Still the One (20 page)

Gracie’s hand went still. “My baby doesn’t have a father.”

“You’re saying it was an immaculate conception?”

Gracie’s face turned stony. “I’m saying it’s none of your business.”

A nerve ticked in Zack’s jaw. He’d meant to try to cajole her into a conversation about her baby’s father, but if she wouldn’t
cooperate, he had no problem forcing the issue. Seeing that ultrasound had made the baby’s arrival seem imminent. The fact
that there might be a problem made it seem all the more urgent that they waste no time notifying the baby’s father.

If he had seen a picture of Gracie in Katie’s womb, it could have changed his whole life. He was sure of it. He wasn’t sure
what he would have done, but he liked to think he would have given Katie the option of keeping her baby if she’d wanted to.
“I beg your pardon, Gracie, but you made it my business when you showed up and asked me to take you in.”

“Zack, I really don’t think…,” Katie began.

“I never asked you to take me in.” Gracie’s eyes flashed. “I asked you to make me an emancipated minor.”

“Which I’m not going to do.”

“Well, there are some things I’m not going to do, either.” Gracie stabbed a spear of broccoli. “Including having this conversation.”

“Drop it, Zack,” Katie urged.

But Zack wasn’t about to. “Your baby’s father needs to know.”

“He’s not a father. He’s a sperm donor.” She stuck the forkful of food in her mouth, and continued talking. “Like you were.”

She shoots, she scores.
She’d wanted to hurt him, and she had. He leaned forward. “Is it Justin?”

Gracie’s mouth fell open, inelegantly exposing her partially chewed broccoli, then abruptly closed. He watched an array of
emotions play across her face: surprise, then disbelief, then amusement. “Justin? No way!” Her expression morphed again—this
time into anger. “How’d you get his name, anyway?”

“I called your old high school in Pittsburgh and talked to some of your teachers.”

“Jesus.” Her jaw stiffened. “Is there no such thing as privacy?”

“This isn’t just about you, Gracie.”

“Well, it sure as hell isn’t about you.” She glared at him. “You’re way off base, anyway. Justin’s gay.”

“So who’s the father?”

“No one.”

He leaned back in the chair. “Look, if you’re not sure who it is, just give me a list of the suspects, and we’ll get a blood
test after the baby’s born.”

Her face went scarlet. “Holy crap. You think I’m a
slut
?”

“I didn’t say that.”

“You might as well have.”

“Gracie, sweetie, he didn’t mean anything,” Kate said. “There’s no need to get upset.”

“He accused me of sleeping with a whole list of guys, and you don’t think I should be
upset
?” Her voice was shrill and loud.

Zack scowled. “I’m not judging you. I just believe that the father’s right to know trumps any embarrassment you might have
about who you’ve slept with.”

“My baby has no father. I’m a single parent. Got that? A single parent.” Her chair squawked as she pushed it back from the
table and rose. “Stay the fuck out of my business.” Her glower encompassed Katie. “Both of you!”

“Gracie…,” Katie began.

But she wasn’t listening. She stormed out of the room and into the bedroom, slamming the door behind her.

Zack blew out a sigh. “Well, that went well.”

Gracie wasn’t the only one upset with him. Katie’s eyes threw daggers. “She was just starting to warm up to us. She was excited
about the baby and starting to talk. Why did you have to start railroading her about the baby’s father?”

“That wasn’t railroading. That was straight talk, which is just what that girl needs. You’re not doing her any favors, tiptoeing
around her as if she’s a prison guard with a new stun gun she’s just waiting to try out.”

“I’m trying build a relationship with her.”

“Yeah, well, letting her walk all over you is not the way to make that happen.”

Katie slapped her napkin down on the table. “She’s not walking all over me. I’m exercising patience. Which is something you
might try for a change.” Katie snatched the dishes off the table, her eyes snapping. “The girl is hurting. She’s lost her
parents—the only parents she’s ever known. She’s pregnant, she’s in a strange town with no friends, and all of her life, she’s
thought of us as the bad guys. Don’t you get it?”

“I get that you feel so damned guilty for something you shouldn’t feel guilty about that you don’t want to cross her.”

“You don’t know the first thing about how I feel.” The plates clattered as she piled them on top of one another and strode
into the kitchen.

Hell. She was probably right. He ran a hand down his face, blew out a sigh, then picked up the bowl of rice and the bowl of
chicken and vegetables and followed her into the kitchen.

The plates clanged as she dumped them into the stainless-steel sink. Katie turned on the faucet. She picked up a plate and
scraped its contents into the garbage disposal, then flipped the switch. The disposal roared.

“Would you like me to stick my head in there so you can grind it, too?” he asked over the noise.

“Great idea.” She flipped off the switch. “Unfortunately, your head won’t fit even in the sink, because it’s so swollen with
everything you think you know.”

“I don’t think I know everything. I just think the boy ought to be in on things, especially since Gracie’s going to keep the
baby.”

“What if he doesn’t want to be a part of things? What if you drag him into this and he’s reluctant or angry or unreliable
or just not there? Do you really think that’s in the best interests of Gracie or the baby?”

He stared at her. “Is that what you’re worried about?”

“Yes.” She rinsed the next plate. “Believe me, there are worse things than not knowing your father,” Katie said.

She’d never talked about her dad, other than to say he wasn’t in the picture. Because of Katie’s mother’s barfly ways, he’d
assumed she didn’t know who he was. He crossed the kitchen toward her. “Are you talking from personal experience?”

“Yeah.” She turned on the garbage disposal again.

The roar of the motor reverberated through him. “You knew your dad?”

She flipped off the disposal. “I wouldn’t say that I actually knew him. He popped in a few times. Once he stayed a whole week.
He made all kinds of promises about things we were going to do together and places we were going to go, and I believed him.
And then he’d just disappear for another few years.” She opened the dishwasher and pulled out the bottom rack with a clatter.
“It would have been a lot better if he’d just stayed away.”

His stomach felt like it was being squeezed in a juicer. “Kate—I didn’t know.”

“Why should you?”

“Because…” Because he’d thought they’d been close—closer than he’d let himself get to anybody else, at least as far as sharing
stuff about himself. The poker games that summer hadn’t started until eleven or later, so when he’d pick Katie up after work,
they’d often just sat and talked. He remembered one night in particular.

They’d been sitting in his eight-year-old Ford Taurus in front of her run-down trailer, “Let’s Get Rocked” by Def Leppard
playing on his Radio Shack car-kit stereo. Katie had stared at her mother’s dented blue Chevy Nova with the smashed-in fender
and the mismatched black door, parked at a cockamamy angle. “I hate to go in there. I don’t know if my mother is ‘entertaining’
or passed out, or if she’ll be drunk and crying and I’ll have to stay up half the night comforting her, as if I’m the grown-up.”
She looked at Zack. “It must be nice, having real parents.”

Zack let out a derisive laugh. “I don’t have real parents. And it sure wasn’t nice.”

“What do you mean?”

“Real parents don’t hit their kid just because he’s standing there.”

Katie’s eyes grew round and concerned. “Your folks hit you?”

He’d never told anyone that before. He tried to downplay it with a shrug. “Nothing too bad. Just a slap or a backhand. And
only if I interrupted one of their ‘conversations.’ ” Meaning one of their long, drawn-out, pretty-much-continuous slurfests.
“Most of the time they ignored me.” Because he tiptoed around, trying to act invisible. “But when they got mad at each other,
they’d yell at me, too. And then later they’d say, ‘I love you.’ ” His voice twisted into a sarcastic falsetto. “ ‘I love
you, Zachary.’ As if that made hitting me or screaming at me all right.”

Kate had just sat there, her eyes urging him to keep on talking. So he had. “The worst part was, I had to say it back.” His
voice went into sarcasm mode again. “ ‘Say it like you mean it, Zachary.’ ‘Zachary, tell your mother you love her so she’ll
quit crying and shut up.’ ”

He’d stared at the lightbulb on the front of Katie’s trailer, illuminating the kicked-in dent on the mildew-covered, once-white
door. “They acted like I was a big nuisance, like it was a real pain to take me anywhere or do anything for me, like they
resented the fact I existed. When I was eleven, I found out why.”

“Yeah?”

“I was in my room, and I heard my mom tell my dad that he’d ruined her life. And he yelled back that she was the one who’d
ruined it, getting knocked up with me.”

“Oh, no,” Katie breathed.

“Yeah. He said she’d gotten pregnant on purpose to trick him into marrying her. And she said it was the last thing she wanted,
being stuck with a loser like him. And he said she should have gotten an abortion like he wanted her to. ‘You know I couldn’t,’
she yelled back. ‘I was too far along.’ ”

Katie’s hand had reached for his. “Oh, Zack.”

“I didn’t know what an abortion was. I looked the word up in the dictionary at school the next day.”

The jangle of silverware being jammed into the dishwasher pulled him back to the moment. God. He’d forgotten he’d told Katie
all that. Knowing that about him must have made it really hard for Katie to call all those Fergusons in the Chicago phone
directory when she’d learned she was pregnant herself.

He watched her angrily jab the plates into the dishwasher rack. “Why didn’t you tell me you knew your dad?” he asked.

“I never talk about it.”

Ever? Not even with her husband? It made him jealous to think that another man might have known something she’d held back
from him.

Which was totally stupid. After all, they’d known each other for only six weeks that summer. It only made sense that she’d
form a deeper bond with a man she’d been married to for four years.

The thing was, he’d never formed as deep a bond with another woman as he’d formed that summer with Katie. Hell. Was he emotionally
stunted or something? Apparently he’d peaked out on relationships in his teens.

But then, that had been his choice. He’d never wanted commitment and closeness and all that crap. He’d spent his childhood
wanting his parents’ love, and all he’d gotten were empty words shoved down his throat. Loving someone just gave them power
over you, and he never intended to be in that position again.

He watched Katie storm across the kitchen and yank a couple of plastic storage containers out of a cabinet. Another thought
occurred to him. “When you were pregnant with Gracie, were you worried that I’d be like your father?”

She lifted her shoulders. “Since I decided not to keep the baby, it didn’t really matter.”

It wasn’t the outright “no” he’d hoped for. All that summer, he’d tried to be a stand-up kind of guy, to treat Katie the way
guys in movies treated their girls. “Kate, I want you to know that I would have… I mean, I like to think that I would have…”

She cut him off. “None of us really know what we’d really do in a situation until we’re in it, do we?” She dumped the chicken
and vegetables into one of the containers, smashed on the lid, and slammed it into the refrigerator, then whirled toward him,
her hands on her hips. “I don’t even know why you’re here now.”

Zack didn’t really know himself. He didn’t know how to be a good father; he only knew how not to be the brand of bad father
he’d had—disinterested, self-absorbed, and neglectful.

Zack had figured that being the opposite of his father meant being in Gracie’s life, trying to form some sort of relationship
with her and letting her know he gave a damn. He’d also figured that bringing Gracie and Katie together might, in some small
measure, make things up to Katie. Hell. Was he succeeding at any of that?

Damn it all. He was accustomed to being sure of himself, to making decisions, taking action and not looking back. Ever since
he’d set eyes on Katie, he’d been second-guessing just about every move he’d ever made.

He believed in playing by the rules, but he didn’t know what the rules were in this situation. He was in uncharted territory.
He knew how to be a good friend, a good sex partner, a good card player, a good business associate, a good drinking buddy.
He had no clue how to be a good father, or a good… What? What the hell was he to Katie? An ex-lover? An ex-lovee? Even with
an “ex” in front of them, the words made him sweat.

“I think it’s time for you to go,” Katie said.

It was his turn to have Gracie for the night, but under the circumstances, he wasn’t going to force the issue. “Yeah. Talk
to you tomorrow.” He headed to the foyer and out the front door, locking it behind him. The sun was setting, but it was still
so hot and humid that the air seemed to cling to his skin like plastic wrap.

He’d been so sure he knew what was right—so sure that finding the baby’s father was the moral high ground. Now he wasn’t so
certain. The odds of being right were somewhere around sixty-forty, or even fifty-five–forty-five—too close to call, really.
If he knew more about what kind of guy he was dealing with, he could make a better decision. He wanted to do right by Gracie
and Katie and the baby, but damn it, he didn’t know what the hell that was.

•   •   •

Gracie lay across the cream-colored duvet cover, iPod in her ears, looking at the ultrasound photo of the baby on her laptop,
when the door opened thirty minutes later.

“Gracie?” Katie stood in the doorway, her face lined with worry.