Читать книгу Betrayal In Blood - Michael Benson - Страница 18

CHAPTER 11

The Bride in the Red Shoes

The transition went this way, and it happened in a matter of months: Kevin made Tabby his employee, then his client, then his live-in girlfriend, then his wife.

On December 26, 1997, Tabby and Kevin—who was only two months younger than Tabby’s mother—were married in Fairport, New York. It had been only sixteen months since she had gotten married for the first time, to Arnold, in the Howard Community Center.

In Fairport, for her second wedding, she wanted to tweak the notion that she, being a divorcée, was no longer pure, so Tabby became one of the few brides to be married in red shoes. One of Kevin’s sisters told Tabby that brides couldn’t wear red shoes, but this only served to make Tabby more stubborn. She took her vows, from the ankles down, with a Jezebel-like defiance.

Tabby’s sister remembered that the wedding was at “a real nice place. Maybe a country club. It was a country-club-kind-of-place. About one hundred people attended.

“I don’t remember if there was a band or a deejay, but there was dancing. Most of the family was there. Gram was there. Grampa was there. He had to get in a tuxedo, his first ever. I remember he needed help getting dressed,” Samantha said with a laugh.

Unable to attend the ceremony were Tabby’s mom and stepdad, Ginny and Cleo Winebrenner. They had been to Tabby’s first wedding, but not this one.

“It was the day after Christmas, and, because my husband and I are disabled, we have an extremely limited income,” Ginny said, “We just didn’t have the money to go to New York. The times when we did go to New York was when we had managed to save a couple hundred bucks, or Tabby had sent us a couple hundred bucks.”

To the best of her recollection, the groom had never impressed Ginny much. Years later, she wouldn’t be able to think of anything nice to say about Kevin.

“Kevin has a lot of problems, both mental and physical,” she said. “But I never liked Kevin, so you can’t go by me. I never cared for him. I found him very cold and empty.”

Despite the lack of warmth between Ginny and Kevin, the two were always civil with one another. They did not fight. Kevin was Tabby’s choice and Ginny had to respect that.

“I didn’t have to like him. I didn’t have to live with him,” she said.

Kevin and Tabby honeymooned in the Cayman Islands.

Tabby wasn’t the only one of Ginny’s kids to marry in the 1990s. In 1999, Cyril lived with Ginny’s sister Sharon for a couple months and he was working at McDonald’s in Monticello, Minnesota. It was there that Cyril met the woman he was to marry.

Ginny doesn’t remember if the bride was working at McDonald’s or if she just came in because she knew someone, but Cyril and Patty met in a McDonald’s. Not too long after that, Cyril and Patty married. Next came a baby boy named Cleo.

Ginny recalled the time. “He’s named exactly after my husband. My son didn’t give his wife a choice on the name,” she said with a laugh. “We call him ‘Little One.’ Little One is a miracle for me. He looks exactly like Chris. And he has Cyril’s personality. He’s the perfect combination of the two. I keep telling Patty that she’s in for a world of fun when he grows.”