June 29th 2021

Chapter 180
Our Wind of Generations

"Dada!"

"Yes, Pumpkin?" Lucas turned from where he'd been loading up the bag for them to go. "Where'd your dress go?" he asked, approaching the small girl as she stood just at the door to the nursery, looking at him across the hall.

Maya had just put her into one of the sundresses her Granny Mel had bought her, but all of a sudden there was no sign of the dress anymore. Oh, she wasn't walking around in next to nothing. She had her swimsuit on underneath – another gift from Granny Mel – and now it was uncovered for all to see. She stared up at her father now with a smile full of baby teeth. She loved the swimsuit, especially the little frills around her shoulders and her waist. She was playing with them now.

"Gotta get your dress back on until we get to your uncles' house, okay?" Lucas told her, looking beyond her into the nursery so he might find it.

"Nuh," Marianne shook her head. He looked down again. That smile… That was the Maya in her right there. They always said she'd have him wrapped around her little finger, and right here he couldn't say that they were wrong. And still…

"Alright, fine, but we won't get to go if you don't put it on. Won't get to see your cousins, and your aunts and uncles, and your grandparents, and great-grandparents… Won't even get to go in the pool. It's too bad, you're such a good little swimmer." The more he added on, the more stricken she looked, but the pool was the last straw, and she went off on her sandaled feet until she found the dress and attempted to put it back on herself. It got stuck on her head and she cried for him again, so Lucas went and helped her. "There, that's better," he straightened up her hair when the dress was fixed.

"Go?" she looked up at him with those blue eyes so like her mother's.

"I need to finish with the bag, and then we need Mommy to be ready, too. You want to help me?" She nodded, so he swooped her up and carried her back to the room, plopping her down on the bed where she crawled up to look at what he was putting in the bag.

"Me!" she pointed to her hat.

"Yes, that's yours, that's to protect your head from the sun," Lucas reminded her. She pulled it out of the bag, so he took it and put it on her head. She smiled again. She loved the hat, too. It also had frills, and it was covered in ladybugs, just like her swimsuit.

"Okay, I think that's everything," Maya came into the room, carrying a load of Marianne's things. Her own swimsuit's straps could be spotted peeking out from under her tank top. Lucas held the bag open for her and she placed the last things inside. "I mean, it's not as bad as when she was a baby, but it's still a lot, isn't it?" Maya breathed out.

"At least we're prepared for anything," Lucas zipped the bag shut.

"Yeah, ready for inspection from your mother," Maya joked.

It wasn't as though they hadn't all seen each other very recently. The party for baby Leyton was only a week behind them, but then it had been the reason for all this, too. As much as they all saw each other on a regular basis, it was usually in smaller groups, this family and that one, or this one and that one. They didn't often get together all of them together, the Friars senior, elder, and younger, the Cassidys, the Hillards, the Sullivan-Reyes, and now the Calaharts… With the births of Francesca and Leyton, a new determination came for them to gather, once a month at the least. And since it was the height of summer, how could they not benefit from it as much as possible? So, Michael and Keith had invited them all to the house, swimsuits mandatory.

They pulled up to the house to find that most of the others had already arrived. It took next to no time for Marianne to be taken from them, landing in the arms of Patty Robinson. The woman had been married to Joseph Friar since before the girl was born, and still sometimes Maya would find it impossible not to be amazed, remembering how she'd started off as her professor out in Houston. Now she was her daughter's great grandmother and oh how she loved that little pumpkin. When Marianne tried to pull her dress over her head, she went ahead and helped her.

"Now let's do something about that skin of yours, the sun is out today, not a cloud in the sky," Patty carried her off.

The gathering was bolstered today by the presence of all five Hillard children. Joseph Hillard was here with his spouse Leigh, and the two of them were going on about how they had been looking at houses. They had been putting money aside since their wedding two summers back, but now Leigh's parents had arranged it so that they would advance them the money, the better to get started on that dream of theirs a little earlier. According to Leigh, the stipulation was that they would pay them back by the time it was most convenient to them. If that didn't start until ten years from now, that was fine by them.

Then there were the older girls, Sarah and Evie, whose departure from home after high school had compelled their parents to pack up and move themselves and their youngest children from Houston to Austin. They missed their family terribly, and part of them still lamented their childhood home, but they were doing well out in the world, and by now it was clear that the thing that mattered most wasn't the house but the possibility to return to the people they missed. So long as they had those, the rest mattered less.

"So, are you excited to start high school?" Lucas asked Henry Hillard. It seemed only yesterday that he'd been a small boy in a Yoda hoodie. Now here he was, fifteen years old and about to start the ninth grade. He wasn't that tall still, and possibly it would stay that way, but he had eyes on the basketball team. He was also heading into high school with grades that put him on track for being the top of his class. He'd always had that sort of serious air about him, always was a kid who looked like he knew where he was going, and here there was no exception. But then again…

"I don't know, I guess," Henry shrugged.

"Oh?" Lucas inquired.

"No one likes me at school," he frowned.

"Come on, I'm sure that can't be true," Lucas tried to reassure him.

"No, it is," Henry insisted. "They all knew each other from before, and then I showed up and they decided I was the new kid forever. I pointed out that we were all new, because we were all starting middle school at the time, but it only made it worse."

"Right…" Lucas sighed. That all stayed the same, didn't it? "Well, the way I remember it from when I was starting high school, it's completely different to start there. I think there's going to be a lot of others in your grade feeling like 'the new kid' all of a sudden. You'll find your way… or it'll find you."

Henry went off with this notion playing at the back of his mind. Lucas watched him go for a moment before signalling to the youngest of the Hillards. Maggie was only a tiny thing when he'd first met her, and now here she was, thirteen years old and starting middle school herself in the fall. From what he knew, she didn't have her brother's problems. She'd been going into the fifth grade when the family moved to Austin, and she'd never struggled making friends. By now, she was turning into what could only be described as a kindly queen bee.

"Do you think there's any way you can help Henry this summer, about high school?" Lucas asked her. Maggie bit back a laugh. Her big brother was kind of a dork, according to her, but that was just what made him as great as he was. A lot of people underestimated him, which was a shame, because if they only got to know him, oh… That brotherly energy in him was so strong. "Please?" Lucas asked his young cousin.

"Fine, okay…" Maggie sighed. "I'm not making any promises. He's so bad at… starting?" she explained once she found the word.

"Yeah, I can tell. Just do what you can? For me?"

"Just for you," she gave him the same scrunchy smile she'd been giving him for as long as he'd known her, which made him laugh. "Can I take Marianne in the pool?" she now asked.

"Well, I think Maya's going to take her soon, so you can go with them?" Lucas pointed, and off she went, while he directed himself to find his cousin Dora, the better to get a look at baby Francesca May.

Meanwhile, after keeping her from her destiny, going by the number of times she'd kept pointing at the water since they'd arrived, Maya brought Marianne over to the pool. It was right here that she'd learned to swim, the previous summer. Keith Reyes, back in his younger days, had been a lifeguard and an instructor. He'd taught each of his daughters to swim from an early age, and he would do the same for his son when the time came, just as he'd done it for his nephew's baby girl. Every time they came back here, it was like she remembered being in the water on those days, and all she wanted was to go back.

Maya had a slightly more stressful memory of the experience. It had all gone perfectly fine, as she had known deep down that it would. She trusted Keith infinitely, and still the idea that anything might go wrong had kept her on edge the entire time. Only the fact that Lucas appeared to be somewhere almost on the exact same page made it so that she didn't completely lose control. Sometimes she suspected that he'd made himself appear overly concerned just so that she'd be able to cope with her own fears by reassuring him, but she preferred not to break the illusion.

"Well, now, Miss Friar, how's that water for you, huh?" Maya asked, in her best drawl. Marianne let out a few squeaks as her feet connected with the water. She grappled on to her mother's arms and squared her shoulders like she expected to be cold, but then as soon as she was taken into the pool proper, she was just giddy, completely fine and ready to splash around. "Yeah, that's what I thought," Maya laughed as she did her best not to get any water shot at her face. "You know what we're going to call this place now?" she whispered at her as she swam on her back, keeping her close. "Swan Lake," she made a face and Marianne giggled. By now, it was impossible for her not to know what swans were, with how everyone associated them with her. It would be a while longer before she could understand the whole of the joke, but it worked well enough already, didn't it? "Now if we could just get your dad out here, too… Oh, he's with your cousin. Well, he'll come join us soon enough. When he does get here, you are more than welcome to splash him, yeah? You give him all you've got."

TO BE CONTINUED

See you tomorrow! - mooners