Maureen changed the subject. "Mike's wife Martha is tops. They're off to California after the honeymoon. Mike got promoted. He will make more money in a month than my Jake makes in a year." She added, "and we have four mouths to feed."
I motioned toward her waist line. "You'll have four and a half mouths, by the looks of things. Congratulations."
"Jake's an animal; barefoot and pregnant is his idea of a woman's place." She said it lovingly. "I'm due in June."
"The twins are marvelous," I said.
"Ma dotes on them. She spoils them rotten."
My niece and her family lived an hour and a half south of Boston, across the border in Rhode Island. My sister resided in Elmwood, Connecticut, in the same house and town where I'd been born and raised. It was a hundred miles from Boston so we were all staying in the hotel.
I took her hand. "Look," I said. "You mean well. I've been a real jerk to stay away so long. Suzie has a good reason to give me the cold shoulder."
I embarrassed Maureen with my candor but she didn't deny her mother's attitude. "Maybe now you're closer, we'll get to see you. D.C. must be a big change from Alaska."
I'd left home in a snit twenty years ago to marry a soldier who dragged me to army posts around the world for fifteen years before he was killed in Alaska, leaving me to eventually obtain a teaching degree and remain there. It was only last month I'd returned to the lower forty-eight, taking a job instructing army inductees.
"There are lots more people than Alaska," I answered; not adding more wasn't a plus. I missed the isolation and privacy of the tiny island in the Bering Sea I'd called home for the last two years. I hadn't yet made the adjustment to the chaos of big city life in the nation's Capital. So far, I despised it.
"Mike and I used to call you our Eskimo Aunt. I still have all the post cards you sent us."
I smiled a reply but post cards and small gifts were weak substitutes to being a part of their lives. I wanted to apologize for not attending her wedding and not meeting her family until the children's crayon work was better than mine. I felt like a shit about it, but couldn't find the words for a sincere apology.
"I'm sorry about Uncle Doug," she continued, referring to my deceased husband.
"It's been five years next month."
"That's a long time to wear black. Your husband must have been a heck of a guy."