Growth
The number of envelopes containing a week's worth of pay stacked next to Lalli's tableware amounted to exactly the number that Tuuri had allegedly never given Roni. He knew how to tell something had gone through the paws or jaws of a squirrel, by now. There was another stack of envelopes, all letters from the family. It had more items than usual, yet half as many as the stack of envelopes containing money. The first letter, from Onni, gave him the general outline of how the money had been found. As soon as the family's contract with Roni's parents had been fulfilled, and they had been no longer employed by them, Cecilia had made a squirrel enter the estate and look into various nooks and crannies. The place where Roni had hidden the missing pay envelopes had been found, and they had been snuck out by squirrels, one at a time. Onni seemed confident that Roni would not be able to complain about any sort of theft without needing to explain why he had the envelopes in the first place. Only time would tell, as far as Lalli was concerned. Onni also seemed to have come around to the idea that a partnership between Lalli and Roni wouldn't have worked out in the long term; back when he had decided Lalli should have a vacation, Onni had clearly not really been believing the reasons for which he had broken up with Roni and hoping some time away from him would change his mind. Lalli still wasn't sure whether that whole idea of finding another partner at the Solberg's party was an attempt to show him how lucky he had been to find Roni or Onni finally catching onto the fact that breaking up with him hadn't been a rash decision. Over the years, Onni had gotten several strange ideas about what was best for Lalli and Tuuri, and spent some time persuaded that they didn't work because too little effort was being put into properly implementing them before realizing that they actually didn't work because they didn't work. At least, his apologies after such realizations were sincere as far as Lalli could tell; after all, Lalli was certain that there had been more trial and error ever since their parents had died than Onni would ever admit to. If it had just been that, Lalli would have been fine with it. What he found extremely grating was Onni pretending to be making far fewer mistakes than he actually was all while telling Lalli and Tuuri they weren't allowed to make any. As a very welcome bonus, Onni had apparently stayed in what Tuuri called "reassessment mode" long enough to pay attention to the fact that the party hadn't fulfilled the purpose for which Lalli had gone to it. His letter even told Lalli to do what he wanted to find a partner, as long as it didn't consist of staying home all the time and hoping potential candidates would show up among people coming to visit other members of the household. Lalli had found someone at the Hunter's Lodge, so any sort of musing about the fact that going to the Solberg's party had been Onni's idea in the first place could wait until later. Maybe it had been yet another of those ideas that needed to be tried before Onni would believe it didn't work. Lalli let out a sigh of relief when the admonition about not keeping Juha company didn't come, but it was replaced by yet another admonition to not make him worry more than necessary when giving news of Juha. The only reason Lalli was giving Onni news of his son in the first place was that he had heard him complaining about how the news he got from the old man was probably second-hand from whoever was actually taking care of the boy. Otherwise, Juha was a young child doing young child things and Onni seemed to have a gift for finding reasons to worry about things. Lalli had doubts about whether it was possible to give Onni any real first-hand news about Juha without making him worry more than necessary.
Tuuri's letter was an apology for having believed Roni about the missing pay envelopes, calling him "extremely convincing". On the brighter side of things, she was quite happy to get the news that Juha and Anne-Mari were getting along. On the less fortunate side, the only thing his question to her had elicited had been the – correct, to her credit – guess that there had been a point in time where Lalli had felt unable to be himself around Roni despite loving him. Lalli didn't get what the point of trying to be tactful was when it resulted in the other person only partially – and sometimes not at all –understanding what he was trying to say. For a brief moment, he wondered if it was a good idea to actually name Onni in his next letter to Tuuri or not. Nothing actually kept Tuuri from showing it to him, yet he didn't want confront Onni himself about this unless he got any sort of evidence that it wasn't all his own general tendency to be the only one missing and/or seeing things others didn't. Cecilia's letter was a long explanation of the reasons for which she couldn't actually look for the missing money before the job was done, promised that she wouldn't accept a job from that household ever again and encouraged him to use the money on "something nice". There was a fourth letter. It was from Anne-Mari's father. He opened it, wondering what the man would want to write to him about, considering how things tended to go when they only had each other to interact with. It looked like someone had caught onto the meaning of his question to Tuuri, after all.
xxxx
Stefan's advice on the subject came quite quickly:
-I think it could be worth writing back to him. If you do, tell him I'm stealing that photo idea of his.
Lalli promptly saw the issue with the potential "theft", and let Stefan know it:
-All your stories happen before photos existed. Or at least before it was easy to get them.
-I've already thought of this, actually. Göte keeps illustrated portraits of his children in the store so people will know what they look like and give news if they happen to have run into them in the past or do so in the future. He re-draws them about once a year to account for the fact that they're growing. I wouldn't be surprised if the portraits and actual children turned out to look very different from each other, by now.
-That might work.
Lalli didn't want the conversation to get too off-track, but it was a little difficult. He would have had much more trouble understanding most of Reynir's letter if he hadn't gained an interest in using analogies to describe things over the past month. Even then, he had preferred to check with Stefan to make sure he was understanding what the letter was saying correctly.
The element from the letter that had taken the conversation in its current direction was Reynir's sentiment that his parents had taken a photo of him at least five years ago, on a day on which he had been in great need of their guidance, and had been interacting with that photo rather than the real him ever since. At the beginning, it hadn't been a problem because the real him was still a lot like the photo. Now, the difference between him and the much younger man on the photo was causing problems. If he displayed a personality trait that he didn't have five years ago too prominently, his parents often acted as if he had just announced he was coming back from killing the family's entire flock of sheep on a whim. They would accept that he was growing up when he agreed with them on something, but claim that he was "still a child after all" if he disagreed with them. If he refused to budge about something that was important to him, they took as a sign that he didn't truly care about them. As a result, it felt to him as if they wanted him to remain as close as possible to the young man in the photo and were arbitrarily labelling anything that made him diverge from that picture too much as "not adult behavior". He and Tuuri had met while the family had a job in his village. After years of not wanting to hear about him getting married, his parents had insisted that he go find Tuuri and bring her home after a village kid had randomly mentioned seeing them doing things alone together and made them sound much more intimate than they had actually been. He had only gone as far as finding Tuuri, taking with him a travel bag that contained every single small possession he couldn't bring himself to leave behind.
The letter went on to explain that this was the best way Reynir could manage to explain the reason for which he didn't plan to visit his parents in the near future and had used the same letter to tell them about his marriage to Tuuri and Anne-Mari's birth. Reynir's letter went on to agree that Onni had a milder, and more justified in Reynir's eyes, version of a character trait shared by his parents that he couldn't quite put his finger on. It next announced that he was going to ask a few direct questions to make sure Lalli's question to Tuuri was about what he was assuming it was. Do you feel like he's always worrying more about things than he really needs to? Do your ideas for making his life easier always either not seem to work for very long or go in a bad direction for reasons you don't understand? Is it hard for you to say "no" to him, because you don't want to make his life harder than it already seems to be? Do you feel like that he's treating so many things as a big deal that you have absolutely no idea which of them you're supposed to prioritize over the others? Are you having trouble telling the difference between what he wants for you and what you want for yourself? Is there anything else that makes spending too much time with him tiring? He had apparently needed to stop at that question to have enough space for end-of-letter formalities left. For Lalli, it felt like just the right number of questions, and he had answer ideas for all of them. The last one felt particularly odd coming from Reynir, as he was probably the last person alongside Tuuri that he could picture being tired out by another's company. Lalli couldn't help mentally apologizing to Onni before starting to craft a response; the other reason he wanted Stefan with him while he wrote it was to make sure his words weren't nastier towards Onni than necessary.
xxxx
The conversation with Sigrun eventually reached the point where Emil was telling her what he knew of what Lalli and Stefan were up to. Mikkel had already told her what people living or working under the same roof as Lalli knew. Emil decided it was a good time and place to share information to which he was privy:
-I know Göte is still plotting to break Lalli and Stefan up.
The fact that Sigrun was among those who knew he had his eye on Lalli showed in her response:
-And it would a bad thing for you because…
-If I'm not allowed to deliberately break them up, nobody should be. I'm probably making it more about me than it has any right to be, but that's how I feel.
Sigrun gave him a friendly punch that was a little harder than it needed to be, as per usual:
-Though you definitely still have progress to make, give yourself a little credit for thinking of Lalli enough to reject notion of breaking him and Stefan up on purpose.
-Did you already forget when I told you I might just do it?
-No, I haven't.
-Then why are you assuming I was thinking of Lalli?
-Because if you were thinking entirely of yourself, you'd be coming up with some sort of reason for which the rules shouldn't apply to you, not reluctantly following them.
-Maybe I just don't want to be put under the seagull's man surveillance.
-Is it really that?
-Are you Mikkel in some sort of elaborate disguise?
-Nah, I think he just rubbed off on me little. Otherwise, do remember that I just came back from checking on Lalli's family. If you have any questions about them, go ahead.
Emil hadn't thought of that, and briefly perked up before realizing the implications of the first question he had in mind:
-They come back here once in a while, right? I probably ran into them at least once in the past five years and completely ignored them.
Sigrun remained her usual chipper self:
-Correct. They're in a line of work where showing you're not afraid to get yourself dirty and a little damage on your clothing is a good thing. They tend to have trouble switching to keeping a better eye on the state of their clothes and hair when they come stay here, so the part of you that has been taught that disheveled people don't deserve your attention would have definitely kicked in.
At Sigrun's words, Emil had an even grimmer realization:
-I probably ignored Lalli also, then.
-He's the group's night watch and rarely changes his sleep schedule, so the chances that you've run into him while he was fully awake are slim. Even if you have, the guy honestly seems to only be able to keep proper tabs on a tiny number of people at a time, so he tends to give priority to those he expects to run into on a regular basis for the weeks or months to come. If he's keeping track of you at all, his earliest mental journal entry about you is probably from that time you brought him cake at the Solberg's party.
That piece of information was precious to Emil. If Sigrun was telling the truth, this would be one of the best first impressions he had made in years. He also realized that said impression could be ruined if the fact that he'd hadn't been paying much attention to the seagull man's family until very recently became too obvious. There happened to be a way to fix that situation immediately available to him:
-So, what is Lalli's family like?