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He nodded, not taking his eyes off Alice. “That’s right.”
She made a bottle, and Alice took it, but she didn’t go back to sleep.
He and Ellen ended up staying up until five o’clock in the morning, walking the floor with Alice who wouldn’t stop crying. He felt terrible, because she was probably missing her mom. And at some point, he figured he would probably just lay her down in her crib and let her sleep, but he didn’t want to do that this first night in a strange house with a strange person and none of the things that she was familiar with.
Ellen completely supported him and took turns with him walking the floor with her.
It didn’t seem nearly as hard with Ellen beside him. Funny how a good friend could make a hard job easier. He felt bad though, because she got no sleep before she had to leave to teach her aquatics class.
After everything she’d done for him, he knew he owed her big time, but he wasn’t sure how he was going to repay her. Especially now that his life had taken such a drastic turn.
Chapter 14
Bernadine used her key to open the aquatic center. She had been coming to water aerobics for over three years. She usually beat the teacher, Ellen O’Riley, and eventually the aquatic center had just given her a key.
That might not be the way normal towns did things, but Sweet Water was a little different. Even though they had an Olympic-caliber training center right in town. Or right outside of town, as the case was.
Regardless, Bernadine ignored the ache in her back and pushed her glasses further up her nose. Her hands were too shaky for her to get her contacts in anymore, and she’d taken to wearing her glasses everywhere. She lost her husband fourteen years before and had celebrated her seventy-fourth birthday just a couple of weeks ago.
She was pretty spry for her age, but she had what the doctors called an essential tremor. They assured her it wasn’t Parkinson’s, but whatever it was, it made her life a lot more difficult.
She wished she would have appreciated her youth while she had it, because old age stunk. It was hard, and...ever since she’d lost her husband, she wished she had someone to share it with. Surely getting old would be easier if there were two of them to face it together.
But getting married at her age seemed...maybe foolish. It wouldn’t be what she wanted, which was a lifetime spent with someone, someone who knew her inside out, could finish her sentences, had seen her at her worst—which would have been childbirth for her or maybe the day her husband had his heart attack. Whichever. Still, someone who had seen her at her worst, knew her foibles and admired her strengths, and covered her weaknesses.
Anyone she met now at her age, they would only have a decade together, or maybe two if they were very blessed. Not long enough at all to know someone the way she’d known her husband.
Still, staying home and crying over spilled milk wasn’t going to do her any good either. So, a few years ago, she’d lugged her body off the couch, even though she didn’t want to, and had set off to try to find some friends and do something productive with her life.
That’s when the aquatic ladies had been born.
She dragged her housemate, rode along with her, and there were a bunch of older and getting older ladies who got their old, creaking bones out of bed before the crack of dawn and came to take a dip in the pool.
Ellen had been faithful in teaching them, and the few times that she had missed, Bernadine had taken over.
Maybe she’d try to start her own aerobics class. She surely ought to be able to do it by now. Being that she was a three-year veteran.
She was in the ladies’ locker room starting to change, she had her swimsuit out of her bag, when Ellen walked in, bleary-eyed, looking like she hadn’t slept a wink, and making Bernadine think for the first time that maybe the rumors that had been going around about her were true.
“Doesn’t look like you slept at all last night,” Bernadine said, wondering if she could just come out and ask. She knew older ladies sometimes could get away with things that younger ladies couldn’t, but she liked and respected Ellen, and didn’t want to spread her secret around town if what she heard last night was actually true.
“Actually, I didn’t,” Ellen said, looking around the locker room like she’d never seen it before.
“Were you up with the baby?” Bernadine asked, knowing she probably shouldn’t have.
Ellen stopped, and the unfocused look in her gaze left immediately and she zeroed in on Bernadine. “How did you know that?” There was wonder in her voice, and total shock.
“That’s the rumor that was going around last night. That you’d had a baby, and that you gave it to Travis to raise. That was the reason that he came back from Brazil.”
“What about me? Do I get to raise it too?”
“Well, are you?” Bernadine asked, holding her swimsuit in one hand and staring at Ellen. Why in the world would Ellen be asking her?
“I don’t know. I... Travis does have a baby, but it’s not mine. Not really.”
“Well, last time I checked, it took two to create a baby. Of course, with all these newfangled inventions they seem to come out with on a daily basis, maybe there’s a way for your phone to pop out a baby that only has a dad and not a mom. Is there?”
Bernadine didn’t really think there was, but she never thought that she’d actually be pushing buttons on the screen of a phone and have it do what she told it to do. That was pretty much what her phone did, except when it decided to get cantankerous and not obey her. Or, like her friend said, it was operator error.
