Chapter 26

November 14-24, 2001

After the call ended, Dave yawned and stretched, concentration finally broken. He realized he hadn't even touched the coffee he'd made hours before, and he really needed to use the bathroom again, anyway. Another yawn told him he could stand to get some sleep after being up all night -- but he realized he'd better not sleep too long or his schedule was going to be well and truly loused up. Get a couple hours, he thought, and he might be able to get something done. He didn't even bother with taking his clothes off, just collapsed on the bed and fell asleep instantly. He'd planned to only sleep a couple hours but didn't wake up until Kayla brought the boys home from school.

It still took another couple days for Dave to get his life back to something resembling normal. He did, after all, have his regular work to do, and now he was behind. There was a major rush factor on Castle Wyrthingham, but fortunately it was in pretty good shape, so he knew he could push through on it. Maiden of Hvalfjordjur could wait a bit. Wings of Tregedar, Larissa Hamilton's next work, at least the part that had been written, was waiting in his FTP folder on the Dunlap & Fyre server, and he started off by giving it a quick once over. It was much, much better than her earlier effort. Knowing her history with Dunlap & Fyre, and to show her there was interest in her and the new novel, he decided to put some time into a fast critique and get it off to her before he got to work on the steampunk fantasy.

Much though he wanted to dive headfirst into his own book, which still didn't have a name, he knew he could only devote a part of his energies to it. He decided, for the moment, he'd limit his time on the book to the mornings when he was freshest, and then devote the afternoons and some evening time to his regular work. That meant the time he spent walking the boys to school and wandering over to the Spee-D-Mart afterwards would often be spent trying to get his mind organized on his fictional world.

At that, he couldn't just bail off into writing it. In the first days he wrote several brief "test" scenes, just to try out the concept, suspecting little of them would actually make it into the final work but could give him a feel for the flow of the writing. He spent more of his time organizing his outline, and compiling a handbook of the life and customs of his dystopian universe, and especially "Sinsy", the town where much of the early action would take place. He began developing a file of biographies of his major characters, naming more of them now, getting a feel of who they were and what they were like. It still involved a great deal of imagination.

He drew Shae into his thinking about the novel early on -- and soon realized he needed to listen to her comments and suggestions. She was a great help with the art and the pace of the storytelling, a subject Dave thought he knew a great deal about until one evening Shae read one of the test sections back to him over the phone. A single hearing of it from her lips drove home to him the improvements that needed to be made.

Having the book to work on, along with everything else, really made the days fly by. He was waiting for Shae to arrive a couple days before Thanksgiving, eight days after he'd gotten home, and he couldn't believe it had been that long.

Avalon's shooting schedule was a little goofy because of the holiday, so Shae only had to work on Monday. On Tuesday, she drove to Bradford for an event she and Dave had carefully kept secret from Tyler and Cameron. A month before, Roberta Wisner, the boys' kindergarten teacher, had told Dave and Shae about the kids telling their classmates about their Aunt Shae, and they'd worked out a surprise: Shaella Sunrise would make a surprise visit to the Bradford kindergarten.

To make the surprise even more interesting, Dave had the brilliant idea of asking Dayna and Sandy to be part of the visit. Part of their business was to do school shows, especially for young kids, and they had several costume acts in their repertoire. The two wandering medieval minstrels showed up at the house after Dave got back from taking the boys to school, and the three women spent some time working out a special routine or two.

Of course, Dave wasn't going to miss the show, but he stayed well in the background while it went down. It was all a big surprise for the kids, starting off with Sandy, dressed in one of her medieval outfits, going into each of the three kindergarten rooms with a piccolo and doing a "Pied Piper" routine, leading the kids to the school auditorium. Once everybody got settled down, Shae came bounding into the middle of the group, dressed in the Shaella Sunrise outfit. Many of the kids recognized her right off, and the excitement mounted. She interacted with the kids a little and told them a couple stories, some from the show and some not, while Dayna and Sandy gave some depth to the story with their instruments. While Shae took a break, Dayna and Sandy did a piece of one of their own performances, then Shae told a couple more stories. It went off very well, in spite of it being casual and unrehearsed. Tyler and Cameron got to prove they weren't boasting about their Aunt Shae, the kids all had a ball, and Dave had enjoyed watching Dayna and Sandy work about as much as he had enjoyed watching Shae.

As they picked up after the performance, Dayna commented to Shae, "You're pretty darn good at your stories. If you ever want to go out on the road with us to school dates, I think we could fit you into the regular act."

"Yeah," Sandy agreed. "You really do a great job with the storytelling. You had me about as sucked in as the kids."

"You never know," Shae laughed. "I might just have to take you up on that. Avalon isn't going to last forever, and then I'll have to find something else to do."

"On the topic of something else to do," Dayna replied. "Would you and Dave like to come over and hang out some time? Like, maybe Friday night?"

"Yeah, that sounds like fun," Shae agreed. "I've really wanted to spend some time with you guys but our schedules never seem to match up."

"Comes from being out on the road a lot," Dayna smiled. "Come on over about six and I'll throw some burgers on the grill. No point in eating heavy after being stuffed from Thanksgiving the day before."

The next day, Dave, Shae, and the boys headed across the street for a traditional Thanksgiving dinner -- except that it really wasn't at all traditional in Dave's family. Two or three times when Dave was young, he and JoAnne went to dinner with distant relatives, but as he'd grown older it had mostly stopped for some reason, and often Thanksgiving came down to the two of them, plus often Hazel. He and Julie had been back for Thanksgiving a couple times, but it really wasn't much bigger, especially since the boys were still small. The last time they'd just gone out to the Country Kettle for dinner rather than going through all the hassle.

This time, though, JoAnne decided that the time had come for the traditional feast. Dave couldn't help but wonder if perhaps it was a subconscious desire to impress him with life in Bradford enough to get him to stay permanently, or just wanting to impress Shae, but in any case it promised to be an experience. And with JoAnne, Hazel, and Shae there along with him and the boys, it would be the largest Thanksgiving dinner he could recall. The last couple Thanksgiving dinners had been at the Albrights. They had always seemed a bit sterile to Dave, if for no more reason than he perceived that Stan and Deborah didn't really like him much and blamed him at least in part for Julie's decision to stay working in the brokerage business in New York. He'd only talked to them a couple times since he'd left the city and had experienced rather stiff conversation from them. It probably wasn't a fun holiday around the Albright house today, he thought.

Not so around the Patterson house. JoAnne and Hazel had obviously been cooking well before he, Shae, and the boys walked across the street along in the afternoon; there was still a great deal of hustle and bustle in the kitchen, and he knew well enough to stay out of the way. Before long, though, the two older women got the meal on the table -- and there was a great deal to eat: turkey and the trimmings of course, but salads, several different vegetables, a number of other specialty dishes. When you got right down to it, it probably was the most sumptuous meal he'd ever sat down to around his mother's table. They ate and ate and ate some more, and finally, when everybody was groaning, they found themselves faced with several choices of cake and pie for dessert. "Can we hold off for a little while to let things settle a bit?" Dave groaned.

They all decided that would be a good idea -- it would allow them to pack more dessert aboard -- and staggered to the living room, the adults with coffee. The boys were so overloaded that they soon fell asleep, tempting Dave to do the same, but he just sat back and watched as Shae got into a discussion with Hazel.

For that matter, Dave had never really known Hazel well. Although he had been aware his mother and the shorter, heavier woman had been friends of a sort all though his school days in Bradford, the friendship never really blossomed until he was out of school and at Columbia. The two women spent a lot of time together, often eating together, sometimes going places together, just good, close friends who didn't have anyone at home to keep them company. There had been times Dave had wondered if there was a lesbian relationship, but never saw anything to prove the suspicion other than just the spending a lot of time together. As Dave just sat back and listened to Shae talking with the two, he realized it was just exactly what it seemed, a pair of good friends and nothing more.

Eventually they stirred enough to try on some blueberry pie, and then some pumpkin pie. As the afternoon wound down, a lot of hands were needed to carry some leftovers back across the street to Dave's house; it appeared he and the boys would be working on the leftovers for days. He and Shae were still aching and groaning from all the food when they went to bed a couple hours after the boys went down. For once nothing happened between the two of them besides a quick soulful kiss followed by some heavy sleeping.

Dave had really wanted to spend some time learning more about Dayna and Sandy -- but, as Dayna had said, they were on the road a lot, and there just hadn't been any chance for him to get together with them. He knew the two musicians had a huge stock of good stories, and led an adventurous and different life. He made arrangements for JoAnne to watch the boys the next evening, and about six they showed up at Dayna and Sandy's house, which was a couple blocks up the street from Kevin and Emily's. It was a nice house, an older two-story brick bungalow. "We mostly live downstairs," Sandy explained. "Office and storage is upstairs, and right now we're jammed to the gills. We even have Second Home stacked about half full of CDs."

"We just got a delivery a couple days ago, and this time of year the place is often pretty full. We try to keep boxes out of the living area, though."