8. Patty
“Trixie, Trixie, my happy little pixie,” Patty singsonged, scooping water in a cup and dumping it over the blonde head of her baby girl as she splashed in the bathtub on Jekyll Island. “You’re Mommy’s best girl,” she said, watching as bubbles swirled around Trixie’s round belly. Her parents had been unimpressed by her choice of Trixie as a name, but they’d loved the baby instantly, and had been to Jekyll twice already to see their granddaughter in person.
Patty leaned forward and pulled the plug in the bathtub. Trixie put her pudgy hands underneath the water and squealed. “Oooooh!” she shouted in her tiny voice. “Ooooh, Mama!”
With a fluffy towel in her hands, Patty leaned down and scooped her slippery girl from the tub, folding her into a yellow terrycloth cocoon and holding Trixie tightly to her chest.
“We miss Daddy, don’t we?” Patty cooed to the baby as she laid her on the changing table next to her Raggedy Ann doll and quickly powdered and diapered her. The windows of the beach house were open, and from the kitchen, she could hear the sounds of The Bee Gees singing from the radio that Trixie’s grandmother kept on the windowsill.
Trixie gurgled and grabbed her own tiny toes as Patty kept a hand on the baby’s belly to keep her from rolling off the table. Even at twenty, she knew how to be a good mother. She had defiantly insisted to her parents that—even though Bradley was in Vietnam by the time she found out she was pregnant—she was going to be the best mom in the world, and that she would raise her baby to be good and smart and kind-hearted. She had never loved the world of adolescence, and even though she’d had to defer her acceptance to the University of Washington when she’d fallen pregnant, she was ready to leave her teenage years behind and become a mother. Her own parents had been less than impressed and more than disappointed by this turn of events, so when Patty had informed them that Bradley’s parents had asked her to join them on Jekyll Island and raise the baby there until Bradley came home, they’d been happy to have her leave Seattle and raise a baby born out of wedlock in a place where no one they knew might see her.
Rather than be upset, Patty had understood. It was 1967 when she found out she was pregnant; nineteen-year-old unmarried girls frequently took long trips to visit aunts or cousins in a different state, returning to their hometowns haunted by the babies that they’d left behind or put up for adoption. No one spoke of these incidents, and, with luck, a girl might be able to put it all behind her, marry some unsuspecting young man, and start a legitimate family without ever having to disclose the fact that she’d already given birth once before. So the fact that Bradley’s parents had welcomed her and were helping her to raise Trixie was thrilling for Patty. She loved Evelyn and Jacob Huberman like they were her own parents, and they, in turn, loved Trixie and welcomed Patty with open arms.
“Girls,” Evelyn called from the kitchen. “Dinner is ready!”
Patty made a face at her baby with wide eyes and a huge smile. “Dinner, baby girl! Should we go eat?” She reached out and picked Trixie up, sitting her on her bottom so that she could pull a clean nightgown over the baby’s head. “Let’s go eat with Grandma and Grandpa.”
Patty walked down the hallway with Trixie on one hip. Her little girl smelled like Johnson Johnson’s baby shampoo, and she felt like a delicate feather attached to the side of Patty’s body. It was almost impossible to remember what it felt like not to be a mother, not to wake up to the sound of baby giggles, and not to think that the sun rose and set in the twinkling eyes of a tiny girl.
“Hello, lovies,” Evelyn said, bustling around the dining room table and setting down platters of fried chicken and mashed potatoes.
Jacob Huberman sat in one of the plastic covered chairs, his newspaper open as he skimmed the day’s headlines over the top of his reading glasses. When Patty had Trixie buckled into her high chair, he folded the paper and set it down.
“Good evening, Queen Trixie,” he said in his gravelly voice. As usual, Trixie grinned at him; she was gaga for her grandfather. “Were you a good girl today?”
Patty dished up some mashed potatoes for the baby, sticking a finger into the middle of them to make sure they weren’t too hot before setting the plastic bowl on the high chair tray. “She was an angel,” Patty said, taking the bottle of cold milk that Evelyn brought to her. “And I’m waiting to hear back from the doctor, but when I called today, they said he was out until Monday.”
“Hmph,” Evelyn said, wiping her hands on her apron as she walked back into the kitchen to turn off the radio. As she snapped it off, Simon and Garfunkel’s voices cut out. Evelyn emerged without her apron and sat at the end of the table opposite her husband. “Doctors need to be better about getting back to their patients. This is serious.”
“Well, it might not be,” Jacob countered. “The baby was just drowsy. Could be nothing but a growth spurt.”
“She was more than drowsy, Jacob!” Evelyn picked a fried chicken thigh off the platter and passed it to Patty. “She wouldn’t wake up. Patty and I had to put her in a cool bath and basically force feed her some sugar water before she came to.”
Jacob looked at his plate as he dished up string beans. He said nothing more.
“It’ll be fine,” Patty offered soothingly, mashing some beans with a fork to feed to Trixie. “She’s healthy as a horse. I can’t wait for Bradley to meet her,” she said, changing the subject. It was a favorite topic of hers and Evelyn’s when they took Trixie to walk on the beach every day: what would Bradley think when he saw his little girl, the spitting image of him, cradled in the arms of the girl he’d left behind before he ever knew she was pregnant?
Jacob, however, enjoyed this topic less. He preferred not to discuss Bradley, Vietnam, or anything other than the stock market, baseball scores, and local news.
“Hey,” Evelyn said cheerily. “Let’s take Trixie on a walk after dinner, shall we?”
Patty inhaled deeply and sighed, though she did it quietly and smiled and nodded as she did. “Yes,” she said, reaching over to feed Trixie a bite of green beans mixed with mashed potatoes. “A walk will be good.”