“It's called sunshine, and there's lots of it outside,” Mary Stuart said, as Tanya sat slowly upright in pink shorty pajamas. “If I didn't know you better I'd think you were a drunk, the way you wake up in the morning.”
“It's just old age. I need a lot of sleep,” she said, staggering slowly to the bathroom.
“Well, Big Max is waiting,” Zoe added.
“Tell him to go back to sleep, he'll feel a lot better,” she said, yawning, but twenty minutes later she was dressed and showered, and she looked as spectacular as she did every morning. She was wearing pale pink jeans and a pale pink T-shirt, her old yellow boots, and a pink bandanna. Her hair was down her back in a long braid, and there were soft tendrils around her face that made her look incredibly sexy.
“That ought to catch your wrangler's attention,” Mary Stuart said, when she saw Tanya's outfit. She looked better than ever. “It's a shame you're so ugly.” Mary Stuart smiled at her, suddenly anxious to see Hartley. She had thought about him all night, and she felt like a kid waiting to see him that morning. For the moment, they were just friends, but the undercurrent of something more intrigued her.
They were on their way to the dining room, when Benjamin crossed their path again, and Mary Stuart looked as though she'd seen a ghost as he walked beside them. He wanted to stand next to her, and it was almost eerie the way he wanted to be near her.
“Where's your mom, Benjamin?” Zoe asked, sensing Mary Stuart's discomfort. It was easy to see why. Although she had never seen Todd, the child actually looked like Mary Stuart.
“She's sleeping,” he said matter-of-factly. “My dad told me to go get breakfast.”
“How come she gets to sleep and I don't?” Tanya complained.
“She's eight months pregnant,” Zoe explained to her.
“I'm going to look like a hag by the time we leave if you guys don't let me get some sleep. It's not good for your health to wake up this early.”
“Who said that?” Zoe grinned.
“I did.” Tanya glared at her as they stepped into the main building, and the three of them strode across the dining room a moment later, with Benjamin right behind them. He was sticking to them like glue, and Mary Stuart was determined to ignore him. But when they sat down at the table they'd used the day before, he sat right down with them. Tanya was amused by him, and Zoe liked him too, but neither of them wanted to upset Mary Stuart. They tried to suggest he go sit with his friends, but he absolutely didn't want to.
“It's okay,” Mary Stuart said to them finally. “Don't make a big issue of it.”
“Are you okay?” Tanya asked her pointedly, and Mary Stuart nodded.
“I'm all right.” You couldn't protect yourself to that extent. No matter how much it hurt to see him sitting there, you couldn't create a world without children.
“Nice fax from your husband last night, by the way,” Tanya commented as she drank her orange juice. “Very warm and emotional and loving. Nice guy,” she said, and Mary Stuart smiled. “Sorry I read it, but I couldn't help it Are you going to answer?”
“There's not much to say.” And then she thought of something. The night before had been almost dreamlike, and she was beginning to wonder if it had ever happened, sitting there with Hartley's arms around her, holding her close, and him telling her he wanted to get to know her. “By the way, I clarified things with Hartley last night, about my husband. You were right, I think he did misunderstand what I said. But now he's clear.”
“Did he care?”
She tried to sound cool about it, but the others didn't believe her. “Why would he?”
“Because I don't think he's interested in offering you a secretarial position,” Tanya explained as though she were retarded. “The guy likes you.”
“We'll see what happens,” Mary Stuart said calmly, and couldn't help noticing Benjamin in his red cowboy hat staring at her.
“You look kind of like my mom,” he said, looking at her, “and my Aunt Mary.”
“My name is Mary too,” she said to make conversation, “Mary Stuart. That's kind of weird, isn't it? Stuart was my daddy's name, and he wanted me to be a boy, so that's what they named me.”
“Oh,” he said, nodding. And then, “Do you have any children?” He was far more interested in her than the others, it was as though he sensed something different about her.
“Yes, I have a daughter, but she's very big now. She's twenty.”
“Do you have boys too?” he asked, munching on a Danish Zoe gave him.
“No, I don't,” Mary Stuart answered, and the child was too young to understand the tears in her eyes as she said it.
“I like boys better,” he said matter-of-factly. “I hope my mom doesn't have a girl when the baby comes. I don't like girls. They're stupid.”
“Some of them are okay,” Mary Stuart explained, and he shrugged, unconvinced in his prejudice about females.
“They cry too much when you push them,” he said, by way of an explanation, and Zoe and Tanya exchanged a smile as they listened. Maybe it was good for her to have to talk to him, they wondered silently. Like kind of a vaccination.
“Some girls are pretty brave,” Mary Stuart said in defense of her sex, but he lost interest in the subject and ate a piece of bacon, and a little while later he wandered off again when he saw his father. His mother came into the dining room a little while later too, and Mary Stuart noticed that she was hugely pregnant. Her husband had explained to Zoe earlier that the altitude was making her feel wretched.
“I hope you don't wind up delivering a baby,” Mary Stuart said in an undertone. “She looks like she's having triplets.”
“God, no. There's a hospital here. I don't carry forceps with me. And I haven't delivered a baby since I was an intern. It scared the hell out of me. Delivering babies is a lot scarier than what I do. Too much can go wrong, too many split-second decisions, too many elements you can't control, and I hate dealing with people in that much pain. I'd rather do dermatology than obstetrics,” Zoe said with feeling. Mary Stuart said she thought it would be fun, and a really cheerful job, since most of the time it had a happy outcome. Tanya said then that she wondered what it was like having a baby. She had wanted lots of them when she was young, but as her life had unfolded, the opportunity had never happened. And it intrigued Mary Stuart to realize that of all of them, she was the only one who had ever borne children.
“Maybe it was something subliminal they told us at Berkeley,” Zoe said, smiling at them. She was happy she had adopted.
“I would have loved to have kids,” Tanya said, “I loved having Tony's kids around, they were great children.” She wondered if she'd ever see them again, for more than a few minutes. It was all so unkind, losing them, losing him, and when all was said and done, he could just take them and leave her. It made her think that somewhere along the way she should have had her own kids, then no one could have taken them away, and she'd have had them forever, or maybe not, she realized, as she thought of Mary Stuart.
They finished breakfast just in time, and hurried down to the corral. Hartley was already down there, and he looked pleased to see Mary Stuart. Their eyes met and held for a long time, and he stood very close to her as they waited to mount their horses. The doctors from Chicago were back again, and the same groups formed as the day before. Zoe rode with them, and Hartley rode alongside Mary Stuart, which left Tanya and the wrangler to ride ahead again, and this time he tried to make more of an effort.
“You look very nice today,” he said, looking straight ahead, and sounding like a robot, and she could see there was a faint flush on his cheekbones as he said it. He was really embarrassed, and she tried to put him at ease as they rode along, but it took a while to do it. After a while, he asked her a few questions about Hollywood, the people she'd met. He asked if she'd ever met Tom Cruise or Kevin Costner or Cher, and he told her he'd seen Harrison Ford in Jackson Hole that summer. She said she'd met them all, and she and Cher had been in a movie together.