Page 12 of Summer Longing
But this baby.
Elise had been imagining the possibilities since the moment Ruth Cooperman called the shop and uttered the magical sentenceSomeone left a baby on your front porch.
The first scenario was that someone had intended Fern or Elise to find the baby—someone who didn’t know they had moved out for the summer. The second was that it was a mistake, that someone had left the infant at the wrong house. But who left a baby unattended on a porch no matter whose home it was? So if it was the right house, or even just a random house, the baby had been left on purpose by someone who couldn’t care for her. But who? And if that was the case, why not leave her at the firehouse or the police station? Those were safe-haven locations—no questions would be asked. But then the baby would become a ward of the state. Maybe whoever left this child on their porch didn’t want that to happen. Which brought Elise back to the idea that whoever had left the baby at Shell Haven had not done it by mistake—she had been left specifically for Elise and Fern.
The only clue to her origins was a beaded elastic bracelet Elise had discovered around the baby’s right ankle. The beads were all pink except for four white beads with black print that readMAY 6.Her birth date? Elise slipped the anklet off the baby and placed it in the diaper bag with the rest of her things. She knew the baby couldn’t reach down and pull it off herself, that it wasn’t truly a choking hazard, and yet it made her nervous.
Her phone rang again. Elise stood slowly, cradling the baby and keeping her eyes on her, smiling, even as she crossed the room for her handbag. She knelt down and rooted around for her phone. Four missed calls, and Fern was calling now.
“Hello?” she said, bracing herself for Fern’s irritation.
“Where are you?”
Elise had left the shop after saying she had to run a quick errand. That had been hours ago. “Shell Haven. Ruth called and needed help with something.”
She heard Fern sigh. “I’ve been calling and calling you. When are you coming back to the shop?”
“Actually, I need you to come to the house.”
“Is something wrong?”
Elise hesitated. “No. Not exactly. I’m sorry to be cryptic, but I’d rather talk in person.”
On the other end of the phone, Fern was silent. Elise knew Fern wanted to ask her if this could wait until later, maybe tell her to just come back to work. Their typical yin and yang—Elise the flighty one, Fern the practical one.
“I’ll be right there,” Fern finally said.
Their relationship dynamic had, in some ways, been set from the moment they met. It was fate that had brought them together, but it had also been a classic example of Elise being careless and Fern being a caretaker.
They’d met eight years earlier. Elise had been in her twenties and waitressing at a restaurant by the Boston Seaport. It was not a great time. Her mother was pushing and pushing her to “figure out” her life. Translation: Meet a man and get married. Elise had not yet found the nerve to tell her conservative parents that she had no interest in men. That there would be no husband, no country-club wedding, and maybe—though she hoped this wouldn’t be the case—no grandchildren.
Losing patience, her mother had quietly begun tapping her friends for introductions to sons and friends of sons. Elise made every excuse she could to get out of the setups, usually claiming work.
“Waiting tables is not a priority,” her father said one night. “If money’s an issue, we’ll help you out. But your mother is right—you need to think about the future. Don’t you want a family someday?”
Hoping to placate them for a while, Elise agreed to have dinner with the son of one of her father’s law partners one spring evening. He took her to Eastern Standard, and the fact that he was attractive and nice and a good conversationalist made Elise feel that much worse. She spent most of the appetizer course wishing she were someone else, wishing she could be the person her parents wanted or believed her to be. She was so rattled that when their main course was served, she sliced her finger with her steak knife.
She covered it with a cloth napkin and, cheeks burning with embarrassment, hurried to the ladies’ room to deal with the bleeding. Standing at the sink, holding her finger under running water, she silently cursed herself for being stupid enough to agree to the date.
“You should wrap something around that,” a woman said from the sink next to hers. “Keep pressure on it.”
Elise glanced over, and for a minute, her disastrous date, her failure as a daughter, her throbbing bloody finger—all of it receded. The woman looked at her with concerned, beautiful brown eyes. Her face was defined by prominent cheekbones; her long hair was in thin braids.
“Let me take a look at that,” the woman said, her voice like velvet. She reached for Elise’s hand. “I used to be a paramedic.”
“Are you a doctor now?”
“No,” the woman said. She smelled like vanilla and honey. “I’m an investment banker. But I have a good memory. And I can tell you, hon, you need stitches.”
Elise realized in that moment that her father was right; she did, in fact, need to get her priorities straight.
“Can you give me a ride to the emergency room?” Elise said.
Two months later, she admitted to her parents that she was in love with a woman, an investment banker two years her senior named Fern Douglas. Her parents did not take the news well, and their attitude plummeted further when they found out Fern was Jamaican.
Elise had not spoken to her parents in a few years now.
Being part of a lesbian, biracial couple brought with it a lot of baggage. There had been many external conflicts, but none from within. Not until last year. Still, it seemed, finally, they had gotten back on track, partly thanks to the tea shop, and partly thanks to Elise letting go of the idea of having a baby.
