Free Patterns of Swallows by Connie Cook Page A

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