Village People
CJ/Danny, Donna, Josh, mentions of Helen Santos
NC17, I guess
Spoilers through end of series
Not mine, never were, never will be, but they consume my soul
Reviews, feedback and criticism always welcomed
My apologies to anyone named (or who has kids named) Torch or Periwinkle
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April 25, 2009; Santa Monica CA; home of Frank and Diana Muñoz
Frank Muñoz had just received notice of his promotion to full Colonel (he was assigned to the 61st Air Base Group at El Segundo) and the block was celebrating with an impromptu brunch.
Danny sat down on one of the kitchen counter barstools that had been pulled outside to the deck; he took a drink from his orange juice. He felt two arms come around his shoulders and felt a kiss on the top of his head. He took in a breath of her body wash, her shampoo. "My wife is a very jealous woman," he said. "You'd best be careful."
"Keep telling them that, Fishboy," CJ answered, moving her right hand to play with the curls by his left ear.
Danny tried to get up to give her the barstool, but she pushed him down. "I've been sitting for an hour, I need to stretch."
"Well, in that case, your right arm is a bit tight at my neck. Want some of my juice?" He held the glass up and back toward her.
"It's not a mimosa?" CJ asked.
"Nope. The helicopter will be at the Santa Monica field to take Donna to LAX and Mrs. Santos' plane in about an hour. I need to be sober for that. He looked over to where Donna was talking with their neighbor Jessica, Jessica's "almost 13" daughter Cindy, and Steve, one of the guys who lived on the other side of CJ and Danny. "It's funny that Jessica and Donna grew up in the same town, and that Jessica's husband's youngest sister was a classmate of Donna's," Danny said. "Just to look at the three of them, you'd think that the two of them were sisters, oldest and youngest of the family, there's about ten years between them, and Cindy could be Donna's niece."
"Well, they say all those mid-western farm girl types look alike. It's been nice having Donna here for the past few days. I'm glad that she can talk with Jessica so easily; I still feel a little uncomfortable. We only lost a few men in Kazakhstan, what were the chances that one of their widows would move in next to us?"
"Sweetheart, she doesn't blame you or the President; Rusty's heart could have given out at any time. It just happened over there. No one knew he had a heart valve problem."
"Yeah, but if it had happened here, maybe they could have saved him."
He sighed, kissed the forearms that crossed his chest. They had had this discussion before and it would take some time before he would be able to break down the sense of guilt she held.
She played with his hair again. She noticed a little more gray and wondered if that Grecian Formula stuff really worked. She didn't mind the gray, really, but she kind of missed the brighter red locks of almost ten years ago.
She sensed that he was a little down, and kissed the side of his head. "Honey, are you really okay with not getting the Pulitzer? You seem a little mopey."
"No, like I said, Katie really deserved it." However, his slightly morose tone indicated that something else was wrong.
She followed his gaze back to the three blondes and Steve and realized what was bothering him. She spoke softly into his ear. "Are you jealous that Cindy asked Steve to take her to the Girl Scout father-daughter dinner-dance instead of you?"
Steve ran his Certified Public Accountant/Chartered Financial Consultant practice from his and Hank's house; Danny did most of his writing, both the column and his books, from home also. The two of them were the de facto "stay at home dads" for the block. They were always available to get the baseball from the gutter or the kite from the tree; to carry in the heavy package that the UPS guy left on the porch; to help with the water shut-off valve that wouldn't budge (and to get water from one house's outside spigot to that of the next using hoses and a double female connector until the leak could be fixed); to deal with the rip-off group that said "We just finished a driveway three blocks away and we'll blacktop yours for a good price"; to send home the bully that lived on the next block; and to handle the occasional kids' fight that really screamed "male authority figure needed". Danny could silence the whiniest little boy's "But, Mo-o-o-o-o-om-mm!" with a look that CJ knew only too well and Steve's stern but smiling "Was that really necessary?" had all the little girls (and a few of their moms) eating out of his hand.
She could feel his flush as he admitted, "Well, I guess maybe a little. I mean, I understand, look at him, the guy looks like Billy Dee Williams did in 'The Empire Strikes Back'."
"Or 'Mahogany'," she let out an unconscious sigh.
He swiveled around on the stool and looked at her.
"It was 1975! I was fifteen! Am I supposed to worry about your crush on Jodie Foster or Brooke Shie –".
"Judy Norton on 'The Waltons'," he laughed. "For some reason, I liked Mary Ellen the best. Now that I think of it, she was kind of like you, feisty and rebellious, not wanting to do what every other girl was expected to do; the the first two episodes with her and Curt, maybe I was having premonitions, they were kind of like us. Everyone else thought Erin was the prettiest, but with my sister and all, it was too close to incest to fixate on her."
Danny stood up and walked her over to a glider on the other side of the deck; he had decided that CJ had been standing long enough.
"I wonder if Hank and Steve have ever thought about adopting or finding a surrogate?" she asked.
"Year after next," Danny answered. "They want to wait until they've been together for ten years, to be sure. They figure that having gay, interracial parents will be stress enough without adding divorce to the mix. But yeah, they'd love one of each. Hank can't wait to start making his daughter's clothes."
"One of each would be nice," she said softly.
He put his hand under her chin and turned her face to his, then put the hand on her stomach. "You'd be willing to go through this again?"
She could hear the hope in his voice. "Well, not right away," she replied, "I mean, I feel as if I've been pregnant forever, and it's been almost two years, but maybe after two, two and a half years, assuming we don't totally suck as parents, and that the Minnow doesn't totally suck at being a kid, I could go off the pill again and we can see what happens. The three or four year spacing seems to work well for Frank and Diana." She gave him a small smile. "I've been afraid to talk about it, you know, Toby's incurring the wrath from on high atop the thing."
"I know all about not tempting fate. CJ, we're not getting any younger, maybe we won't be lucky –".
"My mother didn't hit menopause until she was 56, I think we still have ti- "
"And I can't promise you the next one I make will be the opposite of this one."
"If we end up with two of a kind, we can adopt," she answered.
"Yeah?"
"Yeah."
They sat there smiling at each other for a few seconds; then he looked at his watch. "Better go get the First Lady's Chief of Staff to the airport."
They walked over to Donna. "Do you want me to go with you, Danny?"
"Stay here, I'll be back as soon as the chopper takes off."
"Danny, you don't have to leave the party," Donna said. "I can take a cab."
Before Danny could open his mouth, CJ told her, laughingly, "Oh, Donna, please don't get him started."
The willowy (well, except for the stomach that stuck out a good eight inches) blonde said her good-byes, congratulated Frank again on her own behalf and that of the Administration.
CJ grabbed another glass of juice, some strawberries, and half a bagel and sat down at a table with Yan Wei. When Yan got up to go to the bathroom, CJ held out her arms for Mei-Ling and thought about how much she had enjoyed the last few days with Donna. They caught up on each other's lives, talked about their joys and apprehensions concerning impending motherhood. Donna admired CJ for wearing her "Pillsbury" shirt in public and confessed that she only wore hers as a nightshirt. Then Donna met Jessica and the two of them caught up on hometown news.
The Girl Scout dinner-dance had been last night. Most of the block was outside when Steve, debonair to the max in his white dinner jacket and carrying a corsage box, went to Jessica and Cindy's house, and then escorted Cindy to his Mercedes convertible. The girl seemed to float three inches off the ground and her eyes never left Steve's face. Eleven-year old Carmen Muñoz, with her father looking very handsome and distinguished in his Air Force formal uniform ("the official term is 'mess dress'," he told them), joined them. As they drove away, Jessica said that it was the happiest Cindy had been since her father left for Asia, and started to cry. Donna put her arm around the woman and took her into her house.
The Wei's, with Mei-Ling in her stroller, decided to walk down to the pier for frozen custard and Diana's two sons pestered her, saying they wanted to go also. Taking in Diana's tired face and her "due any day now" body, Hank and Danny volunteered to take the boys and off they went, seven-year old Mike holding Hank's hand and three-year old Stevie riding Danny's shoulders.
Donna came out of Jessica's house. "She's okay; she just wants to be left alone with her memories. She says she'll never marry again, that she and Rusty fell in love in 10th grade and stayed together through the rest of high school and all the time he was at West Point and she was at Wisconsin, and no one could ever take his place."
The three of them entered CJ and Danny's house, went into the courtyard. "Why don't we get in the hot tub?" CJ suggested. "Diana, I can lend you a suit." With her pregnancy, they kept the hot tub about 15 degrees cooler than they usually did and as long as they didn't turn on the jets, their doctors had no problem with it.
They sat in the warm water, drinking ginger ale, discussing their pregnancies. Diana dispensed advice based on her previous three births. ("Screw political correctness - molded foam plates and cups, plastic silver, pre-packaged meals - that's the way to go. Send the laundry to the "wash and fold". Dustballs are your new best friends. A messy bathroom will not bring about the end of the free world as we know it. Take every advantage of his gratitude for the kid. And if God wanted your clothing to be coordinated, She wouldn't have invented color, stripes, checks, and patterns.")
"You people really have the 'village' here, don't you?" Donna said. "On this block, you all look out for each other, take care of each other. This is the kind of thing we should be promoting. Would it be okay to bring Helen, I mean the First Lady, by sometime? I think she'd be interested in seeing it at work in the real world."
"You need to be careful," CJ warned. "The right-wing conservatives will be all over you. The last time a First Lady put forth the idea that 'It Takes a Village', they reacted as if she had said 'Kill your same sex parent and have intercourse with your opposite sex parent.' It wasn't pretty."
"Actually," Diana chimed in, "the way some of them are, their book title would be 'It Takes Our Village's Morals to Raise Everyone Else's Children'."
They were still there talking when Danny came back. At the site of three very pregnant women sitting in the sunken tub, he went into male protector overdrive.
"If one of you had slipped on the steps, there was no one here to help, the other two of you couldn't have dealt with it," he sputtered, helping each of them out of the tub. When CJ mentioned that when he said something about it last November, the only thing he asked was that she not use it when she was in the house alone, he tried to guilt her by saying that she should have known what he meant.
"Danny, isn't that why you put in the railing?" Donna asked, somewhat amused.
"Donna, you still could have fallen."
"And if I had, it would have been my own fault. You're not my father, Danny!"
He looked at Donna with one of his direct stares and quietly told her, "When you are in my house and in my care, I am responsible to Josh for your safety."
Then he handed each of them towels and walked to the bedroom, muttering to himself about how their hormones must be making them this way, that they probably just wiped out a good hundred years of his time in Purgatory with what they put him through, and that for two cents, he'd spank the lot of them.
As soon as they heard the bathroom door close, the three of them let out the giggles they had been swallowing.
"Frank gets that way, too," Diana said. "I suppose it's kind of sweet, in its own way."
"I've got Josh convinced that I know more about it than he could ever possibly know and Helen backs me up," Donna added. "If he got that way, he'd be dead before the baby's born."
They went off to change and Danny walked Diana back to her house where Hank was waiting on the deck with Stevie asleep on the glider and Mike trying very hard to keep his eyes open.
Her reverie on the deck was broken by clamor and shouting. Diana's water had broken and she and Frank were heading for the hospital. The rest of them put away the leftover food, cleaned the tables, swept the deck. CJ volunteered to take the first couple of hours with the Muñoz kids and as the rest of the block left, she called Danny to let him know where she was and why.
She was taking the first load of things out of the dishwasher when Danny knocked on the kitchen door.
They loaded the dishwasher again and went to the family room where the kids were watching a video (the umpteenth "special release" version of "Lady and the Tramp").
"This is a big day for you, Stevie." Danny picked up the youngster and gave him a pony ride. "You'll have little Maggie to boss around. You're no longer the baby."
The little boy reached over and touched CJ's stomach. "Wha's baby name?" he asked.
"We don't know yet, sweetie, we decided to wait to find out whether it's a boy or a girl."
"I think you should call your baby Torch or Periwinkle." Carmen mentioned the names of the latest tweeny-bopper male and female heartthrobs.
"Nope. They don't pass the 'President, Nobel, Cardinal' test," Danny told her. At her questioning look, he continued. "You're supposed to try out the name to see how it sounds if the kid becomes really important. 'I, Torch Concannon, do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute' doesn't cut it; neither does 'Nobel Peace Prize winner Periwinkle Concannon'. Now, you," he stroked the girl's hair, "are a winner. I, Carmen Antonia – "
"An-to-NEE-ya," she corrected his pronunciation.
"'I, Carmen Antonia Muñoz, do solemnly swear' – that has class. So does 'Nobel Peace Prize winner Miguel Diego Muñoz' and 'Esteban Ramón Cardinal Muñoz, Archbishop of Los Angeles'," he high-fived the older boy and tickled the younger one.
Frank called; things were going well at the hospital. It was their fourth time; they were used to it. He and Diana were playing Scrabble between the contractions.
CJ made hot dogs, macaroni and cheese, and carrot sticks for the kids. She fixed Stevie's plate to look like Pac-man, shaping the mac and cheese into a circle with an open mouth, outlining it with the carrot sticks, cutting up the hot dog into little circles and putting them around the plate, saving one for the eye.
Watching the kids eat, Danny came up behind her and said that he was pretty sure they wouldn't totally suck as parents.
At 5:00 PM, Billy Rogers came by to take the next shift. Sally was out of town visiting her sister; he could spend the night if necessary.
As soon as they got home, CJ took off her shorts and bra and got into bed. Danny tried to watch some golf, but soon gave up, stripped down to his boxers and joined her in sleep.
About the same time; Washington DC; Lyman residence master bedroom
Donna was unpacking, telling Josh about the days she spent in Santa Monica, mentioning things as she remembered them rather than in any thing resembling chronological order.
She told him about how everyone on the block looked out for each other. She told him how Danny took her to the airport, insisted on inspecting the badges of the Secret Service agents before letting her go with them, how he waited until the helicopter took off for LAX before leaving. She told him about how happy the two little girls looked when they drove off with their father and father-substitute and how she imagined Josh enjoying such an event if they had a daughter. She told him about Jessica and how much she missed her husband.
Then she told him about how funny Danny was about the three of them in the hot tub. She told him what Danny said about his being answerable to Josh for her safety. "He was so funny," she said, "he kept muttering about how he should line up the three of us by the kitchen counter and just go down the line, swatting our asses, like he was some school teacher in a 1930's movie. We could barely hold in the gig – OUCH!" she shrieked as the palm of his hand made contact with her backside. "Joshua!"
He put his arms around her waist, smiled what she could only describe as his "Josh smile" and said, "Danny has a good head on his shoulders; I respect Danny's opinion. If he says my wife deserves to get her butt smacked, she's gonna get her butt smacked." He hugged her tightly, kissed her. "I did miss you, worry about you. I'm glad you're back safe."
"Do that again, you'll be in the hospital and they'll be calling me the White House Lorena Bobbitt." She kissed him back, then sniffed at her shoulder when he saw his face. The effects of travel were obvious. "I'm going to shower. Then I want barbeque."
When he heard the shower running, he picked up his phone and started searching.
Santa Monica, CA
Danny was having a mildly erotic dream when he suddenly woke up. Two seconds later, his cell rang and he answered it quickly, softly. "This is Danny". Pause. "Hey, Josh, did Donna get back okay?" Pause. "CJ's sleeping, I'm trying not to wake her". He got out of bed walked toward the empty nursery, keeping his voice down. "No problem, man. I know you'd do the same for me if the situation were reversed." Pause. "Yeah, well, tell you what. Next time she's there, I'll tell her you'll be acting, what's the Latin for husband? maritus, I think, you'll be acting in loco maritio, we'd need to check with our man in New Hampshire for the right case." Pause. He became aware of his discomfort, glanced down at his groin. "Hey, Josh, bit of advice from experience, take advantage of this time now, 'cause when you're in the home stretch like we are, there are things you really miss –" Pause. "Yeah, you, too."
Washington, DC
The phone he called was answered in a whisper. "Hey, Danny, it's Josh." Pause. "Yes, she did. Why the whispers?" Pause. "Understood. Hey, thanks for everything, for being so protective of my lady." Pause. "Well, I'd try, but, you know, your wife is well aware that for seven years, I was damned afraid of her. I don't know if I'd have the same effect on her as you did on Donna." Pause. "Yeah, Bartlet would know." Pause. "Well, I hope the next couple of months pass quickly for you. Look, take care of yourself and CJ. Goodnight."
Donna came out of the shower, taking off the towel she had used to keep her hair from getting wet and reached into a drawer for a nightgown.
"You won't need that," Josh told her as he pulled her onto the bed, turning her away from him on her side, positioning her upper leg where he wanted it.
"What do you think you're doing?" she giggled.
He came up close behind her, hand on her belly but trailing toward another place, kissed her neck.
"Just taking some more of Danny's advice."
Santa Monica, CA
Danny returned to the bedroom to see CJ sitting up on their bed.
Taking in his condition, she got up, went to him, slipped off his boxers, led him to one of the easy chairs, knelt at his feet. When he began to make a mild protest, she told him the same thing she did on that January day in San Diego over two years ago, "Let me take care of you, Danny. Let me do this for you." And she did what she had done that night, what had become a monthly ritual before she got pregnant, what she had done every time her cycle came round. Only this time, rather than it being because she was incapacitated due to infertility, she did it because she was indeed fertile, blooming with his child.
When she was done, he lifted her from the floor, gently pulled her to their bed. "Your turn," he whispered. And as he had done on that day when she told Matt Santos that she was choosing a wordsmith over a president, that day when flesh first touched flesh without a latex barrier and flesh was too fast, he again caused her to dance on his hand and on his mouth.
Night fell on that little village comprised of one block on one street in one town. One family celebrated the safe passage of life from womb to outside world and another family waited for their child's time. A third counted the months until they felt secure enough in their love, secure enough to fight prejudice against color and preference, to add new life to their family. A fourth one mourned the husband and father taken too soon, the life removed from family too cruelly. And all the families of the village bonded together, to celebrate, to encourage, to mourn, and to support each other.