Rough Around the Edges

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The next second he heard the siren wailing as the ambulance driver picked up speed. They were on their way to the hospital. This evening was definitely one he was going to tell the others about when he phoned home.

Or arrived home, he amended, thinking of the deportation notice on his desk at the apartment.

Was she imagining it, or was the stranger with the washboard stomach at her side again? Kitt blinked twice, trying to clear her vision. The man remained sitting where he was.

“What are you doing in here?”

O’Rourke laughed shortly, trying to stay out of the attendant’s way as Martha monitored Kitt’s vital signs. “I’m asking myself the same question.” He glanced toward the closed doors, wondering if the policeman was making good his claim and was following the ambulance. “The good constable seems to think you need moral support.”

His attention drawn back to the woman who was the reason for all the mayhem he’d found himself in in the last half hour, O’Rourke looked at her. There was no doubt that she was exhausted, but there was also no need for him to serve up empty platitudes about her appearance the way Gary had suggested. Despite what she had just been through, wet hair notwithstanding, Kitt Dawson looked radiant. Above and beyond the call of new motherhood. There was something in her face that transcended her ordeal.

O’Rourke had a sneaking suspicion that, fixed up, Kitt Dawson immediately became the center of attention in every room she entered.

Moral support, Kitt thought dully. She could certainly do with some of that right about now. Too exhausted to concentrate, she knew she was going to have to puzzle out what her next move was going to be—and sooner than later.

When she was discharged from the hospital, she could probably stay with Sylvia, her best friend, in her Newport Beach studio apartment. But two people—two and a half people, Kitt silently amended, looking at the sleeping bundle in her arms—living in such close quarters got awfully old fairly quickly.

But at least it would give her a little time to think. And hopefully come up with a viable plan. Right now, she had nothing.

Her Good Samaritan was talking to her, she realized. Concentrating as best she could, Kitt tried to absorb what he was saying to her and not think about how much she hurt. Physically and emotionally.

“Besides,” O’Rourke was saying, “you’ve still got my sweater and my jacket and I sort of thought I’d be taking them back by and by, once they have you settled in at the hospital.” He figured it was as good an excuse as any. Besides, the sweater had been Beth’s going-away gift to him. His youngest sister would be hurt if she thought he’d just given it away.

Kitt realized that the sweater was still wrapped around her baby. The jacket had somehow managed to come along with her when the attendants had transferred her from the van to the gurney. She felt beneath her head now.

“Your things,” she acknowledged with a note of embarrassment. “They’ll probably need a lot of work before you can wear them again.”

“Don’t be worrying about that.” As the attendant withdrew, O’Rourke unconsciously drew in closer to Kitt, placing his hand over hers in a silent bond that was as natural to him as breathing. “My mother taught me how to take care of my things well and make them last,” he told her with a smile. She’d had to, he added silently, doffing his cap to his mother. When there were six children, money only stretched so far. Fabric stretched farther. “So, what’re you going to call her?” He nodded toward her sleeping bundle.

Kitt tightened her arm around the bundle instinctively. She hadn’t thought of names, at least not girls names. Something inside of her had been convinced she was going to give birth to a boy. Just like something inside of her had been convinced that Jeffrey was going to make a miraculous turnaround and suddenly become responsible.

Good thing she didn’t make her living as a fortune teller, she thought sarcastically. She would have starved to death a long time ago.

Looking down at the bit of heaven in her arms, Kitt sighed now. “I don’t know yet.”

He’d had a sibling or two who’d had to wait for a moniker, O’Rourke thought. As if sensing she was the topic of conversation, the baby opened her eyes and looked directly at him.

O’Rourke felt his heart being claimed in an instant. “So you’re nameless, are you, little one?” he whispered to her softly.

As if in response, the baby made a noise and then closed her eyes again.

Very gently, taking care to only touch his hand lightly along the downy hairs, O’Rourke passed his hand over the small head. “I supposed this qualifies as our first conversation.”

Kitt found she couldn’t say anything in response. There was suddenly a large lump in her throat, blocking any words.

The next moment, the ambulance had stopped, its rear doors parallel with the doors leading into Harris Memorial’s emergency room. The doors flew open. Kitt and her baby were engulfed in a sea of activity as the attendants quickly took her out of the ambulance. An awning sheltered them from the rain.

As a nurse hurried out from the hospital to flank one side of the gurney, an emergency room physician took the other while Martha rattled off Kitt and the baby’s vital signs to them.

O’Rourke found himself swept up in the wave, hurrying along to keep up, although logically he knew he should just drop back and let the natural progression of things take over and sweep Kitt and the baby away from him. After all, he wasn’t needed any longer.

Feeling foolish, reminding himself that he was facing a huge dilemma of his own and that Kitt and her baby were in good hands now, he slowed down. But as he did so, a hand came down on his shoulder, generating an intense sensation of déjà vu.

O’Rourke didn’t have to turn around to know that when he did, he’d be looking down into Officer Gary Brinkley’s face.

“What are you doing here?” O’Rourke asked, only mildly surprised.

Gary jerked a thumb back toward the rear of the hospital parking lot where presumably his squad car was standing. “Thought maybe the new dad would need a ride back to his car. Besides—” the policeman nodded at his torso “—you’ve got my rain slicker.”

O’Rourke looked down at his chest. He’d almost forgotten he was walking around in the oversize black slicker. “Oh, right.” He began shrugging the slicker off his shoulders.

The hand was back on his shoulder, stopping him. “No, hang on to it until you get something else to wear,” Gary urged.

O’Rourke looked after the disappearing gurney. He’d accomplished nothing by coming along. Except maybe to push aside his own problem for a short while longer. But that hadn’t erased it. It was time to get going.

He turned to look at the policeman next to him. “I’ll take that ride now, Constable. If you’re sure that it won’t be taking you away from anything more pressing you have to do—”

The idea of there being something more urgent on tap made the policeman laugh again. He clamped a fatherly arm around O’Rourke’s shoulders.

“Hey, this is Bedford.” He nodded at the disappearing gurney. “That’s probably the most exciting thing that’s going to happen around here all night.” He paused, hesitating before venturing back outside. “Don’t you want to see your little woman before you go?”

To try to explain one last time to the policeman that Kitt Dawson wasn’t his little woman and that he had only happened by at an opportune time for her seemed completely futile to him. For simplicity’s sake, and because he wanted to get home sometime before midnight, O’Rourke resigned himself to going along with the charade.

“No, I thought I’d give her a chance to get cleaned up a little—and I’d like to do the same before coming back to see her and the baby,” he added for good measure, having absolutely no intention of doing the latter even if Kitt did have some of his clothing in her possession. It wasn’t as if that was his last jacket or sweater, and despite his words to the contrary, she was right. There probably was no way he could get them cleaned at this point. Beth would just have to understand.

The answer had the desired effect on the policeman. He seemed obviously pleased. Nodding his head, Gary steered O’Rourke around toward the rear doors. “Okay, then let’s get going.”

The trip back to his van was not one undertaken in silence.

O’Rourke hadn’t really thought that it would be. Officer Gary Brinkley strongly reminded him of Shamus O’Brien, a distant cousin of his mother’s in the old country. It wasn’t that the two men looked alike, but Shamus could talk the hands off a grandfather clock and not take any note of it as he just kept on going. Not because the man liked to hear the sound of his own voice, but because Shamus truly felt that everything he said was important, gleaned on the battlefields of life. He felt it his duty to share those lessons with those who hadn’t had a chance to experience them yet.

And after what sounded like an endless twenty years on the police force, first in Los Angeles County, then here in Bedford, it sounded as if the good constable had a great many lessons of life to impart as well. And O’Rourke found himself the lucky recipient tonight.

It occurred to O’Rourke that he might have been better off walking back to the van in the rain. It would have been a great deal wetter and longer, but on the up side, it would have been a great deal more peaceful.

The topic the police force veteran had settled on was marriage and family. Gary was definitely pushing for the pros. At length.

O’Rourke had a headful of cons to oppose him with, albeit—not wanting to prolong the diatribe any longer than absolutely necessary—he listed them silently. In no uncertain terms, marriage and the family that followed had been both his parents’ undoing. And while O’Rourke loved his siblings with a fierceness that would have made the hearts of the creators of greeting cards swell with joy, there was no doubt in his mind that it was the burden of these same siblings, and himself as well, that had first killed off his father, then his mother. Sarah O’Rourke had died of nothing short of a broken heart a little over two years after her husband’s demise. Leaving the business of family-raising squarely on O’Rourke’s shoulders.

“Nothing like it in the world,” Gary was saying for what seemed like the fourth or fifth time. “But hell,” the man said, turning in his seat, “I don’t have to convince you of that, do I?”

“And why’s that?” O’Rourke heard himself asking the question as curiosity got the better of him.

“Because I saw the look in your eyes when you looked down at that baby. You feel it already, don’t you?”

Mystified, O’Rourke asked, “Feel what?”

“That tug on your heart.” He thumped his chest with his fisted hand. “The one that anchors you in their harbor and makes you vow to do everything in your power to see to it that they get every chance in the world to have the things you didn’t. To be happy and healthy and all that other stuff.”

Turning another corner, Gary pulled up his squad car in front of the van. The rain had subsided, falling steadily and sedately now rather than in sheets and gusts.

“Here’s your van,” Gary pointed out needlessly. He twisted around in his seat. “So, you going to do it? Are you going to make an honest woman of her?”

Now, there was a term he hadn’t heard in a long time, O’Rourke thought. Not since before he left Ireland. Then it had come from Susan, telling him that Patrick was going to be making one of her. An honest woman. It was Patrick’s baby she was carrying, all the while he’d been thinking that she belonged to him. He’d felt his heart crack a little then, but told himself it hadn’t. He’d known that the kind of life he’d planned for himself didn’t include having someone like Susan in it. She needed attention he couldn’t spare.

He’d wished her luck and shut his heart. Just another sacrifice he’d made to get to where he wanted to be. A man who could take care of his own, meaning the family that already was, not the one that might be, if things were different.

Problem was, he hadn’t gotten there yet.

A whimsical smile played on his lips as he looked at the policeman next to him. “Are you a Catholic, Constable?”

The shaggy black-and-gray brows drew together in one formidable hairy line. “What? No. Why?”

“Pity.” O’Rourke unhooked his seat belt. “You’d have made an excellent priest. Father Donnelley back home couldn’t have held a candle to you.” Another man dedicated to long-winded sermons, he thought.

Gary hadn’t gotten to where he was in life by not knowing when he was being given the slip. “So, is that a yes or a no?”

O’Rourke grinned. “Not a candle,” he repeated, getting out. “Thank you for the ride and the advice. And the rain slicker.” Shedding the aforementioned garment, he left it on the passenger seat, then closed the door. He could almost hear the man inside the squad car sigh as he pulled away.

O’Rourke’s grin widened.

It faded when he realized he’d left his van keys in his jacket. The jacket that was now with a dewy-eyed, sharp-tongued woman in Harris Memorial, some fifteen or so miles away.