December 5th 2022

Chapter 339
Our Family in Colors & Fabrics

For all she had done this year, the weeks of the musical chief among them, Marianne's excitement appeared to be measured equally on this day as she and her father went on their way to the mall to begin the long anticipated process of furnishing the bed and breakfast.

It didn't start here, no. There had been many steps leading up to this one. What they'd imagined would be the first of those was soon set aside in favor of another. They couldn't start and figure everything out from scratch, not when they had the storage to consider.

In all the years since his grandmother had passed away, since Juliet had come to live in the house, it had never occurred to him to wonder about exactly what had become of all of her things, or his grandfathers'. Oh, he had seen many of them, to be sure. Some had remained in the house, given to Juliet. Others had ended up in his parents' house and his uncles'. Some, to his great honor, had been gifted to him and Maya after they'd been married.

But there was still more, and that had gone into a storage facility. How he'd never known about it, well, his mother would attest that she'd sort of put it out of her mind, unsure she could face it all. Meanwhile, his uncle, who paid for the space, had maintained it a secret all this time for one more surprise. He would have revealed it to Lucas over the summer, when the keys were officially his for the ranch, but now that they were going to furnish the B&B, he thought that they might as well open that door early, in case he could use it. He might use what was inside to decorate or to inspire himself. He could do whatever he wanted; it would be his choice to make.

"She would have wanted it that way," Michael told him, with that smile like his mother's. 'For when you took your place, like she knew you would,' it seemed to say.

He didn't think he'd ever forget the day they went out there, him, Maya, Marianne, Michael, Keith, Lara, Lydia, Melinda, Thomas... He'd invited Cristina and Rafa to join them, but she'd insisted that this needed to be a day for the family. So, Lucas had opened the door for them, and he swore that, even after however long it had been here, everything still smelled like his grandparents' house. It sent shivers through his spine, the good kind, the healing kind. He told as much to Maya, to Marianne...

He almost didn't need to, not with the looks on his mother and uncle's faces. For getting some shiver of this feeling whenever he went back to his parents' home, the place where he'd grown up, he could understand. They all could. Marianne had spent the whole time there holding her Granny Mel's hand and been looked on with gratitude for it.

They had to go more than once, to really take it all in, to figure out what they would do about everything here and the B&B. One of those other times, Cristina and Rafa had finally come. The boy and Marianne would explore together while their parents took their own path, considering. There were some items there for certain that could have ended up in the archive when they had opened it, but Lucas didn't think he would ever take them from here or put them on display. These he decided belonged just where they were, or at least...

Now that it was all his, he knew he would have to figure something out. Maybe they could transfer it to the basement instead of here. Whatever they didn't use or give to others... He imagined one day passing some of these heirlooms to his daughters as they grew, to his cousins just as well, and someday their children, so Simon and Marianne Sullivan and Jax Murphy could count their memories in the hands of family.

"Daddy!" Marianne had called out on that day, pulling Lucas and Cristina from their debate on a pair of nightstands and whether they might scour antique stores to find similar ones. They'd looked up to find the seven-year-old running ahead of her would-be cousin, brandishing a small worn book. "Look what I found!"

She'd put the object in his hand, and he'd carefully pulled back the cover, sensing some fragility in it... preciousness... He was more right than he realized. The curious part was that even as he'd received it, his first thought had been that it reminded him of one of Maya's sketchbooks. That was what it was, a sketchbook, but his wife had not been the artist: his grandfather had been. Simon Sullivan.

His initials had been scratched into the corner of the cracking, straining cover. SWS. Simon William Sullivan. As thick as the volume might have been, it had been made to stretch as several more pages had been stuck inside, forcing it shut with the cord fixed to the spine. The cover showed what was maybe its original color underneath this cord, as they hadn't moved in years... decades. And inside...

Pencil... maybe charcoal? Either way, he'd taken one look at the first few pages and known that he needed to shut it all again, at least for the time being. If he started to look in earnest, they would get nothing done. So, he'd carefully tied it up again and asked Marianne to hold on to it until they got home once she'd shown him where she'd found it. The answer was a trunk, and for being one he never recalled seeing in his life, he could guess what it would hold. Belongings of his grandfather's, memories, the kind that had been as dear as they had been painful for his grandmother. She'd kept them hidden away, even from him, possibly from his mother, her daughter. The whole thing came home with Lucas and Marianne that day, though they had yet to explore it or talk very much about it. The sketchbook though...

It had been Marianne's discovery and they wouldn't dream of keeping it from her. That night, after the other girls had gone to bed, she'd finally pulled it out, and they had looked through it together, finding the long unseen work of Simon Sullivan. His style, for all they knew of him, suited him very well. There was a mix of gentleness and ruggedness to it. The pages had been filled, they could guess by the dates scribbled in the corner of his drawings, from the age of seventeen all the way to his death... The final page was marked with the date of the fire. It showed a one-year-old Melinda Sullivan picking at flowers from the ground.

The pages that had come before told so much of Simon's life, from the time leading up to and the time when he had met the unrelated woman who shared his surname before ever becoming his wife. They told of their romance, their wedding, their growing business, and impending parenthood. And then it stopped, because his life had stopped. So early, too early...

To Lucas it felt like hearing about those days directly from his grandfather's perspective, something he'd never had. And it brought so much to his mind that he couldn't process it all that day. He wasn't sure that he'd done so by now. He'd shown the sketchbook, what they'd come to call Simon's journal, to his mother, knowing that he had to. She had never seen it, had never realized her father was an artist to this extent. She'd heard that he could draw, but never in any way that would make her think of this. She'd let them keep it. For as much as he knew that she craved knowledge of the father she could not recall, it felt right to her that they should hold on to the trunk. It was too much for her.

From their exploration of the storage space, they had started to gain their vision of the B&B in earnest, and so they had made their plans. The bedrooms, the bathrooms, the kitchen, the living room, and the dining room... Cristina and Rafa's rooms were all their own to consider, but the rest needed a lot, and they were ready.

"Can I paint the walls with you?" Marianne asked as they stood in wait for their chosen colors. She held on to the swatches with both hands all the while.

"Tall as you are, I could put you on my shoulders so you can do the ceilings," he teased, which made her giggle. "You know I won't keep you from helping where you can," he went on, more seriously, and she knew what he meant. She knew that there were things, as mature as she considered herself, that she couldn't do like the adults would. But she also knew that her parents would never count her out as being old enough to do anything, like some grown-ups did.

They got their paint, they were set. At the same time, Cristina and Rafa had gone to collect the fabric they had ordered. Recalling how the original curtains and other items like tablecloths and napkins had been sewn by Marianne the first and her mother when she and Simon had gotten the house, it had felt important for them to honor this by doing the same here. In this case, they would be made by Grangie, who had insisted, along with Eliza and Emma, who'd jumped at the chance to pitch in, too.

"It's so much prettier than I thought it would be!" Marianne gasped when she saw the bundles that the Vegas brought along. She touched them with the reverent hands reserved for fragile objects, but once she had her hands back to herself, oh, she hopped around so giddily. It was all coming together! Sure, it was just paint cans and fabric so far, but with the promise of all that was to follow...

They needed several beds, and those would demand sheets, and pillows... To Lucas, as he watched Marianne and Rafa enjoy the testing of the mattresses, it brought back memories of when they'd bought the triplets their toddler beds. This summer, they would already be looking to transfer them into yet another step, into twin beds - which were not, as the three of them had assumed, beds for twins, which would leave Lucy out - and they were as excited as they were hesitant, because that would mean tearing down 'the village' of their house-like beds. They had been promised that they would make up for it, but the soon-to-be four-year-old girls were still doubtful.

Some of the furniture from storage had been selected to return to the house, joining some choice finds to match them, and from there it had all been about following the aesthetics as they had taken shape. They wanted to honor the past while also being mindful of the present, and they were confident that they were achieving this. They'd had a lot of help from Rosa in that department and were eternally grateful to her for it, though they would not name the place Del Vecchio's in her honor, as she had suggested they might.

Their last stop for this day would be the appliances. They had been shopping these ahead of time to the point of driving themselves mad, according to Maya. Everyone had their opinion, and plenty of them were valid, yes, but they only needed so many of those in the entire house, didn't they?

"Daddy?" Marianne stopped him as they were leaving the restaurant where they'd gone for dinner at the end of their long day. Lucas looked at her, quickly seeing how she held the paper close to herself. She'd been drawing at the placemat since before they had gotten their food, taking good care of letting no one see. But now she wanted to show him.

He was sure it was not lost on her how placemats like these had a history with the ranch. The arch had been sketched on one of those, as they'd found in the buried box. And now she had come up with what she felt was the perfect image and name for the B&B. To the best of her ability - bolstered, they now claimed, by the artists on both sides of her family - she had reproduced her great grandfather's final sketch, of his baby girl and the flowers, topping it with her very best letters to spell Melinda's and at the bottom Bed and Breakfast.

"Couldn't have a better partner for this project, pumpkin," Lucas told his daughter, smiling deeply, especially when she smiled back at him. "That's just what we needed."

TO BE CONTINUED

See you tomorrow! - mooners