Ruth had not held a baby in almost thirty years.
Ruth guessed the infant—a girl, judging from her pink knit cap—was about two weeks old. She was small enough that Ruth would have been nervous handling her, and so she didn’t. Swaddled in a standard-issue hospital receiving blanket, the baby appeared to be no longer than Ruth’s forearm. Ruth left her in the car seat.
Whoever dropped the baby off at the house had also left a diaper bag filled with Pampers, two bottles, a few cans of Enfamil, and a pink carrying sling. Fortunately, she was asleep, and Ruth did not need to use any of the supplies. Fern Douglas would hopefully arrive before that changed.
Ruth took the car seat into the living room. She turned the air-conditioning on and sat on the edge of the couch. Someone had felt comfortable leaving the baby unattended, but Ruth couldn’t, in good conscience, leave her alone in the room. Truly, this town might be more than she had bargained for. It was one thing to leave keys in a mailbox. It was quite another to leave a baby on a front porch.
She stood and paced, looking at her phone. Shouldn’t Fern be here by now?
The baby stirred. Oh no—sleep. Sleep!
Her tiny rosebud mouth was puckering even though her eyes were still closed. And just like that, Ruth recalled her own newborn baby’s phantom sucking from long ago, how, even half asleep, her daughter would root around for her breast. It was all so primal, so different from the way everything else could be scheduled and tamed. Ruth had been shocked by it. She’d thought she could manage motherhood the way she’d planned her career; with enough discipline and hard work, things would run smoothly. She could keep it all under control. What no one told her, what perhaps she should have guessed ahead of time, was that becoming a mother was all about letting go of control.
She heard the back door open, then footsteps in the kitchen. Finally!
But it was not Fern Douglas. It was the unpleasant strawberry blonde from yesterday. She rushed into the room, her hair clinging to her forehead and neck in damp tendrils. “I got here as fast as I could,” she said, barely glancing at Ruth. Her eyes locked on the car seat. She approached it slowly, almost reverently, and knelt down, peering at the baby.
“And…you are?” Ruth said.
“Elise Douglas. Fern’s wife,” the woman said. “I’m sorry. We got off to a bad start yesterday.”
That was an understatement. But in the spirit of moving things along, Ruth was willing to let bygones be bygones. “Yes, well, there is a more immediate problem at hand. I guess your friend or whoever dropped her off here didn’t realize you rented out the house for the summer?” Ruth said. Elise did not respond. It was like Ruth wasn’t even in the room.
The baby stirred. Elise reached into the car seat and pulled the small bundle into her arms, murmuring something that Ruth couldn’t quite make out.
She shifted impatiently on her feet.
“Okay, well, you should probably…take her back to her house. I don’t mean to be rude, but I really would like to get settled,” Ruth said.
Elise finally looked at her. “I don’t know where to go. I don’t know whose baby this is.”
What?
The baby began to cry. At first, it was just a squawk, like a bird, but it quickly escalated into a wail. How could such a tiny thing make so much noise? There was something impossible to endure about a baby’s cry. As a mother herself, Ruth was hardwired to respond.
“Perhaps you should call Fern and see if she knows. Or, better yet, take her to the tea shop and discuss it there.”
Elise shook her head. “I’m sorry, Ms. Cooperman. I have to figure this out, obviously. But I can’t take the baby anywhere.”
“Well, you can’t keep her here.”
“What if the person who left her here comes back? Just give me time to sort this out.” She looked down at the baby and then back at Ruth. “And please—don’t mention this to anyone.”
Who would she mention it to? Ruth thought. And why the secrecy? She sighed and looked out the window. It was a gorgeous day.
“I’m going out for a bit,” she said. “I expect to return to an empty house.”
Olivia could not imagine a worse time to have the flu. She’d never taken a sick day, and now—bam! She’d been in bed for three days straight. The optics were bad. It looked like she was sulking over the account she hadn’t been awarded.
The truth was, she’d run herself down by working eighteen-hour days to keep her mind off her recent breakup. The irony was that her job was social media, and while doing her best not to think about Ian, she’d stumbled on a photo of one of her very attractive clients at a lavish black-tie fund-raiser—on Ian’s arm!
For the past few nights, Olivia had tossed and turned, her body seemingly unable to regulate its temperature. Hot and then cold, she opened and closed her bedroom window as her mind ran around in circles wondering if she’d made a terrible mistake letting her relationship languish. Digging deep, she had to admit that she probably was not in love—had never been in love with anyone. Maybe she was meant to be alone.
That left the worry about work. Now that she had so much time to think, the significance of being passed over for the new account really hit her. If she wasn’t getting the big clients, it was only a matter of time before she was phased out.
It was time to leave, to go out on her own.
She’d been preparing for this day, debating whether she should stay with HotFeed and take her chances or start her own company. She would be leaving the security of her steady paycheck and her roster of clients, but she’d put out feelers and knew at least one client would leave with her. April Hollis was a thirty-something reality-TV star turned shoe designer whose every move, purchase, and thought was followed by eighteen million people on social media. When Olivia had met her six years earlier, she’d been a real estate broker in Hoboken spending her days off going to casting calls.
Olivia had already reached out to her.
“Whatever you need, doll,” April had said.
Still, the logistics were daunting. At HotFeed, she had a copy writer for the content and a person who created and managed a calendar of posts and made sure the posts went live and were properly tagged. She had someone who scoured the internet, found mentions of clients, and replied to the commenters. And the company had an analytics team to see what content was getting the best results. She would not have all this support as a one-woman operation. It would take time to build her staff. But she would manage in the meantime.
Her doorman buzzed up on the house phone.
“Hello?” The single word triggered a coughing fit.
“Ms. Cooperman? Your father is here.”
She should have known he’d show up even though she’d spent the past two days assuring him she was fine. When she was growing up, it had been her father who bandaged a skinned knee, who ministered to summertime bug bites, who counseled her over teenage heartbreak. Her mother was always traveling for work.
She opened her front door and found her father holding two bags from the Second Avenue Deli.
“Dad, really, you didn’t have to,” she said, overwhelmed by how happy she was not only to see him but to have company. Sure, she had friends in town. But they were people she went out with, networked with, had fun with; they were not people to sit on her couch and watch Netflix with.
“I wish you would find a lasting relationship,” he said a few minutes later over their matzo ball soup. “I don’t want you to spend your life alone.”
“Dad, I wish you would meet someone. I don’t want you to spend your life alone.”
Her parents had divorced when she was in middle school. The divorce had been difficult on them both—both meaning Olivia and her father. Ruth hadn’t seemed to miss a beat. Unlike most of her friends whose parents split up, Olivia ended up living primarily with her father, who kept the house in Cherry Hill, New Jersey, while her mother moved to a condo in Center City, Philadelphia, just across the Ben Franklin Bridge.
Over the years her dad had had a few girlfriends, but nothing stuck. Olivia was afraid that the divorce had left him wary of investing in someone emotionally. How else to explain his persistent single status? Her dad was—her own bias aside—a catch. He was a respected anesthesiologist, had a remarkably full head of silver hair, and kept in shape by playing tennis year-round; his only vice was rich food.
Once again, she tried to push him on this, and once again, he turned it around on her.
“I had my time being married and I have you. What’s your excuse?”
“Did you ever consider that I like my freedom?” she said. It was partially true; she liked the excitement of meeting someone, the thrill of the chase or of being chased, that first-night discovery of a man’s touch. As far as Olivia was concerned, it was all downhill from there. Clearly, judging from the tenor of her breakups, she wasn’t able to give enough. Maybe she never would be.
At a conversational impasse over their personal lives, they finished dinner in easy, companionable silence. Afterward, her father stuffed the empty soup containers and corned beef sandwich wrappers into the empty takeout bags and carried them to the hallway garbage room.
Olivia retrieved a pint of Emack & Bolio’s raspberry chip ice cream from the freezer. The two of them curled up on the couch, Olivia on one end, a blanket over her outstretched legs and remote in hand, her father on the other.
“A fine pair we are,” she said, smiling at him.
“I’m just happy to see you’re on the mend.”
She nodded. “I think I’m finally kicking this thing. Definitely going back to work on Monday.”
“Getting the flu in May might be a sign you should slow down a little.”
“Yeah, that’s not going to happen. In fact, I’m planning on leaving the company and starting my own.”
As she’d anticipated, her father looked dubious. A physician, Ben Cooperman didn’t understand the vagaries of the corporate world. Yes, medicine had its own politics. But her mother was the one she really should talk to about this. Olivia simply had no interest in making that phone call. She prided herself on not needing her mother. She was an independent woman—independent financially and emotionally.
“Are you ready for that?”
She nodded. “More than ready.” No need to tell him she felt pushed out the door.
“You’re young—you should be enjoying yourself a little. You can’t be all work and no play.”
“It will be fine,” she said confidently.
“Olivia,” her father said, patting her leg over the blanket, “I admire your ambition. I’m proud of you. But I have perspective that you don’t. Life goes fast. Before you know it…well, I worry that you’re going to miss out on the things in life that will make you happy. The things in life that are important. I don’t want you to…”
“What, end up alone like my mother? Trust me, I’m nothing like her,” she said, reaching for the thermometer.
Just one fever-free day, and she would be back in the office.