When Ryan Plummer asked Darlene Kindalia to have his baby, Darlene didn't remind him that they already had done the horizontal hokie-pokie and that procreation had never been the object of their endeavors. She settled for a tart, "In your dreams!" accompanied by a withering glance.

Ryan was, after all, her client, and the one who had plucked her from the hospital transcription pool and set her up as a freelancer. He was also the one she had straddled in the very same high-backed, reclining, leather office chair from which he tendered his present offer, and Darlene figured that gave her some privilege in speaking her mind.

She had stuck her head in the door only to say hi before she dropped the transcripts off, and her right hand still grasped the envelope with the sheaf of printed pages and the cassette tape. She hadn't meant to crush him, yet now he looked so despondent that Darlene regretted even her mild retort. "Don't you think you have enough kids?" she asked as she stepped into his office.

"Jill doesn't," he replied glumly. He motioned her toward one of the upholstered chairs that faced his desk, but Darlene chose to stand.

"You and Jill ought to work that one out yourselves," said Darlene, though she sympathized with Jill. Jill's little boy was probably overwhelmed by the three kids from Ryan's first marriage. Even so, Jill had married him with that baggage. And Darlene knew Ryan: with four kids to put through college, his yearning for more children was only to prevent Jill from leaving and taking what little community property had been left by her predecessor.

Ryan raised his eyes and gazed up at her. "We are working on it," he said. Darlene hadn't seen him up close in a while, and it was unsettling to learn that his wide eyes and long lashes still moved her. Not as much, she assured herself. Not so much that she held his gaze too long, or sat down. She wasn't buying into any more of that my-wife-doesn't-understand-me crap. Even with Jimmy missing since Sunday with her Camaro, she'd do better cruising for a replacement at the Sydonia Farm Bureau than here in the Fort Worth office of Ryan Plummer, M.D.

"Jill and I just need a little help, that's all," Ryan said with the air of a man coming clean. "We need. . . I wish you'd at least sit down, Darlene. Come on," he coaxed, standing up himself and moving around to the two upholstered chairs that faced his desk. He motioned toward one as he seated himself in the other. "This is hard enough without you glowering down at me."

I have an hour before I head back, Darlene thought as she sat next to him, facing him at an angle. This was how he sat when the mass was malignant or the blockage required surgery. This was the configuration that enabled him to put his warm, nurturing hand atop the one that grasped the arm of the other chair, to personally hand over the card of the oncologist he recommended, to locate the exact location of the problem on the pull-apart models clustered on his desktop.

Darlene awaited his pronouncement much as his patients would and, she supposed, with the same wariness about his accuracy in assessing the situation.

"Jill can't conceive," Ryan told her.

"Who conceived Tyler?"

"Taylor," he corrected. "Jill, of course. I mean, she can't conceive anymore."

"Anymore," Darlene repeated. She blinked and looked at the color rising in his neck. "You mean you. . ." He shook his head. "She? She can't. . . she had her tubes tied?"

Ryan nodded.

Darlene had never met Jill, but she knew whose idea this must have been. "You made her have her tubes tied?" Darlene demanded. "After one child?"

"Hey, that was the deal," Ryan protested. "She knew it when we got married." He took a breath and spoke more slowly. "Taylor's my fourth child, Darlene."

She knew that, of course. Jill's pregnancy and Taylor's infancy had defined the temporal perimeters of her relationship with Ryan. Once Taylor started sleeping through the night, Ryan had been far less insistent on seeing her, and they had fallen into this friendly patronage. It had been a relief, really. Guys her own age didn't have as much money, but they liked going out and having a good time. She didn't think Ryan had ever taken her out to a club, and rarely to lunch or dinner.

"So she agreed and you agreed and now you want another baby?" Darlene wiggled back into the chair to get comfortable. "Has anyone ever explained to you that you can't always get what you want?"

"Don't you think I know that?" He waved a hand at his office in a derisive gesture. "Don't you think I learn that again every day?" He shook his head, obviously struggling to control his emotions. "But I. . . this would be something we could get, Darlene. With your help."

"Oh, I'm all ready to help you and Jill."

He ignored her sarcasm. "Darlene, Jill and I are together on this. We really want this baby. We're hoping you'll care enough to help us."

"Care enough!" Darlene rolled her eyes. "What happened? She catch you with someone else?"

"No. C'mon, Darlene, it's nothing like that!" His eyes had grown even larger and he bit his lip a little before he spoke again. "Darlene, Jill and I want another child. We want it so much."

"I want another child, too," Darlene opined. "A little brother or sister for Tiffany. That doesn't mean I'm getting it."

"But you will!" Ryan offered. "You and Jerry--"

"Jimmy."

"Jimmy. You and Jimmy, you'll figure out a way--"

"Jimmy's been unemployed for most of the time I've known him and now he's disappeared with my Camaro!"

"Oh, Darlene, why didn't you say something? Here I am rattling on about my problems -- mine and Jill's -- and you're. . . you've been--"

"Screwed. Screwed over by a car thief."

"What are you going to do?"

Even knowing he had an agenda, Darlene drew comfort from his interest in her problems. He's not a total jerk, she thought. She hadn't been totally stupid to score this guy.

Darlene exhaled hard, then shrugged. "I've already moved back in with Rita."

"God, Darlene, I know how much you hate the Ladies Ranch."

"Farm," she corrected automatically. "It's not that so much -- though Sydonia's pretty hard to take after Fort Worth -- it's having Rita say 'I told you so' every other minute." She thought about her upstairs room at the Ladies Farm and she felt a pang of guilt. Della and Kat, the women who ran the bed and breakfast with her mother, had never hesitated in welcoming her. And they let her drive the Accord as long as she worked it out with Kat, who was some sort of consultant in Fort Worth. "They do look after Tiffany for me, though. And they did take me right in."

He looked ready to say something but he stayed silent, gazing at her sympathetically. It felt good to relate the Jimmy fiasco to someone who didn't remind her how stupid she'd been. "I guess," she said finally, "I should never have let that asshole move in with Tiffany and me. I don't know what we'll do now."

"You've been in tighter spots," Ryan told her. "Your transcription service is coming along, your kid's okay, you're getting child support, aren't you?"

"Only when Jason manages to stay employed for a whole week." Darlene considered her ex-husband and the parade of boyfriends who had preceded Jimmy. "God! I've slept with a bunch of losers!"

"Hey!" Even his laugh sounded good. "I resemble that remark!"

"Oh, not you. You're a shit for cheating on your wife," Darlene explained, "but you were always nice to me." Her eyes burned, but she didn't care.

"Look," Ryan said gently. "There's something you need to know."

She braced herself for the worst: he was HIV positive, he'd helped Jimmy steal her car, he was hiring a full-time transcriptionist and wouldn't need her services anymore.

"Jill and I. . . we really want this baby." He held up his hand to stop her response. "Just listen," he pleaded. "It means so much to us, and you're the perfect candidate. You've had one healthy child, you're young and strong and healthy--"

"I don't want--"

"Just listen, damn it! Jill and I will pay you. . . Darlene, we'll pay you to have this baby for us."

"Pay?" Darlene hated the squeak in her voice. "You want me to--"

"We want you to be a gestational carrier. A surrogate. Have a child from an in vitro embryo. You know: bear a child conceived in a laboratory from Jill's egg and my sperm."

"And you'll pay me for that?"

"Yes."

Darlene closed her eyes and breathed deeply. Her curiosity about Jill and Ryan had vanished, but her fears about living the rest of her life in Sydonia stayed perched on her shoulder. She had been the fastest typist in her high school, but it would take thousands of pages to dig her out of her financial mess. She pictured her shoulders rounding as her fingers grew knobby and her butt grew huge while she hunched over the keyboard. When she opened her eyes again, he was still sitting next to her, still watching her. Darlene leaned toward him so that she could hear him clearly. "How much?" she asked. "How much would you pay me?"

Copyright © 2002 by Viqui Litman