“Dad, if my finger is strong enough to hold my always overloaded tote bag by one strap, it sure can support a high-carat bunch of Art Deco.”
“As you can support yourself,” he said. “We get it.” He glanced at Matt. “You know, these liberated days there isn’t anything for parents to do anymore but foot the bill.”
“Dad, I’m a big girl. I’ll foot the bill for my own wedding.”
“We will,” Matt said.
“Then the only question is where and how,” Karen said, blue eyes glittering like sapphires.
“My family is in Chicago. And very extended.” Matt shrugged his resignation. “They’re threatening the Polish cathedral.”
“The cathedral is magnificent and its aisle is endless. I could have a train, a long, long train,” Temple told her mother. “I’ve always wanted to wear taller clothing.”
“Remember, dear,” Karen countered, “we have a lovely woman minister at our Universal Unitarian congregation, and you could hold it anywhere, at the Historical Society in St. Paul or the American Swedish Institute in Minneapolis.”
“The Swedish Institute mansion is gorgeous,” Temple told Matt.
“You could have a train here too,” her mother mentioned, adding a tempting point.
“What about Las Vegas?” Roger suggested. “Tons of fancy places.”
“Possibly the best solution.” Karen sat forward. “Destination weddings are the thing these days, and the sports bars and casinos would keep your brothers busy and out of our hair.”
“To us, Vegas is…” Temple sounded hesitant.
So Matt finished her dropped sentence. “Old hat when you live there. Although Temple’s hotel client there would be sure put on the Ritz for us.”
“Oh, the Crystal Phoenix is spectacular,” Karen agreed.
“And,” Temple said, “we live at the Circle Ritz condos and our terrific landlady is a Justice of the Peace and has a wedding chapel on-site. Electra would be in Seventieth Heaven if we got married there.” She looked at Matt. “You played a Bob Dylan wedding march on Electra’s organ when we first met, remember?”
“A Bob Dylan wedding march?” Karen was dubious.
“You’d have to hear it on an organ to see what Temple means,” Matt said. “It’s ‘Love Minus Zero, No Limit’.”
Karen shuddered. “Sounds hippy-ish.”
The conversation lapsed into a generation gap silence.
“I know!” Temple said, revving up PR sell-mode and sitting taller to present her pitch. “They used to have progressive dinners in the seventies, each course at a different house. We could have progressive weddings.”
“Not a bad idea,” said Karen. “First, the bridal shower here in Minneapolis with your old girlfriends, then a simple UU wedding—”
Temple took up the narrative. “And then the groom’s dinner in Chicago with Matt’s family and a full-regalia Catholic ceremony so we’re not living in sin in the eyes of the church.”
“And then—” Karen was getting as carried away as Temple, “we all go to a lavish reception at your hotel in Las Vegas.”
“After,” Temple says, “a brief civil ceremony in Electra’s Lovers’ Knot wedding chapel so her feelings wouldn’t be hurt. And it’s not ‘my’ hotel,” she said modestly, “although the owners make me feel like that.”
“Oh,” her mother cooed. “Aldo’s brothers,” she told Roger. “The Fontanas are the large Italian family that ran to boys, too, and they look out for Temple. I’d love to meet and thank each and every one of them.”
The mental picture of a flock of courtly Fontana brothers gathering around her elfin mother stopped Temple’s fantasy scenario cold.
Matt hoped he didn’t look as dazed and white-faced as Roger Barr did at the moment. Both men sipped bourbon and kept their mouths shut.
“Too expensive,” Temple said with a sigh.
“Too exhausting,” her mother added.
The women sat silent also, mulling over reality.
After Temple’s brothers left at 7:30 p.m., Karen and Temple cleared up the picnic table while Matt and his future father-in-law tidied the popcorn and beer-can strewn recreation room on the lower level.
“I suppose we’re expected to have a man-to-man talk,” Roger said, shoveling the mess into a huge garbage bag.
“Do you have any questions?” Matt said.
“Nope. I know what you do for a living, what you’re maybe gonna do. What you did do.” The already well-marked furrows on Rogers’s forehead deepened. “I’m a little uneasy about this stalker thing.”
“That’s a fluke. That person is now out of the country and in the hands of the law.” Well, Matt thought, Max Kinsella was certainly a law unto himself.
Roger nodded. “Then I don’t need to know anything else, except getting to know you better. And finding out what kind of folderol the women will be putting us through.”
He dragged the trash bag through a door to the garage and then led Matt up the stairs, where Temple and Karen were back on the couch, curled up with their shoes off.
Karen rose. “We’ll all need our rest for tomorrow with the entire crew, guys, and then you take off, too soon. Our master is thataway, but you’re going thisaway.” She pointed to a hall leading left off the living room. “Tom put your luggage in the foyer.”
Temple and Matt nodded without comment.
“We did somehow manage to have four boys and one girl,” Karen said, “so there are now three empty bedrooms and two baths in that part of the house. Take your pick of the accommodations.”
Whew, Matt thought, diplomat Karen saved us all from the awkward moment of anyone declaring to sleep together or apart.
“Maybe,” said Temple with a wicked eyebrow lift, “we’ll just do progressive bedrooms.”
Of course, Matt knew, negotiating the sleeping arrangements at the old homestead with Karen’s daughter would be a lot trickier.
19
In Dublin’s Fair City
It may have been a long way to Tipperary in the old Irish song, but Belfast was only a two-hour drive from “Dublin’s fair city, where girls are so pretty”. In terms of “the Troubles” time, it was a centuries-long journey of political and personal pain and suffering.
Max hankered for the drive through tranquil green countryside to lull him, to make up for the sleep he’d lost while traveling with Kathleen. He must have learned his current self-hypnotic drone state during his counterterrorism work. With it, he could function automatically, yet snap out of it at the first sign of a threat.
Kathleen’s toe nervously tapped the floorboard as their rented Honda maneuvered the city’s eternal gridlock and narrow streets. He knew where he was going and hoped to find a precious parking space. Then a jolt of adrenaline zinged his senses like an inhalation of Chinese mustard as he spotted a blot of familiar bright red ahead, near the river Liffey.
At the same instant, Kathleen finally broke the silence. “So is a visitation to my daughter the first step in your Pilgrim’s Progress program?”
“It would seem logical.”
Kathleen burst into laughter. “You sounded like the late, great Mr. Spock just then. If you’re expecting me to provide you with a weepy reunion, you can forget it. I excised her and my abuser’s DNA from my life when she was an infant. This is pointless. You should book yourself a flight back to the U.S.”
“And leave you ‘a lone wolf’ ticking time bomb out there somewhere?”
“How are you going to ensure that I’ll not be that no matter what you do? Ah, such an unexpected sentimentalist you turned out to be. What convinces you that seeing my grown daughter will make me a changed woman?”