Eric Flint: 1635:The Dreeson Incident

"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."