A Baby...Maybe? & How to Hunt a Husband Read online

  He flung the door open and jumped out of the car. An entire lane of speeding vehicles honked at the maneuvers but Rex barely noticed the havoc he’d wreaked. His eyes were fixed on the other billboard, the one across the freeway. Once he’d taken in both of them, he got back into the car and sank in total despair onto the steering wheel.

  He’d been anticipating the debut of the billboards with a bit of pride and excitement that he hadn’t expected, and under no circumstance would admit to having. He didn’t need the billboards to advertise Noble Sperm Bank. His service was so specialized that ranchers and farmers across the country already knew or had heard about him and his prize-winning Galloway bull. Any advertising he did was through livestock and fatstock shows, cattle magazines and word of mouth. He didn’t need an advertising agency to promote his business.

  Then, about a month ago his good friend Dan Sullivan had asked him to help his brother Clay out as a favor. Clay had moved to Houston from Chicago and was starting up an advertising business. Because of Dan, Rex had agreed to be Clay’s first client.

  Rex had no problem helping Clay get his business going. He didn’t even mind spending the money on the billboards to help his friend. What he had a problem with, though, was the billboards. They were nothing at all like what he and Clay had agreed upon.

  The supports for the mammoth, anatomically correct bovine structures had been sunk deep inside concrete cylinders buried along the barbed-wire fence. The first billboard had been cut out in the shape of an enormous bull complete with a huge—make that very huge—reproductive organ. The bull proudly stood watch above old Mabel Sturgeon’s cornfield.

  On the opposite side of the freeway, in Hector Herman’s hay field—which butted up against Mama Jo’s Bar-B-Q, known to the locals as margarita heaven—was the cow. Her big brown eyes stared adoringly across the freeway at the bull. The cow’s eyelashes blinked slowly and her udder swung seductively. Her tail didn’t move. It was permanently shaped to resemble a heart.

  The sexually explicit billboards were double-sided, so anyone traveling the Southwest Freeway either coming or going from Pegleg, Texas, could see the manly bull and swooning cow.

  Clay’s ideas had sounded good in theory, and had even looked good when he presented the mock-up. But except for being from the right species, what was displayed across the freeway was nothing even remotely similar to the mock-up.

  Rex had suggested the billboards use solar power for the cattle’s moving parts. But he certainly hadn’t expected the bull to be moving in such obscene glory or the cow to have such a provocative sway. And move and sway they did. The bull’s tail slowly swayed back and forth while its front right hoof stomped up and down. Thick smoke blew out of its nostrils. He could swear the cow’s udders rippled with excitement.

  Even for the short time he stood in front of the bull billboard, passengers in cars and trucks traveling in both directions honked horns or rolled down windows, shouting out greetings that were not, by any stretch of the imagination, G-rated. The “woo-woos,” and “hubba-hubbas,” were harmless enough. However, one woman—her car went by pretty darn fast, but Rex got a good enough look to be certain it was Clara Dempsey—yelled out, “I want a man that has what that bull has, Dr. Noble.” Her arm pointed through the wind in the general direction of the bull’s, er, jewels. If Clara’s mama knew what her daughter had said, she’d have herself a stroke.

  One of the worst things about the porno-bovine billboards, as far as Rex was concerned, was the distraction they created on the busy freeway. Someone was sure to get in an accident. He didn’t want to be responsible for anyone getting hurt or killed. Especially not over obscene cattle. He didn’t want to explain to some teenager’s parents why those billboards were up there in the first place. He didn’t want to be responsible for a family’s anguish. He certainly didn’t want to give any of those smarmy ambulance-chasing lawyers a reason to come after him. And as long as the words Noble Sperm Bank Association were painted larger than life along the cow’s back, and Where Pedigree Counts and That’s No Bull was up there on the bull’s back for all the world to see, there would be no doubt who to serve with the subpoena. Him. Rex Noble.

  He took the cell phone from his pocket and punched in Clay’s number. “I’m out on the freeway looking at the billboards,” he said. “You need to get out here now.”

  “I’m having a massage.”

  “Massage?”

  “It’s been a stressful month, getting those ready. Need to get the kinks out.” Rex heard a muffled “Hey, Patty, baby, not so rough.” Then Clay said into the mouthpiece, “They look great, don’t you think?”

  “We have to talk.”

  “I can be out there tomorrow morning. Got a date tonight.”

  Rex stomped to his truck. He normally wasn’t an angry man, only his patience was being sorely tested. He threw the phone into the truck and climbed in after it. He gunned the engine, eased his way onto the freeway and headed toward his office.

  When he walked through the door he saw his lab technician, Cathy, sitting behind the receptionist’s desk talking on the phone. That meant only one thing—Barbara hadn’t shown up again today. “The billboards must have gone up either in the dark last night or early this morning,” Cathy said. If it were possible to be shot dead by looks alone, the look Cathy sent him would have him dead on the floor.

  The other phone lines were ringing incessantly. She said goodbye to the caller, then punched the other lines to put everyone on hold. “Where have you been?” She was scowling at him. For no reason as far as he was concerned.

  “I went to see the billboards. You knew that.”

  “Where’s your cell phone? I’ve been calling you for the last twenty minutes.”

  “In the truck.”

  “Did you have it on?”

  “Sure I did. I called Clay.”

  “Why didn’t you answer?”

  “I didn’t hear it.” He remembered throwing it in the cab of the truck. Maybe he overthrew and it went out the other window and was there in the grass some where near Mama Jo’s. He wasn’t going to admit that to Cathy though. “Did Barbara call?”

  “Of course. She said she wasn’t coming in today. She has a sore toe.”

  “Fire Barbara.” He had hired her as a favor to his mother. Every time he’d done someone a favor lately, he ended up getting burned. Barbara was absent more than she was in the office. “Forget that, I’ll call my mother and have her fire Barbara.” He was done doing favors for people. He was done being nice. From now on he was going to be a bastard. Then he wouldn’t have to worry about obscene billboards and receptionists who didn’t show up for work.

  “Oh, nuts,” Cathy moaned when the phone lines started ringing again, the time limits on the hold buttons up. She picked up the receiver and shoved it in Rex’s chest. “You answer it,” she whispered.

  “Yes, Mrs. Taggert. I saw them this morning,” he said. “They’ll be taken care of as soon as possible.”

  Before he could hand the phone back to Cathy, it rang again. She punched in another button, pushed his hand and phone back toward his face and he got another earful, this time from his own mother. When he was off the phone with her, he pulled the plug out of the wall. Silence. Blissful, peaceful silence.

  Until Cathy broke it. “Do you know how many phone calls I’ve gotten this morning about that bull you have hung over the freeway?” Cathy asked. “And I’m using the word hung in the literal sense, as in hanging the billboard, not the hung bull.”

  He glared at her. “I know what you’re talking about and since I just saw them, I have a pretty good idea what you’ve been going through.”

  “Mama Jo called and she wants you to keep them up forever,” she said. “Apparently her business is booming.”

  “It’s only midmorning.” Although he had noticed the parking lot had been nearly full.

  “Maybe it’s the breakfast crowd.”

  “The billboards are obscene.”

 
“I haven’t seen them yet. I’ll drive over there later and tell you what I think. Just so you know, though,” she added, “a couple of the calls were serious. The president of the Pegleg High School Future Farmers of America wants to know if the bull’s penis is proportionate. He wanted to know if there were special hormones you were feeding LuLu that he could experiment with on his bull before the livestock show next year.”

  “I’ll get back to him on that.” He took a deep breath. “Plug the phone back in. I’m ready.”

  Rex went back to his office, sat down and spent the rest of the morning fielding calls. If the calls had been serious ones like that of the high-school kid, geared toward information about the insemination process, or extracting semen, or what the cost of inseminating a cow with his prize bull, LuLu, might be, that would have been fine. But many calls were all about the size of a bull’s penis and whether or not Rex also provided growth hormones for men who wanted to become as large as the bull on the billboard.

  Later that afternoon, he went back out to the billboards. Maybe he had only imagined what they looked like. After all, it had been pretty early in the morning when he had first seen them. He couldn’t even remember if he’d had his first cup of coffee yet.

  No, it was just as he remembered. A bull with an over-inflated penis and a sex-starved cow in the first throes of bull-love. Rex saw red all over again. He searched for his most recent missing cell phone. He searched between the front seats of the cab, under the seats, the back seats. The phone he finally found inside a Burger Bay bag was from three cell phones ago.

  He powered it up and punched in Clay’s number for the second time that day. “Get your sorry ass out here at ten tomorrow morning.”

  He drove the truck to the car wash and gave them explicit instructions to search every fast-food bag, every container, every nook and cranny for cell phones. He spent the rest of the time in the car-wash waiting room fielding sly innuendoes about the size of his bull, while women old enough to be his grandmother were sliding their gazes down the front of his jeans.

  It was too much for a man to take.

  CARA DROVE to her parents’ house after a horrible day at school. She didn’t want to go, she only wanted to go home and get into a hot bath. A lavender bubble bath laden with rosemary bath oil. She’d slather her face with a cucumber facial mask and relax for a while. That’s all she wanted to do. She wanted to wash away the meeting she’d had with Mr. and Mrs. Simpson about their son, Carl. Sometimes being a kindergarten teacher wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. She loved teaching, but dealing with a set of parents who thought their destructive son was cute and who felt his biting and hitting other children should be ignored, made her more determined than ever to have her own child and raise him the right way. Show other parents how the job should be done.

  But instead of going home and washing her horrible day away, she headed toward her mother’s, like the good daughter she was. Right now she regretted calling her mother at lunchtime just to say hello. She should know by now there was never any simple hello when it came to her mom.

  “I bought you the most adorable white blouse,” Cecilia had gushed. “Come by after school and pick it up.”

  “Not today, some other time.”

  “It’s so pretty. It would look beautiful with your complexion.”

  “It can wait until next week. You know I’ll be on spring break and will be able to spend so much more time with you.”

  “I suppose it can.” Cecilia had sounded hurt and put out. The classic I do everything for you, my ungrateful daughter, and this is the thanks I get. “Even though this is Friday night, and technically your spring break starts after school gets out this afternoon.”

  There was no winning with her mother. The pitfalls of being an only child meant that Cara had no sibling who could share Cecilia’s overenthusiastic mothering techniques. It meant that she was the only one Cecilia lavished all her attention on. It meant that she had to be accommodating whether she wanted to or not, because Cecilia had a way of laying on the guilt if Cara even tried to assert some independence.

  With only the rearview mirror as a guide, Cara did the best she could to freshen her makeup. She pulled her hair out of its band, and redid the ponytail before she went inside. The one thing she didn’t want to hear was another lecture about the way she looked and how it would affect her chances of getting a husband. If her mother brought up that stupid bet one more time, Cara swore she’d go absolutely crazy.

  With a deep sigh, she closed her powder case and stuck it back in her purse. There was no hope of looking any better than she did right now. And right now she looked as if she’d been through ten kindergarten relay races and was on the losing team. She might be able to powder her nose, put lipstick on and redo her hair, but there was nothing she could do about the rainbow of finger-paint colors on her skirt and the red ink on her pointer finger she’d tried to scrub off but couldn’t.

  She had barely gotten her foot over the threshold when her mother descended on her, scolding her. “You look terrible.”

  “Mom, it’s been a long day,” she started explaining, but had to stop talking when Cecilia pulled her by the arm so forcefully that she almost lost her balance and had to concentrate just to stay upright. Her mother dragged her into the living room and stopped right in front of the man who struggled to get himself out of the deep cushions of the couch and onto his feet.

  Cecilia quickly turned sugary-sweet and beamed like a proud mother hen when she did the introductions. “This is Billy Atkins, darling. He has a very promising career in waste disposal.”

  Cara smiled at the same time she grabbed her mother by the fleshy part of the arm, and said in a fierce whisper, “I can’t believe you brought another man here to meet me. I can’t believe I fell into this trap. Again.”

  “Say hello to our guest.”

  Cara bit down on her tongue and did what was expected of her. She said, “Hello.” Cara could never be accused of not being polite. She listened as her mother waxed poetic about Billy’s wonderful disposition, which, Cecilia stated, she had personal knowledge of since he always left the trash cans upright on the curb and not thrown into the street.

  Finally, after Cecilia had expounded all his wonderful attributes, they went into the kitchen and sat around the table. Her father, lucky man that he was, had long since disappeared with his paper, not to be seen again.

  Cara could hardly keep her eyes open, and her yawns were getting more and more difficult to hide behind her hand.

  “Snap to, Cara.” Her mother pinched her knee under the table. “You can sleep late tomorrow. You’ll be on vacation, remember?”

  “Believe me, I remember.” This time she didn’t bother to stifle the yawn. Nine whole days of more surprise fix-ups. Who could possibly forget? The knowledge of what her mother would probably try to do would have sent her into a deep depression, were she susceptible to depression, which she wasn’t.

  But what she was tired and hungry. “Are we going to eat, Mom?” she asked.

  “Later, dear. We have plenty of time.”

  Both her mother and Billy ignored her growling stomach and her mother certainly didn’t offer to supply her only daughter with fortification. So while those two droned on like long-lost friends who had suddenly found one another, Cara lapsed into her favorite daydream.

  She had started having this dream about five years ago after seeing her co-workers get married, become pregnant, have baby showers and then the babies. There had to be something about some people who reached a certain age, and the yearning to have a baby became overwhelming. Cara would shop for the baby gifts or see babies in strollers, or mothers sitting in the park holding infants in their arms, and the need to have her own baby would be so profound that it hurt. Ached. Deep inside her where a baby should be growing.

  Problem was, her mother’s offerings of husband material made Cara nauseous. The idea of bedding down with any of these men, even to have a child, was simply out of th
e question. And for her, marriage and children went together. She didn’t see any other way. For some people, a baby out of wedlock was fine. But it wouldn’t work for her. She had to have it all. And right now, everything seemed so far out of reach.

  Before her mother had made the bet with Brigit, Cara still had hopes of finding a perfect husband. Now with all of the Erie eligibles being paraded before her, her hopes dimmed to zero.

  And if the sampling of the parents from her kindergarten class were an example, something must happen to couples between the time they got married and the time their children head off to kindergarten. It was as if they lost all power to their kids and stopped being a couple. True, she only had meetings with the parents whose kids were having problems. Still, she had never come across more men and women who took little or no responsibility for the wrongdoings of their five-year-olds.

  Cara only wanted a baby to hold, and cuddle, and raise the right way, to be a good citizen, a credit to his or her country. She knew she could do it right. She certainly had plenty of examples of how not to do it.

  But the men her mother was pushing off on her did nothing for her, and there was no way she’d contemplate having children with any of them. She wanted a husband who would be her partner in raising their kids, not just any old guy, which seemed to be her mother’s criterion. There had been the grocery deliveryman, Harold Sutcher—shy, balding and definitely not her type. Then there was Boomerang Jones, the high-school football coach who, as part of his contract, had to teach math, only he didn’t know how to add one and one much less multiply one times one. There had been the used-car salesman, the bus driver, the travel agent, the lawyer, the accountant. The list went on and on. It seemed every single day and every single night Cecilia found some poor guy who wasn’t married—or at least said he wasn’t married, who really knew?—and searched Cara out wherever she was to do the introductions. The grocery store, the beauty shop, it didn’t matter. One morning, she even brought a man to school, and in front of the whole kindergarten class gushed, “I’m sorry to bring Jack here to school, darling, but I knew you’d want to meet him, because I know he’s your destiny.” He wasn’t, nor were any of the others.