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

January 7th 2023

Chapter 7
We Discover New Memories

The very first memory both Maya and Lucas had of the day they'd met one another, in one way or another, had to do with the fall festival. For Maya, it was her first proper memory of the school where she would be student and teacher. She'd been buried in her own head until her mother had drawn her attention to a poster advertising the event. Not too far away, sitting in the administrative office and waiting with Zay, Lucas had heard her, too, heard the woman he could not have known at the time would be his mother-in-law and grandmother to his children. Big or small, the influence of that day meant that the fall festival had become one of the first things the future spouses would share, year to year, as friends, as a couple… Without a doubt, the moment the very idea of children started sneaking up on them, they started looking forward to the idea of bringing a pack of their little ones and sharing this tradition with them.

Maya was still pregnant with Marianne when the festival had happened, the year she was born, so their daughter had been nearly a year old by the time they'd gotten to do it for the first time. That almost made it better. She may have been small, but not so much that they didn't get to see her looking around with great curiosity and wonder. Then when the triplets had come around, well, they'd still been so small, and Maya had still been recovering from the delivery, so it was another wash, but they'd more than made up for it the next year, oh… They'd had a giddy Marianne, with her big sister Ella along for the ride for the first time, a year after she'd become a Friar, and one-year-old Kacey, Remy, and Lucy turning them all into an automatic and proper bunch. That only got better the more they grew. Then Mackenzie came along, their funny little macaroni guaranteeing good times all around, always.

Aubrey had been the smallest of their girls they'd brought out there, just last year. They would have had every reason to decide to wait until the following year, but they'd decided against it, decided they just had to go out there with their lucky baby girl. She was among them, her, and Maya as well, and they were so beyond thankful to know it, always, that it had been the easiest choice they'd made in a long while. Oh, she'd slept through the whole thing, but she'd been there, with all her sisters, and her young niece, and her parents… as she would be again this year, now with the traction of her own two feet on her side.

This year's array of outfits for the Friar girls had been supplied by Granny Mel, to make them their cutest and most fit for a fall festival that they could be. She'd had the whole load at the ready when she'd dropped off the little sisters a few days back, and she'd had that great big proud granny smile on her, the one where it was near impossible to tell her no. Did she realize it may had caused the occasional argument between her son and his wife over the years, brief as they had ever been? If she did, she had to figure, as well as they did, that when it came to her family, she simply couldn't help herself most of the time. It was hard to say anything about her choices once everyone was all dressed up and ready to go.

"You like your dress, huh?" Lucas asked, lightly jostling Aubrey as he held her. She kept prodding at the fabric, feeling at the textures… She was delighted, in all her sixteen-month-old squeaky giddiness. "Hey, look who's coming, look," Lucas turned her around so she could see Lucy emerging out of the bathroom, hands inspecting her freshly done hair, courtesy of her mother.

She was beelining for her little buddy sister even as she did this, while Aubrey was getting wriggly, so Lucas did the most logical thing and set his youngest on her feet. Aubrey reached out her hands to touch her big sister's dress, and then looked down at her own with a squeal like she was only realizing that they were the same. It was one of those things where they might, in nearly the same breath, be happy and sad that their youngest was getting older. They remembered how Lucy had decided immediately that she and Aubrey were going to be buddies, and they had seen that bond develop and grow just as their daughters grew. It was never so evident as once Aubrey had started being able to get about on her own, first crawling and then walking, and started to trail along with her sister. And Lucy, naturally, was thrilled at this. When they'd go out and about and Aubrey would be out of the stroller, you could hardly ever find one without the other, the girls holding hands the whole way.

That would be a very important tendency once they got to the festival. As good as they had all become at sticking together in situations like these, they knew very well that it didn't take all that much for someone to get out of sight. If the girls' buddy system wasn't enough, they'd have aunts, uncles, grandparents… Maybe most invested just now was easily one Granny Mel.

"Look at you, all of you…" Melinda beamed, holding her arms out to collect one and another of her granddaughters into a hug until she had all six of the young blondes in her embrace. It was one great benefit of her height and her long arms, as she'd always said with a laugh.

"Gran-Gran, are you doing the scavenger hunt, too?" Tori asked when she approached. She and Ella had been held back upon getting out of the minivan when they'd spotted a couple of her friends from school. They and their families were trailing nearby, the better to join said scavenger hunt, probably. Just now, with her own dress matching that of her aunts, Tori looked like she was on an official team already. Ella would joke at times that, whenever matching outfits came up, she was more than happy to 'surrender her spot' over to her daughter. It was always easy to match seven girls from age one to seven, less so to also cater to a twenty-two-year-old.

"Wouldn't miss it," Melinda promised, catching Tori's face in her hands, and soon feeling that face spread into a new smile. "You all lead the way, alright?"

"Not yet, gotta wait for Daddy and Lea," Tori told her, looking around. She would know that they couldn't be here yet because Theo was waiting to be picked up by Lea, who hadn't been able to make the drive with Ella the night before. That wouldn't stop her from looking, just in case.

So, while they waited, the rest of the party wandered around to take in everything else that the fall festival had to offer. Booths, and tables, live acts, and of course a lot of things to eat, and drink. The kids wasted no opportunities in spying those and reaching for whatever samples they could get their little hands on.

"Hey, kit, you gonna eat any of those or are you worried about dinner later?" Lucas whispered, leaning to Remy. She'd gathered several of these samples in the crook of one arm she kept stuck to her front and looked very focused on not dropping a single one as she advanced, even as it slowed her down. Now she looked up to her father like maybe she wasn't supposed to do this, and someone would take all her treasures away. "I think I saw something over there that might help. Hang in there a minute, okay?"

"Okay," she nodded, just barely, sneaking a look back to her load.

With the 'crisis' averted their progress resumed. Every time they spotted people who looked like they were participating in the scavenger hunt, several of the kids would get antsy, like surely if they didn't get started soon, they wouldn't be able to find everything and get their prizes. If Theo and Lea had arrived all of five minutes later than they did, they would have had to catch up with them and miss the start of the hunt. But they made it, and off they went.

Walking around, tracking down one clue here and another there, both Maya and Lucas saw more familiar faces than they knew how to count. Kids from the after-school program or young riders who took lessons at the ranch, classmates of Marianne's, or Tori's, or the triplets', and students of Maya's present and past.

"Remind me to show you what Bobby drew in his diary this week when we get home, yeah?" Maya tapped Lucas' chest. They'd just spotted the Hunter and Davis twins running along with their friends, doing their own circuit of the hunt. "He's so happy working with the kids at the ranch, isn't he?"

"I think so, yeah," Lucas agreed. It brought him back to this place he'd always loved. Still… "I know he wants to ride again."

"I get that. Couldn't he though?" Maya asked. He could walk unaided by now, though he didn't often do so, not unless he was at home, or the Hunter house, anywhere he felt there was less risk of tripping up or losing his balance. Maya knew he wanted to abandon any sign of a crutch or a cane at school but, choosing stability over embarrassment, he did what he had to do. All that being said…

"He might, but he's still in pain and I'm not sure it'd be a good idea. I just don't want to have to say it to him."

"I wouldn't want to either," Maya agreed, breathing out.

Bobby had been indispensable as their new, third monitor for green group. He was great with the kids, and they all loved him. The way he would talk to all of them whenever they'd go and see the horses, they couldn't have wanted to hear about any of it from anyone else. They loved especially when he took them to see his own horse, Jewel, and she looked like she'd just about adopted the whole of the group of four and five-year-olds. On group days, Lucas could see eagerness mounting in the horse as soon as he saw her in the midst of his rounds. She knew that the children were coming.

Lucas looked forward to those, too, oh, he did. He looked forward to seeing all the kids, but of course it was his own he looked forward to seeing go about the most. Marianne was blossoming as always, now in the ranks of red group. From what he'd been hearing, even though she was one of the youngest in her group once again, she'd been very good about being responsible, and giving help to anyone who might need it. According to Donna, she was like the reincarnation of her namesake and taking her place in the family business. It went a long way that she was taller than most of the kids in red.

Meanwhile, down in green, the triplets were doing pretty well for themselves, too. It had been less than a month since they'd started out there, but oh how they loved it. Lucas and Maya would have to remind them, on Tuesdays and Thursdays, that it wasn't group day, so they should go ahead and leave their bandannas up in their room. They'd had to remind them about it on weekends, too, when the triplets had been found sitting up in their beds already attempting to get the fabric tied around their heads. It was a great look, dishevelled blonde heads and all.

"Look there, that's Austin Abbott," Maya nodded for Lucas to follow her line of sight. He'd heard her talk about the boy enough in the last few weeks but had never seen him in person up to that day.

The way she'd been talking about him, he would have expected the boy to be on his own. Instead, he was one of a small group. Maya was able to identify them all to him, filling in a few more blanks in the process. One of them was Austin's older sister, Sandy, a senior who had been coming up on the basketball team alongside Nellie, Gracie, and Desi. Then there were Freddie, Noor, and Agnes, his station mates. They hadn't all started out that way, but the shuffle of friendships former and dissolving that came with freshman year had landed the four of them together for the last week, and from the looks of it, they were doing very well for themselves. Maya couldn't say if they'd all decided to come here together or if they'd just run into one another and decided to stick together. If Austin had come with anyone, other than his sister, it would be his other new friend, Kip Perreault. The freshman, who was not in art with the rest of those there that day, had possibly been the first crack in Austin's shell. They'd bonded, of all… unfortunate things… in being the favorite targets of school bullies. Kip had notoriously been fished out of the dumpster one day at lunch before being brought out to the nurse, who insisted on checking him out before he could be sent off to the showers, and there he met Austin, just sprung from his second locker. They'd stuck together after that, and Maya was as glad for them as she was sorry. No names had been named, and she didn't look forward to seeing how Principal Davenport would deal with any of this, but that wouldn't stop her from stepping in and doing so to the best of her abilities.

"Mama, we got it?" Mackenzie asked when she was handed her prize at the end of the scavenger hunt.

"Yeah, you did great, Mackerel," Maya bit back a laugh, seeing Mackenzie's eyes brighten with fascination. This might have been her favorite thing ever, and she might well treasure it for her whole life… or for the next few weeks.

"I wanna go again," she started to hop about.

"There'll be another one next year, at the next festival, alright? Promise." Well, this wasn't exactly what Mackenzie wanted to hear, and she had those big shiny eyes and trembling lips like she wanted to cry. "Hey, let me see that prize again," Maya scooped her up. Mackenzie sniffed, but she held it up, and her mother's awe seemed to pull her focus away from the disappointment of no more scavenging and hunting for another year. "That's so cool. Where do you think we should put it?"

TO BE CONTINUED

See you tomorrow! - mooners