Cracked facade

Dear Onni.
So far, so good. He'd written a few letters before, after all.
I went to the stupid party you wanted me to go to and I hated it.
After thinking about the statement for a while, it started sounding like the kind of thing that would have gotten him a slap or a nudge if he had said it out loud around Onni or Tuuri. He thought for a while longer.
I went to the Solbergs' party.
That sounded like it might be okay. Now, he needed something good to say about the party. After that, he could focus on figuring out a way to convey that he really didn't want to go to another of those parties with as little rudeness as he could knowingly manage.
One of the servants was good looking and brought me cake when I went to sit alone in the garden for a while. He had a flower pin on.
Lalli gave it another thought, and realized it was a bad idea. Especially the mention of the fact that the servant was wearing a flower pin matching the one worn by Lalli and other unpaired young adults while serving at a party intended as a meet-up for people who didn't see much of each other in their daily lives. Mentioning the pin would almost certainly make Onni expect some courtship to have happened by the time his answer reached Lalli. Lalli didn't want to start courting someone based on that gesture alone. Roni had also brought Lalli sweets from crowded events that he had left much earlier than he was supposed to. Now, Lalli felt dumb for having believed that this had meant that he was actually nice. Nobody wants to share a bed with a bunch of pointy knees and elbows. He focused on the reason for which he had fled that specific event, which was shared with many past ones.
Too many people tried talking to me at the same time. When it was time to dance, the music was too loud. I couldn't bear the music, watch my steps and talk with my dance partner at the same time. I don't remember the names of the people I didn't already know before the party.
Not even that of the nice-looking servant who brought the cake to him in the garden. This looked like a point in the letter where he could get away with being more direct.
I can't choose someone like this. Is there really no other way to meet people and find out if any of them would make a good partner?
Strictly speaking, Lalli had hunted with Sigrun a couple times in the month he had spent in the old man's house and had taken to having lunch in a local tavern when he could spare the energy to walk to the nearby town and back. Unfortunately, hunting was literally the only context in which Sigrun was quiet and Lalli had been genuinely surprised to find out that she and Mikkel weren't married, or even in any sort of long-term arrangement. Still, the old man himself had told Lalli that they were an example of what a healthy friendship could be like. Lalli reread what he had written and decided that this was all he wanted to tell Onni on the subject matter. There was plenty of space on the sheet to mention the other piece of information he had for Onni.
Juha had a fever for a few days, but he's better now. He got it trying to rescue a family of cats from the rain. Only one kitten is still alive. Väinö says Juha bonded with it. Väinö is probably explaining things better in his own letter.
The kitten now had a collar with a bell, which was a quite annoying when Lalli was tired. Mentioning this was probably rude. Preserving the existence of that brand of magic had been one of the reasons Cecilia has been able to "marry down". Onni was probably going to scold him for not doing anything special for Juha while he was sick, but why should he? The only reason he was currently under the same roof as Onni's son and Tuuri's daughter was that that the three of them had lost their own home a long time ago and they were avoiding visits to Anne-Mari's father's family for some reason; that left Cecilia's grandfather's house as the only place they had any sort of legitimacy in considering their own home. There were already other people caring for the children. Those were the ones who should be keeping them company when they were sick as far as Lalli was concerned. He signed the letter, then took another sheet out to write to Tuuri. The news of Anne-Mari he had initially promised her to keep the farewells from going on forever would be easy: he was seeing Juha play with her more and more often when he went to Mikkel to ask him something. Anne-Mari had turned six months old right around the time Lalli had been sent to have a vacation in the old man's house and had hence been brought into town in a sling wrapped around Lalli's shoulders. He also had a question to ask Tuuri. Depending on how she would answer it, she could become someone Lalli could write to about Roni. At some point during the past month, Lalli had gotten the idea that he had taken so long to notice his relationship with Roni was a mess because his relationship with Onni and Tuuri had already been a mess for several years, if not their entire lives. However, Tuuri was only two years older than Lalli was, and had ended up becoming his second guardian alongside Onni because she understood how most people worked better than Lalli did. Lalli's train of thought concerning his relationship with his older cousins had eventually reached a point where he had noted similarities between what he had started doing to keep Roni from becoming angry too often and how Tuuri had started acting in her teens… and had never really stopped after entering adulthood. Are you also afraid something bad will happen if you stop smiling at everything all the time? This was what he really wanted to know. However, she might not really understand unless she gave a positive answer to the question that he ended up writing down after giving the news of Anne-Mari: Is there someone you love, but don't feel free to be your true self around?

xxxx

The next morning, Lalli was awake early enough to greet the mailman. He handed the man the letters sent by the household, and got letters intended for its members back. As he was trying to figure out which were those he should take to the family's breakfast table and which were those he should leave on a small table near the kitchen's entrance, he saw an unfamiliar name on one of them. When he went to put the kitchen pile in its proper place, he caught the attention of one of the young women working in the kitchen to ask her about it:
-Ah, Västerström. They're the people who lived here before. Give it to the boss, he's the one who's handling those.
Lalli was a little intrigued. He was quite sure the old man had acquired this house while Cecilia had been pregnant with Juha, and the kid was currently four years old if he remembered correctly. Wouldn't all of those people's acquaintances know they had moved out, by now? However, he didn't want to hold up the young woman for longer than he already had, so he decided to ask the old man instead.

The old man hadn't bothered to tell Lalli about the house's previous owners before the letter showed up, knowing that it was the kind of thing that he tended to no pay attention to if it came unsolicited. Despite his newfound curiosity about those people, Lalli had no idea why the old man was telling him all that complicated money stuff. To him, the important part of the story was that the parents were dead, while the only son was now a servant at the Solberg's house, which was the closest thing they had to next-door neighbors. Having long noticed that it was easier for him to talk when there were fewer people around, Lalli had decided to see if he would be able to make up for having fled the party while going there to drop off the letter. The servant who had come to open the door had been neither the one for whom the letter was meant nor the one who had brought him the cake. Lalli's visit quickly became a small tea party involving Mrs. Solberg and her daughter Helena, who had also been wearing a flower pin at the party. He recognized the cake that was served, and understood the reason of that familiarity when he saw the face and beautiful gold hair of the servant who had brought it. The young man gave Lalli a just barely audible "thank you" with a smile, then went to stand near the door in case anything else needed to be fetched; it was then that Lalli noticed the envelope he had brought sticking out of his apron's pocket. Fortunately, the Solberg ladies mostly asked him about basic things that felt safe to talk about and "I was eight" and "Onni took care of most of that" were accepted in place of things he did not know. The snacks and tea were mostly gone by the time the conversation got to sorting out contradictory information his hosts had heard about Anne-Mari's parentage. While Sigrun, Mikkel and other house employees who regularly went into town had made sure that people knew she was Juha's paternal cousin, some people had refused to believe it and started rumors, the most popular of which was that Anne-Mari was actually Lalli's own daughter. Lalli remembered someone once mentioning that an unannounced visitor's welcome rarely outlasted the contents of a single teapot and took his leave as soon as the question was settled. As he left the Solbergs' property, he remembered that "people getting ideas about unexplained single parents" was one of the reasons it was an overall good thing to keep Anne-Mari's father around in spite of his limited usefulness on the job. Onni and Tuuri had often used words akin to "people getting ideas" many times while talking about why Lalli didn't make friends or may have trouble finding a partner on top of the fact that men who were interested in other men were much rarer than men interested in women. Lalli sometimes wondered if there were people interested in both, but waited until they found a woman they liked because there were (according to Onni, Tuuri, Cecilia and Roni at least) many people who thought that being interested in men was a "bad thing". Maybe having confirmed the actual situation concerning Anne-Mari with the family organizing the get-together parties would result in someone who was hesitating to do so before approaching him. If that was the case, he really hoped it wasn't going to be someone like Roni. There was no way he was letting himself go through such an ordeal a second time. Lalli suddenly realized that from purely practical standpoint, there was one person he was hoping for, one he was personally wary of and a third the old man had made sure to advise him against while telling him about the options he had in town. Approaching the first himself might at least keep the two others away.

xxxx

It looked like some investor's association had gotten Emil's father's old contact information again. He looked at the sum of money required to get in, and it looked like he could manage it if he delayed the payment of an installment of the debt he had towards Helena's father. There was no way those people were getting a single crownbit from him. On paper, this looked like the only way for him to be able to bring more than a small servant's room and pittance to an arrangement. In practice, he had sworn to never get his money involved with those associations, regardless of how legitimate they seemed. It had taken a lot of coaxing by Helena merely to let the bank keep the money he was setting aside for installments of his debt, as keeping it in his room would make it a very tempting target to other house employees who were struggling with money more than he was. He decided it was good time to have a look at a specific old investment ledger, to remind himself of his reasons. The numbers could be in different columns depending on whether money was being invested or made back. From page to page, nothing looked out of the ordinary, and it made several of the individual investments look like they were giving good returns. At the end of the part with the numbers written down in neat columns, there was a graph spanning several double pages showing what the numbers meant in regards to the family's overall fortune. There was a horizontal bar with about two thirds of the page above it and a third of the page under it marking the point at which they were technically in debt. In the beginning, the zigzagging line showing the money at the family's disposal was well above that bar, even at its lowest points. However, even on the first page, one could see that the losses were getting more and more consequential while the gains, while seemingly making up for the losses that had preceded them, weren't quite making the money that had been invested overall back. The following pages showed that this was not just a fluke due to the chaotic nature of what was made back in regard to the money invested. Eventually, the lower parts of the zig-zag started dipping under the bar, but the numbers reached by the higher parts still made the investments seem worth it. If Emil's parents had quit the association during that time, their family might have had a chance. Unfortunately, they had been convinced to stick with the association until they were deep in debt. When a chunk of their non-investment revenue was put toward settling that debt, they had been clueless about how to live with what little they were allowed to keep to avoid starving or freezing to death. The entire family had taken on menial jobs in hope of settling the debt faster. While his parents had been discovering that gambling was also a thing among lower classes and had lower stake requirements than what they were used to, Emil had been discovering just how much more money the family had once had compared to most people, and gotten a wake-up call. While his parents had been turning out to be lousy gamblers, he had done his best to figure out what were really necessities, and what he could live without. While he had been unable to prevent his parents from getting into the circles in which one risked life and limb for a chance at getting their hands on what was now a lot of money to them, he had managed to secure a job that included room and board with the Solbergs. By the time his parents had been buried, he had decided that he was going to be very careful about the hands in which he left his money for the rest of his life.