The Stork Of Course

By Jeff Hardesty

Where do babies come from? The answer is no longer as simple as, “When a man loves a woman...” What if a man loves a man? Or a woman loves a woman? Or a man loves a woman but has a varicose vein in his testicle that’s retarding his sperm? What then?

Struggling with infertility, expensive treatments, and a lack of a surrogate mother, three Seattle couples from sordid upbringings decide it’s time to combine efforts to create the family they’ve always wanted. But swapping genetic material between friends is not as simple as a handshake, nor is such an arrangement immune to human nature. Can a mother turn over her child to a friend after nine months of bonding? Can a man and woman create life and remain platonic? And would such a family ever be accepted?

Soon the couples find themselves entangled in a web of legal ambiguity, cultural bias, complex fertility science, human sexuality, and election year politics. The road to familial bliss becomes even bumpier when Rick Francisco of Rolling Stone magazine catches wind of the couples’ unconventional plan and becomes hell-bent on exploiting it for his own journalistic gain. Presidential frontrunner Senator James Flannery piles on, vowing, if elected, to rid the country of the immorality of same sex families and controversial reproductive methods. The couples become the target of right-wing organizations across the country and a hate group with a sinister plan to sway the Presidential election in Flannery’s favor. War-torn and weary from a long year of challenges, the couples must fight to save their family and the country from a devastating fate

• Language: English
• Publisher: Jeff Hardesty
• Release date: Oct 2, 2013
• ISBN: 9781301815265

Jeff Hardesty

Jeff Hardesty was born and raised in Louisville, Kentucky where he received his BA in English Literature and Writing from the University of Louisville. After living in seven states (NM, CA, KY, NC, MO, OR, WA) in five years working as a backpacking guide, house framer and painter, barista, life-skills assistant at a mental health clinic, and ski instructor, Jeff settled in Seattle, Washington where he is now, among other things, an author, freelance writer, husband, and father.

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The Stork Of Course

By Jeff Hardesty

Copyright 2013 Jeff Hardesty

Smashwords Edition

Edited by Tracy Seybold

Photography by Bryn Cowgill

Cover Art by SelfPubBookCovers.com/Phantom

The Stork of Course

By Jeff Hardesty

A Novel

For Allison & Sloane

The best laid schemes o' Mice an' Men, gang aft agley (often go awry). –Robert Burns

Chapter One

Luke McLeod sat on a paper-covered bench in a tiny room with red walls and white flooring with his member in one hand and a collection cup sitting next to him. He watched 1970s pornography on an old television and wondered who had the job of picking these awful films. People in the hallway went about their morning with chatter and laughter, drinking coffee, and waking up. It was what mornings should sound like, and did sound like for most people, most of the time. Unfortunately for Luke, this morning was not shaping up to be one of his prouder moments in life.

The three individuals in the film aggressively pawed at each other like depraved jungle creatures roaring in mock-ecstasy for the entertainment of their unseen audience. Luke watched judgmentally, hoping that something would happen for him down below that might move the process along so he could get on with his day.

Were there really women who were into this sort of thing?

The sounds coming from the pornstar were like nothing Luke had heard from any woman he had ever been with and the exaggeration was grating. She could have at least made an effort if she was going to star in a film! Was she being sarcastic with these sounds? Was this some kind of ironic pornography for people who liked bad acting?

Luke closed his eyes and took a deep breath, trying again to put aside his judgment and get down to business. He started by pretending he wasn’t trying to get sexually aroused in a fertility clinic at eight o’clock in the morning.

Why did they even have appointments this early? Honestly! How the hell was a guy supposed to get off in these conditions at this hour of the day? And was this really the best method? Doctors could remove tumors from a person’s brain but men still had to masturbate like monkeys in a little room to get a sperm sample?

Luke closed his eyes harder and tried to pretend the voice in his head was the voice of the girl in the film. He talked dirty to himself in third person (a trick he developed in adolescence that he still called upon from time to time) until he felt some blood flow into the flood plain and finally he was off and running. Occasionally, he had to refocus when his inner-monologue tried to interject with criticism about the camera angles and the half-assed attempt at fantasy role play the porn stars were engaged in. He silenced these interruptions by imagining the woman yelling over his inner-critic.

"Stop being such a snob and enjoy yourself already! Who do you think I am, Audrey Hepburn?"

He kept the volume of her voice loud in his head and watched the sex acts taking place on the television—acts that no human who had been properly beaten over the head as a child with a holy book of some religious philosophy or another would ever have the courage to attempt. Suddenly there was a blinding rush behind his eyes and an involuntary convulsion of his muscles. At the last moment, he remembered the plastic cup sitting next to him—the entire reason he was doing this at this absurd hour of the morning—and in one less than dexterous movement placed it in front of him and fulfilled his morning mission.

He fell back on the bench, staring at the ceiling. The woman’s voice in his head was gone, though the real woman on the television was still screaming as though trying to talk herself into the pleasure she was supposed to be feeling. For Luke, seeing pornography after the deed had been done was like waking up to a house full of beer-bottles, cigarette stench, and sticky floors the morning after a college party. Vulnerable recovery took the place of endorphin-driven stimulation and suddenly seeing three below-average-looking naked people grabbing at each other was a fairly disgusting sight. He washed up in the tiny sink, pulled a paper towel from the dispenser, and used it to turn off the television. He wasn’t about to touch anything in the room with his bare hands.

Now I have to go back out there. That poor nurse at the desk trying to enjoy her morning coffee, and the family with their child waiting for test results, and here comes this haggard 30-something with a fresh cup of man sample walking down the hall like this is a perfectly average day. Do I smile? Do I make eye-contact?

Luke had done his research in the week leading up to his analysis. He learned about the donation process and had imagined it would be as uncomfortable as it actually was. He had not gone so far as to imagine the awkwardness of handing the sample over to the nurse at the desk and listening to instructions while still coming out of a post-masturbatory stupor. This proved to be equally, if not more, uncomfortable than the donating process itself. Luke decided he had had enough discomfort for one morning and to avoid further embarrassment, tuned out and stared at the framed certifications hanging behind the nurses’ desk. He decided, regardless of what the nurse was telling him, he would just call the clinic in a week or so if he had not heard back from them.

***

Kit Clark sat with her partner, Fran Darcy, in a coffee shop in the Fremont neighborhood of North Seattle, staring out at the gray rain. There was nothing new to say that would make the situation any easier—another month, another negative pregnancy test. After a full year and nine attempts at insemination, Kit was still not pregnant.

She had charted her temperature, used the online calendars, urinated on countless ovulation prediction strips and pregnancy tests, had her hormone levels tested and her fallopian tubes dyed, taken the prescribed medication to induce ovulation, tried intrauterine insemination, and still her period came, month after month. She was aware that the odds of getting pregnant at her age were not great for anyone, lesbian or not, but those odds became significantly lower when considering that she and Fran both lacked the proper anatomy for producing the crucial fertilizer necessary for reproducing.

Prior to exploring the process for a lesbian couple to become pregnant, Kit had no idea what she was in for. On the one hand, she had the distinct advantage of getting to choose the father of her child from a list of men who were, in all honesty, out of her league. For other women, it could take a decade of dating to learn a man’s past while trying to covertly glean information about his sexual history, assess his stability, scrutinize his physical traits and intellectual capacity, meet his family, size-up the potential physical traits and intellectual capabilities of his siblings and parents, and, of course, hope for some chemistry and similarities that could sustain the kind of relationship necessary to be lovers, partners, and parents for the rest of their lives. For Kit, this process was avoided by simply flipping through a website of donors and finding a father with everything she was looking for. On the downside, unlike her heterosexual friends, she had to pay for the semen on each attempt rather than fighting off a male partner who was willing, able, and voraciously trying to make donations whenever he was permitted to do so.

Kit had not always found men unappealing. Before becoming exclusive with Fran, she had dated men and had been open to partnering with a man, had the right one come along. But the right one never did. Instead, the right woman came along, and being with a man hadn’t crossed her mind ever since. But now, given the ticking biological clock and the mounting fees for insemination, the thought of picking up a random handsome man and using him for free semen was increasingly tempting. After all, as she learned, half of all pregnancies were unplanned and a significant portion of those were a result of one drunken night with a sexual partner and a lack of birth control. That is to say, there were thousands of babies being born every year from parents who didn’t know much more than the name and alcoholic beverage of choice of the biological contributor to their offspring. The fact that Kit was spending months pouring over profiles of accomplished, clean, and genetically superior men while the rest of the world was taking what was left in the dating pool at age thirty-six, made her wonder if she wasn’t perhaps being too choosy.

At what point do we just start asking guys to jerk-off in our bathroom and put it in a syringe? Kit asked.

Fran looked appalled at the suggestion. Uh, never.

It’s how the heteros do it, Kit said.

Heteros have sex, Fran said. I’m pretty sure the whole syringe in the bathroom thing is a universally strange way to make a baby.

Why don’t you take a turn injecting yourself for a while? I’ve been doing this for a year; it’s getting a little old. Kit felt stressed just thinking about another month of finding more sperm and taking more pills and monitoring her menstrual cycle.

Because we decided you were going to be the biological mom. Besides, there’s nothing wrong with you. We’ve done all the tests; you’re perfectly capable of having a child, Fran replied.

But when do we call it quits? Kit asked. We can’t afford to try forever. We can barely afford to keep trying now.

She let her head fall back and gazed at the exposed rafters of the ceiling, feeling hopeless and wishing she was superstitious enough to call upon…something for spiritual assistance. She looked back at her partner and became even sadder, knowing her child would never have Fran’s thick dark hair or crystal blue eyes.

It’s so unfair! Fran exclaimed. There are a half-dozen guys sitting in this room right now who will waste ten thousand dollars’ worth of semen this week. We just need one, fellas! Just one goddamn sperm!

The obese, balding barista behind the coffee bar heard Fran and yelled, I’m yer huckleberry! His name was Frank Gutenberg, a direct descendent, he liked to tell his customers, of the renowned Johannes Gutenberg who invented movable type. He was considerably less accomplished than his predecessor.

I want my baby to have hair past age forty, Frank! Fran yelled back at him.

A bald baby’s better than no baby, Frank said. You think about it. I’m here every day.

You’re a sicko, Fran said.

You’re hurting my feelings, he responded, leaving the bar and coming to Kit and Fran’s table by the window. What’s the problem with you two anyway? I thought half the fun of being lesbians was not having to mess with pain in the ass kids.

We want pain in the ass kids, Kit said. That’s our problem.

Sure is, he said. I’m serious though. I’ll donate if you need it. I’ll sign all the waivers and everything. You can tell him he’s the descendent of a great inventor and that his father died nobly fighting a fire in a children’s hospital. He’ll never have to know.

That’s very kind of you, Frank, Kit replied. But we’d like to avoid answering questions for our child like, ‘Why do I look so much like the bald barista at the coffee shop you’re always taking me to?’

Okay, your loss. With one last suggestive glance, Frank returned to the bar and Kit continued to watch the rain.

***

Luke stopped by home after the clinic to get a cup of coffee and grab a bite to eat before heading to his office. His wife Claire was just getting home from work.

I thought you got off at nine, Luke said, noticing the clock on the microwave read 8:45. Slow morning at the bakery?

Wednesdays usually are. Flo told me to go home, Claire said.

Don’t you usually go to the gym on Wednesdays? Luke asked.

Usually, but I was too anxious to see how it went! So?

So, what? Luke asked, uncomfortably. He and Claire had been trying to get pregnant for a year when Claire’s OBGYN told them it was time to start problem solving. Luke protested, convinced they were too young to be having fertility problems, but the stats suggested otherwise. A year without success was improbable for a healthy couple; now it was a question of which one of them was having an issue.

You know what. Claire unraveled her long blond hair from the tight braid she wore it in for work. How was the clinic?

Awkward and degrading, Luke responded testily. He dumped the grounds from a previous pot of coffee and replaced the filter.

What did you have to do? she asked.

"You know what I had to do. I had to masturbate in a tiny room watching a porno version of Saturday Night Fever. Do I really have to relive it for you?"

I’m sorry, honey. She stifled a giggle. I really appreciate it, if that’s any consoleation. Can I reward you for your efforts? She batted her long eyelashes at him suggestively.

Not now, Luke said. "I just, you know, went. You’re not ovulating today, are you?"

No, she said. Just feeling frisky—and a little sorry for you.

Luke sighed audibly. Sex was no longer something he considered fun. It was for procreating. It was work now. He could barely recall the days when he couldn’t keep his hands off Claire, when she was light and free and confident. The pressure to perform on call made any hope of spontaneity non-existent, and the act itself had become stale and clinical.

It wasn’t only the monotony of planned intercourse that had Luke’s libido running on empty. Claire was unhappy. She had a bachelor’s degree in fine arts and worked at a bakery. She slept while Luke was enjoying his evening. She worked while he was fast asleep, and she spent most of the day stressing herself out over the meaning of life—a quest Luke had given up on years ago. At least once a week he listened to her lament the early morning bread baking and squeezing of Boston Crème into chocolate pastries while wishing she were somewhere else. Her dissatisfaction led to comfort eating the treats she prepared, which had added twenty pounds to her five and a half foot frame, making sex even less appealing. Luke watched powerlessly as her weight gain added to her low morale, which led to more comfort eating, which led to more weight gain, which of course led to even lower morale. The cycle continued ad nauseam. He wanted nothing more than to see Claire find something that would make her happy, but short of supporting her as she jumped from club to club and interest to interest, there was little he could do. He hoped that when a baby finally arrived, no matter what they had to do to get one, she would finally relax into the satisfaction of motherhood.

Maybe tonight, Luke said, addressing Claire’s offer for pity sex. I want to get to the office and do some work. Or stare at the ceiling, as the case may be.

Luke’s work was a novel he had been writing for five years and was, by his own admission, about halfway finished. The delay came three years earlier when his agent, Simon Fulbright, offered him the opportunity to write a book on how to use the Internet directed toward people over sixty-five. Though Luke knew very little about computers, and thought of the Internet as a giant network of gossip and pornography, in addition to being an efficient way to accumulate debt without leaving the house, he knew there was a market for such a book. More importantly, he thought it might be a way out of what he was doing for a day job at the time, which was writing content for online commerce websites. It turned out he could not have been more correct.

Within a month of publishing the Internet how-to book for old people, the book found its way to the top of the non-fiction bestseller lists. Simon Fulbright, the savvy promoter that he was, suggested releasing the book in December and had Luke tour every major book store in every shopping mall in the country while talking about the book on every local radio show he could get him on. After the holiday shopping season, there were over one hundred thousand senior citizens who were now learning to access information, videos, and images that would make them lose all hope that humanity was more than a pack of shallow, angry, sex-addicted animals with Attention Deficit Disorder. On the upside, Luke began receiving sizable royalty checks every month and was able to focus entirely on writing his novel (or on staring at the ceiling, whichever came naturally).

With his first few royalty checks, Luke made a down-payment on an office space, which was actually a condo with large windows and a balcony that looked out on Lake Washington with Mount Rainer towering over it on the southern horizon. Every morning, Luke woke up and drank his first cup of coffee while working the crossword puzzle before biking from his home in the lower Queen Anne neighborhood to his new office near Magnuson Park.

Luke pondered what raising a child in Seattle would be like as he coasted through Queen Anne and across the Fremont Bridge to the Burke Gilman trail. Life on the west coast was nothing like what he had grown up with in St. Louis. The people he grew up around didn’t sit around in coffee shops listening to jazz and waxing intellectual about works of literature they likely never actually read. They worked difficult jobs, dressed in affordable clothing, and if they read at all it was the Bible, or some book interpreting the Bible.

Had he ever seen his mom read a book? He certainly didn’t remember a bookcase in the dingy apartment where he grew up. He was pretty sure he hadn’t even seen a Bible.

That apartment was just awful. His friends never wanted to come over and when they did they looked at his mother’s belongings like they were in a museum of worn out 1960s furniture. Many of their parents wouldn’t even let them come over, seeing as how his mom was a fulltime waitress who was never there.

Had he been the kid who other parents didn’t want their kids around? And if so, what the hell kind of parent was he going to be?

Surely it was just his mother they were concerned about. Hell, he was in honors classes, and got a scholarship to the University of Indiana, which was much more success than a lot of his childhood cohort could claim. He played basketball and football and girls—as far as he could tell anyway—were attracted to his melancholic, bookworm-ish ways. Dating was certainly never something he had trouble with. In hindsight, his mother’s apartment could have been the perfect place to be alone with a girlfriend. It was too bad he never would have dreamed of bringing a girl into that dump. The more he thought about it, his mother had been the source of a lot of Luke’s problems. She worked constantly at a restaurant no one went to, and left Luke at home with the old woman who lived in the apartment next door. Luke was convinced the two of them were competing to see who could die of lung cancer fastest.

Why Luke even had a babysitter growing up was beyond him. Between his mother’s drinking and the men she brought home, he had played the role of parent more often than son. Early in their relationship, Luke warned Claire that she might think better of him if he didn’t answer when she playfully asked what his earliest memory was.

It can’t be that bad, Claire said. You were just a kid.

This was the first time Luke became aware of just how different his upbringing had been from Claire’s.

It was bad, Luke said.

I want to know. I won’t judge. Promise.

Well, it’s awful to say, but my mom was kind of a whore, Luke told her.

Luke! That is awful to say. Why would you say that? Claire asked.

Because it’s necessary to know if you want to hear my earliest memory, Luke told her. She would bring home these disgusting guys—total filth bags that I could tell even back then had no interest in her other than to get her into the sack. So one of these guys, I think his name was Mr. Dachshund—or at least that’s how I knew him—had been around a few times. He was always giving me crappy gifts like the half pack of bubble gum he had in his pocket. I’m sure it was just a way to pacify his guilt for what he was doing to my mom in private.

Which has something to do with this memory? I’m afraid to ask now.

You wanted to know, Luke said. "And yes, it does. I was five and woke up one night from a nightmare only to find a decidedly worse nightmare waiting for me in my mother’s bedroom. My mom was handcuffed to her bed with a night-stick in her mouth while a man wearing only a police hat was attacking her—or so I thought at the time—with what my mom referred to as his dingaling."

Oh no! Clare said. What did you do?

"Well, I had never seen such a dingaling at age five, so—handcuffs and police costume aside—I was pretty terrified. I started crying and ran down the hall, but my mom couldn’t find the key to the handcuffs to free herself. So instead this naked fake police officer—Mr. Dachshund—wrapped himself in a sheet and chased after me, trying to tell me everything was okay. Luke paused to get Claire’s reaction, which was a predictable look of shock and pity. Still not going to judge?"

I certainly won’t judge you, but who was this mother of yours? That’s just plain awful. I’m so sorry you have to remember that forever.

To be honest, I’d kind of forgotten until you asked, Luke said.

Oh, Claire said, Sorry.

Why Luke was remembering this scene again on his bike ride to work, he had no idea, other than to appreciate that no matter how badly he screwed up as a parent, it couldn’t possibly be worse than his own mother.

Once at his office, Luke settled in and stared at the half-written page in front of him, hoping the next line would miraculously write itself. After five years of writing, his story had lost some of its initial inspiration. The characters that once meant so much to him seemed the creation of a much younger man with much less life experience. Had he known five years earlier the struggles of balancing a career with marriage and months of fruitless attempts to impregnate his wife, perhaps his story would have had more depth and maturity. It felt too late to add these components now and Luke perpetually fought the urge to hit the delete button and start all over.

Since no words were coming, Luke squeezed the stress ball he kept by his keyboard and contemplated the possible outcome of his semen analysis.

What if I can’t have children? Will Claire stay with me? What if I can and she can’t? Will I stay with her? How badly do we even want children?

He and Claire were in lockstep with respect to the fact that they both could not imagine their lives without children. Already work had become mundane. Getting paid to write had always been his goal and now he was living his dream—only it was proving to be much less dreamy than he had imagined. Writing was a solitary life that came with all the criticism, scrutiny, and loneliness of putting one’s thoughts and feelings out in the world to be openly reviewed. In a way, he was already a parent. Perhaps creating stories (not children) should be enough. What if his loneliness and cynicism only produced another lonely cynic of a child?

Luke’s phone rang, interrupting his ruminations. It was Kit, wondering if Luke wanted to take advantage of a brief reprieve in the misty Seattle weather to go for a walk along Lake Washington.

Kit and Fran were two of Luke and Claire’s closest friends. Ten years earlier, when Luke first moved to Seattle, he worked with Fran at The Outsider, a free local paper that focused on the arts and progressive politics in Seattle. Fran still worked at the same paper, as the Chief Editor in charge of entertainment. No matter how successful Luke ever became, he would always have Fran to remind him of his early days of turning in absolute drivel on the medical marijuana dispensaries popping up around the Ballard neighborhood and local bands playing at Octoberfest on Canal Street. Luke’s writing would never live up to Fran’s expectations, but this was precisely why she was such a good friend to have. She kept him honest and reminded him of how bad he used to be and how not spectacular he still was.

Luke met Kit the same year he met Fran, while looking for an accountant to make sense of his taxes. He was writing full time for The Outsider but occasionally freelanced for other magazines. Having never made enough to even pay taxes prior to moving to Seattle, he was overwhelmed with filling out the forms and began looking for assistance. Kit was working at a commercial tax service at the time and saved the day.

In the beginning, before Fran and Kit even knew each other, Luke had had a somewhat tepid relationship with Fran. As nice as Fran was, it was difficult for Luke to connect socially with a person who ripped his life’s work apart on a daily basis. Editors had to be the person who reminded a writer that no matter how close to his heart a story may be, the rest of the world doesn’t necessarily give a shit. Fran was more than happy to be that person.

Luke and Kit, on the other hand, hit it off immediately. They were opposites. Kit was a born and raised Seattleite and carried with her all the obliviousness and self-righteousness of an upper-middle class white girl who had never left one of the wealthiest cities in the country. Luke was a self-made man from the so-called heartland who had fought his way to some level of success despite his mother’s drinking and casual sex partners and the pretentious academics who desperately wanted to ignore a less-than-polished poor kid from downtown St. Louis. Luke was attracted to Kit’s easy confidence and from what he could tell, she appreciated his competence and straightforwardness. Had Luke known when he’d met Kit that she wasn’t exclusively into women, he may have been interested in something more than a friendship. Now that they both were paired with partners they adored, the thought of romance with Kit never crossed his mind. Instead, he was appreciative of having a female companion who he could talk to without the sexual tension and he was pretty sure Kit felt the same way.

Luke introduced Kit and Fran six months after meeting each of them separately. It wasn’t that he necessarily thought they were good for each other so much as he thought that because they were both lesbians they must have something in common. This was part of that unpolished side he could