Once they knew Charlie was going to be okay, Matt and Jodi decided to return home. Jodi knew her son would need to nurse soon and was anxious to return to him. By the time they left the hospital plans were already being made for that evening. Matt had volunteered to go to the airport to begin collecting those flying in. Realizing the limitations of her usefulness in legal matters, Penny had decided to help by using what her God-given talent (and her mother's business acumen) had given her. Money. She arranged for hotel rooms for the entire family descending on Virginia plus the others from the SPLC.
Jodi and Matt entered their home greeted by the hungry wails of their son and a look of censure from Nora Gaerte. Jodi took the baby and excused herself to the quiet privacy of the nursery giving her husband an apologetic look as she left him to explain to his parents what was going on. She listened from the other room as he told them Charlie would be alright and that he needed to go to the airport.
"Why?" asked Matthew.
"The Clan is gathering," Matt said then had to explain. "The rest of Jodi's extended family is flying in. I volunteered to shuttle people out from the airport."
"They can't take a cab?" Nora complained.
"You need any help, Matt?" his father asked ignoring his wife's rudeness.
"Jodi needs to rest. So she's going to stay here and take a nap. We brought her parent's SUV back with us. If you can follow me out to Dulles in it, we should be able to get the first arrivals in one trip and take them over to the hospital. Joe's landing at National from Chicago about the same time as the group at Dulles, but Abby harassed Bart into going to get him."
"What do you need me to do?" Nora asked reluctantly.
"Take care of Jed so Jodi can get some sleep. Tonight we're going over to the hotel where everyone's staying. Penny's buying dinner, and everyone's going to just spend some time catching up before we start planning strategy for the lawsuit."
"You're a reporter, Matt. Are you sure you shouldn't stay out of it?"
Matt chuckled. "My boss is coming too, Dad. He's part of the Barlet clan as well. We'll keep ourselves out of the reporting about the lawsuit. Danny will probably do some editorials, but they'll put disclaimers on everything anyway stating that Danny, Sara, and I work at the Post and what our relationship to the lawsuit is."
Matt and his father were exhausted by the time they returned home that afternoon. Matthew was no longer used to the frantic pace of a crisis as he had once been as a member of the Chicago Fire Department. As a reporter, Matt was used to stress and long hours. His instincts were telling him to be prepared for a lot of long hours in the coming weeks. He and his father gladly gave up the driver's seats in the two vehicles to their wives for the drive to the hotel. An hour later they arrived at the hotel to find that reporters and Penny's fans were milling around outside. Matthew and Nora followed close to the younger couple as they pushed through the gathering crowd.
"Quite a crowd out here isn't it?" Joe commented as he helped clear a path through the reporters shouting questions at Congresswoman Gaerte. Matt and Jodi leaned protectively over Jed's carrier shielding him from the cameras and lights. "Back off!" barked Joe in the authoritative voice he learned from Ron Butterfield and later perfected at Quantico.
"Joe!" Mike McGarry called to him across the lobby then quickly jogged over to them. "Dee's looking for you."
"Where is she?" Joe asked. He had been hoping to put this confrontation off for a little while longer. Joe was not a man who enjoyed crawling, but he knew his conversation with Dee would involve a great deal of it. Two months ago when he had accepted the assignment to the Chicago office, he hadn't even discussed it with Dee. Mary Delores "Dee" McGarry was her father's daughter and didn't take kindly to her fiancée making decisions for both of them. He hadn't even thought about what a move to Chicago would mean to her residency. It would be at least a year before she could get into a residency program with a Chicago hospital. A year of wasted time. After their last volcanic fight, Dee had returned his ring to him. Joe had had a lot of time to think about what a stupid thing he'd done in the last two months assigned to surveillance on a corruption case. He could feel the warm metal of the ring resting over his heart suspended from the chain around his neck. He had taken to wearing it as some sort of talisman.
"Dee?" he asked entering CJ and Toby Ziegler's room where Mike had told him he would find Dee. "Can we talk?" Joe asked before she could respond.
Dee nodded rising from her seat on the bed where she'd been talking with her mother, Margaret, and her aunt. She led him into the connecting room where Penny sat talking on the phone, but when she saw them enter the room she quickly ended her call and excused herself saying she wanted to catch up with Dee's mother.
"Let me speak first, Dee. Please?" Joe asked as soon as the door had shut.
"Joe..."
"Please? I was wrong, Dee. I shouldn't have decided for both of us. I didn't even thing about what my being assigned to Chicago would mean to your residency. I was stupid. Let me fix it?" Joe asked. "I've talked to the AD in Chicago and explained the situation. I can have a transfer back to DC."
"Oh Joe," Dee moaned. "You can't fix it that easy!"
"I can't fix it at all with us in two different states! I miss you, Reddee" he confessed coming forward to play with a strand of her long red hair. "I'm not going to let us end like this. Because I was a stupid inconsiderate jerk. We can work this out, Dee. Please."
"Joe, there's something you need to know," Dee told him. "Remember that last fight."
"You gave this back to me," Joe reminisced as he pulled the ring from around his neck.
Tears welled up in Dee's eyes upon seeing the ring he'd chosen for her. "We ended up in bed," she reminded him. "I'm pregnant, Joe." His mouth hung open like a fish as her words penetrated the fog in his brain. "Close your mouth, Special Agent Young" Dee ordered.
"The condom broke," he remembered. Dee, like her mother, was unable to take birth control pills because they made her ill. They had both been responsible for birth control throughout their relationship, but that night they'd used a condom.
"History repeating itself," she admitted.
It was no secret, in fact it was public knowledge, that her elder brother Michael Joseph McGarry had been the result of an accident between Leo McGarry and his longtime assistant Margaret Donnelly. Margaret had shown up at the hotel room Leo called home drunk from a New Year's Eve party held in the hotel's restaurant after her date ditched her. Leo had tucked her into his bed before taking a blanket and curling his tall frame up on the couch. Several hours later Margaret had appeared and led him back to bed saying there was no reason they couldn't as two adults share the bed. When morning came Leo had been guiltily contrite believing he'd taken advantage of her, but Margaret hadn't let him feed that guilt. She'd told him he would make it up to her by taking her out for a real date, and that night he had. Two months later when she realized she was pregnant, they were already committed to a relationship. Leo still worried about the age difference between them, but he wouldn't miss this second chance at fatherhood. They'd weathered the negative op ed pieces in the media. After all, Leo McGarry was hardly the first man to marry a much younger woman, and their obvious devotion to one another made even Mary Marsh go quiet after a few months. For eight years he'd been a wonderful father to Mike and Dee who had followed two years later until his unexpected death from a heart attack. Mike still had strong memories of their father while Dee's memories of him were mostly from family videos and stories. Her mother had remarried two years after her father's death, but Dee and Mike both adored their redheaded step-father.
"I don't care how it happened. I'm happy. The thought of our baby growing inside of you...," he whispered. "Will you take this back, Dee?" Joe asked holding up the ring.
"I won't marry you for the baby, Joe."
"Not for the baby. For us. Would I still be carrying this around if I didn't still want to marry you?" he demanded. "I didn't know about the baby when I was begging you to give us a second chance a few minutes ago. I know its going to be rough. We're going to be parents before we're really ready for it, but no one in this family have ever run from something just because it will be hard. I want us to be a family, Dee. It'll be at least a month before I can get transferred back to DC."
"No," Dee told him. "You're not transferring back to DC."
"Damnit, Dee!" Joe shouted at her forgetting that her mother and their aunt were in the next room. "If you won't marry me. Fine! But I am transferring back to DC. I'm going to be a father to our baby."
"SHUT UP!" Dee shouted right back. "I'm going to finish out this semester then take a semester off. Maybe two so I can stay with the baby when it's young. By then I'll be able to get a residency in Chicago. I've still got two months left in this semester, so I won't be able to move out to you until then," she explained but Joe wasn't listening. He was busy returning his ring to its rightful place on her finger.
"Can we get married now?" he asked. "While everyone's here."
"Leo isn't here. Don't you want him to be your best man?" she asked.
"Somehow I think he'll forgive me," Joe told her. "We'll name the baby after him and your dad."
"No."
"We'll name him Jed then."
"We're not naming the baby after you either, Josiah Ronald Young! There are enough Josiah's and Leo's in this family already."
"How about Daniel then?" Joe asked.
"Pop'd like that," Dee agreed. "But what if it's a girl?"
"Danielle."
