The next morning had a serious dose of deja vu for Dave. Decades before, he'd gotten up and around in the morning, and then walked the three blocks to the same elementary school. Most of the time, after he'd gotten out of kindergarten, he'd done it alone, both going to and from school, since his mother's schedule out at General and the school schedule didn't match up very well. Now, he'd be walking to school again, from just across the street -- but with Tyler and Cameron. How much things had changed -- and how much they'd stayed the same . . .

Dave had called Cindy Stein, the principal, almost a week before to let her know Tyler and Cameron would be coming. Cindy had been nothing but helpful, but asked a favor of Dave: "Can we enroll the boys today or tomorrow by fax or something? If we can have them enrolled by the official count date of Friday it'll mean $13,000 in state aid to us." There had been a little extra messing around, but Dave figured it had been worth it, for the sake of good will if nothing else. But it meant this morning there was little paperwork to do, nothing that made a clear-cut transition in his own mind.

He walked the boys to school, introduced them to Mrs. Stein, who took them to meet their teacher, a bright, smiley woman named Mrs. Wisner. They spent a minute or two of small talk; the boys seemed shy, but Dave figured it would be best if he got out of there, so gave them a hug and left. As he walked up the hall with Cindy, she commented, "Your boys seem interested in getting to school."

"I think so," Dave agreed. "They hadn't really had time to get settled in their old school, so I don't think the transition is a big deal for them. Everything else, though . . . well, I'm kind of worried."

"Losing their mother?" Cindy asked quietly.

"Yeah," Dave sighed. "All in all, they've taken it well, better than I have. I keep waiting for them to recognize reality and blow up."

"You may be lucky," Cindy told him. "The reality may be slow to set in, and it may never hit them all that hard. Still, I made sure that Roberta, their teacher, knows what happened and what the conditions are. We had a psychologist, one the intermediate school district contracts with, come in one day late last week to give us some idea of how to deal with this. Have the boys had any counseling?"

"Not officially, but a friend is a clinical psychologist and has worked with them quite a bit. It seemed to help. Kids aren't her field, but she said at that level it doesn't matter."

"Well, we'll keep a close eye on things," Cindy promised. "I'll make it a point to ask Roberta about them frequently, and maybe observe myself a little. If there's any problems, you want us to contact you, right?"

"Absolutely, and I'm going to be available virtually all the time, except when I'm out of town. My mother will be available when that happens. I'm expecting to be gone two or three days every month or so, but I'll definitely be around for the next several weeks. I just hope we have the boys settled in and comfortable with being here before it happens."

"We'll do our best," Cindy promised, and asked him to confirm she had the correct phone numbers. There was a little updating since she didn't have the landline number at the house -- Dave hadn't known it the last time he'd talked to her -- but with that done, there seemed to be little left to do. All of a sudden, he was standing outside the schoolhouse door, with no idea of what to do next.

There were things that needed to be done, of course -- but considerably less than if Emily and Liz had not done so much to get things set up for him. He really wasn't quite mentally ready to tie into the finishing bits of Dithyran's Probe, which he'd been unable to finish last week with everything else going on, and he 'd hardly even thought about Swordsman of Atlantis, his next major project, although it looked comparatively clean at first glance. He realized getting down to work and concentrating on them were going to be his best escape, but he wanted to be ready to start, first.

One thing crossed his mind as needed doing today: groceries. While Emily or Liz or someone had left a few basic supplies in the kitchen, there really wasn't much there for real meals. It was a bit of a problem -- the grocery store was only a few blocks away, but it would be a long walk with an armload of groceries, since he had no car.

On the other hand, it didn't need to be a real problem, either. It was only a short walk downtown, about five blocks, and it was a nice morning for a walk. A few minutes later he stepped into the Spee-D-Mart, to find Emily behind the counter. "Did the boys get to school all right?" she asked.

"Oh, yes, I took them," he replied, looking around the store. It seemed much the same as it had been the last time he'd been in Bradford -- coolers along one side of the room and in back, several racks of snack foods and a few staples, a coffeepot near the counter. Oh, wait, there was something new -- a cappuccino machine next to the coffee pot. That had to be a big deal for this place. "They've got Mrs. Wisner for a teacher," he added.

"Good, they'll like her," Emily told him. "Both Kayla and JJ had her; they just loved her to death."

Dave got a cup of coffee and a doughnut and relaxed -- he hadn't bothered to make coffee at home, and for that matter, wasn't sure he even had any. He and Emily talked things around for a couple minutes before Dave got down to the real reason why he came. "Is there any place around I can rent a car?" he asked. "I need to go get some groceries and do some other running. I thought I might as well work out where I'm going to rent a car when I have to drive to New York."

"Boy, not in town, for sure," Emily shook her head. "There might be someone in Hawthorne, but I doubt it. The nearest place I know of for sure is the airport in Kalamazoo. Dave, if you're going to be living here, you need a car or something."

"I don't know," he shrugged. "Emily, I've never owned a car. Even when I lived here before, I borrowed Mom's, rode with friends, or did without. It just wasn't practical for me to own a car in New York. The parking is terrible, and what you can find is very expensive; the traffic is terrible, and you can get there quicker on the subway or something. The few times I needed a car, like for road trips back here, I rented one."

"You sure can't do it here," Emily shook her head. "We have no public transportation, except when the county senior citizen bus comes to town in the morning and afternoon."

"But Emily," Dave protested. "I don't know a thing about cars. I mean, I know how to drive, but not well, since I never did it much. I don't know a thing about buying cars, or what needs to be done to them, or anything like that."

"Jesus," Emily shook her head. "I can't believe a Bradford guy could get into his thirties and still be a virgin about cars."

"There it is," Dave sighed. "Like I said, I have never had the need for one."

"All right," Emily said with an audible note of exasperation. "Kevin has to work late tonight, but I'll see what else I can do." She reached into her pocket and pulled out a wad of keys, taking one from the ring. "Here's the key to my minivan so you can go get groceries or whatever. You'll have to walk over to get it; I'm here by myself till noon, and I don't have a spare helmet, so I couldn't take you on the bike anyway. Don't be in too big a rush about a car; I won't need the van for a couple days while the weather is nice. Have to get the seat time on the Harley, you know. It won't be long and it'll be too cold."

Dave took a sip of his coffee and did his best to change the topic. It was embarrassing, at the least, to admit being such a neophyte about cars. Hell, Emily knew more about them than he did. So did a lot of other women he could name, including Shae. It felt as his manhood were somehow being assaulted. After all, guys were supposed to know about cars, not women . . .

After a while he finished his coffee, threw his cup in the trash, said "Later" to Emily, and started off walking toward her house. The streets and houses were familiar, although there were some subtle differences in what he recalled from when he last lived in Bradford. Here someone had added a garage; there someone had made a major change in the color a house had been painted. Kevin and Emily's house -- well, it hadn't been their house then; it had belonged to the family of some kid a year or two ahead of him. He could make out the face in his mind's eye but couldn't have come up with the name if his life had depended on it.

Dave had never driven a minivan, but it proved to not be any big deal despite the slightly different seating position and viewpoint. He headed to the grocery store, got a cart, and started filling it. It was sort of random shopping, impulse buying, since he hadn't made any plans about meals and wasn't sure what he had in the house anyway.

There were a couple other minor errands to deal with, and he was back at the house putting the groceries away by noon. He had just finished up when there was a knock on the door. He opened the door, to find a tall, older bearded man, wearing a loose shirt and a kilt. Not what you'd expect to find in Bradford, he thought -- and then his memory filled the gap: this was Jason MacRae, Vicky's husband! He remembered Jason -- he was about as hard to forget as Shae, in his own way. He was a character from the word go: he was very much into Scottish cultural activities, and had been even back when Dave and Vicky were in high school. Jason was quite a bit older, he remembered someone saying, and in fact had retired from General. He, Vicky, and Emily's husband Kevin ran a custom and collectible knife shop, he remembered being told. Jason's knives were real art if you were into that sort of thing. "Why, Jason!" Dave smiled. "Good to see you again."

"Aye, good ta see ya, too," Jason replied in a broad Scottish accent. Dave remembered Emily or someone saying he could turn the accent on and off like a faucet, and it was really pretty fake. But, it helped sell knives; it made them more exotic, or something. "Yon Emily said ye were needin' some help wi' buyin' a car."

"Yeah," Dave sighed. "I'm afraid I don't know jack shit about cars."

"That's why she sent me," Jason smiled, dropping the accent. "I have a reputation for being able to haggle pretty good, and I've dealt with a few car dealers over the years."

In a few minutes the two of them were in Jason's pickup truck, heading out to the dealer. In times Dave could remember, Bradford had had two dealerships, Ford and Chevy. The Ford dealership went belly up back while Dave was in high school, and now only the Chevy dealer was left, the last survivor of what had once been half a dozen car dealerships in town. "We can head into Hawthorne if we don't find anything we like," Jason explained. "But my experience is it's usually a pretty good idea to just deal with Pat. He's pretty honest for a car dealer, anyway, and since you and I are from Bradford he's not even going to think about pulling anything shady or we could start rumors. Besides, he's going to know your story, and he'll be sympathetic. Do you have any idea of what you're looking for?"

"Not really," Dave admitted. "Like I told you, I don't know jack shit about cars."

"Let's start off with a simple question," Jason smiled. "A lot of people your age don't like to have their kids riding in the back seat like the government demands. It is safer, although it's more of a pain in the ass. Very often people will buy a pickup to get around the issue."

"I'm not sure I want to get around it and see no real use for a pickup, anyway," Dave said.

"OK, that simplifies things right there," Jason nodded. "Now, Emily said you were planning on driving to New York about once a month."

"That or a little more," Dave said. "It's not set in stone, though, and it could change."

"Let's see," Jason replied. "About twelve hundred miles round trip to New York, twelve times a year, that's shy of 15,000 miles but not very shy, so you don't want a lease. They usually have a limit about that amount, or else you pay more. You can set the limit higher, but you still pay more. So, with the kids in the back seat I'd say four-door. Midsize, for the gas mileage, you can just bet we're going to see gas at three bucks a gallon sooner or later. New or fairly new for reliability. You want to pay cash or make payments?"

"Payments, I think," Dave said. "My cash situation is a little fluid right now. I could pay cash but I'd really rather not take it out of the investment account."

"All right," Jason nodded. "That limits the field right there. Now we will see what we will see."

They pulled into the dealership, and Jason led Dave right through the showroom to Pat's office in the back. Of course, they didn't get right down to business; they spent several minutes discussing the currently dismal football prospects of the Bradford Bulldogs, and then somehow slid over to the brighter prospects of Notre Dame, which many Bradfordites considered the home school due to proximity. From there it went to the Michigan Wolverines, which was the home school choice of many others. Dave remembered things could get interesting around town when the two schools met, but it had been before he arrived this year, and apparently no blood had flowed among the partisans.

Somewhere in there the talk shifted to cars and Jason casually mentioned they were looking for a newer midsize four-door, preferably a bargain. After some discussion, most of which Dave didn't understand, the subject turned to a 2001 Chevy Malibu, last year's model but new, with only twenty-six miles on the clock and a good twenty percent under the list price of a 2002, zero down, sixty months. Again, not quite sure how he got there, Dave found himself out in the lot with Pat and Jason next to a good-looking gray car, which smelled of brand new on the inside. Pat gave them the keys, and Dave found himself behind the wheel. It seemed to drive acceptably and was comfortable to ride in, which pushed the limits of Dave's opinion. After some more discussion, of which only about half was comprehensible, he decided it would be all right.

Signing the paperwork took a while. Dave was informed there was a little dealer prep to do on the car, but if he was willing to take delivery in the morning, the dealership would have their run-and-fetch guy get the plates from the Secretary of State's office and deliver the car to his door. All he needed to do was arrange for insurance, and Jason promised he'd help take care of it. A few minutes later, Jason drove Dave to Phil Sharp's office, and within minutes a binder was issued. Dave's head was spinning; he wasn't real sure how he ended up in the world of car ownership, but the next morning there would be a car in the driveway.

"See, that wasn't bad," Jason commented as they drove back toward the house.

"Maybe not," Dave shook his head. "But I sure want you around if I ever have to do it again."

"Probably sooner or later," Jason told him. "But if you take care of it you can put a lot of miles on it. Back when I was a kid 50,000 miles was a lot of time on a car and you hardly ever heard of one going over a hundred thousand. I know a guy who always buys used, and he says these days a car isn't broken in till it's got a hundred thousand. But realistically, it ought to last you for years."

"Yeah, but if I go back to New York it's not quite the same," Dave protested, then thought if he went back to New York there was a good chance it would be to Shae's or somewhere near there, rather than Manhattan. Having a car on Staten Island was a little different deal than having one on Manhattan. "Oh well," he conceded, I guess I'll have to cross that bridge when I get to it."

"I suppose," Jason said. "In the near term you're going to need it, anyway. Now that we got it settled, how'd you like to bring the boys over to the house tonight for dinner, to celebrate your new car?"

"Sure," Dave said. "I'd sort of figured on chicken tonight, but it's still frozen."

They got back to Dave's house well before he expected school to get out, but with little time to do much else constructive. He messed around in the office for a bit without accomplishing anything, then, as the time grew near, headed over to the school to pick up the boys. He got there early enough to have time for a word with Mrs. Wisner, who told him everything seemed to go all right and the boys were fitting in right from the start. That was a good deal, Dave figured, although with school barely a month gone, it seemed unlikely to him that kindergartners would have had the time to build up the cliques that made it hard for older students to fit into a new school.

Dinner with the MacRaes proved to be even more interesting than Dave had expected. He'd known much of his life that Jason was a character, an original, but now that he saw him together with his wife, he realized Vicky was hardly less a character than her husband. They shared a lot of viewpoints and interests despite the large gap in ages, and they seemed like the perfect fit to him.

He learned that, despite the age difference, they had been pretty good friends for much of their lives. Vicky's parents and Jason lived back yard to back yard with each other, and Jason had helped to keep an eye on her when she was younger than Cameron. Time passed, Jason got married, and he and his wife had a kid -- but soon after Duane was born, his wife decided she couldn't hack parenthood, and vanished, never to be seen again. A few years later, needing a mother's influence for Duane, Jason married again. This marriage was considerably happier but ended early when his wife died of leukemia. Not wanting yet another mother to be taken away from his son, Jason had pretty much taken on the role of raising his son himself -- with some help from Vicky and her mother. Vicky was eight years older than Duane and had been a help with babysitting and the like.

Then, Vicky grew up, graduated, had an unhappy college experience and an even unhappier marriage that ended in a nasty divorce. She moved back home, to discover Jason was living alone and Duane was off in college, and the friendship picked up where it left off. They got to be such good, close friends that everyone around them thought they'd be better off just getting married and being honest about it -- and finally, they did.

If Dave thought Shae or Eve or others he could name were in an odd position for a Bradford kid, they had nothing on Duane -- he was now a raft guide in the Grand Canyon and from all reports was having the experience of a lifetime.

Jason and Vicky were full of stories, and Dave enjoyed hearing them -- they were different than he had been hearing from Shae and Emily and put a different view on things. It wasn't until the evening that Dave found out something about Emily that floored him:

Right in the middle of a long, involved story about how she and Jason had decided to get married and went through with it, Vicky dropped a line, "Well, Emily just about stunk up her panties when I asked her to marry us . . ."

"Wait a minute!" Dave broke in. "You had Emily marry you?"

"Why not?" Vicky grinned. "She is the mayor; it's one of the things mayors do."

"Did I just hear you say that Emily . . . is the mayor? Of Bradford?"

"Yeah," Vicky grinned. "It's been what? Three years next month, I guess. People have gotten used to it; city council meetings go a lot more smoothly now, too, from what I hear."

"How did this happen?"

Vicky shrugged. "It goes back to the tenth class reunion. Emily was kind of bummed out after it was over. There were all those kids who had all done different and sometimes unique things, like Shae and Avalon, like Eve, well, like Jennlynn in spades. She was feeling left out, just being a plain mommy with no college who worked at the Spee-D-Mart. Right about then a guy running for council up and died. She decided to run for the seat as a write-in. She won easily because everybody in town knows her from working at the Spee-D-Mart and likes her. Then, the next year when council got together to vote for mayor, someone suggested Emily, not because of her seniority but because naming her mayor would show they were open to younger people and women joining the process. She's been elected every year since, so I guess they like her holding the job. I mean, not that it pays anything, and she doesn't get to do much but pound the gavel."

"Good grief," Dave shook his head. "It's the first I've heard about it."

"I guess it never came up," Vicky shrugged.

"They'd never believe this back at Dunlap and Fyre," he shook his head. "I moved to a town where our woman mayor runs a convenience store and rides a Harley."

All too soon, he had to be getting the boys ready for bed, and Shae would be calling to tell them a bedtime story, so Dave reluctantly bid goodbye. He and the boys walked home through the gathering evening. The leaves on the trees were still green, although looking aged, and starting to turn here and there. In a few days color season would be in full force, he knew, with winter not far behind. Even though he'd only been back a couple days, Dave was beginning to feel comfortable with being back in Bradford.

This evening had been a case in point. Dave could not have said the last time he and Julie had been to dinner in a friend's house, but it had been years, maybe before the boys were born. Oh, they might get together for dinner with someone at a restaurant, but even that was relatively rare. In spite of all the people in New York, and all the people they worked with, they had tended to stay pretty isolated and by themselves. Here, Dave was two for two in eating dinner out, and he hadn't even had a meal with just his mother and the boys yet.

Yes, things were different from New York. Maybe it was the Bradford kid in him, but somehow it seemed like this was the way things were supposed to be.

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