AN: Here we are, another chapter here. I hope there's many more to come.
A very special thanks to a very dear friend, who knows who she is, for helping me to start working through some of the problems I was having in getting this one going again.
I hope you enjoy! Let me know what you think!
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"You didn't make a scene, did you?" Carol asked.
She'd waited until after church. She'd waited until they got home and everyone's clothes had been changed. She'd waited until they'd accomplished things they needed to accomplish, because there was no hurry to admonish her husband in any way. She'd waited until there were absolutely no witnesses because, no matter what, she didn't want to be one of those wives that scolded her husband in public. Daryl was good to her, and though he wasn't perfect—because nobody was—he was just about as close to perfect as she imagined anyone ever came to being.
He loved her, and he granted her perfect freedom to speak her mind to him. She would never want to abuse that, though, and even accidentally use it to belittle or emasculate him in public.
After church, Carol had prepared a meal—a light one, according to Daryl's request—of chilled chicken salad made from the leftover chicken from their dinner the night before. She'd served it with a cold salad and a plate full of sliced tomatoes and cucumbers they'd picked up, on the way home from church, at the roadside stand where they tended to buy much of their locally grown produce. She rounded off the meal with thick slices of fresh buttered bread, one of Daryl's favorites.
After they'd all eaten their fill, Jack had gone down for a nap and Daryl had taken June out to the yard to play catch with her. He'd worn the little girl out, and she'd been content to go and sit quietly with her crayons, after a while, and color in the shady corner of the porch. Jack, red-faced and groggy from his short nap, had joined them outside to play on the porch, and Daryl had moved the little piece of lattice he kept outside so that it would block Jack from trying to go down the porch steps. The baby was unbothered, and appreciated when Carol spread his blanket out for him and dropped his colored blocks there for him to play with. Carol brought lemonade out to cool Daryl down while he rocked in the swing and smoked cigarettes.
When she asked him about what happened at church, she didn't raise her voice, and she didn't scold. She didn't feel the need.
In fact, she kept her voice low so that June wouldn't pay them any attention. She typically ignored most conversation, between adults, unless it contained certain key words that caught her interest, or unless it got loud enough that she became concerned about what was being discussed and whether or not it impacted her.
"This is good lemonade," Daryl offered, keeping his voice at a June-approved volume. "These the lemons you bought the other day?"
"You know they are, Daryl," Carol said, smirking at him. She knew he was avoiding her question, and he knew it, too. He smiled to himself. "Did you make a scene with Judy Rigors today?"
"When you ever known me to make a scene?" He asked, moving closer to her on the porch swing. Carol smiled to herself when he leaned and pressed a cold kiss—his lips were almost icy from the cold glass—to the side of her neck.
"She looked just about pale, Daryl," Carol said. "When she came down from the Sunday School room."
"We just had a chat," Daryl said. "That's all. Nothin' for you to worry about."
Daryl reached his hand over and rested it on Carol's thigh. He rocked the swing with his foot, and squeezed her thigh beneath his fingers. Carol leaned against him.
"A lot of people seemed surprised by the announcement," Carol said. "The prayer request."
"Decent amount of congratulations come from all around," Daryl mused. "Took us easy an extra fifteen or twenty minutes to make it out the door." Carol hummed her agreement. "Won't be long, now, and everyone in town's going to know. They'll be coming up to you everywhere you go, for the next little while, to ask about the baby an' tell you how wonderful it is that you're expecting."
"They will," Carol confirmed. "Does that make you happy?"
"What do you mean?" Daryl asked. He laughed to himself. "It ain't about me."
"To me? It's all about you," Carol offered. "I want you to be happy."
"And the only thing I want is for you to be happy," Daryl offered.
Carol sipped her lemonade. It was a touch bitter, but she was scared that her tastes were changing and she couldn't trust them any longer. She'd used the same amount of sugar that she normally used, and she'd used the same glass pitcher that she always used. The lemonade had no reason to taste any different than it normally did. Still, it tasted more bitter than usual to her, but she feared that adding more sugar would make it unbearably sweet to Daryl.
The bitter wasn't entirely unsatisfying, in its own way. She had to admit, to herself, that it was doing something to settle the feeling of nausea that she almost always had—like some kind of background noise—churning around in her stomach.
"The people in this town, Daryl, are always going to see me the same as they always have. It's never going to change. They're going to see me as the crazy young woman who—who got pregnant out of wedlock and lost her mind," Carol said.
"You didn't lose your mind," Daryl said. "You're the sanest person I know. Hell—you're a lot saner than half the people in this town."
"My point is that…most of them are always going to think you could've done better, and they're never going to be happy for me. Not really."
"Hershel Greene pointed something out to me," Daryl said. "He said that, sometimes, people aren't happy for you because—well, I guess 'cause they see somethin' you got that they don't have. They wish they had it. It's like jealousy, but they turn it into not liking you because it's easier on them to not like you than it is to just accept that they're jealous."
"You think people are jealous that I lost my mind, Daryl?" Carol asked. He scolded her with nothing more than an expression.
"Want you to stop with that line of talk," Daryl said. His voice was firm. It left no doubt that he was serious. "You ain't done it in a long time and, frankly, I'm not real comfortable that it's comin' back pretty strong. I'ma say this once, and then we puttin' it to bed. You didn't lose your mind. You were mistreated. Abandoned. Hurt—in every sense of the word. Betrayed. Experimented upon. It's a wonder with everything they done to you an' give you, that you didn't lose your mind…it really is. But you didn't lose your mind, Carol. I don't like to hear it, and I'll ban the words in my house if I gotta."
Carol smiled to herself. She caught Daryl's hand in hers and squeezed his fingers. She released them only because he moved to get up, and she let him, so that he could resolve an issue at the other end of the porch where Jack had decided to try to steal his sister's things and June had begged help from her father to save her crayons.
Carol smiled at the cherub faced little boy that came back, with his father, and accepted being placed firmly on his lap. She touched his cheek and he smiled at her, baring the little tips of his bottom baby teeth—the emergence of which were making him especially vocal about his likes and many, many dislikes.
For just a second, though, Jack looked like all was great and wonderful in the world. He raised up the wooden block he was holding in his hands and gnawed on the side of it.
"He needs a rag to chew," Carol said. She got up and went into the house for a cold cloth that the baby could chew. It soothed his sore gums, and she imagined it was softer on the damaged tissue than the other things that he liked to gnaw. When she came back onto the porch, she offered the cloth in Daryl's direction, talked June into drinking a little of the lemonade before returning to her work, and then she settled into the swing next to Daryl again. "Maybe you're right, Daryl. Maybe I never lost my mind. But—even you have to admit that my grasp on it got a little loose at times."
Daryl frowned deeply. He kissed the side of Jack's head, and Jack responded to the affection by playfully howling at him and trying to feed him the rag that he was holding in his fist.
"You know I wouldn't say nothin' to ever hurt your feelings, or scare you, or…upset you," Daryl said.
Carol's stomach churned a little in response to the words because she could practically hear a "but" following them. Still, she wanted to hear what he had to say. She wanted to validate his feelings in the same way that he validated hers.
"I want you to be honest with me, Daryl," Carol said. "I think—I've tried to prove to you that I'm a big girl, and I can handle that."
"Ain't about that," Daryl said. "Listen—I hear men talkin' all the time about their wives losin' their minds, once a month, when her time's come upon her. But—you never really done that. Then I hear 'em tellin' me all the time that I should be happy that we adopted June and Jack 'cause it's a thousand times worse when she's expecting."
"And you're worried I'm going to lose my mind," Carol said.
"Not in the literal sense of the word," Daryl said. "But I do worry that it's gonna be harder on you. Not because of you, Carol. But on account of everything they gave you and did to you while you were at Sunny Meadows."
Jack decided he'd had enough of Daryl, and he stretched his arms toward Carol and called out a string of "Mamas" to get her attention. She gladly took the little boy into her arms and cuddled him against her. She smiled to herself, too, to see the unmistakable expression of love cross Daryl's face when he regarded the both of them.
"I can't promise that things won't affect me," Carol said. "And—you know that it scares me, too."
"But we'll get through it together," Daryl supplied, finishing what he already knew she would say—what he would say, too.
She smiled to herself and nodded.
"We'll get through it together," Carol agreed. "What I do know is that I've wanted this, desperately, for so long, Daryl. It really does feel like a miracle. Like our miracle. And I'm happy. I'm so happy. And—I don't know if it makes any sense, Daryl, or if it's some sign that I'm already losing my mind, but I'm looking forward to being even happier. To being even more excited."
"That's what I want you to have," Daryl said. "All the happiness you can have. All the excitement. Everything you wanted to have."
Carol licked her lips and thought about everything that had been running through her mind. She thought about everything she'd been stewing over for a while.
"Maybe what Hershel said is true," Carol said. "Around here? Even if they've got their half a dozen children, Daryl, and their…spotless reputations of having been with one man, and only one man, in their whole lives—since they got married? Even if all their children were born to them, naturally, the way they say it was supposed to happen? Daryl—I can't believe they have everything that I have. I can't believe that they feel as loved as I do, and as lucky, and as blessed, as I feel."
Daryl leaned to kiss her cheek, but she turned her face. It wasn't fast enough to catch his lips and, instead, he kissed the corner of her mouth, but that only made him smile at her, genuinely. He kissed her again, this time purposefully, and she returned the kiss with more enthusiasm than most of the little blue-haired ladies at church would have said was proper for the front porch.
But Carol cared less and less, these days, about what was proper. She loved her husband, and he approved of loving on the front porch on a Sunday. They were married, after all, and God himself had blessed their union, so why shouldn't they share a kiss or two in the shade of a beautiful day?
"I love you," Carol breathed out the moment that their lips parted.
"I love you," Daryl assured her.
"Daryl—let them be jealous of us if that's what they have to do to feel better," Carol said. "I don't need them. They've never approved of me, and they never will. I ruined that a long time ago, maybe."
"Maybe we both did," Daryl offered.
"But it doesn't matter. I don't want what they don't want to give me. I don't want them pretending they care about me—about our family—if they don't. I just want you to be happy. And I want to be happy. And I want us to have our little family."
"We got all that," Daryl said. "But—I know there are things you're supposed to do. Things you're supposed to celebrate and…I don't know…just things that you do, Carol. To make it all extra special. I don't want you to miss out on none of those things."
Carol shrugged her shoulders.
"Then we do those things," She said. "All of them. You and me."
Daryl laughed to himself. He almost instantly looked lighter. Carol could practically see an invisible weight, which he'd put there himself, lifting off his shoulders. He smiled to himself.
"Just you and me?" Daryl asked.
"Well, and our family and friends—if they want to," Carol said. "But—yeah, Daryl, why not? That's how it's always been right? You and me. Why change now?"
"That'll be enough?" Daryl asked, furrowing his brow at her.
Carol leaned against him and laughed to herself when Jack used his cloth to wipe at Daryl's face like he was cleaning him.
"You've always been enough for me, Daryl," Carol assured him. She smiled to herself and closed her eyes for a moment as Daryl affectionately put his arm around her shoulder and kissed her head.
"And you're everything to me," he offered.