Visitors and Friends

The spirit of the house is moving.  It keeps me up all hours.  It also requires lots of help from noisy, talkative story-telling men.

Yesterday, I heard from one of them a new phrase:  "Never get high on your own stash." (I don't believe I'll ever have a need that advice, but I'm a sucker for new phrases.)

Then, another came to clean up the cans and debris left over from flooring, a tattooed-all-over big guy who's as good a craftsman as I've ever met and usually runs between three and four hours late.

It was dark by then, and he brought his 7-year-old twins and his wife to help.  As the story unfolded, I learned that not only did he have four children when he married Second Wife, but so did she.

That's 8, I figured in my rudimentary math--but no, it's actually ten.

When the twins were born, the mother of their father refused to let them go to social services when their mother was returned to prison on a drug offense and their father, her son, "didn't want them." So as soon as those two-pound baby boys got big enough to live outside NICU, Grandma took them home to raise.  But the floor man and second wife wound up keeping them most of the time, along with Grandma down the street, and they consider them their two youngest sons.

Papa had his boys picking up trash while I got acquainted with his wife in the kitchen.

"What happened to their birth mother?" I asked.

"Well, she'd already had nine babies and give them all away," Second Wife said.  "They visit with her and their real daddy sometime, but they always call us and say 'Come get us, we don't like it over here' so we always do."

"But doesn't their mama want them back now that she's out?" I asked.  (And their real daddy who's now her boyfriend again? I wondered)

"I'm mama now," she said.  "She had nine other babies before them, all with different men, and give them all away.  She don't hardly know these boys."  By then, the boys had come inside and were listening to the story they know by heart.

"Eleven babies?" I asked.

"Yeah," one of the twins said, getting into the story he's heard often enough to know verbatim.  "And she was only 39 by then."

So these two little guys walked around my house and noticed everything, especially things had been made by hand.  One asked me to tell him how to make paper mosaics, and I did.

"They aren't identical," the mom told me, pointing to the thin one.  "This one we call crazy eyes cause he's always doing crazy things with his eyes, like rolling one one way and one the other."

"And this one," she said, pointing to the chubby tummy of the other one, "This one we call gordo cause he's, well, healthier than the other one."

Then my phone rang and I watched the four of them getting into their big windowless, dented-all-over primer-painted van and drive away, on their way to Floresville at that hour to install some floors.

Now it's Sunday morning and the house is quiet.  Thanks to Edward, the windows are washed, the blinds clean, pictures hung, new rug unrolled and placed under the table--all extras he tacked on while I was out running errands, "because it's Christmas and we're friends."  Which we are.