Mom for Hire
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Victoria Pade
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11
Chapter One
“I want to have a baby,” Bailey Coltrain announced.
She and Jean Oslin were standing in front of the sinks and mirrors in the restroom of a restaurant near the University of Colorado’s medical center. They’d just taken turns at the podium for lectures to a medical conference on managing heart conditions in pregnant women. They were on their lunch break.
“You want to have a baby?” Jean asked incredulously.
Bailey didn’t take offense at the tone. Jean was her best friend. They owned the office building that housed Bailey’s gynecology and obstetrics practice on one side and Jean’s cardiology practice on the other.
“Right. I want to have a baby of my own.” Bailey ran a comb through her just-below-the-chin-length walnut-colored hair, even though every strand of the bob was already in place.
“You want to have a baby of your own?” Jean parroted yet again, more incredulously than the time before, staring at Bailey in the mirror. Her dark eyes were wide as she ignored her own short, prematurely salt-and-pepper hair, even though it could have benefited from a combing more than Bailey’s.
“That’s what I said, Jean. Is the buzz of that sound system still ringing in your ears or what?”
“I’m hearing you. I just can’t believe what I’m hearing.”
“I know,” Bailey said, anticipating what her friend was getting at. “I’m not married—”
“Or even involved with anyone.”
“Or looking at an intimate relationship on the horizon. That’s the point. I’m thirty-five years old. I deliver other people’s babies day in and day out. I want one of my own. I’m thinking of being artificially inseminated.”
“Oh my God.”
“I’m just saying that I’m established in my career. Making good money. Healthy. Happy. And ready. I can’t help it if Mr. Right-and-Wonderful hasn’t come down the pike. And I can’t keep waiting for him to.” She applied a little light pink gloss to her lips.
Jean was still staring somewhat slack-jawed.
“What?” Bailey demanded impatiently.
“You’re a good physician, Bailey. One of the best around. But let’s face it—if Marguerite quit working for you tomorrow, you couldn’t make yourself a cup of tea, let alone take care of a child. You kill goldfish—”
“Only a few. I was just too busy to remember to feed them. I had the tank taken out of my office and put in the waiting room for the receptionist to take care of.”
“My point exactly.”
“I wouldn’t forget to feed them if they were children, Jean.”
“No? I’m not so sure about that. Sometimes you forget to feed yourself. And what about things like cleaning up after a kid? Cleaning is not your forte, either. In fact, you told me yourself that you’ve never done it. In your entire life. Never dusted a table. Never cooked a meal. Never washed a load of laundry. Never—”
“Okay, so I’m not domestic.”
“In the extreme.”
“It isn’t my fault I grew up the way I did.”
“I know. Mom a neurologist. Dad a cardiac surgeon. Hanging around hospitals with them while they paid people to keep the home fires burning. Just the way you pay Marguerite to do. But, Bailey—”
“So maybe having a baby will domesticate me.”
“Poor baby. Poor, poor baby.”
“I beg your pardon.”
“You never baby-sat as a kid. Have you ever so much as changed a diaper?”
“No, but—”
“You didn’t have any brothers or sisters. You said yourself you didn’t do well on your pediatric rotation as an intern because you didn’t know how to relate to children. That you really didn’t even have friends your own age growing up, that you followed the hospital janitor for fun. And now you think you can have and raise a kid of your own?”
“Okay, so I had an unusual childhood. That’s part of why I’m feeling the itch for a baby myself now—to have a taste of everything I missed. To give my own kid the kind of childhood I wish I’d had.”
“You know what I think?”
“I know you’ll tell me.”
“I think you’re having some kind of early midlife crisis. First you stop taking maternity patients nine months ago so you wouldn’t have any deliveries and could take off for the next three months. To Africa, of all places. And now ydu want to get pregnant. These things are a little extreme, Bailey.”
“Okay, so I’ve been feeling restless and discontented the past year since losing my folks. You said it yourself—I’ve been enmeshed in medicine in one way or another my whole life. I don’t have any other life, especially not now that Mom and Dad are gone. You have Harvey. You have kids. You have more than your work. That’s what I want, too. I’ve had lousy luck with men, but I can have a baby without one. And I want to. I’m going to.”
Jean’s eyebrows arched. “So this is a definite decision? You aren’t just thinking out loud?”
“No, I’m not just thinking out loud.” In fact, this was something she’d been thinking about for a long while. Something she’d been craving for a long while. And yes, she realized at that moment, she had made up her mind. She was going to do it.
She watched her friend’s expression soften. “It isn’t that I don’t understand, Bailey. I’ve said it to Harvey a million times—I wouldn’t have wanted to grow up the way you did or go home to nobody but a housekeeper every night now. But a baby, Bailey. A baby. You just don’t know what an undertaking that is. Especially on your own, a single parent.”
“I’ve thought about that, and I’m okay with it.”
“You can’t be okay with something before you have any idea what it entails.”
Bailey rolled her eyes at her friend.
“I’m serious. Don’t think domestication comes like a bolt of lightning when you’re in the stirrups on the delivery table. It doesn’t. If you want to be a mommy, you’d better know you can wash those cute little rompers it’ll spit up on. You’d better know you can cook up a whole variety of things it can smear in its hair. You’d better know you can swab out the toilet it pours varnish into. And you’d better know it before you have it. Otherwise you’ll be doing a major disservice to that child by bringing it into the world hoping you can always hire someone else to do the dirty work because you don’t have the foggiest idea how to do it yourself.”
Jean disappeared into one of the bathroom’s stalls and Bailey powdered her straight, somewhat thin nose. Then she ran the tip of her ring finger under one pale blue eye as if that might erase the tiny, almost invisible line that wasn’t a wrinkle yet but would be ten years from now. She had spent her thirty-fifth birthday alone this year, and recently she’d been thinking more and more about that. And about living her whole life without a family of her own. Isolated in the same kind of sterile world she’d grown up in. Except even then, she’d had her parents.
Bailey turned to face the full-length mirror on the side wall to see if her new navy blue pantsuit was holding up under the hours of sitting, listening to speeches.
When this conference was over today, Jean would head home to her husband and her two teenagers. Bailey would go home to a house left clean by Marguerite, her housekeeper. Clean and empty. And much, much too quiet.
She cast a glance at the door to the stall Jean had gone into. Since it was still closed and she had a bit of privacy, she turned in profile to the full-length mirror. She pulled her jacket tight across her flat stomach, arched her back to try for a semblance of a pregnant tummy, laid her hand there the way she’d seen so many of her expectant mothers do and tried to imagine what it would feel like to have a child growing inside her own womb.
She thought that if she did, she could go home tonight all alone and happily spend the whole evening just feeling it move inside her. Feeling that special connection to someone. To her own flesh and blood.
How hard could domesticity and parenthood be? If she could deliver a baby she could certainly care for one.
But maybe Jean was right. Maybe she should get in some practice beforehand. She owed her future child that. So she’d be prepared when it got here. So she’d be the best mother she could be, with hired help or without it.
Bailey heard the toilet flush and gave her abdomen one last press—wishing hard that there was a baby growing there already. Then, just as Jean came out, she straightened up and smoothed the wrinkles out of her suit as if that’s all she’d been doing in the first place.
“So where do you suggest I go to get domesticated before I have a baby?” she asked her friend as Jean washed her hands.
“How do I know? Maybe you can borrow one of Marguerite’s grandkids and get her to give you lessons. Nothing like firsthand experience to learn the ropes.”
Any help from Marguerite would have to wait, because Bailey had given her housekeeper the next three months off and as a bonus paid for her tickets to visit her sister in New Mexico. She couldn’t rescind that.
But suddenly she also couldn’t help thinking that she didn’t want to waste the next three months on a vacation. Not when she could spend them learning the ropes—as Jean put it—preparing herself for what she really wanted. For what she was determined to have.
Jean checked her watch. “We better get back.”
But during the walk to the medical center and the rest of the afternoon’s lectures, Bailey’s mind wasn’t on heart problems in obstetrical patients.
It was on canceling her trip and finding a way to get herself some mothering and household experience.
It might not have been how she’d intended to use this time. But the fact was, she had the next three months free, and Jean had just pointed out how she could better use it.
