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Maeve is hanging clean curtains when Jack calls and tells her he has found a doctor and arranged to have the by-pass operation.  Surgery is feasible and his heart is good, he says.  He asks if Mary is there, because he wants to bring Maeve some papers he has found.  Maeve tells him to come on, but doesn't let him off the phone before telling Jack she hopes that after the operation and the baby is born, Jack will let Maeve keep the baby while Mary and Jack go off some place where they can be alone and love each other.  This, she tells him will help them get their marriage back together, and unless she misses her guess will also be the end of Jack's talk about annulment.

As Jack puts the receiver back on the phone he reminisces about picnicking in the park with Mary.  (Mary's Theme*)   Jack looks around the apartment one last time before closing the door then leaving to take the paper to Maeve.

Just as Maeve finishes putting the curtains back up, Jack gets to the apartment.  Maeve is pleased, explaining that she thought maybe she'd said too much and he wouldn't come.

Jack tells her she did say too much.  It's not that he doesn't get mad at her, like the rest of the Ryans, he just doesn't stay mad.  Although, he teases her, she may be pushing her luck.  Jack gives Maeve a life insurance policy explaining that if something should happen to him, it isn't enough to pay for the kind of funeral he'd like to have, so Mary should skip that and use it for the baby.  Maeve and Jack share a few laughs about the grandiose funeral Jack would want.

Maeve decides that Jack reminds her of her uncle, Tom Flairty.  Uncle Tom, it seems was a 'grand old gentleman' who'd made his own coffin and kept it sitting around for years.  He'd said that it was his best piece of carpentry, and no one could appreciate it once he was in the ground.

While Maeve puts the insurance paper Jack has brought into the desk, she finds a paper and wonders if Mary ever showed it to him.  Before Maeve married, she explains, she and her mother had sat down and copied the names, births and deaths from her father's Bible.  The Bible was tiny and had been in the family for three generations.  It was dangerous in those days in Ireland to have a Bible around, and so it had to be small, in case it needed to be quickly hidden under a hearth stone or barrel of grain.

While Maeve thinks it is an interesting piece of family history, Jack is uncomfortable.  He tells Maeve that all these family ties just go to show that she and Johnny raised the one person in the world Jack was bound to make unhappy in the end.  There are too many 'generations, links, ties, ghosts of old men and little children,' all of whom Mary is and what she expects.  He couldn't compete with that, he thinks; his relationship with Mary was over before it started.

Sure, it is a part of Mary, Maeve conceeds, but just a small part.  Jack has the strangest notions of what people living together as a family is all about.   He brings himself, she explains.  Mary brings herself. They have children and drop what's bad or doesn't suit them and go along the way.  Maeve tells Jack that he's jumping at anything to try to justify the annulment.

These words are more than Jack wants to hear, so he bids a hasty retreat, but not before Maeve tells him he should give her a call when he gets to the hospital, so she can come by and see him.  He can't annul and divorce her any more than he can Mary, she informs him.