December 6th 2020

Chapter 341
Their Secret in Heart

In past times, the guys had gone off to Diana Zvolensky's house to spend the night with the girls had their own sleepover. This year however, back in Austin after last year's Arizona Sleepster, with Riley off at the house with Maya and the others, the rest of them had been invited to go and be hosted by the other half of the Matthews-Orlando couple. Coming up to the house, they found Dylan waiting outside, accompanied by his five-year-old brother-in-law, Hunter. Dylan had Hunter on his shoulders, the better to increase his chances and bolster his proximity to the hoop as he tossed the basketball. When it went through, Dylan started running around and cheering, even as his hands reached up and kept hold of the boy to keep him from falling. Hunter had his arms in the air, cheering along.

"Look, opponents!" Dylan stopped and grinned when he noticed the others coming from the minivan. "Who's ready to take us on and be crushed?"

"Crushed!" Hunter shouted, like he was Dylan's hype man all of a sudden.

"Do we have to get one on our shoulders, too? Because, well…" Teddy asked, looking to the smallest among them other than Hunter, which would be Wyatt and MJ, and at nine and seven they were not so small as the five-year-old.

"No, it's good this way, then we've got three against three," Dylan pointed out. "Let's make it Texas versus Arizona… or, well…" he suggested, indicating Lucas, MJ and himself with Hunter, and then Sam, Teddy, and Wyatt, which had brought up the technicality that this was more Hart-Lane brothers than Arizona, as Sam had been in Texas for the last few years and was aiming to stay here after he finished school in a short while. Either way, his suggestion was understood and accepted, so they had their teams.

Before they could go along and play anything, the minivan had been unloaded and the bags were brought inside. There they found that Dylan had started the set-up for them to sleep that night in the living room. The coffee table had been moved aside, the loveseat pushed back, the better to create enough space for the various sleeping bags. It could easily have been that Dylan would have slept up in his and Riley's bed, and maybe Lucas up in the guest room, while the other boys took the living room, but this was a sleepover, wasn't it? It didn't matter that two of their seven were in their mid to late twenties at this point. Sleepovers were made for this. There were already two bags laid out, one child sized and bearing the image of Hunter's favorite cartoon show, the other older, a bit faded, but in excellent condition still, in the unmistakable colors of Dylan's favorite ninja turtle.

Whenever he'd see it, Lucas would chuckle, remembering the story of how he'd gotten it. He'd been at the store with his family, picking out his first sleeping bag, not much older than Hunter was now, and he'd wanted the one with the actual Ninja Turtles design. But his father had said he'd get tired of them and then he wouldn't want to use it anymore. Then, his older brother, Kyle, had spotted another one, which on the whole came off as very plain for a child's sleeping bag, but then the colors had been just those that would represent Dylan's turtle. He hadn't said it out loud, only whispered it to his little brother, who had found this acceptable, and then Dylan had pointed to it and his father had put the bag in their basket and moved on. Dylan had outgrown that bag in time, of course, but then when he'd gone for the replacement, he had found one near identical, same colors, like fate, and this one was now here on his living room floor.

Along with the cleared floor, Lucas and the boys soon found what could only be described as a dentist's fortune worth of candy bags, and chips, and the likes, laid out on the dining room table. The smaller boys especially had zoned in on the loot, and Lucas turned to Sam and Teddy both, the three of them being of a single mind: This had all the makings of this night ending with a trio of small boys either sugar rushing or getting sick, possibly both.

With the bags laid out on the floor, turning the living room carpet into something like a towel-lined beach, dinner had been ordered before they could all head outside for their Texas vs. Hart-Lanes game. It bordered on chaotic, minding the differing heights and skill levels among the players. But if there was one thing that could be said about Maya and her siblings it was how much the love of the sport was something they shared. Whether that love had existed already and become a thing that brought them closer or whether it was developed by proximity, it was plain to see whenever they got to play together, as the boys did that day. Some of them may have had more practice – not to mention the added benefits of height and strength – but this did not count out the younger boys in the slightest. On MJ's part, it could be said he was much more of a watcher and a fan, but he handled himself fairly well as a player, too. Then as far as Wyatt went, he had something which Lucas found so like his big sister, when she'd been a player back in high school. Maya's secret power had always been something he'd call her imagination power. That big creative mind of hers seemed to be able to look at the other players around her and come up with plays other people would never even think of. Wyatt was like that, too.

He still needed to polish the actual implementation of those ideas though, and today this was shown with him being so close to pulling off something massive… only to trip up and hit pavement, the ball bouncing and rolling away, abandoned, as the others fell in around him.

"Hey, easy, can you sit up alright?" Sam crouched by him, Teddy coming in on the other side, as Wyatt rolled over in his attempt to rise again.

"Uh-huh," he grunted, wincing as he saw the state of his knees and of one of his palms. Dylan set Hunter Matthews down on his feet and headed into the house for the first aid kit while the others allowed Wyatt to stand on his own. He was just a bit wobbly on his legs, though it came off as shock more than anything, and he was led into the house and then the kitchen. Dylan came back, making clean work of tending to the boy's scrapes. As his mother would say when they met up the next day, it was not the first time and it would not be the last. It was not so much clumsiness as an overeager urge to act.

The pizzas had arrived just as Dylan was finishing up with Wyatt, and everyone soon dug in, as the two boys out of Tucson shared the story of their flight, which had apparently included Maisie making friends with another small girl across the aisle from her and her dad, and Eliza getting stuck in the bathroom when the handle got stuck.

The evening had been a mix of video games, and a movie, and another pass at the hoop outside, perhaps to help the boys come down from the candy before they went to sleep. Wyatt had decided to sit out, not so much because of his knees but his hand, as it made it hard for him to handle the ball. This had saddled him with keeping an eye on Hunter, who was too sleepy now to return to Dylan's shoulders. In order to even out the teams, and maybe acting as he figured Maya would have done, Lucas also sat out, leaving Teddy and Sam versus Dylan and MJ.

"Does that hurt?" he asked, finding Wyatt was poking at the bandages on his knees. The boy shrugged. It had all been good and fine when he'd been playing with the others earlier, but now that they sat here and he was left to think, it was plain to see that there had been something on his mind all along, and now it was given the freedom of his thoughts. Unless something else had come along, Lucas had a good idea of what that something was. "Hey," he tapped his shoulder. "If you want to talk…" he offered. Wyatt kept playing at his knees for a while, but the thoughts were right there, playing at the back of his mind, until finally it felt like there was no way around it anymore.

"My father… the first one…" Wyatt spoke slowly, poking along.

"Yeah," Lucas encouraged.

"He was Maya's father first, but that was before my mom, and the rest of us…" he went on, like he was laying it all out in his head. "I wasn't born back then. I know that parents break up sometimes, so maybe that's what happened, but… no one talks about it. At school, a girl in my class was saying how her mom and her sister were going to take her to see Ree Forster's show this summer, and I told them how my sister was going to be there, too. She didn't believe how Maya was my sister, even if we have the same name, because she's an adult and I'm just a kid. I guess I never thought about it, the age thing. I tried to figure it out, and… well, my father had to be the age Sam is now when he Maya's mom had her."

"That's right," Lucas confirmed with a nod. He looked over to Sam, playing along with the others, imagining him with an infant… Actually, considering how he and Dora were… Maybe he was better off leaving that notion alone.

"But then my father was with my mom after, and they had Sam, and he's almost nine years younger than Maya. That's how old I am now. But she wasn't with us, I mean… I know kids whose parents got divorced, and they live with their mom sometimes and their dad other times, they have to. One boy in my class, he can't see his father, because they said his father wasn't allowed. Is that why? Whenever my mom, or Sam, or Cara talk about before, I know Maya wasn't there, and in the pictures, she's not there either… Did they not let my father see Maya? Did he do something?"

It was really supposed to be Maya who heard this from him, but now here they were, Wyatt and his brother-in-law, who could just as easily have been his father, he considered, thinking of the young Kermit when Maya had come along. Thinking of this, he took his phone from his pocket. After Kermit had died, Maya had been very concerned to protect certain things of his, and high in priority had been the many videos from the thumb drive he'd sent her, when she'd turned twenty-one. One thing she'd done was to send copies to a number of people. Lucas was naturally one of those, and now he found one of them and pulled it up, keeping the sound low. He handed the phone to Wyatt, who watched his father, years before he had been born, playing on the guitar Maya now had up in the Hex, with the pic she wore around her neck, and singing to a small blonde of all of three years as she stood and swayed along, smiling.

"That's Maya?" Wyatt blinked.

"Yeah," Lucas chuckled. "Look at her, look at your father. You might need to be a little older before it all makes sense, but this much you can know right now. Your father loved her… He loved her very much, and he loved you and Sam and the girls just the same. He didn't do anything wrong, but things were… complicated. He went away, and in time he met your mom, and you know the rest. Whatever you remember about him, it's not wrong, I promise."

TO BE CONTINUED

See you tomorrow! - mooners