He was quiet again for a moment before he said, “Let’s have another baby, Sil!” For just a split second I actually thought he was serious. I jerked my head back and stared up into his face “We could!” He insisted, “We’re only fifty or something!”
I could feel my mouth hanging open. He immediately threw his arms around me and burst out laughing. I joined him.
The wedding came on a gorgeous day in late June. Lucy, Adam’s mother, Milla, and sister, Jayne, who was Carolena’s best friend since uni, Natalie, the twins and I got Caro dressed in the nursery. How odd, yet fitting, it seemed to prepare her for her marriage in the same room she had slept in the first night we brought her home. The walls were still painted as they had been for babies, but there stood Carolena, as her dad had said, grown into a woman. Her veil was draped over the crib.
She was absolutely stunning in my mother’s wedding dress. Where Lucy had worn it once and looked like an angel, my daughter brought out majesty in the gown. Bess took Caro’s thick red curls and turned them into gorgeous plaits that she wove through a studded headband with such skill I’d have thought she’d done it a hundred times. When she was through, our Carolena looked like a princess.
When Oliver came in to tell her that the sun was beginning to set, he stopped in the doorway without a word and stared.
“Daddy?”
“You look so…” He blinked a few times, “Stunning, Caro. You look absolutely stunning.”
Alexander stumbled in behind him. He stopped dead in his step and stared as well.
“Uncle Alex?”
“I…I’m sorry,” Alex smiled, “You just look…just like your Mum did about thirty years ago. It’s like a step back in time. It took me by surprise. You look unbelievable, Muffin. Absolutely exquisite.”
“Thank you!” She ran to him like she used to as a little girl and flung herself into his arms and then turned to her daddy and flung herself into his, “I’m so happy, Daddy!”
“Stay happy, Muffin,” He held her tight and kissed her hair, “Always stay just as happy as you are right now, right this minute. Promise me?”
“I’ll try.”
“They’ll be hard times. I promise. But I promise as well that if you remember the thing that made you love him in the first place and you keep finding it again and again there won’t be a thing you can’t make it through together.”
“I’ll remember.”
“I know you will. I know.” Oliver held her tight and closed his eyes, “Don’t ever forget to laugh, even when things are a mess. It’s the secret of it all. After today, there is no one else but you and him. Just you and him and that’s all that matters. Remember that, too.”
“I will, Daddy.”
“Now, come on. Let’s get you down the aisle,” Oliver held her at arm’s length and grinned, “You’re going to have so much fun!”
Alex moved to the side to allow them to pass.
Our little girl was married as she wished beside that little pond that she and Oliver insisted was a lake. It was an elegant, simple ceremony that ended just as darkness swept across the wood. Warren, Gryffin and Nigel lit the candles and the wood was illuminated in a soft glow that made Carolena look even more beautiful than she had during the day.
After the wedding was through and the dinner was finished and everyone had left us for their homes and honeymoon, my husband and I curled up on the lawn under that old woollen blanket. We sat close and we watched the sky and we said nothing at all.
A year and a half later Carolena missed her cousin Nigel’s wedding because she’d had her first baby, a daughter she named Ekaterina Sophia, after both the baby’s grandmother’s middle names. Kitty, they called her, and she was as lovely as her mum. Caro and Adam would come and visit more often once Kitty was born. She’d send her for a few weeks in the summer and my deep seeded need to be surrounded by children was once again satisfied. Having never had a grandmother myself, I tried to be everything to Kitty that I would have wanted if I’d had one. Kitty, Oliver and I had loads of fun.
Two years after that, still in competition with Nigel, who had just had a son he called Matthew, she gave birth to a son of her own, whom she called Oliver. And then, three years later, she outdid her cousin once more. Nigel had just had another son he called James. Three days later Carolena had twin boys called Nicolas and Alexander.
Nigel had her beat on one thing, however. He and his first wife, Laura, divorced shortly after Matthew turned two. A year later, he married his girlfriend, Mary, whom was the mother of his youngest son, James. They divorced three years after James was born. Nigel stayed single for twenty years, dating here and there, until he met Carla, a cheeky, heavy set girl who was nineteen years younger than him and the daughter of none other than Nigel’s old rugby mate, the mega-fuck brain, Connor Stewart. Carla never wanted to get legally married, nor did she want children of her own, so Nigel bought her an old cottage in Kerry Village and the two lived happily ever after, more or less, “in sin and mortal peril”, as Oliver put it.
Ana Kaye McNeil Dickinson, Oliver and Alexander’s mother, crossed the veil the April after Nic and Alex were born. She’d developed a cough, which she ignored until she was sure she had pneumonia. Thinking she’d go to the doctor and get a shot of antibiotics, she went for a visit and was told after a battery of tests that what she had was cardiac obstructive pulmonary disease. She had a surgery to unclog an artery, but a few months later she suffered a heart attack and six after that, at the age of seventy-eight, she passed away peacefully in Edmond’s presence at hospital in Welshpool.
Oliver and Alexander didn’t take the time immediately to deal with their own feelings over her death. They were too busy looking after their father, whose heart was completely shattered over the loss. He’d been with Ana since they were twenty years old. Much like Oliver and I, she was what his life had revolved around. Being retired, he was at a loss as to what to do with himself in her absence.
“I was holding her in my arms,” He told me as we sat in his front room after her memorial service, “I used to tease her about greasing up her face. I told her she looked like a glazed ham. She‘d say to me, ‘Well, at least I‘ll always be beautiful‘. You know, she didn‘t have a single wrinkle on her face,” He sighed. “She really was always beautiful.”
“She was,” I agreed. I meant it, too. Ana never let herself go for even a day.
“You’re never ready,” Edmond told me, “I don’t think it matters how old you get. You’re just never prepared to be the one left alone.”
I took his hand and said nothing. There simply was nothing to say. I was there. It was the best I could do.
Oliver held himself together until she was buried. Eddie told us he was tired after the service and he asked to be dropped off at his house. Alex asked if he wanted company, but he shook his head. “I’m tired, Son. I need to go home and be alone.”
We hugged and kissed him and respected his wishes. Oliver and I left him off. As we were walking down the garden path to the car, my husband asked me if I would mind driving. “Not at all, Sweetie,” I replied and took the keys from him. I had only made it around the corner before he put his hands over his face and allowed himself to begin to mourn his mother. I took him home and I let him cry without even trying to stop him. Eventually, he fell asleep.
The night of her funeral there was a dreadful rain. It came down in all directions, filled the dips in the road, and made travel on the muddy paths to the cabin nearly impossible. Still, at about ten thirty that night someone was pounding on our door.
Oliver woke up and rolled out of bed and on to his feet. “What the hell? “ He rubbed his head, “Is somebody here?“ The pounding came again. Both of us hurried to the door to find his brother and Lucy huddled together under an umbrella to protect them from the storm. “Are you mad?” Oliver demanded, hurrying them into the house, “Get in here!”
“The door was locked!” Alexander shook his head as if to free an ear of water