Spinning off @pigtailedgirl's comment about Mrs Kowalski and Ma Vecchio meeting...
"Hello, I don't think we've met yet," Barbara said as she sat down next to one of the Vecchio women, one around her own age. Her new - well, son-in-law wasn't right, was it - Stella's new husband had a very large family, it seemed. They'd arrived after the speeches had started (parking an RV in Chicago was not always straightforward, even though she'd told Damien they should leave early) and she wasn't quite sure who was who.
"Carla," the woman said, in an Italian accent. Barbara had lost most of her own accent over the years, but she always liked to meet other people who'd come to Chicago, rather than having been born here. "It's my son who's getting married."
"Barbara," Barbara said. "I'm - a friend of Stella's."
"Ah, you're my other Raimondo's mother," said Carla Vecchio. "Not that I get to keep any of them - Raimondo goes off for work for years, and we get your son undercover, and then he goes off to Canada and my son to Florida - at least they came back for the wedding."
"It's hard when they're all over the place, isn't it? We moved to Arizona when our eldest had his first daughter, and it wasn't so hard to get back to Chicago, but now Stanley's up in the Arctic Circle somewhere." She could see him out on the dancefloor with a very pregnant girl, a woman his own age if she was fair, who looked like she must be a Vecchio too. He looked well. She hadn't thought Canada would suit him, but apparently it did.
"Stella must be a very dutiful kind of girl," Carla went on. "Still talking to you! I liked Raimondo's first wife, Angela, but I haven't seen her except around the neighbourhood for years now. She did marry again a few years back, I suppose."
"Oh, it's not duty," Barbara said. "She likes people or she doesn't, and we've always got along. I think she must like you all, or she'd never have agreed to another big wedding like this."
Carla looked as if she was considering this information. "I see." She looked as if she was considering Barbara, too. "Do you think she wants children? I know better than to ask these modern girls these questions. Mind you, Francesca is giving me another grandchild and she hasn't even bothered to get married, I don't know what the world's come to."
"No," Barbara said, because it was no secret. "No, that's why she and Stanley split up. He wanted them, or he did then." Perhaps he still did; he hadn't said; she had two grandchildren, so she really couldn't complain either way.
"Ah well." Carla contemplated her new daughter-in-law. "She can dance, I'll give her that. Almost makes our Tony look like he can, too."
"Oh, that goes back a very long way," Barbara said, and told this woman who was not quite an in-law, and not quite not an in-law, all the best stories about Stanley and Stella's teenage career as competitive dancers, while the young people swirled across the dance floor. She didn't know when she'd got old; she didn't know when forty had become young.
That was all right. There were so many new places to go and new people to meet yet. Thinking of that, she didn't feel old at all.
