Ring of fire II (assiti shards)

by Eric Flint

  "Noelle's not like Pat." Denise gathered up the cups to take them into the kitchen. "Don't be fooled by her looks. She's been feeling responsible for Pat for the last ten years. Totally responsible for her since Patty finished high school in '95 and moved out."

  Bernadette picked up the forks and saucers. "If you ask me, the greatest kindness Dennis could do her is somehow convince her that he'll really take Pat's problems over now, for good, and cut her loose to live a life of her own without that constant worry."

  "What do you think, Joe?" Aura Lee asked.

  "Hard to tell. Noelle seems friendly enough. A little reserved, I guess, but that's not so surprising under the circumstances. That she's a little hesitant."

  "Do you think that she might be a little more… forthcoming… maybe, with someone younger. Maybe if Eden talked to her?"

  "We could try it, I guess. But Economic Resources keeps her pretty busy. She doesn't have a lot of time to socialize. They'll probably be sending her back to Franconia one of these days."

  Aura Lee looked at him. "Doesn't that tell you that we ought to get a move on?"

  Eden Stull decided to leave the dishes for the time being. Supper hadn't gone badly. But it hadn't gone particularly well, either. So far, she hadn't found any opening to bring up the question of whether Noelle would be willing to change her name to Stull. "I was there. When Francis Murphy shot Dennis, I mean. With the babies. My parents were really ticked off that he shot into the parlor of the funeral home with the five of us there. As if we ought to be immune to that sort of thing happening."

  She stood up. "Help me get the kids to bed, will you? After that, if there are any questions you want answered, fire away. That's why I asked you over."

  "I'm not sure you can answer my main question at all." Noelle got up too. "Considering that you weren't even born back when it was going on and Harlan was just a baby. Why did my mom fall in love with your husband's uncle, who's my father, to start with?"

  "Well." Eden started to shoo her sons in the direction of the stairs. "That's a good one. You might as well ask why Julia fell for Tom. Those are Harlan's parents-they were left up-time. Or Aura Lee for Joe. Or why I went nuts over Harlan. Or, for that matter, why Blanche Leek fell for Ben-he's the guys' first cousin, son of Juliann's sister Lula. They're up in Magdeburg. I suppose you don't see any obvious reason or you wouldn't be asking."

  "Well, I've never met Harlan or his father," Noelle stopped on the first step. "Or the Leeks. I don't think I ever even heard of the Leeks. And since Tom Stull was left up-time, I'm not likely to meet Harlan's father."

  "They're no better looking than Joe and Dennis," Eden smiled. "In fact, Harlan looks more like Joe than he does like Dennis. When it comes to the rating scale, Dennis is the best of the lot. Lucky for you. No girl in her right mind would want to look like Joe or Harlan. It's just lucky that Little Juliann looks more like Aura Lee. I'm really happy that both my kids are boys. It doesn't seem to handicap the Stull boys."

  "Okay," Noelle dropped a rubber ducky into the bathtub. "Where did you get the ducky? You didn't have kids before the Ring of Fire."

  "It was Aura Lee's. She and Joe could have sold it for a bundle to the dealers who come through looking for up-time collectibles, but she gave it to me, instead. And I'm glad. I want my kids to have a rubber ducky. I know that when I finally get to go join Harlan, out of Grantville, we'll probably have a wood stove and a little round tin tub. I'll sort of miss central heating and a real bathroom, but the rubber ducky goes along. They can still have that and I want them to have that. I want them to have something from… from the real world, if you know what I mean."

  "I know. It's odd what we miss." Noelle dipped her fingers into the crock of soft soap and dropped a dollop into the tub. "I miss bananas. That's what I used to have for breakfast. I'd just pick up a banana and run out the door. I've gotten used to a lot less sugar and a lot more fish, but I guess I'd just never imagined a world without bananas."

  Eden pulled a couple of washcloths out from under the sink. "Anyway. Back to the Stulls. What really gets to the parents of their wives-at least, what got to my parents-is that they home in on us so early. And my parents didn't know the half of it. I was allowed to start dating when I was sixteen. And I had my first date with Harlan, who's ten years older. They didn't like it a bit."

  "Well." Noelle thought a minute. "I mean, I can see why."

  "What would really have made them mad," Eden grinned, "is that I'd known for almost three years that he'd call on my sixteenth birthday and ask me out."

  "Good Lord!" Noelle exclaimed.

  "I was in McDonald's one day, with a batch of other kids. I take after Mom in my looks. That is, I was as tall then as I am now and just as filled out. On top that is, at least when I'm not nursing. I got a bit more hips with the kids. I was leaning against the rail, waiting to order, when Harlan leaned on it from the other side, smiled at me, and asked me who I was. I told him, and who my parents were. He looked at the kids I was with and asked me how old I was. I told him that, too. Thirteen. And he said, 'I was afraid of something of the sort.' Then he asked, 'When are Nat and Twila going to let you date?' I said, 'when I'm sixteen.' He said, 'I'm Harlan Stull. Nat and Twila are in the phone book, so I'll call you then. When's your birthday?' And he did. Right in the middle of my birthday party. He asked me to the movies in Fairmont the next Saturday and I said that I'd go."

  "That's… well, that's…" Noelle sputtered.

  "Yeah, my parents thought so, too, when he called. So did the Mulroneys when Harlan's dad-Tom, that was-started dating Julia. Though that was just two years difference, not ten. They'd have married sooner than they did except that they were waiting for Julia's sister Barb to turn eighteen so she could marry John Nash without parental permission. And probably the Hudsons, when Joe started eyeing Aura Lee when she was fourteen and kissing her the next year. As for your parents, Dennis is more than four years older than Pat-closer to five years older. She may have run off to him on her eighteenth birthday, but she'd been waiting to run for a year, at least. Willing to run for two or maybe a little more.

  "They just sort of… focus… on the girl they want when she's awfully young. Not putting pressure, exactly. Just moving in and occupying all the mental space she has available for thinking about guys. So he's the only guy she ever really thinks about. At least, that's the way it worked for me. I was so preoccupied with waiting for Harlan to call on my sixteenth birthday that I just more or less ignored all the other boys in town."

  Eden grinned suddenly. "In a way, I think what makes the parents maddest is that they can't even call the guys pedophiles, because they actually do wait until the girl is of dating age to do something. Joe moved in on Aura Lee earliest, but even then… I suppose a person could say that she sort of provoked him occasionally, from everything I've heard."

  Noelle frowned. "But why did it preoccupy you that much? After all…"

  "Well, yeah. Probably if it had been anyone else who tried that trick, I'd have forgotten it in a couple of days. But it was Harlan, and if he called, then we'd have a date, and if we had a date, then some day he'd kiss me, and if he kissed me, then eventually… You can sort of see how the train of thought went. Trust me, it was plenty to keep me ignoring all the other guys. Of course, if he hadn't called, I'd have had to restructure my picture of my future life drastically. But he did, and like I said, I never doubted that he would. Honestly, the only thing on earth that my parents had against him was that he was ten years older.

  "Plus the fact that I moved in with him on my eighteenth birthday, which was a year before I finished high school. But he wasn't on a 'barefoot and pregnant' kick. He paid for me to finish a two-year degree in laboratory technology and then I worked two years before we got married. I guess we could have gotten married earlier, but there didn't seem to be any real reason to. For that matter, there wasn't any real reason in 1997 more than there had been for the last five and a half years, but we woke up one morning and
decided it was time, so we did. We went to the courthouse and had a judge perform the ceremony with Joe and Aura Lee as witnesses and sent my parents a photocopy of the certificate.

  "It didn't change the way we lived. I didn't get pregnant the first time until after the Ring of Fire and now I've got two kids. I predict I'll end up with a few more, because birth control down-time isn't what it might be. We've talked around all the angles and Harlan and I aren't likely to give up sex any time soon, thank you.

  "Though having him over in Fulda really cuts down on the frequency. Once they get something going over there that doesn't mean that a lab technician is of six times more use to the world in Grantville than in Fulda, I'll be on the first freight wagon out of here. We're lucky that he's the budget officer, so he gets to come back more often than most of the guys in the administration there do. He'll be in town in a week or so. I'll have everyone over for dinner.

  "The guys started to make a scrapbook about Juliann, after the visitation got shot up. Joe has it, I think. You'll have to ask him to let you look at it. They put in their favorite 'Ma' stories, so I'm not going to spoil things by telling you any of them."

  "But Nat and Twila were with you at the visitation. So you must be getting along now?"

  "Oh, that. When I finally had a baby, they couldn't resist. They showed up at the hospital nursery looking wistful, so Harlan told them to come on in and we all had a good cry together and made everything up. And we named the baby Nathan. On the theory that we were likely to have more, given the birth control situation, so we could name kids on down the line Tom for Harlan's dad and a Harlan Junior, maybe. Tom we've already got. He was born last May."

  Noelle started to towel off the older boy. "If you ever need a babysitter when I'm in town…"

  "My favorite story about Grandma for a scrapbook?" Harlan Stull asked. "God, it has to be the day that Eden moved in with me. June 11, 1992. It was a Thursday." He winked at his wife.

  "I think I remember that one. The famous Lady Godiva of Grantville?" Joe grinned at him. "We were living in Fairmont then, but somebody called Aura Lee at work and the story that Eden had been streaking was waiting for me when I got home for supper."

  Harlan grinned back. He had always considered his youngest uncle more of a cousin, considering their ages, and never gave him the 'uncle' title.

  "One thing sort of led to another," Harlan turned to Noelle. He thought she was looking a little intimidated by her first family dinner with the entire world supply of Stulls all at once.

  "Nat and Twila didn't really like it that I started dating Eden when she was sixteen. Considering that I was twenty-six. From the perspective of the parents of a girl, they might have had a point. Although I was very good. Even by their standards. For the first six months or so, at least. I took her all sorts of neutral places, like to historical reenactments up at Prickett's Fort State Park, as if she really wanted to watch eighteenth-century gunsmiths at work, and to the district fair and stuff. Concentrating on Saturday afternoons. Sunday afternoons. Hiking and things like that. Roller skating. Co-ed volleyball in the high school gym."

  Eden interrupted. "Until I got a little pissed off and told him that I was perfectly willing to try to cram ten years' worth of growing up into two years or so, since it looked like I'd need to, but he had to give me a fair chance. Introduce me to his own friends and things."

  Harlan shrugged. "Well, by that time, the people I'd gone to school with were mostly either married with a kid or two or doing things I didn't want to introduce Eden to, so my 'friends' list got remodeled. Pared down a lot in pretty much of a hurry."

  Joe laughed. "Funny how that works."

  "Anyhow, one thing led to another. Eden was born at 1:40 in the morning. She looked it up on her birth certificate. So on June 10, I kept her out beyond her weekday curfew so I could stick an engagement ring on her finger at the very instant she turned eighteen in the early a.m. She didn't think Nat and Twila would be happy about it. The Davis household always had breakfast at 6:30 a.m. She asked me to be outside with the car by seven, because it might not go over very well. I called into work first thing in the morning and took the day off too, just in case. But I sure didn't expect what did happen."

  "Which was?" Dennis asked. "Remember, Pat and Noelle don't know the story at all."

  "Well, Eden came down to breakfast and served herself with toast and scrambled eggs. Nat started in on her about breaking curfew. She put her hand down on the table and showed them the ring. Itty bitty diamond on a very skinny platinum band. Nat told her to take it off. She refused and pointed out that she was of age. He said that either she took it off or he would throw her out. She said, 'then toss me down the steps.' He said that he had paid for everything she had and that none of it would be going with her."

  "Oh." Noelle sounded a little surprised.

  "Eden just looked at him. Then she got up from the table, went to their little half-bath downstairs, and stripped. Stripped everything, including her underwear and shoes. Took the bobby pins out of her hair. She even left her glasses behind. They were probably the single most expensive thing she had, given her prescription. Walked out the front door, down the steps, down the sidewalk, and got into my car just as bare as the day she was born, except for her engagement ring. With Twila screeching on the porch, by the time she closed the car door."

  Dennis reached for the baked beans. "I was over in Clarksburg, then. But about that time of the morning someone called me, too. So I probably heard before Joe and Aura Lee did."

  Harlan winked at Eden. "So we drove over to my place. She parted her hair in back so it would hang in front and sort of hunkered down on the seat while I ran in and got one of my shirts. It was a little later by then and more people were up and about in my neighborhood."

  Eden tossed her head. "I'd have been willing to walk in just as I was. If that's what it took. But it was nice of him to get the shirt. I had a lot of hair-still do-but not anywhere near as much hair as Lady Godiva is supposed to have had and I really preferred not to show that many people how I was built."

  "Ah." Harlan looked at the ceiling. "Having her there, so conveniently undressed, and having the day off, what with being engaged now and all, we spent the next three hours or so very pleasantly. We figured that the way Nat had behaved that morning sort of cancelled all the limits on our behavior that he had imposed in the way of dating rules. Somewhere in the middle of it, the police phoned. Eden talked to them, pointed out that she was eighteen, and told them that she was quite happy to be exactly where she was. When Ralph Onofrio asked where she was, she answered, 'in bed with Harlan,' which made the state of affairs pretty plain. Ralph must have figured out what had Nat and Twila in such a twist, because he just laughed."

  Noelle was struggling with a desire to laugh, too. Or, maybe, a desire to cry a little.

  "Then we began to think about slightly more practical things. Like getting her some clothes. Without her glasses, Eden couldn't even see to write down a list. I couldn't quite imagine myself over at the Bargain General buying clothes for her. Or trying to, even with a clerk to help me. And I thought that taking her there wearing one of my shirts and no shoes would sort of fuel the gossip that was bound to be going around. Plus, without glasses, she couldn't read the labels and I'd have had to read them out loud to her to get sizes. I could just see myself doing that."

  "Yeah," Dennis was looking at the beans again. "I can just picture it."

  "So I called Grandma. Mom and Dad were at work. Someone had already phoned her, of course. She came over and took a look at the two of us, Eden blinking at the world through a fog, so to speak, and trying to get the tangles out of her hair with a dinky little six-inch plastic pocket comb." Harlan paused and ran his hand over his scalp. "Well, working at the mine, I kept a crewcut. It was a lot easier to keep clean. Why would I have wanted a brush? Grandma started to laugh so hard that I thought she would never stop. Eventually she did, though. Eden told her the sizes, I took her over to Bargain
General, and she asked, 'How much can I spend?' I gave her five twenties. I'd stopped at the bank the day before, sort of expecting that I'd need some cash somewhere along the line. Grandma said that she'd probably never spent that much at once in her life and that she intended to have a good time. She got the practical stuff, toothbrush and hair brush and things. But then she picked out a couple of sets of pretty fancy underwear, a pair of jeans, a tee shirt, a pair of sandals. Said she expected I'd prefer it if she forgot about pajamas."

  Joe laughed again. "Ma to the hilt."

  "Then she looked at me and grinned. Asked, 'Do you really want to frost Nat and Twila?' By then, I sure did. 'You got any more money?' she asked. I gave her a couple more twenties. She said, 'Then take Eden to First Methodist with you Sunday,' and picked out a sort of rose colored tee with little frilly arms and a skirt with a background the same color and a little ruffle around the hem. And a headband that matched and a pair of little pink pearl earrings. And lipstick and nail polish."

  Joe leaned back. "Whodathunkit? I'd scarcely have thought it of Ma."

  "Well, I guess with three boys, you two and Dad, she never had a little girl to dress." Harlan grabbed the last of the beans before Dennis finished making up his mind about thirds. "She made the most of it. Then she ordered me to go by Nat and Twila's. She got out. I didn't think she should go up by herself, just in case Nat was still there, so I went with her. Charlene answered the door. Grandma said that they were certainly welcome to give the rest of Eden's things to the Goodwill if it suited them, but she did need her glasses and they wouldn't do anyone else much good if they threw them into the box at the Lions Club."

  "Now that I would think of Ma," Dennis inserted into the conversation.