His Best Friend's Baby (15 page)

The answer came to him without even a pretense of a struggle. He’d already known. Just hadn’t wanted to admit it.

Mindy wasn’t his, and Jessie wasn’t his. If he got too close, he’d be kidding himself. Some kind of invisible force field surrounded them, and he couldn’t cross it.

Quinn shook his head, stunned by the devastation that lay inside him, as gray and lifeless as the land buried in ash after Mount Saint Helens had erupted.

He’d always felt the same way when he saw kids with their parents, mothers with babies, fathers swinging toddlers onto their shoulders or shooting baskets with their teenage sons on the driveway outside their houses. From the time he was little, he’d watched other kids run to meet their parents after school, babbling about what Teacher told them and eager to show off schoolwork, and he’d felt...invisible. A watcher who would never be enclosed in one of those shimmering bubbles. Even at the Howies’, he’d been the one who hadn’t fit, the silent, solitary extra at the table, as if he were forever a guest.

By then, he’d told himself he didn’t care. Now, standing in his kitchen watching across a great distance as Mindy cooed softly to her baby, he knew he’d lied to himself. He did care. He’d cared then, and he cared now, with a searing pain that roared in his ears like a wildfire that had leaped the fire line.

He wanted to be loved.

And the agony came from knowing whose love he wanted, and could never have.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

I
NFECTED
WITH
A
SENSE
of urgency about the future, Mindy waited only until the evening after the Howies’ visit to ask Quinn if she could use his tools in the garage. He had a well-equipped workbench, she’d discovered on further exploration, with a table saw she itched to get her hands on.

Even though she knew he’d seen some of her work, he seemed surprised when she told him that, before Dean’s death, she’d actually been selling wall plaques and signs that said Welcome or My Secret Garden in gift shops. Either he thought her stuff was nothing special or he’d assumed her woodworking was no more than a hobby. His surprise left her feeling insulted. Or maybe hurt was a better word.

But he did shrug and say, “Sure. Use anything you want. Just let me know if you need help. The table saw can be dangerous if you don’t know what you’re doing.”

The next morning, after he’d left for work, she headed out to the lumberyard and the hardware store, Jessie in a cloth carrier on her stomach. She came home with several thicknesses of plywood, enough lumber to cut out the bits and pieces she had in mind, paint and sheets of copper and galvanized steel, miscellaneous mosaic tiles and wooden dowels, springs and intriguing pieces of hardware. On impulse she stopped at a junk store that had caught her eye on the way to Lamaze class and bought old signs, buttons, a broken stained-glass window and a hideous collage someone had once made after a beach vacation. She’d need more. Lots more. But this was enough to get her started.

Mindy was going to make birdhouses.

She’d seen a few quirky ones in leafy neighborhoods of the city, hanging from tree limbs or sitting atop fence posts. Back when she’d first suspected she was pregnant, Mindy had seen one that looked like a gingerbread cottage. Meticulous and charming, it had made her smile—and think. There were almost limitless possibilities. She could build a miniature southern plantation house, or a tiny church. She could use an old wooden game board, or paint and age plywood to look like one. She imagined gingerbread trimming eaves; a deep blue, star-spangled birdhouse; a small log cabin.

She hadn’t yet made a single one when Dean had died. After that, well, the whole idea had seemed like a dream.

But looking out at that enormous old maple in Quinn’s backyard, she’d started picturing a birdhouse hanging from one of the branches. It would have to look as if it might have been hanging there since this house had been built, but it would also have to be witty in some way. She wanted a birdhouse that would make Quinn smile.

All those wonderful tools
were
sitting unused out in the garage. She had time. And Mindy really thought the fantastical birdhouses she was imagining would sell. What better time to experiment?

What’s more, if she made even one really great birdhouse, she’d have a Christmas present for Quinn. Something made by her own hands.

The next two weeks, Jessamine napped contentedly in an oval wicker laundry basket in the garage while her mommy sawed and hammered and painted and mumbled when she figured out flaws in her designs.

Mindy got books from the library and read about Pacific Northwest birds. Some preferred perches, others holes; some open-air accommodations, others dark interiors as if they’d found a hole in a rotting cedar tree. Many of the birdhouses she imagined would probably decorate a porch or even a living room and never be inhabited, but she wanted to design them so they could be.

She split tiny shakes for the roof of her first one, a rough-hewn cottage decorated with stars cut out of an old tin sign she’d found at a junk store. But when, as an experiment, she set it outside in the rain for a couple of days, to the side of the house where Quinn wouldn’t see it, she discovered the roof leaked. She had to cover the seam at the ridge. After some experimentation, she bent a strip of the same tin sign and tacked it on. In faded red letters, it advertised some long-forgotten brand of soda pop. She liked the effect.

Her favorite was a Northwest Indian style longhouse, with the door opening beneath the legs of a bear she painted in red and black. That was one of the first she took to the gift shop in Belltown that had once carried her signs.

The owner, a woman who wove baskets for sale in the shop, leaped up to coo over Jessamine. “Ha! Well, now I know why you disappeared. Do you have something for me again?”

“I do. I don’t know if they’ll appeal to you, but...”

The owner followed her out to the car. The minute she saw the row of birdhouses in the trunk, she said, “They’ll be gone in a week. Christmas shoppers are already getting frantic. What are you thinking we should ask?”

They discussed price, and Mindy left those first birdhouses at the shop. Three days later, the store owner called to tell her they’d all sold and to ask when she could have more.

“’Tis the season,” she reminded her.

Mindy started making two or three birdhouses in a similar style before she moved on. It would make sense, she realized, to alternate simple ones, perhaps painted in a checkerboard of white and red and then distressed, with more ambitious undertakings. The latest of those was a doozy. Working from a photo, she was trying to capture the soaring spire of the Smith Tower, the tallest skyscraper west of the Mississippi when it was built early in the twentieth century.

Quinn came down to the workshop a couple of times and admired her efforts. “So you’re selling them, huh?”

“Yes, and they’re going fast.”

“Good for you.” He grinned at Jessie, nestled against his shoulder. “Your mommy is an artist. Did you know that?”

Jessie opened her mouth and wailed. She neither knew nor cared what Mommy did with saws and hammers. She just wanted a snack. Laughing, Mindy took her from Quinn and followed him into the house.

As she settled down in the living room to nurse, Quinn backed away, his expression remote. “I think I’ll go to the gym. Will you be okay?”

“Of course I’ll be okay.” She flapped her hand at him. “Go.”

He emerged a moment later from his bedroom with a gym bag, cast a single, distracted glance at her and went out the front door.

He’d been distant lately, Mindy thought with dismay. He seemed to enjoy Jessamine, but mainly when he could have her to himself. He never hung around when Mindy was nursing or changing diapers—although, the diaper part she could understand. Not that Quinn hadn’t changed a few diapers himself. He seemed happy on his days off to take care of Jessie for a couple of hours while Mindy worked in the garage or did errands.

What was missing was the closeness she’d felt with him those last couple of weeks before Jessie was born, and even at first after she had been. Mindy couldn’t quite pinpoint when he’d changed. It hadn’t been abrupt, more like a gradual retreat.

Did it have anything to do with the Christmas season? She couldn’t remember whether he had seemed any different last year. She had noticed that, despite Quinn’s talk about making Jessie’s first holiday special, he hadn’t even hung strings of lights from the eaves like his neighbors. Three days before Christmas, and he hadn’t suggested putting up a tree. Did he even have ornaments?

She sighed. Blaming his mood on holiday-induced depression was wishful thinking on her part. Christmas had nothing to do with his mood.
She
had everything to do with it.

Her sad conclusion was that the closeness had been an illusion. When he thought she’d needed him, he’d been there. Of course they’d talked—they’d spent an awful lot of time together that had had to be filled somehow. Now she didn’t need him, and he was following his preference, which seemed to involve avoiding her.

Mindy knew she should be looking for a place to live. She
had
been looking—halfheartedly.

He’d spoiled her. She’d been okay with scrimping until she’d come to live here. Now, her determination to save a substantial portion of Dean’s estate to put Jessie through college was flagging. After listening to Quinn’s bleak stories about his and Dean’s childhoods, she’d decided that she had to worry first about giving her daughter a sense of security neither man had had. She didn’t want Jessie learning to crawl on dirty indoor-outdoor carpet laid over a cold concrete floor, or paddling in a rusty bathtub. She especially didn’t want Jessie ever to be embarrassed about where she lived or feeling somehow
less
than her playmates. College...well, they’d worry about that when it came.

Mindy had been looking through the classified ads in
The Times
and circling possibilities. She’d even called on a few. Secretly, she was relieved when they were already rented or had some feature that ruled them out.

Now, looking down to find that Jessie had fallen asleep, Mindy thought,
We have to find our own place.
Quinn was trying to tell her he wanted his life back. She shouldn’t make him come right out and say it. She wasn’t sure she could bear it if he did.

She and Jessie would have Christmas with him, such as it was, and then move.

* * *

S
HE
CIRCLED
ADS
IN
THE
PAPER
and made a dozen calls, dismayed at discovering that all she could afford were apartments in complexes where she wouldn’t be able to set up a workbench a thin wall from someone else’s bedroom or kitchen. Nonetheless, she made appointments to see several.

Would Quinn let her keep using his work area? she wondered with a flutter of hope. If she came only when he was gone, so she didn’t intrude, he might be willing. At least for now.

At the sound of his key in the lock, she hastily folded the paper and put it on the chair next to her. She wanted to find a place and actually have a date set to move before she said anything. If Quinn saw she was looking, he’d feel obligated to tell her there was no hurry, and that would hurt when she could see he didn’t mean it.

“Hi,” she said when he walked in.

He must have showered at the gym, because his hair was wet and slicked back and his gray T-shirt clung damply to his chest. Mindy tried not to stare obviously, but he had such a beautiful body. He was muscular without being bulky like a weight lifter or stringy like a runner. He wasn’t super hairy, either, which she liked. Although his jaw was shadowed with evening bristle, he had only a dusting of dark hair on his forearms and no thick mat creeping from the collar of his shirt.

“Hey,” he said. “Jessie asleep?”

“Mmm.” She nodded. “I was tempted to try to keep her up, but she sleeps with such determination.”

His expression softened. “Yeah, the way she scrunches up her face, I’d be afraid to try to wake her up.”

“Won’t it be wonderful when she smiles?”

“Yeah. A smile will be good.”

He stood there, gym bag over his shoulder, and she sat at the table without even a book in front of her, as if she’d been staring into space.

“Selene called,” she lied, indicating the phone.

He nodded. They avoided meeting each other’s eyes for another awkward moment.

“I should go to bed,” she said. It was almost nine. She might get a couple of hours of sleep before Jessie woke with an empty tummy.

“Listen, I was thinking. Do you want to go pick out a Christmas tree?”

“Oh! That would be fun.” Mindy hesitated. “Um...do you have ornaments? And lights?”

“No, I thought we could buy some of those, too. Unless you kept Dean’s?”

No Christmas decorations at all, she marveled.

“No, he had sort of a designer tree with mauve and silver. I could never have hung a plastic spoon Jessie decorated with glitter in preschool on that tree. Anyway... Christmas ornaments didn’t seem like the kind of thing I needed to cart from apartment to apartment. So I sold them.”

Embarrassed, even feeling a little guilty, as if she were tacitly criticizing Dean, she waited to see how Quinn reacted.

He didn’t sound as if he’d even noticed her momentary discomfiture. “Makes sense.”

Getting back to the point, Mindy said, “We’d better hurry up and do it or there won’t be anything left but scraggly trees and plain glass balls.”

Quinn’s face was a study in conflict. He probably didn’t give a flying leap what kind of ornaments or tree they bought, but didn’t want to say so. After all, for whatever reason, he was determined to do this right.

“Tomorrow? When I get home?”

“That’ll be fun,” she agreed, without the slightest idea whether it would be.

Another awkward pause ensued. “I’d better throw my stuff in the wash,” he said finally.

She rose, phone in hand. “Sure. I’d better hang this up.”

He shifted the gym bag on his shoulder and turned away.

A minute later, she was heading for the bathroom when Quinn emerged from his room.

“Going to bed?”

Mindy nodded. “Do you want the bathroom first?”

“No, go ahead.”

She started toward it just as he came down the hall. They bumped right into each other.

His hands gripped her upper arms.

“I’m sorry...” died on her lips.

Something flared in his eyes, and for an instant his fingers bit into her flesh. Then he all but pushed her away and went on down the hall.

Breathless and shaken, she sagged against the wall. What had just happened?

Nothing, she decided, on a wave of depression. She’d been imagining...well, she didn’t even know what she had imagined. Quinn was just in a mood. Disconcerted because she’d charged at him, maybe.

She was the one who resonated at his touch and remembered the strength of his hand holding hers while she panted in labor, his gentleness massaging her back. She was the one who realized how careful he had been
not
to touch her since. Even handing Jessie back and forth, he seemed to try not to let their hands do more than brush.

Swallowing, she continued into the bathroom.

* * *

“D
O
YOU
LIKE
LITTLE
LIGHTS
that blink on and off, or bigger ones?” Mindy’s tone was one of exaggerated patience.