"I'm not sure you can answer my main question at all." Noelle got up too. "Considering that you weren't even born back when it was going on and Harlan was just a baby. Why did my mom fall in love with your husband's uncle, who's my father, to start with?"
"Well." Eden started to shoo her sons in the direction of the stairs. "That's a good one. You might as well ask why Julia fell for Tom. Those are Harlan's parents-they were left up-time. Or Aura Lee for Joe. Or why I went nuts over Harlan. Or, for that matter, why Blanche Leek fell for Ben-he's the guys' first cousin, son of Juliann's sister Lula. They're up in Magdeburg. I suppose you don't see any obvious reason or you wouldn't be asking."
"Well, I've never met Harlan or his father," Noelle stopped on the first step. "Or the Leeks. I don't think I ever even heard of the Leeks. And since Tom Stull was left up-time, I'm not likely to meet Harlan's father."
"They're no better looking than Joe and Dennis," Eden smiled. "In fact, Harlan looks more like Joe than he does like Dennis. When it comes to the rating scale, Dennis is the best of the lot. Lucky for you. No girl in her right mind would want to look like Joe or Harlan. It's just lucky that Little Juliann looks more like Aura Lee. I'm really happy that both my kids are boys. It doesn't seem to handicap the Stull boys."
"Okay," Noelle dropped a rubber ducky into the bathtub. "Where did you get the ducky? You didn't have kids before the Ring of Fire."
"It was Aura Lee's. She and Joe could have sold it for a bundle to the dealers who come through looking for up-time collectibles, but she gave it to me, instead. And I'm glad. I want my kids to have a rubber ducky. I know that when I finally get to go join Harlan, out of Grantville, we'll probably have a wood stove and a little round tin tub. I'll sort of miss central heating and a real bathroom, but the rubber ducky goes along. They can still have that and I want them to have that. I want them to have something from… from the real world, if you know what I mean."
"I know. It's odd what we miss." Noelle dipped her fingers into the crock of soft soap and dropped a dollop into the tub. "I miss bananas. That's what I used to have for breakfast. I'd just pick up a banana and run out the door. I've gotten used to a lot less sugar and a lot more fish, but I guess I'd just never imagined a world without bananas."
Eden pulled a couple of washcloths out from under the sink. "Anyway. Back to the Stulls. What really gets to the parents of their wives-at least, what got to my parents-is that they home in on us so early. And my parents didn't know the half of it. I was allowed to start dating when I was sixteen. And I had my first date with Harlan, who's ten years older. They didn't like it a bit."
"Well." Noelle thought a minute. "I mean, I can see why."
"What would really have made them mad," Eden grinned, "is that I'd known for almost three years that he'd call on my sixteenth birthday and ask me out."
"Good Lord!" Noelle exclaimed.
"I was in McDonald's one day, with a batch of other kids. I take after Mom in my looks. That is, I was as tall then as I am now and just as filled out. On top that is, at least when I'm not nursing. I got a bit more hips with the kids. I was leaning against the rail, waiting to order, when Harlan leaned on it from the other side, smiled at me, and asked me who I was. I told him, and who my parents were. He looked at the kids I was with and asked me how old I was. I told him that, too. Thirteen. And he said, 'I was afraid of something of the sort.' Then he asked, 'When are Nat and Twila going to let you date?' I said, 'when I'm sixteen.' He said, 'I'm Harlan Stull. Nat and Twila are in the phone book, so I'll call you then. When's your birthday?' And he did. Right in the middle of my birthday party. He asked me to the movies in Fairmont the next Saturday and I said that I'd go."
"That's… well, that's…" Noelle sputtered.
"Yeah, my parents thought so, too, when he called. So did the Mulroneys when Harlan's dad-Tom, that was-started dating Julia. Though that was just two years difference, not ten. They'd have married sooner than they did except that they were waiting for Julia's sister Barb to turn eighteen so she could marry John Nash without parental permission. And probably the Hudsons, when Joe started eyeing Aura Lee when she was fourteen and kissing her the next year. As for your parents, Dennis is more than four years older than Pat-closer to five years older. She may have run off to him on her eighteenth birthday, but she'd been waiting to run for a year, at least. Willing to run for two or maybe a little more.
"They just sort of… focus… on the girl they want when she's awfully young. Not putting pressure, exactly. Just moving in and occupying all the mental space she has available for thinking about guys. So he's the only guy she ever really thinks about. At least, that's the way it worked for me. I was so preoccupied with waiting for Harlan to call on my sixteenth birthday that I just more or less ignored all the other boys in town."
Eden grinned suddenly. "In a way, I think what makes the parents maddest is that they can't even call the guys pedophiles, because they actually do wait until the girl is of dating age to do something. Joe moved in on Aura Lee earliest, but even then… I suppose a person could say that she sort of provoked him occasionally, from everything I've heard."
Noelle frowned. "But why did it preoccupy you that much? After all…"
"Well, yeah. Probably if it had been anyone else who tried that trick, I'd have forgotten it in a couple of days. But it was Harlan, and if he called, then we'd have a date, and if we had a date, then some day he'd kiss me, and if he kissed me, then eventually… You can sort of see how the train of thought went. Trust me, it was plenty to keep me ignoring all the other guys. Of course, if he hadn't called, I'd have had to restructure my picture of my future life drastically. But he did, and like I said, I never doubted that he would. Honestly, the only thing on earth that my parents had against him was that he was ten years older.
"Plus the fact that I moved in with him on my eighteenth birthday, which was a year before I finished high school. But he wasn't on a 'barefoot and pregnant' kick. He paid for me to finish a two-year degree in laboratory technology and then I worked two years before we got married. I guess we could have gotten married earlier, but there didn't seem to be any real reason to. For that matter, there wasn't any real reason in 1997 more than there had been for the last five and a half years, but we woke up one morning and decided it was time, so we did. We went to the courthouse and had a judge perform the ceremony with Joe and Aura Lee as witnesses and sent my parents a photocopy of the certificate.
"It didn't change the way we lived. I didn't get pregnant the first time until after the Ring of Fire and now I've got two kids. I predict I'll end up with a few more, because birth control down-time isn't what it might be. We've talked around all the angles and Harlan and I aren't likely to give up sex any time soon, thank you.
"Though having him over in Fulda really cuts down on the frequency. Once they get something going over there that doesn't mean that a lab technician is of six times more use to the world in Grantville than in Fulda, I'll be on the first freight wagon out of here. We're lucky that he's the budget officer, so he gets to come back more often than most of the guys in the administration there do. He'll be in town in a week or so. I'll have everyone over for dinner.
"The guys started to make a scrapbook about Juliann, after the visitation got shot up. Joe has it, I think. You'll have to ask him to let you look at it. They put in their favorite 'Ma' stories, so I'm not going to spoil things by telling you any of them."
"But Nat and Twila were with you at the visitation. So you must be getting along now?"
"Oh, that. When I finally had a baby, they couldn't resist. They showed up at the hospital nursery looking wistful, so Harlan told them to come on in and we all had a good cry together and made everything up. And we named the baby Nathan. On the theory that we were likely to have more, given the birth control situation, so we could name kids on down the line Tom for Harlan's dad and a Harlan Junior, maybe. Tom we've already got. He was born last May."