Beauty and the Baby Read online

  She took a few steps toward the girl. “Angela, what’s wrong?”

  “Nothin’.” The girl jerked her head up, wiping away the tears from her cheeks with the heel of her hand. She tossed her head defiantly, looking away. Her silence told Lori that this was none of her business.

  Lori chose not to hear.

  For her, working at the center was a complete departure from life as she had known it. Here the word “deprived” didn’t mean not having the latest video game as soon as it came out. “Doing without” had serious connotations here that involved ill-fitting hand-me-down clothing and hunger pangs that had nothing to do with dieting. Here, life was painted in bleaker colors.

  But then, that was what the center was for, painting rainbows over the shades of gray.

  “Sorry, but I think it’s something.” Angela kept her face averted. “The tears were a dead giveaway.” Still nothing. “You know, for a pregnant woman, I can be very patient.” Lori planted herself in front of the teenager. “I’m not going away until you level with me and tell me why you’re sitting here by yourself, watering your knees.”

  Normally, her banter could evoke a smile out of the girl. But not today.

  This was worse than she thought. With effort, Lori lowered herself to the girl’s level. Her voice lost its teasing banter. “C’mon, Angela. Talk to me. Maybe I can help.”

  Angela shook her head. Fresh tears formed in the corners of her eyes. “Nobody can help me.” She sighed with a hopelessness that was far too old for her to be feeling. “Except maybe a doctor.”

  In that moment, Lori understood. She knew what had reduced the fifteen-year-old to this kind of despair and tears.

  Lori placed her hand on the girl’s shoulder. She was so thin, so small. And living a nightmare shared by so many.

  “Are you in trouble, Angela?”

  It was an old-fashioned term, Lori knew, but in its own way as appropriate today as it had been when it was first coined. Because a pregnant girl just barely in high school was most assuredly in trouble.

  The sigh was bottomless. “Yeah, I’ll say.” She sniffled. Lori dug into her pocket and pulled out a tissue, offering it to her. Angela took it and dried the fresh tears. Her voice quavered as she spoke. “A hell of a lot of trouble.”

  There were no indications that the girl was pregnant, but then, she hadn’t looked it herself until just recently, Lori thought. “How far along are you?”

  “I don’t know.” Angela shrugged restlessly. She looked down at the tissue. It was shredding. “It’s been over two months, I think.”

  “You need to see a doctor.”

  Lori could see the beginning of a new thought entering the girl’s eyes. “Yeah, somebody who can make this go away.”

  Lori shook her head. She didn’t want Angela thinking that she was cavalierly suggesting she have an abortion. Decisions like that couldn’t be made quickly.

  “No. Somebody who can tell you what’s going on with your body.” She took the girl’s hands into her own, forming a bond. “You might not be pregnant, it might be something else.” Although, Lori thought, other possibilities could be equally as frightening to a fifteen-year-old as having a baby.

  Thin, dark brown brows furrowed in confusion as Angela looked at her. “Like what?”

  She didn’t know enough about medicine to hypothesize. “That’s what you need to find out. Do you have a doctor?”

  Again the thin shoulders rose and fell, half vague, half defiant. “There’s this doctor on Figueroa Street. I hear she’s pretty decent.”

  Lori thought of her own doctor, a woman she’d been going to and trusted since she’d gotten out of college. Dr. Sheila Pollack had become more like a friend than just a physician. Angela needed someone like that right now, a professional who could clear up the mysteries for her and keep her healthy. Someone who could make her feel at ease rather than afraid.

  “All right, go to her.”

  Angela frowned. “Word on the street is she don’t do no abortions.”

  The girl’s mind was stuck in a groove that might not be the answer she needed, or would even want a few months down the line. “Don’t do anything hasty,” Lori counseled. “If you’re pregnant, talk to your mother.”

  Angela looked at her as if she’d just suggested she cover herself with honey and walk into cave full of bears. “Yeah, right and have her kill me? No thanks.” There was disdain in the teen’s voice, as if she’d just lost all credibility in the young girl’s eyes.

  When she moved to put her arm around the girl’s shoulders, Angela jerked away. Lori wasn’t put off. She tried again, more firmly this time. Angela needed to get a few barriers down. “She might surprise you.”

  Angela blew out a mocking breath. “Only surprises my mother gives me are the boyfriends she brings home.” She shivered.

  Had one of them put the moves on Angela? It wouldn’t have been the first time in history something like that had happened. Lori tread carefully, determined to do the right thing and not fail this girl she hadn’t known six months ago.

  “If you want, I can talk to your mother for you.”

  Angela buried her face in her hands. Lori sat beside her on the floor, stroking her hair. “What I want is not to be pregnant.”

  “First find out if you are pregnant.”

  Angela slowly raised her head and looked at her. “And then?”

  “And then—” With effort, Lori raised herself to her feet, “—we’ll go from there. One step at a time. When I see you tomorrow, Angela, I want you to tell me you have an appointment with the doctor.”

  The girl nodded, scrambled up to her feet and wiped away the last of the telltale streaks from her face. She looked at her for a long moment. And then, slowly, just the barest of smiles emerged. “You know, you’re pretty pushy for a pregnant woman.”

  “You’re not the first one to tell me that.” Lori slipped her arm around the girl’s shoulder and gave her a quick hug.

  She couldn’t get Angela’s face out of her mind. All through her instructions at the Lamaze class, Lori kept visualizing Angela in her mind’s eye. She could almost see her here at Blair, taking classes to prepare for the monumental change that lay ahead of her.

  The classes weren’t enough, Lori thought. Not for her and certainly not for a fifteen-year-old.

  The classes Lori gave with such authority taught woman how to give birth, but not what to do after that. Not really, not if she was being honest with herself. There was more to being a parent than knowing how to give a sponge bath to a newborn and that you should support their heads above all else. So much more.

  Lori walked down the long, brightly lit corridor of the first floor of one of Blair Memorial’s annex buildings. She’d waited until the last couple had left before locking up. The building felt lonely to her despite the bright lights. Seeing Angela huddled in a corner like that today had brought out all her own insecurities and fears. She had no mother to cower before, but there wasn’t a mother to turn to for guidance, either.

  She missed her mother, Lori thought not for the first time as she unlocked the door of her 1995 Honda Civic. Missed her something awful. For once, she lowered her defenses and allowed the sadness to come.

  With a sigh, she started up her car. Leukemia had robbed her of her mother more than a dozen years ago. A heart attack had claimed her father just as she was in the middle of college. By twenty, she was all alone and struggling to make the best of it. And then Kurt had entered her life and she felt as if the sun had finally come out in her world.

  Now here she was, eight years later, struggling all over again. The upbeat, feisty manner that the rest of the world saw was not always a hundred percent authentic. There were times which she really ached to have someone in her corner.

  She had someone in her corner, Lori reminded herself as she turned down the hospital’s winding path. She had Carson.

  Leaving the hospital grounds, she fleetingly debated stopping by the old-fashioned Ice Cre
am Parlor where she and the other three single mothers had so often gone after classes, eager to temporarily drown their problems in creamy confections sinfully overloaded with whipped cream and empty, sumptuous calories.

  It wasn’t nearly as much fun alone.

  Lori drove by the establishment. It was still open and doing a brisk business. The tables beside the bay windows were all filled. She wavered only for a moment before she pressed down on the gas pedal. The Ice Cream Parlor became a reflection in her rearview mirror.

  She couldn’t help wondering what the other women were doing tonight and if they still found motherhood as exciting as they had in the beginning.

  Would she? Or was her only certainty these days the fact that she found the prospect of giving birth and motherhood scary as hell?

  She came to a stop at a red light. Her hands felt slippery on the steering wheel.

  Opening night jitters, she told herself.

  Her due date was breathing down her neck and although part of her felt as if she had been pregnant since the beginning of time, another part of her did not want to race to the finish line, did not want the awesome weight of being responsible for the welfare of someone else other than herself.

  “I know what you’re going through, Angela,” she whispered into the darkness as she eased onto the gas pedal again.

  Right now, Angela probably felt isolated and alone. Maybe if she gave the girl a call, to see how she was doing and if she’d called to make an appointment with the doctor, Angela wouldn’t feel so alone.

  The next moment, the thought was shot down in flames. She didn’t have Angela’s number. On top of that, she wasn’t even sure where the girl lived or what her mother’s name was, so surfing through the Internet’s numerous helpful sites wouldn’t be productive.

  The number, she realized, was probably on Carson’s computer.

  Lori made a U-turn at the end of the next block and pointed her vehicle back toward the center.

  By car, St. Augustine’s Teen Center was only fifteen minutes away from Bedford and home, but it might as well have resided in a completely different world. Here, the streets were narrow rather than wide, and the neighborhoods had not grown old gracefully. The windows of the buildings seemed to be staring out hopelessly at cars as they drove by. The street lights cast shadows rather than illumination. It made Lori sad just to be here.

  This was the kind of neighborhood Kurt and Carson had grown up in, she thought. The kind they had both tried to leave behind.

  Except that Carson had come back. By choice.

  Lori saw St. Augustine’s Teen Center up ahead. Lights came from the rear of the building where Carson kept his office. She glanced at her watch. It was past eight.

  What was Carson still doing here?

  Chapter Three

  The parking lot was deserted, except for Carson’s beat-up pickup truck. His other car, a sedan, was housed in his garage at home. Right beside the classic Buick Skylark he had been lovingly restoring for the past three years. Lori had a hunch that working on the car was what kept him sane.

  Everyone needed something, she mused.

  Parking beside the truck, Lori got out and crossed to the rear entrance. Curiosity piqued, she let herself into the building and walked down the short hallway to the back office. Light was pooling out into the room onto the floor outside, beckoning to her.

  For a moment, she stood in the doorway, watching him, trying to be impartial. Carson was really a very good-looking man, she thought. Handsomer, actually, than Kurt had been. There was a maturity about him, a steadfastness that marked his features. It was a plateau that Kurt hadn’t reached yet.

  What Carson needed, she decided, was a life. A life that went beyond these trouble-filled walls. Contrast was always a good thing.

  Right now, he looked like a man with the weight of the world on his shoulders. A weight he guarded jealously. Carson O’Neill wasn’t a man who shared responsibility or had ever learned how to delegate. He thought he had to do it all in order for it to be done right.

  Carson glanced up. He’d thought he felt someone looking at him, but he hadn’t expected it to be Lori. If he was surprised to see her standing there, he made sure he didn’t show it. He let the papers he was shuffling through sit quietly on the desk.

  “Can’t seem to get rid of you, can I?” And then he realized how late it was. How did she get in after hours? It was late. “I thought I locked up.”

  “You did. I have keys, remember?” She held them up and jingled the set for his benefit before slipping them back into her purse.

  He laughed shortly. “That’ll teach me to hand out keys indiscriminately.”

  “You really are in a mood tonight, aren’t you?” She noted that he wasn’t smiling and there was an edge to his words.

  Carson laced his fingers together as he leaned back in his chair and rocked, looking at the stack of bills that never seemed to go away, never seemed to get smaller. It felt as if he had come full circle in his life, except that this time, he was hunting for funds at work instead of in his private life.

  “Looking for money that isn’t there always does that to me.”

  She crossed to his desk and picked up the last paper in his in-box. It was from the electric company. The one beneath it was for the phones. Both were past due. She had a feeling they weren’t the only ones.

  Dropping the papers, Lori raised her eyes to his. “Trouble keeping the wolf away from the door?”

  He shook his head. Times were tight. People picked and chose their charities carefully. St. Augustine’s had no name and wasn’t at the top of anyone’s list. If it closed its doors, no one would notice. No one except the kids who needed it most.

  Carson sighed. “It’s beyond trouble. More like a major disaster.” He glanced at the figures on the computer monitor again. They didn’t get any better no matter how many times he looked at them. “I’m trying to meet 2003 prices with a 1950s budget.”

  Her heart went out to him. He was one of the good guys no matter what kind of face he tried to present to the world. But she was a firm believer in it always being darkest before the dawn. Somehow, he’d find the money to make it through one more month. And then another, and another. He had before.

  Lori smiled at him. “I think this is the part where Mickey Rooney jumps up on a table and shouts, ‘Hey kids, let’s save the old place by putting on a show.’”

  The funny thing was, Carson understood what she was talking about. She’d made him watch one of those old movies once. It was while Kurt was still alive. His brother was out of town on some get-rich-quick venture and he’d come down with the flu. This was right after he’d taken over at the center and Jaclyn had walked out on him. Lori had come by with chicken soup she’d made from scratch and a sack of videotapes to entertain him despite his protests to the contrary. It was around then that he’d begun to seriously envy his brother.

  But he scowled now. He needed a miracle, not an old movie grounded in fantasy. “People really watched films like that in the old days?”

  She nodded. “Ate them up.”

  He pushed himself away from the desk, wishing he could push himself away from the bills as easily. “Well, there’s no one to put on a show here.”

  Lori had felt tired until she’d walked in. Now, one thought was forming into one hell of an idea. “No, but there could be a fund-raiser.”

  “What?” She was babbling, he thought. Fund-raisers were for fashionable causes backed by wealthy foundations and people blessed with too much money and too much time on their hands.

  Lori’s mind was racing. There was Sherry’s fiancé, not to mention the man who had returned into Joanna’s life. Both were well-connected billionaires in their own right. It could work.

  Her grin was almost blinding. It matched the sparkle in her eyes as she turned them on him. He had trouble keeping his mind on the situation.

  “I know a few people who know a few people who have more money than God.” Maybe it was ti
me she got together with the ladies of the Mom Squad again, Lori thought. She’d been the one who had baptized the group, the one who had been instrumental in bringing them all together for mutual support in the first place. Maybe it was time to spread some of that support around. “From what I hear, they’re always up for worthy causes.”

  Even so, that did him no good. “And probably get hit up by them every other minute of their lives.”

  She looked at him fondly. No one would ever accuse Carson of being a rampaging optimist. “Which is why having the inside track is a good thing.”

  He looked at her skeptically. “And you have the inside track.”

  He didn’t believe her. What else was new? She had a feeling that if he ever traced his family tree, he would find that his lineage went back to the original Doubting Thomas.

  “Anymore ‘inside,’ she told him, “and it might have to be surgically removed.”

  “What the hell do they put in those prenatal vitamins of yours?” She was dreaming, pure and simple. And wasting his time with pipe dreams. Miracles didn’t happen to people like him.

  She’d made up her mind about this and she wasn’t about to allow him to rain on her parade. “Energy.”

  He laughed, shaking his head. Watching her as she moved about his broom closet of an office. “Like you need some.”

  Her eyes laughed at him. The man was never satisfied. She’d be satisfied just removing the furrow from between his brows. “This afternoon you were complaining I looked tired.” She grinned. “There is just no pleasing you, is there?”

  She had a way of lighting up a room, he thought, even when he wanted nothing else than to stay in the dark. “You don’t have to please me, Lori—”

  Lori came around to his side of the desk and then sat down on top of it. She looked down on Carson, her eyes teasing him. “No, but I’d like to try. It’s a dirty job but someone has to do it.”

  “Why?”