A/N: The new chapter of "We Three Hearts" is now available!

December 23rd 2022

Chapter 357
Our Future to Connect

They would remember fondly the day the girls found out that the Oswalds were moving away. It started off with a goat chase.

"Daddy! Dad!"

Lucas was awakened by the feeling of two hands shaking his shoulder and arm with haste, which made him startle and woke Maya at the same time. He turned around to find Marianne stood there in her PJs with a look of urgency.

"What's wrong? Is someone hurt?" he asked, already moving to sit up.

"No, Tabitha got out again."

They had nicknamed the Sandersons' goat the escape artist. Including its very first trip up the road, where Marianne had innocently rushed right out of the house and nearly given both her parents a heart attack, this was the sixth time she had wandered away from the farm. It wasn't always so early in the morning that she came or was spotted, nor was it always Marianne who got to spy her out there, but it was a semi regular occurrence for the Friars, and so by now they knew the drill. At least now no small girls ran out of the house without alerting anyone.

"Alright, let's go," Lucas sighed, and off they went.

The goat had disappeared by the time they'd gotten outside, enough so that Lucas had to ask if she was sure, if she hadn't imagined it. Marianne was sure, and so they started looking, calling the goat's name. After a while, Maya came out of the house to help them, bringing the rest of the girls along, the triplets, the little sisters… This was before Ella and the others came for the summer, or else they would have helped, too. Kacey, Lucy, and Remy called for Tabitha. Mackenzie called for 'Tabby.' Aubrey babbled in what approximation they imagined translated to the goat's name, too.

They finally found her snoozing in the pumpkin patch. She woke to Marianne's petting her and, because she knew and liked the girl, allowed herself to be picked up and carried along, back to the road, so they might head up the lane to return her to the farm. It was as they walked along that the kids started to notice something curious. There was activity up at the Oswalds' house, which sat across the road from their house and just a bit further along, not quite halfway between the Friars and Sandersons. And this morning, as early as it was, there was activity out there. A big truck, and furniture and boxes either sitting outside the house or being loaded on to the truck. The smaller girls didn't know exactly what it meant, but Marianne definitely did, and she stopped walking so suddenly that the goat nearly slipped out of her arms.

It wasn't the way they would have wanted the news to come out, but there it was, and they couldn't pretend as though it was anything else than what it was. The Oswalds, who had been part of their little neighborhood for as long as the girls could remember, were going away. The hope had been that once the house was taken care of, they would go and visit the Friars, so they could tell the girls. They wouldn't be gone from their lives, no, even if they wouldn't see each other in person very often anymore. They would always want to find out what the little Friars were up to, how much they were growing… They'd even set aside certain things from their house that they wanted to leave as souvenirs to their young neighbors.

For a couple of weeks after that, there'd been an air of sorrow whenever they were reminded that the house across from theirs sat empty, but after that the logical next question appeared: if there was no one now, surely there would be new people at some point, so… when were they going to show up?

The answer remained 'not yet' for a while. It hadn't exactly been the plan for them to keep it a secret, but then at some point that was just what had happened. It was easy for them not to know what was going on in Tucson, not unless someone told them explicitly, and no one did. It started innocently out of Maisie talking to her young niece and knowingly – with a hint of mischief – evading the fact that she and her parents and her brother (for now) were moving, and not just anywhere. But from that, the others had started to do the same. Before they knew it, the knowledge that the Oswalds' old house was about to become the Hart-Lanes' new house was the best kept secret. It all changed, finally, the morning after Ella, Taylor, and Tori settled into the guest room.

Marianne had already been driven off to camp by her big sister, while Lucas had left for the ranch, when the truck arrived. It was a beautiful day, not too hot, so the rest of them, Maya, Ella (once she'd returned), Taylor, and the kids, were out front with the dogs, playing around. Eliza and Emma had finished classes and were gearing up for their own graduation ceremony coming up, so they were outside, too, but only sitting on the porch, discussing things they needed to do while browsing on Eliza's laptop. Finding this a much better activity, the two Italian greyhounds were keeping them company.

The pups' quiet summer revelry was interrupted by Mackenzie Friar's sudden and loud call of…

"Truck!" She used to call them cars, too, but she knew the word now, and that was definitely a… "Truck!" She pointed her finger at it and turned her head to find her mother.

Maya wasn't the only one to look and spot the thing coming up the road. In no time, all of them there outside the Friar house were looking. Most of them knew exactly what the truck's arrival meant, while others, they of the smaller kind, only understood part of it, especially as it reversed its way into the Oswalds' former driveway and stopped there. The new people were coming! They just didn't know who the new people were yet.

"The people! Mommy, the people!" Remy hopped around.

"I know, kit," Maya laughed, picking up Aubrey as she approached the three-year-old. "That's only their things though. The people aren't here yet."

Well, that was a bit disappointing, but at least they knew that the people were almost here. For a while, they watched the procession, more or less abandoning their playtime and graduation prepping. The guys in the truck went about unloading everything, bringing the items into the house. Eventually, the watchers had to go back into the house, but many times in the hours that followed, one or more of them would go and see out the window for any updates. They'd seen the truck go away again, meaning that everything had been brought out of it and into the house. But still, no sign of The People.

They couldn't know of course that, infinitely conscientious grandparents as they were, Abigail and James were trying to ensure that everyone would have a chance to arrive or return by the time they drove in. That meant that Lucas and Marianne had to come home from work and from camp, while dinner guests had to come along. Sam and Dora and the kids were recently back from New York, and they came over that afternoon. Cara and Mateo came, too, with Felix, and Teddy joined them along with Priya and Lily. Ben and Dakota arrived and joined their girlfriends. Of all of them, only the children were unaware of the big surprise, while the adults were all having their own levels of attempting to keep it quiet. In fact, Abigail, James, Wyatt, and Maisie had driven in around mid day, but they went and ran some errands in their new city, took their time with lunch, as they waited for the 'signal' that they were cleared for approach.

Ella went and collected Marianne from camp, as she'd promised she would. Lucas arrived while she was gone, which was their signal to call in the Hart-Lanes to start and head for home. Maya and her siblings didn't realize they had all started pulling the same move as the kids, spying out the windows, until Lucy came up alongside her mother and casually took hold of her hand before staring out along with her. Maya smiled, wishing that she could tell her what they were actually waiting for. If she was curious for the new neighbors now, once she knew who the new neighbors would be, well…

Marianne arrived with her big sister, her still wet hair letting everyone know even before she told them that she'd been at the pool right before Ella came and got her. She wasted no time telling them about the game she and her friends had created out there. She wanted them to go to Michael and Keith's so she could show her parents and sisters – and her uncles – her great invention, but then she forgot all about it as, for the second time that day, Mackenzie was the bearer of great news.

"Car! Car!"

"Thanks, Macaw," Lucas bent to kiss the top of the two-year-old's head.

It was only now that Marianne was able to be caught up on the events of the day, most importantly that a moving truck had passed by earlier, unloading its contents into the house across the road. She was told about how they'd waited for the arrival of the new people who would live in the Oswalds' old house, and how they now believed that these people were arriving. So now, Marianne joined the spying, and maybe for being oldest among the six of them unaware sisters, she didn't just see a car. She saw a familiar car. And she saw plates on that car that were not like all the ones she was used to seeing here in Texas, no. They were different, but as familiar to her as the car, especially in association with the car, but… but…

"No way!" she blurted out, whirling around to look at her parents so fast that her damp ponytail nearly caught Kacey, who yelped in surprise and backed away.

"You okay there, pumpkin?" Lucas asked, innocence personified. It was a good thing that he could speak, because Maya would have given them away if she'd tried to speak. Marianne, for her part, seemed to do some quick thinking, signalling that she very much wanted to blurt out whose car that was, but she was understanding what was going on, too, mainly that the little kids didn't know either and this was going to be a surprise, so if she played her cards right, she'd get to be in on it. So, she quietly but energetically nodded. Yes, she was very okay. Also antsy… but with a thought.

"Can we go say hi?"

"I think that would be a good idea, yeah?" Lucas nodded over to Maya, who nodded back and shrugged.

"Neighborly," she provided, which made him snicker.

The car had pulled up into the driveway already as the group migrated out of the house and walked on to the road, toward the former Oswald house. The passengers were clearly taking their time in getting out of the car, but they finally did, as the doors opened and they climbed out, just as their neighbors and their guests turned at the mailbox. And thus, they discovered…

Even though the adults among them knew that it would be them and they were on their way, this time not just to visit but to stay, they were elated, just as the kids were, though they did not join in on the chorus of 'Grandma!' and 'Grandpa!' aimed toward Abigail and James. There were so many of them stepping into that driveway, enough so that all four of the new arrivals had more than one person there to hug them and welcome them. The kids were definitely much more all over the place, but it only made things happier and funnier. They'd had no idea that this was coming, and even in those first few minutes it still wasn't clear to all of them exactly what was happening. Yes, they were here, but they visited every now and then. The staying part was new, and the understanding that they weren't just staying, that they would be living right there, across and up the road from the Friars… They weren't sure that all of them grasped it by the end of the day, but they would, in time.

Marianne definitely understood, and her parents could see she was excited; how could she not be? The Oswalds had been wonderful, but they were older. They didn't have kids, at least none that lived there and were anywhere near her age, neither did the Sandersons, or the McCulloughs. The Dixon girls, Cole's half-sisters, were near to or in middle school at this point, so they hardly hung out with the seven-year-old, though they did babysit once in a while. But Maisie Hart-Lane was freshly ten years old, while Marianne would be eight in the fall. She was her aunt, but she was also what Marianne had always dreamed of, a friend that was also a neighbor. She could already picture it in her head, just as Maisie could, and the girls were beyond thrilled. They hardly left each other's side all evening.

Emma and Eliza were not moved out of the Friar house just yet, though their apartment with Ben and Dakota was already secured. Now that Wyatt was in Austin, the eventual occupant of one of their rooms, they had to think more and more about packing up their lives of the past four years, even as their big sister was having to get ready to say goodbye to them, at least as lodgers. They had been with her through the triplets' baby days, and two more pregnancies after them, and it was in times where they'd look at it like this that they'd have to reflect on how much their lives had changed while they'd gone through 'the Eliza and Emma era' of their household. It wasn't all just about their daughters and how much they'd grown. So many other things, so many other memories would stay with them of this time, enough that they didn't feel ready for it to end. That was always the way it went, wasn't it? It had been that way after Sam, and after Cara, and it would be the same after Wyatt… and Nellie and Gracie when they came, if they came. That was still left to be seen. They wondered sometimes how long it would be before they didn't have any of Maya's siblings living with them, but also, they weren't in any hurry for it to happen. They were a part of their family's ever evolving history, an important part, one they would miss when it all came to a stop.

TO BE CONTINUED

See you tomorrow! - mooners