June 26th 2021

Chapter 177
Our Wind of Legacy

"Hey, I wasn't sure if you'd answer. If you're too tired, you don't have to…"

"No, please, I told you to call me if you needed it, day or night, didn't I?"

"You did, yeah. It's just that…"

"Sammy, I get it, okay? You don't like to impose, about anything. But I'm your big sister, and a fellow parent who remembers very well what those first weeks could be like. You were there for me and Lucas and Marianne at the time, so please allow me to do the same for you and Dora and Francesca. How's she doing tonight, keeping you up?"

"Got her right here with me, sleeping. The second I go and put her down in her crib, she starts to cry. And Dora's exhausted, so if they both get to sleep if I stay this way, then…"

"Then you'll stay there all night," Maya smiled. She'd carefully left the room, so not to wake Lucas, and the impulse was to go into the nursery, to look on her daughter while Sam was with his, but they were better off leaving her to sleep, too. Eventually, she headed down the stairs and went to sit out on the porch. The world was near silent around her, only the sounds of nature at night to surround her. She could have fallen asleep right there.

"I don't know, if I just wait a few hours, she could be okay to put back, and if not, then… I don't know."

"I know you want to help Dora rest up, and you were already a very selfless guy before you lived under the same roof as Huckleberry Friar for four years, but you and Dora made that kid together, and you both want what's best for her. You also want the best for each other, and I don't think Dora will like the idea of you putting yourself through sleepless nights for her. All that will accomplish will be for you guys to become like… ships passing each other, one awake while the other's asleep. You want to stay with Francesca for a while, that's good, but if she still keeps waking up, then you need to go get Dora, alright?"

"Alright," Sam breathed.

"Good. We're coming over in the morning, so I'm going to see if you told the truth, yeah?" she teased. She could almost hear him roll his eyes.

"I promise."

Maya stayed on the line with her little brother for a half hour more before they hung up and she went back to bed. In the morning, after breakfast, the young Friars got in the minivan along with Granny Lizzie and headed to the apartment. Baby Francesca was two weeks old exactly as of today, and it would have taken this long before her parents finally came to a decision with regards to the family surname. As they would learn, Sam and Dora had reached their consensus after he had awakened her and told her how he'd been up with the baby. They'd sat there, with their daughter, and they'd run through the hang ups they'd been having about this name thing before considering their options. After they'd done that, the solution was almost too easy to find. And once they'd both managed to get a bit more sleep, they still agreed it was the way to go, so all they had to do was go through the procedures to make it official.

"Everyone's been asking about it, over and over," Dora let out a faintly exasperated sigh.

"Hey, you were busy," Lucas told his cousin with a simple nod. He wasn't about to have his cousin made to feel bad for not doing something that mattered this much to her within other people's demanded schedule. Her daughter's name was very important and that patience of hers had paid off.

"Yeah, no kidding," Dora chuckled appreciatively.

"So, what did you decide?" Maya asked her brother and his wife.

In the time it took for them to look at each other with a silent query as to who would tell the story, the sound of the baby's cries came in from the other room, where she'd been napping. Both her parents moved to rise but were beat to it by Auntie Maya, maybe for her being more rested than either of them were.

"I got her, I got her," she gave her brother a teasing smirk. How many times had he 'stolen' her daughter away from her? Marianne was presently sitting on her knees, on the couch, next to him, and Sam had his arm around her almost on reflex.

Into the nursery Maya went, there to find Miss Francesca May all tiny and frantic with her crying fit. Maya reached in and picked her up before bringing her close to herself, giving her every indication that she was good and safe.

"What's going on here?" Maya spoke calmly and lovingly before giving her niece the very practiced check. She didn't have to get much further than 'how's the diaper?' "There she is," she nodded. This could be handled quick, no sweat. She changed the baby's diaper, and by the time she'd cleaned up after herself with the baby cradled in one arm, Francesca was quietly lounging in her aunt's hold. "I know, it's really unpleasant, isn't it?" she spoke in a soothing, conversational tone. As they were going to be discussing her name, she brought her back to the living room and kept her as she sat next to Lucas again. He leaned in to look at her at once, that great Huckleberry smile on him… Oh, he missed those days with Marianne as much as she did.

In the few minutes while she'd been away, seeing as they had been about to talk about one thing, none of them felt like jumping on to another topic. That wasn't a problem, of course, not with Marianne in the room, especially Marianne in the room with her godfather. The sound of the baby's cries in the other room looked ready to trigger some sympathetic tears out of her, and her father could see it, knew the 'warning signs' by heart. As soon as he pointed this out to Sam, he picked up Marianne and brought her to sit in his lap. He started playing 'Duck Duck' with her, a new favorite game, wherein his hands would turn into the beaks of two ducks. He'd have them talking – in an appropriate duck voice, of course – and going on about any number of situations. Their names were Gus and Louise, and Marianne loved them like mad. It only worked when Sam did it, as Maya and Lucas had discovered when they'd tried it once.

Today, Gus and Louise were picking fruit for a pie, but they couldn't decide which fruit they wanted, which was making them get very agitated and quacky. The great twist ending became that they would make… 'a pumpkin pie!' And then Sam would hug and tickle his niece, and she'd be squealing and giggling merrily along. She was still sort of hiccup-laughing when her mother returned with Francesca in tow, and she greeted the arrival of her newborn cousin with a point of the finger and a cry of 'baby!'

"Did we miss anything?" Maya asked as she sat down, and Lucas leaned in to look at the baby.

"Gus and Louise made pumpkin pie," Sam informed his sister, his eyes, like Dora's, going to Francesca so that he saw for himself that she was alright again.

"A classic," Maya approved with a grin. This was equal parts for the story and for the feeling of her niece's thin little fingers sitting on top of her index. She grazed them with her thumb, looking to the girl she held. After two weeks already it felt like her features were refining themselves. She was still growing, but there was definitely an echo of her parents in her. "So, where were we?"

Again, there was a look between Sam and Dora, and finally they figured they could tell the story together. What better way would there be?

The collective story started with how both Sam Hart-Lane and Dora Cassidy shared a deep connection to their families, to where they came from. In Sam's case it had been the thing that had made him want to take his stepfather's name along with his father's when his mother married James. That, in turn, meant that he felt strongly about holding on to the names and passing them on to his children. And then with Dora, it came with a desire to keep her father's name in some fashion, as well as a desire to pass it on to her own children. If not for Sam's existing hyphen, they would likely have united their two names and been done with it. But there was the Lane, and it mattered enough to land them in this conundrum. Cassidy Hart-Lane was too much of a surname.

"We got so caught up in not wanting to lose any one of the names that we never considered there could be other ways," Dora told her cousin and her sister-in-law.

"Like?" Maya asked.

"Like merging them all into one. We'd take part of each name and put them together. No hyphen, just a name, for all three of us. Like a bit of all those trees, put together, starting from the ground," Sam explained.

"It wasn't easy," Dora continued. "With what letters we had to work with and wanting to make sure all three names really felt represented…"

"I think it was after four in the morning by the time we got there, and we had been saying a lot of things that made no sense," Sam recalled. "But then…" he shook his head before turning a smile to Dora they took to mean she'd been the one to say the magic word. By that fact, he saw it as her right to be the one to share it. She started to look around, searching for something which she spotted on the small table next to the couch. It was a pad of paper, yellow and ruled. She passed it to her cousin and Lucas held it so that he and Maya could both have a look.

Across much of the surface they could see a multitude of attempts, crossed out or scribbled out. They did not follow the lines and, seeing as this brainstorm had happened between two sleep-deprived young parents in the middle of the night, they could understand. Both Sam and Dora had usually neat handwriting, but here they could barely tell for sure which of the two had written some of these words. At the bottom of the page though, they could see that Dora had taken her time, and she'd traced out the words with her neatest hand, so that they could see their daughter's full name as they had created it and find whether or not it was the right one.

Francesca May Calahart

"What do you think?" Sam asked. He sounded nervous now, worried that they might think it was stupid or wrong and that he and Dora would be forced to go back to the start, back to their conundrum when they had finally believed they'd found the answer.

"This is going to be both of your names as well?" Maya asked. They nodded. "Man, you had some really weird ones up here," she pointed to the rejected section. Looking back to the big name at the bottom, she had to smile. She looked to Lucas, and he was smiling, too. They looked to the girl in Maya's arms, and it really felt as though the name had become hers the moment that they read it.

"It really feels like the two of you together," Lucas stated.

"Right?" Maya responded with enthusiasm. "Sounds sort of… artistic, and a little bit… woodlandy," she declared, and if Sam or Dora still had any doubts on their choice – they didn't – then this would have settled the matter. Today, the Calahart family was born.

TO BE CONTINUED

See you tomorrow! - mooners