40 - Further Eggsplanation

Jon rubbed a thoughtful thumb over his chin, watching the sun rise out the plane window. Sheridan was busily tapping away on her iPad screen again, and he was lost in his thoughts.

Still fixated on Karl and Suzanne's daughter, he couldn't imagine what it felt like to knowingly have a child and not be her parent.   There was nothing in the world like having kids. They were a piece of you, able to do things you never dreamed of, or follow paths you never considered. He never grew tired of picking in his children's brains. Despite their similar upbringing, they had such varied and unique opinions of the world.

Jon held out his hand, palm up. When she put the electronic tablet to sleep and slid her palm against his, he twisted their fingers together and inquired quietly,   "Can I ask you something?"

"Mm." She scooted around in her seat to face him and smiled. "If you tell me what you and Riley talked about."

They'd had this conversation no less than three times since yesterday morning, and Jon still wasn't budging.  She didn't need to know that he'd been on a scouting mission for information. Riley had been very helpful in providing her sister's jewelry preferences.

"I told ya, she invited me for Christmas. Any more than that I'll tell ya as soon as you tell me what you're doing on that damn iPad the last couple of days. You don't seem like an Angry Birds kinda girl."

"And I told you that I'm not ready to share yet."

"But it's not anything to do with me?"

She pursed her lips with annoyance. "It's not a biography. Now what did you want to ask?"

"Don't get your panties in a twist," he chided. "I don't like surprises, that's all."

"I get that, but how many times do I have to reassure you?  Are you ever going to just trust me and move on?"

"Point taken." Her exasperated question was actually the perfect segue into what he wanted to talk about.  "Tell me about Madison?"

Sheridan's eyebrows flattened in confusion.  "What do you want to know?"

"She's your daughter.  I just wanna know about her."

Frowning slightly, she rubbed her thumb along the outside of his hand and said slowly, "Sweetheart, she’s not my daughter.  She’s Karl and Suzy’s daughter.  I’m just Aunt Sheri.”

“You’ve never thought of her that way?”

“No.  I haven’t.  All I did was have a medical procedure done so that her mommy could have her.  That’s it.”

It was still hard for Jon to fathom, but she looked sincere and there was no wistfulness lurking behind her eyes.  She really seemed to believe what she was saying. 

“I’d like to see a picture of her if you have one.”  He gave her a little grin.  “I’m nosy like that.”

A short laugh escaped her lips and she detached herself to power the iPad back on.  “No you’re not.  I have a feeling you can be perfectly content minding your own business.  And I have that feeling because this is one of the few personal questions you’ve ever asked.”

Executing a couple of taps on the screen, she slid her finger back and forth until she found what she was looking for.  When she passed the tablet into his hands, it was to present him with a picture of the woman he vaguely recalled from the book launch party smiling happily into the camera’s lens.  The young girl with the freckled cheek pressed against hers was giggling at something and looking above the lens at the photographer. 

Jon systematically compared the coppery hair, the green eyes and the dusting of freckles.  The girl’s features weren’t a carbon copy of Suzanne’s, but the similar coloring would convince anyone that the two were mother and daughter.  It was only upon closer inspection that he noticed that the shape of Madison’s eyes and chin resembled Sheridan’s.

“She looks a lot like Suzanne.  Even down to the red hair and green eyes.”

He passed the iPad back to Sheridan, who was smiling fondly at the digital image.  “Yeah, she does.  My mom is a redhead, which was handy. Suzanne was pregnant.  She's the one who carried the baby and went through labor.  No one would ever guess Madi wasn’t conceived with her egg.  It was even more reason not to tell anyone.”

“Why didn’t you tell anyone?” he asked curiously as she tucked the iPad into her carry-on and folded her legs into the seat.  

“Because it wasn’t anybody else’s business,” was the unadorned reply.

“Not even your husband?”

She stroked her fingers along his forearm, rearranging the hair there in a random pattern and then smoothing it again.  “Ian was already pretty heavily annoyed with me at the time because I didn’t want to have children.  This would have been adding fuel to the fire.  He wouldn’t have understood.  My family wouldn’t have either.  They all thought I should have been procreating for myself by that age.  I was thirty-one, after all.”  

Watching her roll her eyes, he couldn't find it in himself to share her amusement.  “I don’t know if I would’ve understood either.”

Her fingers went still, and she slowly lifted guarded eyes.  “Does that mean you don’t approve of what I did?”

That was a hell of a question, and an honest answer may not come across the way he intended.  It was a touchy area and Jon rested his hand atop hers, taking great care when choosing his words.

“The fact that you shared this very personal thing with me…  The significance is not wasted, and I feel privileged by your trust.  That’s why I want you to recognize that approval and understanding are two distinctly different things for me, Kitten.  How could anybody not approve of the way you stepped up to help Suzanne’s dream come true?  Me... I’m very much into family, so it’s hard for me to stand aside and say that I understand why you didn’t want kids, but that doesn’t diminish the life-changing generosity of what you did.”

She was quiet, and he spent tense seconds waiting for her to either pull away or cheerfully move onto the next topic.  She didn’t do either one.

“It’s my hope that you’ll also appreciate the significance of this: I want you to understand.  I’ve never been a woman inclined to explain my decisions.  They're my decisions, and that’s pretty much the only justification I’ve ever offered, but I want to see if I can translate this into something you might be able to relate to.”

Sheridan was more like him that he’d originally realized, because that was something he could fully identify with.  You went with your gut, and if nobody else got it, that was okay.  You knew you were doing what was right.  If it didn’t turn out so well?  Well, then you picked up and moved on, but there was nobody to blame but yourself. 

So, yeah…   Knowing that he seldom explained or justified his choices, he totally got the significance of her willingness – and wanting – to do so for him.

“Okay.”  He lifted her hand and tugged toward him.  “But why don’t you come over her and sit on my lap while you translate?”

She unfastened her seatbelt and stood willingly enough, but hovered over him without sitting.  A crooked smirk twisted the pretty pink bow of her mouth into a cynical arch.  “Are you sure you want me so close for this?”

“Unless you’re gonna punch me in the nuts, yeah.” 

He tucked his forefinger into the front pocket of her jeans and pulled, guiding her bottom to plunk firmly on his left thigh.  Lifting her legs to dangle over the arm of the airplane seat, he hit the button to recline and finished arranging her so that they were both comfortable.  Jon snuck his hand under the same emerald green sweater she’d worn on the trip out, softly curving his palm around her waist.  He wanted her to know that his understanding wasn’t a condition for his acceptance, and that this wasn’t going to change because of it. 

“M’kay, I’m ready.  Translate away.”

Her shoulder pushed into his chest when she inhaled.  “You love your job.”

“I do.”  Most days, anyway.

“I don’t know your ex-wife, but if I had to guess, I’d say she hates your job.”

“Not so much hate…”  It had provided her with an awfully nice lifestyle to warrant pure hatred.

“Okay, then if she didn’t hate your job, she hated the time you devote to it.”

With a rueful chuckle, he admitted, “Based on a few late-night screaming matches, I’d say that’s true.”

“But you couldn’t give it up if you had to.  There’s something inside you that drives you to keep going, making what you do bigger and better than what it was.  Bigger and better than all your peers.”

He was a competitive freak with a desire to over-achieve.  That was pretty well documented.

“Yeah.”

“That’s how I felt about my job.  I turned one store into two, and two into four.  I made improvements and tried new ideas and grew an empire.  In case you haven’t figured it out, I’m not after your money.  I made, and have, plenty of my own.  The novelty of not having to watch pennies wore off pretty quickly for Ian, though.  It wasn't any time before found himself in the same place as your ex.”

“Dorothea.  Her name is Dorothea.”

Her hair tickled his jaw when she nodded.  “Dorothea.  But Ian had the added fun of being intimidated by my success.  Male ego and all that.  His CPA job didn't stack up, in his mind.”

Sheridan sighed, tracing the crown on his ‘Keep Calm’ t-shirt with her finger.  “Who wanted to have children?  You or Dorothea?”

“Both.”

Dorothea got tired of running around the globe and told him she wanted to stay home and raise babies.  He’d been more than happy with that decision.

“Would you still have wanted them if you had to quit your job to do it?”

Stephanie had been conceived after a particularly rough period in his career – life, for that matter.  Even at that, he hadn’t been ready to give up his music – hadn’t been ready to give up his desire to make a mark on the pages of history.  But the thought of not having his babies...

“I… don’t know.”

“Mm."  She nodded again.  "I’m glad you didn’t have to make that choice, but I did.  It was never that I didn’t want kids, it was that I didn’t want to resent them for taking away the career I loved.  Children should never be anything but first in a mother’s life.  Maybe it just eases my conscience, but I like to think I was smart enough to know, at the time, I couldn’t give a child what they deserved.  As I get older, particularly in the last few months, I admit that I sometimes question my choices, but what’s done is done.  I’ll continue to be content with the path I took.”

Now he understood.  More than that, he respected her decision.  It sounded ass-backward, but she had put the needs of a child first by knowing she couldn’t fulfill those needs the way they deserved to be fulfilled. 

“You could still have a baby, if you wanted.  Dottie was forty when she had Jake, and almost forty-two with Romeo.”

She raised her head, snickering as she lightly tapped him on the end of the nose with her index finger and asked, “You offering?”