A Promise for the Baby

And he’d come up short, which had probably been the alcohol and his thirty-ninth birthday talking. He had a job that was more than just important to him, it was important to the city of Chicago. He was the independent watchdog for the taxpayer and that didn’t mean he was looking out only for their money.

The worst effects of corruption and fraud weren’t wasted dollars, but wasted lives. Two dead Milek men on the side of the highway and one dying Milek boy in the hospital were testimony to the devastation a bribe and a blind eye could leave.

He averted his eyes when Vivian started to scoot her butt to the edge of the exam table and put her feet in the stirruplike things. The doctor had a wand-ish instrument covered with a condom and lubricant. The woman who had just been patting his knee was now telling Vivian how the ultrasound would feel compared to a vaginal exam and he nearly leapt out of his chair and headed for the door.

His presence here was a mistake. Whatever was involved in an internal ultrasound was far, far too private for him to witness. They were strangers. He’d planned on having babies with Jessica, who would’ve known better than to ask him to come to the doctor’s office to witness this. Jessica had wanted two children—preferably one boy and one girl. They were going to buy a house in Andersonville and he was going to have the beautiful wife, two perfectly behaved children and a meaningful job. And when his thirty-ninth birthday hit, he was going to compare his life to his father’s and see that he’d lived up to all the man’s expectations.

“Dad.” The doctor’s voice broke through the existential crisis he wouldn’t admit he was having, even in confession, should the priest ask. “If you look on the monitor you can see the embryo. And your date for conception looks pretty spot-on with the embryo’s growth.”

The last, lingering nugget of doubt he’d had about Vivian’s pregnancy burst when Karl looked up. On the screen was some pulsing gray matter and, in a flash of emptiness, a little thing that looked like a mouse standing up and dancing. Only it wasn’t a mouse. It wasn’t anywhere near the size of a mouse. It was his baby and the doctor was saying it was a quarter of an inch in size.

From somewhere in the room came the sound of a horse clopping. Vivian’s wide smile made her cheeks pop like a chipmunk’s, but he didn’t know the source of the sound until the doctor said, “And this is your baby’s heartbeat.”

The blood pulsing in his ears took on the same rhythm of the horse galloping, the sound that the doctor was claiming was his baby. The baby he made with the beautiful woman lying back calmly on the exam table, looking at him as if she expected him to say something.

“Holy shit.” His life was never going to be the same.

* * *

KARL WAS SILENT as he pushed the cart through the aisles of the grocery store. Normally, his quiet didn’t bother Vivian, but there was quiet and then there was the silence that buzzed between them.

“Are you okay?” she asked for probably the tenth time since they’d left the doctor’s office.

“Fine.” He held the plastic bag full of apples high in the air, twisted it and tied the bag in a knot.

Already in the cart were bananas, oranges, clementines, grapefruit, grapes and strawberries that looked pretty but would probably be tasteless since it was only March. And that was just the fruit. They also had sweet potatoes, kale, Swiss chard, carrots, cabbage and a rainbow of peppers. If a doctor sitting on Oprah’s couch had ever called a plant a “superfood,” Karl had put it in their cart. His previously empty fridge was likely to expire with the pressure of the extra work. At least she’d be able to make every recipe on the planet without having to go to the store again.

She weighed the bleak look that had been on Karl’s face when their baby’s heartbeat had filled the exam room and the fact that they were strangers and she was dependent on him. The bleak look won. She put a hand on his before he could bag some rocks masquerading as peaches.

“You are not fine. You nearly fainted at the doctor’s.” A muscle pulsed where his ear rounded into his jaw, but Vivian ignored the warning. “And your silence has a deathlike quality about it. We’re partners in this. Friends, right?”

At the word death the twitch had stopped. Karl left the peaches on the display and moved on to the pears. When he’d bagged five pears, he turned his attention to her. “This is not how I expected to have a child.”

He pushed the cart away from the produce, leaving her wishing she had a bag of potatoes she could bean him over the head with. She caught up to him in the bread aisle as he was reading nutritional information.

“This wasn’t how I expected to have a child, either.” All through adulthood, she’d held on to her dream of a perfect nuclear family, raising children in a house they would own into retirement, the memories made in the home impossible to distinguish from the stuff cluttering the shelves. When she’d decided she couldn’t abort the baby, no matter how desperate her situation seemed, she’d surrendered that dream. Karl hadn’t been offered the same choices she had, and he probably had completely different dreams.

She grabbed one of the loaves and added cinnamon-raisin bread to the cart, as well. “I suspect there’s more to your reaction.”

As they passed the fancy cheeses, Vivian added Gruyère to the cart.

“No cheese.” Karl put it back in the cooler.

“No soft cheese.” She put it back into the cart.

“Huh.” He added a couple more cheeses to the pile, then crossed his arms on the cart handle and pushed his way along the aisle. She’d never seen a man look so uncomfortable while trying to look so relaxed, and again she had to hurry after him.

“Is the cheese for you?”

“No. You seem to like cheese.”

“I can’t eat all that. It’ll go bad.”

“You’re supposed to eat more, and a variety of foods.”

She put her hand on the front of the cart and turned it before he could knock down a display of potato chips with his manic forward progress. “After the second trimester, I should eat an extra three hundred calories a day. That does not mean I get to gorge myself on cheese.”

He sighed. “I’ll help eat the cheese.”

“And the fruit? And the bread? And whatever else you plan to buy me and Jelly Bean while we’re in the store?”

“Jelly Bean?” Finally, she had his attention. “You call our baby Jelly Bean?”

“You call our baby the fetus.”

“Apparently I should be calling it an embryo for another three or four weeks.”

She sighed. “Can we talk about this possessed shopping trip and what happened in the doctor’s office?”

“Not here.”

“Fine.” She navigated the cart past the dairy and around several displays until she’d dragged Karl and his cornucopia in front of the shoe polish and laces. “This is as empty as a grocery store gets. Spill.”

He looked over his shoulder. She wanted to smack him, but she also needed him. No one could call her actions patient, but she was waiting. “Hearing the heartbeat was the first time this became real. Until then I expected to wake up. But it’s not a dream and we’re in this together. I want to make sure you have all you need.”

The warmth in his voice glided above the soft hits that were playing over the loudspeakers. For the first time since she’d sat on her bathroom floor in Vegas looking at the third positive pregnancy test in a row, Vivian felt like something other than a problem. She’d come to Karl because he was the father and he was a fixer. But now...she and Jelly Bean might be something more than a speed bump in his perfectly ordered and sterile life.

His hand didn’t feel cool to the touch when she grabbed on to it—a phantom warmth she attributed to the hope rising in her own chest. “We won’t be left communicating with each other through notes about Jelly Bean’s progress in school.”

“What?” Karl hid his emotions most of the time, but puzzlement was clear on his face.

“I had visions of us as divorced parents exchanging notes through Jelly Bean’s backpack.”

“Oh.” And then he laughed. “What a ridiculous thing to think. That’s what text messages are for.”

She laughed along with him, ignoring the looks they got from passing shoppers.

“Vivian.” He lifted her hand to his lips and kissed it. “I may not have imagined this as how I was going to have children, but I’m finding I could do much worse.”

“It’s not much of a compliment, but I’ll take it.” She lifted up onto her toes and kissed him once on the lips. Then she headed for the cereal aisle before he could read anything other than humor in her expression.

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