A/N I wanted to finish this in time to post for Amanda's birthday, and even though I was only a couple of days off, I have waited more than a week to post it because it just isn't as good as I'd like it to be. I've finally decided it probably never will be, but the series deserves a conclusion, so here it is. With one exception, I don't own these characters, but the premise for this story is all mine. Lovingly dedicated to Miss Amanda Blake, Miss Kitty. Also, a big thank you to Singerme for giving me the idea for the series in the first place.
A Shotgun Wedding
It was a beautiful day for a wedding. A perfect June day, sunny yet still cool enough for everyone from the bride in all her finery to the oldest guest to be comfortable. All guests were assembled for the first wedding to take place in the recently built Silver Creek Methodist Church. Only two people were missing; three, if you counted the man who had just departed for the parsonage to see what was keeping the bride and her mother.
In the guest room of the parsonage, it wasn't the bride who was holding things up. She was ready and calmly attending to her mother, who readily confessed to not having been such a bundle of nerves since her own wedding nearly twenty years earlier.
"This isn't like you at all, Mama," the bride said with concern, referring not just to her mother's anxiety but to the tears which repeatedly ruined her usually flawless makeup.
"It's my prerogative as the mother of the bride," she laughed nervously as her daughter attempted to repair the damage from the most recent onslaught of tears. "After all, it's not every day your baby girl gets married. Or at least it shouldn't be."
The bride rolled her eyes at being referred to as "baby girl" and continued. "But you never cry. I haven't seen you cry since..." There was no need to complete the sentence, for they both knew what event she referred to.
"But you were so little! How can you remember that?"
"I remember. You still miss him, don't you?"
The mother nodded. "I always will. I wish he could have lived to see this day, honey. You know the proudest day of his life was the day you were born."
"Yes, you've told me." She stood back to admire her handiwork and looked at her mother pensively. "Do you think I'm doing the right thing, Mama?"
"It doesn't matter what I think. You're the one who has to be sure. Both of you."
"We are sure, and I think you are too, Mama. I think you knew before I did. He's the only boy you never threatened to run off the place with a shotgun."
"Madeleine Dillon!" Kitty gasped with mock indignation. "I did no such thing!"
Maddy successfully held back a smirk as she put the finishing touches on what she hoped was the final application of her mother's makeup. In the ensuing silence, Kitty lost herself in a memory of a day when Maddy had come to her with something obviously on her mind.
"Mama, was I...early?"
"Well, you came a few weeks before you were supposed to, and you were really tiny, but that isn't what you were asking me, is it?"
She shook her head. "Uh, uh." She took a breath and then asked, "Does that mean you and Daddy had to get married because of me?"
"Where's this coming from, Maddy?" Kitty mentally chastised herself for not talking to her about this before someone else did.
"Hattie Burke said I was a love child and that Daddy only married you because of me and…." Maddy's voice trailed off in embarrassment.
Damn those Burkes! Nathan Burke had married several years previously. An old flame, widowed with twin daughters a year older than Maddy, had come to Dodge to be his mail order bride of sorts. The new Mrs. Burke had turned out to be a worse gossip than her husband. While Burke merely had the tendency to mind everyone else's business along with the habit of speaking before thinking, his wife was a judgmental sort who thought herself superior to anyone who didn't conform to her standards. In short, she fit right in with a dwindling but nonetheless influential group of "respectable" women who still looked down their noses at the former Kitty Russell, and whether it was they who had told her the Dillons' history or she had heard it from her husband, she had been all too willing to think the worst of Kitty. Obviously, the apples hadn't fallen far from the tree where Hattie and Hallie Burke were concerned.
"I thought you didn't care what those girls thought."
"I don't. But..."
"But it still hurts, doesn't it?" Maddy nodded. Kitty sat down in her rocking chair, the same one she had rocked Maddy in as a baby. "Come here. I guess we have some things to talk about."
"Mama, I'm too big to sit on your lap." The fourteen year old giggled in spite of her distress.
"You will never be too big for me to hold on my lap." Kitty pronounced. "Now sit." Maddy allowed herself to be pulled onto her mother's lap, and immediately put her arms around Kitty's neck, laying her head on her shoulder.
"I meant to tell you a few things before now, but it never seemed like the right time. I guess it's the right time now. Some of these things you already know, but they're important to the story.
"First of all, in this house, love child is not an insult. It means your father and I loved each other so much we created you. I know what this town thought at the time, but you need to know that things aren't always how they appear.
"You know your father was a marshal for a lot of years before you were born. Well, for most of that time he believed that his badge kept him from having a family or even a wife. But one thing that badge couldn't do was keep the two of us from loving each other, although it sure made it difficult sometimes."
"Difficult, how?"
Kitty spared Maddy the details of the times her own life was in danger and all the disappointments of missed dances and picnics and got right to the point. "Well, I loved your father so much, and still do, that I was willing to accept that I might never marry or have children, in order to be with him. When we were still young it didn't seem that important, it was enough just to be together. The more time passed, the harder I had to work to make my peace with it. Seems like there was always some reminder." Her man holding a tiny triplet. Men she said no to because they weren't Matt. A baby named Mary who went to another mother. "Then one day, after we'd been together for many years, I found out I was having a baby. That baby was you, Madeleine. I was so happy to be having the child I always wanted that it didn't matter to me, well, much, anyway, that I wasn't married. I knew your father was a good man, and whether we married or not, he'd never leave us."
"What did he say when you told him?"
"He said you were a nice surprise. Turns out he had a surprise, too. Being a decent, honorable man, he proposed, of course. But while I had been waiting up for him the night he was due back in town so I could tell him, he'd been doing some thinking on his way back, and he'd made a decision. He already had your grandma Dillon's wedding ring in his pocket when he asked me to marry him. So you see, honey, I was happy about you, married or not, and your father was ready to marry without even knowing there was a baby on the way. No one had to marry anyone in this family, no matter what the people in this town say."
Maddy picked up Kitty's left hand and traced the ring that, along with her, had joined her parents forever. "Is that why you waited so long for him? Because you loved him?"
"Most of the time we were both too busy just living to think of it as waiting. Hoping, maybe."
"I don't think I could wait twenty years for a man, Mama."
To Maddy's surprise, Kitty threw her head back and laughed.
"Why is that funny?"
"I once said the same thing to your father when we were still getting to know each other. Made him very nervous."
Maddy raised one eyebrow, silently asking her mother to elaborate.
"I believe I mentioned buckshot."
"Mama!"
"Of course, I was only teasing him. Mostly."
"Seems to me I did hear something about you and a shotgun once."
"Don't you believe a word of it." It had been a wilder time and Dodge had been newer when her younger self had gone after Matt, and a few others, with a shotgun in order to make a point. If her aim had been off at any of those times, she could be sitting in prison or even lying on Boot Hill instead of reminiscing to her half-grown daughter.
"Mama? Mama?"
"Oh, I'm sorry honey, I guess I was daydreaming."
They were interrupted by a knock at the door.
"Well, that must be our escort." Kitty opened the door and looked up with a smile on her face at the man who stepped in.
"What's taking you girls so long?"
"Sorry, Matt, we keep having to redo my makeup."
"Well, the groom is beginning to worry that he's been left at the altar and your brother is probably out booby-trapping the carriage about now."
"He would! Oh, Daddy, you won't let him spoil everything will you?"
"Shotguns? Booby traps? Are we going to a wedding or a war?" Kitty looked from her husband to her daughter with a smirk.
"Who said anything about shotguns?" Matt asked.
"Oh, it's just a little mother-daughter talk." Kitty gave Maddy a conspiratorial wink.
Matt shook his head. There was just no understanding women. Thankfully, he didn't have to understand his women in order to love them.
The father of the bride escorted his wife and daughter across the yard the through the open front doors of the church into the vestibule. Stopping in front of the doors to the sanctuary, he said, "Wait here and I'll walk your mother to her seat."
"Uh uh." Shaking her head, the bride stopped them with a hand on each arm. Three pair of blue eyes met and silently agreed. With Kitty on Matt's right and Madeleine on his left, the Dillons began their walk up the aisle together. The bridegroom and preacher waited at the altar, with Maddy's friend Mary Baines standing on one side to serve as bridesmaid and Mary's fiance, the youngest Roniger boy, as best man. The organist began to play The Wedding March and the assembled guests looked back as one. For a moment they were all stunned to see three people, not two, in the aisle. Both parents giving the bride away? No one had ever heard of such a thing. Everyone knew it was the fathers' place... Henrietta Burke exchanged looks with her still-single daughters. Obviously, twenty years of marriage hadn't turned that jezebel-Mrs. Dillon-into a decent woman, and by the looks of things her daughter wasn't going to turn out any better, or she would have insisted her mother follow proper etiquette. In fact, everyone present, with the exception of one row of guests, was so concerned with this breach in manners that they failed to follow the usual custom of rising to their feet when the bride appeared. The group of guests in the first row, consisting of the bride's brothers and honorary aunts and uncles, looked disdainfully at the people behind them.
"Foot!" the old, bewhiskered man wearing his best paisley shirt muttered softly but audibly, and rose to his feet stiffly, assisted by a man with streaks of gray in his dark hair and a badge on the left side of his chest. The two brothers stood immediately afterward. The parents of the best man were the next to stand. Finally, a retired army sergeant, his dress uniform brought out of storage for the occasion, used his cane to pull himself up and then offered his hand to a tall, stout woman with red streaks in her gray hair, who ignored the proffered help and stood on her own. Finally, the remainder of the guests got sheepishly to their feet, most of them having the grace to recognize their own hypocrisy.
Fortunately, of the three beginning their way up the aisle, the man in the center was the only one to notice the judgmental looks that had momentarily been sent their way. He smiled grimly as he returned those looks with a stony glare, but the two redheads on either side of him wore nearly identical expressions as they gazed with adoration at the men they loved.
END