"Well, I have had it!" Jonathan Hart declared, pushing his chair away from the desk. The top of the desk was filled with papers that he had been reviewing and signing for what seemed like the whole day. He stood and stretched, attempting to pull loose all the kinks that had formed from sitting so long.
He looked down at his desk to Jennifer’s picture. She was gone to San Francisco for the day to meet with one of her editors. After all their years together, he still missed her when she was away, even if it was only for a day.
"Better check on the girls." He thought to himself walking to the master bedroom.
The master bedroom windows overlooked the front driveway where his daughter, J.J. and her friend Marnie had been roller blading. He could see the two girls skate up the drive and take a seat on the bench under the window from where he stood watching. He could hear them talking.
"It’s five, Marnie. Your dad will be here soon." He heard J.J. say to her visiting friend..
"J.J., why don’t you just go up and ask your dad if you can stay over to my house." Marnie whined. "You know he’ll let you. I don’t want to spend the weekend with my father and stepmonster by myself."
"Nope, Jennifer Hart will not be caning me this evening. She said for me to be here when she got back, and that is exactly what she meant."
"You know your mother doesn’t hit you. She doesn’t even yell at you. You are so lucky that you don’t have to deal with stepparents. Just go ask him. You know him. He can make her forget what she said."
Jonathan smiled at that. Yes, Marnie, I probably could.
"Not when it comes to me, he can’t," J.J. asserted, shaking her head. "I have been on her nerves all week. That’s why I’m here today. I was supposed to go with her to San Francisco."
"What did you do?"
Mrs. Hart had to be the nicest mother of all of their friends. She just talked to J.J. She didn’t yell. She didn’t hit. She just talked. She had always made Marnie feel welcome when she visited, which was fairly often.
J.J. adjusted one of her skates. "I wish I could figure out how to put a motor on these things. That might be fun." She said absently, and then she continued, "Well, on Sunday night, I couldn’t sleep, so I got up and got on the Playstation. I wanted to finish a level on a game I was on, but there was a wire loose on the controller and it kept shorting out. So I took the back off to fiddle with it. I was on the floor in my room. I thought she was already asleep."
Coming up from the skate, J.J. brushed hair from her face. "The next thing I knew, the hem of Jennifer Hart’s nightgown was standing next to me."
"Wha’d she do?" Marnie asked breathlessly.
"She just reached down and took the parts of the control from me. Then she pointed to the bed."
"That doesn’t sound so bad."
"By itself, no," J.J. bent back down to tighten the strap on her other skate, "But the next day we had that math test. Since I didn’t rest well the night before, I guess I couldn’t think straight on the test and I made some dumb mistakes. When we got the tests back on Wednesday, I had gotten a C, and Ms. Cathcart made me take it home to get it signed by a parent."
"So, why didn’t you just get your dad to sign it? You always get A’s. He would have let one C slide."
"Can’t," said J.J. "A major Jennifer Hart rule. She signs everything that’s school-related. She says that my dad is putty in my hands, and that I run all over him."
Jonathan grinned widely. Jennifer Hart was quite right on that one. J.J. Hart would be spoiled beyond redemption if it had been left up to him.
J.J. continued, "And then you know she caught me on the phone at midnight last Thursday talking to you."
Jonathan recalled the moment vividly.
They were making love, and Jennifer was on top of him. She was working her special blend of magic with her body on his body, and caught the red ‘in use’ light on the phone out of the corner of her eye. Without missing a stroke, she reached over and picked up the telephone next to the bed.
"Hang up, now" she had said, slowly and deliberately.
There had been an audible click, and Jennifer put the phone back down. She leaned over him so that her soft, fragrant hair fell into his face.
"Just plain incorrigible." Was the breathy whisper in his ear.
His two girls, they were so much fun!
The gate buzzer went off, and he went to answer it.
J.J. waved to Marnie as she and her father pulled off down the driveway.
"See you!" she called.
She skated to the front door and slid into the foyer, closing the door behind her.
"You do know that your mother is going to cut you off at the knees if she finds out that you’ve been on those skates in the house."
J.J. looked up at the voice that came from over her head. Her father stood grinning his Cheshire Cat grin at her from the upstairs railing that overlooked the foyer.
"Get out of those things and come up here for a minute, will you? I want to talk to you."
"O.K., Daddy."
She sat down on the bottom step and released the straps on her skates. Taking them off, she put them in the cubby under the massive oak staircase. She ran up the stairs in her socks, calling, "Where are you?"
"I’m in the library!"
Her father sat at his desk. He was moving some papers out of the way. She plopped down in the chair across from him.
"What’s up?" She asked, brushing the escaped tendrils of her wild red ponytail out of her face.
Jonathan watched her. Jeez, how he loved this little girl, his and Jennifer’s last minute kid. She never ceased to delight and amaze him. He leaned forward to look into that little face so like Jennifer’s, but with his blue eyes.
"Tell me something." He began, "Why is it that when you’re with your friends, and you talk about your mother, you refer to her as "Jennifer Hart" and not "My mom"?"
J.J. looked down for a moment and rubbed her forehead. A sly smile played at her lips. So… he had heard her. She shifted position in the chair.
Jonathan watched her squirm.
"I’m just curious." He reassured her. "Even with me you don’t call her mom. You always say "My Mother."
J.J. looked up again. She adored her father. He asked good questions that made her have to think, and he always listened to her answers.
The two of them were kindred spirits; clever, mischievous, perceptive, persistent, they could see humor in any situation, and shared a passion for electronics.
And they both loved Jennifer deeply.
"Daddy, it’s hard to explain." She shifted in the chair again. "Do you remember the time, a couple of years ago, when I was ten and I had that fight at school? You know, when you had to come get me?"
Jonathan’s eyes twinkled at the memory. Jennifer had been away for the day, so he had gotten the call at the office that there was a problem at J.J’s school. He had arrived in the principal’s office to find his tiny, very angry daughter sitting in a chair. The cute uniform that her mother had laid out for her before leaving was now disheveled. Her ponytail was a tangled, tousled mess. Upon seeing her daddy enter the office, she ran to him. He instinctively bent down to check her for injuries.
"What happened?" He asked as he wiped her tear stained face with his handkerchief.
She leaned into him and whispered into his ear, "I kicked Blake’s ass, Daddy. That’s what happened."
"Yes I do remember." He replied, trying to restrain a smile at the memory by placing his finger to the side of his face, resting his chin on his hand. "And I also still recall that you never told your mother and I what that was all about. You never told us what he did or said to make you so angry."
None of the other kids that witnessed the fight claimed to know what triggered J.J.’s outburst. He and Jennifer figured that it must have been justifiable since there was no backlash from the parents of the boy whose nose she bloodied and whose eye she blacked.
J.J. sighed deeply and waved her hand. "It’s all water under the bridge, now. I guess I’ll tell you."
She settled back.
"My mother came to our class and helped us with the yearbook that we were working on. Of course, everybody liked her and she was fun. The next day, we were at the lunch table and some of the kids were asking me about my mother’s work. Blake Nichols starts up with he heard his father telling some of his friends while they were playing cards that he knew my mother a long time ago when she lived in New York. His father lived there too. I ignored him. He said that his father said that he had dated my mother. I knew that he was trying to make me mad, so I kept ignoring him. Then he started saying how all his father’s friends started talking about how good my mother looked. I still was trying to act like I didn’t hear him. Everybody was looking at me, though. They knew I was getting angry. Then he took it a step too far. He said that if his father dated my mother then he must have done her, you know, had s-e-x with her. The next thing I knew, somebody was pulling me off him."
Jonathan winced outwardly and inwardly at the thought of his daughter’s humiliation and rage.
"Then," J.J. continued, "After I wouldn’t tell what happened, my mother put me on lockdown for ‘unladylike conduct’." She leaned forward. "Daddy, I just couldn’t tell her about that. But, when I had time to think,… during my unfortunate incarceration…, I began to realize some things."
"Well, maybe if you had told us-"
J.J. held up her hand and cut him off, "I had taken care of it. I beat him up. If his parents knew what he said to me, then he would have gotten into more trouble. That wasn’t necessary for me. If the principal knew, he might have gotten kicked out. I told everybody to shut up about it. This way, he had to face me every day with everybody knowing that I beat the snot out of him. It was worth being on punishment."
She had been nodding her head through that whole explanation, looking at him through narrowed, glazed eyes, replaying the incident in her head.
She stopped and ran her hand over her hair, pulling off the scrunchee that held her ponytail. Her thick curly hair fell around her face and over her shoulders. Jonathan felt a twinge of anxiety. J.J. was going to be beautiful, just like her mother. At this point, it seemed she was blissfully unaware of it. He worried for a brief second that she would have to endure some the same pain that he sometimes felt that Jennifer had experienced because of her looks.
Then, suddenly for some reason, he didn’t think so. J.J. was beginning to give him the impression that even though she looked like her mother, she was made out of different stuff than her mother.
"What did you realize?" He looked into her eyes.
"I thought to myself, Blake’s dad was still talking about going out with my mother even though it had to be over twenty years ago. And Blake was thinking that his dad having s-e-x with my mother was a big deal. Then that must really make my mother something special. I mean, what’s the big deal? Why my mother? What makes her different from anybody else’s mother? But it wasn’t just anybody. It was Jennifer Hart he was talking about- not my mother."
She breathed deeply and rubbed her furrowed brow as if she was still working it out in her head. " I began to realize that my mother just happens to be Jennifer Hart. She is a person on her own, apart from you, apart from me. She is herself."
Jonathan leaned back in his chair, watching her quizzically. Her reasoning and perception fascinated him. "So, tell me, why am I always ‘Daddy’ or ‘My Dad’ to your friends?"
J.J. laughed, "Oh Daddy, you could be anybody’s daddy. You’re the man at Hart Industries, but not here with us. All the kids would like for you to be their dad. It’s not the same with my mother." She pursed her lips and threw up her hands in frustration. "It’s so hard to tell you what I mean!"
Jonathan nodded, beginning to understand. "So, keep trying. I think I’m getting the picture."
"See, Jennifer Hart happens to be my mother. She’s not anybody else’s mother. She doesn’t pretend to be. She doesn’t try to be. She’s only my mother. I’m her only daughter." She threw up her hands again. "I can’t explain, Daddy! She’s a writer. She’s a keynote speaker. She’s the chairperson of all kinds of committees. She’s part of Hart Industries. She’s known for being very pretty. She’s your wife. Those things make her Jennifer Hart. But she’s mother just to me- not even you. She’s my mother."
There was almost a reverent tone to her last statement, emphasis on ‘my’.
Jonathan understood. As much of a woman as he knew his wife to be, and as many admirable qualities he knew that she possessed, maternal was not a term he could attribute to her, not before J.J.
Before they married, their views on a future family had definitely differed. He knew that he wanted children. She said that she really did not. After they had been married for a few years, he again broached the subject with her, hoping that their deep love for each other had changed her position. She consented to maybe just one child, since it would be his child. She didn’t sound too enthused. She was afraid of the changes they would have to make in their lives. They agreed to let nature take its course.
Max, his good friend, was with them then, and he knew how much Jonathan wanted a child with Jennifer. Max encouraged him to let her know his heart, but he wasn reluctant to put pressure on her to do something that she really did not want to do. He wanted to spend his life with her even if they never had a child.
Shortly after celebrating their tenth anniversary, Max became ill. Before his final surgery, he told Jennifer that Jonathan would be taking her somewhere that she needed to go in order for them to get on with the exciting business of life. They did not know at the time what he was trying to tell them.
Max did not make it through the surgery. Jennifer seemed to grieve his passing much harder and longer that even he had. She had no energy and took no interest in food. When she began sleeping all day, he insisted that she see a doctor.
The diagnosis was a well- established pregnancy. It was a complete surprise, and he had been terrified. As much as he so desperately wanted the baby, he was afraid that Jennifer would only going through the motions for his sake. Throughout the pregnancy she never complained, even when she was as much as forty pounds heavier than she ever had been in her life. She was so beautiful. He couldn’t tell her enough times.
Through fourteen hours of hard labor trying to ease his baby into the world she was eerily silent. She never cried out, but with each contraction, she squeezed his hand until she was actually hurting him, but he hadn’t felt it. It was heartache that he felt because there was nothing he could do to ease the pain.
It wasn’t until J.J. was actually in her arms that he relaxed.
The little girl had been delivered and washed. The nurses wrapped her in a little pink blanket and handed her to her mother. He and Kate Kendall, Jennifer’s doctor, were standing on either side of the bed. The baby settled into Jennifer’s arms and opened her blue, blue eyes to look at her mother.
"Oh, Jonathan," Jennifer finally whispered, uttering her first words in almost an entire day. The little girl had curled a tiny hand around her mother’s finger. "She’s absolutely beautiful!"
The baby began nuzzling her face toward her bosom.
"Jennifer," Doctor Kendall smiled, "She recognizes her mommy, and she’s hungry"
Jennifer opened her gown and had given the baby her breast. She never even discussed breastfeeding the baby, in fact she had bought bottles for the baby. He realized that this had been instinctive on her part. It was then that he knew that Jennifer wanted this baby as much as he did, and he exhaled. He did not even realize that he had been holding his breath.
At that moment in time, she became, for him, more of a woman and lover than he had ever known her to be. She was the only mother of his only child. He knew exactly what J.J. was trying so hard to say.
J.J. brought out an undiscovered facet of his beautiful wife just when he thought he knew all that he could possibly know about her. She was a wonderful mother to their child, always loving, patient, consistent, and fair.
Even in naming their baby, Jennifer was careful to be fair. He wanted to name the baby for her, Jennifer Justine. Jennifer insisted on reversing the names to allow the little girl her own identity. So she had been named Justine Jennifer Hart. He had tagged her with her J.J, thinking that she was too small for so much name. To cement it, he had given her a gold bracelet when she was a month old; their two intertwined hearts with engraved J’s, but with a diamond in the middle of both hearts to represent their child. J.J. had worn that bracelet all of her life, removing it only for resizing as she grew.
As she sat in before him now, he could see it slide up and down her thin wrist as she used her hands to help her talk..
The relationship between Jennifer and J.J. had never been playful and silly. That was reserved father and daughter. Jennifer and J.J. were genuine and serene. They walked, talked, shared, held. He knew that in everything that she did, Jennifer was teaching J.J. to be a woman of substance. Their relationship was their own. Jennifer seldom raised her voice. It was fascinating to watch her communicate with her daughter through a look, a raised eyebrow, a touch of the hand on a little shoulder.
Jennifer Hart was raising one child- her daughter- her way. Although J.J. frequently had friends over, it was clear that Jennifer was mother to only one. She was always kind and gracious, welcoming all that came, but the only child allowed completely inside her personal space and heart was J.J.
He on the other hand was, just as J.J. said, everybody’s daddy. All the kids felt free to be the kids they were with him. Something about Jennifer’s presence in a room brought out the best behavior in the most unruly hellion. Only J.J. knew her well enough to separate Jennifer Hart from ‘my mother’ and occasionally push the envelope.
"I just wondered." Jonathan finally said, leaning back and folding his hands behind his head.
J.J. suddenly leaned forward, placing her hands on the desk and looking concerned, "You don’t think it’s disrespectful, do you? I don’t mean to be." She was almost whispering. "I’ll stop if you think it is."
Jonathan leaned forward again and took his daughter’s hands and squeezed them gently.
"Now that you’ve explained yourself, I think it’s very respectful. If that’s how you see your mother, then that’s how you see her. There’s nothing wrong with that. Now, I smell Marie’s dinner. You had better go get cleaned up."
He released her hands. She jumped up, leaned across the desk and rubbed noses with him. " I love you, Daddy." Then she ran off to her room.
Jonathan picked up Jennifer’s picture. He traced the outline of her face and then her mouth with his finger.
"Darling." He said quietly. "Thank you for trusting me enough to finally have my baby. She’s wonderful and… sort of… ruthless."
He put the picture back in its spot and leaned back. Closing his eyes, he pictured his wife in his mind. Her smile, that flowing red hair, those beautiful eyes… How could one guy be so lucky in one lifetime?
