Chapter 19

"Hi, Dan. I'm Dan," I said, extending a hand.

He smiled broadly. "Happy to meet you, Dan. The little redhead trying to break out of the scrum is my wife, Cindy."

Cindy did extricate herself and shook my hand. "This is going to be sooo confusing," she said. "Two Dans." Nikki slid up beside her. Cindy turned to her. "Does yours know his master's voice?"

Nikki giggled. "Or I can just whistle. Or wave."

Cindy said, "Oh, you've trained yours well, then. So we have Nikki's Dan and Cindy's Dan."

"That'll work for informal occasions," Nikki retorted. "And for formal occasions, they can be Dan R. and Dan G."

"Or 'hey, you. No, not YOU!" I laughed.

Tina interrupted to give the house tour again. I noted that Cindy made a comment similar to the 'Decorating for Engineers' one made earlier. These girls WERE alike. Dangerous.

We all ended up in the living room, sipping cold drinks and snacking. Tina gave a stern look to everybody and said, "Don't fill on junk! I have us booked for six o'clock at a great restaurant and you need to save your appetite."

I saw the way Alan looked at Tina and I was pretty sure that food wasn't the appetite he was saving. After a half hour of conversation, listening to teen girls who jumped right in on discussion of business and education, I could see that every one of us guys had reason to be utterly taken, if intelligent, attractive women were the thing.

Cindy, as I'd been warned, was a natural leader. First off, she was so obviously fourteen, the youngest of the crew, that she disarmed me. I guess I expected some immaturity, thinking that descriptions to the contrary were shaded by friendship. She didn't sound immature. Nor was she bashful. She laid out the educational plans for the girls and they nodded and commented assent.

"But we still need to see where Jason is going to end up in all this," she said. "Jason, you need to talk to a counselor about your plan."

Like she was giving marching orders, except the sounds came out of this little redheaded pixy. I got up to go to the bathroom and bumped into Cindy's Dan in the hall. "She just sort of takes charge. Has she always been like that?"

"Gosh, no," he said. "When I met her, she was almost afraid of her own shadow. Just blossomed into what you see here."

"You know," I said, "I noticed Nikki doing something like that. At least socially."

"From what Cindy's told me, she and Nikki were under similar burdens," he said.

"That's what I understand. It makes me happy to see her growing away from that." I was truthful, at least up to the part where I was a bit apprehensive that my sweet teen wife might find herself swayed by the attentions of the sort of guys who'd never graced her proximity before. My namesake saw the look.

"I know. I worry too. But SHE says NO!"

"That's what Nikki says, too. But she turned into my everything, Dan."

"Way it's supposed to be, Nikki's Dan," he smiled. "Some guys don't EVER get the paradise I have with Cindy. And I don't think I've ever done as much good in somebody's life as I did with her. Of course, she saved..."

"Dannnn? Where ARE you?" came Cindy's voice.

"That'd be mine."

"Yeah, baby..." came Nikki's lilt.

"And that's mine," I laughed.

We went back into the living room. Cindy got up and let her Dan sit down, then sat on his lap, chastely, at least at first, then she leaned back into his arms, pulling them around her. She exuded a sensuality that made me want to wrap my Nikki in my own arms. I put my arm around Nikki and she seemed to sense this, snuggling against me. She twisted and kissed my shoulder.

And we heard a car pull into the driveway. Alan looked through the window, and opened the front door. It was his sister, Elise, bearing a foil-covered tray.

"Hi, Elise," he said. "Come in!"

"Hi! I brought a tray of cookies and brownies," she said. She looked around the room. "Actually, I wanted an excuse to come back over and meet this Cindy that everybody talks about."

Cindy stood up. "Hi! I'm Cindy!"

Dan was right behind her. "And I'm her husband, Dan Richards."

Alan said, "This is my nosy sister Elise. She met everybody else at the airport."

"Don't make me sound bad, Alan! I've listened to everybody talk about Cindy and I just wanted to meet..." She looked at Cindy standing before her with a smile on her face. "You! You're a doll!"

"Thank you, Mizz Elise," Cindy said, giving her a welcoming hug. "Does this mean my sisters talked about me?"

"We told Elise you were the ringleader," Tina said.

"I'm NOOOOOOT," Cindy countered. "Every one of YOU gets in on some of this stuff! I'm quite happy to be the mascot, though!"

Susan said, "Actually, Mizz Elise, we're pretty much a set. Like bowling pins. If you don't have ALL of us, it's not gonna work quite right."

"We're REALLY a set," Nikki chimed in. "A week ago, THEY were a set, missing a piece. Now I'm here."

I interjected, "Alan says they're the Manhattan Project, except with cuties!"

Elise laughed. "Cute! Does everybody here eat gumbo?" she asked.

Cindy giggled. "My Dan made a big pot for a Saturday event in Alabama."

"Alan made if for us on a rainy Sunday. So me 'n' Jason's had it."

"Well, if you all want, I can make a big batch for a late lunch tomorrow before everyone heads home. Save you from having to deal with another road meal."

Universal head-nodding indicated agreement.

"I'll bring it here, then. One o'clock tomorrow." She looked at me. "And bowls and stuff. I know you don't have enough for this crew, Alan. And don't worry about the house..."

"I'll leave you enough money to pay somebody to clean up the place when we leave," Alan said.

"That's nice," said Elise. "I'll put it in my casino fund and clean the place myself." She gave Alan an unusual look.

"Whhaaaat?!?!" he whined.

"No more of those little booby traps, either," Elise said. To us, she said, "I told 'im I'd clean his place one time, and he left booby traps all over the place. A drawer full of those springy fake snakes. Styrofoam blocks leaned against closet doors. I opened a cabinet an' got buried in an avalanche. If he'd've walked through the door that day, I'd've killed him right there."

"I'll make sure he's good, Elise," Tina said. She glared at her husband. "I can't believe you treat your sister like that."

"Uh, baby..." Alan said. "That's the woman who put sugar in my sleeping bag before I took off on a camping trip."

General laughter ensued, the conversations fueled by horrible pranks played on family and co-workers over the years.

Nikki's looks mirrored the other girls. "I can't believe YOU did stuff like that!"

"I can't believe that I had stuff like that done to me, baby," I said. "As for my victims, nothing was hurt except dignity and ego."

"And usually that means somebody's ego needed a little deflation," Cindy's Dan interrupted. "Of course, between brother and sister, it's just one more way of communicating love."

Elise laughed. "Yeah, uh-huh. I just wanted 'im to be miserable. Had nothing to do with love."

"That's the alternative view," I said in the midst of laughter.

The afternoon was spend in happy conversation with coffee and Elise's cookies and brownies. Elise, Nikki and I hadn't heard but the barest allusions to Dan R. and Cindy's lives, specifically two shooting incidents.

"I remember the first time we went out after the hurricane," Nikki said to me in front of the the group. "You got that shotgun to take with you."

"Man's gotta defend himself and his family."

"I wasn't your family yet that day."

"I know," I said, "but it applies to innocent bystanders, too."

"That's how I ended up with Alan," Tina added. "Protector of the innocent."

Jason kept the conversation from getting too serious. "I protected Susan, too. Swatted a ferocious jumping spider."

"My hero," Susan squealed, clasping his arm.

"Was a BIG spider," Jason added. "She needed rescuing."

Susan smiled broadly. "I REALLY did!"

Other conversations had to do with flying. Nikki elbowed me. "Everybody else gets to fly, baby."

I knew that before long, I'd find a wall. With handwriting on it. I wasn't totally without experience in the subject. Groups of engineers tend to have some hobbies that polite society ('muggles', Alan called them) might find odd or exotic, and I'd flown with friends, even took a few lessons, but life, in the form of a wife, had a way of intruding. I stopped. Never started again. I kept the thought to myself, but here I was in a roomful of people who mere hours before had been a few hundred miles away.

Nikki was sitting on my knee. She leaned over and whispered in my ear and by speaking a few words, handwriting magically appeared on that wall. "We need to do that." She slid back in my lap and pulled my arms around her to emphasize exactly where she fit in my life. I was happy with that.

Eventually we all got underway, headed to the restaurant for dinner. Two SUV's handled the whole load, segregated by gender. In the car with the other guys, I asked, "D'ya think we're being talked about?"

My namesake laughed. "Guaranteed. And in the best possible way. I'll get a report when I get home tonight."

"Relax, Dan," Alan said to me. "They're sisters. And they're in love, and they get along well together."

"I kinda got that from listening in on the calls," I said. "I mean, Nikki and Tina, they have history together. But Susan and Cindy just jumped right in. Wasn't any of that, 'She's MY friend, so back off!' stuff that you see sometimes."

The other Dan laughed. "You're looking at four girls who've been on the outside most of their lives. Susan is the only one who had a really normal family life, and her intelligence made her somewhat of an outsider."

Jason nodded. "She told me about having to 'dumb down' to try and fit in. Tina and Cindy told her she didn't need to 'fit in', she needed to find her place in the world."

"That's what I'm saying," Dan said. "They have a group where THEY can be themselves. I know that Cindy has friends at school now, but with this crew, she's got real peers, equals, in so many more ways."

Jason added, "And Susan just brings another angle to it. She says that she kind of shows what a normal family can be like, at least to Tina and Cindy. I'm sure that Nikki gets some of that, too."

I thought about all this. It sounded feasible. Believable. Was my Nikki finally in the family she was meant to have?

Alan broke into my thoughts. "So when do the flying lessons start? I saw the look on Nikki's face."

"You guys are gonna cost me a fortune, you know," I said.

"Think about it," Alan countered. "Any place you want within five hundred miles on a weekend."

"With a cutie flying, grinning at you the whole time," Jason added. "It's funny! Alan gave it to Tina. Tina gave it to me and Susan. Wings."

"I gave it to Cindy," Dan said. "She loves flying. I just wish she was old enough to..."

Alan laughed. "Cindy gets so aggravated about her age. She can't get a license to do anything. Dan lets her fly all the time, but that's legal as long as he has a set of controls. She can't get behind the wheel of a car, though."

From what I'd seen and heard from Cindy, I could imagine that exasperated expression. My Nikki did something similar, and when she did, I wanted to scoop her into my arms and love on her. Wasn't too much of a stretch to believe that the other Dan felt the same way about the redheaded pixy. After all, I had my own.

Dinner was easily as good as I came to expect from seafood in south Louisiana. The place wasn't one of those 'white tablecloth' restaurants. The best seafood places seldom are.

"This is GOOD!" Nikki said. "Good job, Tina!"

"Thank you," Tina answered, "But it was Alan's idea! Cindy passed up crawfish for this place."

"You were gonna do crawfish? Do they do that in Alabama?" Nikki asked.

Cindy grinned. "Nope. Was gonna be my first time. Dan ... MY Dan's sister ... he says her husband does 'em GOOD!"

The waitress overheard the conversation. "Excuse me, folks, but WE have crawfish if you want. They're not on the menu. You have to ask."

Alan said, "They're probably pretty good here. If you want to try some."

Cindy shook her head. "Uh ... not tonight, I'm full ... But thank you for offering."

"That's okay," the waitress said. "I could've mentioned it earlier, but you folks had your order ready." She left.

Susan jumped in. "Crawfish? You don't think that's scary? I mean ... they grow in the ditch!"