A Fool and his Honey Page 0,42
the front and bushed out behind her shoulders. Martin turned and gestured to me to come on, and I slipped out of the car and started to walk toward the little house.
And then I remembered the baby. I heaved a sigh, the theatrical kind, and turned around to go through the process of retrieving Hayden. "Oh, isn't he beautiful!" the young woman said. "Won't you come in?" While we exchanged condolences on the death of her brother-in-law, she waved us into the tiny house, which reminded me of an apartment I'd had while I was in college. The complex had just been finished when I signed the lease, and everything in the small space had gleamed: kitchen cabinets, walls, countertops. Craig's older brother Dylan and his wife Shondra were obviously house-proud, and after a few days of taking care of an infant, I was impressed that Shondra, herself a new mother, was still keeping her standards high. Shondra was just as spotless as her house; her face was scrubbed, making me feel like a made-up tramp, her rose-tinted sweats were pristine, and even her sneakers were spanky white.
"Such a nice home," I said quietly, after she'd talked about Craig a little, without much sorrow. Shondra beamed, her conventional expression of grief shucked in a second.
"Thank you," she said, trying to sound offhand. "Dylan did most of the work on it himself, in the evenings and on weekends."
"That must have been hard," Martin commented. He had taken off his coat and was holding the baby while I tugged mine at the sleeves. "Well, I didn't get to see a lot of him. So I'd come over with his supper or a snack and just sit and watch, while I was expecting," Shondra said, a little smile letting us know she'd enjoyed that.
"Where's your little girl?" I asked politely.
"Kelly. She's taking a nap," Shondra said. "Can I hold this little guy? My brother was just here, and I wanted to thank you for bringing him home." Martin and I glanced at each other. We were sure slow on the uptake. Martin, who'd had more sleep, heard the shoe drop first. "Rory? Rory Brown is your brother?"
Shondra looked down at the baby, rocking him gently in her round arms. "Yes," she admitted, less happily. "Rory is my big brother. He's, ah, he's... a good-natured guy, and Dylan and I have been praying hard that he'll see the Lord's ways."
I looked at the little table sitting in the exact middle of the kitchen. There were two mugs on it, one with a spoon beside it with a little circle of brown in the center. The coffee wasn't dry yet.
"We must have just missed him?" I held out my hands, offering to take Hayden back. Shondra noted my gesture but she stared down at his face for several more long seconds, as if she'd just noticed something that gave her pause. "Oh, that's right. You just missed him," she said absently. "In fact, when we heard your car pull up, he went right out the back door." Shondra glanced over at some pictures and a vase of dried flowers on top of the composite oak-colored TV cabinet, then back to the baby's face. She slowly returned Hayden to me. "He's a beautiful baby," she said soberly. Her small mouth pursed, as if she was thinking over a problem.
A little wail from the back of the house pulled at her attention like a tractor beam. "My goodness, Kelly is up. Let me go see to her." While Shondra was out of the room, I strolled over to the TV cabinet as casually as I could manage. The framed baby pictures were old enough to be from Shondra's family album, or Dylan's, and in one grouping was a baby girl about a year old, a baby girl embedded in a ruffled dress with a little bow stuck in her wispy hair, and a baby boy in a tiny suit. "Barf," I muttered, and then the face of the baby caught my eye.
"Hmmm and double hmmm," I muttered, turning away right before Shondra came back in carrying a much larger bundle than Hayden.
While we were doing the obligatory admiring of the child, I was nasty enough to be sorry this young couple already had a baby, so perfect would they be to leave Hayden with. And they were blood relations to the baby, one way or the other. Martin and I had not discussed the possibility of finding