Balancing Act. Lilian Darcy

at the pizza restaurant, and chose one in a quiet corner in back, near the open kitchen. The girls were happy to squiggle with crayons on sheets of paper, watch the pizzas sliding in and out of the big, wood-fired oven and slurp their juice.

      “Have you always lived in St. Paul?” Brady asked Libby as they waited for their order, and she couldn’t help her suspicion that it was more than just a casual question. Had she once again lost the initiative she was seeking?

      “No, I was born in Kansas City,” she answered him, too accustomed to behaving as good manners dictated. She wasn’t prepared to avoid his question, or to challenge it, no matter how suspicious of it she was. “But I grew up in Chicago after my parents got divorced. I met my husband at Northwestern—he was doing his master’s—and we moved here when his company transferred him, around ten years ago, right after I finished college.”

      “You’ve moved around some, then. I was born in Columbus, and I’ve stayed there.”

      “So Scarlett is a third-generation Buckeye fan?”

      He laughed. It was the kind of laugh that invited a response, deep and chuckling, like a little stream gurgling way down in a forest’s secret hollows. “Fifth.”

      “Wow!”

      “My grandfather used to take me to games when I was a kid, and his father took him. I’ve been taking Scarlett since she was a baby. Not sure how she’ll go this season, now that she wants to run around.”

      “That’s nice.”

      His eyes were nice, too. Libby didn’t want to notice the fact, but it was a little hard not to, when they were looking at her from just a few feet away, across the table. She was right in what she’d seen earlier. They didn’t always look blue. Now, for instance, you’d have said they were gray—dark and smoky and thoughtful.

      She got the impression he wasn’t an intellectual man—not the kind of person who read serious books and watched documentaries on TV—but he wasn’t stupid, either. He was the kind of person who kept his thought processes to himself, then came out with surprising results in the end. Take his next question, for example.

      “Were you and your husband trying to have a baby for long?” he asked. “Were you on that whole assisted reproduction treadmill, like Stacey and I put ourselves through?”

      “No, we hadn’t been trying long at all,” she answered, startled into honesty. A couple’s fertility wasn’t something most people wanted to ask about at a first meeting. As it happened, she and Glenn hadn’t had time to discover whether they had any problems in that area. “Just three or four months,” she added. “Glenn hadn’t felt ready until he hit thirty-seven.”

      Too late, she realized what she’d unconsciously implied—that she herself had been ready much sooner.

      Well, that was true, wasn’t it? Although ten years younger than he was, she’d been ready for a long time, but Glenn had stood firm, as always. He wasn’t ready to share her with a baby yet. He wanted her all to himself. He still had career goals to accomplish. He didn’t want to be tied down and woken in the night. She had pretended to herself for years that she understood those reasons, and that she didn’t mind.

      She just wished she hadn’t let Brady Buchanan in on the secret. There had been some dissatisfactions in her marriage before Glenn’s illness. For the sake of the deeper connection they’d made with each other during those last months when Glenn had softened so much, however, she kept those to herself.

      It seemed weird to be talking on such a personal level with Brady, a near-stranger, but discovering that you shared twin daughters with a man cut through some of the usual barriers.

      Some of them.

      In other areas, she felt even more wary, and more protective of secrets and doubts and resolutions.

      She went on quickly, “Then his cancer was diagnosed, and that was the end of it. With the type of cancer and treatment he had, there was no possibility of getting another chance to conceive once his treatment was over, even if he had survived.”

      “That must have been tough.”

      “It was. A double loss, in a lot of ways. My husband, and my chance for a child that was his. Even so, it took me a long time to decide on adoption. I knew it would be a major undertaking on my own.”

      “Stacey and I tried to have a baby for eight years,” Brady said. “Deciding to go for an intercountry adoption gave us the best year of our marriage.”

      It didn’t quite make sense. They’d only had Scarlett for two or three months before his wife’s death. He must have been including the months before that.

      Libby couldn’t agree on those months being good ones in her own case. Although she’d appreciated the need for all the bureaucratic red tape in two countries, in order to ensure that children were willingly given up to responsible adoptive parents, she’d found the actual process of it—the waiting and the uncertainty—quite gruelling.

      She’d had to list every address she’d had in her adult life, every organization she’d ever belonged to, and every job she’d ever had. She’d been allowed to choose the sex and approximate age of the child she hoped for, but that was all. Brady and Stacey must have been through the same thing.

      She’d spent weeks in fear that her application would snag and fail on some small detail, and weeks more, before her flight to Vietnam, panicking that she might not be able to bond with the child who’d been chosen for her.

      She couldn’t imagine how those had been good months in Brady’s life, but maybe it was a very different process if you weren’t going through it alone.

      “So, if you moved because of your husband’s job, that means you don’t have parents or siblings here, right?” he asked, while she was still thinking about his last statement.

      “No, no siblings anywhere,” she told him.

      His gray, thoughtful gaze was still fixed on her, and she found it unsettling. His questions were like an interview, or a test. For the sake of Colleen and Scarlett, she hid her growing anger and discomfort. What was he angling toward?

      “I’m an only child,” she explained.

      “Me, too.”

      “My parents divorced when I was in grade school, as I said. My mother’s still in Chicago, and my Dad died when I was eighteen.”

      “I’m sorry to hear that.”

      “Yes, it was hard,” she answered. It wasn’t something she let herself think about.

      “But at least you have your mother, not so far away.”

      “Far enough!”

      Mom hadn’t visited since Colleen’s adoption. She’d sent gifts, and she talked about coming, but she hadn’t made it yet. Mom was a cautious, conservative person, slow to adjust to new situations. How would she deal with the news of Colleen’s twin?

      “And what about your husband’s parents?” Brady asked.

      “They’re in Florida. We were never all that close, and I’ve lost touch with them since Glenn’s death.”

      It all sounded too arid and distant. She knew that, and wondered what Brady would think. It wasn’t her fault. She’d called Glenn’s parents and sent cards for birthdays and anniversaries and holidays. But if they were out when she called and she left a message, they never called back. They never sent cards in return, and when she’d told them about her plan to adopt a Vietnamese baby, she could practically hear the ice crackling down the phone. They’d considered her action an affront to their son’s memory.

      This was when she’d given up. She and Colleen would go on putting down their roots here in St. Paul. They had a great house in a great neighborhood. She had good friends she’d made over the past ten years, and more friends she’d begun to make with other mothers since adopting Colleen.