"If a couple of other people are interested in this, is there anyplace in town I can catch you later today? I know it's a holiday. .."
"I was going back home. I suppose I could always go over and annoy Missy's parents by existing."
"I would not, if I were you." Clara said. "Debbie has already sent Missy to go to sleep and called me to complain."
"Go over to Ben Hardesty's," Wes suggested. "Cory Joe has already been in touch with Arnold Bellamy this morning, early. He's waiting at Ben's until we get a meeting set up. I'll swing by for the two of you when we've gotten in touch with everyone who should be sitting in on this. At least, everyone who doesn't have a hangover. The administration of the SoTF has at least a couple of officials who seem to have partied harder than the rest of them." He grinned. "Ed Piazza among them. We'll brief them tomorrow."
Ron blinked. The principal? Well, the president of the State of Thuringia-Franconia?
"He's Italian," Clara said gently. "There was red wine. Annabelle says that at least New Years Eve is not a wedding or a wake."
By a week or so later, it became clear that Bill Hudson was wasting an awful lot of time getting back and forth from Willie Ray's place to Lothlorien. Ron suggested that he might as well move in, since it didn't seem likely that his brother Frank would ever need his room there again.
They packed up the personal stuff that Frank had left behind when they left for Italy a year before into barrels and put those in a storeroom. Then they moved Bill's stuff with his father's team and wagon.
This involved meeting Bill's grandmother. Who was also Missy's other grandmother, the Hudson one, the one she called "Nani."
It was a sort of interesting experience. The kind of thing that made Ron glad that she had introduced him to her Jenkins grandmother first. That had to be saying something.
They were standing next to the wagon, waiting for someone to bring out another load of stuff on the dolly. She appeared and demanded fiercely, "Are you the young man who kissed Missy while she was riding a motorcycle last fall?"
Perhaps he shouldn't have answered, "Like this?" and demonstrated the procedure.
It certainly hadn't helped that Missy responded to the old lady's glare by throwing her arms around his neck and kissing him again. With considerably more verve.
Chapter 35
Grantville
"Good morning, Lenore. It's nice to have you back." Faye Andersen jumped up and gave her a hug. "We have an in-box waiting for you and can you work with Donella an hour or so every day? She's learning, but she hasn't had a chance to work in one of the down-time chanceries yet."
"Oh, Faye, it's so good to be back." Lenore leaned across the desk and gave the older woman a hug. "Hi, Linda Beth. Donella, I love your engagement ring. Catrina, oh golly, you have the baby right here. Isn't he a doll. I wish Bryant had let me do that after Weshelle was born. Where's Andrea? She said she still had some more forms for me to fill out."
"Meeting with the judges. You'll have to wait till that's over. Jon Villareal is our liaison with the consular service now. He's in the meeting, too. All okay at your end? No child care problems?"
"Great, Faye. Chandra is babysitting for Weshelle, so everything is smooth at home. Your problems must be nearly over by now."
"Sometimes I think they're worse when you have teenagers. Toddlers at least have the good grace to stay where you put them, so to speak, until you come back and pick them up again. Brandon and Hanna have so many activities now…"
"Are you on your own, again?" Linda Beth Rush asked.
"Bryant left for Magdeburg again the first thing this morning. He's got to make some stops on the way, though." Lenore grinned. "Give me some records to transcribe and I'll transcribe them."
"Back in the swing of things?" Chandra asked when Lenore knocked on the door to drop off Weshelle.
"Three days at work and it's as if I had never been gone."
"Did you eat breakfast?"
"You know me too well, Sis." Lenore laughed.
"Well, I'm hungry, and we have time. But I'm out of eggs. I've got to drop Mikey off anyway, and then Tom, so let's both walk downtown and stop at Cora's."
"When is she due?" Cora asked as she deposited the plates of buckwheat pancakes in front of them.
"Who?" Chandra broke a piece of hard bread in three pieces and gave one each to Lena Sue, Sandra Lou, and Weshelle to teethe on. She had dropped Mikey off at school on the way, but Tom was running around the table at a rate which made her yearn for the moment when St. Veronica's Academy would open its doors and receive him for the morning.
"Stop pretending you don't know who, Chandra. Your stepmother, of course."
"Um."
"When?"
"Late May."
"Didn't waste any time, did they?"
"Shoo, Cora." Chandra watched the proprietress head for another table, taking their coffee pot, and turned to her sister. "Cora Ennis has no shame at all."
"I think everyone in Grantville is asking the same question," Lenore answered. "And some of them are making bets on how long it took between the time they married themselves to each other and start of the pregnancy. I understand that the heavy money at the Thuringen Gardens is on fifteen minutes. The 250 Club types aren't conceding that the vows came first, on the grounds that German women are all whores." She blushed.
"Cut it out, Lenore. Why should you be sitting here blushing for Dad? We didn't have a thing to do with it."
"Except for your manipulating to send her over there in the first place. Let's hope for a week's margin. Early June."
"Kortney Pence gives them nine months to the day, and the story I heard from Mary Kathryn, who got it straight from Derek Utt, is that it was already well after dark when the kidnappers locked them into Ritter von Schlitz's pantry, so the money on 'fifteen minutes' may not be too far off the mark."
"Chandra! Stop it!"
"Oh, well. I guess I'd better write Nathan before he hears it from someone else. And you're going to be late for work if we don't get a move on."
Sandra Prickett, Nathan's mother, was happily demonstrating the workings of the Bureau of Vital Statistics filing system to an interested and admiring Jacques-Pierre Dumais. There really weren't a lot of people around who were interested in the nuts and bolts of how she spent her days. Since he mentioned that he had attended the wedding of Velma Hardesty to Laurent Mauger, she pulled out the master file card.
Jacques-Pierre looked at it with some interest for the content. Particularly the age of the bride. "It's accurate," Sandra said. "She's lived in this town all her life, so there wasn't any point in trying to fudge off a few years. I wouldn't put it past her, though, if she moves away."
His attention fixed on the meaning of the punched holes around the edges of each card.
"It's because we don't have computer systems available," Sandra answered. "Grantville wasn't maintaining its own vital statistics before the Ring of Fire. They were kept at state level. So when we set the bureau up, it was from scratch, and we did a system that was really old-fashioned back home. But it's one that any down-time office, all through what was the NUS, through Thuringia-Franconia, can maintain. We get the blank forms printed and manually punch the holes that code the data that is on each license and certificate. Each of the squares around the edge represents a specific fact."
She explained the retrieval system, saying that, for example, for statistical purposes, they could easily use this to track all up-timer/down-timer marriages, such as that between Velma and her husband. Returning the Mauger/Hardesty card to its place, she stuck her little wire rod through the cards in the drawer and pulled out all of the up-timer/down-timer marriages for the last four months, spreading them out on the table.
As it happened, this included the ceremony performed for Wesley Williams Jenkins and Clara Bachmeierin at the Methodist parsonage. The one that Jenny Maddox had filed personally and had not included in the weekly list sent to the newspaper.