April 5th 2020
Chapter 96
Their Fall in Starts
As he drove up to the house, Lucas couldn't help but feel deeply how this day had been going on for ages. That short beat of peace, waking up with his fiancée in his arms, having waffles, that all felt like it had to have been days ago, when it had in fact been all of twelve hours, just half a day… A lot of that endlessness had come from the whole situation with Ramona and Robbie that morning, but then his afternoon classes had been fairly loaded, too, for a first day, so by the end of it… All he wanted was to go home and see Maya, and Sam, and the dogs…
The drive back from school had been a lot quieter. Even though Robbie's tale had helped to smooth some of mess over, it didn't change the fact that a lot of things had been said between them on the morning drive, and those would need a bit more work to sort through. The couple had spent the ride back sitting in silence, each on their side of the back seat, in their own world. Now the radio was on to break the lack of sound rather than to mask the chaotic presence of it.
He'd just dropped them off, and as he'd watched them go up to their building, where Robbie opened the door and held it for Ramona, there had been the pinging from his phone. Maya was texting, asking when he'd be home. They were having an unexpected guest for dinner. She didn't say who, so it had to be someone she wanted him to be surprised about. Either way, as he arrived back at the house, he was kind of spent and not looking forward to company.
But then he walked in, and Maya was making dinner with Sam and Cecilia, and she had that nervous/excited air about her that inevitably triggered what she would call his Huckleberry mode. He could have been dragging his feet, dead tired, and if she was looking forward to something he'd just find some reserve in his and power through. This went both ways, of course, because it was Maya. She looked up when he walked into the kitchen, and her brow shifted, like 'uh oh.'
"Hey…" she came up to him with a smile. He set the wine on the counter before closing his arms around her, kissing the top of her head, then her lips as she looked up. "Long day?"
"I'll tell you about it later," he promised.
"I'm so sorry, it kind of happened out of the blue and I…"
"Don't worry about it," he shook his head. "Being here, with you, I'm good." She smiled. "It's just one person, right?"
"It is," Maya nodded.
"Do I get to know who it is?"
"Soon, yeah," she teased, and he kissed her again.
"Where do you need me? Do I need to change?"
"Not one thing," she assured him. "And can you set the table?"
Their guest arrived, dessert in hand, right on time. Of all the surprises Lucas could have envisioned, there was absolutely no way for him to conjure up the idea that it would be his and Maya's middle school English teacher. But then he'd gone to the door at the sound of the bell, and when he'd opened it, there she was, near on a decade older but still just the image he had in the back of his mind. He was genuinely so happy to see her that his outlook on the evening soon took an upswing.
"Miss Alcott?" he blinked, his reaction not unlike Maya's, right down to his recollections of her being taller, although in his case he had gone and grown enough that he might have had a few inches over her. She was just as surprised to see him, even if in this case she did know she'd be crossing paths with him, because he had grown so much. All he could think about was how she had been new to the school, the fall he had returned after his suspension, and she had treated him well, but even beyond that, he believed she would have treated him just the same if she had been there the year before and seen him suspended. The way she looked at him now, it was like he could just tell she was thinking about those days, too, like she'd hoped things would turn out alright for him and now… now she was seeing that they had. "Come in, please," he stepped aside, remembering himself.
"I think you might have even more difficulty with this than Maya did, but please call me Lindsay," she smiled as he took the dessert box while she took off her jacket. They traded again as he moved to hang it up for her.
"I'll do my best," he nodded. Now that she was here, he was very curious to find out exactly how she and Maya had managed to run into one another and ended up with the teacher being invited here tonight.
"Your home is lovely," Lindsay declared, looking around as he led her toward the kitchen.
"Thank you. It was my grandfather's, he passed it on to me," he explained. At the flash of concern in her eyes, he quickly clarified. "Graduation present, he lives in Houston now. He got married again," he added.
"Oh, good for him," Lindsay chuckled now, following Lucas into the kitchen to find the others in wait, unbeknownst to her all of five seconds after having put the finishing touches on everything. Dinner was ready to be served. "Thanks again for the invitation," Lindsay greeted Maya as she came forward.
"It's our pleasure, really," she assured her, stealing a look to Lucas, smiling at him, too. "This is my brother, Sam," she went on to introduce him as he came and offered his hand.
"Hello, Sam," Lindsay shook his hand, recognizing him from the picture on Maya's desk. "It's very nice to meet you."
"Thanks, you, too. Maya's told me about you before," he revealed before taking on the last introduction. "This is my girlfriend, Cecilia," he turned to her as she came to stand by him and shook hands with the teacher as he'd done.
As they sat down to dinner, Maya and Sam both worked through giving Miss Alcott a brief rundown of their history. The last time she'd really known the former New Yorker, Maya lived alone with her mother. There were no brothers or sisters back then, but now, nine years later, there were ten of them, four by her mother and her second husband, four by her father and his second wife, and two by her stepmother's marriage. It was as though the English teacher still lived in a former reality, where Maya had no one to claim for family but Katy Hart, when today… today, it felt as though the universe had worked overtime to compensate for lonely years that were, by now, just a small fraction of her life. A couple years from now, she would be hitting a point where she had been in Texas as long as she'd been in New York, and then she would have been here longer than she'd been there.
The tale of the many siblings, and stepparents, and long lost relatives, and the loss of Kermit had soon veered into talk of Lucas and Maya's progress through the years. Some of it Lindsay already knew about, mostly the parts that had to do with basketball, as she'd seen plenty of trophies and photos and news clippings since moving up to the high school. She was glad to hear of their time in college, in Houston, and then their return to Austin, and especially of their engagement and how it had all gone down. Miss Alcott had never taught Sophie, who had transferred to their class in high school, but she was touched to hear how they cared for her so much as to delay their wedding.
It was almost weird to realize it, not in a 'how can she not know?' sort of way, more like 'somehow they always seem to know and it's so surprising,' but she'd never heard about the band. But then to know that Maya, and Riley, and Nadine had been part of it, were still part of it, she swore she would look into it when she got home, and they knew her enough to trust this was not an empty promise. Sam had been happy to brag for his big sister, sharing the fact that she was now a songwriter and had written Ree Forster's hit from the previous summer. Lindsay Alcott's jaw almost went slack at this. She'd heard that song, she loved that song, she knew it by heart…
"Tell me the truth, did I look like a tomato? I felt like a tomato," Maya declared, later, as she and Lucas sat in the kitchen after the guests had left, after Sam had gone to bed. They'd snuck out the box with the leftover cake, a fork to each of them.
"I happen to love tomatoes," Lucas informed her, his smirk leaving Maya to assume she really had gone red in the face. She laughed, making to cover her face like she was embarrassed. Lucas prodded at her hand until she'd pull it down and he could see that bright smile all over her face. "You know what this reminds me of?" he asked, and she nodded at once.
"Valentine's Day, the honey cake," she answered, taking another bite. "Man, my feet hurt that night… Good thing I had you there to carry me around."
"Good thing you're easy to carry," he countered. She 'gasped,' but it was no use and she burst into giggles. When she'd finally gotten hold of herself again, after almost sliding right off her chair before he caught her, Maya took a few breaths to calm again and turn to him.
"You know, we never got a chance to talk about today. What got you down?" For a few minutes there he'd almost forgotten, and now the memory made him frown, setting his fork down. "That bad?" she asked, serious now.
"It's not me, I just… Ramona and Robbie got into this big argument on the ride to school this morning because of a misunderstanding. It was really bad."
"Oh, no…" Maya replied with sympathy.
"Took a while after we'd made it through our first class before the explanation happened, but even after that it was all kind of…"
"Can't put the toothpaste back in the tube?" Maya guessed. Lucas shook his head. "That sucks," Maya frowned, gripping his hand where it lay on the table.
"Yeah, really does," he agreed, turning his hand over so he might grip back, palm to palm.
"They'll make it work… I hope they'll make it work," Maya told him.
"I keep thinking about them, and then I think about Zay and Nadine when they broke up, and Rebecca and Joey, too. It was different, I know, not just the outcome, but every time anything like that happens we all react the same way. We can't believe that would be them."
She knew what he was trying to say. It had hit him, made him worry about what could be, if the two of them ever… They'd been through that before, hadn't they? Right before Pappy Joe's accident. It had been some of the worst days of their lives, and all through the years that had followed they'd done their best to try and never end up in that situation again, tried to be open and honest with one another. It wasn't foolproof, nothing was, but it had absolutely left them stronger in the end.
"Hey…" Maya tilted her head until he'd look at her. "We should really put this cake away or there won't be any left and Sam will be so upset." He stared back at her for a moment before letting out a small laugh. "Not saying I couldn't do it, especially if you helped me…" His laugh settled into a smile, and a nod. Whatever would happen with Ramona and Robbie, there was nothing they could do about it. But right here and now there was him and her, and that much they could do so much about.
"Hey, you know me, not about to let a partner down."
"She was our teacher anyway," she grinned as he picked up his fork again.
TO BE CONTINUED
See you tomorrow! - mooners
