LaVyrle Spencer - Spring Fancy

"I'll head over there in a minute. There's something I've got to do first, though." He had her by both buns and was dancing her backward toward the archway and the stairway around the corner.

"How much time before your brothers get home?"

His tongue teased the corner of her mouth. "They'll be gone till midnight." She felt him grin against her lips. "The beer's damn good at Dick's."

Her heels struck the bottom step and brought them both up short. With her arms looped about his neck she ordered huskily, "Hurry up, Jo-Jo Duggan. The past four days have seemed like years. Show me your bedroom."

He bent and picked her up like a sack of potatoes and took the steps at a leisurely pace while she caressed his backside. "I will. But I'll show you my bathroom first. I played a tough game and took a hard slide into home in the eighth inning. I'm dust from one end to the other."

The bathroom was Classic Grandma: no shower, but a tub with a rubber plug on the end of a chain. The room was painted aqua blue and trimmed with white swan decals on one wall, while that behind the vanityless sink was paneled with some marbly gray stuff that looked like plastic. There was a water heater in one corner and a clothes hamper next to the stool, and the floor was covered with pure unadulterated grade-B hardware-store linoleum, its worn spot covered with an aqua blue scatter rug.

But it mattered not in the least, for anywhere Joseph and Winn shared was their own private heaven. She watched him drop his dusty uniform in the hamper. Then the body that had taken a hard slide into home took a soft slide into the tub. And she came to know the texture of his slick, soapy skin both above and below the surface of the water.

Her Joseph. How she loved him. Kneeling beside the tub, with her eyes caught in his, she lifted her wet hand from the water and laid it on his cheek. His eyes were dark, lustrous, close to hers. "Joseph Duggan, I love you," she whispered thickly.

All was silent but for the soft blip of the ancient, dripping tap. Then he brought his hands from the water to her jaws. His wet thumbs caressed her lips before he gently eradicated the space between their mouths, kissing her gently, wonderingly, the touch filled with praise and promise.

"And I love you, Winn Gardner. Marry me."

Her murmured agreement was lost in his kiss, but neither heard nor cared. For it could be no other way: the choice had never been theirs, not from the first night they'd met to walk down an aisle together.

The wedding invitations numbered twenty-two. Each was handwritten on plain typing paper, but not all in the same pen. Half were written in Winn's neat forward slant and half in Joseph's rather chicken-scratchy semi-legibility. They began with the words, "Joseph Duggan and Winnifred Gardner invite you to join them in Elm Creek Park…"

Joseph and Winn chose a Friday afternoon for their wedding. She wore a white summer dress of airy piqué, and fixed her hair in a Gibson Girl doughnut, trimming it with a simple sprig of baby's breath they found blooming in Joseph's grandma's garden.

Joseph and Winn rode out together in his Haynes a half hour before the scheduled time of the service to walk through the woods and gather a bouquet of brown-eyed Susans, wild buttercups and fragrant wild roses, conveniently abloom now in this month of roses.

The guests were waiting when they returned from their walk to the chosen spot, a grassy knoll in a break between the trees where birds were their only music and the grass their aisle. Around them were those they loved most dearly, including a surprised Sandy and Mick, Joseph's parents and brothers, as well as Fern Gardner, still in a state of shock, but present nevertheless.

The service lasted seven minutes and thirty-five seconds, approximately one-third the length of time it had taken most of the assembled to drive out from town.

When Winn kissed her mother's cheek, there was a radiant smile upon the bride's face. That smile was reflected upon the faces of several others close enough to hear the following words. "Mother, I'd like you to meet my husband, Joseph Duggan."

The two shook hands while Joseph spoke his first words to Fern. "Mrs. Gardner, I promise to love your daughter and keep her ecstatic at least until we're seventy years old. After that it depends on whether she lets our grandchildren overrun us or not."

Mr. and Mrs. Joseph Duggan honeymooned in a log cabin on Lake Bemidji. On their first afternoon there they went out fishing, something Winn had never tried before. With typical beginner's luck she caught the only fish of the day-a seven-pound walleyed pike. Within an hour, when the lake provided no more action, she lost all interest in the sport and asked Joseph to head the boat back to the cabin. There, inside, Jo-Jo warned, "Hands off, Killer, I have to clean the fish first."

"Throw him away."

"But he's such a big one."

"I caught one big one. I can catch another…" Then she ran her hands down his body and giggled. "Oh-oh! Here comes one now!"

But in the end Joseph cleaned the walleye, and by the time he finished it was time for dinner. They ate at The Seasons, then returned to their private retreat amid the lakeshore pines. When they faced each other at the side of their bed, Winn felt oddly timid. Joseph was dressed in cotton pajama pants and she in a long white nightgown with tiny satin straps and a bow beneath her breasts. Her cheeks were flushed and his eyes sparkly. His callused hand reached for hers and gave one gentle tug.

"Come here, Mrs. Duggan."

She lifted her arms, and his closed about her, bringing their wispily clad bodies close. His neck smelled of the cedar after-shave she now knew so well. She closed her eyes against the warm skin there and slipped her fingers into his soft curls, cradling his head as her eyes drifted closed. "Mrs. Duggan," she repeated rapturously. "I really am." She backed away and found his eyes with her own. "I'm Mrs. Joseph Duggan."

He slipped one satin strap over a narrow shoulder. "From now till you're at least seventy," he replied with gruff tenderness.

Her fingers brushed the hair on his chest, trembling upon it. "And then?"

The second strap fell slack as he pushed it down. "And then…" His eyes dropped to the satin bow as his fingers freed it. The gown shimmied into an ivory puddle at her feet. Just before his lips and arms claimed her Joseph chided raspily, "Don't ask foolish questions, my love."

"In the spring a young man's fancy lightly turns to thoughts of love…"

– Alfred, Lord Tennyson

From the poem, Locksley Hall