

“Maybe he finally knows the meaning of the word divorce,” Melanie said. She could have said maybe he’d finally taken her threat of a restraining order seriously. And somewhere in a far corner of her heart she wondered if it was because he didn’t care anymore.

Peg sighed a little cloud of cigarette smoke. “I always enjoyed seeing him, even if you didn’t. I used to keep lollipops in my desk for him when he was trying to quit smoking. Red ones.”

“I remember.” She also remembered how those damned red lollipops increased the sensuality of Sonny’s already way-too-sexy mouth and how many times she’d wanted to kiss him, just to see if he still tasted as good as he looked.

All of a sudden she noticed that Peg was standing there silent and staring at her as if waiting for a reply to a question Melanie hadn’t even heard.

“I’m sorry. Did you say something?”

“Just that it’s a shame to be having artificial insemination when the genuine article is…”

“I’d better get going, Peg, before the traffic gets too bad.” Melanie stabbed her key in the car lock, opened the door, and tossed her handbag inside. “Thanks again for the wonderful party. Hold down the fort while I’m gone, huh? And don’t let Cleo do anything too bizarre to my office, okay?”

“Oh, sure. Good luck, Melanie. But I still think…”

“’Bye, Peg.”

The genuine article.

Peg’s words kept sneaking into Melanie’s thoughts no matter how she tried to dismiss them. It was a good thing she could have made the drive from city hall to Channing Square with her eyes closed because images of Sonny kept distracting her from the worse-than-usual Friday rush-hour traffic inching south on Grant Parkway.

The genuine article.

The first time she’d ever seen him, Solomon Stephen “Sonny” Randle had looked like a genuine bum and smelled as if he’d just climbed out of a Dumpster.

Two years ago, during one of Mayor Venneman’s forays to New York to do the morning talk shows, Melanie had presided in his absence at an awards ceremony for the police department. Always a nervous wreck at such occasions, she’d been even worse that afternoon, sitting up front with the chief of police and various dignitaries, trying to keep her trembling knees together in the way-too-short skirt of her gray gabardine suit.

After she’d made an equally short, rather gray-gabardine speech, she had handed out a score of letters of commendation to fresh-faced young patrolmen in dress blue uniforms with gleaming buttons, and presented half a dozen certificates of valor to older, but no less natty, officers. Then she called the name on the final certificate—Lieutenant Solomon S. Randle—and watched in horror as a bearded derelict shambled from the back of the auditorium to the podium where she stood.