His Best Friend's Baby (7 page)

Of course, her relationships all petered out. Mindy thought that usually her mother was the one to lose interest. She’d never figured out why her mother had married her father, or stayed with him for fifteen years until his shocking death of a heart attack when he was barely over forty. If she’d been deeply in love with him, she wouldn’t have had a new man in her life within weeks.

Mindy tuned in to hear, “Now, if he were as good-looking as that friend of Dean’s...”

She did
not
want to hear what a hottie Quinn was. “Would you like a cup of coffee?” Mindy interrupted.

Her mother glanced toward the kitchen. Her nostrils quivered. “Thank you, but no. I don’t dare stay that long.”

Or imbibe anything that came out of that kitchen, apparently.

“I should have spent today housecleaning,” Mindy admitted. “But I’m so tired. When you were pregnant, were you...”

Her mother made a moue. “Pregnancy is horrible. Why do you think you don’t have a younger brother or sister?”

Maybe because you discovered you hated being a mother?

“Of course I was tired! I made your father get me housecleaning help.”

Not an option for Mindy.

“You are seeing the doctor?” her mother asked.

“Yes, of course. I’m not stupid.” Even to Mindy, that sounded childish. She sighed. “Actually, I have an appointment Tuesday.”

“Oh, good.” Her mother surveyed her once again. “Because you really do look...”

She rolled her eyes. “Like garbage. I know.”

“I wasn’t going to say that. It’s just...” Tiny lines furrowed her brow. Genuine concern—could it be?—battling Botox. “You’re too pale. And puffy. I’d hoped to see you blooming.”

“I’m sure I’m fine.” Did anybody
bloom
at seven and a half months pregnant? “It’s been a long week, and I just got up from a nap.”

Her mother glanced at her watch and stood. “Oh, dear! I didn’t mean to stay so long. I just wanted to see where you’re living, since you’ve been so evasive.”

“I haven’t been evasive.” Mindy began levering herself forward so that she could rise, too.

“Oh, you just haven’t invited me over?” The tiny snap in her voice silenced Mindy. She gave one last, disdainful glance around. “Spend his money, Mindy. Don’t keep feeling as if you have to keep it in some sort of trust for the baby. You’re entitled.”

She swept out, leaving Mindy still struggling to stand.

At the sound of the door closing, Mindy gave up the battle and sank back into the chair.

Entitled! Mindy fumed.

And people wondered why she wasn’t closer to her mother! Mindy had seen it in Quinn’s eyes. He just couldn’t imagine why she hadn’t wanted to call her mother to come comfort her.

Could it be because after her own husband had died, Cheri Walker had been so busy dating other men she hadn’t noticed how her fourteen-year-old daughter grieved?

Mindy had never forgiven her mother, and she never intended to. Her father had loved her mother, and she’d apparently been desperate to be single and giddy again. If she’d just waited a few months...!

Mindy squeezed her eyes shut and took a deep breath, trying to will away the familiar resentment. She couldn’t change the past, and fortunately she didn’t need to depend on her mother.

She just wished...oh, that she had someone who would go with her to the doctor on Tuesday, someone to give her back rubs and make her cups of herbal tea and maybe pamper her just a little bit. Someone she could depend on.

* * *

Q
UINN
HAD
GIVEN
UP
the battle one day in late September and driven by the house. Not in the Camaro, of course; he’d have jumped from the observation deck on the Space Needle before he took a chance of Mindy seeing him hovering.

He felt like an idiot. What would a quick glance at the house tell him? But he told himself he still owed it to Dean to keep an eye on her. He wasn’t absolved of responsibility just because she’d become petulant.

He’d barely turned the corner when he saw the real-estate sign planted out front. Then he spotted the Sold sign.

Despite himself, his foot lifted from the gas. She’d sold the house already? Then, stunned, he saw the bike lying on the lawn and the shiny green Toyota SUV parked in the driveway. A planter, filled with rust and orange mums, had been added to the front porch.

His car eased to the curb as his gaze searched for other changes and found them.

The front blinds had been replaced by drapes. Wind chimes hung from a corner of the front porch. Through an upstairs bedroom window he could see that posters covered the wall.

Mindy had not only sold the house, she’d already moved. She was gone. He didn’t even know why he was blindsided, but he was. Clearly, her intention was to walk away and never look back.

He shouldn’t have even minded, but he did. Dean had connected them in a way Quinn had considered indelible. It would appear she didn’t feel the same.

Familiar anger curled in his stomach. Why should she? She hadn’t known Dean that long. Easy come, easy go. She’d made a nice profit on an eighteen-month commitment. She’d enjoy it more without any anchors to drag her down.

He drove away with barely a glance back himself.

Once he got over being angry, he made a halfhearted effort to find out where she’d gone. Not because he was going to contact her, just to be easy in his own mind. But her name, married or maiden, didn’t pop up anywhere. No telephone, which wasn’t uncommon these days. She was probably using a cell phone. She hadn’t changed her address with the DMV.

Pride kept him from checking with the lawyer or her mother. Chances were, neither knew where she was anyway. Once the will had been filed and the money was hers, why would she have kept Armstrong informed? And she and her mother didn’t have a real warm, fuzzy relationship. Besides...the choice was hers, he admitted. She knew how to find him.

That night and plenty of other nights, he escaped churning emotions he didn’t want to identify in his usual way—by going to the gym. A police-department basketball league had started up, and he joined that. But all too many evenings, he went home, tried to read or watch TV and finally, grabbed his gym bag yet again and went out the door. Loneliness, grief, anger, regret, could all be sweated out like toxins. He lifted weights, hammered down three pointers, swam laps, or ran miles on a treadmill until he was too exhausted to mourn or feel sorry for himself.

He despised self-pity, and hardly recognized it when it first crept up on him. He’d be shaving in the morning and stop and stare at himself, and he’d think,
There’s not a single person in the world who cares about me.
The idiotic thing was, he knew it wasn’t true; he had friends. Not as close as Dean, but friends.

Then he found himself dreading going home. He’d tell Carter to cut loose, then he’d sit back down to do paperwork in the past he’d have put off. If anybody suggested stopping by the tavern, he’d go along even though he wasn’t much of a drinker. He’d watch Seahawks games there on the big screen instead of at home, which he’d once have preferred. Anything but solitude and the inescapable realization that he was living a lonely, loveless life.

The one thing he didn’t do was ask any women out. He just couldn’t seem to summon any interest. Given his bleak mood, the idea of dating a woman he didn’t care about seemed lonelier than staying home alone.

In mid-October, he took the ferry across the Sound to Bremerton to have lunch with the Howies. He hadn’t been back in three or four years, and then it had felt like a duty. Beyond a few observations about changes in the neighborhood—new houses, a widened street and sidewalks where they hadn’t been before—he hadn’t connected himself with the house or felt any sense of homecoming.

This time, he did. He drove the Camaro to please them or himself, he wasn’t sure. After driving off the ferry, he had this sense that it knew the way, like a horse heading for the barn. Every turn was familiar, and felt ingrained in a way the drive home to his existing house never would. And every landscape reminded him of escapades and girls and trouble he and Dean had wriggled out of. He was smiling by the time he pulled up in front of the small house on the quiet street above an inlet of the Sound.

The Howies had bought this house back in the early fifties; nowadays, they wouldn’t have been able to afford it. All the houses on the street had been modest, although several, he saw, had recently undergone dramatic remodeling with additions that looked out of place. Given the setting and the value of these lots now, every house on this street would be razed or remodeled within a few years.

Nancy and George both came out to meet him. George walked around the Camaro, stroking its gleaming flanks, pretending to admire the car when Quinn could see that his eyes were damp.

“Dean was so proud of that car when he bought it!” Nancy’s smile was a little tremulous. “But come in, Brendan! Oh, it’s so good to see you here. Are you sure you can’t stay?”

He hadn’t been ready to do that, to sleep in his boyhood room and think back to who he’d been. “I work tomorrow. But I wanted to see how you two are doing.” He paused on the doorstep. “It’s been a while.”

“Too long,” she said, quietly.

They hadn’t changed a thing inside. Maybe that’s why he
didn’t
come. It was like time traveling. Except for finding Dean, there wasn’t much about his youth that he wanted to remember. Here, remembering was unavoidable.

The living room was a little dim, the oak floors mostly covered with dark Oriental rugs. The furniture was mahogany or upholstered in deep forest green, the paintings on the wall landscapes in oils. As a teenager, he’d felt...stifled in this room. Now, for the first time, he realized it was restful.

But then, he’d felt stifled by the Howies and this house from the minute the social worker had dropped him off. They’d been old to have young teenage boys in the house, and maybe had been old-fashioned even for their age. The jump from squalor and terrified self-sufficiency to a Norman Rockwell perfect slice of Americana had been too jarring for Quinn. The movie
The Truman Show
had jolted him. Living here had felt like that to him, as if this house and neighborhood and the kind older couple who’d taken him in were unreal. Scripted.

He’d reacted like the Jim Carrey character, poking and prodding and trying to find the rip in the fabric. When he could, he’d escaped.

Even though police work wasn’t the best way to see how normal people lived, he’d gotten an idea since that the Howies weren’t that abnormal. They were just nice people who’d held middle-of-the-road jobs and were content with themselves, with unchanging traditions, even with an annual vacation to the same resort on the Oregon coast, taken the same two weeks every summer.

Then, he’d have said they were oblivious to anything but the surface he let them see. Now, he noticed a sharpness in George’s fading blue eyes that had probably always been there, a perception in Nancy’s memories of him and Dean.

In the middle of lunch, he said, “You always knew how uncomfortable I felt here, didn’t you?”

Their smiles were sad. “We kept hoping,” Nancy said. “But you never let yourself trust us.”

George nodded. “But you did trust Dean. That let us have confidence that you still could care about someone and even have faith in them.”

“But you’ve never married,” Nancy added.

Quinn picked up his fork again. “Would you believe I just haven’t met the right woman?”

His foster mother patted his hand. “If Dean did, you can. Keep looking, Brendan.”

She’d made his favorite casserole and, to follow it up, blueberry pie, which he’d loved. Eating here with them, at the maple table set in the dining alcove with small-paned windows that looked out on the rocky inlet, the wooded backyards that ran down to it and the docks and small boats—he and Dean had had a twelve-foot skiff with a small, noisy outboard motor—he kept having to shake off disorientation.

Deliberately, he dragged his gaze from the inlet and settled it purposefully on Nancy’s hand, shaking as she reached to pick up her coffee cup. Seeing his expression, she withdrew her hand quickly.

“Parkinson’s?” he asked.

Her face set in stubborn lines. After a moment she surrendered enough to nod. “But I’m fine. Just fine. They’ve got me on all kinds of medications. You should see me lining up my pills at night to be sure I don’t forget one of them!”

He’d have been proud and unwilling to admit vulnerability, too, so he only nodded. “You’ll let me know if there’s anything I can do for you?”

She gave a watery smile. “Thank you, Brendan. You were always a good boy. It’s nice to have you home.”

He asked casually whether they’d stayed in touch with Mindy.

“She’s called several times, but not since she moved.” Nancy’s wrinkles deepened. “She said she’d let us know when she was settled, but we haven’t heard from her. I do hope she’s all right.”

Annoyed afresh that she had worried these nice old people, he didn’t like realizing that a thread of tension underlay his dark mood these last months. Yeah, he was worried, too. Couldn’t she just drop them all a note that said, “Hey, went to Hollywood to make it as an actress, having fun spending Dean’s money.”

But he didn’t let her presence hover. She didn’t belong here, wasn’t part of this homecoming. He went down to the bedroom in the basement that he and Dean had shared, and felt a pang when he saw it unchanged, too. He and George walked down the wooden steps to the dock and sat there talking about nothing much.

George climbed the steps slowly, with a few pauses and apologies for being an old man. Quinn felt like a jerk for not being here to see them age, and for not realizing sooner that they were already getting so they needed help.

He accepted when they invited him to Thanksgiving and was already thinking ahead to Christmas, something he hadn’t done since he’d lived here and felt some of the same anticipation other kids did, even if he would have let someone yank his fingernails out before he would have admitted it.

When he drove away, Quinn was glad that he’d come. Maybe, after all, his roots weren’t so tangled with Dean’s that they’d died this summer, too.