So at least Lois had had something going for her.
Oh yes, and what did we say when everyone wanted to know why the big black dragon had come booming in for Jake? What was that all about? We waffled. Oh, my, how we waffled. Now that we've been kind of winning for a while (and there's even money in the bank, we've NEVER had money in the bank before) Dad's developed quite a flair for waffling. (I'm still a lousy waffler, so I just disappeared.) Katie's really good at it too — she's always been a gift to the business admin side, and she's done more and more of the interface with Outsiders stuff since Mom died, and she got him started on Waffling as a live art (as opposed to his natural style of thumping and roaring). Katie's weakness is being too nice, which has never been one of Dad's problems.
So you're reading it here for the first time, about Gulp's babies. The publisher who thinks they're going to get this — although they haven't actually read it yet, so who knows — have already been sworn to ninety-six jillion kinds of secrecy, with sub clauses about underlings being chained to their desks with no internet access till pub date, etc. And even if it does get out, it doesn't really matter. I hope. Our security nowadays makes your average bank vault look like a wet paper bag, and a lot of the Dragon Squadron money has gone on the fence — which at this point probably would hold up against a bomb or two. I wish I knew whether I should be glad about that or not.
It was about two months after this, after Gulp's babies were born, that Martha told me she was pregnant.
There should be a very large white space here on the page . . . because I don't care how much else has happened to you in your life and how many unique things you've been a part of and how many endangered species you've rescued and how many laws of science and biology you've personally exploded . . . there's nothing like the prospect of your own first child for making your life turn over and start becoming something else.
. . . And it got worse fast. First Martha said that she was going to spend as much time at Nearcamp and Dragon Central as she could — which is to say as much of the headaches as she could stand — which I understood but didn't want her torturing herself and who knew if this would mean the baby was busy adapting and wouldn't have to have dragon headaches or whether it would just start having the headache before it was born, which seemed pretty rough. Martha said no, she'd be able to tell if the baby was unhappy. I'd've (nervously) said okay to that one . . . till she said she wanted to have it at Dragon Central, I mean, born there. She said that if she had a totally free hand she'd have it at the birthplace in the Bonelands, if the dragons would allow it and whew I started bouncing up to the ceiling and making holes in it with my head she said, Jake, calm down, Dragon Central was good enough.
And I said something like GOOD ENOUGH??? And the conversation went on like that for a while. Her point was that birth was a big deal (. . . duh . . . ), and that Gulp's dragonlets' birth that I'd been able to be a part of had changed me profoundly and made my connection to the/my dragons so much stronger and the least we could do was try to return the favor. And I was damned out of my own mouth because I'd told her about this. And I could see her point but I couldn't stop gobbling about "safety" and "if something went wrong" and so on.
We were still arguing and in fact we had so not come to any conclusions or even any working hypotheses that we hadn't told anybody, not even Dad and Katie, yet, when Dad and Katie came to us and said that, uh, well, they'd decided to get married.
"Oh, that's great! That's wonderful!" Martha said, and grabbed her mother and swung her around in an impromptu tango. And I hugged my dad, and he hugged me back, which is absolutely the dragons' fault, all that sticking my hand (or more) in dragons' mouths and learning to see/hear/read the atmosphere and all that group-bond stuff with dragons and so on, I've got so touchy-feely with my human friends it's probably pretty repulsive, but they put up with it, probably partly because to the extent that they hang out with dragons it's happening to them too, which certainly includes my dad. So we actually hugged each other pretty well.
It's been this hilariously open secret that Dad and Katie have been together for, I don't know, years now. Eleanor, before she went off to boarding school last year (she's got accepted on some kind of Eleanor-invented fast track and is going to be a lawyer by the time she's seventeen or something: it may not take till she's fifty to become president), asked them why they didn't just get married and get it over with? Or at least move in together. Poor Eleanor — if "poor" and "Eleanor" can ever be combined — had the worst of it. She'd got Martha and me out of her hair but here was her mom still hopelessly soppy and silly with my dad — and pretending it didn't show.
"They just told me that it was their business and not mine," she said disgustedly to Martha and me. "You see if you can do anything with them while I'm gone. I don't get it — all those secrets when Lois was a baby, you'd think they'd be glad not to have a secret that they don't, you know, have to have." (I'm hoping Eleanor will keep this attitude. Think of it: a president whose default position is not "whatever we do don't tell the voters." Can the country stand it? Stay tuned.)
So this was terrific news. We were still celebrating, and Martha had got out the cranberry juice to put in the champagne glasses because she wasn't drinking because of the baby, but since it was the middle of the afternoon we thought maybe no one would think about it being cranberry juice, and it's not like we had a bottle of champagne in the refrigerator waiting for a major announcement either. But we'd just made the first toast when Martha said, "So, okay, is there a reason you've finally decided to get married now and not two or three years ago?"
And the two of them looked at each other as guiltily and sheepishly as, well, teenagers, and then Dad said, "Well — Katie — "
And Katie said, "I'm pregnant," at exactly the same moment as Martha said, "You're pregnant," and then Martha and I started laughing and couldn't stop, and Dad and Katie were obviously relieved, but they were also a bit puzzled till Martha finally gasped out, "So am I!"
So then the fun really began because Martha told Katie about her idea about the birth at Dragon Central and Katie thought it was a great idea and wanted to do the same, and then Dad started behaving in a way that made the way I'd been behaving look restrained, which isn't entirely surprising because while Katie was completely healthy and had popped out her two previous daughters with no particular effort, from what she said less drama than most women have to put in, she was now forty-six and so automatically on all the high-risk lists, and Dad wasn't having any. She'd have that baby in a hospital like a normal twenty-first century first-world woman, and there was no argument.
Oh yes there was an argument. Martha and I were so fascinated we almost forgot to keep arguing ourselves. So pretty much within a day or two all of Smokehill knew that (a) Dad and Katie were getting married, (b) Katie was pregnant, (c) Martha was pregnant, (d) Katie and Martha wanted to have their babies at Dragon Central, (e) and the dads concerned were AGAINST this. Soap opera with dragons? You never saw anything like it.
I don't know how Dad really felt — we didn't dare talk about it, we might implode and there'd be a black sucking hole into a parallel universe where two generations of Mendoza men used to be — but he never said This is all YOUR fault although he must have thought it. I thought it. I could almost have done the black hole thing alone. Of course our baby should be born with dragons around. It was the obvious right thing to happen. And it was mean and horrible and two-faced and disloyal and treacherous of me to be trying to make something else happen instead.