Whose Baby?. Janice Johnson Kay

and turned her head, cheeks pale and her eyes unfocused. “I…I’m not sure…”

      He glanced around and saw that the shoppers had gone about their business. A young woman behind the counter was ringing up a purchase. At the same moment, a giggle wafted from the sunporch.

      “I’m here, Mommy! Remember?”

      The playhouse. It must be two-story, because framed in an upper window of the fake castle was a little girl’s face, flushed with delight because her presence had been a secret.

      The rock that had been sitting in his stomach was suddenly a boulder, craggy and painful. It pressed his lungs until he couldn’t breathe.

      Rose was wriggling, so he set her down without tearing his gaze from the child. He felt his lips move, knew they formed a name: Jennifer.

      Even the voice. Sounding confident and open, she invited Rose to come up. Shyly his daughter went, bending to crawl across the mock drawbridge and inside. As if Rose couldn’t figure out how to climb a ladder, Shelly gave her directions and told her what she’d find up at the top and how Mom had said they’d go to the beach and did Rose like hot dogs ’cuz Mom said maybe that’s what they could have for lunch. The words flowed like a stream over stones, making a kind of song, and all as inevitable as water finding its way downhill.

      Jennifer, he thought in agony.

      She peeked out the window at him, her face, alight with laughter, looking for all the world like a nineteenth-century children’s book illustration of an elf perched on a flower stem. Shelly’s ears stuck out just a little. Jennifer had hated hers, though he had thought them cute. Just like Jennifer’s, Shelly’s face narrowed from high cheekbones to a pointy chin, and just like Jennifer’s, her eyes shimmered with amusement and devilment.

      “It’s worse than seeing the picture, isn’t it?” the woman beside him said softly.

      Taking a ragged breath, he turned his head and met Lynn Chanak’s eyes. “God.”

      She nodded.

      “Do you see yourself?” he asked, keeping his voice low.

      “I suppose.” Like him, she gazed toward the playhouse. Neither girl was visible in the window, although whispers and laughter drifted out. “She does look like pictures of me at that age, but I don’t exactly remember my face in the mirror from when I was three, so it’s not quite as big a shock as Shelly must be for you.”

      He fumbled for his wallet and, with shaking hands, took out a photo of his dead wife and handed it to Lynn.

      She looked at it for a long moment. When she lifted her head, her gray-green eyes were misty. “She was beautiful.”

      “Shelly is going to look like her.”

      A tear dropped, shimmering, from her lash. She wiped it from her cheek. “Oh, I wish…”

      “This hadn’t happened?”

      She squeezed her eyes shut, as if willing back further tears. “No,” Lynn said finally. “Because then I wouldn’t have Shelly, and she’s my life. No, I was going to say, I wish we’d never found out. But now…” She gazed again toward the playhouse where first one girl’s laughing face, then the other, popped up. “But now, I’m not so sure.”

      “Jennifer’s parents want to meet her,” he heard himself say.

      Lynn squeezed her hands together without looking at him. “I thought they might. But how can we do that, without Shelly knowing who they are?”

      “I told them they might have to wait.”

      She smiled with obvious difficulty. “Thank you.”

      “What about your parents? And your ex-husband’s?”

      “My mother and stepfather love Shelly, and I’m sure they’ll love Rose, if you give them the chance. They’ll support whatever we decide. Brian’s parents…” She hesitated. “I don’t know. At the moment, he’s washed his hands of the whole thing. My pregnancy wasn’t planned, and…” She swallowed whatever she had been going to say, perhaps suddenly aware that she had been going to reveal too much that was private to a relative stranger. “Well,” she said, a little awkwardly. “Certainly there’s no rush, where they’re concerned. Right now, it’s just Shelly and me.”