Patterns of Swallows (9 page)

Lily and Bo's engagement came as
a very small surprise compared to the bombshell of their original
interest in each other. Even Lily's parents put a brave face on it
and refused to grieve publicly. No doubt, their daughter's
connection to Bo Weaver was a bitter pill for them to swallow, but
they had never managed to exercise any control over Lily. They knew
she would do as she wished. So they made up their minds to accept Bo
Weaver as a son-in-law.

The couple were engaged by the
next spring – the spring after Ruth's return to Arrowhead.
They planned a late summer wedding – simple but tasteful
(simple by Turnbull standards). It wouldn't give Lily much time for
planning, but from the time Lily could walk (if not sooner) Mrs.
Turnbull had been planning Lily's walk down the aisle – the
only hitch when the time drew near to the actual event being that the
groom was not the one Mrs. Turnbull had been envisioning. But every
wedding has its minor setbacks. So everything would no doubt come
together quite nicely and in time for late summer.

"Come on! Why not?"
Graham said.

"Because your parents would
be disappointed in you."

"They'll get over it!
Besides, they're the reason, really. I don't want to have to listen
to any more of their lectures and their concerns and all that."

"And what if they're
right?"

"They're not right. Look
me in the eyes, and tell me you think my parents are right about
you."

"It's not me I'm thinking
about, you know that. I could care less for my own sake. I don't
have anyone to disappoint. But I don't want to come between you and
your parents. I know they don't think I'm good enough for you. This
would just prove it to them."

"They're wrong about that.
You're much too good for me. Anyways, they'd just have to accept it
in the end. It would simplify things, really. There's not much they
could say once it's all over. I'm so tired of listening to
lectures!"

"But what if they're
right?"

"They're not right. And
you and I both know it."

"And if
they
are
right and you and I both know it, it's not going to make much
difference, is it? I mean, it's going to happen, anyways, isn't it,
one way or the other because we won't stop it?"

"That's my girl! Always
expecting the worst, but going ahead, anyways. What would make you
think my parents are right?"

"I don't. You're right.
Neither one of us thinks they're right. I'm just saying, what if?
What if they're right and we're wrong?"

"Well, you can't live your
life by what anyone else thinks, can you? And you can't live your
life on 'what ifs'."

"No, you can't."

"So, wha'd'you say?"

"Well, I don't have anyone
but myself to think about on my side, so I don't mind for myself."

"You mean you will?"

"Oh, I suppose I will."

"Well, try to curb your
enthusiasm, woncha?"

"Okay, yes! Yes, yes, yes!
There! Happy now?"

"Ecstatic."

"Really?"

"Over the moon."

"So, when?"

"Tomorrow morning. Early."

"Tomorrow? So soon?"

"What's the point in
waiting? I'm ready when you are."

"Well, tomorrow then. What
time should I expect you?"

"I'll pick you up about
six?"

"I'll be ready.”

*
* *

Mrs. MacKellum poured boiling
water over the peaches in the sink. The boiling water was supposed
to make the skins come off easier. She'd never noticed that it
worked. Either the peaches were at the point of ripeness where the
skins came off easily or they weren't. It had nothing to do with the
boiling water. She knew it, but she continued to pour boiling water
over her peaches. It was the way her mother had taught her to can
peaches, and it was the way she had taught her daughter. Not that
Pat ever canned peaches anymore.

The boiling water might have
been superstition on her part. Everything had to be done just right
to have winning peaches. She'd be chanting incantations over the
peaches next, she supposed. But maybe this year was the year her
peaches would take first prize at the Fall Fair. Why shouldn't it be
this year? Her turn was coming, she felt sure of it. She'd been
saying the same thing to herself for years, but after all, if it was
ever going to happen, every year brought that magical year another
year closer.

She didn't know why it mattered,
but it did. Maybe it was on account of the number of years she'd
been trying for it. When one went after a thing for that long, it
was hard not to find one's sense of personal worth all tied up with a
jar of peaches. She knew it was silly, but there! Why shouldn't she
be silly once in awhile?

She chose the best-looking
peaches – not bruised, not too green, just the right size –
and began carefully stripping off the skins and cutting the fruit as
uniformly as she could. She'd do the jar for the fair first.

It turned out very nicely, too.
She never could see why the winning peaches were any better than her
own. Sometimes she was even sure they were worse.

She finished the other jars and
poured the sticky sugar-water over them, then put the rings and lids
on them, set them in the canner, and turned on the heat.

By the time Guy came back from
picking up a paper (delivery to their street had stopped on weekends,
and they knew not why), he was good and ready for his breakfast.
They always ate later on a Saturday so the men could have a lie-in on
their day off.

The peaches had just finished.
She tested them all and opened a jar that hadn't sealed properly
(fortunately, not her fair peaches); then dished the still-hot
peaches into the small bowls at each of the three places.

"Graham's vehicle's not
here. Did he go out already?" her husband asked her.

"Must have. It was there
last night when I went to bed. He turned in before I did, even."

"I wonder where the boy's
at. Surely he wouldn't be over at that girl's place already!"
(Mr. MacKellum knew "that girl's" name very well until
Graham had started spending all his free time with her. Then he'd
developed selective memory loss.)

"Not at this hour. I'm
surprised he's awake at all on a Saturday before ten. It's not
likely he'd be with Ruth already. He'll turn up. He must have had
an errand."

Mrs. MacKellum waited breakfast
as long as she could, but Guy was getting irritable. His moods
didn't handle an empty stomach well.

"Let's eat. Graham can get
something for himself when he comes in," she said finally.

They were just finishing up (the
peaches were delicious. Mrs. MacKellum only wished the judges could
taste her peaches as well as look at them) when they heard Graham's
pickup pull into the driveway.

"There! I told you he'd be
back," she said, satisfied. Whatever the errand had been, he
wasn't with that Chavinski girl.

"Mom, Dad!" Graham
said, putting his head through the open door of the dining room, "I
have someone I'd like you to meet."

"Come in, Graham. Your
scrambled eggs are cold. Sit down and eat," his mother said,
disregarding his announcement, imagining it was just one of his
pranks.

He ignored her instructions.

"Come on in, Ruth. Come in
here. Mom, Dad, I have a new daughter for you. Meet my wife, the
new Mrs. MacKellum." He looked like a child on Christmas
morning. The shine in his eyes and his boyish excitement tore his
mother's heart apart. Why was the world arranged in such a way that
children had to grow up at all? Couldn't time stand still once in
awhile?

"Oh, Graham," she
whispered, her heart visible in her eyes for a moment.

"Now don't carry on, Mom.
I know it's a surprise, but I hope it will be a nice one. At least
in time when you get used to the idea of me being all grown up and
able to decide things for myself."

"Well, Ruth! So he made an
honest woman of you, did he?" Mr. MacKellum intended it to sound
jovial, but it fell flat. He got up from the table to give her a
hearty handshake. Ruth returned the handshake but could think of
nothing to say.

"I hope you'll be very
happy," Mrs. MacKellum said in a tone that sounded as though it
wasn't a wish very likely to come true. She went to Ruth to kiss her
cheek. Then she choked back a sob and fled the dining room.

"You'll have to excuse your
mother. It takes a little getting used to, y'know, the two of you
bursting in here, announcing a thing like that. When did it happen?"

"Just this morning. I had
the license and the ring for a few days, but I still had to convince
Ruth. Finally wore her down yesterday, so I wasn't waiting any
longer after that. Didn't wanna give her any more chances of
slipping through my fingers than I had to, y'know. We drove this
morning to Camille to a justice of the peace I'd arranged things
with. Got there about eight and had the deed all done by about
quarter past. No endless wedding sermons to sit through. I tell ya,
that's the way to get hitched. All that fuss and bother and expense
just to do something that can be done in fifteen minutes. Not for
me."

"As long as that was how
you both wanted it," Graham's father said drily.

"I didn't mind," Ruth
said. It was the first thing she'd said since entering the
MacKellums' house.

"I don't mind telling you,
your mother will probably take this hard, though. No church wedding
and all that, I mean. You know women. They always want a big 'do'
with all the trimmings."

"She'll get used to the
idea. You can remind her how much money I saved her by doing it this
way."

Mr. MacKellum chuckled. "That
might help."

"We can always have some
kind of a reception later if she has her heart set on some kind of
formality."

No one bothered to mention that
it wasn't really the formality that Mrs. MacKellum had had her heart
set on.

She came back in at that
juncture, dry-eyed and composed and trying to smile. She clamped her
lips over the bitter disappointment that could so easily have spilled
out into words.

With Lily's abrupt throwing-over
of Bo early that summer just a month before the wedding, the hopes
that she thought had died had spontaneously resurrected themselves.
Town gossip had said things like, "It's because Bo ended up
being too easy to catch," and, "I imagine Graham
MacKellum's starting to look pretty good to her again now that he's
got eyes only for that Chavinski girl," and, "That
Chavinski girl'd better look sharp if she doesn't want to lose her
man after all."

Of course, Mrs. MacKellum hadn't
listened to town gossip, but she couldn't keep hope from "springing
eternal" all the same. Now that eternally-springing hope lay in
pieces around her feet.

She couldn't have said why she'd
wanted Lily for Graham. Maybe it was just like the peaches. You
start off wanting something, and if you keep it up too long, it gets
to be a habit.

Or maybe she had, somewhere
along the way, convinced herself that Lily was who Graham wanted, and
mothers have a difficult time separating their children's wishes from
their own just as they have a difficult time separating their
children's persons from their own.

"I'm sorry," she said
to them all. "It's just the emotion of the moment. It's all a
little sudden, you know. Congratulations to you both. I just hope
you won't be sorry, Ruth. You don't know what you're letting
yourself in for, marrying a MacKellum. Graham takes after his
father, you know. My son can be rather a handful." His fond
mother said the words to Ruth but the smile she couldn't help every
time she looked at her son was all for him. "Now. If you're
going to do me out of helping to plan a wedding, at least let me
serve you the wedding breakfast. I'm sure you're both famished.
With your early start you wouldn't have time to eat, and you were
probably too excited to stop anywhere on the way back. Sit down and
eat. There's plenty, Ruth. You can tell us all the plans for things
while you eat."

"I don't mind. I have to
tell you, all this marrying business gives me an appetite,"
Graham said, easy and comfortable back in his own home now that the
worst was over. He straddled a chair backwards, a habit he hadn't
outgrown from his teenage years. If he noticed that Ruth wasn't
quite as easy and comfortable, he didn't let on. She took a seat
beside him, sitting gingerly and without leaning all her weight back,
as though the chair might disappear beneath her without warning.

Graham ate well, and Ruth ate a
little. Graham answered most of the questions with his mouth full.

Where would they live now? The
farm, of course. It was perfectly adequate for the two of them. For
now, at least. They'd think about a place in town when they had
enough for a down payment and then some. Graham had quite a chunk
saved from working in management at the mill for the past year and
before that, from working part time on all the different lines. (His
father thought it would be good for his only son to know every aspect
of the running of operations intimately the way he, himself, had
learned them: from the ground up.)