and the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, anyway.
“This doesn’t make any sense,” he muttered. “Why would she do something like this?”
“Check out early?” the nurse asked, obviously misunderstanding the question. “Because she has no insurance, that’s why. I mean, your policy will cover the nursery charges, of course, because the baby is your dependent. But since you haven’t married the baby’s mother,” she added, placing emphasis on the last part of her statement clearly to indicate her disapproval of Cooper’s moral misconduct, “the bills for her portion of the hospital stay will have to be out-of-pocket. So she checked out early to save you both some money.”
“No, I mean—”
“Naturally, she didn’t want to leave without the baby, so she checked him out, too,” the nurse continued, ignoring Cooper’s interjection. “Since you didn’t show up to meet her this morning, she took a cab home. And frankly, Mr. Dugan,” she added, “I thought better of you than to do something like that.”
“But…” Cooper’s voice trailed off again, before he completed his statement. His head was buzzing with confusion, and all he could do was stare at the hospital chart in his hands.
“Your girlfriend was all ready to go when I went in this morning,” the nurse continued. “Her doctor wanted her to stay longer, but since there were no complications with the delivery, and since she and the baby were perfectly healthy, and since it’s not at all unusual to be released so quickly, nobody had a problem with letting her go.”
“But…but…but what about me?” Cooper finally asked, his mind still reeling as it tried to process so much misinformation. “I might have had a problem with it.”
The nurse snatched back her clipboard. “Then you should have been here this morning when your girlfriend was ready to leave.”
“But—”
“Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go file these forms.”
“But—”
“Go home to be with your new son, Mr. Dugan,” the nurse told him as she sifted through the collection of forms. “And not that it’s any of my business, but you might want to think about marrying that woman. Make yourself a proper family. Do the right thing.”
With that, Cooper found himself alone, without the nurse in the raspberry-colored scrubs who had become the booming voice of moral integrity. And even though he had done nothing wrong where Katie and her son were concerned, even though Katie was the one who had overstepped the boundaries of reason and propriety, Cooper felt guilty and duly taken to task. Why? He couldn’t begin to imagine. But for some reason, he suddenly felt as if he were the one who needed to set things to right.
For some reason, he suddenly felt like he really should do the right thing and marry Katie, thus making his son legitimate. Thus making the three of them, as the nurse had said, “a proper family.” Even though Katie was still a virtual stranger. Even though Andrew was in no way his son.
The only problem was, Cooper had no idea where the other members of his newly formed family could be.
Normally, Cooper couldn’t get out of the supermarket fast enough Normally, he stood in the check-out line shifting his weight restlessly from one foot to the other, and shaking his head in amazement at the headlines that screamed out from the tabloid racks about alien Elvises, mutant gerbil children and man-eating dieffenbachias. Normally, all he wanted was to escape the legions of slow-moving blue-haired ladies, screeching, whiny toddlers and single guys like himself who knew of no other aisle outside the frozen food section.
But he hadn’t been feeling normal for some time now, and today he didn’t mind lingering behind the woman ahead of him in line. And not because of her cascade of blond hair or the slim, tanned legs extending from her tight cut-offs, either, although he had noted those things about her right off. What held Cooper’s attention now was the woman’s baby.
He had no idea how to gauge the age of the infant strapped into the carrier that had been settled in the seat part of the grocery cart ahead of him. Nor did he have a clue as to the baby’s gender. It could be a two-week-old boy or a seven-month-old girl for all he knew about babies. Hell, before today, the only time he’d been this close to one had been the night he’d delivered—
But he wouldn’t think about that. He wouldn’t think about Katie and Andrew Brennan and the fact that the two of them still haunted his dreams nearly two months after he’d last seen them. He wouldn’t think about how he’d gone back to Katie’s house in Chestnut Hill—at least, what he’d thought was Katie’s house in Chestnut Hill—only to find it inhabited by an elderly couple who’d called the place home since 1958, and who had never heard of any family in the neighborhood named Brennan.
He wouldn’t think about the fact that there were no Brennans in the Philadelphia phone book that had a Chestnut Hill address. Nor would he wonder yet again why Katie had given the hospital a phony Las Vegas address as her own. God knows he wouldn’t recall yet again his concern about being named Andrew’s father on the baby’s birth certificate. And he wouldn’t think about the fact that he had absolutely no hope of ever finding Katie or Andrew again to demand answers for all the questions that would trouble him for some time to come.
Instead, Cooper focused again on the baby in the grocery cart, who stared back at him with a steady, unblinking gaze, eyes huge and brown and mesmerizing. Then the baby smiled, a wide, toothless grin that crinkled its eyes at the corners and wrinkled its little nose, and it stuck its tongue out at Cooper and uttered a heartfelt, and very wet, “Spthibble.”
The baby’s unabashed commentary made Cooper laugh. He hadn’t even realized he’d reacted in such a way until the leggy blonde turned around and began to laugh, too.
“He likes you,” she said. “He doesn’t usually smile that way at strangers.”
Cooper glanced up long enough to acknowledge her comment, then looked back down at the baby. “It’s a boy, huh?”
The woman nodded. “As of the last time I changed his diaper, anyway.”
Cooper smiled. “How old?”
“He’ll be five months next week.”
“Cute kid.”
“Yeah, I think so, too.”
“Is he a lot of trouble?”
The woman chuckled. “Oh, yeah. The whole time I was pregnant, all of our friends with kids kept saying, ‘You can’t imagine how much your life will change once you have that baby.’ And my husband and I kept saying, ‘Yeah, yeah, we know. We’re ready for it.’” Her chuckle turned to laughter. “We had no idea. You really can’t imagine what a huge life change it is until you have one of your own.”
This time Cooper was the one to nod.
“But he’s worth it,” the woman said as she stroked her son’s cheek. Her voice oozed affection, and her eyes shone with happiness. “He’s just so wonderful. You can’t imagine that part, either, until you have one of your own.”
