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necessarily. People have been getting married on a Saturday for generations. The only thing that goes a long way to explaining the divorce statistics is the fact that so many people nowadays don’t stick at their marriages.’ She smiled suddenly and Rafferty knew he’d been let off the May hook. ‘But this is the only one I want.’
    ‘It’s the only one I want, too,’ Rafferty said. It was true enough. He certainly hadn’t wanted his first marriage to Angie, but an unexpected pregnancy had rather hastened things along on the marital front with that one. Just his luck she’d lost the baby after the wedding rather than before. Angie was dead now, leaving him with a burden of guilt at her passing.
    But he’d been a widower long enough, as Ma kept reminding him. And this time he was marrying for the right reasons; he knew that, in spite of all this silliness they were currently going through over the wedding arrangements. ‘Let’s make it June, Abra, for the sake of peace. You know Ma will have plenty to say at the merest hint of a squabble between us if we stick to a May wedding. She’ll tell us we tempted the fates.’
    ‘Go on then. May, June. What does it matter?' she said crossly. 'I just want to get the important things settled, so I’ll bow to your Ma’s superstitious beliefs on that one. June it is. But you needn’t think your mother is going to influence all our decisions about the wedding. It’s our day, not hers.’
    ‘Indeed it is. And so I’ll tell her if she comes up with any more superstitions or old wives’ tales.’
    ‘Though it’s no good settling on the date unless we also settle on the place.’
    Rafferty grinned. ‘Ma’s got firm opinions on that and all. But you know that. She has her heart set on Father Kelly marrying us in St Boniface.’
    ‘I rather fancied one of the local stately homes. But I’m going to have to let you off the hook on that one, too. I rang all the nearest ones today. Not a hope. They’re very popular so are booked up months ahead. So, given that I haven’t got that option, I can agree to St Boniface as long as I’m not expected to learn a lot of religious claptrap in the weeks leading up to the wedding.’
    Abra, unlike Rafferty, wasn’t a Catholic. Not even a lapsed one. So Rafferty, suspecting the opposite, crossed his fingers behind his back as he told her, ‘I think you’ll find Father Kelly can be an obliging sort. And more than understanding.’ With all his vices, he had to be. ‘You were a bit out of it at the time, but he came up trumps when you lost little Joey early and insisted you wanted him christened.’ Abra had miscarried their first child some months before in the early stages of pregnancy. ‘If it hadn’t been for him the christening you’d set your heart on wouldn’t have happened.’
    ‘I know that. I’m not stupid, Joe.’
    ‘OK. So that’s two of the majors sorted. Now for the guest list.’ Two out of three things going his way wasn’t bad for one evening, Rafferty mused, particularly given the mood Abra had worked herself into by the time he arrived home. Perhaps he was pushing his luck in going for the hat trick?
    And so it proved. Abra dug her heels in over the invitees.
    ‘Why on earth do you want all these people to attend?’ Rafferty asked as he scanned the list of names. ‘I’ve never met most of them.’
    ‘That’s because you spend so much of your time at work,’ Abra pointed out. ‘Besides, you’ve been married before. I haven’t. I bet your first wife insisted on a big wedding and got her own way.’
    As this was true, Rafferty didn’t have much of an argument. It was no good lying to Abra. She had a way of knowing when he wasn’t telling the truth. She was like his Ma in that respect. Instead, he tried a more sneaky tactic. ‘I wanted our marriage to be a more intimate occasion,’ he began. ‘Small and exclusive.’ It sounded horribly pretentious put like that, but he didn’t know how else