March 15th 2020

Chapter 75
Their Day of Cheering

Neither Maya nor Lucas could recall ever going to a wedding – and they had been to their fair share in their lives – where they knew every last guest to some degree or another. There was always a selection of distant relatives or family friends that they had never met. This would mean any number of conversations, introductions, with strangers.

The day of Abigail and James' wedding, the closest thing to a stranger they had was James' college roommate, and they had met him, when they'd been up in Tucson the month before for James' birthday, along with his family. After him, they had some of both James and Abigail's co-workers, who they'd met a couple of times, and some of James' family… There were about forty of them in total, all of them fitting comfortably in the backyard, where they had installed chairs the previous afternoon.

"Hey, where's Mom?" Sam appeared out of nowhere, and to see him there in his suit, his hair taken from its sometime ridiculous heights into a neat, combed back style… Maya had been the one on the receiving end of the question, and she barely heard it, too busy seeing how grown up her little brother seemed now, how grown up and how just…

"You look… so much like Dad right now," she had to say, feeling that small twist to the heart that came with the strongest of her good memories of Kermit now that he was gone. It didn't spare Sam either, whose eyes seemed to say he'd thought it, too, when he'd seen himself in the mirror, but he hadn't believed it completely until now.

"Yeah?" he asked, as Maya came up and squeezed his shoulders with a smile.

"Big time. Abigail's upstairs, if you want to go see her, maybe let her see you before she's walking down the aisle, yeah?"

"Okay, I just have to make sure she doesn't see James and he doesn't see her. He's coming up from the car now, walking around to the backyard."

"Got it, Eagle One in flight," she smirked as they started to head to where they needed to be. "Wait, wait," Maya turned back and caught hold of her brother again, hugging him close. "Wanted you to be the first to know," she leaned in to his ear and shared the new date she and Lucas had picked the previous night. Sam beamed.

"I'll be there," he nodded.

"Better be," Maya laughed, just as her brother's eyes widened and she turned to find, as expected, Cecilia, all ready for the ceremony. "Make heart eyes on your own time, you're on bride-mom duty, go, go, go," Maya nudged Sam toward the stairs and he went, stealing a good few looks back and almost tripping twice as he went. Maya tried not to laugh, looking back to Cecilia once he'd gotten out of sight. "You good?"

"Glad for the crutch right now," Cecilia replied, a pink flush at her cheeks.

Out in the yard, Lucas had been working to help coordinate the arrival of guests and directing them to find places across the chairs. There was no bride's side or groom's side to the whole set up. Today was a day about bringing together two families into one, and they had chosen to reflect this here, asking for the guests to mingle amongst themselves as well.

"He's coming, he's coming!" Wyatt came hurtling toward Lucas with a giddy smile on his face.

"James is coming?" Lucas guessed, stalling the boy before he skidded off and ended up getting grass stains on his suit.

"With Teddy," Wyatt nodded, a curious look growing on his face after a moment. "Do I have to call him Dad now?"

"Do you want to?" Lucas crouched down to get at his eye level.

"Sorta…" Wyatt admitted, looking shy. "One time I did, not to him, to Cara and Eliza, and their faces looked weird."

"And now you don't know if you should." The boy nodded.

"But that's what he is, right?" How he was supposed to respond to this, Lucas didn't know. Was it even his place to do it?

"Do you understand why the girls reacted like that?" he asked. Wyatt considered this a moment before shaking his head. Lucas wasn't sure if it would have been easier if he'd said yes. "They… might be worried about what it means about your dad, your other dad, Kermit?" He'd made certain not to throw in any word like 'real' dad, because what would that make James? And now that he'd pointed out the issue, Wyatt was all at once catching on and left perplexed.

"He's Dad, too," he declared, like it went without saying as far as he was concerned.

"Good, then you tell them that. And if you want to call James your dad, too, then you do it. I have a feeling it'll make him happy to hear it." That was good enough for him, and Wyatt was off again, running to find James. Going by the smile that came over the man's face as he hoisted the boy in his arms, Wyatt had gone ahead and staked his claim.

There had been plenty of questions along those lines in the days and weeks leading up to the wedding. Maya had told Lucas how the girls had been wondering whether they'd have to change their names once their parents were married. As far as they knew, a decision hadn't been made yet, but the belief was very much that, if or when that choice was made, Abigail and James wouldn't do a thing until they'd consulted all seven of the kids. Maybe, as Maya assumed, it would happen today, seeing as they were all in one place and would not be so again for weeks after this.

Maya had been 'guarding' the back door since James and the boys had arrived, acting more as a liaison between everyone inside and outside, as they awaited the moment where everyone would be taking their positions and the ceremony would begin. She spotted Lucas standing across the yard and smiled over at him.

"Everything going okay?" she signed.

"As far as I can tell," he signed back. "How long before it starts?" Maya scanned the yard, seeing how everyone appeared to have arrived and taken their seats. The officiant was in place, James and his best man, too… She took out her phone and tapped out a text, waited on the spot while she waited for a response. Once it came, she smiled and whistled to their music guy, who got the tune started and effectively brought the whole yard to attention. The wedding party took its place, ready to lead their bride to her groom.

"Hey," Maya smiled, when she and Lucas rejoined.

"I was hoping I'd run into you," he joked, making her laugh.

"Same to you," she promised.

Looking over her shoulder, she made a funny face at flower girls Ginny and Sadie that got them both to giggle, and nearly had Sadie spill her flowers ahead of time, a crisis soon averted. And then here was Abigail, their glowing bride, on the arm of her eldest child, cutting quite the figure and looking very proud to stand as his mother's escort to the altar.

Up the makeshift aisle they went, and the closer they got to the front, they were able to catch the moment when James saw Abigail. Much as the both of them had never expected or really gone out searching to find someone new after they'd lost their respective first spouses, here they were today, given fortune in their misfortunes for having found one another, for having found a new and very true love. It wasn't just about the two of them, and that was possibly the thing that had solidified their union. It was about all of them, about Abigail and James, and Maya, and Sam, and Teddy, and Cara, and Eliza, and Emma, and Wyatt… and who knew, maybe someone else, too, in the years to come.

Abigail and Sam stopped when they reached the end of the aisle. The flowers were passed on to Cara, who quickly embraced her mother before getting back in place, and then after mother and son embraced as well, Abigail set her hand in the one James held out to her, and they came to stand side by side, looking to one another with those unbreakable smiles.

Lucas had wondered whether those thoughts of his and Maya's wedding, the one that was supposed to have happened three months from now, would be pushed to their peak once they stood here, watching Abigail and James say their vows to one another. But then he was looking to Maya, and she was looking back at him… and maybe she'd had it right, the night before, when she'd said they should pick the date again. Now they were looking at each other and his mind wasn't sad for what might have been. It looked forward to the year to come. If not for the fact that they had decided, out of the blue, just after midnight on New Year's Day, that they were going to do it all this year, they probably would have done it next year, wouldn't they? Maybe that was just when it was meant to happen for them.

It was good and done before they knew it, and as James and Abigail were proclaimed husband and wife, they were cheered by none louder than by their children. Wyatt had been the first to rush at them, where he was scooped up by his new stepfather. Never to be left out, Eliza had been next to go up, and Emma came right along with her, the best friends now sisters going hand in hand. It didn't take long after this for the others to follow, Cara and Teddy, coming from two sides but almost at once, too, and then Sam, who circled about and caught his big sister by the hand, bringing her so they might close around the group. Soon after they'd return to Austin, a picture of this moment, snapped by Luna, would be printed and framed and hung on the wall back home, with other family photos. They had one, too, where they'd been made to stand a bit more formally, facing the camera and giving their best smiles, but that first one was just made for memories to display.

The newlyweds had disappeared off into the house under a shower of confetti soon carpeting the yard. They would get some time to themselves, to properly let everything sink in, and in that time the yard would morph from ceremony mode into a party, with tables for the guests, for the food…

"You alright there, Grandma?" Maya stopped by Elizabeth Hart, sitting once again now that her chair had found its way to her table. She would sit here with her grandchildren, and in that moment she looked lost in her head.

"Oh, yes," the woman smiled, patting her granddaughter's hand as it sat on her shoulder. "It was a beautiful wedding," she declared, genuinely, even as Maya guessed she'd been caught in thoughts of her late son. His presence seemed unavoidable today. "It'll be you, next," Elizabeth went on. "Next year."

She might have been the one who was the most okay with the shift in the date. She respected Maya and Lucas' decision, their reason, so very much. Her father and two of her brothers, she'd told her granddaughter, had been cops themselves, something she hadn't even thought to wonder about until then. Her youngest brother had been one of them, and they'd nearly lost him once.

"Tall, gangly limbed all his life… His name was Francis, but the guys at his station nicknamed him Kermit the Frog. I was pregnant with your father when we did lose him, six days away from giving birth, and when they handed him to me, well…" she gave a sad smile up to Maya, who leaned over the back of her chair to wrap her arms around her. For having come so close to never knowing the woman, she couldn't imagine her life without her now.

TO BE CONTINUED

See you tomorrow! - mooners