Father Found Read online

  “On your back porch?”

  “She was just left there in this seat…I don’t know, I think may be it’s a car seat. And there was a suitcase full of stuff next to her, packed with little clothes and…cripes, it’s the tiniest clothing I’ve ever seen, all these snaps and stuff.”

  Leaning over the counter, Allison groped for a pencil and paper. “Tiny clothes?”

  “And bottles and cans of formula. And diapers. Lots of diapers. Hundreds of them.”

  “Hundreds of diapers.” She jotted “one hundred diapers” on her scrap paper, then wondered why she’d bothered.

  “I mean, I don’t know what I’m supposed to do.”

  “With the diapers?”

  “With anything. Like, am I supposed to heat the formula?”

  He’d found an abandoned infant on his porch and he was worrying about formula? “Have you contacted the police?” she inquired. “If someone abandoned a baby on your porch, the police need to know. The baby must belong to someone.”

  “I think, actually, she belongs to me.”

  Allison took a deep breath and collected her wits. Nothing the man had said made much sense. But she didn’t want to scare him away. If she mentioned the police again, he might pack up his baby and his bottles of formula and disappear. And then the baby would have no chance at all.

  “What is your name?” she asked as calmly as possible.

  “Jamie McCoy.”

  “Mr. McCoy—” she scribbled his name onto the paper “—are you saying an infant was abandoned on your porch and it’s yours?”

  “Well, I…I mean, sperm-wise…yes. It’s mine.”

  “Where is the mother?” Ovum-wise, she added silently.

  “Who the hell knows?”

  Oh, great. This was one of those guys, the kind who spread their seed around so carelessly they lost track of the fertile fields they’d sown. Allison had some teenage fathers in her fathering-skills class for teenagers scheduled at the YMCA that evening. Jamie McCoy would fit right in. He was undoubtedly a swaggering adolescent whose girlfriend had dumped his mistake in his lap and walked away. Allison wasn’t sure she blamed the girl.

  “Who is the mother?” she asked.

  “Her name is Luanne Hackett. I think.”

  “You think?” McCoy dropped another few notches in Allison’s esteem.

  “The thing is, the woman lied. She told me she was from New York City, but the phone company has no listing for her. She gave me her phone number, but it turned out not to be hers. For all I know, she could have given me a false name.”

  “But she gave you her baby.”

  “Hers and mine. I mean, it must be mine. If you count backward nine months…” He let out a long breath, punctuated by a curse.

  “All right.” Allison cut him off. “Do you have health insurance? Are you included in your parents’ policy?”

  “My parents?” He snorted. “I’ve been on my own a long time.”

  “Medicaid, then,” she guessed. If he was on his own, he was probably on some kind of public assistance.

  “I’m insured,” he said, sounding almost impatient.

  “Well, then, why don’t you call your health care provider and get a recommendation for a pediatrician.”

  He cursed again under his breath. “I guess that’s what I’ll have to do.”

  “Is it a problem?”

  “Look, I just found out I’ve got this kid. It’s not like I want to go fill out a bunch of forms and try to explain this thing to my doctor. I just…I mean…” He sighed once more, then added tentatively, helplessly, “I don’t know what to do.”

  She nibbled her lower lip and gazed at the scrawl of her handwriting across the sheet of paper. “One hundred diapers. Jamie McCoy. Insured. Mother?”

  “How old is the baby?”

  “I would guess about two weeks old.”

  Sheesh. Two weeks old, the mother was gone and the father didn’t even know how to prepare formula. Allison shuddered to think of the child’s prospects. “Here’s what you need to do, Mr. McCoy. Call your health care provider and get a pediatrician. Have the baby examined. Then go to the police and see if they can help you track down the mother. Child abandonment is a crime.”

  “She didn’t abandon the child,” he retorted. “She gave the child to me.”

  “She left the child on your back porch. I hardly consider that the proper way to work out custody arrangements.”

  “Look, the mother isn’t the issue, okay? I need to know what temperature the formula is supposed to be.”

  She cautioned herself not to push too hard. If she did, she might lose him, and if she lost him, she would lose his baby. Tracking down the mother could wait until Allison was certain the baby was safe. “A pediatrician can advise you about formula. For now, you can fill a bottle with it, then set the bottle in a pot of hot tap water. Not boiling, hot You don’t want to burn the baby’s mouth.”

  “Hot, not boiling,” he repeated slowly. She imagined that he was writing down her instructions.

  “Test a drop on the inside of your wrist. It should be lukewarm. If it feels hot on your wrist, it’s too hot for the baby.”

  “Inside of my wrist. Okay.”

  “Check her diaper frequently. New babies urinate and move their bowels on no set schedule, and if she wears a soiled diaper for any length of time, she’ll develop skin irritations. Wash her bottom carefully with warm water whenever you change her. Wet cotton or a wet washcloth will do it. No alcohol. No powder. Make sure she’s completely dry before you put a new diaper on.”

  “Completely dry,” he recited.

  “Is there an experienced woman you can call on? Your mother, maybe?”

  “I’d just as soon not involve my mother in this right now,” he muttered.

  “All right, then.” Shoving back a stray curl that had unraveled from her barrette, Allison glanced at the wall clock above the nurses’ station. Nearly noon. Could this loser last until evening? Could his baby? “I teach a course in child care skills for new fathers, Mr. McCoy. It’s a program I call the Daddy School.”

  “The what?”

  “The Daddy School. I have a class scheduled for tonight at six o’clock at the downtown YMCA. It’s an eight-week program. You missed the first class, but if you stay afterward, I can get you up to speed. The other students are fathers-to-be—unless someone’s baby has been born in the past week. But the information I teach is useful even if your baby has already been born. I cover all the basics of child care. Like how to change diapers and warm formula.”

  “Great. That’s what I need to know. Meanwhile, I guess I’d better change a diaper and warm some formula.” He sighed. “There’s got to be an easier way to feed a baby.”

  “There is. It’s called breast-feeding.”

  “Yeah, well, that’s not really an option here.”

  His words sounded weary yet underlined with laughter. For a frenzied new dad caught in a strange predicament, he hadn’t lost his sense of humor. He was definitely different from her other teenage students, who still squirmed and snickered like kindergartners whenever she broached such subjects as women’s anatomy.

  She wondered what McCoy looked like. She wondered how he’d gotten into such a fix and how he was going to get out of it. She wondered whether he was salvageable as a father.

  She wondered what kind of woman he’d hooked up with if that woman could lie about her identity, dump a newborn infant on his porch and vanish.

  She wondered why his name had a familiar ring to it.

  As a matter of fact, she was just a bit too curious about Jamie McCoy.

  “What time did you say this class was?” he asked.

  “Six o’clock. Do you know where the YMCA is?”

  “Center Street, right?”

  “On the corner of Center Street and Dudley Avenue. We meet in one of the community rooms on the first floor.”

  “I’ll find it. What does it cost?”

  “There’s
no charge,” she told him. For its first trial run, she’d gotten the hospital to cover the costs. Which was a good thing, since most of her younger students wouldn’t have come if they’d had to pay.

  “I’ll be there.” She heard a click, and Jamie McCoy was gone.

  “What was that all about?” Margaret asked as Allison hung up the phone.

  Another errant lock of hair curled against her cheek. She tucked it behind her ear and frowned. “A guy who just got custody of a baby he didn’t even know he’d fathered,” she said. “It sounds like a disaster.”

  “Men,” Margaret snorted, then turned back to her work. In her midfifties, Margaret had never married and didn’t even seem to like children that much. Allison still hadn’t figured out how the woman had risen to the position of head nurse on the maternity floor, where she had to deal with babies and daddies, as well as mommies, every day.

  Well, Allison loved babies. She respected and admired mommies, and she believed men could usually be redeemed.

  She wasn’t so sure about Jamie McCoy, though. Something didn’t seem right about him. He’d started the conversation sounding as frenetic as most unprepared fathers, but by the end of the call she was convinced he wasn’t like the rest. He had money, he didn’t depend on his parents…and he’d cracked a joke about breast-feeding. Who was he?

  A jerk, she reminded herself. Someone alarmingly indifferent about the woman who had given birth to his child, a woman even more unconcerned about the child than McCoy was. Allison was probably going to hate him.

  Her personal opinion of him was irrelevant, though. She would teach him what she knew about babies and paternity. Every child born into the world deserved a capable, loving father. And it was Allison’s job to make sure babies got what they needed. That was why she’d become a pediatrics nurse and why she’d started the Daddy School.

  She picked up her inventory list and headed down the hall to the supply closet. But her mind was no longer on the department’s lack of cotton swabs and bed pads. It was on Jamie McCoy—and on his baby.

  CHAPTER TWO

  SHE WAS the only woman in the room.

  It wasn’t as if they were all alone, of course. Nine other guys were seated on folding metal chairs in a semicircle. Two of them looked old enough to be fathers. The rest were barely out of puberty. One of them looked years away from sprouting facial hair.

  They were a motley group. The young guys were dressed in oversize jeans, T-shirts that could have doubled as highway billboards, advertising all manner of brand-name junk, and expensive, enormous sneakers. One had a silver ring through his nose; another had a tiger tattooed onto his forearm; yet another had a cigarette tucked behind one ear.

  The older guys looked like antiques in comparison. One had a bald spot as round as a bagel poking through his hair. The other had a golf look about him; he wore a collared polo shirt the color of fermented raspberries. It hurt Jamie’s eyes.

  He was the only one in the room with an actual baby. He’d brought Samantha with him because the prospect of hiring a qualified baby-sitter boggled his mind.

  Samantha was quiet at the moment, but he wasn’t sure how long that would last. He’d learned, after a long and generally abysmal day, that at regular intervals she liked to do an uncanny impersonation of an air-raid siren. At least she was dry—although he wasn’t sure how long that would last, either. He had exhausted more than a dozen diapers on her, as well as a large percentage of the itty-bitty clothing in the suitcase. When she wasn’t leaking from one end, she was leaking from the other, spewing white fluids from her mouth whenever she belched, as if she were auditioning for a remake of The Exorcist. The receptionist who’d made an appointment for him at his HMO’s pediatrics office for tomorrow had assured him that it was perfectly normal for babies to spit up half of everything they ate.

  Normal, perhaps, but disgusting. He’d thought diapers were bad. The barfing was arguably worse. Maybe it was. an early warning sign of alcoholism: Samantha would chugalug an entire bottle at one sitting, and then she’d hurl and pass out.

  He’d tried to catch a few winks while she was sleeping off her formula jags on the makeshift bed he’d prepared for her—a mat of folded sheets spread across the thick carpet in his bedroom. But he’d been too worried to rest. What if she rolled over and banged herself on the dresser? What if she choked? What if she started howling again, or mewling? What if, what if, what if.

  How did people survive parenthood, anyway?

  More than once during the day, he’d considered telephoning his mother down at her no-kids-allowed retirement community in Arizona. She’d survived the great challenge of parenting him, so she must know the secret. Yet how could he phone her and his father, two nice, decent, middle-class retirees, and say, “Hi, folks—guess what? You’re grandparents! I don’t know where the mother is—I’m not even sure who the mother is—but this baby showed up on my back porch, and by the way, can two-week-old infants roll over yet?”

  If he called them with that sort of news, they’d probably have heart attacks on the spot. Bad enough he had an out-of-wedlock baby on his conscience. He didn’t want to have the deaths of his parents on his conscience, too.

  Before he resorted to shocking his parents into coronary crisis, he decided to give the Daddy School a try. The nurse he’d spoken to at Arlington Memorial, Allison Winslow, had to know what she was doing. Maybe she could give him some pointers on how to stop Samantha’s heaving fits. If not, maybe Nurse Winslow could offer some laundry tips.

  He arrived at the class ten minutes late. It had taken him that long just to figure out how to strap the baby seat into the passenger side of his sporty Miata coupe. He’d had to park in the far corner of the lot behind the YMCA building; the only empty spaces near the door had been marked Handicapped Only. As he lugged the squirming baby in her car seat and a backpack stuffed with several tons of infant paraphernalia across the lot and into the building, it occurred to him that having a newborn ought to qualify a person as handicapped.

  He found the room easily enough, swung in through the open doorway to find seven tattooed and body-pierced adolescents laughing about something and two genuine adult males who looked serious enough to be his father. Then he noticed the woman at the far end of the room, standing beside a blackboard. When her gaze met his, he nearly dropped the baby.

  Allison Winslow was gorgeous.

  Well, technically, she wasn’t. She was a bit too tall, a touch too thin and way too pale. Her hair was a tumble of auburn curls that she’d attempted to tame with a barrette, but rippling tendrils had escaped from the clasp to frame her cheeks and drizzle down her back. She wore a pair of pleated white slacks, a white pocket T-shirt and clean white sneakers.

  Nurse’s clothes, he reminded himself, although all that white made him think of angels. Allison Winslow could pass as an underweight Botticelli angel with that absurdly lush copper-tinged hair and her wide, round green eyes and her pursed cherry red lips.

  Her expression was quizzical as she looked him up and down, her brows arched and her chin raised. Without speaking a word, she was issuing a demand.

  “Is this the class for new fathers?” he asked.

  Before she could answer, one of the youths hollered, “Dude, looks like you got here a little too late.”

  “It’s only ten past six,” he said.

  “I think he means,” the woman explained, “that you already have your baby. These fellows haven’t become fathers yet.” She no longer seemed to be questioning him with her gaze, but she still looked bemused. “You must be Mr. McCoy.”

  “Yes.”

  “Come in. You’ve found the right place.” She gestured toward an empty seat in the semicircle of folding metal chairs at the center of the room.

  Jamie lugged the car seat over, set it carefully on the floor and then lowered himself into the chair. Not surprisingly, the baby began to whimper. He’d learned from painful experience that it didn’t take much to get her going. Merely putti
ng down her seat was enough.

  “That baby is small,” observed the bald guy, who sat to the right of Jamie.

  He nodded, thinking, “Small but lethal.” His gaze arced across the room to the nurse. She was staring at him, making him feel as if he’d done something wrong. He supposed he had, misusing a condom and accidentally fathering a child. He supposed he was the world’s worst screwup—except that at least some of the tattooed kids in the room had to be screwups, too. Why didn’t the pretty nurse stare at them, instead?

  “I’m Allison Winslow,” she informed him. “We’ve been discussing some of the changes a baby causes in both fathers’ and mothers’ lives. Some of this may not be pertinent to you, but you may as well listen.”

  “Man, that thing is tiny,” said the kid seated on Jamie’s left. “How old is it, anyway?”

  “It’s not an it,” Jamie snapped. The kid had a silver skull-and-crossbones dangling from his earlobe. “It’s a girl, and she’s two weeks old.”

  “That’s a girl?” a boy across the room asked, rising from his chair and peering into the car seat “How can you tell?”

  “The usual way, stupid,” one of the other boys teased him.

  “What, she’s got PMS?”

  “Sure sounds like it, the way she’s whining.”

  “Guys, settle down,” Allison said firmly. She ruminated for a minute, then shrugged and tossed the stick of chalk she’d been holding onto the tray under the blackboard. “You know, it’s very special having a newborn in class with us. Maybe Mr. McCoy could show us how to hold her.”

  “Hold her?” Jamie shot Allison a frantic glance. Whenever he picked Samantha up, he was afraid of dropping her or hurting her. She was tiny, and his hands were big, and he was positive that if he held her the wrong way, he would break all her bones without even realizing it.

  “Sure. Babies love to be held.” Allison strode across the room to the car seat, gesturing for the others to gather around. “I can’t emphasize how important it is for you to hold your babies. There’s a condition called ‘failure to thrive…’” She deftly worked the straps holding Samantha in the seat, straps that had stymied Jamie for longer than he’d like to admit. The buckle popped open and the baby began to fidget. Allison slid one arm under Samantha, cupped her hand around the baby’s head and lifted her up, easily wrapping the blanket around her as she did.