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

May 6th 2023

Chapter 126
We Feast Til The Turn

None of them were as sorry about the fact that they weren't going to Arkansas for the New Year as Lucas was. There was a big part of him that wanted to just say 'let's go,' and he might have listened to that part if not that there was another part, this one pointing out the problems with that plan, and that was inevitably the one that won out. He was doing better than he'd done in the beginning, but there was no error to be made, he was still very much recovering, and this trip would be too much, no matter how much he felt that it would have been beneficial to him and his family in some way.

There were some benefits to staying in Texas for the last days of the year, no doubt about it. Maybe the biggest one, the nearer they had gotten to it, was the people who would be here, too. They hadn't wanted to do the thing where if some of them didn't go none of them went, or to have everyone come down to Austin instead. The Hunters and Clutterbuckets might have done that, but they clearly wanted to go, and Maya and Lucas insisted that they should.

The same would not be said for Betsy. She was not in the mood for another round of the 'pity party' over her divorce, or worse yet to have her family very clumsily attempt to fix her up with anyone. In the past, this had involved some women who were interested in women, but it had also veered into women her parents just assumed were gay for some reason, or once a man, too, 'just in case.'

Betsy was not interested in being with anyone at this point, and her cousin and her family understood this very well. She had made friends, through the staff at the high school, and beyond it through Marianne, when they had been out and about one day and she'd spotted her teacher, Ingrid McAllister. She'd only been so happy to see the woman, never thinking anything more of it, but the two women had hit it off and soon got to hang out, them and the other Mrs. McAllister, Natalie. At this point, the couple had as good as adopted Betsy into their circle of friends, and if anyone was going to find her a viable match, it would be them.

This was one of the perks of her staying in Austin over the holidays, though she'd hardly needed the incentive. Now, between her and the Friars, all of them dealing with anything from physical recovery to ongoing grief through the merry season, they had sort of banded together, all of them with a single goal in mind. They were going to make these last days as good as they could be, the better to carry this hope into the new year.

The days had been everything they could have wanted, one after another, until they only had the one to see through and then they'd be counting down to midnight. They had had little to no snow throughout the month and figured that would remain the norm, a disappointment to the children most of all, except on one fortunate day, which felt like a collective illusion by the following morning, where they'd had a steady snowfall throughout the day, and oh, how they had made the absolute most of it.

Betsy had been along, bright and early, like she'd been awakened by some awareness of snow, and immediately she had hurried to dress and drive over to the young Friars' house. Once she'd gotten there, she'd collected the bunch of blond girls and gotten them bundled up and out the door to play, even as breakfast hadn't been made yet. When the time had come to return inside and eat, Maya had found her assistant coach in the midst of teaching a silly routine of some kind to her daughters. They all did well enough and would have made Donna Devereaux proud, so Maya made sure to capture the scene on video before calling them all inside.

They came with red cheeks and a few snotty noses, but there were smiles all around, and an eagerness to go and play again as soon as possible most of all. It was a task to convince them to wait a bit so they could digest first, but 'luckily,' an opportunity presented itself to do both at once.

Their 'little sisters' were the first ones to sprint for the mountains of outdoor clothes left to dry when they'd come inside, not yet hearing, or following the counsel that they should wait until their breakfast had been in them a little longer. Maya and Lucas were both of a mind that, after being apart from one another for so much of the week since the previous fall, Mackenzie and Aubrey had been like magnets, drawn to one another all through the break, and this continued now. They almost hated to think about when Mackenzie would return to preschool, leaving behind her younger sister once again. But until then…

"What's going on out here?" Maya asked as she went and tracked down her youngest daughters, the pair of them digging through the clothes and making a mess, flinging things left and right and getting the dogs frantic.

"Mommy, Mommy!" Aubrey sprinted over and grabbed her mother's arm, like finally all would be well, it had to be. There was just the simmer of panic rising in her, threatening to spill over. "Look! Help!" she produced a single pink knitted mitten, blue eyes like saucers. Maya took the mitten, looked at it, looked to her youngest, looked at the mess and her second youngest still on the prowl, and the conclusion could only be one thing.

"Can't find the other one?" she asked, and Aubrey shook her head, and sniffed, and her face was getting bright… "Okay, okay, hey, come here," Maya lifted her up, but there was no point. The dam broke, and Aubrey started to cry. "No, hey, hey, we're going to find it, yeah? If it's not in here, it'll be out there, and we'll find it. Pink like that? Out there? Not a problem. Easy. Okay?"

Was she running the risk of breaking her first ever promise to one of her daughters? Maybe. But she had determination in her, and that was going to have to count for something, right here. Her baby girl needed her mitten, so she was going to get her mitten. The crying was as good of a rallying cry as she was going to need, and in no time everyone else in the house had joined the search. That very quickly had them dressed again and heading outside to widen the perimeter. Aubrey stayed back with Lucas, and the two of them went very slowly around where most of the playing had happened while the others went further, following the trail of their earlier adventures in the snow and – they feared – the push of the wind against one tiny pink mitten.

It took a few hours, but the mitten was found. Without any of them ever meaning or trying to, those hours had been some of if not their favorites in the winter break that year. For Maya and the group of searchers, it was a lot of chasing around, like a winter edition of the hunt for figurines around the ranch at Halloween, except on a brand new field, and one that had snow over it. As for the two that stayed back, as distressed as Aubrey had been over the lost mitten, she did now get to spend some time outside the house with her father, the two of them slowly but surely searching together, and the more that went on, the more Aubrey seemed able to think of that and nothing else… and this was fun.

It was an even sweeter turn for that, because they were the ones to finally find the mitten. Lucas saw it first, but he did his very best to casually direct his baby girl to find what she was looking for. It had been harder than one might have imagined, so much so that, by the end of it, he was having to use everything in him not to burst out laughing over the entire situation. Finally, though, success was achieved. With a great squeal, Aubrey was brandishing the little mitten, no worse for wear, and it was reunited with its buddy, their sogginess not a problem, not once they were on the child's hands. Now, everyone had digested well enough, and so they could go and play some more!

When Lucas woke up on the morning of the thirty-first, it was with a start that caused him to bite down on a sudden pain in his back, which in turn woke Maya.

"Hey, you alright?" she asked, instantly tuned in and ready to aid him.

"Yeah... Yeah, I'm good," he assured her. She gave him a look. "I swear," he held her gaze, and that was good enough for her... mostly.

"So, your back is fine, but what about whatever led to..." He let out a breath, and she softened. "Nightmare?" she guessed, her tone showing her dismay. He hadn't had one of those in a few weeks, had he?

"I don't know, not exactly," he slowly replied. She didn't know what to make of that. He sat quietly for a moment, thinking back, before he could go on and speak again. "It was... about my mother," he admitted, and she went on listening, so he did his best to explain what he had dreamed, what he took from it. "It was like I was there, with them, that day in the car. I wanted to tell them what was about to happen, but I couldn't do it. I had no voice, or... they just couldn't hear me, and then... and then..." he swallowed the emotions down, bowed his head, and his wife closed herself around him, a shield against everything. They remained this way, silent, for a full minute, before he spoke aloud what he figured to have brought the nightmare along. "I started to realize that, with the new year starting, February will be right around the corner..."

"Yeah," Maya quietly replied. She'd put the pieces together, too. February would mark one year since that day when they had lost Melinda.

"Doesn't change that much, does it? We still all miss her so much, but somehow, the thought kind of flips things upside down."

"It kind of does," she agreed. "I can't help thinking more about... the year changing means that February is behind us... and November, too," she quietly added. He didn't have to say a thing, just continued holding her as she was holding him. "We've only got as much control as we can get in this, but I'm going to do everything I can to make this next year a great one with as little of dark days as there can be. Aiming for zero, personally... Can we go beyond that? Negative dark days?"

"If anyone can figure that out, I'm assuming it's you," Lucas decided, which made her chuckle. "First things first..."

"The thirty-first, yes," she patted his chest and looked up at him. "How many do you wager make it to midnight this time?" He grinned, pondered.

"All of them."

"Wow, confidence, huh?"

"Very much, yes."

As the day progressed, it was very clear that this wasn't just a wager: it was a goal. All the girls, from Aubrey up to Marianne and even up to Ella, with a detour down to Tori, wanted it to be every last one of them together at midnight, and that was all fine and good, except some of them were definitely a bit more on top of things so far as ensuring that they would get there. A very obvious helper in getting to their goal involved an afternoon nap, and maybe one in the evening, too, if they really wanted to give it all they had, but that was easier said than done when they didn't feel like sleeping at all. The best they could do from there then was to help them without their realizing, whether that involved tiring them out a bit – easily accomplished – or cranking up the soothing sounds and activities once it came time to settle down. The littlest pair never saw it coming, though the triplets all did, at one time or another, and they'd start and piece it all together. They didn't stand a chance either way, and if their big sisters or their niece saw it coming, too, they offered no resistance of any kind. They were going to make it to midnight.

The great capper to their run to 2039 was a successful wager. They were never going to forget this, never going to forget when they all stood together, out on the porch and huddled together, the tall and the short, looking at the night sky and chanting the seconds down together, some of them loud enough so that their neighbors up and down the lane could hear it, which made the rest of them laugh. And when they hit zero, when the last of December became the first of January, in a brand new year, and the skies near and far lit up with fireworks that they could see, they felt happy to have all seen it together.

Maya and Lucas shared a look, exchanged smiles… They had just put to bed what had easily been one of their strangest years, definitely one marred with much more darkness than they could have imagined it would back when it had started. Did they have any better idea of what the new year would have in store for them or whether this one would be better than the last? They didn't, couldn't. But if anything was going to get them going, the wheels turning faster and faster, picking up steam, it would be this moment, their girls all around them, fascinated by all they saw and heard around them.

"Now what do we do?" Remy asked, as the fireworks died down and Lucy could let her hands down from her ears. She'd loved seeing the display much more than she'd loved hearing it.

"Now, we go get ready for bed," Lucas told her, and alas the sound of several disappointed small blondes was not enough to sway him or Maya in changing this answer. "If you guys hurry though, we might have a couple of stories worthy of tonight and…"

He didn't have to say anything more. Everyone hurried into the house until there was no one but Lucas, Maya, Ella, Taylor, and Betsy. New year or not, these girls would never say no to story time.

TO BE CONTINUED

See you tomorrow! - mooners