year. But that meant they needed decent enough roads to carry cattle to the stockyard at the train station, roads over which to get to town and see their kids get to school...oh, a million reasons why folks these days couldn’t just be cut off from the rest of the world for months at a time.
Like it or not, expensive or not, the county was going to have to fix this culvert.
“I believe we’ve got enough in the budget,” he said to Doug. “This clearly can’t wait.”
“I agree. But we’ve got a dozen others that aren’t much better.”
“At least they’re not already collapsing. Let’s get the signs up. You have some barricades?”
Doug laughed. “Never travel without them. Okay, I’ll work on pulling together the equipment and crew.” He paused, looking back at the dip in the road. “How you want to do this? Another culvert?”
“We talked about other solutions, you remember. The problem is that if we don’t use culverts, the erosion just expands to eat the road.” As dry as this place was in general, he was often surprised how much of a headache water gave him. Usually in the spring, however. The last rains had been record-breaking for September.
While he put out some orange cones and staked some detour signs at the crossroad, his thoughts wandered back to Diane. He wondered how she was going to like dealing with the good ol’ boys of Conard County. He wondered if they’d give her a hard time about the baby.
Mostly he wondered why she was haunting his thoughts and why he kept thinking she was a tidy armful. And why his body stirred in response.
Well, he assured himself, that would wear off. It had to. Anyway, he’d hardly talked to her. Chances were he wouldn’t continue to feel the sexual draw when he learned what she was really like.
Wasn’t that always the way?
Diane went to her little rented house that night with a briefcase full of files that had been left on her desk and a baby who’d eaten enough today to satisfy a horse...well, relatively speaking. It seemed as if she needed to be fed about every two or three hours, even though the social worker had said that should begin to slow down. Not yet, obviously, and it might continue through the night.
Oh, yeah, get the girl a pediatrician. Maybe she ought to start keeping a list so she didn’t forget something. The move and taking charge of an infant had left her a bit scatterbrained.
At the last moment, before settling into a small house she hadn’t yet been able to turn into a home, she thought to check her diaper stash even though she’d bought quite a few yesterday. Who would have thought such a bitty thing could fill so many diapers?
She counted and decided she had enough for a couple of days. Plenty of formula, too. And since Candy and Aubrey had brought her a huge lunch from the café, she didn’t need to cook.
Good heavens, she thought. The baby was sleeping contentedly, she could dine without cooking and she had time to kick off her shoes and collapse on the recliner that had been delivered just yesterday. Beaten and creaky, it held a lot of memories of her father, a veteran who had largely retreated to a distant land inside his own head. Memories of her father, as rare as the good ones had been, were something she didn’t want to lose entirely.
She wandered down the hall to the bedroom she hadn’t had time to unpack yet and opened a suitcase to pull out her favorite old jeans and a checked shirt as softened by age as the jeans. Her grungies, her comfies, whatever anyone wanted to call them. That night she had nothing to do except care for Daphne and herself...for the first time since she’d accepted this job. She supposed she ought to feel slothful for not unpacking just a little, but frankly, she was worn out. She could live out of a suitcase for another day.
When she emerged from her bedroom, slightly freshened for the evening, she heard Daphne stirring, making little sounds that might soon turn into a full-throated cry. Diaper. Feeding. Blaine had been right about one thing: it was actually very simple. Demanding but simple.
In a very short time, she had become practiced at pulling out a bottle and filling it with room-temperature formula from a can. The woman who had turned Daphne over to Diane had told her she didn’t need to warm the baby bottles as long as the formula was at room temperature. However, it had been chilly outside, so she put the bottle in a pan of warm water from the sink and gave it a few minutes to lose any chill.
She tested the warmth of the formula on the inside of her wrist, then went to rescue her increasingly noisy charge. A finger in the diaper told her that could wait, so she gathered the child to her and let her drink from the bottle.
Sitting in her recliner without putting her feet up, she became fascinated with watching Daphne eat. Her little eyes, beginning to get darker and resemble her mother’s, watched her back. Intense. Content.
Amazing. After just a few days she could feel her heart reaching out to this child, taking her in, wrapping her in swiftly growing love. If MaryJo got well, it was going to hurt to have to give this baby up. Hurt like hell.
But the social worker’s assessment had been brutal: MaryJo would never be well enough to care for her own child. If she improved, like so many with her illness, she probably couldn’t be trusted to stay on her meds. And if she didn’t keep taking her medication...
Diane shook her head a little and began to hum softly. Daphne continued to watch her, then with a surprisingly strong thrust of arms and legs, she turned her head from the bottle.
“Enough of that, huh?” Diane asked. “A little gas bubble, maybe? You eat more than that.”
Daphne scrunched up her face, so Diane quickly put the girl over her shoulder and began to pat and rub her back. She felt a bit embarrassed that Blaine had done it for her earlier, clearly thinking she didn’t know to do such a thing. But she’d forgotten in the midst of her overwhelming day.
She wouldn’t forget now. Rising from the chair, she paced and patted, continuing to hum quietly. When the little burp emerged, she offered more formula.
“Easy peasy,” Diane said. Twenty minutes later, she had the child changed—she decided she was going to need a changing table soon—dressed in a fresh onesie and apparently content enough to yawn.
“Success.” The best evening yet. She paced with the little girl on her shoulder some more, drawing out another tiny burp, then moved her to the cradle of her arm. Daphne waved one fist around then shoved it toward her mouth. In an eye blink, she fell asleep.
A very successful evening. Diane was smiling happily as she settled Daphne into her small travel bed. She needed to get a crib soon, too. But first there’d be another round of hungry baby around eleven.
One of her girlfriends had told her before she left her old job that she was lucky, missing the first three months of caring for the baby. “By four months,” Lucy had said, “I was beginning to wonder if the little brat would ever sleep through the night. You remember. I was in a fog of sleep deprivation all the time.”
Diane didn’t really remember, because she hadn’t seen a whole lot of Lucy after she birthed her first child. “Too busy” had been Lucy’s response to every invitation. She probably had been, too.
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