Around this time my foster son Chris's wife died. He couldn't stand living in the same place that the two of them had spent so much happy time, so he came back to the family for support in his time of grief. I spent much of my time with him, helping him relearn his hometown and eliciting his help as a chemist for the poisons in a mystery I was writing. I had been starting to be bored with my life again, and both the new writing style and the new companion were welcome changes. And Chris had changed enough since he moved away that I could look at him as a man (and quite an attractive one at that, I noticed; no wonder Momma Sara had been so susceptible to his allure, years ago when Jill had been conceived) rather than as a child. one day our eyes met over diagrams of the chemical action of carbon monoxide on the hemoglobin in the blood, and we just knew the two of us were meant to be together. To quote one of our favorite movies, we wanted to "fuck like minks, raise rug rats, and live happily ever after." The first part of that quickly led to an adorable baby girl we named Stephanie. A few months later Bob and Michelle gave birth to another little girl named Laurie. The two of them were so close growing up that we often joked about them sharing a brain between them. The Tumbleweed: An Explanation of a Family Genealogy
Part 2
About this time, Uncle Brian turned up with a new girlfriend. She was much younger than he was, and I wondered what she saw in him at his age. I even went so far as to ask him if he were giving her expensive presents or something like that, but he assured me he wasn't. The two of them went off for an extended vacation in Mexico, and about six months later Brian came back without the girlfriend but with a baby boy. He seemed a little bewildered when I tried to get the story out of him, but he babbled something about little Michael being half alien, because the lady had been unaware that her species and ours could crossbreed. He added something about the baby's gestation being sped up so that the mother could go back to wherever it was she came from. But whether or not all this was true, Brian was depressed at having been left alone, and really didn't have the heart to raise his son. But at first Michael was raised by all the parents in our complex, and then Karl took to visiting more often and eventually took Michael entirely under his wing. They disappeared in Michael's early teens off to wherever it was that Karl was basing his operations at that moment.
Brian also left our home about that time, saying something about becoming a monk. Shortly thereafter, his clone/great-nephew Skippy showed up, with no luggage except a car. It looked like a VW bug at the front and back, but another compartment seemed to have been added in the middle. Skippy entered into some alliance with my son Kris that involved computer programming, and dashing back and forth from the house to the car constantly. I tried spying on them, not very successfully, but finally curiosity got the best of me and I flat-out asked what they were doing. Skippy sat me down in front of the computer and said, "Meet Marvin."
"Hi. You're Suzanne? Kris's mother, Skippy's aunt?" said the computer. I jumped halfway out of my seat. Skippy and Marvin explained that the car was a time machine piloted by Marvin. Apparently Skippy's earlier experiments had been successful. He had bought the car in the future when the style had been fashionable, and done something to it to make it bigger on the inside than the outside, like in the "Doctor Who" TV series (and don't ask me how he did it!) He had come back to visit so he could "get some Champburgers and eggnog and see who's gone crazy," and hopefully to enlist some help for his next endeavor, the establishment of a Mars colony. I thought he was joking, but he said Marvin, connected to the house computer and its modem, had been soliciting on the Internet for people who might be interested, with some success. Though I would be way too scared to go (plus having too many commitments on this planet) the idea fascinated me and I promised to help, maybe even plug the concept in the next story I wrote.
Shortly after this, Stephanie landed in the hospital because of a broken leg received in an accident that Laurie, the only eyewitness, shook her head and described as "falling off the floor." She had to stay in traction for quite a while. One day after visiting her, Chris and I came home to find Karl in our living room, his arm in a sling. He sheepishly admitted that the injury was incurred in the process of blowing up some crack house. Michael had been involved in the same operation, and was in the hospital, the same one as Stephanie, because Karl felt a little safer around here where our family was known and had some clout. Just in case anybody tried to pry into exactly where these injuries had happened.
Both patients were glad to find they had a friend/family member (first cousins once removed or great-great-uncle and niece, depending on whether you traced Stephanie through me or Chris) with whom to spend some time. As much time as Michael was willing to spend, actually, since he was the mobile one (though followed by an IV stand trailing him around). Stephanie became depressed when he was released and returned with Karl to their hideout.
She went from depressed to angry several weeks later when she found out she was pregnant. (Don't ask me how they managed that without rebreaking her leg or anything. I gave her a lecture on how stupid it was to risk her health, but I didn't ask for details of what happened.) She decided to keep the baby, and when he was born she named him Trevor. He was a rambunctious little brat who drove us all up the wall. But somehow Stephanie managed (with the help of everyone else around the complex) to stay in high school while caring for him.
Matt was running for President for the second time, and this time it looked like he might have a serious chance of winning. The country was fed up with twelve years of Republicans in the White House. As a widower whose parents were dead, without any children he could publicly acknowledge, Matt asked all of us to be his public family, since we were the closest relatives he had. He felt that an extended family would help appeal to advocates of "traditional" values, making him look better to conservative voters. He also mentioned that a somewhat well-known science fiction writer in the family might win him some votes (although it ended up making for some interesting editorial cartoons.) He spent vacation time with us and brought whoever had free time along on the campaign trail. The publicity wasn't too bothersome, since there was so large a family that no one got overloaded with interviews.
Laurie had spent a lot of time supporting Stephanie, who was now calming down and planning some project with her grandmother Sara. So during the summer Laurie was the family member with the most free time to act as hostess for Matt's campaign dinners. Her "cousin" (grandfather/great-grandfather, but I doubt if the relationship was ever explained to her) didn't object to having a young, attractive woman around, and her parents thought it was educational, and fine as long as it didn't interfere with her schoolwork in the fall. When Matt was elected, he invited her to become his personal secretary and official hostess. It was a incredible after-school job for a junior in high school, but it wasn't too bad a commute from where we live in Virginia. Matt also spent his vacations at our compound. (It was becoming all one house now; we built connecting rooms between the three houses one the same side of the street, and were debating building a tunnel under or a bridge over the street to the other house.) So we officially became the President's family. We had to make up some public relationships to cover up some of the weirder realities, but nobody ever checked on us. Laurie spent quite a few nights at the White House, but no one minded as long as she didn't miss too much school.
Matt told me later how his affair with Laurie started. At first she only spent the night in the White House for convenience, but the two of them had done a lot of talking when they were alone with each other. Laurie had been dating someone from her high school, and though it had not been incredibly serious, it was still a blow to her when he decided to break it off. She had started to cry while Matt was dictating a speech to her. He suggested they knock off work for the evening and go play some cards in the Lincoln bedroom, Matt's favorite place to relax. After the game, he gave her a hug to comfort her, and she broke down in tears again. He let her lean against him while he tried to comfort her. And then, "entirely out of habit," he claims, he started to unbutton the back of her dress. I'm surprised she didn't protest when she realized what he was doing, but apparently not. After that start, their assignations became a part of the routine.
Stephanie was involving herself in volunteer work after school; she worked with other unwed mothers and wrote to people in prison. Her favorite pen-pal was named Neil and they wrote volumes to each other. I quizzed her about him, wanting to make sure my daughter wasn't getting involved with some psychopath. It turned out that he was only in prison for breaking the new software piracy laws, so I raised no objection. He seemed like a very nice young man when he got out a few months later and I met him; he was going to take college classes until his cellmate Cardy got out and then the two of them were going to go into business together. Neil and Stephanie celebrated her 18th birthday by spending the weekend in a little cabin in the mountains. Stephanie seemed a bit shaken when they came back, but she recovered from her surprise in a few days and seemed fine and happy with Neil.
The two girls graduated from high school and decided to go to college in Washington, D.C. so that Laurie could keep her job. Their decision became final when Matt offered Neil a job working for his administration. The two girls roomed together on campus and spent the weekends with their respective males, and all seemed well. But I was a little suspicious, because I remembered Matt's earlier exploits with women (and Neil got along with him far too well not to be suspected by association); who knew what either of them was doing behind our girls' backs?
It was a year and a half since the election when the rumors started. A lot of scandal sheets printed headlines like "President's affair with teen shocks Washington." Then the New York Times suddenly printed a column on it, bylined "Shira Khish." I called my aunt up and asked just what the hell she thought she was doing?
"Matt promised me an interview when I saw him at the charity ball a few weeks ago. I showed up for it and he didn't. I asked the Secret Service guy where he might be, and he said, "oh, he's probably off bangin' his secretary." I wasn't going to be stood up like that, so I was going to really slam his administration in my column. Then I remembered who his secretary was. So I snooped around, interviewed some of the White House staff and some of the people at Laurie's dorm. I got revenge for being denied my exclusive!"
Once it was out in Shira's article, many other journalists decided to look into this idea that the President of the United States had been having an affair for nearly two years with this 17-year-old girl (actually she turned 18 right after Shira's article came out) who was somehow related to him (no one ever got straight exactly how.) And they found a lot of evidence. Apparently the two had rarely bothered to be circumspect, since it hadn't seemed to matter when Laurie appeared to be in her twenties. But when a lot of papers started printing it, Matt called a press conference to deny everything. He might have; gotten away with it, too, if it hadn't been for one slight snag. Stephanie told me that Laurie had missed two periods before she became desperate enough to tell either Matt or her parents. Matt stayed at our house and comforted her and tried to explain to Bob and Michelle why the man we trusted to run the country had let this happen to their daughter.
He left on Monday morning but instead of going back to the White House, he went to the airport and took an unscheduled trip to Rio de Janeiro. He told his Secret Service to call the Vice-President as soon as the plane took off and say that Matt had resigned. The furor as soon as the news became public was unimaginable. Laurie came home to live with us, while Stephanie and Trevor hid out in Neil's apartment so she could keep going to classes, but they visited us frequently.
We tried to help Laurie as much as we could through her pregnancy and the emotional stress of her situation. She was very depressed, and showed some strange symptoms, almost a kind of regression. She filled her room with stuffed animals, children's books, and posters for movies, but sometimes she would sit hunched over the computer screen playing a game called "Lemmings." I never did get the hang of the rules, but it seemed to involve blowing up all the lemmings before they could walk off the cliff. I was a little worried about the aggression she only let out on the computer, and tried to talk to her parents about perhaps one of those counseling programs for unwed mothers, to help them deal with being abandoned by the father. But they said that it would be too public and they didn't want Laurie to be besieged by the press again. I could see their point; we had to shut the houses up like a fortress when the news first hit.
For a while we were preoccupied with little Jay. Then one day Laurie received a letter with no return address, but a postmark from Rio de Janeiro. I brought it to her and stayed to coo over the baby. I looked up when I heard her yell, "The nerve of him!"
She shoved the letter into my hand and said "Read this. Can you believe him? Ooh!" She almost growled and stomped out of the room.
There was an address at the bottom, and the body of the letter read: "Dear Laurie, Rio is gorgeous. I bought a nice big house, full of servants at my beck and call. Nobody even cares that I'm probably wanted up there. Come visit for spring break if you want. Love, Matt. P.S. How's the kid?"
I think Laurie originally just wanted to tell Matt off when she first wrote him back. But she got such an apologetic letter in response (not an ounce of it real, if I know Matt) that she started to warm to him again. So they started corresponding. Matt also wrote a few letters to me, which is how I found about all these things that weren't really my business. Matt always liked bragging.
Stephanie became pregnant about this time, so it was Laurie's turn again to throw baby showers and such. Laurie was in town a lot anyway, since she went back to school after Jay was born, so visits to Neil and Steph's apartment were no problem. Both girls needed the company; taking care of babies can make you long for adult conversation.
One weekend in the eighth month of her pregnancy, Stephanie decided to attend some weekend nutrition camp for pregnant women. Laurie had become fairly close friends with Neil while she and Stephanie had been living together, so she went over that Friday night to find something to do that evening. What ended up happening was certainly not what the two had intended. But I suppose it had been a long time for Laurie, since Matt left, and a while for Neil, since Stephanie was getting big enough where sex was inconvenient. So they ended up in bed together.
Both of them felt incredibly guilty about what had happened, and confessed to Stephanie shortly after she got back. I suppose they were hoping for forgiveness to ease their guilt, but Stephanie wasn't about to make it that easy. She was pissed off that her longtime lover and her best friend had betrayed her in such a way. She and Trevor moved back into our house, and when Charlie was born a few weeks later, Neil's name went on the birth certificate but not on the list of people to call about the birth. The estrangement saddened me, but all I could do was secretly call Neil, tell him that his child had been born, and promise that the next time Stephanie let me babysit I would give him a chance to meet the baby.
Karl came to visit again (and conspire with Neil about revenge on the politicians who drove Matt to resign, but no one saw fit to mention that to Laurie or Stephanie) when Charlie was six weeks old. Stephanie was tired enough of being stuck in the house caring for the kids that she was very eager to accompany Karl on his jaunts in search of entertainment. Apparently the one disadvantage of his island hideaway was that it was boring.
We had all known Karl was only planning to stay three months; he said he couldn't leave the island in Mike's charge any longer. Shortly before his departure date, it became obvious that he and Stephanie had fought. One day when I found her crying in her room, I finally asked my daughter what was wrong.
"I'm pregnant again and it's Karl's and he doesn't even care!" she bawled. "Are they all like this, Mom? Do they all just enjoy themselves for a while and leave?"
I sighed. "Not all of them, honey. There are men like your father, who will stay with a woman through thick and thin. But Mike and Karl are both the type who value their silly political games more than any person."
"What about Neil? He did the same thing, without even that much reason!"
I tried to convince her that one night's affair was not the same as walking out on her forever, that Neil still loved her and cared about he child he fathered. Gradually she quit raising objections. I asked her if her affair with Karl had changed her feelings for Neil and she said no, it had mostly happened because he was there and willing while she was alone. I told her Neil and Laurie had probably done it for the same reasons. She decided to go apologize to Laurie that minute. While she was across the street, I called Neil and asked him to call back that evening, since I wasn't sure if Stephanie would give in enough to call him first. He called, and the two had a long discussion, and a few days later, she and the boys moved back in with Neil.
It was good that Stephanie had some extra support, because she ended up deciding to give Karl's child up for adoption. It was difficult to do, but she and Neil decided it was best, and I silently agreed. They didn't need a reminder of that unpleasant period in their lives.
Less than a month after the reconciliation, Laurie decided she was tired of her life. Matt had paid her handsomely as his secretary, and sent money from his Swiss account for child support, so she decided to use some of the accumulated money in her bank account and make him a surprise visit. She took a flight to Brazil, took a cab to Matt's mansion, and pushed her way past the protesting butler to find her lover for their long-awaited reunion. She surprised him, all right--in bed cuddled up to a Brazilian woman. Matt wrote me that she pulled the woman out of the bed, and pushed her out the screened patio door with enough force to tear out that panel of screening. Then she pointed at Matt, so much in shock that he hadn't bothered to pull the covers back over himself, and said, "If you value those, you will learn to control them." (I always said Laurie had a lot of aggression bottled up inside.) But apparently Matt didn't mind being under her thumb; the two of them lived happily ever after down in South America. They sent me a birth announcement for Chris, their little boy, and I counted backwards and decided he couldn't possibly be Matt's son and might even be Neil's, but I never mentioned that to my daughter.
After Laurie was safely away from Neil, he and Stephanie settled down and he went into business with Cardy, his ex-cellmate. Cardy and his wife Angela became frequent visitors at our complex, and eventually their baby Dameion joined the horde crawling around the (many years child-proofed) living room.
The school system kept raising the mandatory retirement age because of longer lifespans and to combat the teacher shortage, but finally Crystal reached the cutoff. But she didn't want to sit around the house for the rest of her life expectancy, so she started searching the classified ads for another job. In the local entertainment paper, she found one that sounded good--maybe. None of us could quite figure out what the position would require. The ad said: "Manager needed. La Gata Encantada," and an address. We found another ad for customers of the place, but it gave just as little information. It said: "It's OK to be different. It's OK to feel better. Therapy without fear of rejection or embarrassment. Acceptance of variation in human expression. La Gata Encantada," and a phone number. My sister decided to check out the job anyway.
Skippy drove Crystal to the address from the ad, because she wanted moral support from her son to get her to face the interview. On the way there, she looked out of the window in dismay as they passed into an unfamiliar section of town. The buildings needed painting, people in sloppy clothes stood on the sidewalk with their hands in their pockets, and many of the handmade signs for grocery and liquor stores were misspelled.
It got slightly better by the time Skippy turned into the small parking lot of a green building. A sign above the door proclaimed that they had indeed found "La Gata Encantada." Crystal was getting less enthusiastic by the minute, but she still wanted to check out the job possibility. So Skippy locked up the car and they went inside.
The bell over the door rang as they came through, and a woman came out to the counter. Crystal looked around at the dim lobby, mostly decorated in shades of dark red, and hesitantly approached the front desk and said, "I've come to inquire about the manager's job."
A smile broke out on the woman's face. "Really?! Well, I guess you need to fill out some paperwork, but it's only a formality. If you want the job, it's yours. I'm no good at running things; this place is a worse mess than it was when the last manager left."
I'm sure Crystal hated to dampen the woman's happiness, but she had to know. "Um, actually I wanted a little more formation about the job first. What exactly is this place?"
"Well, it's an escort service and massage parlor for women customers," replied the desk clerk reluctantly.
Even Crystal could not fail to mistake the real meaning of that description. "You're trying to hire a pimp!" she said, outraged.
"Actually, I think 'madam' would be the applicable term in this case," Skippy murmured. "Why not, Mom? The pay is probably good."
Crystal turned around to reprove her son. "Do you think I'd take a horrible job like this?"
Skippy shrugged. "Why not? Are you afraid? Don't think you could handle it?"
"I could so handle it!" Crystal was getting even angrier. she turned to the baffled desk clerk. "Where do I sign?"
"Are you sure, Ma'am?" was the hesitant reply as the woman dug underneath the desk to collect some papers.
"Of course I'm sure!" Crystal grabbed a pen lying on the counter. "And I'll do the best of anyone you've ever had!"
Surprisingly, Crystal lived up to that prediction. Even though when she first calmed down she regretted letting Skippy goad her into taking the job, she felt too guilty to quit, especially since the temporary manager had been so relieved to be out of the job. (Her name was Geraldine and she was receptionist at a legal enterprise owned by the same person; we saw a lot of her because she delivered messages to Crystal from their boss, who Crystal never met in person.)
I drove her to work often enough that I got to know the boys who worked there. Marcus was my favorite; he worked at the house for money to buy LSD and told me charming stories about all his trips. I gave him old earrings to put in his pierced nose and used his descriptions in my stories.
Crystal really spruced up the place; she got the owner to pay for a decorator. This was a recent college grad named Sharit, whose personality was so similar to Crystal's that they became fast friends. After finishing with the job of decorating the place in subdued shades of green and tan, Sharit even helped in Crystal's next marketing ploy, free cookies and milk for all patrons. I don't know why that worked, but it did. "It just makes it seem more like home," was my sister's explanation.
In other family news, Shira was embarking on a new career. Now as famous as Woodward and Bernstein in their own day (they broke the Watergate scandal, for any young'uns who fell asleep in history class) she used her big name as security to try her luck at her other love, stand-up comedy. Chris and I saw her perform when we were in New York for the 225th World Science Fiction Convention, and she was pretty good. We went backstage to congratulate her, and to arrange a lunch date for her and Chris. He was dutifully accompanying me on the trip, but he preferred science to science fiction and the con bored him. He spent a lot of time with her during the two remaining days we were there. Too much, as it turned out. After an angry phone call from her two months later, Chris wretchedly confessed that they had slept together, and now it appeared she was pregnant. I wasn't too angry with him for cheating on me; I don't expect people to be particularly faithful (look at the records of the people around me!) but I was annoyed that he hadn't thought of birth control. That mistake has been made often enough around here (as in his own case when Jill was conceived) that you think he would have learned from it.
Stephanie and Momma Sara had been planning something together for eons, and I never thought they would get around to doing it, whatever it was. But when Neil told Stephanie he wanted to go on a little vacation by himself, the two women wondered what was up. About that time, the literary agent I share with Karl gossiped to me that my cousin was coming to this country and stopping by for a chat about some articles for Soldier of Fortune magazine. I mentioned this to my mother and she got a strange, plotting look on her face, and shortly thereafter I saw her whispering to my daughter. I was pissed at being left out, and being incurably nosy (if you hadn't figured that out by this time!) I did my best to listen in. All I picked up was something about following Neil. I knew Momma could have heard the gossip that Karl, Michael, and Neil were planning some revenge on Matt's political enemies, but what business was that of anyone else's?
I suppose Stephanie found Neil's plane tickets or something, because they knew where he was going. I found out later that Momma and Steph ran ads in various mercenary magazines, promising a reward for the kidnapping and delivery to them of Karl and Michael. Actually this turned out to be the salvation of all three men, because the people who kidnapped them broke them out of a police wagon after they had been taken in for blowing up the Ronald Reagan Public Library. I don't know how they got caught (you'd think at least the two professional terrorists would have enough practice to avoid these things!) but I'm sure they never expected to be broken out and then delivered to two pissed-off women.
Finally I was let in on the secret at this point because my dear relatives needed help with some of the equipment. I don't know what Stephanie did to Neil; that was apparently just between the two of them. But as the fathers of two of Stephanie's kids and two or three of Crystal's (I wouldn't count Skippy, knowing his history, but Momma probably did) Michael and Karl had earned some enmity.
The family has owned a vacation house in Hilton Head, South Carolina, for years, and Momma Sara and Stephanie took it over for a while. Since the advent of SenseSurround movies (Yes, I know a lot of you youngsters can't imagine the days when you just watched the picture on a screen, but perceiving a movie as if you were there, in all five senses, was new and scary for people of even a few generations later than mine) Disney had redone a lot of its old animated classics, including several that Karl had hated as a child. And of course, Disney has never stopped producing children's movies that verge on the sappy. The three of us tinkered with the movie player, dismantled the control that shuts the movie off if it detects great emotional distress from the viewer and rigged fastenings so that the input headpiece (sort of a combination of headphones and sunglasses) could not be removed without triggering an alarm (not that it mattered since we had our two viewers tied to the chairs anyway). And once we made Karl and Michael our captive audience, we programmed the player to show all the Disney movies it had stored, in one long sequence.
From a scientific point of view, it was an interesting experiment. Since the headset, in addition to putting the energy waves out that form the movie, monitors the viewer's brainwaves to know when to turn off, I had the computer save those files. No one I knew of had ever studied subjects reactions to being forced to feel movies, so it was really interesting to see, for example, how the sensation of being underwater during The Little Mermaid affects a subject who is actively fighting the illusion and the mood of the movie.
I won't go into the details of the whole several days the five of us spent shut up in the vacation house, but by the end Michael and Karl were ready to promise not to trifle with the family's women ever again. Momma and Stephanie were very pleased with the results of their little project. We let them go and went home, probably more ready to deal with everyday life with our respective males because of this chance to get our aggressions out. Presumably the two of them immediately fled the country; after all, they were still wanted for the destruction of the library.
My other daughter Lisa had finally settled down, with a John Stanley, the grandson of one of her favorite rock stars from adolescence and himself a musician. They had a little boy after living together about ten years and named him Rob. That was fine by me; my last grandchild was in high school and a little too old to pamper. Charlie was a nice young man with a girlfriend, Maria, while Trevor was off at college, dodging his dormmates' retaliations for the practical jokes he played on them. He happened to be home for vacation once when Uncle Brian, now Father Brian, visited. Brian had risen fast when he joined the Church. In the thirty years since he first entered seminary, he had managed to become Archbishop of Miami. We didn't see much of him now that he lived in Florida, and this was actually the first vacation he'd taken in nearly ten years. It was very unfortunate that his visit coincided with Trevor's vacation, because my grandson was quite anxious to show off all the joke ideas he'd acquired at college to his brother and the other young people around.
All the adults kept reprimanding Trevor for leaving foul-smelling messes in the sink, pools of clear dishwashing liquid on lawn chairs, and other jokes. But the last straw was when, in the middle of the night, he went through all the bathrooms in the three houses on the west side of the street, locking the doors from the inside and crawling out through the windows. When Father Brian found out who had made him run in a bathrobe across an open walkway above the street to get to an unlocked bathroom, he truly gave Trevor hell. Stephanie had no objections to him chewing out her son, who had long since ceased listening to his mother. Brian was so pissed off that he ended his tirade by sharing his finger in Trevor's face and saying, "As an archbishop of the Catholic Church, I hereby excommunicate you!"
I don't think Trevor felt the impact of that pronouncement as Brian intended him to. Technically Trevor was Catholic, since Stephanie had followed Chris's and my tradition of taking the children to church at least while they were young. And when our family members have bothered to attend church, it has always been Roman Catholic. But Trevor had not practiced in years. Nevertheless Brian felt that he had meted out a proper punishment.
Shortly after this Charlie announced that he and his longtime sweetheart Maria were expecting a child. The birth of their Mike started things off. Over the next two years Dameion married a girl named Melanie and had two girls, Walita and Maralijn, Matt wrote me that his son Jay had married the American ambassador's daughter Amy and that they had had a little boy Salvatore, and Trevor got his girlfriend Kim pregnant, which turned out to be a girl they named Lucie.
The next fifteen years were an oddly quiet time for the family. About the only thing I can think of that happened is that my niece Joey left the convent she had been in for most of her life. But that wasn't because of any soap-opera style reason, just that she was tired of it. Even the Catholic Church no longer expects people to dedicate a lifetime to obedience, chastity and poverty, now that a lifetime can measure hundreds of years. A lot has changed in society since I was born, though you probably wouldn't know it from this narrative.
Trevor took his daughter Lucie to visit Matt and Laurie in South America, and on a little afternoon jaunt across the border into Uruguay he offended someone important and got thrown into jail. It was no big deal because Karl and Michael were in town at the same time (I think this was supposed to be some good ol' boys get-together) and broke him out the next day. They didn't even tell those of us in the US until it was all over. I only mention it because that was when Karl met Lucie. She was about sixteen at the time, and very impressed with the fast work in rescuing her father. So she asked if she could join their band of vigilantes and learn to do the same sort of thing. I don't know how willing the co-heads of the group were at first to accept a teenage girl as a trainee, but eventually they (and her father) capitulated to her stubbornness. I don't know if Karl's attraction to her had anything to do with it, or if that only came out later; the two of them didn't become an official couple until nearly a year later. Eventually they had a little girl, Tiffany. I always felt a little sorry for my great-great-granddaughter; her parents loved each other and her, but for her own safety they had to leave her behind at headquarters a lot while they were off on operations. She grew up to be a withdrawn little girl, unlike the other children that were born to the family within those few years. (Rob married Maralijn, Cardy's granddaughter, and they had a boy named Dave and a girl, Roberta. Charlie and Maria's Mike had a son named Curtis with his girlfriend Debbie.) Tiffany's parents attempted to train her to follow their vocation, but she wasn't interested. She came back to the mainland from the island headquarters and stayed with us while she attended college.
I don't know exactly what happened; Charlie would never quite tell us. But apparently Tiffany had been complaining about her parents and her life to her great-uncle/great-nephew, who was the only person around at the time, and then she had decided he was quite attractive. Charlie had protested, being married as well as old enough to be her grandfather, and Tiffany had not liked being rebuffed. Her parents had trained her well, though I doubt if they had intended for her to use her skills at overpowering someone to tie down a relative to the bed and rape him.
When we found out about this, and then that Tiffany was pregnant, Maria wanted to call the police on her, but the rest of the family overpowered that suggestion and had her committed instead. The baby was born while Tiffany was still in the hospital, and the mother wanted to name the baby after the child's grandmother. But due to the horrendous educational standards in this country nowadays, and a nearly illiterate clerk, the child's name was entered on the birth certificate as Loosie rather than Lucie. We raised the child in our compound, as usual when a parent is not willing or able, and although she got teased about her name as she grew older, Loosie was a perfectly normal child. About the same time a little boy, Matt, was born to Dave and his girlfriend Rene.
One day when Loosie was about thirteen, Stephanie got a phone call. The man said he was trying to find his mother. Was she Stephanie R. Morr, who had given up a child for adoption about seventy-three years ago?
I think my daughter nearly fainted. But she told him that she was that same woman, and he said he was that son. His name was Foul Neosaabi (that wasn't the name his adoptive parents had given him; he had adopted it when he had entered a Buddhist monastery in California). He wanted to come and visit us.
One more visitor is never anything big for us, and Stephanie was sort of curious about the son she had never seen. It was long enough ago that Neil would probably not be offended by the reminder of Stephanie and Karl's affair. She told him certainly, gave him the address, even offered to pick him up from the airport if he were flying in. tie respectfully declined, saying that he was already in the area.
We first saw him the next day. Foul was a soft-spoken man, very nice to everyone who had gathered to welcome the lost sheep. He stayed with us for weeks and got acquainted with everyone and the twisted relationships between them. I even showed him my attempts at diagramming the family, and he just looked at the page and said in awe, "It's not just a family tree, it's a tumbleweed!"
We asked Foul about his life but he was very reluctant to talk about most of it. He told us all about the monastery where he had acquired his name, but never about his career beforehand or his childhood. Stephanie was especially concerned about this omission; she felt guilty for giving him up to strangers. When she asked him flat out, though, all he would say was that his childhood had been pleasant but that his adoptive parents were dead now.
Foul went off to start a gerbil-breeding farm, but he came and visited us quite regularly for the next few years. I was not surprised when Loosie, now aged seventeen, decided to go back with him. Their years of romance had not been quite so clandestine as they thought, but then I'm a busybody and nobody else tries to gather as much gossip as I do. Some family members objected, considering all the ancestors that Foul and Loosie have in common, but I thought it was no worse that half the things that have gone on in this family. Anyway, it was soon overshadowed by a much closer relationship, even before Foul and Loosie had their little boy Jim.
My great-grandson Matt was about to go off to college when he asked his aunt Roberta to come and live with him. She said yes, to the surprise and disgust of many of the people who had never puzzled out the genealogy of many other relationships I could point out. Despite the gossip, they stayed together for quite a while and had a son named Phil. Oh, well. Phil was the last kid born in the family, and he's not even weaned yet. We'll see what's happened by the next time I update this story, but I don't feel like speculating. I've left the fates of a lot of people out, just because nothing interesting has happened to them; all this soap-opera stuff is much more fun to write. And since nobody in our family has died of natural causes in over a hundred years, I expect to live a great while longer than my current 29 decades. I'm sure I'll get a chance to update the chronicle soon enough.