I am the daughter of the infamous Rae Kelly and Beauregard Wayne…and let me tell you, that wasn't always an easy thing. My mother was known for her temper and Daddy…well, Daddy could be almost as bad. Don't get me wrong, they were the best parents a girl could ask for and I rarely saw the bad side of their tempers. That side was usually reserved for my younger twin brothers, mostly Mason. He looked like Daddy but was as wild as Mama had been when she was a child. Poppa said Mama deserved five more just like him for all the trouble she and her friends caused him growing up. Well, that's another story.
When I was younger there was a boy in our neighborhood named Liam who was good friends with my adopted cousin Kael. They were practically inseparable even though he was two years older than Kael. Seeing as my daddy and Uncle Johnny were very close, Kael was at our house almost as much as he was at his own, which meant I got to see a lot of Liam. Looking back, I think I knew even at the age of eleven that I would marry Liam one day. But, I'm getting ahead of myself…I'm bad about that.
That was about a year after Daddy had an accident at work and spent several months in bed barely able to walk. As Daddy was nearing the end of his recovery Liam started spending more time at our house, even when Kael wasn't there. Sometimes Liam would stay for dinner and go home when Mama would send us kids to bed…and I even remember a time or two when he was there for breakfast before school. Mama and Daddy never seemed to mind that he was at our house more than his own…and they never said anything when Liam would show up looking like he had been in a fight. Mama would just patch him up quietly and feed him or let him take a nap on the couch.
One night I heard something on the fire escape outside my window and when I got up to look, there was Liam curled up trying to stay warm. He begged me not to get my parents, but I did give him my blanket to help stay warm. Come to find out that the people he had thought were his parents were actually his birth mother's parents and they took him from his father when he was almost three after his mother had died. His birth father drank away the next ten years and then showed up wanting his son back. Liam had gone, thinking that it would get him away from his grandparents who beat him regularly. Only he hadn't counted on meeting his match on stubbornness with the father he had never known. His birth father was Liam "Spot" Conlon, one of Mama's childhood friends. I think she was mad at herself for not seeing it before then.
As the weather grew even colder, he stopped simply sleeping on the fire escape when he needed to get away from his father. He now would climb through my window and go downstairs and settle himself on the couch for the night with the blanket that Mama, Aunt North and Nana had made just for him. I had always wondered why he left it at our house instead of taking it home. I guess Mama and Daddy had given him permission to come inside, because they never told him to stop. Although when I turned thirteen they did give him his own key to the house. I started missing the whispered conversations we sometimes had before he would go downstairs.
It was several years later before I heard the old familiar noise of him climbing the fire escape and settling down under my window. I was eighteen and we had been courting for two years. Confused, I hurried to the window and opened it. Sure enough, there was my Liam kneeling outside my window. It was the moment I had been dreaming of! He had come to ask me to marry him…and of course, I said yes! How could I not say yes? I wanted to be married in Mama's wedding dress, but it had not survived four very curious children, so my cousin Callie graciously offered me the dress she had made for her own wedding before her beloved died during the war.
A pleasant surprise greeted me on the morning on my wedding. My mother's older brother, my adored Uncle Peb, had come to see me marry my sweetheart. And to my even greater surprise, he had brought me a gown from Paris to wear on my special day. It was to be a day full of surprises, for Mama gave me a strand of pearls that she had worn on her wedding day. They had been given to her by Papa's mother only a few months Mama married Daddy. Later that day when I walked to meet my groom I felt almost like a princess in the fairy tales that Daddy had read to me when I was little.