A/N: The new chapter of "We Three Hearts" is now available!

April 8th 2021

Chapter 98
Our Turn to Wait

"Hey, is everything okay?" Maya asked her grandmother as they stood in the laundry room in the basement. Elizabeth Hart looked up after setting down the towel she'd just folded.

"I'm sorry?" she blinked.

"You look like you're… somewhere else. Are you feeling alright?"

"Oh, yes," Elizabeth laughed now, in a way that indicated an attempt to lead her away from thinking otherwise. To Maya though, it felt more like evading, hiding behind a smile.

"Gran…" she insisted. "Talk to me." Her grandmother shook her head to herself. She was resisting, and the apprehension that seemed to exist underneath… it sort of suggested… "What is this about? If it's not about you, then… it's someone else, isn't it?" The woman was many things, but she had a certain weakness when it came to guarding her face. She could fool some people, but others… "Granny," Maya nudged again. She didn't want to have to get it out of her.

"No," Elizabeth shook her head to herself. She continued to fold. "I've been down this path once, and I won't do it again."

"What are you talking about? What…" Maya tried to ask, but her grandmother was staying quiet now, folding the towels.

Maya folded, too, for a few moments, as she reviewed the things she had been told and held them up to what had happened today. She didn't remember her grandmother acting like this before, which seemed to suggest it had to do with something that happened today, but… Today had been such a normal day, it had been… almost boring, by some people's standards. It hadn't been boring to her, not at all. It was Sunday, and tomorrow she was going back to work, so the name of the game, from the moment they got up today, Lucas and her, was 'casual.' They went and did the groceries, ran errands, cleaned around the house, did laundry… On the surface, it was domestic maintenance, but then what were all those things except the means for them to spend time together and be able to share good, long conversations, at the end of which they had a clean house, clean clothes, and food to eat for the week to come.

They'd even had help. Cara's friends came over, as did Mateo, and while the plan there had initially been to simply hang out, after the girls had left, Mateo had remained and helped with the cleaning. He'd stayed for dinner, too, and it had been a great occasion for them to get to know him some more. His parents had moved to Texas from Mexico as newlyweds, to join his mother's sister and her husband in running the store they'd opened in Austin. They'd had six children, of which Mateo was the fifth and the first boy, though he'd been followed by his little brother. For a while, the family would spend a year or two in Austin before spending one or two back in Mexico, back and forth like this until Mateo was fourteen. They had stopped these moves after his father passed away.

His family meant everything to him, here and back in Mexico, and it was something he and Cara had bonded over very early on in their friendship, before it became a relationship. He still lived at home now, to help his mother and to look after his younger brother, who was still in high school and – according to Mateo – was barely scraping by no matter what they tried. He was apparently one frustrated tantrum away from giving it all up.

Cara had gone out to the house with him, shortly after dinner, for movie night with Mateo's mother, sisters, brother, and an assortment of brothers-in-law, sisters' boyfriends, and nieces and nephews. It had been a tradition with all of them, for as long as Mateo remembered, and it meant a lot to him that he got to bring Cara into it. The family had been doing it over the years, whether they were in Austin years or Mexico years, as something like a through line activity for them to hold on to. Just before Maya and Elizabeth had gone down to the basement, Cara had called to check in and let them know that she'd be spending the night at the Arroyo house and…

Ah.

"Gran…" Maya put down the tiny shirt she'd been folding and turned to her grandmother.

"I haven't said a word," Elizabeth vowed, carrying on. "And I'm not going to, I'm not…" She sighed. "She is old enough to make her choices, and I trust her… Him, as well. He's truly a lovely young man, and he clearly thinks the world of your sister."

"Then what's the problem?" Maya asked, in all kindness.

"There is no problem, just me being a… silly old woman," Elizabeth tried to wave her off again.

"Well, I knew that," Maya tried for a joke and was pleased to get a chuckle out of her. "I don't think silliness comes into it. I think… you're worried something will happen, and you'll end up pushing her away, the way you did Dad." Elizabeth folded the towels. "You're not going to do that, this is… a completely different situation, and you know it."

"I suppose I do."

"Let's just finish up things out here, and then we can have our own movie night. You decide what we watch, okay?" Maya's smile grew, seeing the amused look on Elizabeth's face now.

"I see you're slipping into that teacher tone already."

"I have a tone for teaching?" Maya wondered.

"Oh, yes," her grandmother laughed. Maya blinked for a moment before getting back in on the folding. When they went upstairs, Elizabeth settled to her task of picking the movie while Maya went in search of Lucas. She found him upstairs, rocking Marianne to sleep.

"Does my voice sound different when I'm with my students?" Maya asked in a whisper. Lucas turned back to her with questions in his eyes like 'what's going on here?' "My grandmother says I have a teacher tone." Lucas considered this for a few seconds now.

"Huh… Yeah, I guess that's what you'd call that," he slowly nodded. Maya gave him a look. "What, it's true. Don't you hear it?"

"Not really, I'm not… See, it's not going to work if I try it now, it'll be forced, or… Never mind," she finally shook her head. "Movie night, are you in?"

"The three of us?" Lucas asked as he turned to go and put Marianne down in her crib.

"Yeah, is that bad?" Maya walked over to peer in at their sleeping girl.

"No, not bad, just… I guess I was thinking we'd have ourselves a bit of a lowercase date, you know, in honor of 'the big day' tomorrow. I would have suggested going out somewhere this evening, but we do have to get up early…"

"Right, the glamorous life of working parents," Maya intoned dramatically as she put her arms around him.

"That's us," Lucas chuckled, hugging her back and kissing the top of her head. "But this is good, too, so… What are we watching?"

"Not sure yet, Gran's picking," she told him, nodding out the door. With the baby monitor in hand, they headed down to the living room. As they descended the stairs, they could see the television was on and the movie had been queued up already. All they had to do was press play. "She is getting very good at that," Maya commented in a whisper.

They would playfully tease her about this, more so in the beginning. When she'd first moved from Florida to Arizona, to live with Luna, she had been notorious for not having any patience for technology beyond a simple phone or a television with one basic remote. She'd grown up with that, on her parents' dairy farm, and it had been the extent of her needs. By the time she'd made it to Austin to stay with Maya and Lucas, she had taken some strides, thanks in large part to her granddaughters, but she still looked most of the time like she would get a headache, the longer it took for her to be done handling whatever she needed.

Then, once she'd been here, once she'd started hanging out with the Clutterbuckets, she'd found the most surprising helpers – surprising mostly to their shared granddaughter, who knew the troubles brought on by something as simple as a television, many years ago. At this point, she was by no means a genius about all of it, but she no longer had that headache face going.

"Gran?" Maya called, just as they heard the unmistakable sound of popcorn popping out in the kitchen. Now, Maya made a noise that had Lucas laughing for how it sounded more or less like 'I hadn't even thought of that yet, but then you did, and I realized it was a very good idea.'

"So, can it still count as a lowercase with your grandmother here with us?" Lucas whispered at her ear. Maya turned around on the step where she stood, saw how much taller it made him, and made a motion he both understood and applied at once. He climbed down two steps, and now they were about equal heights.

"The way I see it, I know this is one of her favorite movies, and once she's sitting in that chair, with her snacks, with her movie, we will almost be invisible to her. We could start in on some serious kissing, hands and everything, and she might not even notice," Maya informed him. Lucas gave her a pointed look at this, and she buried her laugh in his shoulder. "Fine, keeping our hands to ourselves, I guess."

One thing could be said for Maya's predictions, and it was that the part regarding her grandmother had been spot on. Elizabeth Hart was a mainstay in the armchair, to the point where the rest of them got to consider it her chair. She took her spot with her portion of the popcorn and a couple other things she kept on the end table near her, and from the moment they hit play on the movie, she was off in her own little bubble. It was actually kind of sweet to watch her.

For their part, Maya and Lucas sat huddled together on the couch, and they were as cozy and at ease as they could hope for, here on their 'date.' Later on, they would both admit to one another that they hadn't actually paid a great deal of attention to the movie the whole time. They had too much on their minds. Lucas was starting his residency in a few days, and Maya was going back to work in the morning… It meant that their roles would be reversed, if only for those few days. He would be home with the baby, and she would be at work. If it wasn't for how he needed to get through these next three years and be done with them, he might have considered taking some leave of his own, to just be with Marianne.

"If she falls asleep, are you going to carry her down into the basement?" Maya signed up to Lucas. He looked at her and she discreetly indicated her grandmother. By this point in the movie, she had no more snacks, and she was still watching, but they had known her to fall asleep when they watched movies or television shows, and it wouldn't matter whether or not this was her favorite. She almost looked on her way to a doze off. Lucas didn't say or sign anything, but he saw what Maya saw and he was on board.

In the end, Granny Lizzie made it to the end of the movie, thanks to their having to pause when Grangie called and asked her if she wanted to come over for lunch the next day. It was enough to wake her back up again and get her through the rest of the runtime. When it was over, she explained how she hadn't known this movie until just a few years ago, but since she'd come by it, she'd watched it many times. Luna had suggested that, after her mother had left her father and moved in with her and her daughters, she had taken it upon herself to do a bit of 'expanding of the horizons.' This had been reflected in movies, and books, and music… and food… oh, the food…

"One grandmother returned to her room on her own two feet," Lucas reported as he and Maya went up the stairs. She chuckled. "Now it's just you and me, Mrs. Friar…"

"That could almost be ruined coming out of the mouth of anyone not between the ages of fifteen and nineteen, but somehow when you say it… well, it doesn't sound the same."

"Not the same how?" Lucas wondered.

"Oh, you know how," Maya gave him a look, which he returned in kind. "If it wasn't that I need to be up very early…" she breathed, just a bit disappointed.

"Hey, the sooner we get to bed, sooner we get up, and who knows, we could have time to spare…" Lucas provided, brought to whispers by her coming closer to him until their lips met in a kiss and he put his arms around her to keep them steady.

"Well, that's just encouraging unruly discipline there, young man," Maya told him when they pulled back.

"See, there is it, the teacher tone," Lucas joked.

"Better not sound like that, that's how rumors get started."

"Alright, teacher tone with… bonus," he went on instead.

"Okay, that I can take." The kiss resumed, just a little while, before they finally had to stop. Much as it pained them, responsibility called, and they had to answer. "This is going to sound the opposite of helping, but come on, let's get into bed already," she tipped her head toward the second floor, and Lucas had no words to come back on that one.

They headed into their room, starting the sort of dance they had going here, where they would both be getting changed for bed but also would pivot toward the crib here and there, checking on Marianne. Maya especially found herself compelled toward her, until she almost wanted to pick her up and bring her to the bed. Hadn't they always been thinking about the day when they would go to bed with a little child between them that was their own instead of one of her siblings?

"Would it be helping the matter or making it worse if I brought her to the school over lunch time tomorrow?" Lucas asked as they settled under the covers.

"Part of me says it would be good, but then I think that might be the bad part, trying to corrupt me," Maya informed him.

"Hey," he wrapped his arms around her from behind, her great big spoon as always. "You'll do great," he promised. He kissed the flowers at her shoulder, and she hummed. Her heart was drumming for all the good reasons. Finally, finally, she was going back…

TO BE CONTINUED

See you tomorrow! - mooners