Friends and Relations

[titusnowl]

cupiecake: I want to see a conversation between Dan and Jimbo's sister, the cool one.
like "NO SRSLY Y?" hahaha


Dan got dragged to a family picnic that spring, because Jim said he didn't get enough sun. Dan said Jim got enough for both of them - how the hell had he kept his brick-red roughneck's tan through almost two years of running a detective business out of a fourth-story office in the 24-hour twilight of the downtown Dallas canyons? - but he knew he was fighting a losing battle, and anyway, going would mean he'd get to eat some of Mrs. Dalton's biscuits, which was worth any amount of fuss.

It wasn't the first time he'd met the family, but it had been a long while; he remembered a swarm of knee-high youngsters who seemed to assume he was just another uncle, and a passel of sisters one of whom had tried to pull him, and the patriarch a gentle red-headed giant with a slow drawling voice that could snap like a whip when one of the kid stepped out of line. Now the youngsters were mostly getting into their teens, the sisters were all married, the only ones trying moves on him were Jim and his oldest niece - Geraldine; he'd met her before, as she was in Dallas for college these days - and Mr. Dalton's hair had gone grey, although he was still so tall that it was almost ludicrous to think Jim was his.

It was still noisy as a riot, and Dan had removed himself, a slice of watermelon and a glass of lemonade to the outskirts of the gathering as soon as it seemed decent. He sat under a shade-tree and watched as Jim tried to organize the kids into baseball teams to have a proper game - there was enough of them, that was for sure.

Jim wasn't any bigger than half of them, and he didn't act any older either. His explanation of the rules of the game included the importance of arguing with the umpire as much as possible, and the demonstration of the concept devolved into a dirt-kicking contest, a wrestling match, and a let's-smother-Uncle-Jimbo dogpile, successively, within minutes.

Dan wondered idly whether he ought to wade in and sort through the couple dozen stacked bodies. His reverie was interrupted by a sudden shadow and a blue-skirted presence at his side. He looked up, squinting into the sun.

"If you want a kid so bad, you can have one of mine," the presence said, then lowered itself down to sit tidily by his side. A dark-haired woman not too many years his senior, with Jim's angular face and the blue eyes that were even more a part of the family legacy than the not-quite-ubiquitous red hair. Most of the sisters Dan couldn't have told apart if they were wearing name tags, but he recognized this one as -

"Rosie," she said with a smile.

"I was getting there," Dan protested.

"Honestly I wouldn't blame you for not knowing me from Adam. Well, at least not from Eve anyway. It ought to be pretty obvious I'm not Adam, I hope." She flashed a very Jim-like grin. "I get my own twins mixed up if I'm not careful."

"Those are the ones Jim lost once, right?"

"He told me he only lost one of them. There something I ought to know?" she asked playfully. "I was half-serious with that crack about the kids, you know. I think my Jim acts more like a grown-up than yours, and he's only seven."

"Oh, he's mine now, is he?" Dan raised an eyebrow.

"I should hope he is. He needs somebody to look after him." They sat and watched the game for a few minutes, while Dan tried to sort out what to say. Finally Rosie broke the silence again. "Dad isn't looking, is he? Quick, lend me a smoke." Dan obliged, fishing out his cigarettes and lighter and passing them over. Rosie fired up and took a deep, thankful draw. "36 years old," she complained as she handed them back, "and I still can't smoke in front of my father. If you catch him looking over here, make like it's yours."

Dan had to laugh. "You're an awful lot like Jim."

"I reckon I am," she said. "We'd be like twins ourselves except for that whole six-years-apart thing. We're the official family troublemakers."

Out on the field Jim carefully slow-pitched to the littlest nephew, who managed to bunt it straight back to him; he made a big show of fumbling the catch as the boy's stubby legs propelled him around the diamond. "Oh boy, a home run!"

Everyone cheered except Jim's team's nine-year-old outfielders, who decided to come play kick-dirt-at-the-umpire again, only by "umpire" they meant "pitcher" and by "kick dirt at" they meant "kick at the shins of."

Dan looked away from the drama, laughing, and caught Rosie eyeing him significantly. "He tells me everything, you know," she said. "I was the only one who knew where he was when he disappeared in Tijuana after college, and when he went to Havana fall before last - "

"He went to Havana?"

"Oops. Shut my mouth for me, will ya?" Rosie looked up at the tree, faking innocence, then looked back. "And I'm the only one who knows about you."

"I don't know what you're talking about," Dan said automatically.

"Shut up," she replied amiably. "I obviously don't give a damn. I'm not gonna call the vice squad on you. I think it's nice - for him, anyway. Like I said, he needs looking after. I don't doubt but he'd be dead in a ditch years ago if it weren't for you. What I don't get is what's in it for you. Maybe I'm just prejudiced from years of getting my pigtails yanked, but my baby brother is no prize."

Dan snorted and shook his head. "Well, what do you see in your husband?"

"He's funny," she said without hesitation, "and I think he's dead handsome, and he's smart and strong and he makes good coffee."

"Well, what's to stop me saying the same of Jim?"

"Cal doesn't sleep around on me." She looked sharply at Jim, who was currently trying to wrest the bat out of the hands of his centerfielder without getting his face broken. "Besides, everybody knows Jim's coffee tastes like paint stripper."

"Grease cutter," Dan corrected her. "And I got to say you're a hell of a confidante." He lit a second cigarette, smoked it himself until Mr. Dalton looked away, and handed it to Rosie. "You say you approve, and then try to convince me not to approve myself?"

"I'm not trying to convince anybody of anything. I'm genuinely curious. I mean, I can kind of see how he picks up all his girls - he's cute, I guess, if you like 'em that way, and he can be a charmer for as much as fifteen minutes on end when he feels like it - but you two've been together off'n'on for what, ten years now? And with him running off and sleeping around and being generally heedless... honestly, what's so great about it?"

Dan contemplated this while Rosie smoked her cigarette and Jim took his turn at bat. Dan and Rosie started speaking at the same time. "Could be 'cause he's hung like a - "

They both stopped, looked at each other, and cracked up. Rosie fell over onto her back, nearly crying. Dan was, and this is the only word for it, hooting.

Jim tramped over from the ballgame, chewing on a blade of grass and looking like he thought he'd slept through Christmas and missed all the fun. "You two are starting something," he said accusingly.

"Are you struck out already?" Dan asked, when he could breathe again. "You suck at baseball, Jim. You well and truly do."

"I'll suck at something else," he said, and Rosie said it at the same time, and then all three of them were hooting.

And then Jim crawled away and crawled back with more lemonade and biscuits for everybody, and Rosie caught the way he watched Dan watching the kids play tag, and she got it.

She still offered to let them take one of her kids with them when they left.