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When the formula was as close to lukewarm as Travis could manage, he hurried back to the nursery, where he stood in the center of the room, clutching the precious bottles and staring from one wailing infant to the other. “Which one do I feed first?”
The radio was silent. Frustrated, he shifted both bottles to one hand and reached for the button at his hip. “They’re both screaming, Sue Anne.”
She sighed. “You’ve got two hands, don’t you?”
“Yeah, but I can’t reach both cribs at the same time. My arms aren’t long enough.”
“Then, I guess you’ll have to move one of them, won’t you?”
His heart plummeted toward his boots. “You mean…?” His frantic gaze spun from one cranky infant to the other. “Oh, Lordy, I can’t, Sue Anne, I just can’t. They’re squirming and squawking, wiggling like a pair of hooked worms. I’ll drop them for sure.”
“Oh, for crying out loud, Travis, get a grip. You can flatten a thousand-pound steer with your bare hands. I figure you can handle a tiny baby that doesn’t weigh more than a bag of flour.”
“A bag of flour doesn’t wiggle!”
The radio buzzed, crackled. “Okay, let’s try this. Picture the look on Peggy’s face when she finds out you let those babies starve because you were too chicken to pick ’em up.”
Travis felt the blood drain to his toes. “Right.”
He set the bottles on the dresser, flexed his fingers, then slipped his hands beneath T.J.’s warm little body and lifted.
* * *
Peggy tried to shift up on an elbow, but dizziness forced her to lie back, helpless in the hands of the efficient technicians who were cheerfully guiding the gurney down the hall. “Where are you taking me?”
“X ray,” replied the male nurse, angling a flippant grin. “We’re going to make sure that thunk on your noggin didn’t shake anything loose.”
Peggy closed her eyes a moment, frustrated and feeling lost. “My head is fine,” she muttered. “It’s everything else that’s spinning. What’s wrong with me, anyway?”
“We won’t know until the blood tests come back, but you certainly look a lot perkier than you did a few hours ago.”
“Only if your definition of perky includes the sensation of having been wrung out like a wet rag. I don’t feel quite as weak, though.” She eyed the bag of dripping liquid that had been her constant companion since the ambulance trip. “What’s in there, anyway?”
The male nurse winked. “All kinds of magic stuff.”
The female nurse gave her colleague a withering look. “She’s a patient, not a fool.” Ignoring the man’s embarrassed flush, she patted Peggy’s hand. “Forgive him, dear. He tends to treat all patients as if they were recalcitrant children. The bag contains a saline fluid solution. You were extremely dehydrated.”
“Oh.” Peggy would have asked more questions had her attention not been captured by the large glass window they were passing. “Wait…please.”
The gurney slowed, then stopped in front of the hospital nursery. Peggy focused on two Plexiglas bassinets in the front row. They were empty now, but almost nine weeks ago, they’d cradled her own precious babies. The memory made her ache with loneliness. She missed them so. She told herself that they were all right, that Travis had probably called Sue Anne over to care for them.
They’d be fine, just fine.
So why was she crying?
As she turned away, movement caught her eye, and she focused on the incubator at the far side of the room. She twisted to her side as the gurney began to move. “That baby in the incubator, isn’t it the same one that was here during the blackout?”
The female nurse followed her gaze and heaved a sad sigh. “Yes, that’s Christopher. The good news is that he’s doing splendidly and will be ready to go home soon. The bad news is that he has no home. His mother still hasn’t been found.”
Peggy was horrified. “You mean that poor child has no one to care for him?”
“Oh, I wouldn’t say that. In fact, I doubt there’s a baby on the face of the earth who has more care than our Christopher. We all adore him.” She leaned down and whispered, “To tell you the truth, the staff has grown so attached to him that I’m not sure they’ll ever let the little guy leave. He certainly doesn’t lack love and attention.”
It wasn’t enough, Peggy thought as the gurney was rolled toward the elevator. Little Christopher deserved a mother’s nurturing love. All babies deserved that, just as they deserved fathers to provide role models of a strong, caring male.
But her babies didn’t have a caring father. They had only Clyde.
Still, Peggy was hopeful. She knew Dr. Jennings would explain the situation to Clyde and inform him that if anything happened to Peggy, the twins would be shuttled off to foster care unless he returned to Grand Springs and exercised his parental responsibility.
But later that morning, after the X ray’s had been completed and Peggy had been returned to her room, she awoke to find Dr. Jennings standing beside her bed with a blue scratch sheet in her hand, pity in her eyes. Peggy knew then that Clyde had refused.
Chapter Twelve
Travis bent like a human safety pin, his aching elbows levered over the crib’s lowered side slat. At the business end of the bottles he held were two sticky, sucking, milk-splattered infants, lying side by side in Ginny’s crib. Rubber nipples, Travis had discovered, tended to squirt uncontrollably when tipped toward greedy, biting little mouths.
Initially, he’d withdrawn the bottles, launched into a face-wiping frenzy that had the twins shrieking and whipping their heads in a desperate attempt to recapture the delivering mechanism of their much-needed meal.
Eventually, Travis had given up his quest for cleanliness, wishing nothing more than to simply survive the sloppy process before his stooped spine cracked under the strain. It may not be the most practical posture from which to play Mr. Mom, but since the formula was nearly gone, it had clearly worked well enough to resolve the basic crisis.
In fact, T.J.’s bottle was empty. The baby continued to suck happily, which didn’t bother Travis one whit. Ginny still had some formula left, so he didn’t see any need to take her brother’s bottle away. After all, the little guy was enjoying himself, and it didn’t seem fair to penalize T.J. just because the masculine milk-sucking apparatus was just naturally more powerful than the puny pucker of a baby girl.
Of course, Travis had expected Virginia to feed more demurely than her brother. She was a nibbler, after all, sweet and delicate and ultimately feminine, just like her mama. That’s how it was supposed to be.
But T.J. was a rough-and-tumble boy child, a no-nonsense gulping gobbler. There wasn’t a doubt in Travis’s mind that his namesake was destined to be a three-bite burger man.
Travis couldn’t have been prouder.
The radio on his belt crackled. “What’s going on?” Sue Anne asked. “Are they still eating?”
Travis rested the empty bottle on T.J.’s tummy and reached for the transmission switch. “Ginny’s almost done,” Travis told his sister, then couldn’t resist adding, “T.J. finished up a few minutes ago.”
“Good.” Sue Anne paused. “By the way, you do know enough to take the bottle away as soon as it’s empty so they don’t get air in their tummies, right?”
“Uh, sure, everyone knows that.” Horrified, Travis realized that T.J. had probably siphoned enough air to float a blimp. As he snatched the bottle away, the nipple snapped from startled infant’s mouth with a noisy pop. “Okay, Ginny’s done, too,” he muttered, setting both bottles on the dresser. “Breakfast is officially over.”
“Don’t forget to burp them.”
Travis glared at the radio. “I’m not a complete idiot. I know what to do.”
Actually, he didn’t, but the thinly veiled amusement in Sue Anne’s voice was beginning to grate on his nerves. He rubbed his forehead, tried to jog his memory. Peggy always breast-fed the babies in private, so Travis hadn’t actually witnessed the post-meal burping process. He had, however, seen a similar activity that consisted of holding the infant upright at the shoulder and patting the baby’s back until the anticipated result was obtained. It seemed easy enough when Peggy did it.
But the mere thought of holding a fragile infant against his big, bony chest gave Travis palpitations. What if he patted too hard and broke something? What if a bobbling little head flopped backward? What if…?
T.J. let out a massive wail. Travis wrung his hands, then gently touched the baby’s tummy. It was rock hard and swollen like a balloon. There was no choice now.
Mumbling to himself, Travis slipped one rigid hand under T.J.’s sticky, powder-gummed little head, and the other hand beneath his diapered, pajama-clad bottom, then took a deep breath and lifted.
The baby stopped crying, bobbled his little head around and stared at Travis as if he was also shocked by this unexpected development. “Okay, partner.” Travis shifted awkwardly, managing a couple of tentative pats between the tiny shoulders. “Do your stuff.”
T. J. gurgled, kind of grinned. They smiled a lot now, and not a gassy-type grimace, either. They’d plumped up real pretty over the past couple of months and had learned to sprout honest-to-goodness life-is-swell, happy-to-see-you grins. Travis loved the little critters so much it hurt.
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