Somebody's Baby. Annie Jones

or to check the chalkboard for messages or new prayer requests. Always with a sense of community that one couldn’t find anywhere else.

      This was, to Josie, the essence of why she lived in Mt. Knott. It was also one of the reasons she had brought Nathan to work with her this morning. She felt safe here and felt her son would be safe here, as well.

      Not that she thought Adam would do any harm to Nathan or even break his word about taking the child but…

      But in her whole life she could not recall ever having felt so vulnerable.

      A product, she suspected, of more than just Adam’s introduction into Nathan’s life. This emotion was also a byproduct of her realization that the man would be a presence in her life for a long time to come, as well.

      She went up on tiptoe to peer over the cash register at the baby playing quietly in the bright blue portable playpen in the corner of the café.

      She had promised herself she wouldn’t make a habit of bringing Nathan to work. Maybe when he was older, she had thought, she would have him come by after school. He could do his homework in one of the booths and she would serve him a snack and whatever advice she could spare until he got into calculus or something else she knew nothing about. But until then she had determined she would have him at work as little as possible.

      Josie didn’t need to bring him here, really. She had been blessed with a network of moms and grandmothers around town who had taken turns watching her son since Ophelia left him in her care. The original plan was to depend on this patchwork safety net just until the newborn was old enough for day care. Well, that had been the plan, but then when the jobs began to dry up, so had the town’s only day-care center.

      She wondered if Adam Burdett would see that as unacceptable and use it as a wedge to take Nathan from her. He had promised he wouldn’t do that, but then, what did she really know about him?

      “Adam Burdett?” The first person she had asked, not giving the particulars behind her sudden interest in the man, had pondered it a moment. “Oh, Stray Dawg! Yeah. Yeah, I know which one he was, uh, is. The one who cashed out. Cut and run.”

      “Heard he went through that cash in nothing flat.” The woman at the cash register took her change from Josie and, as she dropped the quarters and nickels into her coin purse, she elaborated, “Gambling.” Clink. “Drinking.” Clink. “Women.” Clink. Clink.

      “Gambling?” Josie shoved the cash drawer shut. “Drinking?”

      “And women!” Warren and Jed confirmed in unison as they broke off from the morning gathering of curmudgeons to take their usual seats at the counter.

      Of course Adam had women. A wealthy, handsome man like that probably had all kinds of girlfriends. She blushed at her own lack of sophistication and what many people would tsk-tsk as simple, out-of-date values. To hide her chagrin, she ducked back into the kitchen to check on the morning’s first offering of pies still cooling on the racks beside the oven. Girlfriends? She doubted very much that a man like that thought of his conquests as girlfriends.

      The aroma of apple and cinnamon and other spices filled the air. The tart sweetness of cherries bubbling in deep-red juices stung her nose. All buffered by the homey smell of flaky crust and Josie’s specialty topping.

      She went to the back door and cracked it open a tiny bit, to allow some fresh air into the hot, almost steamy kitchen. She paused only a moment, lifting her ponytail and turning her head to cool the back of her neck before hurrying back to her tasks, and to talk of Adam. She peered through the door and shut out the noise and views of the room around her.

      “Ended up with a factory job, they say.” A man took a wad of bills from his wallet, showed them to some fellow coffee-bar patrons as if to say “this one’s on me” then stuffed them into the pickle jar. “Ironic, huh?”

      “Reap what you sow.” One of his cohorts raised his mug in grateful salute for the freebie. “Bible says.”

      Josie glanced around for one of the silicon gloves she used to handle hot pie plates and the like. When she didn’t find it immediately, she grabbed the nearest dish towel and used it to cover her hand as she picked up one of the cherry pies. She didn’t want to miss a word of the conversation in the dining room.

      “I spotted that Adam at a hotel in Raleigh a year ago. Back when my husband went to that International Snack Cake Expo deal, remember?” spoke up Elvie Maloney, who had just started coming in after she went back to work when her husband lost his middle-management job at the Crumble. “Kept to the outskirts of the show. Didn’t interact with the old gang, not at all.”

      “Well, can you blame him?” Micah Applebee scoffed. Micah had worked out at the Crumble for even longer than Elvie’s husband. “After the mean-spirited way the Burdetts treated him?”

      “The way they treated him was to make him a millionaire,” Elvie shot back.

      “Wish they’d up and treat me like that. I wouldn’t even care if it was mean-spirited,” Warren joked.

      “You say that now but you’d come in here blubbering like a baby,” Jed teased.

      “Yeah, and using hundred-dollar bills to dry my tears,” Warren said right back. They both laughed.

      “Well, that Stray Dawg Burdett boy might have done better using money for hankies. It might have got it soggy but at least he’d have some of it left.” Elvie whirled her spoon through her coffee.

      “How do you know he doesn’t?” Jed asked.

      Elvie tapped the spoon on the edge of her cup, making everybody look her way. “Because he was at that conference working for somebody else. If I had millions, the last thing I’d want to do is work in a snack-cake factory all week and go to conferences on snack cakes on the weekend. Real suspicious if you ask me.”