Chapter 1

Author note: If you haven't read the introduction to this story, I strongly recommend that you do so. I'm working hard to make "Community" stand alone, but the characters in this story have had a year (in 'story' time) to get where they are. I think that the enjoyment of this story will be much greater if you know the players.

Friday afternoon under a sky punctuated with puffy cumulus clouds, two small private planes hustled along purposefully from two different directions.

The destination was a rural airfield in Tennessee, a stretch of concrete, a few buildings, a fueling station, a hangar left over from World War II.

Piloting one of the planes was Dan Granger, fortyish, engineer, not exactly white-knuckled, but more than a bit wary. This Dan had just under a hundred total hours of flight time and his airplane was, according everybody who knew flying, a bit 'hot' for a novice pilot. In the right seat was his wife, all of fifteen years old, dark brunette hair in convenient pageboy bob, bangs cut straight across her forehead at eyebrow level. Nikki.

Almost directly south of the airport, flying in from Alabama, was a thirty year old Cessna 180, another forty year old engineer, but this time he's in the right seat. The left seat is occupied by a redheaded young girl, her eyes scanning the skies, even though the instrument panel almost obscured her forward vision. Cindy. The guy in the right seat is the other Dan in the story, Dan Richards, husband of fourteen year old Cindy.

The two couples have a common goal. One of their friends is getting married. The wedding is slated for Saturday afternoon

We'll let Cindy tell the story for a while.

High-speed let-down into Tina and Susan's home field. I know I could get this ol' plane down faster and steeper, but right now I'm trading the altitude I paid for two hours ago for some ground speed at this end. I just changed the frequency on the radio from the air traffic center to the Unicom. Tina's home field is like ours, a little place with no control tower, so there's a universal frequency for places like this. Everybody knows about it, and a goodly number of them monitor the frequency and broadcast their status.

Like us. I pressed the 'transmit' button on my control yoke. "Tulla traffic, this is Cessna 6-5-6-7 Golf, ten miles south, descending for landing."

The radio broke squelch. "Roger, 6-7 Golf, this is Tulla. No known traffic."

"Uh, Cessna 6-7 Golf, Tulla, this is Mooney 2-8-3-5 Kilo, about fifteen southeast, also for landing at Tulla. We'll be watching for you."

I squealed just a little bit, mind you, and I wasn't transmitting. My Dan looked at me and smiled. "There's the rest of the gang."

"I know! Isn't this exciting? Susan's getting married." Reason to be happy, that. Susan. Can't call her 'best friend' because she's one of us and we're SISTERS. And among our sisterhood, Susan's the only one that's NOT married, and when she DOES get married tomorrow, her marriage will be the most normal of the bunch. It's 'giggle' material, our marriages, when it's not 'huh?' or 'You're kidding me!' or 'Is that LEGAL?'. Let's see. We have me, fourteen, MY Dan, forty-one. There's Tina, seventeen, and HER Alan, forty-one. And Nikki, fifteen and HER Dan, forty-one. And Susan's eighteen, the oldest of us, and her Jason's twenty-six.

Eighteen and twenty-six, that's almost normal.

Okay, I'm flying today. Must be doing a good job of it, because the REAL pilot (he has his license. I can't get one. Too young!) is riding along with his arms folded, talking with me. I punch the transmit button again. "Roger, Mooney 3-5 Kilo. We'll meet you in a few minutes."

"Roger, 6-7 Golf. Mooney 3-5 Kilo out."

Dan laughed. "You can take the guy out of the army, but you can't take the army out of the guy. That last transmission is pure military procedure." Dan (mine), Dan (Nikki's) and Alan are all army veterans.

Anyhow, we're doing a good descent, keeping the speed up and I see the field ahead of me. And off in the distance I see the strobe flashing on Dan and Nikki's Mooney. I'm at a thousand feet entering the downwind leg and the Mooney's closing in. Nikki's husband is getting good. He puts the Mooney in 'dirty' configuration, flaps and gear down, to slow them up a bit to sequence behind us for landing.

I can do this. Wheels on the ground, pulled the yoke back to keep the tail pasted down while I stood on the brakes and took the mid-runway exit.

"You're getting good," my Dan said. "And you can fly, too!"

I giggled. Love my guy. And seven months into being married, eight if you count where we committed to each other before the State of Alabama certified us, Dan and I have our little jokes and suggestive comments.

"Let me get us parked and we can work on that other thing later," I replied.

I put our plane on the transient tie-down line and shut the engine down. By the time we got the doors open and I stepped out onto the wheel, a crowd was streaming out of the office and the Mooney was pulling up beside us. The planes could wait. I had sisters to hug. And a niece. It wouldn't do to forget Terri, Tina's stepdaughter and a very neat little person in her own right.

Dan calls it 'the scrum'. He's played rugby and I've watched it on TV and 'scrum' describes our massive group hug pretty well, except instead of cussing and grunting, we're laughing and giggling. The guys attended to tying down the planes while we caught up on physical contact with each other.

Yeah, this bunch knows all about Skype and email and dropboxes and every manner of digital communication, so there's hardly a second when we're more than a connection away from each other. During school, before the graduation marathon last week, we got together almost daily to talk about school and life. Now it is just about life. School will start again next week when Nikki goes to Auburn for interviews. I did that a couple of weeks ago and they pulled me sideways off the ladder to getting my degree. I'm hoping the same thing for my sisters. Nikki's already on their radar, and I sent Mizz Patel at the Auburn School of Engineering a little email advising her that she just MIGHT want to sift through the stack and look at Tina and Susan.

This time we did the car-sharing thing a little different. Instead of separating by couples, all us girls piled into Tina's little Honda. I got in the back seat with Nikki and Terri. Terri and I are the smallest, physically. Mentally, I think we could punch holes in steel. I didn't know I was smart until Dan told me and showed me and led me along. Now I have some idea of intelligence and how it shows up in people.

Okay, so it's the day before Susan's wedding. Susan's pretty. And the day before her wedding? Gosh, she's glowing. Today's the rehearsal and the rehearsal dinner.

No, Susan's not doing the 'Princess for a Day' weddings that you see all over, where there's a ten thousand dollar cake and a ten-thousand dollar dress and eight matching bridesmaids and all that sort of thing.

"Mom and Dad didn't raise me to be a spoiled little twerp," Susan said. "Mom and Dad got married in the preacher's office at a little Baptist church. Since I have all you guys, we can't fit in the office. So we're gonna do the church, but then we'll move to the activity hall."

And dress. I, no, WE went with her, Tina and I and Susan's mom, Mizz Kathy, went to buy it. And it's WHITE!, and that's in the traditional sense of things, too. Susan's an eighteen year old virgin. But the dress? After she gets married in it, it's STILL a nice dress that she might wear again. The rest of the sisters and I will wear nice clothes and Terri's gonna be the flower girl/ringbearer and the whole assemblage is not nearly as important as the two people who will pledge their eternal love in front of God and family and friends.

And then Susan's gonna kill Jason. Tina and Nikki and I all agree. Our sister Susan is a virgin. We believe her when she says that. And that her and her Jason have never gotten past a little enthusiastic kissing and cuddling and then they both stop, but...

"I don't wanna stop sometimes," she said. "But I promised myself and God and my family..."

"You're a good girl, Susan," Tina said. "That's something rare these days."

I couldn't say much on that subject. I was a good girl, too, and my Dan is the only man who's ever done ANYTHING with me and that's the way it should be. But we weren't married. But I knew that when we did it that first time that there was never gonna be another for me. So I guess that qualifies. But still, we had a couple of months where the only 'married' was our vows to each other.

Some of our talks, though, Susan got pretty specific. "I REALLY get all gooshy when I'm with Jason and I sort of think about it. Am I ... Is that normal?"

I kept my mouth shut. I was like a fountain when I touched Dan the first time. Still am. Lucky for me I have a guy who knows how to deal with all that wetness. I think Tina handled that one best. "Everybody's different, Sis," she said. "But I get that way. First time. And still..."

All I really told her was that watching and hearing Mom sort of turned me off to the idea of sex, but Dan turned me back on because it was making love. I can play innocent, you know. AND bashful. Until I get Dan in the right kind of place, where we have some privacy. That might be a bedroom or a secluded glen next to a creek or a back yard behind a privacy fence under a sky full of stars. I just can't see Susan being much different.

But we're all in the car and we have Terri with us so the conversation is pretty well G-rated. I like Terri. It's funny when we have one of those Skype things going with the sisterhood and many times Terri's face pops up alongside Tina's. She usually says 'Hi' and then scoots off, but sometimes she joins in, talking, and sometimes she's just there, listening, so she knows how we are about school and education and love and family.

"I'm part of this now, aren't I?" Terri said in the middle of one of those sessions.

Tina was officially in the 'step-mom' position but that wasn't the way she played it. More like big sister, I think. And when we said 'little sister', Terri straightened us out. "Tina's my step-mom, actually. So that makes me your niece." So okay, I thought 'not something to waste time on." And let it drop.

We pulled up the caravan in front of Susan's house and went in behind Susan's "Mom! Dad! We're here!" and sat down to have coffee or sodas. Terri was sitting beside Tina, doing that polite thing she does, listening, answering when she was addressed. Mizz Kathy said something to Tina about how Terri finished the second grade and her status among the group.

"Mizz Kathy, you an' Mister Mike are awfully close to being my grandparents, you know."

Mizz Kathy almost choked. Mister Mike patted her on the back.

"How'd you come up with that, baby?" Alan asked Terri.

"It's just simple, Dad," she said. "Tina's REALLY my step-mom and Susan 'n' Nikki 'n' Cindy are Tina's sisters, right? So that makes 'em my AUNTS, because your mom's sisters are your aunts. So that makes Mizz Kathy my GREAT aunt. Almost a grandparent, right?

Mizz Kathy started to smile. "I'd planned on waiting a few years before I gained grandma status, baby. But I will happily claim you as my great-niece."

"And it's a whole lot less painful that way," Mister Mike laughed. He looked around the room. I guess some expressions hinted at other surprised people. "So I'm thinking, 'Who explained this to Terri?' and I've a sneaking suspicion that she came up with it on her own."

Chapter 2 »