Barbara Dunlop: Forever Jake

But she hadn’t. And for one crazy second he’d been tempted to swagger over to Seth and Alex and the rest of the boys to recount it all.

She wouldn’t have denied it, couldn’t have denied it. Everyone in town knew that Robin’s neck turned bright red whenever she told less than the truth. He could have elevated his social status to the stratosphere with a few well-chosen sentences.

It was a big temptation for a misfit eighteen-year-old boy. But the thirty-two-year-old man was inordinately proud of his silence.

Across the dinner table, she laughed at something the children said. It had been the most noble moment of his life. Too bad she didn’t even remember.

“YOU MUST REMEMBER what that overpowering maternal urge feels like.” Robin pegged one of her nephew’s T-shirts on the clothesline behind her mother’s house. She ran her hand lovingly across the damp fabric of the tiny garment. Soon, she told herself. Soon she’d have tiny clothes of her own to wash.

“But I was already married,” said Connie. “I had somebody to support me and help me.”

“I don’t need anybody to support me.” Money was not an issue. “My promotion at Wild Ones will keep me in one city, and the salary is enough for anything we might need.” Including teeny, tiny clothes.

“I don’t just mean financial support.” Connie draped a voluminous bedsheet over the line. “I mean emotional support.”

“In case you’ve forgotten, I’m a very independent person.” Her job as a location scout for Wild Ones Tours took her all over the globe. She traveled alone, checking out potential adventure tours for the company to promote. She enjoyed the freedom.

“Well, you’ve never independently paced the floor at 2:00 a.m. with a crying baby in your arms.”

“I once stayed up for forty-eight hours straight, pacing nervously while I listened to lions roar.” She could handle sleep deprivation and emotional fatigue.

“It’s not the same thing.” Then Connie grinned. “Though it might be good training.”

“See?” Robin added a peg to an end of the bed-sheet, smoothing out the wrinkles with the palm of her hand. “I’m completely ready.”

“But the lions went away after forty-eight hours. Babies stay for years.”

“I know that.” Robin had considered her plan from all angles. She loved babies. She loved children. She was not going to end up a decrepit old maiden aunt to Connie’s boys just because she hadn’t met the right man during her child-bearing years.

“I’m only suggesting you wait a bit. You never know what’s right around the corner in life.”

“I’m thirty-two years old. The window of opportunity is closing. Have you read the statistics for child-bearing past thirty-five?”

“Women have babies as late as forty now.”

“It’s a much higher risk.”

“You read too much.”

“How old were you when you had Sammy?”

“Twenty-eight.”

“See.”

“But I was married.”

“This isn’t 1950. Women do not have to define their lives by their marital status.” Robin believed that. She really did. Sure, she’d like a father for her children. But she’d worked in more than thirty countries around the world, she’d met men of all shapes, sizes, ideologies and personalities. She’d never once found one she wanted to spend her life with.

She wasn’t getting married simply to be married.

“What are you going to tell Grandma?” Connie pegged up the last pillowcase and lifted the empty laundry basket, settling it at her waist.

“I haven’t decided yet.” Robin bit her lower lip, fixing a small wrinkle in the pillowcase. “I’ll probably make up a temporary boyfriend.”

“So she won’t know you had casual sex?” Connie quirked her eyebrows.

Robin hesitated. She wasn’t at all comfortable lying to her grandmother, but she was even less comfortable telling her the truth. “There’ll be nothing casual about it. It will be deliberate and effective.”

“Let me guess.” Connie turned and started for the short staircase. “You’ve read a book on this, too.”

“Of course.” Robin followed. “I’ve researched fertility and conception.” She had a basal body thermometer in her suitcase. She’d done her first temperature test run last month, and was doing another this month. She could identify her fertile time to within twenty-four hours.

Connie laughed. “I just hope you make sure your baby reads the same books you did. They tend to ignore the experts and do whatever the heck they want.”

“I read that, too.”

“Of course you did.”

“I’m ready for this,” Robin assured her sister. “I’m probably more ready for this than most married women.”

Connie sighed. Then she turned and lowered herself to sit on the stairs, setting the basket on the dry grass beside her.

“You know, you don’t always have to grab life by the throat and shake it until it gives you what you want.”

“That was a ridiculously obscure statement.” Intrigued, Robin sat next to her big sister.

“You’ve always been like that.”

“Like what?”

“Once you set your sights on the goal line, you don’t look to the right or to the left. You just blast along like a steamroller.”

“I’m efficient. I get things done.” There was nothing worse than wandering willy-nilly around an idea for months on end. Once you made a decision, you implemented it. Simple as that.

Connie leaned over and picked a blade of grass, twisting it in her fingertips. “Take Wild Ones, for instance. You decided working as a location scout for an adventure travel company was a great way to see the world.”

“It was.” Robin wasn’t getting her sister’s point. Her career with Wild Ones was an ongoing success. As an example of mistakes in life, it was rather pathetic.

“They needed pilots. You became a pilot.”

“So?”

“They needed translators. You learned Portuguese.”

“I don’t understand what you’re getting at. What’s wrong with learning Portuguese? These are all good things.”

“Everything you did, for years and years, was focused toward the goal of becoming a perfect Wild Ones employee.”

“I still don’t see this as a problem. So I’m focused? So I’m determined? It’s taken me a long way in life.” A gust of wind blew Robin’s hair across her face, and she swept the strands behind her ear.

“But you never give life a chance.”

“A chance to do what?”

“You never trust that there are people around you who might make good things happen. Good things that you never even knew you wanted. All I’m suggesting is that you slow down for a while and give fate a chance.”

Fate? Robin had tried fate once. Fifteen years ago in the Forever River. But Jacob Bronson had stopped her, thank goodness.

She still shuddered at the possible consequences of making love with Jake. She might have become pregnant at eighteen. Or worse, she might have imagined she was in love with him and stayed in Forever. She would have missed out on her education, her career, her life.

No. Fate couldn’t be trusted in the driver’s seat.

She blinked at Connie. “You want me to wander willy-nilly through life and let fate blow me around like a dried leaf?”

“It’s worked for me. I never would have met Robert if I hadn’t missed that plane to Seattle.”

“That was luck.”

“Call it what you want.”

“I don’t know, Connie. I can’t imagine myself hanging around international airports hoping to meet the man of my dreams.”

Connie chuckled. “All I’m suggesting is that you go with the flow once in a while. Let the wind take you.”

“Like a dried leaf?”

“You’re not a dried leaf.” Connie sighed and put an arm around Robin. “Just don’t get so focused that you miss an opportunity right under your nose.”