Susan Wiggs - Dockside at Willow Lake

He hoped Olivia would have better luck than he had.

Daisy shifted uncomfortably in her chair, folding her arms across her stomach. “So I wanted to ask you something, Dad.”

“Sure, anything.” But of course, inwardly, he braced himself, wondering, Now what?

“Classes start in a few weeks, and I thought …” Her voice trailed off and she got up, rubbing the small of her back. She turned, and the evening light from the window crisply outlined the incongruous curve of her belly.

And with that movement, Greg saw his daughter as though through a fragmented glass. The illusion that she was still his little girl fell to pieces. Even now that he’d had months to get used to the idea, the sight of her extremely pregnant silhouette still sometimes shocked him. She was a bundle of contradictions. The untimely ripeness of her form looked wrong with her still-soft, vaguely childlike features. She had painted her nails a vivid red-black and wore ripped jeans and a top that draped over the arc of her belly. She was a little girl, teenager and grown woman all in one, and she regarded him with a need and trust Greg wasn’t sure he deserved. She was his kid . And at thirty-eight, he hardly felt ready to be a grandfather.

Cut it out, he warned himself. He simply didn’t have a choice in the matter. Regrets and what-ifs were not an option, not at this point. “You thought what?” he prompted.

“Could you be my coach?” she asked. “For the childbirth classes, you know, and for the hospital.”

Her coach? The guy who stands by her in the delivery room? No, thought Greg, fighting a sick premonition. No way. Not in a million years would he be that guy, witnessing his child having a child of her own.

“My doctor said it should be somebody I trust and feel safe with.” She paused, bit her lip, and her expression was one he’d seen a thousand times through the years. “That’s you, right?” she said.

“But I’m … a guy,” he said lamely. A scared, freaking-out guy who didn’t trust himself to stay conscious in the delivery room or come through in an emergency. A guy who would rather have a root canal than see his daughter give birth. That seemed wrong on so many levels, he didn’t know where to begin.

“What about your mother?” he asked, his mouth working ahead of his brain, as usual.

Daisy’s expression froze, and although she would not appreciate knowing it, she looked just like Sophie. They both had that regal, withering ice-queen manner, able to belittle or intimidate with a razor-sharp glance.

“What about her?” Daisy asked. “The classes go on for six weeks. You think she’s going to put her life on hold and camp out in Avalon for six weeks?”

Sophie lived in The Hague, where she was a lawyer at the International Criminal Court. She came back to the States once a month to see the kids. After the divorce, Sophie had insisted that Daisy and Max live with her. Both kids, traumatized by the breakup of their family, had returned after just a couple of weeks, demanding to stay with Greg. He didn’t fool himself into thinking he was the preferred parent. It was just that the life he offered here in the States was a better fit for his two lost, hurting kids. So now Sophie had to make do with the visits, with phone calls and e-mail. The situation was sad and awkward, and Greg couldn’t tell if the kids had forgiven her or not. He figured his job was to stay neutral on the issue.

Daisy made a lofty gesture around the house. “Will Mom live with us? Yeah, she’d love that.”

“I own a hotel,” Greg pointed out. “We could put her in the Guinevere suite.” Like many of Avalon’s local establishments, the Inn at Willow Lake had an Arthurian theme with rooms named after characters from the old legend.

“Guinevere. Wasn’t she the one who cheated on her husband with his best friend?” Daisy asked archly.

“That was never proven. The French added it later.” Greg felt a strange and unjustified sense of solidarity with his ex. It was probably because of Daisy’s situation—unmarried and pregnant, with the monumental struggle of single motherhood ahead of her. Despite his differences with Sophie, he shared with her the sense that Daisy was going to need all the support and compassion they could offer. “I’m sure she’d be honored to be your coach.”

“And you wouldn’t?”

“Honey, of course I would. But I’m …” Damn . “It would be …” He paused, got up and paced the room, searching for the right word to describe attending your teenage daughter giving birth to your grandchild. “Weird,” he concluded. And that was putting it mildly.

“Listen, it’s just classes. You learn about the process and signs to watch for, and what to do when things start happening. And in the delivery room, everything is all draped, and you can just deal with me from the neck up. Maybe, um, hold my hand and talk to me, give me ice chips, stuff like that. It didn’t look like that big a deal in the video the doctor gave me to watch.”

“That’s assuming everything goes according to the video.”

“Okay, fine,” she said. “Whatever. A birth coach is optional, anyway.”

“Right, like I’m going to let you do this on your own.” Greg stuck his thumbs in his back pockets and stood at the window, looking out but seeing only memories of his own child being born. He hadn’t been there for Daisy’s birth, of course, thanks to the way Sophie had manipulated the situation. But he’d been present for Max. He remembered the long night, the glare of lights, the pain and the terror and the joy. God, it was yesterday.

Then he turned back to Daisy, his daughter—his heart. “I’ll do it.”

“Do what?” asked Max, coming in from the kitchen, trailing shoelaces and backpack straps in his wake. He was eating again. Of course he was. It had been a half hour since dinner. Max, who had the appetite of some hypermetabolic creature in a sci-fi flick, had taken to refueling a couple of times per hour. At the moment, he was eating a Pop-Tart, stone cold out of the wrapper.

“I’m going to be your sister’s birth coach,” he said. “What do you think of that?”

“I think you’re out of your freaking mind,” Max said with a shudder.

“Gosh, and I was going to invite you, too, Max,” Daisy said. “Having you there, holding my hand, would have meant so much to me.”

“It would mean you finally lost what’s left of your marbles. Geez .” He shuddered again.

Greg ground his teeth. Despite the fact that she was pregnant, she still bickered like a third grader with her brother. Although it took some restraint, Greg knew it was best not to intervene when the two of them went at it. The bickering usually played itself out and sometimes even seemed to relieve tension, oddly enough.

With an older brother and two older sisters, he understood the dynamics of siblings. The main thing was to stand back and let the fur fly. He found this surprisingly easy to do, zoning out while they picked at each other about everything from the way Max ate a Pop-Tart to their cousin Olivia’s upcoming wedding, in which Daisy was to be a bridesmaid, Max an usher.

“You know you’re going to have to take ballroom dancing lessons,” Daisy told her brother with a satisfied smirk.

“Better than birthing lessons,” he shot back. “You’ll be, like, the world’s largest bridesmaid.”

“And you’ll be, like, the world’s dorkiest uncle. Weird Uncle Max. I’m going to teach the baby to call you that.”

Greg figured if these kids could survive each other, they could survive anything. He left them to battle it out and went to his study to check e-mail. There was a message from Brooke with a noncommittal subject line—thanks for today …