"Babe," Mort said as they made their way up the interstate. Carmen was, admittedly, half asleep in the passenger seat, so Mort took his hand off of the gear shifter and nudged her gently with the back of his knuckles until she stirred, shaking her head fervently and looked back at Mort with drowsy, bleary eyes.
"I'm awake."
"The drool on your chin says otherwise."
Carmen quickly jolted to complete wakefulness and pulled down the sun visor, tipping open the mirror and swiping at her face, only to realize that Mort had been bluffing and was now laughing heartily at her as she turned to glare playfully at him. He eventually allowed his laughter to die down, letting the car go quiet for a moment before asking his question. "Would now be a bad time to mention that I might have left out a couple details about my family?"
"What?"
"I - well, I actually have a lot of family," he said with a nervous grin, very purposefully keeping his eyes on the road to avoid the look of surprise he knew would be plastered across Carmen's face. "I don't speak with them much, but - you know. Aunts, uncles, the whole shebang. I'm not sure how many of them I'm actually related to -"
"Oh. Those kinds of aunts and uncles," Carmen smirked. Though she was unfamiliar with what it felt like to have extended family, she knew well enough that there were some people you knew for so long that it was just more useful to consider them family anyway. She'd grown that way with Rob's family, after all. "I'm sure they'll be great," she chuckled.
"They'll love you, I don't doubt that for a half a second," Mort assured. "But, well… my mother can be a little bit… eccentric."
"Mort, I'm really in no position to judge what your parents are like," she reminded, raising her eyebrows gently. Mort bristled slightly, not out of any ill grudge harbored towards his fiance, but out of reflex. It was difficult to mention her parents without some shadow of discomfort. Carmen sighed gently and gave his hand a reassuring squeeze. "I'm sure it'll be fine."
This was the first long trip that Carmen and Mort were taking since… since Cape Cod, Carmen recalled with a small smile. That had been years ago, before they'd split up. Actually, they had first split up in Boston, during that trip, but she still remembered the beginning of their adventure there with fondness. She drew her knees up so her feet rested on the edge of the seat - she'd discarded her shoes a good while ago and they had since slid somewhere under her seat - and contented herself to quietly look out the window. Mort glanced over at her from time to time, a lopsided grin coming onto his face with every passing look.
"Babe?"
"Hm?"
"Are you sure you're okay with using your journal for my story?" he asked suddenly, so abruptly that Carmen's attention was effectively jerked away from the beautiful scenery.
"Of course I'm okay," she said with a confused smile. "Why wouldn't I be?"
"Because it's about him. Because you might want to keep stuff about him private and -"
"Shooter. His name was John Shooter, he was my father, and he can't do anything to us anymore," Carmen said resolutely, with a certain braveness to her tone that Mort had to admit her loved about her. His fiancee was stubborn. She was set in her ways. But, Mort could never deny, she was daring. She was practically fearless if you asked him. She reached out and squeezed his hand which was resting on the gear shifter and smiled.
"Well, you know. It's your story. I don't want you to think that I -"
"-stole it?" Carmen supplied, raising an eyebrow gently. "We're getting married, Mort. My story is your story. None of that needs to be separate anymore. I don't want it to be."
My story is your story. Visibly relieved by such a simple statement, Mort smiled, and the pair enjoyed the remainder of the drive in relative quiet. He admittedly found it a little amazing how quickly they had rebuilt everything - even after two years of absolutely no contact, they had managed within a matter of months to find a place of balance, a point at which there was no reason to question the stability of their soon-to-be marriage.
Carmen had again fallen asleep by the time Mort pulled up in front of his old family home, where his mother now lived alone since his father's passing. Leonora Rainey, as it turned out, was already sitting on the porch and waving at Mort's car as it came up the street. Parking in the wide open driveway, Mort stepped out first to greet her.
"Hi, Ma -"
"You go years without visiting, months without calling, and the best you can give me is a 'Hi Ma'? C'mere," she said, wrapping her arms around her son and hugging him with surprising strength - Mort felt surprisingly glad that Carmen was asleep for this. Perhaps, he realized, the fact that he never grew acclimated to the idea of being an adult, getting a real job, doing what other adults do, was in part due to the fact that his mother certainly didn't see him as an adult.
"I'm here now, aren't I?" he chuckled weakly as his mother pulled back from the embrace. "Carmen just dozed off because the roads were a little slick. First rain and all - we were driving a little slow -"
"Well, don't wake the poor thing."
"She asked me to wake her up the moment we pulled into the state, she might already get on my case for being late," Mort smirked. "But Ma - she's been really excited, and really nervous, so…"
Tone it down a little, Mort had wanted to say. But he had brought Carmen here to meet his family, and mid-sentence, he realized that she might as well get used to it now if she was going to be part of it. He held up his index finger to signal for his mother to wait a moment while he traipsed back down the driveway and pulled open the passenger-side door. Giving Carmen's shoulder a brief shake, he laughed when her brow wrinkled and she mumbled a few unintelligible syllables. Leonora laughed as well - and at the sound of another person's laughter, Carmen's eyes flew open, and, as she noticed they had come to a stop, she undid her seatbelt and leapt to her feet outside of the car.
"Hi - I'm Carmen," she said, sparing Mort a brief glance that suggested he was in for an earful later. Carmen smoothed out her hair and scurried up the driveway and held out her hand to Leonora. "It's really nice to -"
But before she could finish her sentence, Leonora had already enveloped her in a hug as well - a tight, genuine bear hug that Carmen couldn't help but return, even though hesitantly. Leonora finally pulled back and placed her hands on Carmen's shoulders, appraising her briefly before looking back at Mort who had just come back up the driveway with a couple of their bags.
"She's a darling," Leonora said warmly. "You two get inside before the rain starts up again."
Leonora Rainey got straight to work making coffee and sandwiches for the pair, excited apparently to have company around while simultaneously getting a feel for her soon-to-be daughter-in-law.
"I'm just so happy that Mort's found someone who makes him happy," she said, placing a cup of coffee in front of Carmen and sitting next to her at the kitchen table so that Leonora was effectively sandwiched between the two. "He told me that you had a bit of a falling out for a while -"
"Ma."
" - but it looks like everything's fallen right back into place, hasn't it?" she said with a bright smile as Carmen raised the coffee mug to her lips, hoping to conceal the flush that had risen into her cheeks. "So, when's the wedding?"
"Well," Carmen said, looking upwards in thought. "You know, to be honest, we haven't done much planning yet. There's just been so much going on with work, and -"
"You mean, you don't have any details at all?" Leonora said, her eyes wide and piteous as though Carmen had just said that she'd been starved and raised in an attic. Once Carmen put down her coffee mug, Leonora reached out for both of her hands, squeezing them tightly. "You must be frazzled to death - but don't worry. I'll help get you two back on track. You could have it here!" she said brightly, which caused Mort to choke slightly on the bite of sandwich he had taken. Why, he wondered, did his mother always have the uncanny ability to make him feel like an embarrassed twelve-year-old?
"There's the old church down the road where Mort's father and I were married - you should take a look there," Leonora said with such excitement that Carmen almost had no choice but to mirror it - and it was in that moment that Mort realized that despite whatever her own wishes had been, Carmen had already conceded to his mother's wishes to have their wedding in Maine. "Riverside Trinity - it's small, but it's just perfect."
"I'd love to see it! Just down the road?" Carmen said with a warm smile, and while it seemed to warm Leonora Rainey's heart to the point of near-combustion, Mort fought the internal urge to grimace. Carmen was such a people-pleaser, and he knew that - but he didn't expect it to carry over to their wedding plans. However, he allowed his mother to chatter with his fiancee for a few moments before Mort found himself being pulled out of his seat and shooed away.
"You didn't need to agree to that," Mort said, crossing his arms over himself as he and Carmen walked down the small road to the church. "You could've said no and that we had other plans in mind. I could've handled it."
"I want your mother to like me," Carmen replied. "And besides - I don't have that many people I'm inviting. You do, and they're mostly from here. It makes sense. We said we wanted to be practical about this, didn't we?"
For all of her fire and spunk, there were times that Carmen was so accommodating that it could be infuriating - whether it was what to have for dinner, or now, where they were going to get married, it was nearly inevitable that her answer would be whatever was best for everyone else. Even worse, she never brought it up again, not begrudgingly, not jokingly, not ever. Instead, Mort remembered every instance of his own volition and felt bad for it yet again. Not this time. He refused to feel bad about their wedding. Even if she was set on accommodating everyone else on location, there was one part of the wedding in which he could give her exactly what she wanted, and she would have no excuse to veto.
"We'll still have Bayside Betty's cater the reception."
Mort smirked triumphantly at the grin that crossed his fiancée's face at this, and he knew that he'd won a round, at least this time. He wrapped his arm around her shoulders with a slightly triumphant grin as they walked down the road to the small church down the way his mother had suggested - an unassuming white chapel with bells and wooden doors, the likes of which city slickers like Carmen obviously had never been properly acquainted with. She gripped Mort's hand tightly and grinned with excitement.
"Can we go inside?" she said, giving his arm a slight shake - Mort chuckled, and nodded towards the door. He knew his mother would love Carmen even more than she already did when she saw the reverence with which Carmen approached the old church - it was empty for now, as it often was on days except for Sundays. People usually came in and out to light candles and say prayers, but didn't linger.
As they entered, Mort realized with admitted surprise that Carmen was genuinely in love with the small church - the way her eyes glinted in the light tinted through the stained glass was the same expression he'd seen when he'd first taken her up into the trees by Tashmore Lake. He placed a hand on her shoulder to get her attention, and she turned back with an unusually serene smile, which cemented the conclusion that she had found the place she wanted to get married.
"Well, Morton Rainey…"
They turned immediately to face the source of a voice that interrupted their moment, and found that a third person - a slightly older woman with familiar cornsilk blonde hair - had entered the small church as well, approaching Mort with strange familiarity. "The Adlers said they saw you pull up at your old house, but I didn't believe 'em - I never thought I'd see your face in town again!"
The blonde woman was smiling, but something about it seemed adamantly false when her eyes fell on Carmen, who immediately felt an unsettling but unconfirmed recognition of the woman. Mort's arm discreetly but protectively snaked around Carmen's shoulders as they withstood the woman's misplaced smile.
"Babe," Mort said, his pronunciation sharp and deliberate. "This is Claire. Claire Scaletti."
Scaletti, Carmen mulled over in her head a moment. Amy's maiden name. She instantly realized that the woman's appraising glance would inevitably be one of bitterness and loathing; Mort's grip around her shoulders tightened as he felt her posture shrink a little, a show of shame that surprised him.
"So," Claire said with a tinny, audibly forced laugh. "This is your upgrade, Morton?"
"It's - it's a pleasure to meet you," Carmen said, holding her hand out hesitantly. Mort only barely kept from wincing at his fiancée's attempts to make this experience any less terrible. Nothing could make an interaction with Claire Scaletti less terrible.
"Well. I wish I could say the same," Claire said, gently raising an eyebrow and refusing to shake Carmen's hand, which Carmen quickly withdrew to spare herself further humiliation. Claire, however, continued, completely unfazed and unencumbered by the fact that she was in a church, of all places. "So, looking at churches, I see. Good of you to want to do things right the second time around, Morton -"
"Yes, well, I figure that's what Ted was planning for Amy - a nice church wedding, don't you think?" Mort asked with a pointed smirk. "They were so excited planning their life together, they forgot the little tiny detail that she was married to me still - those hooligans."
At this brief impasse, the snaps in emotion were visible - Mort quickly shifted from awkwardness to boldness, Carmen from friendliness to discomfort… and Claire from condescension to well-concealed rage.
"Still sensitive as ever I see - never could take a joke," Claire chuckled quietly, shaking her head. "I hear your mother has a get-together going on this evening for her retirement. I think our invitation was lost in the mail. But," Claire grinned slyly, "I'll see you both there?"
"Of course," Carmen said, groping for some semblance of civility in their interaction. In the world she functioned in, after all, you pretended you liked someone until you couldn't pretend anymore. That was business. That was tact. That was not, however, the way things worked in these small towns. "We'll see you there."
At that, Mort mumbled a few trite niceties before tugging Carmen out of the church, heading back down the street towards home. Once they had gotten away from the church and, more importantly, from Claire, he groaned and shook his head, stepping ahead of Carmen and placing his hands on her shoulders.
"I think you should've let me handle that."
"We were in a church -"
"Obviously, the church needs an upgrade, because that woman stepped into it without catching on fire," Mort said, raising his eyebrows. "The Scalettis are crazy, that's why I wanted to badly to move away from here when I - when Amy and I got married." Mort immediately felt terrible at the need to bring up Amy in order to explain any of this, but he'd known that the topic of his ex-wife would come up when they came back to his hometown. Her hometown as well.
"You know how I told you about Amy always saying she - had weird little feelings?" he continued, letting go of Carmen and running his hands through his hair. "That didn't come out of nowhere. The Scalettis were always into all of that… cursing, voodoo mumbo jumbo -"
"We're hardly in a position to be calling it mumbo jumbo," Carmen pointed out. Mort paused and nodded in concession. That voodoo mumbo jumbo was the reason Shooter became a part of their lives. But that was different, Mort truly believed.
"It's usually fake," he corrected. "The Scalettis fall into that category. It's all in their heads. And you just invited them into our lives like vampires instead of nipping it in the bud. You don't even understand how -"
"I'm sure they just want some closure," Carmen interrupted, holding up a hand to cease Mort's tirade. "And if putting up with uncomfortable questions for a while gets us a little closer to that, then we can deal, can't we?"
No. No, we can't, Mort wanted to say. He wanted to say that he couldn't - he didn't want to deal with the Scalettis. But when Carmen was set on trying to make amends with someone, he knew arguing was no good until peace talks completely went up in smoke. And with the Scalettis, Mort knew that would not take long.
