Chapter 124
And We'll Build It Together

Lucas' shortened class day had gone by quickly enough, time wise, though in his mind it had gone by fast because his thoughts were so far away. He'd taken notes all along the way, so clearly a part of him had still been tuned to what his professors were saying, but the part he had been most actively thinking about was Pappy Joe and the situation there. They'd sort of left the question alone for the time being, but there was no way it was going to be left alone for very long, even if they wouldn't need that extra room until the baby was old enough to be moved out of his and Maya's room. That wouldn't be for… over a year, but Pappy Joe's bringing it all up now, saying he'd leave sooner rather than later… That put them on the clock for an answer.

He knew very well why he wanted to do it now, and that was because he didn't want to do it at all. He didn't want to leave him and Maya, didn't want to leave Elliott or Noah… But he felt that he needed to, so he preferred to do it now, rather than to be faced with having to go in that moment over a year from now. He wanted to rip the bandage off. Lucas knew that, because he knew his grandfather, knew how much he despised the idea of his ever being a burden to anyone and how he would hate to put him or Maya in the position of having to ask him to go. They would never do that though… They were in the business of finding solutions, not throwing in the towel before actually trying.

But what could they really do? That was more than a big question, it was just so… Yes, there was the basement, but it didn't feel right. And anyway, if he was perfectly honest, if he was going to see his grandfather moved anywhere, he kind of wanted to get him on a ground level. As much as he'd recovered from his fall a few years back, it wasn't always easy for him to go up and down like that, and it was only going to get harder as he got older, wasn't it?

The whole question had been spinning around in his head like that all afternoon in class. As he headed home, he knew he was going to have to talk it over with Maya… as soon as possible. He would arrive before her today though, so when he walked into the house, his mind was quickly released from its burden, if for a little while, as he spotted a pair of short bare legs sticking out from below the curtains. There was also a small hand gripping those curtains, the better to keep them in place. After a beat, he scanned the room and found another pair of legs, poking out of the blanket on the couch. The blanket was moving about, in a heap that was possibly more than a heap. But then again, the feet were moving, too.

"Pappy Joe?" he called. The blanket and the curtains fluttered… maybe giggled a bit.

"Yeah?" the man strolled casually from the kitchen. The smirk on his face said it all. The finer points of hide and seek may not have been established between them, but the boys clearly didn't mind it.

"Where's Elliott? And Noah?" Lucas asked, playing along.

"Do you know? I haven't the faintest idea," he trailed along into the living room. "We were playing hide, and then they just… disappeared," he sat down on the couch, right next to Noah's feet. The proximity caused him to try and pull his legs in. "No, not one clue."

"Huh…" Lucas slowly nodded. "Well, now, I don't know what we're going to…" Before he got to go on, the door opened again and there was Maya. "Hey, I didn't think you'd be home this early," he smiled.

"Oh, yeah, well, I didn't think so either, but…"

As soon as she'd spoken enough for them to hear her and recognize her, the boys sprang from their hiding places at once, all the better to hurry toward her. It startled Maya most of all, and maybe Lucas and Pappy Joe, too, for it being so unexpected, but then she saw them and how happy they were to see her, and she just smiled.

"Mommy, we hide!" Elliott informed her, as she crouched down to greet them. Right about now, she didn't think it would be reasonable for her to try and lift them both at once.

"You did, huh? And they didn't find you?" she asked. They shook their heads. "Nice…" she nodded before offering them each a hand. They knew what this was for, and they each gave her a high five. It wasn't exactly centered all the way, but it did the job.

For a while after this, it was the natural flow of life in the evening at their house. Dinner, and bath time for the boys, and story time, and very soon they were off to bed and sleeping. Pappy Joe would spend his evenings after this either watching television, or reading, or just sitting outside on the porch. For Maya and Lucas both, it was time to settle in with their respective schoolwork. When it was finally done, Maya turned to Lucas and gave him a look he understood very well. Something's on your mind, talk.

After a brief moment's hesitation, Lucas stood and went to shut their door. He went back and sat with her at the desk – which they'd arranged so that they could both work when they had to – before telling her about his conversation with Pappy Joe that morning.

"You told him we don't want him to go, right?" Maya asked when he was done. Her eyes gave him the impression that she was resisting the urge to put her hand to her small curve. It had become so much of a reflex to her throughout those two almost consecutive pregnancies that she sometimes caught herself doing it even now, when something had her troubled or overwhelmed.

"I did, and I told him that we would come up with a solution," Lucas assured her.

"Right, we will," Maya nodded.

"Now that I've got you on the case with me, we'll get there, no sweat," he smiled. It made her laugh.

"Knowing how it usually goes, I might end up waking you in the middle of the night with an idea. So, you know, don't go into panic mode if I do."

"When do I go into panic mode?" Lucas asked with a mock defensive tone.

"I'm sorry, would you like me to start from the most recent time and work my way back or should I just go right to Halloween 2022 and go in chronological order. Oh, I can also go from least to most… or most to least…" she illustrated with her hands as she spoke.

"That bad, huh?" he bowed his head and returned to look at her with a smile.

"Don't beat yourself up, my list makes yours look like a post-it note," she reached over and put her arms around his neck. He closed the embrace and kissed her, slowly, tenderly. This was really all he could have hoped for, after the whole situation with the nausea. For her sake, he hoped it stayed this way from now on and until this part of the pregnancy was over.

"So how did it go today?" he asked her as they moved to get ready for bed.

"Oh, I made a not-friend," she announced, and the almost exaggerated chipper tone in her voice made him wonder who could have pissed her off at a middle school.

"It's not a student, is it?"

"The students, no, definitely not, they were great. I saw Missy, of course, and Ariel, and Daphne… There was one kid," she chuckled, recalling, "Best way I can describe her is 'Dylan, if he'd been a girl.'"

"Good people, bit all over the place?" Lucas smiled and nodded.

"When she left class, she turned to say goodbye, said it had been her favorite art class all year… and then she ran into the door frame." Lucas made a face of sympathetic pain.

"Was she okay?"

"Oh, yeah. She had her own first aid kit in her bag."

"Got it," Lucas laughed. That definitely reminded him of Dylan, too.

"Also tag teamed with me to defend another student from my brand new not-friend," Maya added, and it took Lucas a moment to realize this meant…

"Wait, so the art teacher…"

"… is something else," Maya confirmed, with her best look of 'I am resisting using more colorful language.'

"What did she do?" Lucas asked.

So, Maya did her bit of story sharing. She told Lucas about being with Missy, outside the school before classes started, and how she'd asked her to talk about her classmates. She told him how Missy had pointed out Bodhi and told her that he was transgender. It wasn't a secret. Bodhi clearly knew who he was and wanted the world to know. The problem was that the world, or his world as it surrounded him, continued to fight him on it.

Maya went on to tell Lucas about Missy's warnings regarding Mrs. Cartwright, and her introduction to Bodhi, before moving the story to the moment when she'd actually been in a class with the boy and this teacher. She told him about the teacher's behavior, the comments and their total lack of subtlety. And she told him about how she'd refused to toe Sue's line, instead making her position very clear, which led to 'Miss Munroe' (or Phoebe, as she got to know her) throwing in her lot as well.

"I keep thinking about after we found out we were going to have another baby, so soon after Elliott, and I didn't think I'd ever go back, that I'd ever become a teacher…" Maya breathed, shaking her head to herself.

"You stuck it out. You found a way," Lucas smiled, recalling what they'd been discussing before, about Pappy Joe. Maya smiled back.

"Well, I had a lot of help. And because of that, I'm here, and whatever good I'm able to bring, I want to do it," she nodded firmly. Lucas leaned in to kiss her forehead. You will.

When she woke to find it was still the middle of the night, Maya looked to the clock and found it was actually just before two o'clock, which felt much too early. It wasn't the nausea – thank goodness – it wasn't any pain or discomfort… She didn't even need to go to the bathroom, and that would become a common thing later on, if her last two pregnancies were any indication. No, this was just a plain old 'I'm tired but I'm wide awake' type of wakefulness. She knew herself too well to think she'd close her eyes again and be carried off to dreamland in a flash.

So, she got up, careful not to wake Lucas as she extricated herself from spoon mode. Once she was up, she walked quietly to the window, looking out on the land out this way, and the road stretching out, Sanderson Farm in the distance… How fortunate they had been, Lucas and her, to have this home passed on to them by Pappy Joe. He'd given it to them, to Lucas at least, so they could do exactly what they were doing now, hadn't he? To have their life, to create this family and watch it grow. She knew they would have worked things out regardless, probably, when Elliott was going to come along, when they chose to return to Austin. They would have landed somewhere, yes, but… It wouldn't have been this, and because they did have it here, they also got to know how sad they would have been not to be right here, to raise their children. With him by our side…

She blinked. She played the words back through her head, the simple, errant thought. It didn't sound like much on the surface, no, but… but if they considered it another way, maybe…

She might have gone up to the attic, to look through those windows there in order to get a better idea, to see whether this idea was just a little crazy or very, very crazy. But again, it was coming on two in the morning, and because they had little boys in the house the trap to the attic remained closed if it wasn't in use. It wasn't a very loud thing, but it wasn't silent either, so that was out of the question.

If she was going to align herself to a crazy idea, then she might as well see it through, right? Even if it meant walking out of her house in the middle of the night. She didn't make it that far though, not once she started going down the stairs and both saw and heard that the television was on. Pappy Joe was sitting on the couch, and he turned to see her coming along.

"Come to bust me now, Mama?" he joked.

"Yes, it's way past your bedtime," she informed him, and he laughed quietly.

"I know why I'm up, why are you?"

"Well… You, actually… sort of," Maya admitted. She went and sat next to him and he turned the volume all the way down so that they'd still have the illumination of the screen.

"Me? What did I do?" he asked.

"You started talking nonsense this morning, that's what," Maya stared him down. He didn't know what she was talking about at first, but then he figured it out. He leaned back into his seat with a sigh. "Says a lot about you that you said it to him and not me," she tapped his arm.

"He's not as scary," Pappy Joe informed her.

"I'll allow it," Maya squinted at him. She sat back, too, quietly fussing her shirt, flattening it over herself with a smile. "Say I had an idea… Some might call it a crazy idea."

"They tend to be the best ones."

"They can be, especially now." She looked at him, and her eyes said plainly that she was giving him a possibility to stay. He received this with complete open-mindedness. "Out there, behind the house, the land that's attached to the property…"

"All yours," Pappy Joe confirmed.

"To do with as we please… So, we could build on it? Say, a smaller house, just next to this one. Put it right in the back, then it's just a very short walk into the house by the kitchen door. Like a pool house, but for living…" she explained.

"We don't have a pool…"

"We could get a pool. We don't have to, just the house would be enough, and then Elliott, and Noah, and… this little human here… They'd have their favorite Grand Pappy just nearby, and the extra room upstairs, too."

"They would," Pappy Joe considered all this. She could see his mind working, exploring all the different avenues. All of them wound their way back to the same conclusion: it could work. And he wouldn't have to leave them. "If we do this – and I'm going to be looking into it, I promise you that – then I'm paying for it, not you, not Lucas."

"Please, we're about to have a third kid to pay for, we can't go building a house," Maya tossed back, and now he laughed.

"Do me a favor, don't mention it to him yet," Pappy Joe pointed up the stairs. "Let me talk to some people first."

"It'll be like it never happened," Maya promised. "You know, depending on what it's like in there, that little house might be big enough for you and a certain lady," she smirked.

"And now it's time for both of us to head to bed. I'm old, and you're with child."

"Maybe getting you to get back up there was the plan all along."

TO BE CONTINUED

See you next week! - mooners