CHAPTER 02:

when sisters fight..

"Gimme that back!" Raven yelped as Phoenix grabbed the doll sitting at her little tea table, took off with it down the hallway and said "Uh uh.. My dolly and she don't like tea parties. She gotta learn to dance with me!"

"Okay, you two, what's going on up there?" Bobby called up the stairs from the kitchen as he tried like hell to remember where he put the can opener/bottle top opener earlier today when he'd been looking for that other thing he'd written down about Wendigos for Ellen Harvell's husband.

"Nothin daddy." Raven called down the stairs as she sat on her sister and smirked, taking the doll. "You can play tea party too."

"I don't wanna.. I practicin."

"For what?"

"For when I gets bigger, and I a actress.. Like Julia Roberts."

Raven groaned as she said with a little laugh, "How are ya gonna be an actress? That means you have to leave daddy."

"No it do not! I take him with me! I gonna marry daddy."

"Not if I do." Raven said as she and her sister started arguing over that. Their father's throat clearing from the stairwell, as he looked at them, shaking his head had them looking up.

"She started it, daddy." Two little blondes with their mother's eyes said to him and he bent down to their level, gently picking up Raven, sitting her on one side, while he moved Phoenix to the other side of his lap and said "Heard you two." smiling.

"But it's true, right daddy?" both of them said as he looked at them and laughing said "Yeah, it's true.. It better be, dang it."

Hugging them he said calmly, "Let's go downstairs and eat Spaghettios now, okay?"

Inwardly, he was already dreading the day some punk would show up at the door, wanting to take the two girls out on a date. He'd already started debating on whether he was just gonna answer the door with his shotgun in hand, or be waiting on the porch, casually 'cleaning' said gun. If only there were some way to pick the men his little girls would wind up with someday, right?

But he knew that sadly, there wasn't. He'd just have to teach him how to spot the bad ones, and hope to hell that they were lucky to find what he and his late wife Karen had together.