December 15th- Merger and Acquisition by Dawnwind

Note: This story is a sequel to A Women’s Work Is Never Done posted in the 2017 Advent Calendar.

“Did you put the champagne on ice?” Minnie asked, expertly cutting the cheese for the plate already brimming with salami, crackers, a bowl of spinach dip, and slices of French bread.

“What if they say no?” Linda asked, biting her thumbnail.

“To champagne?” Minnie laughed, wiping her hands on the dishtowel. “You know those boys better’n that.”

“That’s not what I mean,” Linda fretted. “I—” She stopped, shrugging. “All this planning, discussion…could be for nothing.”

“Baby.” Minnie pulled Linda close, clasping her hands behind her lover’s slender waist to sway her in an impromptu waltz. She kissed Linda, humming Waiting for a Girl Like You. “Then we try elsewhere. They ain’t the only fish in the sea.”

Linda took a calming breath, her normal optimism resurfacing. “This just seems like such a perfect solution that could go horribly wrong. They’re friends of ours and I don’t want to change that.”

Minnie tucked a lock of Linda’s fiery red hair behind her ear, using the gesture to stroke her neck. “You are so pretty when you worry.” Stepping away so she could shove the platter of hors d’oeuvres into Linda’s hands, she smiled as confidently as she could. It wasn’t like she didn’t have reservations herself. She did, but that wasn’t going to hold her back. This would work out; she could feel it in her bones.

The doorbell chimed as Linda dropped a kiss onto her cheek and wheeled away to carry the food into the living room. “I’ll get that!” she called.

Summoning every drop of confidence, Minnie swept into the living room with a sassy grin on her face. “Starsky, Hutchinson, get in here!” She waved at her friends as they tromped into the small house.

Wasn’t the first time she’d noticed how the place seemed to fill up with just two other people inside. Should she and Linda consider that going forward?

“I know we’re not supposed to talk shop,” Hutch said, as usual sitting so close to Starsky on the settee that there was no space between them, “but you two put the pieces together to take down Rodriquez in record time.”

Linda grinned in appreciation, taking a mocking bow. “Sometimes, those guys just don’t pay much attention to two little girls.”

“Who you calling little?” Minnie challenged with a laugh. ”Them’s fighting words.”

“Be careful, Linda, she knows karate,” Starsky reminded, digging into the temping platter of food.

“Kung Fu!” Minnie dropped into a crouch, stiffening her hands, and pretending she was about to take on Kwai Chang Caine.

“She’s demonstrated her prowess to me on many occasions.” Linda took a chair, pulling her partner down into its mate.

Hutch held up the bottle of wine he’d brought. A California white, Minnie noted with appreciation.

“There’s a corkscrew there on the side table,” Linda said, pointing to a row of wine glasses beside it.

“Who wants some?” Hutch said, easily pulling out the cork.

Starsky had his mouthful of French bread and spinach dip so he raised his hand. Minnie held up two fingers for herself and Linda, her belly suddenly in knots. She’d been so calm, so sure this was exactly what should happen right before they arrived, but now she’d caught Linda’s case of nerves.

As if reading her mind, Linda latched onto her hand, giving her a slice of salami on a cracker at the same time.

“Thanks, babe,” she and Starsky said at the exact same time as Hutch handed Starsky a glass of wine. That seemed to break the brittle tension she’d sensed in the air and they all laughed, settling into the hors d’oeuvres.

“We talked it over,” Starsky said finally, wiping his fingers on the paper napkin Hutch had draped over his knee. “And we both think it’s an amazing idea.”

Caught in the act of taking a sip of wine, Linda gasped and choked, giggling as if she’d drunk the whole bottle instead of half a glass.

“You breathing?” Minnie asked lazily even when joy was bubbling up inside her like the champagne she had in the ice bucket in the kitchen.

“Oh, yes.” Linda grinned at her and abruptly leaned over to give her a quick kiss.

Minnie didn’t even glance at their guests. Starsky and Hutch knew about their relationship—just as she and Linda knew about theirs. Part of the reason for the get-together tonight.

“Gettin’ raunchy in here. Save it for the bedroom, ladies,” Starsky teased.

“You don’t have any reservations?” Minnie asked, to put things on an even keel. Had to be practical, at all costs.

“Half a dozen,” Hutch said calmly, despite the worrisome reply. “But who doesn’t? Isn’t that the point? No one knows how something like this will turn out. It’s the unknown, but the important thing is to try.”

“Never thought of you as a motivational speaker!” Starsky looked at him in surprised admiration.

“I can’t tell you how…grateful we are,” Linda said, grabbing each of their hands. “There are other ways, I know–Minnie keeps reminding me, but this just seemed–”

“Like the closing of a perfect circle,” Minnie finished. She sipped her wine, relishing the warm glow it provided.

“So what now?” Starsky stuffed another piece of bread smeared with spinach dip in his mouth. “Not like I’m really up on the specifics of this…”

“You’re well-grounded in the basics, believe me.” Hutch grinned, selecting a slice of French bread.

“But I did some reading, as a matter of fact.” Starsky shot Hutch a top that look. “And don’t you have to be…uh, at the right time of the month, kinda thing?”

“We are,” Linda said, slightly pink at the embarrassing topic. “We’re—“

“Synced,” Minnie provided. “Have been since we got together. Weird at first but now, we both know.” She shrugged, rubbing Linda’s arm. “So it’s tonight or—“

“In one month,” Hutch said. “My sister explained some of this when she was pregnant. How do you want us to work this?”

“The guest bedroom is all set up. There’s a small bowl, and a plastic syringe,” Minnie explained. “Some Marvin Gaye on the turntable and a couple of magazines, if you need them. But I didn’t figure you did.”

“Nope. We don’t generally have a problem getting in the mood.” Starsky winked at Hutch.

“Once you’ve both made a deposit into the bowl, pull it up into the syringe and alert the media…” Linda snickered. “It will be our turn.”

“Turkey basters at the ready,” Minnie said, wanting to do it immediately.

“So no one will be sure?” Hutch said in wonder. “It could be any of the four of us?”

“Until evidence proves otherwise.” Linda pressed her hands over her heart. “It’s all of ours.”

Minnie groaned, gripping the car handle, that fateful night playing out in her head like a movie. Contractions contorted her huge belly, rippling across the expanse of her abdomen like hidden sharks circling underwater. The sequins on her party gown seemed to flicker and dance with the movement.

This was not at all how they’d planned it. Her due date wasn’t until 1984—January third, to be exact. She wasn’t at all ready! No overnight bag ready for the hospital, no little outfit set out for the birthday baby-to-be.

She and Linda had been at a Metro after-Christmas gala to raise money for foster and orphaned kids serviced by the Child Protection unit. She’s been ignoring what she hoped were Braxton-Hicks contractions for most of the day. None of them had been consistent, nor all that painful. Not until the dessert buffet—maybe it had been the fried shrimp she had for dinner?

Glancing over at Linda driving the car as if she were qualifying for safe-driver award of the decade, Minnie couldn’t help but admire the Kelly green party dress she wore. Set off her bright hair perfectly, and the faux diamond clip Minnie had given her for Christmas sparkled in the passing streetlights like fireworks.

“You look beautiful,” she said.

“You look pregnant,” Linda deadpanned, flicking her eyes off the road for a split second.

“And here I thought this dress hid the bulges—Damn.” She grit her teeth against a particularly sharp pain that threatened to rip her from rib cage to pelvis.

“Gorgeous curves,” Linda corrected, taking a left. “You okay? I told you those weren’t Braxton—“

“I’m sorry.”

“For what? This isn’t ruining my evening. It’s the best Boxing Day gift I ever got!”

“Boxing Day?” Minnie repeated, perplexed. “I meant, thought we’d be doing this together.” She had to wait out the rest of the contraction before finishing. “Both of us.”

“Doll.” Linda braked at a stoplight.

Up ahead, Minnie could see the illuminated Bay City General sign. Their destination.

“Don’t go there. It didn’t happen. And for the record, as I’ve told you already, ever since Francine—and your sister Mariah—told us about dealing with newborn twins, I’ve been glad we didn’t get knocked up on the same night.”

“How are Cyrus and Cyprus? Isn’t this their first birthday?” Minnie recalled in horror. She’d sent them identical sets of Duplo blocks last week, she should have remembered. Pregnancy brain was real.

“Yes, so Mr. Mister here had better come tomorrow, because we’re not having cousin birthday wars,” Linda said snidely. “Bad enough that Iris had Lamont on our birthday, so now there are four of us on June 19^th, competing for cake.”

“Geeze, how did your mother manage triplets…?” Minnie moaned, and not from a contraction.

“You are not having triplets. Multiples may run in both our families, but that is not happening here.” Linda bumped the car into the hospital parking lot, heading for the ER doors.

Minnie spotted the bright red and white Torino parked in a tow-away zone. “Starsky and Hutch are here.”

“I didn’t call them!”

“How much longer?” Hutch groused to no one in particular, giving his cuffed and bleeding prisoner the evil eye. They’d already been in the ER waiting room for half an hour. Just his luck—or maybe this was some kind of cosmic karma. The day before he and Starsky were due to go for a three-day after-Christmas vacation to Santa Catalina. Just them, the ocean, and endless hours to lie in bed in a century old restored lighthouse, when their bust of a crack dealer had gone bust.

“You think I like this?” Rigoberto Reyes-Rodriquez, or Triple R, as he was known on the street, retorted with a pout more suited to a five-year-old rather than a streetwise eighteen-year-old. “This is cuttin’ into my overhead, man. I am an entray-pen-oor.”

“Entrepreneur,” Starsky corrected sourly, balancing his swollen right ankle on the side of his left foot. “You’re nothing but a drug dealer, Rig, and don’t you forget that.”

“You can add assaulting a police officer to your list of charges,” Hutch said, seeing a nurse come out of the double doors. “Resisting arrest, dealing, and possession.”

“He fell on me!” Rigoberto sent Starsky a petulant snarl. “I hit the curb when he landed on me.” He pointed to the gash on his head. “I’d’a got away if he hadn’t jumped out of the car.”

“You got your priorities all catawampus,” Starsky said, brightening as the nurse walked nearer. “My turn, Margery?”

“Sorry, Starsky,” she said, going past them as a couple of elegantly dressed women came through the automatic doors.

A slender redhead wearing a Kelly green mini was pushing a wheelchair containing a lovely pregnant woman resplendent in a silver sequined maternity cocktail dress.

“Linda.” Hutch stood, staring at them.

“Minnie!” Starsky yelped when his sprained ankle hit the floor.

“Those are the bitches put my bro away for life!” Rigoberto snarled, jumping to his feet.

“Down, Fido.” Hutch jerked him back into his chair by the handcuffs, mentally berating himself for getting distracted when he had a prisoner. There was no way he was going to let Triple R escape—particularly in front of fellow cops.

“Is the baby comin’?” Starsky demanded as Margery intercepted the pair. “I thought he wasn’t due ‘til next year!”

“She.” Minnie ground out, gripping the armrests of the chair, her knuckles blanched from the strain. “Starsky, we had this conversation already.”

“Neither of you will get an answer until Mr. Mister comes out,” Linda interrupted. “Tomorrow, if I have any say in the matter.”

“Babies come when they decide,” Hutch said, suddenly giddy that the baby was about to arrive. “My sister’s had three. Not one of them came on the day the OB predicted.”

Linda looked more than a bit frazzled, but she took a calming breath, addressing the nurse who’d been trying to get a word in edgewise for the last minute. “Minnie Kaplan is in active labor, contractions less than ten minutes apart and getting more frequent. Her doctor is Esme Hughes.”

“I’ll give the L and D floor a call, and send you right up,” Margery said with a nod. “And Starsky, then it’s your turn.”

“What about me?” Rigoberto wailed, pointing at his bloody head again. “I’m the injured party here.”

“Rigoberto, what are you doing hanging out with these two?” Linda snorted a laugh, patting Minnie’s shoulder.

Hutch recognized the gesture. He’d done the same many a time when Starsky was in distress, when the touch of a partner was enough to soothe the both of them.

“Had to find a way to get into prison like your brother?” Minnie finished Linda’s sentence, grasping her hand.

“After you two took Raymundo Rodriquez out of the equation, Triple R here staged a—what would you call it?” Hutch swung around to look at his partner with a chuckle.

“I think that’s what they refer to as a coup d’état,” Starsky said, grinning maniacally, extending his leg across several chairs to protect the swollen ankle. “Rigoberto thinks he’s managerial material.”

“I been reading up!” Rigoberto said indignantly, blood dripping around his eye, which made it look like his bright red mascara was running. “High Input Management and How to Succeed in Busin—“

“That’s a musical,” Linda said, not sounding at all impressed. “Go to prison, get your GED before you spread your wings…”

“The three Rs, baby boy,” Minnie added, “ain’t the initials in your name. Oooo…” She trailed off as another contraction hit. She leaned back in the wheelchair, stretching her legs forward as if to push the baby out immediately. “Shitshitshit.”

Hutch had never actually witnessed his sister giving birth; only heard about the spectacle secondhand from his mother. This was much more graphic than he was prepared for. He wasn’t about to help deliver a child that might be his—or Starsky’s—right here on the ER waiting room floor.

“She’s about to blow!” Rigoberto said snidely.

“Shut your trap, RRR,” Starsky snarled. “That’s one special lady about to have a very important baby.”

Linda bent, giving Minnie a gentle but awkward hug. “That nurse hasn’t come back. I’ll wheel you upstairs myself. Where’s the elevator in this joint?”

Starsky, Hutch, and Minnie all pointed down the hall as Linda shoved the wheelchair forward.

“Come upstairs when you can!” Minnie called over her shoulder.

“We’re about to become…” Hutch stared at Starsky, his heart pounding with anticipation.

“Fathers!” Starsky shook his hand, as new fathers did, giggling when Margery returned with a wheelchair for him.

“Do I have to sit near them?” Rigoberto rolled his eyes.

Other women had told her about labor: described the intensity, the pain, the fear of motherhood, and the dread possibility of a damaged baby. They were all wrong and all right. It was like nothing Minnie had ever encountered in her entire life. Because she was thirty-six-years old, the doctor had informed her that she was—in medical terms—an elderly primip, or first-time mother.

Damn.

She’d be in her mid-fifties when this one was twenty. Even older if she or Linda had another child. She’d never even considered that angle. The whole pregnancy had been so perfect. She’d gotten pregnant immediately—had no complications, no morning sickness. Had worked until her eighth month, transferring to the Child Protection unit in her second trimester to avoid another stint in records. She simply hadn’t stopped to reflect on what the future might hold.

Suddenly, she was terrified—and there was a whole phalanx of medical personnel huddled around her bent knees, intent on yanking a poor defenseless infant into this cruel world.

Linda sighed in wonder; apparently she could see what Minnie could not. “There’s a head,” she cried, tears on her face.

“I’m not ready!” Minnie wailed, gripping Linda’s hand with all her might. Felt like her entire insides were being sucked out of her pussy. “Put it back!”

“You have a beautiful daughter!” Dr. Hughes proclaimed, holding up a squalling baby.

She was a girl all right; that was obvious. Screaming her tiny lungs out, bright red and covered in all manner of bodily fluids, her hands and feet slightly purple.

The most gorgeous baby on the face of the planet. Minnie gasped, holding out her arms, all trepidation utterly gone. All she wanted was to hold that baby.

“She looks perfect,” the doctor said, quickly cutting the cord so that a nurse could wrap the baby in a pink and blue striped blanket. “You can hold her.”

“Who does she look like?” Hutch asked, gazing down at the newest member of the combined Kaplan-Baylor-Starsky-Hutchinson family.

“Everyone keeps askin’,” Minnie said dreamily, cooing at her baby. She lay back against the pillows in her hospital bed, cuddling the blanket wrapped bundle closely. “She looks like me.”

That was the truth. Linda placed a finger in her daughter’s sweet, warm palm, relishing the miracle of it all when five tiny fingers grabbed hold. What infinite bliss just to look into those bluish gray eyes and wonder what life held for her.

She looked exactly like Minnie. Of course, she was only six hours old. There was lots of time for her to grow into herself. But right now, she was Minnie’s girl with skin the color of pale mocha and wisps of dark hair across her round head.

“Don’t see a bit of me or Hutch.” From his chair by the bed, Starsky grasped Hutch’s chin in one hand, scrutinizing his face for any resemblance to the baby. “Nah, doesn’t have your arrow straight nose or big chin.”

“No crooked grin or moles,” Hutch shot back across the bow.

“Hey, hey, trashy daddies,” Minnie chided. The baby made a tiny sound that riveted them all for a moment.

“She need a boob?” Starsky asked, stroking her cheek. She opened those fathomless eyes, peering up at him.

“You are so crass, Starsky.” Linda rolled her eyes, amused nonetheless. “What she needs is a name. The nurse said we could take a couple of days, if necessary, but the Birth Certificate lady comes at eight a.m. every morning.”

“Then you have one hour.” Hutch covered a yawn with one big palm, but it was clear he’d been up for a long time. He leaned back in his chair as if a short nap might be in order.

“We’ve all talked about this some.” Minnie shifted her daughter, placing her into Linda’s arms. “But I really wanted to see what name would suit her.”

“I remember the rules,” Starsky said, propping his ace-bandaged foot on Hutch’s knee. “She gets her own name. No Davidas or Kennethies…”

“Kennethie is not even a name,” Hutch retorted with a beleaguered sniff, although he didn’t shove off Starsky’s foot.

Linda perched beside Minnie on the bed so they could hold their daughter together. “No sharing names. There is Lamont, Cyrus, and Cyprus on my side. And her sister Mariah recently had twins Krystal and Tiffani.”

“My brother’s kid is Charlemagne.” Minnie pressed a kiss on the baby’s forehead and then a second on Linda’s mouth.

“Really?” Hutch gaped. “My sister went for much more plebian fare: Jennifer, Joshua, and Jason.”

“Nick’s girlfriend is due in the Spring,” Starsky said thoughtfully. “Should I tell him the rules?”

“These are our conditions,” Linda stressed. “No Ms, no Ls.”

“What does that leave?” Hutch asked. “Abigail, Beatrice, Camille…”

“Noel,” Minnie said.

“I just said that, doll.” Linda grinned at her. “Leftover pregnancy brain? No Ms, no Ls.”

“Noel,” Minnie said, tapping the baby’s tummy. “Her name is Noel.”

“Christmas in French. Perfect.” Hutch nodded. “Because her birthday is December 27^th, on the second day of Christmas.”

“Isn’t that pronounced knoll?” Starsky asked. “Like the actor who was in Girl From UNCLE.”

“Only if it’s for a boy.” Linda kissed Minnie right back. “Noel. Noel Kaplan. I like it.”

“Wish it could be Noel Kaplan-Baylor, but they only allow a mother and father’s name on the birth certificate,” Minnie said.

“And no matter who’s her daddy.” Starsky chucked Noel gently under the chin. She burped. “We don’t wanna advertise our arrangement just yet.”

“So it’s Noel Kaplan,” Hutch said, yawning again. “What about a middle name?”

“More decisions!” Linda moaned, happier than she’d been in a long time. There would be changes in the new year, adjustments, but that was what life was all about. Right now she had a wonderful, if unorthodox, family to bring into 1984. “Merry belated Christmas—“

“And happy New Year,” the other three chorused.