Chapter 4

Ellie and Jordyn neared their college graduations, with their wedding following right behind it. Both of them had jobs lined up to start in July, leaving them a couple of weeks to have a honeymoon. The last tenant had vacated the other half of our duplex at the end of April, so we had it all cleaned up, painted and ready for them to move in at the end of May. Nancy Beth was looking forward to having them right next door to us. Frankly, so was I.

Randall’s graduation from high school was just a few days after their college graduation and Rose held a graduation party the following Saturday. Ellie attended both of those by herself but the rest of us, being persona non grata, stayed home. The next day the girls held what they officially called a housewarming party to show off their half of the duplex, but the decorations inside were all for a graduation celebration. There were three of them with fresh diplomas, after all, and we were all proud of Randall for graduating with honors.

The girls married the next week. They opted to have the ceremony performed by a justice of the peace in his office. Nancy Beth and I were the witnesses for the ceremony. We had invited what immediate family there was. Nancy Beth was an only child and her parents had passed away before I met her. My sister and her husband came from my side of the family and Randall was there along with Rose’s parents, Jeanelle and Gary. Rose had been invited, too, but she declined. Randall told me she was still declining, and doing it at the top of her lungs, when he left the house. We were better off without her.

I’ve read accounts of some lesbian weddings where one of them is in a tux and the other in a wedding dress. That wasn’t the case for our girls. There wasn’t a butch bone in either of them. Some other stories tell about two wedding dresses. That might be closer but it wasn’t their style either. Jordyn and Ellie were in dresses suitable for a day at the office. The only special touches were sprays of orange blossoms in their hair and the small bouquets, almost nosegays, that each of them held. They were beautiful to begin with, but today they had an extra layer of beauty. I’m not referring to makeup. That was actually minimal, in keeping with their usual style. I think it was love. Knowing that their marriage was going to be made official, recorded in the public ledger, gave them a glow that all of us could see. That was for the official record, of course. Nancy Beth and I have considered the girls married since their high school days. They’ve never been apart since that day Ellie dragged me in the door at Nancy Beth’s house. Never an argument, never a separation, never even a hiccup on their journey to this day.

We’d arrange for the wedding to be late in the afternoon so the judge, an old acquaintance of Nancy Beth’s, could join us for champagne and cake in his conference room. The ceremony was straightforward, the girls signed the license, pictures were taken and then we shared cake and champagne. Randall was too young for anything alcoholic. He was also their chauffeur. Their bags were already packed and waiting in Nancy Beth’s SUV, ready for the trip to the airport and their flight to San Diego for a stay at the Hotel Del Coronado. Nancy Beth and I funded that as a gift to them.

Jordyn and Ellie didn’t know anything about the Hotel Del when we first told them they would be staying there. We educated them a little about it, first with pictures and stories from the hotel website, then with some of my own reminiscences of having stayed there once many years back. To cap it off, we spent an evening watching the movie “Some Like it Hot,” which was filmed there even though the movie was supposedly set in Florida. By then, they were properly excited. Since Nancy Beth had never been there, I had to promise her a trip of her own.

We didn’t get to linger very long. It was already late in the day and the courthouse custodial staff wanted to shoo everyone out of the building so they could lock up. Randall escorted the girls out to Nancy Beth’s SUV for their trip to the airport and the rest of us had a limousine waiting for us. Walking out of the judge’s office after a drink and driving myself home? Not a good idea. The six of us were on the road not long after the newlyweds. The driver dropped Gary and Jeanelle at one hotel and Rhonda and Nathan at another nearby before taking Nancy Beth and me back to the duplex. We tipped him generously and sent him on his way before we went in the house.

Something about weddings makes women amorous. It’s like they feel like helping the newlyweds have a better wedding night by example. I’m not going to analyze it, and I’m certainly not complaining, I’m just noting a fact. It explains why we went to bed without dinner, ordered a pizza at the last minute before the shop closed and somehow ended up sleeping until almost noon the next day. I can only hope our daughters celebrated as well as we did. Yes, they texted us when they got to the hotel. We were too busy to answer and I expected they’d be too busy to communicate until they were on their way home.

On Ellie’s twenty-fifth birthday, just a little more than nine years after the night when I first met Nancy Beth and Jordyn, our daughters came over to speak with us. They looked nervous when they came in, so I knew whatever it was would be something monumental. I was afraid they had job offers on the other side of the country. I raised my eyebrows when Jordyn, Ellie and Nancy Beth all sat as close to me as they could manage.

“Ellie and I want to have a baby, Papa Ron,” Jordyn told me, batting her big green eyes. “We want you to be the father. Will you put a baby in me, please?”

I stuttered in shock, protesting that I would never betray my daughter by having sex with her wife, no matter how much they wanted a child. Just as I was getting my moral outrage truly warmed up, the three women started laughing. Even Nancy Beth was laughing, so I knew I’d been set up.

“Gotcha, Dad,” Ellie grinned. “I mean, yes, we’ve decided we’d like you to be the biological father of our child, but sex with Jordy? That ain’t gonna happen and you know it. We want to do it by artificial insemination.”

It took a while for my brain to process this last bit of information. When it finally sank in, I sagged back in my chair and said, “Are you going to do this through the doctor’s office or does Nancy Beth need to buy a new turkey baster?” Now it was Nancy Beth’s turn to sputter while our daughters blushed at the mental image.

“We have appointments with our gynecologist next week, Papa Ron,” Jordyn squeaked. “If you’re willing to help, they’ll set up some appointments for, uhm, collection.”

After that, we had a fairly serious conversation about their wishes and the reasons behind them. They’d been married almost three years, officially, and the biological urge was getting stronger. They didn’t want to wait any longer. They could adopt but felt it was a last resort. That meant one of them would be giving birth. For that, they’d need a sperm donor. There were services out there. They were expensive but the family could afford it. They didn’t want that option either. They wanted a grandchild of the family — a child that was as genetically ‘theirs’ as possible.

I could understand that. They reasoned that if Ellie had a brother - that is, a full brother and not a half-brother like Randall - he would have been the perfect sperm donor because he would be closest to her genetically, but with half of my daughter’s genes coming from me – and remember, I had the DNA tests run when I discovered Rose had been cheating on me – my DNA was the closest we could get. I had the cynical thought that none of Rose’s genes would be going into making this child. I was fine with that but I wondered if she would see it as part of my evil plot to destroy her. I mentally shrugged, thinking, ‘if it makes her happy... ‘

Appointments were made, first for a screening to see if there were any heritable traits in my DNA that might pose a risk. No bad genes were identified, so the next appointment was for sperm collection. I won’t go into details, other than to say the medical professionals involved were pleased with the volume and motility of the samples I gave over the next couple of days. Those were frozen and held for when Jordyn would be most likely to conceive. All very clinical and professional.

It only took two months of trying before the procedure was successful. Another month and I would have been called on for more samples. I would have given them, even though it’s not really all that fun. Jordyn was elated. Ellie was over the moon. I’ve rarely seen any couple as happy to see a plus sign on a stick. We threw a big celebration to make it official. Strangely, even Rose seemed to be happy about it. Maybe there is a ‘grandma gene’ in the X chromosomes. It’s the only way I can account for the turnaround.

We had another party when they learned it was a boy. I was excited by that. I had wanted a son and had been looking forward to raising the baby boy Rose was carrying. That is, right up until I saw that Randall wasn’t mine and my world fell apart and tumbled down the toilet. Nancy Beth was nearly past her childbearing years by the time we married and we had decided not to have kids of our own, choosing to wait and dote on the grandchildren Ellie and Jordyn would have or adopt. Having a grandson on the way was exciting for us all but I had an extra rush because this boy was going to be, genetically speaking, my son.

There were several baby showers, too. Those were opportunities for me to hang out with Randall, who was excited about having a nephew. I’m still amazed at the relationship I have with him. It’s amazing to have any amiable relationship with him at all, considering I took one look at him and divorced his mother on the day he was born. I got to know him as he was growing up, simply because of Ellie’s affection for her little brother. Ellie’s affection for her girlfriend, Jordyn, also led to meeting Nancy Beth. Now she’s led us on the next bit of the path — the baby boy we’re all looking forward to meeting.

Pregnancy suited Jordyn, who positively glowed for the entire nine months. She never had morning sickness, didn’t gain a lot of excess weight and faced no other complications. Women around the world have to be jealous of her for that. Even delivery was fairly quick and easy, taking only four hours from realizing we had to get her to the hospital until little Robert Foreman-Beene was born in perfect health. Jordy even looked fresh in the first pictures holding her baby. It hardly seems fair, doesn’t it?

Rose wasn’t invited to meet little Robert until a couple of weeks after he was born. That wasn’t my doing. Jordyn and Ellie didn’t tell Rose about his birth until Jordyn came home with him, and they followed the pediatrician’s advice to keep him home and away from people for two weeks to avoid germs, but naturally I got the blame for the evil plot to keep her apart from her grandson. We all thought it strange that Rose was still ranting about the sinfulness of gay marriage while pushing to see her grandchild. Little inconsistencies like that never seemed to register on Rose, though.

I’ll admit that Ellie and Jordyn didn’t issue her an invitation until most of the other interested relatives had visited. Jeanelle and Gary loved their little great-grandson. My sister and her family doted on him, as did Rose’s sister, Dianne. There were moments I thought it would take brute force to get Randall to let go of his nephew. Their reactions warmed my heart. That left the only dark spot on the horizon: Rose. It was hard to predict which way she’d bounce.

I was laid back on a recliner in Ellie and Jordyn’s half of the duplex, holding the sleeping little boy, when Rose came in the house. She took one look at him and started raising hell because the little guy looked just like I had as a baby, and therefore just like Ellie had, except that he had Jordyn’s red hair. It was fairly obvious that this was my biological son. Everyone else had been told the story but Rose, obviously, didn’t have a clue about that one detail of Robert’s conception.