She tore back down the stairs, calling toward the porch as she passed, "He's on his way!" (She could picture Fiona getting up and leaving.) Through the kitchen, down a set of narrow wooden steps, over to Ira's workbench. No plans there, either. Ira's tools hung neatly on the backboard, each matching its own painted outline-a sure sign Jesse had not been near them. On the workbench itself were two squares of sandpaper and a sheaf of doweling rods still bound together by rubber bands, part of a drying rack that Ira had promised to build into a corner of the back porch. She seized the doweling rods and raced back up the basement steps. "Look," she told Fiona, slamming out the screen door. "Jesse's cradle."
Fiona lowered her glass. She accepted the rods and gazed at them.
"Cradle?" she said doubtfully.
"It's going to have . . . spindles; that's what they are," Maggie said.
"Antique style."
You would think those rods could be read, the way Fiona studied them.
Then Jesse came out, bringing with him the fragrance of shampoo. His hair was wet and tousled and his skin was radiant. He said, "Fiona? You didn't go through with it?" and she lifted her face, still holding the rods like a kind of scepter, and said, "Well, all right, Jesse, if you want. I guess we could get married if you want."
Then Jesse wrapped his arms around her and dropped his head to her shoulder, and something about that picture-his dark head next to her blond one-reminded Maggie of the way she used to envision marriage before she was married herself. She had thought of it as more different than it really was, somehow, more of an alteration in people's lives-two opposites drawn together with a dramatic crashing sound. She had supposed that when she was married all her old problems would fall away, something like when you go on vacation and leave a few knotty tasks incomplete as if you'd never have to come back and face them. And of course, she had been wrong. But watching Jesse and Fiona, she could almost believe that that early vision was the right one. She slipped into the house, shutting the screen door very softly behind her, and she decided everything was going to work out after all.
They were married in Cartwheel, in Mrs. Stuckey's living room. Just family attended. Ira was grim-faced and silent, Maggie's mother sat stiff with outrage, and Maggie's father seemed befuddled. Only Mrs. Stuckey showed the proper festive attitude.
She wore a fuchsia corduroy pantsuit and a corsage as big as her head, and before the ceremony she told everybody that her one regret was that Mr. Stuckey had not lived to see this day. Although maybe, she said, he was here in spirit; and then she went on at some length about her personal theory of ghosts. (They were the completions of the dead's intended gestures, their unfinished plans still hanging in the air-something like when you can't remember what it was you went to the kitchen for and so you pantomime the motion, a twist of the wrist perhaps, and that reminds you you had come out to turn the dripping faucet off. So wasn't there a chance that Mr. Stuckey was right here in the living room, having dreamed of walking both his precious daughters down the aisle someday?) Then she said that to her mind, marriage was just as educational as high school and maybe more so. "I mean I dropped out of school myself," she said, "and have never once regretted it."
Fiona's sister rolled her eyes. But it was a good thing Mrs. Stuckey felt that way, since Fiona wouldn't turn eighteen till January and required parental permission for a marriage license.
Fiona herself wore a beige, loose-waisted dress that she and Maggie had gone shopping for together, and Jesse looked very distinguished in a suit and tie. He looked like a grownup, in fact. Daisy acted shy around him, and kept hanging on to Maggie's arm and looking over at him. "What's the matter with you? Straighten up," Maggie told her. She was feeling very irritable, for some reason. She worried that Ira was going to be angry at her forever. He seemed to be holding her solely accountable for this entire situation.
After the wedding, Jesse and Fiona went to Ocean City for a week. Then they came home to Jesse's room, where Maggie had moved in an extra bureau and exchanged his old bunks for a double bed from J. C. Penney. The house grew more crowded, of course, but it was a pleasant sort of crowdedness, cheerful and expectant. Fiona seemed to fit right in; she was so agreeable, so ready to let Maggie take charge-more so than Maggie's own children had ever been. Jesse set off happily every morning for his computer job, and returned every evening with some new baby-care gadget-a pack of bunny-shaped diaper pins or an ingenious spouted training cup. He was reading up on childbirth and kept embracing different theories, each more peculiar than the last. (For instance, at one point he proposed that the delivery take place underwater, but he couldn't find a doctor who would agree to it.)
Daisy and her friends forgot Mrs. Perfect entirely and camped in Maggie's living room-five dumbstruck, enchanted little girls reverently eyeing Fiona's stomach. And Fiona played up to them, sometimes inviting them to her room to admire her growing layette, after which she might seat them one by one at the mirror and experiment with their hair. (Her sister was a beautician and had taught Fiona everything she knew, Fiona said.) Then in the evening, if Jesse's band had an engagement somewhere, he and Fiona would go out together and not return till or a.m., and Maggie, half waking, would hear their whispers on the stairs. The lock on their bedroom door would click stealthily and Maggie would sink back into sleep, contented.
Even Ira seemed resigned, after he'd got over the shock. Oh, at first he was so disgusted that Maggie had feared he would walk out of the house forever. For days he had not spoken, and when Jesse entered the room he would leave. But gradually he came around. He was most comfortable, Maggie thought, when he could act tolerant and long-suffering, and surely he had the opportunity for that now. Here all his apprehensions had been confirmed: His son had got a girl in trouble and his wife had meddled unforgivably and now the girl was living in Jesse's bedroom among the Iggy Pop posters. He could sigh and say, "Didn't I tell you? Didn't I always warn you?" (Or at least he could give that impression; not that he said it aloud.) Fiona drifted past him into the bathroom every morning, wearing her fluffy pink robe and her big pink powder-puff slippers and carrying her tortoiseshell soapbox, and Ira flattened himself against the wall as if she were .twice as big as she was. But he treated her with unfailing courtesy. He even taught her his complicated brand of solitaire, when the boredom of sitting at home got to be too much for her, and he lent her his Mariner's Library books-a whole row of memoirs by people who had sailed alone around the world and such. He had been trying to press them on his children for years. ("As far as I'm concerned," Fiona told Maggie, "those books are just more of that 'How I took Route So-and-so' that men always think is so fascinating." But she didn't let on to Ira.) And by November, when the Waverly apartment was supposed to become available, Ira didn't ask why they weren't moving out.
Nor did Maggie; she carefully avoided the subject. In fact, for all she knew, the apartment had fallen through somehow. Maybe the current tenants had changed their plans. At any rate, Jesse and Fiona said nothing about leaving. Fiona followed Maggie around now the way the children had followed her when they were tiny. She trailed her from room to room, asking fractious questions. "Why do I feel so logy?" she asked, and, "Am I ever going to have anklebones again?" She had started attending childbirth classes and wanted Maggie to go with her to the labor room.
Jesse, she said, might pass out or something. Maggie said, "Why, Jesse's dying to go with you," but Fiona said, "I don't want him to see me like that! He isn't even kin."
Nor was Maggie, Maggie could have said. Although it seemed she really was, in some ways.