A Misty Mourning
by Rett MacPherson
Chapter One


            You know you're pregnant when the only towel in the house that will wrap around your ever-enlarging midsection is your husband's Batman beach towel. Taking a shower in general is a fairly precarious task. And forget shaving altogether. I could barely put socks on, much less shave my legs-proof that the state of pregnancy was invented long before personal hygiene.
            "I'm taking your beach towel," I said to Rudy as I shoved it intomy suitcase.
            "That's okay. I don't think I'll be doing much swimming while you're gone," he said. He made an exaggerated sad face. Even the ends of his brown eyes turned downward. "How long did you say you were going to be gone again?"
            "Should be a week," I said. "Oh, please. Don't give me that Stan Laurel face."
            "But I'll miss you," he said.
            "Yeah, right. You're going to miss me getting up fifteen times in the middle of the night? You'll finally get a decent night's sleep," I said. I went over to the closet and pulled out all the maternity clothes I had, which wasn't many, took them off the hangers, and put them into the suitcase on top of Rudy's beach towel.
            "Well, at least you're taking your grandmother," he said. He stood with his arms crossed on the opposite side of our bed wearing his plaid sleeping pants and a Samuel Adams beer T-shirt. His hair still stood on end. It was, after all, only six in the morning. I'm not sure exactly why Rudy thought that if I took my grandmother on my trip to West Virginia no ill would befall me, but he did. Aside from his cinematic exaggeration, he really did look worried about me.
            It was June and I was due with our third child in August. I was thirty-one weeks along, and so I had a good two months to go before having to deliver this little O'Shea. While you're pregnant, everybody talks about how big your belly is and, oh, what a big baby you're carrying. Then it comes out and suddenly those same people can't get over how tiny the baby is. It makes no sense, but then, most of the time I think I could give Mother Nature a few lessons on how to run things. Just for the record, stretch marks would be nonexistent.
            Now that I thought about it, the fact that I was pregnant was probably why Rudy was being overconcerned about my trip to West Virginia. He's just so darn cute.
            "I don't understand why you have to go all the way to West Virginia, Tone," he said. "Why can't this be done over the phone? Or over the Internet?"
            We'd just gotten Internet access at home and suddenly Rudy was a computer expert. He talked about things like modems, DNS, HTML, and jpegs. Is it me or do those things sound like exotic communicable diseases? Maybe everything can be done over the Internet, but does it have to be?
            I'd been fighting technology tooth and nail. That's me, Torie O'Shea, confirmed cavewoman. I have Internet access at my office at the Gaheimer House, because of all the genealogy that I do for the historical society. I have no idea how any of it actually works, mind you. It comes in handy, I'll admit, but I really miss the written letter or a voice on the other end of the line.             "Well, Rudy. I guess maybe this could be done over the computer. But we're dealing with a one-hundred-and-one-year-old woman. There are some people who still do things the old-fashioned way, thank God. At any rate, she requested my presence for the reading of her will and I'm going," I said.
            "Why?" he asked. "It's not like she's related to you."
            "She was best friends with my grandmother's mother," I said.
            "That's all I know. Maybe she has something that belonged to my great-grandmother and she wants to make sure that I get it." He looked at me peculiarly. "Yes, but she's not even dead yet. She's having a reading of her will and she's not dead. If you want my opinion, that is weird." I found it a little bizarre myself, but what would it hurt for me to go? My grandmother hadn't been back to her native West Virginia since 1986. I wanted her to see it again.
            She was eighty-two now and you just never knew. Besides, I knew this would be a real bonding trip for us.
            Rudy carried my suitcase for me down the stairs and into the living room where my grandmother sat waiting. She was early, as usual. Gertrude Crookshank, my grandmother, sat with her cane in one hand and her extremely large black vinyl purse in the other. I knew for a fact that the purse contained a wallet, a photo carrier, and a ton of Kleenex. Why she needed a purse that big for those few items, I'll never know.
            Her hair was totally white now, her brown eyes appearing much darker because of it. Her cheekbones were high and wide, and she had absolutely beautiful skin. It was barely wrinkled, which she credited to good genes and Ponds cold cream.
            "You ready, Gert?" I asked her. I have always called her Gert or Granny Gert.
            "As long as I can stop and get some coffee, I'll be fine," she answered.
            Rudy carried my suitcase and various other canvas bags, a cooler, and my grandmother's things out to the car while I said good-bye to my daughters. Rachel, who is nine and counting down the days, months, and years until she will be a teenager, was awake and waiting for me to come into the room. On the other hand, Mary, who would be six this fall, was snoring away.
            "Don't let Granny get you into trouble," Rachel said to me. Her long straight brownish hair was matted to one side of her head and sticking straight out on the other.
            "I won't," I said and kissed her on the forehead. "Try not to fight with your sister."
            She rolled her eyes heavenward. "You tell her that," she said and pointed to Mary, who was both snoring and drooling at the same time.
            It bothered me that my daughters had reached the stage of hating each other. Well, Mary actually adored Rachel; Rachel hated Mary, which made Mary defensive and act like she hated Rachel. I was an only child. I hadn't had this problem.
            I sat on Mary's bed and shook her shoulder. "Mare," I said. "Wake up. Mommy's leaving." Now, normally Mary would kick and scream, pull the covers over her head, and demand to sleep just a few more minutes, but she knew I was leaving for a week so she sat straight up in bed. Bob Marley had nothing on this kid; her curly blond hair stuck out like somebody had sent her to bed with wet dreadlocks.
            "Be good," I said and kissed her.
            Sleepy green eyes tried their darnedest to open. Finally, she just gave up, nodded her head up and down, and gave me a big hug. I'd said good-bye to them last night in case they weren't up when I left this morning, but I couldn't actually leave without saying it to them again.
            With that, both girls snuggled back into bed-Mary flopped back into bed-and I closed my eyes for a second to burn that vision in my memory.
            When I returned to the living room, my mother was there saying good-bye to her mother. My mother, who was wheelchair-bound, was serenely beautiful, with large, dark eyes and a perfectly oval face.
            "Be good," my mother said to me. "Don't give your grandmother a hard time."
            Wasn't that a variation of what I'd just said to my girls? Funny how that stuff gets recycled.
            My mother was marrying the local sheriff, Colin Brooke, at the beginning of August, about two weeks before I was due. I was her matron of honor and still adjusting to the fact that she would be moving out of my house when the nuptials took place.
            "Me, give her a hard time?" I asked. "Tell her to be good to me." I kissed my mother good-bye and then came Rudy. He wouldn't settle for just a kiss good-bye in the living room. He had to walk me out to the car, help my grandmother get in it, and then kiss me once again.
            "I love you," he said.
            "I love you, too."
            With that, I got in the car and felt that little bubble of excitement in my stomach I always feel when I'm getting ready to make a long trip. As I pulled out of the driveway Rudy yelled, "Hurry home! Call me. Take good care of my son!"
            He patted his belly, so that I knew he meant the baby I was carrying. Like I wouldn't know? We didn't know if it was a boy or a girl, but Rudy thought as long as he called it a boy, it would be. I honked as I pulled away, watching Rudy wave through my rearview mirror.

End Of Chapter One