Chapter 30

The six of them stayed together after that moving around the festival tasting and talking, not about anything important just about things they were seeing and , Allen couldn't wait until they got home for the other conversation. He started it as soon as they were in the car.

"Bethany, Breen have you guys been thinking about this family thing they want? Cuz I have and I really want to stay and make this work," Allen eagerly stated.

"We were talking about it before you guys came over to us at the gyro stand," Bethany said.

"And?!" Danika and Allen jumped in.

"Well we kinda think it's a good idea," Breen put in.

"So does that mean 'yes'?" Danika insisted.

"Yeah we will give it a go," Bethany offered for both her and her brother.

"You know you two never told us which of you two are the oldest. I have a twin sister who is thirteen minutes older and she never let me hear the end of it," AJ said.

"I'm oldest," Breen told him.

"You're lucky," AJ replied.

"But he's only older by seven minutes!" Bethany jumped in.

"I'm still older," Breen taunted.

AJ really hadn't meant to get an argument started but the verbal fight going on in the back seat sounded so very familiar. He looked over and exchanged a look with Jessy and she smiled back at him.

"I think we need to call Mr. Roberts when we get home," Jessy suggested to AJ.

"Why?!" Danika gasped in a very worried tone.

Jessy smiled at her, "So we can add three more names to the adoption records."

"Oh cool!" she replied.

"Breen, Bethany we will need to know your last name and what happened to your parents, because if they are still alive we need to contact them to get them to terminate their parental rights so we can adopt you," AJ told them.

"We don't know where our dad is. Mom said he didn't want one kid but when mom had two of us that was it for him. He ran off that night. He was a jerk!" Bethany said.

"And your mother?" Jessy gently pushed.

"She's dead," Breen snapped.

"I'm sorry Breen but we do have to know what happened to her as well as your father's full name so we can try to track him down," AJ asked as kindly as he could.

"Mom got real sick and when she couldn't work anymore the manager kept wantin his money and we didn't have it. She died in the apartment and we had to call someone we couldn't just leave her there. But when the ambulance and cops came they wanted to take us away. We had a friend in school that was in the system he had two brothers and a sister and they had seperated them all to different places but they couldn't find a place for Mike so he was in what they called a group home. He hated it…"

Bethany interupted her brother, "That was why we had to run away. Mom had a hundred bucks she was saving to pay the rent. We thought that was a lot of money but we were only twelve and a half and didn't know how fast it would go. But we were together and that was all that mattered to us," she told them.

Breen took up the story from there, "So we had to find a place to live cuz the manager of the apartment threw us out. We heard that there wee people living under the underpass so we went over there but the people there scared Bethany…" at that his sister gave him a dirty look so he admitted, "Okay they scared both of us. So we found out there was a shelter that we could stay for three nights, they had a lot of people wanting a place to stay."

When her brother paused in his story his sister took it up, "So we did something bad. When no one was looking we stole the blankets and pillows from our beds after we stayed our three days. We knew we shouldn't have done that but we really needed them. So we went to the park, there were other kids there during the day so no one took notice of us. At night we used the benches to sleep on."

To be continued…..