Work Text:
The armchair isn’t nearly big enough for the two of them - even before age and childbearing and the happiness of well-fed years - but Katherine snuggles into Jack’s lap, drawing the quilt over them for warmth.
They’ll both be uncomfortable in the morning (and, woe, the embarrassed groans that they’ll earn if the children see them), but neither would consider separate chairs.
“You didn’t read ahead, didja Ace?”
Katherine feigned insult, “Of course not! I promised, didn’t I?”
“It wouldn’t be the first time ya did it. And it has been a whole week.”
“Have a bit of faith in your wife, Jack Kelly. I didn’t even read the chapter’s title.”
He cleared his throat and began.
Captain Jim was buried in the little over-harbor graveyard, very near to the spot where the wee white lady slept. His relatives put up a very expensive, very ugly “monument”–a monument at which he would have poked sly fun had he seen it in life. But his real monument was in the hearts of those who knew him, and in the book that was to live for generations.
She loved reading for her children and with them. Patient and proud, as they learned their letters and how words came together to create stories. Laughing, as Jack and Davey performed for the applause of Katherine and little Lucy. But this time alone with Jack was precious in a different way. Curled together in the armchair, as close as they could be. When Katherine read, Jack (rarely one to sit with anything resembling stillness) would gently run his fingers through her hair.
And there were, of course, times when they had to interrupt their reading because of that lack of stillness -
Still, reading together had been one of their favorite things to do, from the very start. Newspaper articles sometimes (her own, for his thoughts and critiques, and those written by colleagues and strangers) and books of all kinds. Jack’s serial novels about the West. Fairy tales for the children. And Katherine’s own favorite series about a proud and romantic orphan …
Oh, Jack had teased her endlessly when she first brought home “Anne of Green Gables”, not so many years ago. And that was without Katherine ever telling him (though certainly he knew, he had to know) that there were times when Gilbert Blythe reminded her for all the world of her young husband. The tall boy with curly brown hair and roguish eyes. His smug smile, obviously, which appeared when he knew that he was absolutely completely without a doubt right (and she was certainly, definitely, without question wrong).
He’d teased her, certainly, but dutifully read the books. When they read the very first book together, Katherine was a young mother. Now it was Anne and Gilbert, navigating the early years of marriage and family.
“But it will be rompers next–and then trousers–and in no time he will be grown-up,“ she sighed.
“Well, you would not want him to stay a baby always, Mrs. Doctor, dear, would you?” said Susan.
Poor Anne. It felt like that, too. One moment Davey was her baby, always happiest when he was in her arms, and now he couldn’t wait to be out of her embrace.
She stretched her legs out, entwining them with Jack’s, and closed her eyes while he read. She wasn’t sleepy (she wouldn’t fall asleep and miss the end of the book), but felt a sense of warmth and peace. A quiet house, a warm quilt, and Jack.
One October morning Anne wakened to the realisation that she had slept for the last time under the roof of her little house. The day was too busy to indulge regret and when evening came the house was stripped and bare. Anne and Gilbert were alone in it to say farewell. Leslie and Susan and Little Jem had gone to the Glen with the last load of furniture. The sunset light streamed in through the curtainless windows.
“It has all such a heart-broken, reproachful look, hasn’t it?” said Anne. “Oh, I shall be so homesick at the Glen tonight!”
“We have been very happy here, haven’t we, Anne-girl?” said Gilbert, his voice full of feeling.
She understood that feeling, too. Their first home together, a small flat (all that they could afford as the newly hired illustrator for the Sun and his reporter bride), had been something of a dream in the beginning. It wasn’t the mansion that Katherine grew up knowing or the lodging house that had been Jack’s home, but something in between for the two of them. Always full of friends and loud voices and the smell of paints and typewriter ink. The home where little Davey had taken his first awkward steps. And, for a few brief months, the first home for little Lucille.
They’d been happy there, indeed.
“Good-bye, dear little house of dreams,” she said.
Katherine snuggled against Jack. They’d begin a new book next Sunday.