December 13th 2020

Chapter 348
Their Place to Share

In the end, Lucas could have picked Maya up from the school instead of Sam. Maeve had let him go ahead of closing, not by much but enough so that he ended up arriving home before Maya and Sam. He checked in with the dogs, grabbed a snack, and was on his way to go and sit on the couch as he waited for his wife and brother-in-law to return when the door opened and in they came. Sam was carrying the bags filled, Lucas guessed, with Maya's afternoon purchases.

"Time for the fashion show?" he joked, just as the expression on the brother and sister's faces registered with him. Sam looked confused and curious, while Maya… Her mind just seemed somewhere else, far away and active at some task he wasn't aware of. "So that's a no then?" Finally, Maya paused for a moment, turning to look at him.

"Just… give me two minutes to go change, okay? Be right back," she told him before heading upstairs. Lucas watched her go before turning to Sam.

"Don't look at me, she was like that when I got to the school. Didn't talk the whole way back, just said she needed to get here." They had both known her long enough that they understood sometimes her ideas had a way of capturing the vast majority of her mind until they were expressed in some way, but it didn't make the witnessing on the other side any less strange.

When Maya returned, she had changed into her PJs and slippers, hair left to tumble free from the loose bun it had been in all day. Now she was browsing through the cabinet where they kept a number of photo albums, especially childhood images they had, thanks to their parents. She pulled one of those albums from the shelf and carried it into the kitchen. Lucas and Sam followed, wanting now more than ever to find out just what was going on. Lucas was especially curious as to why she'd taken one of the albums from his childhood.

"Are you looking for something?" he asked, standing where he could peer over his wife's shoulder.

"Someone…" she mumbled, flipping pages, flipping, flipping, coming back the other way before finally… She stopped, and she looked, and then she gasped, pulling one of the chairs so she might sit.

"Maya, what…" Lucas asked. She pointed to a woman in one of the photos.

"Her… I saw her, tonight," she told him. Lucas sat down next to her.

"Where? At school?" he asked. She nodded. "Are you sure?"

"I am now," she looked to the photo, to the woman, and the small boy in the little league uniform.

"Who's that?" Sam asked, the most clueless of the three.

"Jocelyn Orlando. That's Dylan's mother," Lucas explained.

"That's not her name anymore," Maya shook her head, pulling her phone from her pocket and making quick work of finding a photo of the girls' basketball team, pinching to zoom in on one of the players' faces. "It's Jo Munroe now." Lucas looked like he'd just taken a cannonball to the gut, which was probably not too far off from what she'd looked like after seeing the photo of Taylor Munroe.

"Munroe, as in… Phoebe?" he asked. Maya passed him the phone, so he might get to properly call up the girl's face.

It was strange to think how you could look at someone for two years and not notice something so obvious. Of course, once you got to the part where you were only missing the last few pieces of the puzzle, it became very, very easy to see the whole picture and fit them in place.

"You know, from day one, I looked at that girl, sitting in my class, and… I liked her. I mean, sure, she's one of the most likable people you'll ever meet, so it's not that hard, but it was more than that. I didn't understand it, probably just thought 'she's got a good sense of humor, she likes TXNY, she's got good energy for a class like this…' But it was more than that, I just didn't see it. I mean I saw…" she gestured to the picture on the phone.

They weren't so alike that it was uncanny, but now it was so easy to find the resemblance that it didn't feel possible she wouldn't have made the connection before.

"Is that even possible?" Sam asked, sitting with them now, too.

Lucas was staring at that picture, his free hand gripped somewhere about his chin and over his mouth. He hadn't exactly hung out with her, but he'd definitely met Phoebe Munroe a few times in the last two years, whether it was at the Fall Festival, or whenever he and Maya attended basketball games at the high school, or that time she and Stella and Missy and Kai had sort of 'crashed' their party. Dylan was there… Did he see her? No, he would have said something.

"She's, what, seventeen now?" Lucas asked Maya, and she nodded.

"2011," she recalled, from having seen it on her file. The year meant something to Lucas, she could tell, and for having known Dylan long enough, for having known his family history, the dots connected for her, too.

"What does that mean?" Sam asked.

"That's… That's when Dylan's mother left Mr. Orlando, and Kyle, and Dylan," Maya slowly told him.

"So then… Oh…"

Sam stopped rather than state what they had already figured out, or at least what the various facts they had at hand suggested. They didn't exactly have a complete account, only what Dylan had known, what he'd been told by his father and his brother. He'd never known exactly why his mother had left, but now… It couldn't be a coincidence, could it? They knew when Mrs. Orlando had left her family, and they knew when Mrs. Munroe had given birth to Phoebe, and the two events were simply much too close to one another not to have… overlapped.

The whole ride home, all Maya had been able to think about was Dylan, golden-hearted, accident prone Dylan… Remind you of anyone? It was staring you in the face, Friar. She'd thought about him, and about the first time he'd told her about his mother leaving. They'd barely even known each other at the time, just a couple of thirteen-year-olds, new classmates and even newer friends. But he'd picked up on something in her, recognized a shared experience. Her father had left her, and his mother had left him. He'd allowed that part of her to remain her own until she was ready to share it, and if that hadn't been the moment when he'd become so cherished to her…

Now, it was getting to be that their stories were even more parallel than they'd known. The circumstances of their departures were not the same, obviously, not that she could really speak for Jo Munroe… Jocelyn… But now there was this other family, a sister, a brother…

"She's been in Austin all this time?" Lucas asked Maya. He still couldn't wrap his head around it.

He had vivid memories of the woman, even if he'd only known her for about two years, between the day he'd met Dylan at little league and the day his friend had shown up to school holding so tightly to his brother's hand for fear that he'd leave, because that was what their mother had done. She'd been such a presence, in part because Melinda Friar had known Jocelyn Orlando before, and once their sons had become such good friends, well naturally they saw a lot more of each other. He still remembered, and she had been… She was a great mom, that was the main thing he couldn't forget. He had been so shocked when she'd left. Sure, he'd been ten years old at the time, and he didn't know a whole lot, but it still didn't seem possible that she'd decide to go like that.

"I think so. Phoebe never mentioned anything about moving here or living anywhere else. From what I know, she's been in school with a lot of the other kids in her year since… kindergarten. Didn't Dylan's mom send him birthday cards? He said…"

"She did, yeah," Lucas nodded.

"Wasn't there a return address on those?" Sam pitched in, but they couldn't say. They knew the cards existed, and that Dylan had kept them, unopened, but they'd never seen them with their own eyes. "Any chance that he knows all this?" Sam asked. Maya and Lucas looked to one another. They couldn't expect their friends not to have some secrets they'd choose to keep to themselves, but… No, not this. He'd have said something, they trusted that much.

"What do we do?" Maya asked. Right then, it didn't matter that she'd known Dylan nearly as long as she hadn't known him. In her mind, she felt she had to defer to Lucas, who'd known Dylan and been a friend and brother to him for just about two decades.

"We don't have a choice, do we?" Lucas sighed. "We can't decide whether or not he's better off knowing. Now we know, and if we don't tell him then we're keeping it from him. He deserves to know, to decide where to go from there.

"Yeah…" Maya quietly replied. That was what she'd been thinking, too.

"What about Phoebe?" Lucas turned to her, and it was like another punch.

She didn't know either, and didn't she have just as much right to know? Except… well, she was still a teenager, and if they told her that she'd been born of an affair, that her mother had left behind a husband and two sons in some great part because of her… That golden heart she shared with her half-brother would be broken in pieces. How am I supposed to look her in the eye anymore if I keep this from her? Maya thought, devastated.

They could just as easily have never found out, none of them. If Jo Munroe hadn't missed her son's Parent-Teacher Night and been made to trade places with her husband, if of all people she hadn't ended up sitting across from her estranged son's close friend… How close did she have to have stayed, that they all ended up at one time or another attending the same school?

"For now, I just… We should talk to Dylan first," Maya stated.

"Yeah, we do," Lucas agreed. If it wasn't so late already, if they didn't have to get up so early in the morning… "I can call him tomorrow, or… maybe you should call Riley." If Lucas spoke to his friend, he might spill the whole thing over the phone, and that didn't feel right at all.

"I can do that. I will," Maya promised.

There was little point to stay up much longer after that. The 'fashion show' was abandoned, as Lucas carried the bags upstairs, trailing after Maya. She crawled up into bed, staring up at the ceiling, breathing deep. Her hand rested just at her little bump, and he didn't think she even realized she was doing it, but her mind was with their child.

"Want to talk about tonight?" he asked her, coming to sit on his side. "The rest of it?"

"Can it wait until morning? Over breakfast? I'm just really tired after everything," Maya quietly told him.

"No problem," Lucas agreed. He'd barely laid down that she was scooting closer, the better to set her head at his shoulder. He welcomed this, wrapping his arms around her, kissing the side of her head. He didn't know what they'd dream about tonight, or if they'd dream at all, but he had to think their thoughts, conscious or otherwise, would be with Dylan… and Phoebe… and Kyle and Taylor, too.

TO BE CONTINUED

See you tomorrow! - mooners