Always You (21 page)

Abby stood and gathered their empty plates. “Maybe if I’d been
more
bossy and
more
dictatorial when you were little, you’d have better sense than to settle for being some man’s baby mama!”

Chiara caught the fiery look in John’s eyes before he launched to his feet, but she wasn’t quick enough to take his arm and stem the tide of his words.

“That’s the second time you’ve called Chiara a baby mama, and I resent it,” John boomed in a voice that made Chiara’s hands slide from his arm and Abby pause in the doorway between the kitchen and dining room. “There are worse things than Chiara being pregnant. You seem to be more concerned about how her pregnancy reflects on you than the fact that she could have lost the baby as a result of the attack in her apartment last week. You’re more worried about what people like Rev. Kurl and Etheline Simpson will think about this pregnancy than you are about what it must be like for Chiara right now, to be pregnant and completely stressed out by—” He caught himself as Chiara tugged on his arm to shut him up. “Other things,” he finished. “I love you, Mrs. Winters, and I love your daughter. Perhaps it’s best that I just come out and tell you right now that I’m not just ‘some man,’ and Chiara is not my baby mama. I’m her husband. She’s my wife.”

* * *

“Did you have to tell her like that?” Chiara snapped at John as they kneeled over Abby, who’d collapsed in a dead faint.

“I was only trying to put her mind at ease about the baby,” John said. He grunted as he scooped Abby up and carried her into the living room where he gently deposited her on the sofa.

“You were mad at her and wanted to shut her up,” Chiara accused. “I can’t believe you told her. When she comes to, you better pretend like she hallucinated it.”

“No.” John crossed his arms over his chest.

Chiara tucked a pillow under her mother’s knees to elevate them. “If I’d wanted her to know, I’d have told her already!” she whispered sharply before turning to Abby. “Mama?” she said loudly. “Mama, wake up!”

“Wha…” Abby muttered drowsily. “What happened?”

“You could have given her a heart attack,” Chiara hissed at John.

He leaned back against the mantel of the fireplace. “I can’t wait to see how
my
mother reacts when we tell her.”

“About the baby or the…” She darted her head twice toward Abby, who finally opened her eyes and tried to sit up.

“Both,” John said.

“Are you okay, Mama?” Chiara asked. “You fainted.” She pressed her hand to Abby’s forehead, and she was slightly concerned by the clamminess of it. “Should I call Keren or Zweli, Mama? You took a real good spin on the floor.”

“I don’t know what happened,” Abby said, patting her hair back in place. “One minute we were talking, and the next…” Her chin quivered and her eyes filled. “Are you really married?”

Chiara’s answer caught in her throat, which suddenly felt very tight. For the first time in her life, she actually felt guilty about her desperate need to keep her life compartmentalized.

“Are you going to faint again?” Chiara asked.

“No, baby,” Abby said softly through her tears. “I just want to know what’s going on.”

Chiara looked at John, who came and knelt at her side. He took her hand and gave it a supportive squeeze.

“When the time’s right, Mama, I’ll tell you ev—”

“AREYOUMARRIEDORNOT?”
Abby hollered, the whole sofa shaking from the force of her eruption.

“Yes,” Chiara and John said together.

It was close to midnight by the time Abby had amassed her army: daughters one through four, her sons-in-law and her grandchildren. Abby had called Cady first, to make sure that she hadn’t known of Chiara and John’s marriage, and from there Cady had placed the next call, to Kyla, in the Winters family phone tree.

Chiara’s comings and goings had always fascinated the rest of the family, and even though it was a weeknight, Abby’s house once again looked like family was gathering for a holiday, National Pajama Party Day, once the whole gang descended.

Ciel, a little bleary-eyed from having been awakened from a sound sleep only an hour earlier, sat in a position of power at the head of the dining room table. Abby had called upon her to preside over a very special ceremony: the verification of the marriage certificate Chiara had reluctantly provided.

While Ciel perused the document with the assistance of her laptop computer to resource reference material, the rest of the family passed around the one photo that documented the marriage.

“Can I see it now?” asked Danielle, who still wore her winter coat over her nightgown.

“I agreed to let you come as long as you sat in the living room and kept quiet,” Clara told her youngest child. “Keep rocking the baby.”

Danielle scowled, but continued the gentle rocking movement of the baby carrier containing a lightly snoring Niema. She matched the pace Abigail and Ella had set with Virginia, who was tucked into her own baby carrier.

“You look so young,” Troy said to John as he peeped over his mother’s shoulder to look at the photo.

“They
were
young,” Clara said. “When was this again?”

“Yes, Chiara,” Abby said stiffly. “When was it you decided to run off and get married?”

Chiara and John sat hip to hip at the dining table as though they were double defendants in a criminal trial. Chiara’s sisters and their husbands and their older children were arranged around the room opposite them, like a jury allowed to wear flannel pajamas, slippers and soft, fat rollers. Since they were all assembled, Chiara figured this would be as good a time as any other to tell them about her marriage to John.

“Well,” she began on a deep sigh, “we didn’t run off.”

“We did it during our senior trip to San Francisco,” John added.

“Oh, my Lord,” Abby gasped, settling heavily into a chair. “You got married on your high school trip?”

Chiara nodded, bowing her head to hide her smile.

“Cool,” Troy said, earning a lethal glance from his mother.

“We had a free day on Friday, our last full day there,” John said. He rested his forearms on the table and gazed at his clasped hands. “We decided to do something really special.”

“You couldn’t go to Fisherman’s Wharf or Ghirardelli Square, like every other tourist?” Kyla suggested dryly.

“It was a spur of the moment thing,” John said. “We knew we would get married someday, and it just felt right at that time.”

“That’s why I hate those senior trips, and prom, and all that other nonsense where children,” Abby glared at Troy and C.J., “yes,
children
,” she repeated angrily, “get to pretend to be adults.”

“It’s not like that,” Troy interjected. “We’ll have adult chaperones for our senior trip to Hawaii this spring.”

“Just so you know, Clara,” Ciel said through a yawn, “Hawaii’s marriage requirements are the same as California’s in that there’s no waiting period between the application for a marriage license and its issuance, and you can marry immediately once the license is issued. No blood tests are required, either.”

Clara’s face darkened. “You ain’t goin’ to no Hawaii.”

“Tiffani is a junior,” Troy said calmly. “She won’t be going on the trip.”

Clara brightened. “Then you can go to Hawaii.”

“How many chaperones will be on your trip?” Abby asked.

Troy shrugged. “I don’t know. Two or three.”

“For a class of one hundred students?” Abby asked, horrified.

“I’ll volunteer to be a chaperone,” Christopher said.

“Me, too,” Lee laughed.

“Want to go to Hawaii, Ky?” Zweli asked. “We can all chaperone.”

Abby went on the attack. “You all think this is a joke, don’t you? Have you seen what these kids do just for prom? When I was still teaching, I used to chaperone the proms, and it would make your head spin to know what these young people get up to these days.”

“It’s just for fun, Grandma,” Troy nearly whined.

Talk of prom was too much for Danielle, and she zipped into the dining room, leaving Abigail and Ella in charge of Niema and a freshly awakened Virginia. “I can’t wait until I get to go to my prom!” she gushed, her hands clasped under the soft point of her chin. “Remember Aaliyah, that singer who died when I was little? She wore a dress in one of her videos that I just loved and I want to wear one just like it when I go to the prom, only I want mine in red. My boyfriend will pick me up in a lime green stretch limousine, the kind with the lights that change colors on the ceiling—”

Christopher used a freckled hand to rub his temple, which suddenly seemed to sport more gray hairs than red. “My little girl wants to go to the prom with a pimp,” he fretted.

“—he’ll be wearing a red tux to match my dress, but with a white vest and a white bow tie,” Danielle went on as if her father hadn’t spoken. “After the prom we’re going to go to a hotel suite with all our friends, and—”

“See what I mean?” Abby cut in. “This girl isn’t even in high school yet, and she’s already planning her practice honeymoon. That’s all the prom is these days. I used to see young men planning the most elaborate ways to ask a girl to the prom. One of the students I tutored got his parents to hire a skywriter to present the invitation. If the boy’s parents had had as much sense as they had money to burn, he wouldn’t have needed tutoring to pass remedial English.”

Danielle gleefully hopped up and down. “Ooh, I’d love to have my boyfriend hire a skywriter for me!”

“Go down to the basement and help C.J. amuse Clarence and the twins,” Clara ordered her.

Danielle, sulking, skulked off, leading with her lower lip while her Aunt Cady said, “John, how did you propose to Chiara?”

But for the corner containing Abby, the overall mood in the room lightened with Cady’s question. “We were on the chartered bus, driving across the Golden Gate Bridge on Saturday, our first full day in California,” John recalled. “Chiara was taking pictures of the Bay and Alcatraz. She was standing out of her seat and she was wearing a pair of blue jeans, this funny white sweater—”

“The one with the knobby bits of yarn on it,” Chiara said, lacing her fingers through John’s.

“And her hair was down, but it was a lot shorter than it is now,” John went on, looking at Chiara as though seeing her as she’d been that day on the bus. “San Francisco Bay is supposedly one of the most beautiful places on the west coast, but I didn’t see anything that day more beautiful than Chiara. She turned her camera on me and took my photo just as I said, ‘Let’s get married.’ ”

“I laughed and said okay, but I thought he was kidding,” Chiara said. “But over the next few days, he seemed too happy and too quiet. When we got our free day on Friday, a lot of the kids wanted to go to Fisherman’s Wharf, but John told our chaperone that we wanted to go to the Civic Center, to take photos of city hall.”

“I’d buy that,” Kyla said. “I shot a TV movie in San Francisco a few years ago, and the city hall really is a gorgeous building. It’s one of the best examples of Beaux Arts architecture in the world. Its dome is fourteen inches taller at the spire than the one on the Capitol in Washington, D.C., and the inside has the most beautiful California marble, Indiana sandstone and Manchurian oak.”

“Thank you for that lovely commercial interruption,” Cady said, tucking her hands into the pockets of the coat she wore over her robe. “Chiara, you were saying?”

“Well, Mr. Collins, our chaperone, was also our sociology teacher, and he thought John was so mature to want to go to the Civic Center. He figured he could trust us on our own, and he went with everyone else to the Wharf.”

Abby harrumphed. Loudly.

“Mr. Collins is the one who married us the second time,” Chiara chuckled.

Cady raised her hand. “Don’t forget me. I married you the first time.”

“Does any of this make sense to anyone other than Cady, Chiara and John?” Abby asked the room.

“It makes sense in a Winters family kind of way,” Lee said. “In that it doesn’t have to make sense to the rest of us, only to the folks directly involved.”

“Thank you, Lee,” Abby said snidely, “now shut up.”

“When we got to city hall, I told Chiara what I really wanted to do,” John said. He smiled at the tabletop as he said, “I told her that we could get married, right then and there, since we were both eighteen.” He looked up and took in everyone in the room, not really focusing on any individual person. “We must have stood outside city hall for ten minutes, looking at the building that looked just like a cathedral.”

“It took me only two minutes to agree to your plan,” Chiara said. “I was annoyed that my hair was a mess.”

“It was windswept,” John said. “Very sexy.”

Abby scowled.

John cleared his throat. “I’d already made the appointment for a confidential marriage license.”

“What’s that?” Zweli asked.

“You don’t need witnesses for the ceremony, and the license itself won’t be made public,” Ciel volunteered as she looked at her monitor, the words on screen reflected in her glasses. Her delicate eyebrows moved a bit closer together. “There’s something else about it, though,” she started.

“We had to wait about thirty minutes for the license,” John said. “And then we were able to go right into the private ceremony room and exchange our vows.”

“It was perfect,” Chiara said, wondering if anyone else could feel the radiant heat of her blush. “Just me and John and the officer of the court.”

“She did a cartwheel on the plaza as soon as we left the building,” John said. “I don’t think my feet touched the ground once when we were leaving.”

“So did you get any pictures of city hall?” Keren asked, earning a light pop on the arm from Cady.

“We got a tourist to take our photo in front of the building,” John said. “That’s it right there.” With a tip of his head, he indicated the photo that had been circulating, which Abby then chucked onto the table.

Chiara picked it up and held it where she and John could look at it together. Other than their marriage certificate, this photo was the only evidence in existence of their third wedding day. The bride wore a black denim skirt and leather coat, and the groom wore a cable-knit sweater and khaki trousers. Thinking about her own baby growing under her heart made Chiara see how truly young she and John had been when they’d legally sealed their lives together. It had seemed like the most natural thing in the world to do, the perfect finish to high school. It had been a pact of the mind and heart more so than the body, because they’d waited another month, for prom night, before consummating the marriage.

As if picking up the thread of Chiara’s thoughts, Abby boldly asked, “So after you got married, while everybody else was running around Fisherman’s Wharf, you two went back to your hotel and…and…”

“Bumped uglies?” Lee said.

“We caught up with everyone else at the Wharf, actually,” Chiara said primly. “John and I didn’t get married just to have sex.”

Zweli and Lee giggled like a pair of schoolboys. “Already doin’ it to it,” Zweli mumbled.

“No, we weren’t,” Chiara said. “And if you keep it up, I might be so bold as to speculate that I’m the only one of Abby Winters’s daughters who didn’t have premarital sex with the man she married.”

Lee, Zweli, Keren and Christopher all shifted from foot to foot or glanced up at the ceiling. “Good heavens, look at the time,” Lee said. “Ciel, honey, I think I’ll go check on Clarence and the girls, see if they’re asleep on their feet.”

“I think I’ll chase down the twins,” Keren said, making his escape with Lee.

Abby covered her ears with her hands. “No more,” she said, shaking her head. “I don’t want to hear another word unless it comes from Ciel.”

“Huh?” Ciel grunted, popping from behind her laptop monitor. “What are we talking about?”

“Premarital sex,” Cady said.

“We were not!” Abby said through clenched teeth. Turning on Ciel, she said, “Have you verified that marriage certificate? Is it legal?”

John took Chiara’s hand under the table and rested it on his thigh, squeezing it. Chiara breathed a little heavier and bit her lower lip as she awaited Ciel’s verdict.

Ciel took off her glasses and set them carefully on the table. “I’m sorry, Mama,” she sighed heavily, casting a quick glance at Chiara and John, “but everything appears to be in order. John and Chiara have been legally married for the past eleven and a half years.”

For a second, it looked as though Abby would faint again. She seemed to gain strength by saying, “Why didn’t you tell me? Why do you hide so much all the time, Chiara?”

“I don’t know how you managed to keep it a secret for twelve years,” Cady said. “I’m impressed.”

“I always wondered how you could wait so long for Chiara,” Abby said to John, earning a look of indignation from Chiara. “I don’t mean it that way, Chi, you’re worth waiting for. But John is so handsome and so sweet, and he’s got a good job and a good head on his shoulders. I always wondered why he never gave in to any of the women who threw themselves at him.”

“Of course, Mama, this also explains why Chiara never fell for any of the men who chased after
her
,” Cady said. “It’s not like she didn’t have her share of admirers. Remember that guy in Taiwan who sent six dozen roses to the house for her? And that other one in Chicago, who used to send her baskets of breads from his bakery?”

“John’s the only man I ever let in my heart,” Chiara told her family. “There’s never been anyone else because there was never room for anyone else.”

“I loved Chiara before I even knew what love was,” John said simply.

“All this time, you guys have been married,” Christopher said, pushing at his imaginary spectacles. “Why didn’t you ever live together?”