Epilogue

Money doesn’t solve all problems, but it usually helps to have it. Having goals and dreams also helps. What really made this little family group work was the love that was shared among all three of them.

One of the first goals was to transform Mai Li’s last name from Attenborough to Washington. That was accomplished in a small, private ceremony at the Ranch. There was a short honeymoon in California, where Mai Li introduced Bobby to her parents, who had moved to Long Beach while Mai Li was in college, to finally retire. They had medical issues that prevented them from traveling to Kansas for the wedding. The newlyweds spent some time at the beach and Bobby tried to learn how to surf, but mostly they cuddled and Bobby tried his best to get her pregnant...

While they were gone Vicky got a local contractor started on turning one of the outbuildings into a photo studio. She was both delighted and amazed at how simple things were on a digital platform. Her old Minolta was on a shelf, in plain view. She might use it again. She noticed a degradation that pixels created if a picture was blown up very much and digital prints weren’t as rich or dense as film, but with her digital camera she could take thousands of pictures and the only time involved in processing them was to look at the computer screen and decide to either keep or delete each shot.

Initially, she started by shooting old, leaning barns and abandoned, breaking down farmhouses. Her intent was to preserve the images of those sad places, once so full of life, but now lonely and forlorn. She would, years later, publish a coffee table book titled What’s Been Left behind. She also took portraits, primarily of children, also to preserve their images for when the parents wanted to look back and smile at the memories such pictures evoked.

For Mai Li, being married didn’t really seem much different than what she had enjoyed before the ceremony. She continued working in the physical therapy field, but now she donated her time twice a week to three extended care homes, working with elderly and infirm people to increase their ability to move more freely and get around more easily. She also explored cooking, learning more and turning the kitchen into a place that always smelled good and produced (usually) delightful dishes.

Bobby also felt like getting married had changed things only a little and he continued his education. He gave up the idea of becoming a veterinarian because he’d have to go to K-State to get that degree and that was too far to commute. Instead, he transferred to Brown Mackie College, in Lenexa, which is a suburb of Kansas City and was only twenty miles from the ranch. There he finished a veterinary tech course in two more years. While he was doing that he had a stable built that could hold four horses. He bought three, one for each of them, and they rode frequently, exploring their property. He made an arrangement with a recent graduate of the K-State vet program and put her on retainer. Whenever she came out to look at the horses, he was her tech.

Through it all, though, Bobby’s primary dream was of Mai Li and his mother moving around the house with swollen abdomens, carrying his children in their wombs.

He actually succeeded with his mother, first, to Mai Li’s chagrin. He was prodding their fertile pussies at least nightly, and he often begged one of them to “help him” with an erection during the day. When they moved onto the ranch he hadn’t had a major seizure in over eight months, and his focal seizures were almost undetectable, except that he zoned out for a few seconds. Everyone knew he didn’t really need any “help” with his erections. He still couldn’t get a driver’s license, but the only time that caused any issues was when both women wanted to do something and someone had to drive him to school, instead.

At any rate, Vicky missed a period first, about three months after Mai Li and Bobby got married. She actually kept that a secret for a month, hoping that Mai Li would catch, too, but she finally had to go to the doctor to start her prenatal care regimen.

Mai Li doubled her efforts to get with child, and when Vicky was four months along Mai Li finally missed a period, too. They would later say she caught up with Vicky, because it turned out she would bear fraternal twins, a boy and a girl, who distended her belly to the point she joked that she was as wide as she was tall. Still, she was in excellent health and carrying two babies in her womb slowed her down only in her last trimester of pregnancy. By then Vicky’s baby had been born, a healthy, loud little girl they named Matilda (Mattie) Elaine. She was a greedy little thing, too, completely emptying one breast each time she fed, by the time she was a month and a half old.

Mai Li had gone with Vicky when Vicky’s water broke, and coached her through the birth. Both women thought seeing childbirth would be too much stress for Bobby and cause him to seize. That was also true when Mai Li went into labor, so he took care of Mattie while his mother helped his wife have two babies.

The twins were named Richard Lee and Roberta Lynne. Richard was the name of Mai Li’s adopted father and Roberta her mother. The middle names had no special significance, even though Richard’s sounded, phonetically, like Mai Li’s ‘middle’ name. In Mai Li’s opinion, those names just rolled off the tongue well when used with the first names. The babies were obviously part Asian, though the features were not as pronounced as their mother’s.

Suddenly the Washington household was much noisier than before. That was actually the only part of it that bothered Bobby. The women expected it, and Bobby knew how loud Mattie could be, but when the twins got home it took him a week to adapt.

Time went by. Bobby continued to work on his degree. Seclusion allowed them to continue their ménage a trois, of sorts, and Bobby continued to rut between the legs of his lovers as if it was the most normal kind of relationship in the world. Both women fed from the breast, which afforded them some measure of protection from his sperm. Vicky asked Mai Li if she could have one more before Mai Li did, and before she got old enough that there might be issues there.

“Have as many as you want to,” said Mai Li. “You’re only as old as you feel.”

“How many more do you think you’ll have?” asked Vicky.

“Knowing Bobby, we’ll have to hire a nanny, maybe two, to help me take care of all the babies he’ll try to make with me.”

“I know,” sighed Vicky. “I get two or three times as much sex from him as I did from his father. There’s an old saying, you know.”

“What’s that?” asked Mai Li.

“A woman’s place is barefoot, pregnant, and in the kitchen,” said Vicky.

“That’s awful!” yipped Mai Li.

“We’re lucky that the only part of that Bobby thinks is the pregnant part,” said Vicky, smiling.

“It’s hard, sometimes,” said Mai Li, “but it sure feels good to be adored.”

“It does,” said Vicky. “I wouldn’t change any of what’s happened.”

“What happened is that, together, we brought him back from something that would have killed most people,” said Mai Li. “We’re a good team.”

“We are,” Vicky agreed. “Unorthodox, but good.”

Life has a way of dulling the senses, if it drones on in the same way each day and nothing new breaks up the routine. It’s not that it isn’t interesting. Bobby loved his life and he loved his routine. He loved going to bed each night with two beautiful, usually naked women, one of whom would always roll on top of him and start kissing him. He got as much sex as a teenage boy dreams of getting and with women who look like that teenage boy’s dreams.

But just as the accident that had brought Mai Li into his life was unusual and had broken up the routine of his teenage life, and just as Mai Li (and then his mother) had decided they needed to help him in ways nobody else would have, Bobby’s life refused to become routinely the same.

While he was attending his classes to become a vet tech he discovered that there were a lot of unwanted horses in the world. Some of them were race horses that could no longer race and were gelded or not deemed important enough to breed. Some were working horses who “aged out” of the rodeo circuit. Others had gotten injured and could no longer perform whatever duties or work someone wanted them to. Horses are expensive to keep and care for so most have to offer something to the owner or they are discarded. Discarded usually means killed.

A few of these horses were donated to universities that had a veterinary PhD program, and they became cadavers for students. Most were killed and sent to rendering facilities, which harvested bone and other parts of the carcass and then either buried, incinerated, or composted what was left. The harvested products were then sold to generate a profit. Bone, for example, is used to make bone meal and gelatin. Most people have no idea that the happy gelatin dessert they eat probably came from the bones of a horse or cow.

At any rate, Bobby had a soft heart and the thought that beautiful horses that could have lived for years more were being slaughtered pierced that heart. He knew there were “retirement” homes for circus animals, or for animals who can’t survive in the wild any longer, so why not use his acres to create a retirement home for horses? He had always intended on getting more horses anyway, when the kids were old enough to ride.

The first horse he got came from a man who owned a carriage that his horse pulled for tourists to ride in. He worked primarily in the Plaza section of Kansas City and his horse had been hit by a car. Its leg had a hairline fracture in it that meant it needed complete rest for two months. The man couldn’t afford to miss that much work so he got another horse. He didn’t have the facilities to care for two horses and, as much as he liked the injured one, he offered to donate it to a university. Word got around and, because one of Bobby’s instructors knew he might be interested in a horse like that, told Bobby about it.

A week later Bobby owned a new dualie pickup truck and a gooseneck stock trailer. Vicky insisted he hire someone to help him establish all this and complained he was rushing into things.

He disagreed. He had the stable space and an ample supply of feed and fodder. All the animal needed was rest and it was, only twelve years old. It could easily live long enough for one of his children to “raise” it. He arranged to get this horse, but as soon as he had moved the animal into the only remaining stall another person who a vet had referred to Bobby inquired as to whether he could board his horse. He liked to ride but couldn’t take care of the animal’s routine needs.

Having outgrown what he had thought was a large stable, Bobby hired a local contractor to expand it into a building with twelve-stalls with storage for tack, feed, and so on. The company he chose to build it said they could get it done in a month or less. He got his stable, but even more importantly, one of the laborers in the company suggested something that would make his new idea actually flourish.

Bobby was fascinated by watching his new stables go up. He spent hours just sitting and watching the men work. He brought out bottles of water and snacks that Mai Li made in the kitchen and there was idle chit chat as the men took a break from the work, occasionally. They knew what they were building and one of them asked why he was building it. When he answered, a young man approached him. Juan had only been out of high school for a year. He had gone into construction because he could get hired immediately. He had applied himself and was now a valued member of the team.

“Who you gonna have to run this horse operation?” he asked. “You gonna do it yourself?”

“I’ll probably have to hire somebody to help me,” said Bobby. “I’m learning how to help a vet take care of horses, but it would be better if I had somebody around who knew what they were doing.”

“You should hire my grandpa,” said Juan. “He worked with horses all his life in Mexico before he came to America.”

“What’s he doing now?” asked Bobby.

“Nothing. He sits around the house driving my wife nuts. He needs something to do and he knows horses.”

The next day Juan’s grandfather came with him to the ranch. The man was in his fifties and looked like a wrinkled up cowboy. He was wearing jeans that showed he was bowlegged, a checkered shirt, and a cowboy hat that had once been white but was now tan. His name was Hector and he spoke passable English with a heavy accent.

Hector’s story was like that of many other Mexicans. His daughter emigrated to the US to pick crops and then married a citizen. He had no intent to leave Mexico and made good money taking care of horses belonging to a variety of owners. Eventually he went to work for one of the cartels and he thought his life was set. Then a horse died, not due to anything Hector did, but because of the foolish actions of a spoiled young man who ignored Hector’s instructions. The horse was his employer’s favorite. The boy blamed it on Hector, lying to cover up his own stupidity. Hector managed to flee before he was shot and buried in an unmarked grave.