EPILOGUE
Eight months later and they were back in Kennebunkport for a Saturday barbecue.
Samuel was manning the grill. Eloise and Wyatt were having a Karaoke contest. Don and Edmund were complaining about the other one cheating as they trash-talked their way through another game of Tunk.
Don and Wyatt’s girlfriends were further back on the property, on the tennis court, although they were laughing at their atrocious play more than they were hitting the ball over the net. But it was all good fun.
And Maude, helping Samuel at the grill, was checking her watch. Again.
It had been a tough eight months after all that went down on that very same estate. And then Natasha’s arrest and subsequent trial didn’t help to calm matters either.
Maude covered the trial for the Dillon Post-Dispatch after Edmund pulled some strings and got her rehired as a reporter.
Natasha had once been an editor at the paper and the publisher wanted firsthand reports to keep their readers informed.
When the hammer came down hard on her, with the judge giving her fifteen years in prison for conspiracy to commit murder, among other crimes, Eloise felt it was too harsh.
But Samuel and Edmund felt it wasn’t harsh enough.
Maude didn’t render an opinion. She was just glad it was all over now.
And it was. They were moving on together.
Edmund kept his parents involved in his life for the first time in his life, and whenever there was a holiday or even just a desire to get together, they would fly to him, or he and Maude would fly to them.
And Maude and Samuel, remarkably to everybody, had become thick as thieves.
They spoke constantly on the phone. She sought his advice, and he sought hers.
There was a mutual respect between the two of them as if they understood each other.
Then Samuel’s phone began ringing. They both seemed startled, because they had been expecting a call, and he quickly answered. Then he nodded. “Yes,” he said. “Send them back.”
And with those words, he ended the call, turned down the grill and closed the top, and looked at Maude. “Fingers crossed,” he said.
But Maude wasn’t crossing any fingers. She was inwardly praying and outwardly making the sign of the cross even though she wasn’t Catholic.
And then the glass doors slid open and Edmund Austin Keating, Junior and Princilla Meredith Keating stepped out onto the patio.
Everything stopped when they walked out.
Even the two girlfriends, who didn’t know who they were, could sense it was something special.
Eloise stopped singing and Wyatt stopped dancing to her tune.
Don, who was about to sling his card onto the pile in a definitive show of who was really the master of the game, stopped mid-sling.
And Edmund, who could hardly believe his eyes, began to slowly stand from his chair.
“Austin?” he said with a sense of shock in his voice. “Princilla?”
When the two young people, both in their early twenties, saw their father, a rush of emotion overtook them and they began rushing to him.
His chair fell backwards as he began rushing to them.
He had not seen his children in years. But there they were.
Both of them together. And in the middle of that patio, they fell into each other’s arms. It was a reunion he did not see coming.
As his children was clinging to him and he was clinging to them, he looked over at his father and at Maude. Because they were the only two who didn’t appear shocked. They were the only two with big smiles on their faces.
But Edmund was elated and baffled too. He had no clue a reunion was in the works. “How?” he asked his father as he held his children.
“It was all Maude,” Samuel said. “She told me those children needed their father, and their father needed them.”
“But Austin was incarcerated.”
Samuel nodded. “Maude got on my case about that too. She said I was always getting Natasha out of tough spots, why wasn’t I doing the same for my grandson?
When I told her he made his bed and had to lie in it, she called that bullshit.
Especially when we knew he was taking the fall for Tasha.
So I pulled out the stops and pulled some strings. And there he is.”
Edmund was amazed. He thanked his father.
Then he looked at that woman called Maude and mouthed thank you to her so heartfelt that it made him even more emotional than he already was.
And then he and his children walked over to the firepit further in the backyard, sat down, and caught up on all those years upon years that they had missed.
Nearly two hours later, Edmund was heading for the patio while his parents were over at the firepit with their grandchildren catching up on all those lost years too.
As he walked onto the patio to sit beside Maude, she was smiling and shaking her head.
Edmund started smiling too, as he watched her sitting up there in her shorts and t-shirt, looking angelic to him, although he had no clue what was so funny to her. “What has you unable to stop smiling?” he asked as he sat beside her.
“Your children,” she said. “I was surprised when I first laid eyes on them yesterday. You definitely have a type.”
Edmund immediately knew what she meant. Because both of his children were biracial black and white. He laughed.
“They’re gorgeous, Edmund,” Maude said as they both looked across the backyard at them. “And so sweet,” she added. “I expected attitude all day long from both of them. But instead I got relief and a sense of excitement about reuniting with their father.”
“Princilla told me how you used your investigative reporter skills and tracked her down.”
Maude nodded. “While your father was working on getting Austin out of jail, I was working on finding out just where Princilla was.”
“Did you have the misfortune of meeting their mothers?” Edmund asked her.
“Nope. Just the children. I didn’t want any of that baby mama drama,” she added, and Edmund laughed.
And then they settled back down to that easy quietness they loved.
It had been a long eight months for them too.
They both agreed to take their relationship slow so that Edmund could get accustomed to the monogamous lifestyle, and so that Maude could get accustomed to Edmund.
But she refused to get a job in Baltimore.
She didn’t want to uproot her life based on a maybe.
But there was a compromise: She had to move into an apartment that Edmund would choose and that Edmund would pay for.
It was definitely upscale, in an exclusive Dillon neighborhood, but she understood she represented him too.
He also got her a car, a Mercedes S class no less, and paid for it too.
But her refusal to pack up and move to Baltimore was tough on Edmund.
Because they only got to see each other on the weekends.
And it usually involved him sending his plane to fly her into Baltimore on Friday evening, and back to Georgia on Sunday night.
But he understood why she preferred to do it that way.
His lifestyle before he met her was everything she despised. He knew he had a lot to atone for.
But then, when they saw Don and his lady, and Wyatt and his lady standing up and slow-dancing to a song neither one of them recognized, Edmund stood up and asked Maude to dance too. Not because he wanted to dance. But because he wanted to hold her.
And as they slow-dragged to the music, they stared at each other as if they still were figuring it out.
Maude hated that they were in a long distance relationship almost as much as Edmund did.
But he hadn’t made any move to change it, which told her he was still fighting against a full commitment.
And it would take nothing short of a full commitment for her to give up her life in Dillon.
But then, when the song ended and Maude was moving out of his arms, he pulled her back in. “I almost forgot,” he said.
“Forgot what?” she asked.
And that was when he took her hand and then got down on bended knee.
When everybody saw it, a chain of excitement filled the backyard.
His children and his parents hurried over to the patio.
His parents loved Maude. Don and Wyatt and even their girlfriends loved Maude.
And Edmund’s children, although just getting to know her, really liked her too. They all were thrilled.
But Edmund was more nervous than an unrepentant hoe in church.
But this, he felt, was long overdue. “I changed my lifestyle for you, Maude, because I knew you were a lady who wasn’t going to settle for anything less than total commitment.
It wasn’t easy. I’m not going to pretend it was.
Sometimes I wasn’t sure if it was truly for me.
But the one thing I knew with absolute certainty was that you were for me.
I knew with absolute certainty that you were worth it, Maude. ”
Maude’s heart soared even higher.
“That fact, that you were more than worth it, is what kept me on the straight and narrow,” he said to laughter from everybody assembled.
But Maude was a ball of emotion. So much so that Samuel went over and placed his arm around her.
But he and Eloise had been praying for this very moment for months.
Especially Samuel. Because he knew Maude wasn’t someday going to be his daughter-in-law.
She was going to be his daughter. Because in every way except biologically, she already was.
And when Edmund pulled out the box, opened it, and displayed a huge diamond ring, Maude could not stop the tears from trickling down her joyous face.
Then Edmund, the unpretentious man that he was, didn’t go around the world to get around the corner. He went around the corner and got on with it. “Maudetta Drayton,” he said, “will you do me the honor and the pleasure of marrying me and becoming my wife?”
Maude always thought, if he ever said those words to her, that she was going to play coy or be cute and say no at first and then laugh it off and say yes. But she did none of those things. Because the reality was too beautiful. And she wasn’t about to play with that. “Yes,” she said. “Oh yes.”
And Edmund put that ring on it. Then he stood up, grunting as he did, and kissed her as they all cheered.
After all the hugs and congratulations were over, Edmund took Maude into his arms for another dance. No longer with his girlfriend. Now with his fiancée.
But as Eloise found the song for them to dance to, instead of dancing, they both laughed. It was Donnie Hathaway singing Then There’s Maude. And through their laughter, they danced anyway:
“And then there’s Maude.
(And then there’s Maude).
And then there’s Maude.
And then there’s …
That old compromising, enterprising,
anything but tranquilizing.
Right on Maude!”
He dipped her so low, and they were laughing so hard, that they stumbled and fell. Which caused everybody else to laugh too.
But Maude was still in his arms. He held onto her. He didn’t let her go.
And that little fact, to Maude, was the perfect sign that they were going to make it. That they were going to be just fine.