A/N: [July 5th 2024]

September 23rd 2023

Chapter 266
We Breathe With Family All Around

They were born three days apart, almost to the minute, so long as you minded the time difference between Texas and Ireland. That had been a big part of the first few days that Shonagh spent among the Friars, not the fact that she was born in the very early hours of November 4th, almost eleven years prior, but the getting to know one another part. She and Marianne would share a fact about their lives, and the other would give one in return, and the similarities and differences would be just as fascinating. Marianne was the firstborn child – if not the eldest – in a family of now eight children, seven of them living here with their parents. Shonagh was the youngest of three children being raised by her mother, though her grandparents were almost always around, one or the other, ever since her father had died. She'd been three at the time, didn't remember him much.

Maya and Lucas were so used to having so many people in the house, that it genuinely did not throw them to have one more joining them. It was a good thing in this situation, as it allowed them to really help her settle in, show her around, make sure she had everything she'd need. It allowed them to enjoy her presence and get to know her, and she really was such a sweet young girl to get to know. She was very like Marianne in the ways that allowed the girls to bond as they did. They had lived their own lives, in their own cities, their own countries, and there the differences were, but when it came down to it… They were all good to go for their year with Miss Hallissey.

They barely had those first few days to get her settled in that they would be heading off with her, of course, and she only got more excited as they told her what the next several days would involve. For one, they would be driving to Arkansas rather than flying. It always depended on how they all felt whenever the occasion came that would bring them out to where Katy Clutterbucket had been born and raised, whether they would fly or drive, but on this occasion it really seemed that they needed to drive. It would be only a stretch of what they could show her, but it would be the kind of road trip that their young guest would never have had, driving through this part of the world that she'd never been to, so why would they ever skip over it and fly? Plus… well, Ella was not at all in the mood to fly again until after the baby unless she absolutely had to, so road trip it would be, to Arkansas and back again when the family reunion was over and they all came home again.

"Pappy Luke, look what we made for Mom," Tori motioned for Lucas to come up to the car after they arrived, the morning they would set off for their trip. He went as requested, coming to a stop for a moment at the open front passenger side window to give his daughter's extended hand a squeeze hello, before looking into the backseat. In the space that wasn't occupied with the car seat that held a very happy looking Sunny, there sat a cooler. "It's everything in case she feels sick on the way. I can give her whatever she needs. I got these, too," she pointed to a bag of what he guessed to be anything that didn't need to be kept on ice.

"Well, you're all set, huh?" he gave her shoulder a squeeze as he looked back to Ella and her amused smile. She'd been dealing with the ins and outs of a nausea that could not tell the time, as she and Taylor had come to see it. There was no telling when it would rear up, and now that they were adding long stretches on the road, there was no telling what would happen. But she wanted to go to the reunion, and nothing was going to keep her away, especially not nausea.

Lucas finally made his way over to the minivan after climbing halfway into the backseat to greet his younger granddaughter. He'd started to move away, and she'd let out a 'pa-POP!' He couldn't just leave her hanging when she called for him, could he?

"Sorry, sunshine, where are my manners?" he'd told her, kissing her little cheeks, and she'd giggled and grabbed at his face. "One for me, too?" he asked her, showing his cheek, and she pressed a good one at it, complete with her best 'mwah!' Now they could go.

They might have opted to drive through the night and arrive in the morning, but this was as much for Shonagh's sake as it was for the other girls across the vehicles that their way to Arkansas that day that they drove when everyone would be awake and able to take in any and all things they might want to take in. Would there be stretches of road where there was absolutely nothing to see except the other cars around them? Sure. But even that could be interesting if they set off with the right point of view, couldn't it?

Anyway, if they wanted someone who could find beauty and possibility in just about anything, they had the right carload of kids, where Shonagh was in excellent company. There would be a lot of messages sent back and forth, between Tori and her aunts, all of them keeping updated on how the other side was doing, and most importantly what they were seeing. Sometimes they'd send pictures to one another, and that would become part of the game, too.

If this wasn't enough to get them through the hours, they always had music. They had prepared a whole playlist ahead of the trip, long enough to get them all the way to where they were going, and they had all pitched in. There would be songs that all of them knew, and songs that only some of them knew, but that would be just as interesting to them, as they would stop and listen, and discover… They didn't always have to end up liking what they heard, but they were eager to find new things, and that was really what made it interesting to keep going and hear who had picked this song, and who knew it…

All this made it so that by the time they met up with the Hunters in Arkansas, the day had really not felt all that long at all. They could have kept going, but also they were glad to be in the final stretch of their road trip. Katy and Shawn had four of their kids in their car with them, and even though they would have loved to have all five, they knew why they didn't, just as Maya and Lucas did with their eighth and eldest. Already, it had been really great for the six of them to be together in this way since Texas. Maya tried not to poke too much at the way her parents looked ready to burst with nostalgia, thinking of when their 'four little Hunters' had actually been little. Now it was the two of them, their twin girls who were very near to their twenty-first birthday, their son who was eighteen and about to move out and start college, and their baby girl, who'd just gone and celebrated her sweet sixteen…

They'd needed this trip together, all of them, just as MJ and Haley had done especially. After they'd return to Texas, it wouldn't be long that he'd leave their home and move in with their older sisters, and then she'd be the last of the kids left at home. She was not looking forward to it.

The feeling would not stop once they reached their first stop, over at the Olsen house. It still seemed like only a moment ago when they had first met Charlie and learned that she was Katy's sister, a moment ago that she'd been very pregnant with her son, while her daughter had been just a little toddler of a girl, obsessed with her plastic guitar. Now Caitlin was sixteen and about to start sophomore year just like her cousin Haley, while 'baby Harry' was already thirteen and about to start middle school.

The family came together, so many branches already with the Olsens, the Hunters, the Friars, and the Munroes, and the Clutterbuckets who were great grandparents, grandparents, and parents to nearly all of them collecting at David and Charlie's house. There were plenty more branches, some who continued to be locals, others who were slowly but surely converging…

"You could have come with us, you know?" Katy teased her cousin when Betsy finally arrived a few hours later.

"What can I say, I didn't feel like driving all the way out," she smiled, hugging her.

"And how long did you have to wait in the airport after your flight was delayed?" Maya inquired, and Betsy squinted at her in a way that felt so very deeply genetic to their family line.

Instead of continuing to tease her for her choice of travel, Katy suggested that they might take the kids around town for a bit of a tour, a look back through the ages of hers and Betsy's younger years, before they'd both flown off to New York – figuratively speaking. Everyone was a bit restless from their travel day, so the idea was agreed upon at once.

In all the times they had come out here, for New Year's especially, Maya and Lucas had seen just about everything that Katy and Betsy decided to show the girls, often with stories attached to them that were a lot more detailed when they'd heard them. They edited out some of it for their younger crowd, which was really appreciated. Everyone had their own definitions of right and wrong, and some things fell in a gray area, but either way, they were better off keeping their tour 'age appropriate.'

"Is this the first time you left Ireland, Shonagh?" Betsy asked as they moved away from what had been hers and Katy's middle school.

"I went to London for my birthday last year, to see a musical," the girl shook her head with a smile, but then she shrugged, which told them that was the one and only time she had been anywhere until she'd flown out to Texas.

"Look at that, she likes musicals," Betsy turned a smirk to Maya, who quietly laughed.

"You should hear her sing."

They eventually circled back to rejoin the others, finding Tanner and Angela sitting outside their daughter's house. They were soon surrounded by their great-grandchildren, who were eager to tell them what they had seen. This entire trip seemed to do its very best to remind them how time was passing, and this included the likes of them, too. Thirteen years back, when they had come to surprise them, they had been celebrating their fiftieth wedding anniversary. Now they had been married a whole sixty-three years, and they were both of them in their eighties. In a lot of ways, they were both still so solid, but in others… they were not so solid as they used to be, and it left them considering a very real and not so far future where they might no longer be with them.

Being back here with them, in the town where they had both spent the better part of their lives, it was to wonder if they'd be better off returning here, to be in this place that had been so important to them to live… however long they had left here after being away for over a decade.

"Now, I wouldn't see it that way," Tanner told his granddaughter when she brought up this point as delicately as she possibly could.

"How do you see it?" Maya asked, smiling lightly.

"Well… Angela and I, before all of you came around and found us, I don't think either one of us ever imagined leaving here, living anywhere else… And now that we have been away, I see how much of a mistake that would have been. We needed this. I think a lot of us need this. You started out in New York, ended up in Texas. Do you ever think about what it might have been like, if you'd never gone anywhere else?"

The answer seemed very easy, especially if she factored in the Lucas of it all, her career, her family… How much of it had come out of her being in Texas? But that wasn't the point of the question, not exactly. She didn't need to answer him. The thoughts were in her mind, and that was enough. She hugged her grandfather in thanks. She hugged him, hugged her grandmother, more and more these days, and they all knew why.

"Do you regret never living anywhere outside of Texas?" Maya asked Lucas, that night, as they prepared to go to bed. He had Ezra in his arms and was getting him back to sleep after he'd been awakened by a car backfiring outside.

"Not really, no," Lucas told her. "Why?"

"Just something I was talking about earlier, with my grandfather," she shrugged.

"We did sort of consider it a couple times, didn't we? Going to New York, or maybe California…"

"Yeah, but we couldn't really do it, could we? There's just too much, the ranch, the school, the girls, now him," she looked to Ezra, who was just about back to slumbering. Lucas kissed the top of his head but kept moving with him. It wasn't something that they needed, not now. Maybe that would change, someday. But today wasn't that day, and as they let the subject fade away, another gladly took its place, one that never seemed far away these days. "What are we going to do about Agnes?"

"Depends, I guess," Lucas hummed. "We can try and talk to her before school starts again. We can wait and talk to her after school starts. Or we don't have to talk to her, not yet, if ever… I'm not helping, am I?" he reflected after a moment.

"With making a decision? No, not really," she smiled. "But the rest is good enough," she promised. He went and set Ezra down in his travel crib, turned off the lights, and climbed into bed with his wife. "Especially this," Maya whispered, and he laughed against her shoulder, his favorite little spoon, now and always.

"Better enjoy it while it's just us," he told her, and she chuckled quietly. He had a point. First night away from home? There was no way they wouldn't get one little visitor, or two, or five…

TO BE CONTINUED

See you tomorrow! - mooners