June 13th 2023

Chapter 164
We Must Celebrate the Year

There were two Shelby parties that year, as there had been the year before and would likely be for the next two years at the least. The one nearer to the end of classes was one thing, but now with reunions marking twenty years for some of them and bringing them back to school... Some of them just did not live in Austin or Texas at all anymore, and distance would be just one of the things to make it impossible for them to be around for 'the real party.' That was why they'd had what was being called the Shelby Party: Reunion Edition.

Depending on how you looked at it, the night was either a much smaller affair than the usual party, or it was the biggest thing, and the difference of it all came down to how they did not have the current players having their bit out in the yard. No kids around meant they didn't have to retreat to the basement for most of the night... and it also meant a lot more freedom when it came to drinks and games. To hear it out of a lot of them at the end of the night, they might have to make this a regular thing, reunion or not.

Now, tonight, it was time for the regular party, and those former players who had been able to congregate in the basement, where they could hear the voices and the music from upstairs, remembered their last party... and it made them laugh. It was good to have these moments, wasn't it, moments where they could stop and contemplate how they may have been twenty or so years older, with careers, with families, all of that… and at heart they were nowhere near as far from the kids they used to be than the ones upstairs might think. And if that was a shocker to them, it was a relief to the basement group, a perk. For having been involved in reunions with some of those people who'd been in school with them, they knew that it wasn't always a given. They spent a lot of that time in the basement recalling encounters with any number of their former schoolmates who had definitely aged out of the people they'd been.

Sometimes it felt as though a big reason that they'd gotten to be who they had become came down to the fact that they'd had each other as a team in high school, that they'd gone through those very specific experiences, losing their teams, holding on to one another and fighting to get it all back… That was their experience and no one else's, and that was why they even went to the trouble of having these gatherings now. They had not, would not forget any of it, and any chance they got to get together, to catch up, to reminisce… It would be, at one time, like no time had gone by and every second of it was actually very real.

Maybe because a lot of them were parents now, and all of them had grown up with a love of the game that brought them together in the first place, Maya and Lucas did not feel like they were overstepping any bounds for bringing up Max McAllister and her current predicament with their former teammates. They all felt for the girl, even if none of them had gone through anything like she was going through now. Some of them had for sure gone through some big, life changing events, had seen their means to play basketball be challenged. It would not compare to what she was experiencing now, nor were they trying to make that happen… But they felt a strong attachment to her for knowing what was happening with her.

This all led them to take a trip out of the basement a bit earlier than they might have done otherwise a pack of grown adults, sneaking about – some of them in their own home – the better to see what the kids were up to… and obvious see about challenging them at the hoops…

With everything that had been happening, Max being benched from the end of the season, some of her teammates being real 'witches,' they had wondered what this evening would be like, who would be there, how would they all behave? The teams were not at all the way Maya and Lucas' old teams were, that much was always clear, but then no one ever expected them to be; it was a different kind of scenario. Still, they were teams, and on the whole they had been doing great, which had made their reaction to Max and her secret kind of shocking and unfortunate.

As the days had gone on, Maya had been happy to report that some of the moods had shifted, suggesting that the girls' reaction had been for the most part a reaction, a disappointment they might have known they'd share with their affected teammate. Now, tonight, Max was at the party with the rest of the players, and it felt to her art teacher as though maybe this 'class' of the girls' and boys' team had found their unity, the thing that would pull them closer to one another. They had their young teammate and she needed assistance, so they were going to give it to her… most of them. There was hope yet for the rest of them, but in the meantime Max McAllister looked just a bit lighter on her feet than she'd done since she'd found out she was pregnant, and she walked with her shoulders back, head held high, because she had no reason not to. And she may not have been able to play for her school anytime soon, but she could sure show why she belonged on her team in the shoot off against her teacher's old teammates.

Maya and Lucas came home from this party feeling tired but content, which was just the way they would have hoped to feel because the next day was going to be a very big one for them, too, for them and for others in their household even more so. The next morning, a surprise to his father most of all, Finneas Hart-Lane would be celebrating his very first birthday.

Wyatt had never been one to sit back when a family member's birthday came along, and now that it was his son's very first one of these, oh… He'd wanted nothing more than to make it special, whether or not his son would ever remember any of it. Over the last week, he had been counting down to 'Finn's First,' every morning taking a new picture with the boy, the two of them doing something that had been meaningful to them as father and son, and Finn may not have remembered by the time he'd be older, but to look at him in this moment, there'd be no denying that he was the happiest of little kids.

Now, the countdown was over, and as Maya and Lucas woke up on that morning, they could just hear, off in the distance of the floor above them, Wyatt's voice as he sang a happy birthday song to his son, and it made them smile. One year ago, that day, or the one right afterward, he had been in a singing mood. He'd been terrified, facing the prospect of being a single father to his Finneas. They might have called him the opposite of who he'd been back then, except they knew well that the fear never went away, that it belonged to him as a parent. But he was so far from that now, for so many reasons. Now, he had so embraced his role as a father, and they could not have been prouder.

"Hey, fellas!" Maya chuckled when she saw her brother coming along, his son perched in one arm and birthday hats on both of their heads. He gladly wore his own, while Finneas looked just a bit unsure about the thing on his head. He moved like he was either trying to catch it in his hands or to move until it came into his line of sight, maybe both. He was not having much success with either tactic, and sooner or later it was going to frustrate him into a fit. Wyatt finally just went ahead and pulled the hat off his dark hair and placed it in his little hands. The frustration immediately turned to curiosity, which soon meant that the hat ended up stuck between his baby teeth, point first.

"You're getting actual food, Finny, come on," Wyatt delicately prevented the cardboard from ending up any closer to his son's stomach, which did not please him.

Thankfully, 'Finny' had the perfect thing to distract him and stop him from crying: he had a very large family, and while some of them were still an hour or more away from arriving, others were just across the road… if they weren't directly in the house already. They were just close enough that, when they heard him crying, they quickly came flooding in to see what was troubling him. His many cousins in the house were the first to arrive, crowding Wyatt until he'd set the one-year-old down, at which point they could finally play with him. It was hard not to look at the way Marianne and the others flocked to him, like he may have been their baby brother, for how they cared for him. He had been living with them since he was a newborn, they'd seen him grow into the small boy he was today, and for the smallest among them especially, there was no doubt to them about how he fit into their lives. Oh, it would be a very sad day when Wyatt and Finneas would move out of the house, somewhere down the line. They kind of made a point not to even suggest it, knowing it would get them all worked up for nothing. It wasn't as though they were the only ones who were subject to it all.

"He really likes it when you hold him like that, doesn't he?" Wyatt commented as he came upon Lucas a few hours later, sitting back, holding Finneas in his arms as the boy barely clung to wakefulness. Lucas smiled, looking to his nephew as he aided him in sleep.

"We spent plenty of time out here while I was recovering, didn't we, Finneas?" he quietly asked. Finneas yawned, burrowed in.

"I sort of did something," Wyatt spoke, before the quiet could completely settle in. "Sort of. I didn't actually send it, I just…" He reached into his pocket, pulling out a folded piece of paper and handing it over. Lucas couldn't exactly do anything except hold it without disturbing the birthday boy, so he looked to Wyatt for an explanation. "It's for Alicia. I wrote about him," he nodded to his son. "Not a lot, even if I could have done it, just the big things, I guess. I wanted her to know that he's okay, and that I don't hold it against her, leaving us, leaving him… But maybe I shouldn't, I don't know. What would you do?"

Lucas looked at the folded paper, at Wyatt, at Finn. He didn't know what it was like to grow up without one of your parents. Maya would have known a lot better, but Wyatt had chosen his brother-in-law for a reason, hadn't he? He carried no bias in that respect. Not that Maya wouldn't have given it all the thought that it deserved, but still…

"If you think it's the right thing, then you go for it. Just be prepared for her to respond… or not, and for you to like that response… or not." Wyatt let out a breath, contemplated the letter. He didn't know; he couldn't know. He wanted to make the right choice for his boy, but it was harder to come by than he expected. "Put it away, for now," Lucas offered, and Wyatt did so at once. When this was done, Lucas moved to transfer the sleeping boy into his father's arms, brushed his hair once he'd been received. "Just focus on him right now…" Take it all in while you can. He'll grow up before you know it, and you won't get these days back.

TO BE CONTINUED

See you tomorrow! - mooners