Vivian had ended up with the claddagh ring because her Aunt Catharine left it to the first niece to marry. That was the rule. And if everybody was just going to ignore the rules, Vivian thought, what was the point of having them in the first place? Aunt Catharine had, of course, played by her own rules. She’d married three times, which was two more times than the Catholic Church recommended. “Marriage,” Aunt Catharine had said, “is a wonderful thing, but people make mistakes.” She’d made two mistakes, but she knew God would understand that she was just fixing them. No one should get too bent out of shape about it.

It was an open-and-shut case, as far as Vivian was concerned. She was the first of the McGinty nieces to marry, and Vera shouldn’t have even argued about it. Vera had claimed Aunt Catharine said the ring should go to the oldest niece, but no one else remembered it that way. Vera, like Aunt Catharine, had her own way of looking at rules. As she got older she scoffed that she didn’t want Aunt Catharine’s ugly old ring anyhow, and started calling Aunt Catharine “the slut” of the McGinty family.

Vivian twisted the gold ring around her right ring finger as the band music swelled from the television speaker and the title words swept across the screen. I Love Lucy drew the Daltons into the merry, lighthearted, brightly lit world of the Ricardos and the Mertzes like cartoon animals following the aroma of pie cooling on a windowsill. For a half hour on Monday nights everything outside the Lucy world was forgotten, left suspended in the air around the television set. Vivian kept a suspicious eye on Edward, but soon felt herself sucked into the show, just like always. The happy families on television seemed to prove Vivian’s mother right. Everyone else has it better than us. Vivian had always been caught between her father’s good nature and her mother’s gloom. She had to push hard against the gloom. It was heavy.

The Daltons all laughed at Ricky’s anxious overbearing smothering. They all laughed when Ricky, Fred, and Ethel practiced dry runs of taking Lucy to the hospital. They all laughed when Lucy announced, “It’s time,” and the other three flew into slapstick chaos, with Ricky dumping out the contents of Lucy’s overnight suitcase. And they all laughed when Ricky, Fred, and Ethel screamed at each other to get a cab for Lucy, and then all three of them rushed out the door to get the cab, leaving Lucy forgotten and by herself in the apartment yelling, “Wait for me!”

During the cigarette advertisement, Vivian thought back to the night Charlotte had been born, and how panicked Edward had been; how he’d been all doting and concerned and frantic, and how he’d argued with the nurses and attendants that he wanted to be in the room with his wife. “My wife needs me!”

When Lucy came back on the television, the doors to the hospital opened with the nurse saying “Another maternity case coming in,” and then Ricky was pushed through the door in a wheelchair, followed by the pregnant Lucy, waddling in carrying her own overnight suitcase. Edward and Vivian laughed the hardest at this. Edward’d had his own fainting spell in the hospital where he, too, was “just a little dizzy” and had to sit himself down on the bank of chairs in the waiting room.