1635:The Dreeson Incident

Chapter 66

Grantville

Missy lay in Ron's arms, shuddering, her face down on his shoulder. "What in hell was that?"

Ron stroked her hair, then started rubbing the back of her neck. "You came. All the way. Not because we were doing it, or even anywhere close. Not even heavy petting. Not even really making out. Just lying here with all our clothes on the way we always do-well, mostly do, kissing and hugging, and wanting. Damn it, Missy. We're so ready for prime time that it isn't even funny any more."

She left her face right where it was and nodded.

He slipped his hand between her sweater and her blouse. His knee came up between her legs. Then he realized something.

"Where's the accessory? Want to get it?"

"It's prom night. I loaned it to Gertrude, just in case."

He thought about that a minute. "I take it that's not an open invitation to further advances. 'Greater love hath no woman' than to take a risk for the sake of her 'kid sister.' Because she loves her."

"What?"

"After I gave it to Gertrude, I went and saw Kortney. And she. She said to tell you."

Missy stopped.

"Tell me what, Miss Missy?"

She had her face buried all the way in his sweater. He pushed her chin up.

"That it's the biggest sponge she could squeeze in the way things are so you'll have to be careful not to poke it through the cervix because they're a pain to get out all in one piece and don't do any good anyhow unless they stay on this side. And I'm to come back and get a bigger one next week, if… if it turns out not to be a one time thing."

Her face went right back down into his sweater. What little skin he could see around the edges of her hair was beet red.

Any guy who would hang around a girl for six months waiting for her to agree to do it and only want to do it once would have to be some kind of pathological… Normal guys didn't wait that long in hopes of a one night stand. But he'd never exactly said anything about long-term. Long range. Whatever. They'd talked about everything else on earth, but when it came to sex, all they'd ever said was, "No way, not now." And it was Missy who kept saying that.

Even here in Grantville, right in the high school, there had been a couple of guys who did whatever it took to score and then dropped the girl the minute she was on their card.

There was something skeptical that was part of the basic Missy. She never made assumptions. She didn't take anything for granted. "No risks you don't want" from him didn't quite cover the case of risks she did want.

The day her mind decided to agree with her instincts, she had gone to see Kortney, who could and did ask the most embarrassing questions imaginable. Then she had come out to Lothlorien this evening and walked right into his arms.

"You'd better plan on going back. And getting a large-sized bottle of that solution they dunk the sponges in."

He stroked her spine for a while. The little bit of her face he could see was returning to its usual color. While he thought. Once she decided, she had walked right into his arms. Without a word of commitment from him. Even though the last thing in the world she wanted to do was have a baby. Even though she knew how iffy anything Kortney could give her was. Even though she had thought about the possibility that it might be a "one time thing" for him.

"Miss Jenkins, would you do me the honor of bestowing your hand upon me in matrimony? And all that?" The fancy words were good. If she wasn't at all interested, they could pretend it had been another bit of joking and go on from there.

"But…"

Joking wasn't good enough. "I mean it, Missy. Let's clear things up before we get ourselves into a situation where we feel like we have to, and it comes up as a grudge in every fight we have for the next fifty years."

"I want to be a librarian, not…"

"Be one."

"If we get married. If we don't have to stop and think about what we're doing in advance every single time, because it will be so convenient…"

He tilted her chin up again. "Is your Aunt Clara going to be a Little Miss Perfect Housewife?"

"No. She's going back to work after six weeks off."

"Think about it. Why? How?"

"Why? Because she wants to. How? Because with Uncle Wes and her both working for the consular service, she can afford a nursery maid to do the scut stuff and handle the baby while she has meetings and things at work. And another maid to keep the house, so supper's ready when they get back home. And they send the laundry and stuff to MaidenFresh." She pulled herself up, sat back, and grinned. "Clara really isn't into housework. She knows how to do it, cook and bake and stuff, and she's run a house before, but she would a lot rather be doing something else."

"So pull your mind set out of up-time middle class. Dad used to talk about this, sometimes. What happened in the nineteenth century was that there was this push on for everyone to follow bourgeois values. But most families didn't have the money to hire the staff that it required back then when modern appliances weren't around, so for most families, the mom turned into the maid and the nursemaid, too. Doing scut work and changing diapers all day and then expected to dress nice and make like the lady of the house in the evening so her husband wouldn't notice that her hands were all rough and chapped from scouring pots."

"I never thought of it that way."

"Bourgeois hypocrisy, Dad used to call it. 'Boor-jwah!' But there's no reason for you to, Missy, any more than Clara does. Get real. As weird as it still seems to me-my Dad, too, even more-the fact remains that in the here-and-now the once scruffy and disreputable hippie Stones are fast becoming one of the richest families in Europe. Outside of royalty, for sure. If there's any couple our age in Grantville who'll be able to afford all the household help they'll ever need, it's us. And we don't need to do the upstairs/downstairs thing, either. Just hire employees at home, like we hire the people at the plant."

He abandoned the fancy words. "Marry me, Melissa Marie Jenkins. No matter how unlikely it seems, we'll make a good team."

Missy wrapped her arms around her knees and looked down at him. "We'll make a good team" wasn't exactly, "You are the light of my heart and the love of my life," she thought. But she wasn't going to get flowery declarations from Ron. No lacy valentines. No poems. Probably not chocolates, either. If there ever were sweet, smooth milk chocolates again. No bouquets on anniversaries. No… flimflam, except as an occasional joke. No "I adore you and will until my last breath."

But she'd never said those things to him, either. He wouldn't know what to do with them if she did.

"Mom and Dad separated for a couple of years, did you know? She caught him running around with another woman. Anne was already away at nursing school. Chip lived with Grandma Jenkins and I stayed with Mom. Later on, Mom forgave him and took him back."

Ron shook his head. "I guess we weren't that close to most of the people in Grantville back then. I never heard about that."

"They didn't explain any of it to me when it was going on. I found out the reason a couple of years after they got back together. At a picnic out at Pop's. I was being a 'little pitcher with big ears,' eavesdropping on Nani while she sniped at Gran about Dad."

He looked up. Missy's cheek had marks from the texture of his sweater. Her gray eyes were bleak. She had pulled her hair back that morning, fastening it in a twist. She was magnificent. He wondered how she had ever come close to disguising herself as a cheerleading ditz. Maybe it had been the uniform.

"I wouldn't forgive you and take you back if you did that," she said quietly. "I would kill you, instead. I would find the heaviest long-handled cast iron skillet in our house. I would take it in a two-handed grip and bring it down on your skull as hard as I could swing it. Then I would sit there and howl over your corpse until I died of grief."

Ron reached up and took one of her hands.

"I don't remember ever seeing my mother. She took off when I was too little. Here's my own promise, separate from anything your family's ministers at First Methodist will ask me to say. I won't run around on you, if you say yes. Never, ever. I won't run off from you, the way Nathan did from Chandra without telling her what was going on. If I do have to go somewhere without you, you'll know why or I won't be going. No matter what."

In the back of her mind a little voice wailed for the last time. I soooo did not want this complication right now.

Missy took his other hand. "Done."

Ron pulled her down against him again. "It's going to be okay, Missy. Really it is. Honest."

Chad could not entirely believe that he had just received a formal request for his daughter's hand in marriage.

Accompanied, reasonably enough, by a separately delivered warning from the daughter in question that she and Ron would be getting married with or without her family's approval, even though they would rather have it. Nope, can't begin to imagine where she gets it.

Not to mention that he was examining a set of tax returns. Chad shuffled the papers in his hands. Apparently growing up on a hippie commune made Ron less sensitive than ordinary Grantvillers when it came to talking about practical things. The kid was almost down-time that way. And even though the rumor that Tom Stone refused to make a profit on the pharmaceuticals turned out to be correct, he was at least enough of a businessman to break even on them. But it hardly mattered, since the profits from the dye-making business were well-nigh astronomical and the business was expanding explosively.

Interestingly, the "improvident hippie" Stones were plowing most of the profits right back into the business. Their own income was quite modest, given what it could have been. Still, Ron received a reasonable salary for the work he was doing. It was a lot of work, too, even aside from setting up the new subsidiary with Bill Hudson. The dye works. Stone had incorporated, with his sons as minority shareholders. While the Venice-based enterprises…

Ron and Missy would not be suffering deprivation, to put it mildly.

Ron had the makings of a very good businessman, actually. Perhaps because money as such really didn't mean much to him, he had the knack of seeing ways to make it grow. He also had ties to the Committees of Correspondence, not to mention Don Francisco. Those would gave him entree into a lot of other things.

Debbie would be okay with it, he thought. At least not surprised, by now. Willie Ray would be okay, too. He'd gotten to know Tom Stone pretty well through the Grange activities since the Ring of Fire. Chip wouldn't really care. He and Ron had the CoC in common and he seemed to get along well with Gerry. That left…

Vera and his own mother.

He couldn't do a thing about Vera. Missy had made her primary allegiance pretty clear at Easter already. For that matter, the first appearance of Ron on the Jenkins family's horizon was Missy's spirited defense of him against Vera, way last fall. It might be that Vera had finally met her match. Which would be hard on Debbie, if neither of them backed down. Let Willie Ray handle it.

He looked back down at the tax returns, folded them up, and handed them back to Ron.

"Should we expect to be grandparents?"

Ron studied the ornate wallpaper border that someone had applied all the way around the room, about a foot below where the walls met the ceiling. "Not any time in the next few months, if that's what you're asking."

Chad nodded.

"We'd actually rather put that off till after Missy finishes her library training, if we can. Even though Eleanor Maria is cuter than either of us had ever really thought a kid might be. But the best thing anyone can say about down-time birth control is that it's fallible. That's one reason why we thought we'd get married. So if Missy does get pregnant one of these days, all we'll have to cope with is a baby instead of a crisis. If you know what I mean."

"I'm a little surprised that the formality of a marriage means that much to you."

"To me?" Ron raised his eyebrows in surprise. "It doesn't, really. I'd be perfectly happy to go on from here with the promises we've made each other already. But I'm not the only person involved and you and your wife brought Missy up differently."

"Give me a week, will you?" Chad asked. "Before you make it public? To bring my mom around."

That sounded like a paternal blessing to Ron. At least, closer to one than he had been expecting.

He thought of his few meetings with Eleanor Jenkins since the dinner last Thanksgiving. She hadn't been really thrilled when Wes and Clara had invited Missy and him to be Eleanor Maria's godparents.

She particularly had not been thrilled when Gerry entertained the christening party with a description of the day that Magda, finding out that her stepsons had never been baptized, had taken care of the matter. In the Lothlorien Farbenwerke greenhouse. With a garden hose. On the grounds that, after all, only water and the Word were necessary.

Clara had thought it was hilarious. Clara and Magda would get along great if Dad and Magda ever got back from Italy. They had a lot in common.

If Missy's dad could bring the old lady around in a week, then he had to be as good a salesman as he claimed. Though even Chad hadn't said anything about bringing Vera Hudson around.

"Ah," he said. "Um. The things that Missy's grandma was saying last Thanksgiving. All that stuff about handing china down in the family for generations and such."

Chad nodded.

"I'm not going to lie to you. I don't have that. We have the best dad any boys could ask for, but growing up on a commune, you don't have that generation to generation stuff."

"People have wondered, sometimes."

"Dad's always made things plain to us. He's Frank's father, biologically. He's not Gerry's, no way. For me, it's sort of iffy. There was opportunity and our blood types don't rule out that he's my father, but we don't know for sure. Nothing ever made it important to find out, up-time. It's never made any difference to him. He's always been there for all of us when we needed him, and that's enough."

"That pot-growing hippie in our family!" Eleanor Jenkins said. For about the tenth time.

Chad got up and wandered over to the wall with the family photos, standing with his hands folded behind his back. "Tom Stone is not a hippie anymore, Mom. Not a poor one, at least. He's made a lot of money. Legally. In fact, today he's easily the richest man in Grantville or anywhere nearby. And I've worked a couple of deals with his father-in-law. No flies on him or his daughter."

He looked at the picture of his grandfather Newton. "It's not like Ron is in a hillbilly band, traveling cross-country in a bus. I wonder what Great-grandma Williams said when Grandma told her who she wanted to get married to."

"That was different," his mother said primly, her arms folded across her slim chest. "Besides, it's pretty obvious that Ron, or young Gerry at least, isn't…"

"Hold it right there, Mom," Chad interrupted, turning towards her. "What Tom Stone has been for those boys ought to be enough for us too, I think. There when they needed him. That's exactly what Dad always was for Wes and me, and you told me once that he was the finest man on earth. Emphasized it with a slap, as I recall. I figure you had reason to say that. Right?"

Chad pinned his mother with his eyes, glaring at her until at last she turned her head away. "I'm not asking you to clasp Ron Stone to your bosom. Just don't make Missy miserable. She loves you."

She started to shake her head.

"In the Bible, Mom. About casting the first stone. I'm not going to cast it. I know I haven't been perfect. I let you get away with bossing us around a lot because it's easier and most of the time I don't give a damn either way. But not this time and if you can't see your way clear to accepting Ron and his family, you're going to be seeing a lot less of the rest of us.

"Sure, having china being handed down through the generations is nice. So is having a lot of family photographs. But it's not worth spit if you're a miserable human being. I don't care if Tom Stone doesn't have a plate or bowl older than a week. He's brought up three good sons, Mom, no matter else he's done. Three decent, honorable, boys. Even if only one of them was 'his' son, the way some people might see it. That was what Ron said to me. 'He's always been there for all of us when we needed him, and that's enough.' There's stuff in the Bible about pride going before a fall. Get over it."

Eleanor sat silently in her chair. Then she raised her head and in a calm, clear voice said, "You may as well get the quote right. It's from Proverbs. 'Pride goes before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall.' I'll drop my objections except for those I reserve mentally. Not that I can tell what Missy sees in the boy."

"That's it?"

"Yes. I want her to be happy. I'm far from sure that this is the best choice for her. But I guess she's old enough to know her own mind and make her own mistakes. Just like you thought you were old enough when you married a woman with a nine-year-old daughter when you were only twenty-three yourself. Not that I think Debbie was a mistake now," she added hastily. That was a battle that had already been fought. "Back then, your father overruled my objections. Which you seem to be doing this time."

"Wes likes him," Chad said. "For what it's worth, Wes likes Ron Stone a lot."

"He would scarcely have asked him to stand godfather for my littlest granddaughter if he didn't. As absurd as that was. For that matter, Wes would probably enjoy knowing Tom Stone. Wes remodeled himself quite a bit over the years in order to become the kind of man with whom Lena would be happy."

Eleanor relaxed a little. "The quirky, sardonic sense of humor that has been showing up this winter is more or less a reversion to normal. He never quite managed to stamp it out, but he controlled those tendencies pretty firmly for nearly thirty years. With Clara, he can be himself." She smiled wryly. "I do wonder what will become of him."