January 10th 2020

Chapter 10
Their Year to Search

It had been easy up to now not to get overly caught up in any of this for too long. Even after Lucas had started working at the bookstore a couple weeks back, Sam would be with her, they'd be having a blast, getting him acclimated to the city, prepared to start his first semester of college… But now, today, Lucas was at work, Sam was at school, and she was left to herself, to her thoughts… Truth be told, the reason she had gone to see her father and sister after dropping off Lucas at work was that, if she went back to the house on her own, she wouldn't get anywhere. She'd just be going around in circles, contemplating that big question, wondering how long it would take for her to put her studies to use, to actually be a teacher.

She knew these things took time for a lot of people, that it was normal. She'd been lucky with Houston, with Isabel and the restaurant. She'd had Asher and his uncle out here, they'd put her in touch with the chef, and then… she was in. Four years working in that dining room… If not for the distance, she would never have quit that job, but she really had no choice.

Before they'd left for college, she had her work at the diner, that was good, too, but she wasn't looking to go back. Much as she had no doubt she'd have a shot, she knew there were kids in high school, or in college, who'd find a great experience of their own out there, and they should have it. Sam was one of them. He'd been hired on and started working, before Lucas had even started at the bookstore. They hadn't even helped him. He'd worked it out all his own, had his interview and then he'd come home with a job.

"You told me about when you were working there, so I went and asked if they were hiring. When I told them my name, he took one look at me and he knew you were my sister," Sam had explained with a proud smile.

So, the diner was out for her, and her mother's theater. She'd had two jobs in her life, both of them, she didn't deny, in great part thanks to her connection to Asher. From here on out, she kind of needed to make things happen for herself, on her own merits and her achievements.

Like the band…

Soon as she'd started thinking about the contract offer, what they'd turned down, it just kept bugging her, like… like every so often she could feel the tips of her fingers tingling, the ghost feeling of guitar chords, a melody just out of earshot, and that feeling in her heart when she'd be on stage. It was like nothing else…

The band wasn't gone, they would keep playing, and she'd feel that rush again, and again… She knew that, just like she knew that they'd made the right call to turn down the offer, for herself and what she wanted from her life, same as the others did. But now she had this thing that was messing with her head, she could only doubt, and wonder. Should she have thought about it longer before saying no? She could have made something she was proud to have followed through.

Her phone chirped and she picked it up to find a message waiting.

Shawn: You going to stay out there all day or do you want to come and say hi?

Maya blinked, looking up to find her father watching from the window, Haley perched in his arm, looking out at the world with the curiosity of a one-year-old. So, she got out of the car and jogged up to the door, using her key to let herself in. Shawn was just on the other side, mid reach for the handle.

"Oh, so you do remember how to get in here," he teased.

"Getting back to me, yeah," she squinted at him before turning to her sister, who had gotten very giddy at the sight of her. "Hey, you!" she beamed, reaching out for the youngest Hunter and pulling her into her arms. If she could stay like this, with her 4H Haley burrowing her curly head at her shoulder with happy little squeals…

"Got Sam off to school?" Shawn asked, taking this opportunity to see to the burst of toys across the living room floor. Between the twins, MJ, and even Haley, he would call it the 'morning tornado,' the time between the kids' waking up and their departure for school, and pre-school, after which there'd be this layer of objects spread across the floors both upstairs and downstairs. To see him going around, crouching and rising over and over again, his arms getting more and more loaded, you would think Shawn Hunter saw this as his favorite pastime.

"Yeah," Maya told him, all the while keeping eye contact with her sister, doing a light sort of dance with her.

"Did you give him the first day of school treatment?" her father asked.

"What's that tone there, Pops?" she turned to him with a raised eyebrow.

"Oh, you know, your mom told me about your first day of school, and how that went…" When she just kept looking at him, her face bent into an expression of confusion, he blinked. "You don't remember?"

"Well, my father had just left us not long before, so, you know, it was a weird time," she admitted, hugging Haley a little closer. The girl was curled to her now, looking like she'd fall asleep if they stayed this way. "What'd she tell you?"

"That you didn't want to go," Shawn chuckled.

"Yeah, sounds about right," Maya conceded.

"Do you remember why?" he asked. She didn't. "He promised he'd take you?" he carefully reminded her. It came back to her at once, not all of it, but… yeah… There'd been a time where she had been looking forward to the start of school, more so when her father had laid out that first morning to her and made it sound like it would be even greater than her wildest expectation. But then he'd left, and after that… Well, it came down to Katy to fix it, and she was fighting an uphill battle, a very steep one.

"You're going to feel like a million million bucks…" she spoke, recited, the words seeming to fall out from the space Shawn had opened in her memories. He nodded at this. Those were the words her mother had told her, words she'd repeated to him in sharing the story. "She got me ready that morning, and… the dress was new… the shoes… I wore those until I outgrew them, maybe longer… Loved those shoes… She did my hair, two braids," she pointed to either side of her head.

"It still wasn't enough," Shawn told her, like he could sense the memory train was meeting trouble to go forward.

"I thought it meant he was coming back, that she was doing all that to get me ready for when he showed up, but… he wasn't going to come, it… it was just me and her." She looked back to Shawn, bowed her head. "Yeah…" Apparently, all these years her mother had never understood what was behind her monster of a tantrum.

She'd gone back to her room, tried to barricade herself in by stacking anything and everything she could lift or pull into place in front of the door, and then at one point she'd turned around and there was her mother, standing in her room. Maya had been sure, just for a moment, that her mother had to be a witch, or an alien, because how else could she have found her way… And then she'd seen the open window. She had gone out to the fire escape and climbed in.

"She said she would take me to school. And she was going to stay out there as long as I needed her to, so I told her I wanted her to stay all day. So, she did that. All I had to do was go and look out the window and there she'd be. Every time, she'd try and make me laugh. She's very dramatic, you know?"

"Who, Katy?" Shawn looked 'shocked.'

"I think if she had a trunk of costumes she couldn't have been funnier. Sometimes she's actually such a natural at it…" Maya smiled. "She make you laugh, too, Hales?" Haley giggled. "Runs in the family," Maya gave her little sister's cheek a smooch and received a thin-armed hug around her head for it. "Ooh, okay, okay…" she laughed.

After a while, she'd gotten the girl to go to sleep for real, and she'd taken her up to her room, sitting by her crib, watching her sleep. Her siblings had no idea how much they had changed her, all of them, and how much she cherished that change, every day. And her parents… There were no words for all they'd done for her. Was that why she didn't want to tell them about her worries, the job thing? She didn't want to let them down.

She'd stayed at the house a while longer, had lunch with both her parents, as her mother came home from work to eat, and then she'd gotten back in the car and made her way to the university.

When Sam came out from his third and last class of the day, he found he had a visitor waiting for him, with iced coffee and cupcakes. He was surprised, but also thrilled to see her.

"Alright, I couldn't wait any longer," Maya declared, holding up the cup to him. "Am I the creepy sister now?"

"No," Sam laughed as she got up and they walked along.

"So, come on, how was it?"

"Good, I think."

"You think?"

"We didn't really do anything yet," Sam pointed out. Maya nodded. She remembered those first days, too. "One of my professors kept looking at me, like she either wanted to make sure I got by okay or she was surprised by me being there. And then there's one who didn't show up today, but his assistant told us about the syllabus and all that."

"Wow," Maya shook her head.

"Yeah. But the third one, she was my favorite so far." Now she needed to hear this. Sam told her about that class, which had been the one he'd just come from.

He didn't mention whether he'd talked much to any of his classmates, and Maya didn't ask if he did. It didn't have to happen just like that, and she wasn't going to make him think that it did and that he was doing it wrong if he didn't already have a whole group of friends on his heels… It wasn't lost on her that, if some words were substituted here, in this thought, then she might have benefited from taking her own advice for herself.

"You want to eat somewhere out here tonight?" Maya asked Sam as they got into the car. "Chubbie's maybe? Maybe Dora would like to join us…" she trailed off innocently. He may not have had any friends at school yet, but he had Dora, and she was worth ten of any one of them, a hundred even. A million million…

"Yeah," Sam hid his smile in a sip from his straw. "Can we go spy on Lucas at the bookstore?"

"Oh! Yes, yes we can do that," she tapped his arm like she'd never been so proud to call him her brother. "Let's see if we can stump the great bookseller…"

TO BE CONTINUED

See you tomorrow! - mooners