Sister Time lota-9 Page 9

  Island finances being what they were, the end result of all this was Granpa becoming a silent partner in the store. Before, Ashley had had to make the store look full, or at least not empty, by spreading the off-island goods out at the front of the shelves, interspersed among locally made home crafts. Now, the shelves were actually full, and with manufactured goods and things that weren’t merely regional. There were frozen turkeys and canned cranberry sauce to be had for Thanksgiving dinner this year. Mike and Duncan Sunday — who of course still thought their last name was Thompson — were happily applying an olive drab coat of paint to the store’s exterior walls, no doubt for exchange credits to apply to the purchase of some of the goodies inside.

  Shari was flipping through a fashion magazine on the rack that Ashley had for some reason installed at the back of the store, cooing shamelessly over the fall runway photoshoot from Chicago. Tommy had hacked them a back door into the online version of the same magazine, but there was just something about holding the glossy pages in your hands. Cally was keeping half an eye on the clothes on the pages and half an eye on Morgan and Sinda, who were nudging and whispering to each other near a batch of toys. None of the toys looked breakable, at least. Sinda was eying a doll in a lacy blue and white dress with equal measures of childhood greed and love.

  A quiet, irritated buzzing from the front of the store escalated in volume to two clearly audible and irate female voices.

  “…just because I had to punish your kid over that disgusting frog mess…” Yep, Pam again. She was starting to get shrill.

  “Nobody gets credit in my shop… and if you didn’t spend all your money on that trash you read, you’d be able…” Whups, Ashley already biting her words out like that. Not good. Cally walked over to Morgan and Sinda and grabbed their unresisting hands, leading them back towards Shari, who hadn’t even looked up from her magazine. She absently gathered her great-grandchildren in with one arm while Karen edged slightly behind her.

  Cally walked around her small collection of people, assassin-turned-mom securing a ready exit by moving a dolly of soft drink cases so that instead of blocking the back door it was blocking one of the aisles.

  “…know a book if it bit you on the… and you just know they’ll all be gone by the time…” Pam was shrieking now. Pretty soon she’d be fainting and making a great show of looking all over her body for her inhaler.

  “…into my shop, driving off my paying customers…” If Ashley didn’t watch it, she was going to lose her voice again. Probably for days this time. Cally nudged a box of something out of the way with her foot. Shari still hadn’t looked up from her magazine, lifting her arm from around the children to turn the page, returning it to pat Sinda on the shoulder. Karen just looked frozen in shock.

  Another voice joined the first two, querulous as another woman started to complain about the inequity of ever-rising prices for people on a fixed income.

  “Time to go.” Cally scooped the magazine out of Shari’s hands and dropped it back on the rack. “You know with Louise joining in they’ll be lucky to get it over without coming to blows.” She put her hands behind her charges and made gentle shooing motions as she ushered them out the back door, moving Karen along with the group. Emerging into the sunlight seemed to shake Karen out of her daze a little.

  “Are they always like that?” she asked in disbelief.

  “Nope,” Cally answered, “sometimes they’re worse. Welcome to family politics 101.”

  They walked around the side of the building towards the front. Shari waved to Mike and Duncan, who hadn’t missed a beat, spreading paint onto the freshly-bleached boards with smooth, even strokes. “There they go again.” Mike rolled his eyes and scratched his nose, leaving a smear of green paint.

  In front of the store, they paused near the small group of older children who were gathering from across the street to observe the entertainment. A coconut came bouncing out the door at speed. Cally sighed and handed her purse to Shari.

  “Welp, the imports have started flying. Better go in and save Granpa’s stock.” She disappeared through the door, emerging a moment later holding onto a short, red-faced woman with dark, frizzy hair, glasses askew on her face. The woman was cursing fluently but cut her one attempt at a struggle short when Cally subtly tightened her hold on the joint lock and took her to the ground. She looked down at the sputtering woman.

  “That’s it for you, Pam. You’re banned from Ashley’s shop for a month,” she said.

  “I don’t have to answer to you, bitch. I’m not even Clan O’Neal!” The woman glared up at the blonde juggernaut looming over her, but didn’t try to get up.

  “Sundays are the same difference. And if you can’t be trusted to be discreet in front of the children, I’ll take it straight to Granpa.” The assassin’s eyes were flashing now.

  The woman paled and stood up, dusting herself off. “No! Uh, you don’t need to do that. I’m going. Look, I’m going.” She edged down the street back towards the neighborhood holding the small house where she and her kids lived. “But you’re still a bitch. Always throwing your weight around…” The woman said the last under her breath, but she didn’t say it until she was a good twenty meters from Cally.

  Cally stood her ground for a moment, then sighed and appeared to deflate. She walked back over to the kids and picked Sinda up, bouncing and nuzzling her until the tears no longer threatened to spill over from the little girl’s eyes. “It’s okay, Mommy’s not mad at you. Mommy’s not mad at anybody. It’s okay, it’s all right…”

  “Yeah, definitely time to go home.” Shari nodded. “Karen, why don’t you come home with us for a cup of tea and put your feet up. You look like you need it.”

  “Okay. Okay, I will.” She looked at her watch. “The babysitter doesn’t expect me back for an hour and a half, anyway.”

  “Y’all go ahead. I’ll just get the fudge and catch up with you,” Cally said. “What do you think, chocolate mint or rocky road?”

  “Go for the rocky road while she’s still got the marshmallows and almonds,” Shari said, already walking off towards the truck with the children.

  By the time she got back with the fudge, Shari already had everyone in the truck. Cally climbed in the back with Karen, leaving the girls in the front seat.

  “Why didn’t you sit up front? The girls could’ve ridden back here,” she asked the smaller woman.

  “After all that I needed the fresh air. Besides, Morgan called shotgun.” Karen shrugged. “Can I ask you about one thing?”

  “Sure.”

  “How did the Sundays end up being in Clan O’Neal?”

  “Hell if I know,” Cally said.

  “Huh? That doesn’t make sense.”

  “Exactly.” The blonde grinned at her quieter friend. “It’s an inexplicable, alien, Indowy thing that pretty much none of us understand.” The truck was bouncing across the island road by now and she settled herself more comfortably in the bed of the truck to tell the story.

  “See, when Tommy and Wendy first joined the Bane Sidhe, Granpa invited them to come live down here and bring the kids. We had plenty of space, and we pretty much needed the help and the company, anyway. Shari and Wendy are friends from way back in the war. And me too, sort of. So anyway, some time after that, and we haven’t been able to pinpoint when, the Indowy started referring to the Sundays as O’Neals. And we all thought it was weird, so Granpa sat down with Aelool and got him to explain five times, and he still didn’t understand it. You’ve met Granpa, you know how stubborn he can be when he doesn’t understand something. In the end, he quit because Aelool started to get really anxious and upset. Turns out he thought Granpa was trying to disown the Sundays, which would have been an unthinkable dishonor by Indowy standards.” At Karen’s puzzled look Cally paused and thought for a minute. “Okay, like for humans if you recruited some soldiers to do a job, and the mission started to go sour, and you just walked off and left them but for no good reason but you didn’t have to, s
ee?” When the other woman grimaced she nodded and went on. “So finally Granpa got him convinced that it was all a misunderstanding and he’d certainly never meant to sound like he was trying to disown the Sundays. And the upshot was that Tommy and Wendy didn’t mind, and Granpa grumbled a bit around the house for the form of the thing but he didn’t really mind, either, and the Sundays are O’Neals.”

  “So the Sundays are O’Neals and nobody knows why.”

  “Yup. Nobody human, anyway. Oh, apparently something about what Granpa did or didn’t do or something made them think he meant to adopt the Sundays, and over some length of time occasionally an Indowy would ask Granpa a strange question that didn’t seem related to anything and Granpa would just answer it without thinking about it much, and we never knew if they asked Tommy anything they thought was significant. Not anything Tommy could remember, anyway. But yep, there it is. It’s an Indowy thing. Aliens. Go figure.”

  Friday 10/15/54

  The man in the hotel bed had dark hair and recognizably Asian features, but it would have been impossible, even for someone from Fleet, to place exactly what part of Asia his ancestors had originally been from. The typical response would be, and had been, to shrug and assume his parents had been of mixed extraction before the war and that, in all the chaos and global upheaval of that time — upheaval that the world had never seen the like of before that horrible catastrophe — the records and even family legends had simply gotten lost, as they had for so many. Nobody would have guessed that the “Asian” man had begun life as a Latino gang leader named Manuel, and finished it, after a fashion, as an Anglo Fleet Strike general named James Stewart. Nobody but the stacked blonde in the sheer red pegnoir crossing the floor towards him from the suite’s bathroom. With the silvery highlights of her hair caught in the glow of the lamplight, the room otherwise darkened by the heavy drapes drawn across the windows, she looked like a fourteen-year-old boy’s wet dream of a Scandinavian goddess. He rolled up onto one elbow to watch her better, brushing a stray wisp of hair back from her cheek as she climbed into his bed.

  “I never really thought I’d end up in a marriage that would feel so much like an affair,” he said, not for the first time. For either of them.

  “I know,” she said, kissing his cheek and trailing her kisses back up around his ear. “I’m glad you could make it down for the weekend.”

  “God, I missed you, Cally.” Stewart turned his face into her kisses and took her in his arms, giving himself up to the moment of having his beautiful wife in his bed again, no matter for how short a time.

  Later, he tried to keep his damned eyes from misting up as they watched the latest home holos she’d brought him of the daughters he’d never been able to meet, who had and would grow up believing their father dead. Somehow, Cally always arranged it so that she could be in the holos with the girls. He wondered if she suspected how many lonely hours he spent, late at night, playing over those bits and scraps of the lives of his family, again and again, until he could see them behind his eyes as he dreamed. Many of the dreams were not pleasant. They were, in fact, about what you’d expect. On the whole, those were less painful than the happier dreams that put him in the holos with Cally and Morgan and Sinda, only to wake up alone in bed in the perpetually recycled air of the moon, with the metallic tang of machinery at the back of his throat. He’d thought about getting a dog, but it was hell getting them through quarantine, and getting a puppy from a licensed breeder was expensive. He’d do it when he got back though. It was no substitute, but at this point… He shook his head and reminded himself of his oft-repeated resolution on these visits, never to leave in his head until the visit was actually over. The time was too precious to be eaten up with regrets. He felt a deep sympathy with Mike O’Neal in bearing his curse. He was often thankful that, even though unlike Mike he knew he was in hell, at least he could look forward to the occasional weekend pass in heaven.

  They were about fifteen minutes into the latest pack of holos — she must have hidden cameras all over the place, because she always brought hours of them, even though they only watched a few together — when dinner arrived from the seafood place across the street. Yes, the room would smell like fish afterwards until the filter in the air unit cleared it all out, but one thing he had learned about Cally over the seven years of stolen moments that comprised their marriage was that the woman loved seafood more than any three other people. He had decided to try some bizarre local dish called shrimp and grits at her behest, but spent most of his time feeding her strips of calamari just to feel her lips close over his fingers as she took each tidbit. The shrimp dish certainly wasn’t bad, but he had never understood why anglos from this part of the U.S. had to call polenta something as undignified as “grits.” His own colleagues in Noble Lion Tong tolerated his unusual fondness for Italian cuisine with a certain degree of amusement. Mostly, he’d learned to cook it for himself, although it did occasionally require him to import some unusual ingredients from Earth. She was right. He did like the shrimp dish. With the polenta.

  “I feel guilty, a lot, for the girls growing up without a dad,” he said.

  “It’s hard. But there’s nothing we can do differently, so I try not to think about it,” she said, looking away and picking at the worn bedspread that would never have passed muster in a decent prewar hotel.

  “I’m just glad you live with your grandparents. At least they’ve got a grandfather around.”

  “Yeah,” she sighed. “It’s not the same, though. Growing up I always missed Daddy, and I never really got over losing my mom. But for having been a kid in the war years, I had it really good.”

  “I noticed a lot of the clothes you and the girls were wearing had seen better days. Same with Papa O’Neal and Shari.” He didn’t like broaching such an awkward subject. But having grown up poor himself, he couldn’t let it lie. This was his family. “Are you guys having money problems? What’s happening? It looks to me like those people aren’t paying you nearly enough for what you do. Okay, there isn’t enough and I wish you’d quit, but I understand why you can’t. Almost. Still, how bad is it?”

  “Money was pretty tight for awhile. The salaries took a severe dive after I got back, for various reasons. They’d pay more if they could. Anyway, we just had a windfall and things are better now. For awhile at least. Enough to get everybody some decent clothes and stuff. Besides, there’s not a lot we could do if they weren’t. They’re extra paranoid about people with too high a lifestyle for their salaries, what with Jay’s defection.”

  “Sorry about that.” Stewart winced. He hadn’t turned Jay, but he had provided the money to keep him turned.

  “Not your fault. He would have found someone to buy his information. Traitors do. Anyway, we made a commission on finding a buyer for something for them. Brokering isn’t usually in the scope of what we do and the sale was too much money to argue that they couldn’t afford the commission. It was… large.”

  “Cally, what do you think would happen, really happen, if your organization found out about me?” he asked.

  “Uh… bad things. They’re really paranoid right now and they’d probably believe you were on deep cover for the Darhel and I was compromised. I’d probably be able to keep any of it from spilling over onto Granpa or anyone else in the clan, but, well, don’t ask.”

  His lips tightened. “And you still won’t leave, right? We could go under deep enough cover that they’d never find you. The Tong is good at that. But it’s still no use asking, right?” He sighed as she shook her head. “You’re going to invest your windfall, right? Is it enough for that? How much are we talking?”

  “A bit over six thousand FedCreds.”

  “Okay. That’s enough to stake you for some investments.” He stared off into the distance. “I… know some things about some businesses that aren’t common knowledge. Things that will influence share prices. If I was careful to keep the tips to businesses where you could rationally decide to invest in them if you were a
shrewd investor and good researcher, and tell you where to look so you could leave an electronic trail in your systems of doing your homework if they asked any questions, that’s some help I could probably safely give,” he said. “My boss wouldn’t mind one or two people going along for the ride — just keep it in the immediate family. Really keep it close.”

  “I’d have to lay some red herrings by doing similar research of other companies I don’t invest in,” she mused. “Yeah, it could work. I could even just take my results to Granpa and suggest an investment. But how would I get him not to share with the immediate world? What am I thinking — it’s Granpa. If I buy an investment book that’s already well thumbed, like at a used bookstore while I’m here, I can just flip through it to learn how to leave plausible trails and talk the game. It’s not like I’m stupid and couldn’t learn it on my own. And even if Granpa suspects I’ve got a source for stock tips, that would just make him more likely to keep it closer than close and not mention to anyone — especially not the Bane Sidhe. Not as upset as he still is with them about money.” She leaned over and kissed him by way of a thank you, which pretty much led to the end of that conversation.

  “So, back to the moon with the commuters on Monday. What about you? Off to kill people and break things, or do you get a really tough week chasing the girls?” he joked.

  “A week off, then a family reunion, of all things. Wish you could be there,” she said.

  “That might be a bit more reunion than your family bargained for.”

  “I think the O’Neals would keep it quiet. But we’ve got a lot of miscellaneous folks around from the organization, whose loyalty is more to the Bane Sidhe than to Clan O’Neal. I do wish, but wishing doesn’t work, does it?”