Perfect Timing

  Ceara went on to tell her mother of other things—water coming out of the walls, lights in the ceiling that weren’t candles, about the strange power Quincy called electricity, and the wagons that moved without any horses to pull them.

  “I have me very own computer now,” she told her mum. “It tells me many things, some of which I dinna ken. New lands with strange names that dinna exist in our time. ’Tis fair miraculous. I’ll tell ye about that next time. I ken ’tis growing late where ye are, and ye’re weary.” She sent best wishes to her brothers, and then, with a catch in her voice, she added, “And tell Brigid fer me that every time I think of her dear face, me heart warms with gladness. Give Da a hearty hug from me, and ask him to kiss yer soft cheek fer me afore ye drift off to sleep.”

  “Who the hell are you talking to?”

  Ceara jumped with a start. She hadn’t heard Quincy enter, but there he stood, staring at her with worry in his dark eyes. “Me mum.”

  “Yer mum? Shit, I’m starting to talk like you do. You’re rubbing off on me.” He sat across from her in the chair Loni had recently vacated. “How can you be talking to your mum? I don’t get it.”

  Ceara lifted her glass to him. “She is watching me through her crystal ball. Loni saw her and Da, happy as weevils in the flour to be seeing me. ’Tis like television, me mum’s ball. Ye can see and hear, just like in yer movies.”

  “Really?”

  “Really, ’struth.” Ceara wagged her fingers at the air. “G’night, Mum. ’Tis time to turn off yer television. Me husband is to home, and I’ve a mind to take him upstairs to our bedchamber.”

  “You do?” Quincy gave her a long study.

  Ceara stood up and wobbled on her feet. “Yep.” She giggled and curled her little finger at him. “Come hither, me man. Yer wife has plans fer ye.”

  He shot up from his chair and circled the table to grab her elbow. “Well, shit. You’re drunker than a lord.” While he held her arm, he plucked his cell phone from his belt. “Did Loni walk home in this condition?”

  “Yep, I am thinking so. I didna drink two bottles of wine all by meself.”

  Quincy speed-dialed Clint and nearly shouted into his cell, “Go check on your wife. She’s got close to a whole bottle of wine under her belt, and she’s walking home.” Quincy curled a strong arm around Ceara’s shoulders. “No, I’m not saying she’s drunk for sure, only that my wife can barely stand up, and the two bottles of wine on my kitchen table are definitely dead soldiers.”

  Ceara leaned against her husband, enjoying his hardness and warmth. He ended his conversation with his brother and encircled her with both his arms. “Sweetheart, you may have the mother of all hangovers in the morning. What possessed you and Loni to start drinking so early in the day and kill two jugs of vino?”

  “’Twas a hen party.” Ceara burped. She giggled and tipped her head back to study Quincy’s dark, handsome face. “A mini, but we made the best of it. Now that ye’re done with silly questions, will ye take me upstairs and put on yer seduction outfit?” Another belch rolled up from her belly. Embarrassed, she pressed her fingertips over her lips. “Me apologies, Sir Quincy. ’Tis verra unladylike to burp aloud.”

  “I have a very bad feeling that my seduction outfit had better stay on ice. Before the night is over, I’ll be holding your head over the toilet. You’ll be a very sorry girl come morning. Drinking can run up and bite you on the ass, sweetheart. You can’t guzzle wine like it’s soda pop.”

  “What is soda and why does it pop?”

  Ceara felt him sweep her up against his chest. Trusting in the safe cradle of his arms, she let her head rest on his shoulder. Bump, bump. Her cheek bounced against his collarbone as he ascended the stairs. Somewhere along the way, she fell asleep, and all remained dark until she woke up with a demon inside her head and her face only inches above the blue water in the toilet bowl.

  “Jesus save me,” she heard Quincy mutter. Then a cold cloth covered her face. She sputtered, gagged, and then went limp. “I barely got you to the toilet in time. I thought only college kids did this kind of shit.”

  Ceara moaned. Her lips felt thick, and she couldn’t open her eyes all the way. “What,” she croaked, “is a college kid, and what’s got loose inside me skull?”

  “A college kid is a young person going to school away from home who sometimes guzzles booze like it’s water because he doesn’t realize how sick it might make him. As for what’s got loose in your head, I’d say it’s too much wine.” He sighed and dabbed moisture on her gaping lips. “Ah, sweetheart, I’m so sorry. When I saw you two drinking, I should have stayed to monitor your intake. It’s all new to you, isn’t it?”

  At the moment, it all felt very old to Ceara, and as her body snapped taut to purge her gut of more wine, she only wished for it to be over. Wine. ’Twas her vow never to take another sip of the stuff. Poison was its name.

  When the gagging spasms ebbed, she was dimly aware of Quincy wrapping her in a blanket and leaving her curled up like a baby on the bathroom floor. Later he returned, scooped her up into his strong arms, and carried her back to bed.

  “Here, have a sip of 7UP. Maybe it’ll settle your tummy down.”

  Ceara wrinkled her nose, because the liquid reminded her of Quincy’s bubbly. She wanted no part of any more alcohol. “Nay, nay,” she protested.

  “Just one sip, honey. It’s good stuff; I promise.”

  Ceara trusted in his word, just as she trusted in the safety of his embrace, so she obediently swallowed. Then blackness swept over her. From somewhere far away, she heard Quincy talking to someone. “Yeah, well, buck up, bro. If Loni made it to the toilet on her own, you’re a lucky man. I think Ceara finished off one of the bottles while she was talking to her mum. Her mother, I mean. Yeah, well, I don’t get it, either. The woman’s been dead for nearly five hundred years, but Loni hooked them up somehow.” Long pause. “Hello? She’s your wife, not mine. Don’t ask me how she’s communicating with ghosts. Like I know? That’s your bivouac, pal.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  The first break of dawn tinted the windows of the bedroom when Quincy jerked awake the next morning. He blinked and went still, sensing that something other than his inner alarm clock had tugged him from dreamland. He patted the bed beside him, searching the lumpy covers for Ceara, who was so small she could vanish under the fluffy folds. Gone. Memory crashed back into his brain. She’d been sicker than a dog last night. He bolted upright just as the unmistakable sound of retching drifted from the bathroom.

  Dressed decently enough for head-holding in only his boxers, he leaped from bed and ran in to find his wife on her knees with her arms draped over the rim of the commode, her head dangling over what appeared to be only tinted sanitizing water in the toilet bowl. Dry heaves. Quincy had done some time in the same position, what he and his brothers laughingly called “worshiping the porcelain god,” but somehow it wasn’t nearly so humorous to Quincy when it was Ceara paying the piper. He felt responsible, for one thing. He’d known she was an inexperienced drinker. Except for the hen party at Loni’s, which had been interrupted by guys with growling stomachs, he’d always been with Ceara when she imbibed, and he’d never offered her more than two carefully measured glasses of wine, maybe three ounces at a whack, six total. And even then, she’d gotten a little tipsy.

  Quincy got a fresh washcloth, soaked it with cold water, gave it a quick wring, and crouched next to his sick wife. Crouching was a more comfortable position for him than kneeling, maybe because he had bony knees. He knew only that he could hunker down for prolonged periods of time, something he did often as a horseman, with his ass resting on his bootheels. During Mass or after confession, he put in plenty of time on a padded kneeler, but knee against floor—nope.

  “Hey, sweetheart.” He cupped her pointy chin in his right hand to lift her head, prompting her to moan and squinch her eyes even more tightly shut. Her face was beyond pale. “Pretty sick, huh?”

  Her only answer was
to retch again, and after the spasm passed, she gestured with a limp hand, trying to make him go away. Quincy got that. He didn’t like an audience when he puked, either. But no way was he leaving her. People got sick. A man stood by his wife through thick and thin, and in Quincy’s book, thick and thin included the dry heaves. Yeah, she was humiliated. But she needed help, he’d seen worse, and before the morning ended, he might see worst. Too much vino was notorious for giving the imbiber diarrhea. Shit, he thought, and then cringed.

  “’Tis dying I am,” she said, her tremulous voice bouncing off the curved walls of the toilet bowl. “Call a priest quick to give me last rites, and then just leave me to cock up me toes and bury me in hallowed ground.”

  Nowadays, the last rites were called the Anointing of the Sick, and judging from personal experience, Quincy doubted she was in dire need of either. Not to say she didn’t feel like she was dying. He’d been there and done that. Never again.

  He pressed the cold cloth against her slender throat, hoping it might curb her nausea. “You won’t die, darlin’. It just feels that way right now. Give it a couple of hours. Then you’ll be nibbling soda crackers and sipping 7UP, well on your way back to normal.”

  Quincy stayed with her until the retching passed, and then he carried her back to bed. As he’d predicted, she awakened three hours later, still pale but feeling more chipper. He thought about fixing her a Bloody Mary, a surefire hangover cure. A little hair of the dog always helped. But instead he took her up a tray of bland crackers with a glass of 7UP, which, much like ginger ale, usually worked wonders on a sick stomach.

  By noon, she was downstairs surfing the fridge like a hungry shark. Quincy gave her dry toast, cut into fingers, so she could dip them into hot tomato soup. Something about the acid in tomatoes always helped when his stomach felt topsy-turvy.

  “We missed Mass,” she said as she dipped and munched.

  “Ah, well.” Sitting across from her, Quincy rocked back on his chair, relieved that the worst of it was over. “We’ll go next Sunday. In fact, I’ve been toying with the idea of taking you on Saturday nights to the Latin Mass. It’s special. It’ll still be a little different from what you’re used to, but maybe not as much.”

  She smiled wanly. “I’d like that. But then we must go again on Sunday. Correct?”

  “The Saturday-night Mass is a vigil celebration and counts as your Sunday obligation. But if you want to go twice, I’m game.”

  * * *

  Quincy expected Ceara to make a full recovery from her dive into a wine bottle, but on Monday morning as he fixed breakfast, she clamped a hand over her mouth and raced for the downstairs bathroom. Puke detail again. He was thankful he had a strong stomach. Anyone who worked full-time with animals acquired one or found another occupation. He mopped up, held Ceara’s head, and decided later as he fed her more soda crackers and 7UP that maybe, in addition to the initial hangover, she’d picked up a stomach virus.

  Tuesday morning confirmed his diagnosis. Just as he got the bacon hot in the skillet—and, hello, bacon was one of Ceara’s favorite foods—she dropped the spatula she’d been using to stir the spuds, covered her mouth with both hands, and made another emergency dash for the bathroom.

  Quincy turned off the burners, went to take care of his sick wife, and told himself it was probably that three-day thing he’d heard was going around. No worries. In another twenty-four hours or so, she’d be fit as a fiddle again.

  He was wrong.

  Toward the end of the week, when Ceara continued to get sick every morning, Quincy was starting to worry, but a red alert didn’t flash inside his brain until he walked in from the arena on Friday morning to find his wife at the kitchen table, eating cold pickled artichoke hearts straight from the can and washing them down with a tall glass of chocolate milk, which she’d made, judging by the squeeze bottle on the counter, with the Hershey’s chocolate syrup he’d bought to drizzle over ice cream, another of her new favorite treats.

  “What the hell are you doing?” he asked, fighting to swallow his gorge. It took a lot to make Quincy’s stomach roll, but just the thought of an artichoke-and-chocolate-milk combo did the trick. “That’s disgusting.”

  Ceara stopped chewing to give him a surprised look. A chocolate mustache lined her bowed upper lip, and a bit of pickled vegetable dangled from the corner of her mouth. “I ken ’tis strange, but it sounded delicious and tastes even better. Me stomach told me ’tis just the thing.”

  Ding-dong. Is anyone home? Quincy had a strong urge to smack himself on the head. Young female. One night of unprotected sex in mid-March. Puking every morning when she smelled frying bacon. Holy hell, he’d knocked her up.

  Quincy had no practice at this marriage business. He’d sort of gotten pushed over a cliff and fallen into the situation. How was a guy supposed to tell a woman that he thought she might be pregnant? Damn, they were still only newlyweds, and he’d been so careful ever since they broke the curse, insisting on wearing protection even when Ceara protested on religious grounds. To his way of thinking, a guy sometimes had to consider the teachings of the Church as guidelines, not hard-and-fast rules never to be broken. He and Ceara hadn’t had a courtship. Hello, they hadn’t even gone out on a frigging date before they got married. On top of that, she’d been tossed into a whole new world where everything was foreign to her. He hadn’t wanted to complicate matters for her by throwing a baby into the mix right off the bat.

  But apparently he’d done just that. Quincy sank onto a chair across from her, watching with a puckered tongue as she shoveled artichoke bits into her mouth and chased them with a slug of sweetened milk. “’Tis more cans of this we’ll be needing,” she told him between bites. “We’ve only one left, and ’tis thinking I am that this is how I shall break me fast from now on.” Quincy pictured himself sitting across the table from this spectacle every morning for months and wondered if men could suffer morning sickness by association—or observation.

  How the hell had this happened? Quincy could barely wrap his mind around it. They’d had unprotected sex only one lousy time. That said, he’d been warned enough times by his dad in his younger years that it took only once. It just seemed so completely unfair that it had happened to someone like Ceara. Quincy had always wanted kids, and he hoped that he and Ceara would eventually have a passel. Just not now. She was still adjusting to cell phones, digital cameras, electricity, surround-sound stereo music, not wrecking his truck when she got behind the wheel, and programmable ovens. She wasn’t ready to take on the responsibilities of motherhood in the modern world.

  They’d been married in mid-March, and he felt certain egg had met sperm on their wedding night. He did a mental tally. It was nearly the end of May now. She was probably about two and a half months along, give or take a few days.

  Carefully phrasing his words, Quincy said, “Sweetheart, I know this will come as a big surprise to you—maybe even more along the line of a shock—but I think you may be PG.”

  Holding a blob of artichoke balanced on the tines of a fork, she gave him a long study. “PG? ’Tis something serious, mayhap even deadly?”

  “No, no.” Quincy waved a hand as if to erase a blackboard. “Let me back up. PG is an acronym, honey.” He erased that, too. “Well, not really, more just a slang expression in this time. If a woman is PG, it means she’s pregnant.”

  “Pregnant? Ye mean with a babe?” Her blue eyes went as round as quarters. She dropped the fork into the can and placed her hand over her waist. “Oh, Quincy!” Her face broke into a joyous grin. “’Tis why I have been sick of a morn, because I am with child?”

  He nodded. “I think it’s a strong possibility. I’ll run into town and buy a pregnancy test so we can find out for sure.”

  * * *

  Ceara’s hands trembled as she went into the downstairs bathroom to take the test. Acutely aware of Quincy standing just outside the closed door, keeping an eye on his watch, she did as he’d instructed, wondering how peeing on a funn
y-looking stick could tell them if she was pregnant. Midstream, she thought, Start to pee, but do na wait too long before poking the stick under the flow. Then remove it to start the countdown.

  “Now!” she called out.

  From outside, she heard him counting off the seconds, and then, “Okay, that’s seven. Put the cap back on.”

  Ceara struggled with the plastic container, which had to be recapped to proceed with the test. Then she cried, “’Tis done.”

  When she finished tidying herself, she invited Quincy in, and they stood arm-to-arm, staring at the little window in the tester. “It says it takes from two to five minutes,” he said.

  “Is it time yet?” she asked.

  “No, honey, we’re only forty-five seconds in.”

  It seemed to Ceara that the minutes passed more slowly than a cow slogging through belly-deep mud.

  “Look,” Quincy whispered. “Two pink lines.” He grinned broadly and bent to kiss her. “We’re pregnant, Ceara.”

  “Are ye certain?” Ceara peered at the window, yearning to see something more telling than colored lines, mayhap a baby in the window. It wasn’t that she disbelieved Quincy, but she distrusted this peculiar contraption he termed a pregnancy kit. “How can lines tell ye fer sure and certain?”

  “I don’t know how to answer that. But these tests are ninety-nine percent accurate, and yours showed dark pink before two minutes even passed. It’s a strong positive.” He curled his arm around her shoulders and gave her a gentle jostle. “We’re going to have a baby.”