Smooth Talking Stranger Read Free Page B

boy. He was dressed in blue, his arms out-flung, his mouth clamped tight as a powder compact as he slept. I crawled onto the bed beside him, staring at this defenseless creature with his little-old-man face and tender pink skin. His eyelids were so fragile they were tinted blue as they lay closed over his sleeping eyes. The small skull was covered with soft black hair, and his fingers were tipped with nails as tiny and sharp as bird claws.
    The baby’s absolute helplessness made me intensely anxious. When he woke up, he was going to cry. And leak. He was going to need things, mysterious things that I knew nothing about and had no desire to learn.
    I could almost sympathize with Tara for having foisted this overwhelming problem on someone else. Almost. But mainly I wanted to kill her. Because my sister had known that leaving him with Mom was a stupid idea. She had known that Mom would never keep him. And she had been aware that I would probably be recruited to do something about it. I had always been the family’s problem-solver, until I had opted out in an act of self-preservation. They still hadn’t forgiven me for that.
    Since then I had often wondered how and when I might be able to reunite with my mother and sister, if we all would have changed enough that we could have some kind of workable relationship. I hoped maybe it would turn out like one of those Hallmark movies, a lot of soft-focus hugging and laughing as we sat on a porch swing.
    That would have been nice. But it wasn’t my family.
    As the baby slept, I listened to his soft kitten-breaths. His smallness, his aloneness, caused an invisible weight to settle over me, sadness mixed with anger. I wasn’t going to let Tara run from this, I vowed grimly. I was going to find her, and for once she would have to deal with the consequences of her actions. Failing that, I was going to find the baby’s father and insist that he bear some responsibility.
    “Don’t wake him up,” my mother said from the doorway. “It took me two hours to put him down.”
    “Hi, Mom,” I said. “You look great.”
    “I’ve been working with a personal trainer. He can hardly keep his hands off me. You’ve put on weight, Ella. You’d better be careful . . . you get your figure from your daddy’s side, and his people always ran to fat.”
    “I exercise,” I countered, annoyed. I was not at all fat. I was curvy and strong, and I took yoga three times a week. “And I get no complaints from Dane,” I added defensively, before I could stop myself. Immediately I was tempted to smack myself in the head. “But it doesn’t matter what anyone thinks of my figure, as long as I’m happy with it.”
    My mother ran a dismissive glance over me. “You’re still with him?”
    “Yes. And I’d like to get back to him as soon as possible, which means we need to find Tara. Can you tell me again what happened when you saw her?”
    “Come to the kitchen.”
    Easing myself from the bed, I left the room and followed her.
    “Tara showed up without calling first,” my mother explained as we reached the kitchen, “and said, ‘Here’s your grandbaby’ Just like that. I let her in, and I poured some tea, and we sat down to talk. Tara said she’s been living with your cousin Liza, and working at a temp agency. She got pregnant by one of her boyfriends, and she says he’s not in a position to help. You know what that means. Either he doesn’t have two nickels to rub together, or he’s already married. I told Tara she should put the baby up for adoption, and she said she didn’t want to do that. So I said, ‘Your life will never be the same. Everything changes after you have a baby’ And Tara said she was starting to figure that out. Then she mixed some formula for the baby and fed him while I went to the back room to take a nap. When I got up, Tara was gone and the baby was still here. You’ll have to get him out of here by tomorrow. My boyfriend can’t know about this.”
    “Why