Our Private Eden: Family

A squirrely and insecure man with twitchy, rheumy eyes from years of helping himself for free to liquor from bar at Conway's, I introduced myself as Holly's new husband. His face blanched, he swallowed hard and he took a couple of steps back, outside my easy grasp.

"Darnell, I've heard from no fewer than four people that you've accused Holly of lewd and indecent conduct, lies I'd love to hear you repeat to my face, though I know you're not man enough to do that."

His thin lips began to twitch as his eyes jumped nervously about for the best, fastest exit. A hand began inching toward his pocket.

"Pull that hand away from your pocket and the knife inside it or I will put you in the hospital for weeks."

He nervously folded his arms in front of him and stared at the floor.

"Now Darnell, here's how this is going to work. I am going to hear starting this evening from folks in this town that you have admitted to them you lied about my wife. If I don't, three things are going to happen. First, not one man from the Wallington Construction crew will ever set foot in this place again. Second, I know you're behind on your loan payments and we will use Holly's considerable clout as a major Ozark National Bank shareholder to call the note you took out to buy this place from her which puts you in foreclosure. Third, I will tie up every asset you have suing you for defamation. This place will have boards on the windows and a for-sale sign in front of it by Christmas if I do that and you'll be living in a refrigerator box under the railroad bridge. Got it?

He nodded.

"Good," I said, taking a step toward him, close enough to smell the deep rot on his breath that's a marker among chronic alcoholics. My voice turned low, full of menace. "And if economic and legal consequences don't work, you can be sure that I will find you and make you unrecognizable to your next of kin. You understand me, you wormy bag of shit?"

His lips moved but no words came from them. So he just nodded again.

"Now, you need to get to work taking back your slander, starting with Darlene and the staff here at Conway's. And I will know if you don't."

I stared at him.

"If you have one last shred of manhood about you, look me in the eye."

He raised his head slowly, batting his eyelids like a pig in a hailstorm, his gaze meeting mine for only fractions of a second at a time before darting left and right as though expecting a fist to crash into his face at any instant.

"If I was going to hit you, you'd already be on the floor. I guess that will have to do for any expectation that you could look at me man-to-man." I shook my head in disgust, turned and walked slowly to the front door. On the way out, I glimpsed Darlene and other former colleagues of Holly's huddled silently in a doorway leading to the kitchen watching their boss get his ass handed to him and was glad to see them smiling.

●●●

Holly had decided, as I guessed she would, to keep Raymer Lodge as a getaway for us that could also be rented to families visiting Big Spring and the Current River during the summer tourist season. I urged her not to part with it because her roots were here; this place was imbued with her father's spirit. We didn't need it to amass a down payment or qualify for a mortgage. And besides, real estate holds its value over time better than about any other investment.

In our visit to Kansas City, we had made an offer on a well-kept two-story Craftsman-style home in a lovely neighborhood of Independence, the suburb that was home to President Harry Truman and that had somehow preserved its own small-town flavor and a distinctive sense of community. The house had been vacant since the 89-year-old widow who had lived there for 63 years moved to a nursing home only to die within weeks of it. Her estate was eager to get the asset sold and off the books by year's end for tax and liability reasons, so the executor accepted our offer and its requirement for a clean inspection contingent on a swift closing. Holly and I would stay with my parents for about 10 days until we could close on November 3rd, then complete a few renovations like refinishing the oak floors and replacing the old furnace with a modern forced-air central heating and cooling system before moving in.

That left us less than two weeks to box up what we would carry with us from Raymer Lodge and get to Kansas City for my first day in the office. Most of the furniture would remain in Van Buren, where Holly had hired Emily Ann Crowther, her maid of honor and owner of a growing property management company that specialized in vacation rentals, to look after it. We had already purchased a bedroom set, a sofa and recliner and a new fridge and gas range for the Craftsman. Much of the rest was heirloom furniture earmarked for me and stored in the root cellar (local term for basement) at my parents' house in Excelsior Springs, just a 20-minute drive from our new house.

"Honey, this is real, but somehow it doesn't feel real," Holly said as she sealed the top flaps of a cardboard box with a wide strip of clear packing tape and then wrote DISHES/KITCHEN on it using a red indelible marker. "It's like a long goodbye that's been shortened. All these calls from friends - their reaction when I tell them we're moving to Kansas City, that silence and sadness."

I scooted across the floor to sit beside her and run my hand through her hair, something that reliably calmed her.

"I'm listening, angel," I said.

"Oh, I'm going to be all right. I am ready mentally. I think I'm getting there emotionally. I guess we won't really know until we pull away for the last time," she said.

"I understand. I've only lived here a few months and I'm expecting some post-partum sadness myself. Not only can I feel your family's presence, but that veranda out there - the first place we kissed. This is where we began, where we first made love, where our family took root," I said, pulling her to me peppering kisses onto her wild mop of reddish-blond curls.

She repositioned herself in my lap and kissed me. Then she held my face gently between both her hands.

"I'm hearing that Darnell is admitting to people around town that he made up those lies about me - about us. Darlene told me, and Emily Ann said she'd heard about it from a couple of clients." Her gaze locked on me. "You know anything about why he'd do that?"

"Can I plead the Fifth?"

She smiled. "Thought so. What did you do?"

I borrowed Vito Corleone's famous line.

"Let's just say I made him an offer he couldn't refuse."

Holly gently turned my face toward hers and looked me in the eye. "Hey, I don't want you beating people up, got it? That said, nobody's defended my honor but me since daddy died, and I am touched. Thank you, Corey. I love you."

We hadn't planned on undressing each other that evening on the kitchen floor of Raymer Lodge among the old newspapers we were using as packing material and the filled and yet-to-be-filled cardboard boxes we had carted off from a dumpster behind Van Buren's only liquor store. But within five minutes after Holly kissed me, that's exactly what transpired. I was on my back and Holly was on all-fours above me, either kissing me or presenting her swollen nipples to the eager ministrations of my lips and tongue.

My right hand slid down her belly, past her baby bump and beneath the waistband of her pink cotton panties and the soft curls of her vee into her slit, already wet and blooming open. I swirled the hooded nub of her clitoris under the slickened pads of my first two fingers.

As my left hand fondled the nipple that my lips and tongue weren't teasing, I realized a greater fullness in her breasts as they prepared to nourish our child in a few months. Holly was more easily aroused by breast and nipple play. A couple of nights earlier in my parents' guest bedroom, I had brought her to a climax that she strived mightily to muffle just by fondling and tonguing her nipples. Now, with minimal stimulation to her clit and no digital penetration of her vagina yet, Holly was about to cum.

"I want you now," she rasped. With that, she pulled the moist gusset of her panties to one side and pressed her yearning flower onto the tip of my cock, already fully erect and poised at a 45-degree angle for Holly to impale herself. Once she made contact, she sunk fully onto me in one motion and just rested there, savoring the moment.

"Dear Lord, Holly. You're so... so beautiful. So sexy. So... so fully a woman. I've never seen you more gorgeous, more wholly irresistible than you are right now," I said.

She gave me a hungry, sultry look and lowered herself onto me, her mouth consuming mine, her tongue seeking out mine, as she ground her pussy into me, pushing me so deeply inside that I worried momentarily about the wellbeing of our baby. If it were bothering her, I reasoned, she'd let me know. She didn't. Instead she growled and fucked me with full abandon, moaning loudly as she rode down her orgasm and claimed it like the cowgirl she resembled.

As the first climactic tremor rippled through her, she did something new: she placed her hand on her lower abdomen as if to keep her baby bump in place, to assure that no harm came to it. As the muscles of her hips flexed and seized and her pelvic floor contracted, milking the cum out of me in the process, one hand remained on her tummy while she braced herself on my chest with the other.

Exhausted, her chest heaving, Holly slumped languidly onto my chest.

"Baby," she said as she caught her breath, "promise me we'll never outgrow times like this."

I whispered, caressing her gently as I planted soft kisses on her brow, her nose, her cheeks, her lips, her ear, her neck. "Talk about an offer I can't refuse."

●●●

The move was easy. Wallington paid the costs of moving, which in this case was just a Ryder box truck and some laborers to help me unload stuff at the new house. The company even paid to put us up in a Marriott near our new address in Independence as we waited for the renovations to wrap up after I started my new job. We stayed with mom and dad a couple of nights but availed ourselves to several nights of room service and breakfasts in bed until we spent the first night in the new house.

By mid-November, Holly had finally reconciled herself to the necessity of maternity clothes with the stretchy, supportive waists and the blousy, almost tent-like tops. She also had to purchase new brassieres to accommodate a rapidly expanding bosom. She even had to find relief for her nipples that were now constantly turgid and highly sensitive as they once had been only when we were in the throes of seduction.

The winter solstice marked the start of the third trimester of her pregnancy. And despite the bodily changes and discomforts, she reveled in it. She showed off her protruding abdomen, even in Van Buren just before Thanksgiving when we made a weekend trip to meet with Emily Ann and finalize terms of her company's contract to manage Raymer Lodge as a vacation rental. An old high school friend of hers almost caused a fender-bender when he saw a very pregnant Holly in the middle of town as we walked to Emily Ann's office and, without warning, jammed his brakes, forcing a car behind him to swerve across the median to avoid a rear-end collision. Another time at the Piggly Wiggly, Darlene squealed and rushed over to Holly when she saw her picking up a frozen pizza for dinner that night.

That visit to Van Buren was the last of more than an hour's duration she would make before giving birth.

As fate would have it, Christmas Eve brought snow and the first white Christmas I had experienced since I was in fifth grade. Holly and I dressed in red, one-piece flannel pajamas that buttoned up the front (for me) and had a trap door befitting female plumbing (for her). We spread blankets beneath our first Christmas tree with its colored lights blazing and made out. That we were able to progress from heavy petting to dry humping to fingering and, eventually, full penetrative coitus with orgasms without removing our garments was a powerful turn-on, even though we perspired so heavily that we had to remove our damp onesies and sleep naked beneath flannel sheets and a heavy duvet cover.

All the excitement got junior all stirred up. From within, our baby kicked and prodded its mom for hours until Holly, in exhaustion, just ignored him (or her) and dozed off.

Nell and her family had flown in from Portland, Oregon, putting the whole extended Vaught clan under the same roof for the first time to welcome its newest member, Holly. As tempting as it was to spend Christmas Eve there and wake up Christmas morning in the same house where I had raced down the stairs as a child to reap Santa's bounty, Nell, her husband, Steve and their two kids had maxed out the beds. Rather than try to bunk on the couch, Holly and I spent that night in Independence and commuted to the homeplace in Excelsior Springs before sunrise.

We got there before 7 o'clock to watch our niece and nephew relish the wonder of Christmas morning as Nell and I once had. We felt it was important to see it, to make mental notes for moments of our own Christmas mornings in a few years, and to enjoy this fleeting moment of being together as a close, extended family.

It was comforting to see the traditions from our youth alive in a new generation. Mom served up buckwheat pancakes with blueberries, real butter and maple syrup along with smoked sausage links for a late breakfast. Dinner was late afternoon, about 4 p.m., with dad carving both the ham and the turkey. And mom, perpetuating the tradition practiced in the Methodist parsonages of her girlhood, rendered the blessing.

The day was spent napping, watching pro football (the holiday fell on a Sunday, and the Kansas City Chiefs were fighting for a playoff spot) and opening presents. Holly was inundated, everything from a Redbook subscription to a breast pump for expressing and saving excess milk to a basinet to a car seat that fastens into a seat belt and secures the baby while in transit.

The gift that meant the most to her: two framed photos - one a color enlargement of the breathtaking picture of our first dance under the blazing Ozark sky at our wedding reception, and the other an enlargement of an old black-and-white snapshot of me during a church Thanksgiving event. Judging from my crewcut, the latter photo must have been made when I was in third of fourth grade, smiling broadly withy my eyelids clenched shut against the powerful flashbulb I knew was coming. In the photo, I am holding a construction paper sign bearing my watercolor handprint made to resemble a turkey in the center. Below it, in my child's hand lettering, were and the words "Thank you God for someone to love," the answer I had given in Sunday School when asked to name the main reason I was thankful. The modern intent of the message for Holly was unmistakable.

Both photos were professionally archived, matted and framed. The wedding photo bore an inscription on the gray matte beneath it with the date of our wedding. The old photo of me as a boy bore a calligraphy inscription in gold ink: True then. True now. Holly+Corey Vaught. Christmas 1977. The card identified the giver only as "Santa," but but there was no doubt in my mind that my father had done this. He had a sense for the deeply meaningful, things that speak powerfully and eternally to the heart.

That one made Holly's eyes water and her lip quiver. She clutched it to her chest, unable to speak, knowing that she'd fall apart if she tried.

By 8 p.m., we were all drained. Sis and Steve trudged up to bed, having just put their family to bed in what was once my room. Mom and dad were willing to try to stay awake as long as Holly and I were there, but I could see the fatigue in their eyes, just as they could see it in ours. We hugged and hemmed and hawed until it was clear the time had come to head back to Independence.

Holly reclined her seat to accommodate her growing abdomen for the ride home. One of the drawbacks of a five-speed sportscar is that it makes it difficult to hold hands with the front-seat passenger. So Holly gently looped her hand under my right bicep before she dozed off, not five minutes into the ride. I had to jostle her awake after I shut off the car in our garage. Groggy, she got out, walked around the car and leaned against me.

"Being pregnant is exhausting," she said.

"Here, let me help."

I swept her up, just as I had when I carried her over the threshold of the bridal suite in the Chase Park Plaza Hotel in St. Louis and carried her up the front steps. The house key at the ready, I was able somehow to unlock and open the door without putting her down. I carried her upstairs and put her on the bed.

I carefully undressed her, covered her tenderly and then stripped myself and slid into bed beside her, spooning my nakedness against hers. In her deep and peaceful sleep, I wrapped my arm around her, kissed her neck, whispered "I love you."

Outside, new snow began to fall on a silent Kansas City night.

●●●

I accompanied Holly to her monthly visit in early January to the obstetrician. There, for the first time, we were able to see a rough outline of our still-developing child through a technology that used reflected, high-frequency sound waves to form a crude image, a principle similar to sonar. I could make out a head and what the doctor said were arms. What I thought was proof that the baby was a boy was actually the umbilical cord, the doctor, Glenda St. John, patiently informed me.

Holly put the question on both our minds to her bluntly: "How long can Corey and I keep having sex. And if we have to stop with, you know, penis-vagina relations, can we still do like... hand and mouth stuff?"

Glenda smiled and shrugged.

"That's up to you. There's nothing unhealthy about continuing to have intercourse almost until the start of labor. There are studies that suggest it's actually good for the fetus because it increases blood flow and, consequently, oxygen supply for the little one, and the motion is both stimulating and comforting to it," the doctor said matter-of-factly.

"There are some specific complications that would rule out sex like placental previa or a predisposition to preterm labor, but normally we'd see signs of that if that by now if either was going to be any concern for you. Of course, don't try it after your water breaks, but that's sort of a no-brainer," she said.

"Your body will tell you. Just listen to it," she said, "and if it's giving you the green light, go for it. Many women are much more easily aroused during pregnancy because of the hormones flooding their system and the increased blood flow to their genitals. One patient told me that she started having orgasms just from imagining sexual fantasies, and another told me her boyfriend couldn't keep up with her two- or three-times-a-day needs during the second trimester. But it's also true that the closer you get to delivery, the harder it can be for some women to have a deep orgasm because the uterus is stretched to the point where it can't contract as it does in non-pregnant climaxes. If that happens, just remember that it's not permanent."

Holly and I both nodded appreciatively. So we had a few more weeks before Sir Hollywood went into dry dock, which raised a new question. And I asked it.

"How long after pregnancy should we wait before we... you know, do it?"

"I recommend at least a month, and that's pushing it," Dr. Glenda said. "Holly's vagina will undergo quite an ordeal and it will need time to heal. The stretching and microscopic tears to its lining can easily become sources for infections from an invading penis, and it's more difficult for her vagina in that condition to lubricate. If she has an episiotomy, then it's longer - six to eight weeks minimum. You might be able to engage in things like clitoral stimulation or mutual masturbation a little earlier than that if you're both up to it. But I say err on the side of not rushing things. Again, her body will let her know."