Chapter 19
Home Sweet Home

"Look, look, look, here he goes," Maya laughed, holding her hands away as Riley, Sophie, and Chiara all crowded in. They all watched as the baby's movements revealed themselves in his mother's belly. For as long as it had been happening, none of them had ever managed to be around in time to see it, but by now Maya was familiar enough with her unborn son's habits, and she'd taken a shot at predicting the next instance while her friends and roommates were there to see.

"Wow…" Riley's face split into the greatest smile, reaching out to lightly lay her hand and meet that movement.

"Kid's active, huh?" Sophie laughed. "You a soccer player? Dancer? Swimmer?" she inquired of Maya's belly.

"He is trying to escape," Chiara suggested. "You know the movie, Alien?" she mimed.

"Don't. Even," Maya pointed at her. "I'm already having nightmares, I don't need that one."

She had been spending the last couple of weeks just counting down the days to this moment, and now it had finally come. Spring Break. One glorious week off. A lot of college kids her age had about one thing in mind for this week: parties, trips… Her big plan was much simpler: she wasn't going to do a damned thing.

Alright, that wasn't exactly true, but she was definitely going to spend as much time as she could just relaxing, not running around all day. She needed this, a week to give her a chance and recharge, before charging onward to the end of the semester and the end of this pregnancy. And she was spending it with Lucas back in Austin, back at their house.

It was the kind of opportunity they couldn't turn down, one whole week to give as much of a push as they could in getting the place ready for them once they moved in, waiting on their son.

"So… what can I do to help the master renovator today?" Maya asked, laying on some drama over her favorite new nickname for him. Lucas laughed. They were driving on their way out of Houston early the next morning, hoping to make good time and get started on the kitchen. "I can… hand you tiles," she suggested, like it was just so hard.

"Well, you could," he shrugged. "Less chance I'll mess up the pattern. But we're not doing the floor until the end."

"Oh… Okay, so what are you doing then, and can I help? Like, at all?"

"I thought you wanted to sit and relax," he looked at her as they slowed to a stop after having caught up with traffic.

"Well, yeah, but not right after we've been driving all this time, I need to just…" she stretched out her arms. "You know?"

"You need something to do," he nodded, understanding.

"So bad," she whispered.

"Look in my bag," Lucas laughed. Maya reached into the back. "Can you get it?" he moved to help.

"I got it, I got it," she promised. "Hands off," she shooed him off before getting the backpack on to her knees and opening it. Sitting right on top was a stack of paint swatches. She gasped and turned to him. "And you said nothing?" she 'accused.' He burst out laughing. "Honestly…" she shook her head, keeping the color cards and tossing the bag into the back again.

"Careful," he looked back to make sure it hadn't spilled out, then had to look forward again when a honk warned him that they were moving again. "I've lost you for the rest of the ride, haven't I?" he nodded to himself.

"I have colors, all is well," she promised. He could work with that.

They'd worked together in figuring out what they wanted for each of their 'priority rooms.' Though her abilities to help him were somewhat limited, in some tasks more than others, drawing up plans had been right in her wheelhouse. Well, mostly in her wheelhouse. Adjacent, that was the word. The point was that they had brought their vision on to paper, and now they were going to take it into reality. The only thing that still needed doing besides the actual work was the choice of colors, of materials. They hadn't made up their minds yet, but they would have to make those choices sooner or later, as they needed to go to the store on the way to the house.

"Your father and mine are meeting us there, yeah?" Maya asked as they were coming into the mall lot. She was picking up the mess of color cards from her lap, putting them in order, keeping them well away from the ones she had favored.

"Isn't yours supposed to drive to the airport?" Lucas asked back and she gasped. She couldn't believe that she'd forgotten.

Of course, her father wouldn't be there. He was going to pick up Luna and her girls when they landed from their short flight out of Tucson.

That was the other part of this week Maya had been looking forward to. Luna was coming. Luna, and Ginny, and Sadie, they would be here, as the girls' school break happened to coincide with hers. Her cousins would be meeting everyone, but especially 'Auntie Katy,' who would be reunited with her former sister-in-law after a good decade and a half. She could easily have been the one to go and pick the trio up instead of Shawn, seeing as she'd actually known one of them, but instead she'd sent a stranger – Maya suspected – because she was still too nervous. She had chased her away, all those years ago, and though Luna held no grudge, Katy couldn't help but fret.

Being in touch with her aunt, Maya had to say, had helped put a few things into perspective. And it had convinced her, in what she could only call a probationary effort, to open up communications with her father back in New York, to get to know him again, not as the man he had been, the man who'd left her, but the man who had flown to Texas, for no other reason than to see her. And then he'd passed out on her front step, but the point was he'd come, and they'd talked, and in the end she'd been left with a choice to make. She could either send him packing and keep things as they had been between them, with her having a relationship with her half-siblings and her stepmother but keeping away from him, or… or she could give him a chance, let him into her life again, hers and maybe… maybe her boy's, too.

He was the one who made that she really had to think things through, her baby, her son… She had been charged with his well-being from the moment they'd learned of his existence, and it meant everything to her that she would do right by him, whether that was now, taking care of herself and him at the same time, or after he came into the world. And letting the father who'd abandoned her as a child get anywhere near her child… She had to be sure, more than sure.

Well, she'd been convinced to at least try, thanks to Luna, and once she'd decided that much, her reasoning became that she had, at the time, about four months left before the sprout left her belly. Four months then, down to three now… until she was a mother… She had trouble believing that sometimes, like it was one thing that she was pregnant, that the baby was growing, that she was having him. After that, he was having her, as his mother, his parent. She would look at Lucas, and she'd just think 'He's going to be the best father,' and she'd know it was true, but then her…

Anyway…

She had a few months until her son was born, and she'd just have to use this time to decide, once and for all. If, by the end of it, she couldn't see herself letting her father back into her life and into Alex' life, then she wouldn't. Still not sure about the name… If, on the other hand, she thought it was the right thing to do, then Kermit would get to know his grandson, and he could get to know his firstborn daughter again. She would welcome it, with an open mind and heart.

They'd been talking, once a week, every week. That was part of her test for him, too, she guessed. If at any time she felt herself resistant to sitting down and speaking to him, then she'd know things might not be working out for them, and she'd have to re-evaluate the situation. So far though… things had been going well, great even, beyond all expectations.

The first couple of times, their ice-breaker had been for Maya to stand up and turn, showing him how her belly had grown since they'd last talked. So, now, it had become habit. She was always so happy to see how she was growing on her own, so doing a bit of what they'd been calling 'belly brag' was as good of a way to start as she could hope for. After that, the rest would just flow out, and they'd be talking for a good while. Sooner or later, one of her siblings would poke his or her head into the room, join them. When they would get to the point of hanging up, they would wish each other a good week, say goodbye until their next call.

They'd been at this for two months now, and if she had to give this experiment of hers an assessment, she only needed to think of what Lucas had told her, after last week's call. They'd been getting ready for bed, and she'd turned to see him standing there with a smile on his face. When she'd asked him what he was smiling about, he'd pointed out that she'd been talking about what she and her father had been discussing on their call for something like ten minutes, sounding like her sister Nellie when she'd be recounting her days in excessive detail.

"So, it's going well, huh?" he'd smiled, and she'd just felt her face brimming with a smile of her own.

"Yeah, it kind of is."

"Does that mean… Grandpa Kermit?" he'd slowly asked. She'd looked down to herself, run her hand over her belly… She didn't know why she was so sure she knew this, but he'd want to be Granddad.

"It means we keep going, and we see what happens."

Getting to know Luna again, as much as it had facilitated her making a new future with her father, had also helped her reconnect with memories of the past, memories of a part of her life she hadn't so much lost as she'd… needed to remember had actually been good. It had been so easy to lose sight of what she'd had back then, when her father's departure had just shaken everything up until she could hardly sort out the pieces anymore. She'd been getting bits and pieces back thanks to those videos, but Luna, on top of that, had been like… Well, she'd been like the moon, bringing light to a darkened night's sky. Soon enough, she'd get to spend days with her around, with her cousins, too.

Before that though, they had to pick up materials for the house.

They had the future 'Pop-pop' and 'Great Pappy' waiting there to accompany them in their shopping. Tom Friar had been very much involved in the renovation efforts, though with respect to his son's wanting to do as much of it on his own as he could, he would do his best not to intervene unless called upon. As for Pappy Joe, now that it had been decided that he would be returning to his old house, to live with his grandson and his future wife and their boy, he had been taking increasing interest in the work as well. Last weekend, in the midst of more shopping, Lucas and Maya had told him about their position on wanting to accomplish certain things by their own means (which was to say without constant gifts of money from their families), and he had promised to respect this, even as he'd smiled at them with evident pride.

"You will allow me to provide for my own room now, won't you?" he had pointed out, his one exception to the rule. They had accepted. Pappy Joe would be taking up residence in the basement.

"You realize he found a loophole, right?" Maya had told Lucas after this agreement with his grandfather. He'd looked at her, not following. "His room is the basement, which means we've basically agreed to let him pay for all that."

"Not the whole basement," Lucas insisted, but Maya just nodded past him.

"He's looking at the washers and driers."

One very odd argument later – in which each side insisted on paying for the laundry machines – Pappy Joe had managed to win the right of the whole basement, which thus reallocated the money earmarked for the washer and drier toward the living room. Slowly but surely, their house would be coming together, and that had to be the thing they concentrated on.

So, that was last week. This week, it was all about the kitchen, and they had spent every last bit of stircraziness Maya had accumulated in the ride from Houston, so that, by the end of it, she was suddenly very content to sit back and let the others work on the kitchen. They stopped for lunch, and then it was off to the house, where they found company waiting, in the form of Shawn and Katy and the kids, and Luna and her girls. Shawn had MJ curled up asleep in his arms, while he kept an eye on Nellie and Gracie, running around the vast grassy field with Ginny and Sadie Chen. The four girls were laughing and squealing to the point where they could be heard as the truck came driving up the road. Katy and Luna were sitting on the front porch, talking away.

As much as seeing her mother and her aunt back together, talking, might have been the thing to hold her focus, Maya couldn't draw her eyes away from her sisters and her cousins out there, running wild. When they had officially decided they would come and live here, the vision of their child running around out here had been one of the great selling points. Now, as their boy was growing nearer to being born than ever, seeing the girls out there filled her with what could only be described as an excess of maternal anticipation. She was already smiling before the girls stopped and looked at the truck and came hurrying up to meet them, meet her.

She barely had time to get out of the truck that she was surrounded by a pack of eager little faces, not to mention several little hands setting themselves to her belly. Her tolerance for having people's hands feel at her bump was generally: strangers never, friends and family sometimes, children always. The most memorable remained the time when Gracie had felt a kick, right where her hand was, and she'd jumped back and screamed. It had taken a whole week to convince her to do it again.

That was a side benefit of these weekly trips back to Austin now, getting to see her siblings more often. Sure, once they moved back, she'd get to see them so much more, but it didn't diminish from how happy these visits made her and her family, too.

"We rode on a plane! Flying like birds!" Sadie informed her cousin with glee. "And we watched a movie."

"The birds would probably enjoy some in-flight entertainment, too," Maya joked, making the three-year-old laugh. "I'm really glad to see you, all of you. You were having fun, huh?" The girls all nodded. "Alright, carry on," Maya told them, and they were off at once. Ginny, as the eldest of the bunch, looked all too pleased to lead the others along. It didn't matter to any of them who was or wasn't related, so even though technically speaking they were not bound by blood, they would come away from this day telling any and all that they had brand new cousins and that they loved them.

"See, this guy just went and woke up, decided he was going to get first hugs," Shawn declared, walking toward Maya with a very awake and alert MJ reaching out for his sister. "Is it because he's cuter? You can tell me, I won't get offended."

"Hey, don't sell yourself short, man," Maya laughed, picking up MJ with great care to manage him along with her belly, knowing how his little feet had a way to get kind of kicky when he was excited. "Although… damn, he is just getting cuter by the week," she pressed a kiss to her brother's cheek, which got her some squirmy giggles. "That's on you by the way, DNA doesn't lie."

"Please, he's all Katy," Shawn smiled.

"Could that explain why people keep thinking he's mine when I take him out?" she mused.

"Could be, yeah," Shawn played along.

"You two are very quippy, you deserve each other," Katy appeared now, followed by Luna.

"Dad was just complimenting your genes," Maya informed her mother, before MJ was passed off once more, into her arms.

"Oh, yeah, he does that," Katy looked to her husband, and if Shawn believed MJ was cuter, he obviously didn't see the look on his face when he'd look to his wife. The two of them looked like they belonged in some Hallmark romantic comedy or something.

"Maya…" Luna moved to embrace her niece now, and as everyone would do now, when they hadn't been near her for a few weeks, she pulled back to look down at her with that sort of amazed smile, like sure, they knew she was pregnant, knew that as time passed she would get bigger, but that never really prepared them for the actual sight of it. And it had been a solid month and some since the trip to Arizona, when they'd last seen one another, which in sprout growth time was an eternity.

"You're going to cry, aren't you?" Maya asked, smiling.

"No," Luna insisted, with a shaky voice she tried to hide in a laugh.

Before long, the work on the kitchen started, with Lucas being joined by his father, and Maya's mother and father, which left Maya to sit and start to enjoy her time off, surrounded by her aunt, and Pappy Joe, and her siblings and cousins. They watched for a while as MJ tried to follow the girls before finally teetering his way back to the porch, where he ended up sat in Pappy Joe's lap, poking about at the man's beard. It was easy to see him as the great Santa he'd been playing all those years.

More than anything, Maya looked at him now and imagined her own boy getting to grow up around him. She had somehow managed to accumulate something of a sizable family unit over the years, something which had once felt impossible, when it was just her mother and her back in New York. And now, this great big family of hers would be inherited by her son, and that… that might have been one of the greatest things she could have passed on to him. He would be surrounded by people who loved him, before he was ever even born.

"Kermit mentioned you're not talking to your parents anymore either," Maya came to ask her aunt, when Pappy Joe had moved to go see what the girls were up to. Luna looked back at her, not so much upset at her, or at her brother, but still like she would have rather not bring it up.

"About two years now," she finally admitted with a nod. Maya didn't push for more, even though she did kind of wonder. Luna was looking off to where her daughters played for a moment before speaking again. "Your grandparents… It's not that they're bad people, you have to know that. Except after a while, some of their… qualities… can get to be too much, especially for Kermit and I. Years ago, when my brother came home and told them that his girlfriend was pregnant, well… you know how that ended."

"Yup," Maya bowed her head, absently rubbing at her belly. They'd kicked him out, and before long they had cut all ties.

"Right, well, when I told them Kenneth and I were getting divorced, that didn't go over so well either. Words were said, and I guess I'd finally reached my limit. You can love someone all your life and suddenly you reach a point where you realize they're not good in your life, and you need to walk away." They sat quietly for a few moments, watching the girls and MJ as they all ran around Pappy Joe.

"What do you think they'd say of their twenty-one-year-old granddaughter having a baby in college… engaged but unmarried?" Maya asked. Luna looked back at her, quietly debating her answer for a while.

"Honestly, I couldn't say for sure. You know how I told you Kenneth and I might have been better off splitting much earlier than we did? My parents have been due for a split for a good twenty-five years. Except they're staying together, because that's what you do when you get married, when you make a vow, as they so kindly reminded me two years ago."

"Right…" Maya sighed, seeing the picture start to fill in inside her head.

"Separately, I think they might actually be better people. Not perfect, not by far, especially my father, but… better." Another pause, and then… "Are you saying you'd like to get in touch with them?"

"I don't know," Maya leaned back, planting her hands behind her on the porch. "Ever since Kermit mentioned them, I haven't been able to stop sort of… wondering. Maybe it has to do with him, too," she nodded down to her belly. "He might wonder about them one day, and I want to be able to answer him. So far though, everything I've been hearing is just a bit…"

"Did Kermit tell you our mother sings in a choir?" Luna asked. Maya turned to look at her.

"She does?"

"At church," Luna nodded. "She's been in that choir since she was a teenager, kept it up, all those years. When she and Dad moved to Florida, her old choir did this whole going away event for her, they were so sad to see her go. She joined a new one down there, as far as I know she's still in it."

"She must be good, huh?" Maya couldn't help but be interested all at once.

"She's amazing," Luna smiled. "No matter everything else, you can't take that away from her. She could have been famous, but that wasn't her thing. She's the one who got Kermit his first guitar, taught him how to play it and everything."

This struck Maya again, imagining her father as a child, his mother passing on her own love for music on to her son… And then years later, she had let him out of her life, for fathering a child. She wondered what might have happened, what her life might have been like, if her grandparents had reacted to her conception the way her parents and Lucas' parents had reacted to that of their future grandson.

Music had been one of the things she and her father had taken to discussing the most in their weekly calls, and now she learned that it was a connection not only passed to her from her father, but also to him from his mother. With her son, that would make four generations, surely, and yet…

"It was your father who kicked him out, wasn't it?" she asked. Luna didn't reply, but her face said enough. As memories went, this was the kind you tried to remember as little as possible, even as your brain kept kicking it up out of the depths at the most unfortunate times. "And your mother?"

"I begged her not to let him do it," Luna recalled, sounding almost like she might have done back then, twelve years old and watching a rip tear through her family. "This wasn't right, and she had to know it. Looking back on it now, I think she was hoping it would help him."

"Help him… to force him out of his house?" Maya blinked, refusing to believe it.

"I told you what my brother was like growing up. He wasn't always the most dependable, and he was stubborn. I think she wanted it to push him into doing the right thing, for your mother and for you, to prove them wrong. And if not for that, then… She wasn't going to get our father to change his mind. If he said Kermit was out, he was out." Neither of them spoke for a little while after this. "Maya, whatever you decide, all I can tell you is… prepare for the worst, but don't rule out the chance for good."

They were joined by Melinda Friar around dinner time, as she came in with a takeout order for everyone. As was to be expected, the very first thing she did after climbing out of her car, even before getting the bags from the back, was to go and greet her future daughter-in-law, and of course her Junebug of a future grandson. The first time she'd felt him kick and move, she had burst into happy tears and hadn't stopped for about five minutes.

After everyone else had gone away for the night, Lucas and Maya spent the rest of the evening sitting outside the house. Luna and her daughters were staying at the Hunter Hart house, in Maya's old room, with her blessing. Lucas looked to the side, finding his fiancée off somewhere in her head. He reached over, weaving his fingers with hers until she looked at him and smiled.

"Hey…"

"You look far away." She briefly thought to herself before looking at him again.

"What were your grandparents like? I only got to know Pappy Joe."

"Well, I only got to know my grandmothers after him. My mother's dad died when she was one, even she only knows him from stories people told her. So there was Pappy Joe, who was sort of big and imposing when I was little, and there was Granny Marianne and Nana Susannah." Just saying their names made him smile, and that made Maya smile along.

"Tell me about them?" She'd heard about them before, sure, stories here and there, like Granny Marianne's rings, one of which presently hung from a chain around her neck while the other waited in a box somewhere until September 3rd, and about the long lost mug of Nana Susannah Friar which Maya had found again and gifted him one Valentine's Day. But she wanted to feel like she knew them better. Right now, she needed to hear about the people who'd raised Tom and Melinda Friar.

"So, Nana Sus, she was just this sweet woman, kind of delicate. I wasn't that old when she passed, so I never noticed how short she was until I'd be looking at pictures later on. She would never raise her voice, just wasn't the type. But she'd look at you, without saying a word, and you'd go quiet, too, and you'd listen to her." She could see that. She liked what she heard so far.

"What did she do for a living?"

"Receptionist in a dentist's office," Lucas nodded, flashing that white-toothed smile of his and making her laugh.

"That kind of explains some things," she smirked.

"And your mother's mother?"

Again, he was smiling, thinking about her, and seeing the look on his face, Maya wished she could see what he was seeing in there. Everything she'd heard about the woman suggested Lucas had looked up to her… maybe more than anyone. He didn't bring her up all the time, but when he did, it was like they were being allowed into a part of his heart that was very special. Months ago, sitting around that campfire on New Year's Eve, when they had claimed their name choices, before they'd known whether they were having a boy or a girl, Maya had put in for Alexander, and Lucas… That little girl in his mind, she had been called Marianne.

"She raised horses," Lucas told her. "Looked after old ones, too, when they were old, or sick, and they needed extra care."

"Didn't your mother used to compete as a rider?" Maya asked. She could just see her in that uniform, the hat, long hair in a braid, though she'd still been surprised when Mr. Friar had mentioned this in passing some years ago, like she couldn't associate the woman she knew with that girl.

"For years, yeah," he laughed. "She grew up around them, looked after them with her mom. Granny Em, she gave everything to that farm after her husband died, and when she couldn't keep doing it, she made sure the person who'd take over would give it the same care and devotion that she did. I… I haven't been back there in years."

"Lots of memories," Maya understood. He nodded.

"Why'd you want to know?" he wondered. She told him about what Luna had told her, about her parents, her own grandparents.

"Now that I have Kermit back in my life, and Luna and the girls, I just can't stop wondering about them. But after hearing what Luna had to say about them, I don't know."

"You know, if you ever decide to reach out to them, I'll back you up. It's all up to you. You don't owe them anything."

"I know…" she breathed, sitting up with a frown he was getting to know as her 'stupid back pain' frown.

"Want to come see what we got done today?" Lucas asked, smiling back at her. Yeah, getting up and walking around a bit would help.

"Yes, please."

TO BE CONTINUED

See you next week! - mooners