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, see?” 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.”