Page 34 of Always Be My Baby

“Go, go, go…” Lee pushed him out the door. “Don’t come back until there’s a baby. Oh, but don’t forget to call.”

Poor Polk. His emotions ran the gamut as he took off in a dead run. Excited, frustrated, scared, nervous… The guy hadn’t been getting much sleep the last couple of days. Poor Becks had been way too uncomfortable for either of them to sleep, or so he said every time someone asked him about it.

About four hours after he’d gone running, we got a phone call. We thought it was the phone call we’d been waiting for, but it was so far from that.

“Is she here?” Marilee asked into the line, anxiously waiting for his answer.

“Yeah, yeahshe’s here,” Polk said sullenly. Lee had put him on speakerphone for all of us to hear his good news. This didn’t sound like good news.

“Is everything okay?” she asked.

“No,” the man said and he just broke down in tears over the phone. All of us stood around, stunned. What did we do? What did we say? We weren’t doctors. Was there any words that could make him feel better?

“Polk, honey, do you want me to take you off speakerphone?” Lee asked carefully.

“No…” he whispered, sounding completely broken. Dear God. “They all need to know. Ella was born sick. They… They don’t know what’s wrong with her. She’s tiny and she’s hooked up to all of these monitors going off andoh God…” He started crying again.

“What do you need me to do?” Lee asked.

“I don’t know.” He sighed and it was so damn watery that my heart broke all over again. This was his family. His miracle baby. Polk and Becks had been trying for so many years to have a kid. Then my mind shifted to images of Lee and I somewhere down the road with a family of our own and I swear I couldn’t catch my breath. And then I felt like an ass because this wasn’t about me or Lee or our hypothetical “someday” children. Polk. I needed to concentrate on Polk. “She’s being airlifted down to Detroit Children’s,” he finally collected himself enough to continue. “They don’t want Becks leaving, but she’s refusing to stay if Ella goes. I don’t know what to do.”

“You go with your family, Polk,” Lee said. “You don’t worry about the job. You don’t worry about anything else. Do you hear me? You go take care of your family.”

Ella was their miracle baby…Their miracle. Someone messed up granting that, didn’t they? The man didn’t even have it in him to saythank youbefore he hung up.

“Okay, everybody, you heard that,” Marilee said, and the woman was actually crying although she tried to keep it from her voice, but even if I couldn’t see the few gentle tears rolling down her cheeks, she couldn’t hide the quiver from me. “Question is what are we gonna do about it?”

I pulled Lee aside. “Honey, what do you want to do?”

“We’re going to have to rearrange the schedule because he needs to be off. They’re going to have a lot of hospital bills. I know they have insurance, we’ve got good insurance through the restaurant, but he can’t afford to not get paid.”

“He can’t be here waiting tables and down there with his family.”

Lee swiped at the tears rolling down her cheeks. “No, he can’t. But I just came in to twelve thousand dollars.”

“Lee, you can’t—”

She put up her hand to stop me. “I can. And I will. The Bell Jar is a family. And if you’ve learned anything about me, it’s that I will do whatever it takes to take care of my family.”

I draped my arms around her shoulders and kissed the shit out of her right there in front of all the employees, because I couldn’t not kiss her. Lee needed to be kissed.

After such a suffering call it was hard to get back down to business as usual. One of our own was suffering so. The staff were quieter, more somber than their usual, but we had a business to run. I went back into the kitchen, and Marilee got going with her other duties. There were customers to serve and they were the priority for now. Though by the end of dinner service, before the servers started going home for the evening, my kitchen staff was approached by Serena.

“All the servers and hosts and hostesses have put money in to help out Polk. We know Lee said she was putting in a large sum of money out of her own pocket, but if they airlifted that baby down to Detroit, that means she’s quite sick. Polk and Becks are going to need all the help they can get.”

I knew exactly what she was asking. And I was certainly down for it. “Listen up,” I called to my kitchen staff. “We’re taking up a collection for Polk and Becks and baby Ella. The waitstaff have tips, but I know not all of you have cash on you, so I say we keep it open for a day or so and anyone who wants to donate can bring it in tomorrow. Then we can try to get it to the family.”

I was met by rounds of “Absolutely” and “I’ll have it here tomorrow” from all of my staff. Marilee was right. We were a family here at The Bell Jar and we looked after family.

With all the drama we’d been hit with since we’d gotten back from Chicago, I wished I could pack Lee up and take her back down there. But that wasn’t the world we lived in. Instead, at the end of the day, both of us emotionally exhausted, we crashed.

I didn’t remember eating so much take out since high school. Seriously. Because even in college—I went to culinary school—we’d cooked. Tonight, we went with sushi and we legit ate in bed.

My phone vibrated on the bedside table. I picked up the remote to turn down the TV that I’d moved into the bedroom for the evening. Lee and I had chosen not to keep a television in the bedroom early on because the bedroom was our place to talk and reconnect… and sleep. But tonight, we just needed to chill.

It wasn’t a call I expected to get, but it wasn’t a call we could afford not to answer. As I listened to the caller, I looked over at Lee and mouthed, “Officer Dombrowski.” Then when I was able to turn my attention back to him, I announced, “I’m going to put you on speakerphone so Lee can hear too.”

“I’m calling to inform you that there’s been a break in your case,” the officer started. “Lachlan Bell was arrested outside Grand Rapids for a minor offense. As he has been a person of interest in our case, they’re transporting him back up here for questioning. But seeing as he was arrested, his fingerprints will get run through our tests to see if his prints match the prints that we found in your home.”

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