Chapter 11: Once Upon a Midnight Cheery
The house was quiet after the hustle and bustle of the day. Amanda had taken CJ, Dion and their gifts home. Ms. June, the choir director, had dropped them off from the church Christmas party, and they had been so sugared up that opening their Christmas presents from Steve, Mark, and Jesse had sent them into overdrive. Mercifully, by the time she was ready to leave, they had worn themselves out completely and she had to contend only with two sleeping rag dolls instead of the wild barbarians who had arrived just after dinner.
Jesse had eaten so much that when the time came for him to go, he had had to be pulled from the depths of the sofa before managing to totter, Humpty Dumpty-like, to his car, promising, or perhaps threatening, Amanda that he would come over to join the boys in playing the video games he had given them. Steve, too, had eaten more than his fair share and was lying, his bare feet dangling over the arm of the sofa, watching the DVD that the boys had given to him. It was a very funny Bond-esque comedy which, under normal circumstances, would have had Steve in hysterics but the amount of food he had consumed restricted his reactions to the occasional throaty chuckle.
Mark peered over the top of the computer monitor and smiled. Steve so rarely managed to wind down and it was really good to see him relax, even if it was a food induced relaxation. Leaving his son to enjoy the film, Mark returned his gaze to the screen in front of him. When he had the time, Mark enjoyed surfing the net as he found that it freed his mind from the day to day minutiae of his demanding profession and helped him to relax. During the evening, Steve and Jesse had got to discussing their school days and all the people that they hadn't seen for many years. Inevitably, there were people that they decided they would like to see again, mainly girls, and some who they wouldn't want to see this side of purgatory. This got Mark thinking and he typed in ' onto the screen, clicked the 'go' button and, almost instantaneously, was rewarded with a very colourful homepage. On impulse, he brought up Colonial University to see if there was anything worthwhile there. There were a great many names on the list of old alumni. He ignored these and went to the images section and to his surprise, there were hundreds. Some were of trips, some of parties but the vast majority were of the Ravens, the university football team. Mark looked at photo after photo of fit young men in jet black playing gear, trimmed in crimson and gold. The style of the uniform changed from time to time but the colours always remained the same. As Mark moved through the photos one caught his eye, three young men, all in Raven's uniform. Underneath was a caption which read:
The Three Al's
Alan, Alfred and Albert Morganstern. Three brothers, one uniform, one team. Alan's bandaged arm was the result of an in-game injury in which he hurt his elbow. The injury necessitated an operation which caused Alan to miss most of his senior season. He was hurt again on the first play of the championship game, and a second surgery kept him out of athletics for the rest his college career. Even without Big Al, Fred and Bert were able to lead the Ravens to their third conference football championship in as many years.
As Mark looked at the photo in more detail he noticed that one of the young men had a heavily bandaged arm slung around his brothers and he realised that this was, in all probability, the photo that Jesse had mentioned during dinner. Definitely interested now, Mark continued checking the photos and clicked on a link that took him to more photographs of the Morganstern brothers.