The Surrogate

Jamie leaned back in the tub, pla

After she had dried off, she looked at herself in the mirror on the back of the door and hardly recognized herself. “You look like hell,” she told her emaciated self.

She put on a robe and made two phone calls. The first was to the security office. “This is Jamie Long,” she said. “I need for you to bring my dog back. As soon as possible, please.”

Then she called the kitchen. “I’d like some hot tea and toast,” she said when Anita answered.

Ralph arrived just as she was finishing her second cup of tea. His joy was boundless. Jamie wept as she buried her face against his neck.

She took him out into the backyard. While he raced around, she sat on the steps of the gazebo and lifted her face to the sun. Fall was in the air, she realized, with leaves just begi

Ralph came to sit beside her, and she put her arm around his shoulders. “I wish I could get us back to the starting line and withdraw from the race, but that’s not going to happen.”

Ralph thumped his tail on the step and licked her chin. Jamie hugged her dog and sighed. There was no going back.

“We’ll get through this,” she promised, planting a kiss on the top of Ralph’s scruffy head. “Less than seven months from now, we’ll be on our way back to Austin. I’ll find us a little house with a backyard near the campus where we’ll be safe and happy and never have to think of Hartma

But no matter how much she wanted to forget this time in her life, she knew she never would. And sometimes she would pause to think of this other time and place and the child she had borne here.

Not wanting to push her luck, Jamie had only a bowl of soup for lunch, after which Lester came to drive her to Freda’s clinic.

“Montgomery says that you’ve made a miraculous recovery,” Freda said. “Climb up on the table, and let me give you and the baby a once-over. I told you the nausea would pass, didn’t I? I told Montgomery that a big, strong, healthy girl like you would bounce back just fine. Matter of fact, I was more worried about Montgomery worrying herself into a nervous breakdown or a stroke than I was about you.”

When she was finished with her examination, Freda pronounced Jamie “fit as a fiddle.”

“I’ll call Montgomery and let her know,” she said. “And Amanda. She’s been worried sick about you.”

“Where is Amanda?” Jamie asked.

“In Virginia right now. She travels a lot, you know, speaking at revivals and political rallies. She’s a very important woman,” Freda said with pride in her voice. “Some folks say the only reason our dear president got himself elected was because Amanda Hartma

When Jamie came out of the clinic, Lester was dozing behind the wheel. He awoke and stretched when she got in the truck.

Back at the ranch house, instead of climbing the stairs to her apartment, Jamie walked to the end of the first-floor hallway and stopped in front of the door to A

“Can I help you?” the housekeeper’s voice asked from behind her.

Startled, Jamie turned around. Miss Montgomery was wearing her usual navy blue-today’s attire was a double-breasted dress with white buttons. “I want to ask you a question,” Jamie explained.

“Well, what is it?”

“If Amanda Hartma

“Who told you that she was expecting a baby?” Miss Montgomery asked, a frown deepening the creases in her forehead.

“Freda sort of indicated that she was.”

Miss Montgomery digested this information, then forced a smile and patted Jamie’s arm. “You need not concern yourself with what is going on in Amanda’s life,” she said, her tone firm but pleasant. “All you need to know is that the child you are carrying is destined to be her child. And Mister Toby’s, too, of course. They want this child very much, more than you could ever know.”

A

A

Amanda claiming to be pregnant?

She went into her bedroom, which was austere compared with the living room. Her father had made the sturdy bedroom furniture for his only daughter.

She sat on the bed that she had first slept in as a girl, the same bed that she had shared with Buck Hartma

She looked at her ugly old face in the speckled old mirror that hung above the dresser. She had been beautiful back then. Buck would call her his “raven-haired beauty.” But the years had not been kind to her. Her once willowy body was now thick and buxom, her once smooth skin crisscrossed with a maze of wrinkles.

After Buck’s son, Jason, married, Mary Millicent came into A

Mary Millicent was often dismissive of A

After Jason died, Mary Millicent once again took up her ministry, and Amanda and Gus were sent away to school but spent their summers and school vacations at the ranch.

Jason’s death had been more than Buck could bear. Not only had he lost his only child, he lost the dream that his son would one day be president of the United States. A month or so after Jason’s death, Buck went out to the paddock and managed to get his weak, old body on top of an unbroken colt. They found him the next morning miles from the ranch house, his neck broken, the colt grazing nearby.

Buck had promised to leave her enough money that she would never want for anything, but his last will and testament made no provision for the housekeeper whose legs he had crawled between night after night for decades. She chose not to hate him. He had just forgotten.