Summer sunlight glinted off the surface of the Wheeler’s lake. Along the shore, tables and chairs stood ready and bright decorations hung from the trees. Honey twitched a tablecloth into place and stood back to check the effect.
“It looks great, Mom,” her fifteen-year-old daughter Alyssa told her.
Honey smiled. “I think so, too. Thanks for your help. And thanks for making the banner.”
Above the tables hung a white fabric sign that read ‘25 Years of BWGs’ in what appeared to be red cross stitch, but was actually red paint. Alyssa had painted each individual stitch, along with a little shadow, to make it look dimensional. Honey thought it looked amazing.
“Looking good,” Mart greeted, as he arrived on the scene carrying a large basket of food. “Brian just sent me a message to say he’ll be a little late, but I think Jim and Trixie are here now.”
“Well, why aren’t you there to welcome them?” his wife asked, turning to hurry off and greet them herself.
“I’m pretty sure they know the way here. And I left Zach there to tell them where we are,” he called after her, as she almost ran to meet her best friend and brother and their family.
Minutes later, she was engulfed in a hug.
“Honey! Finally!”
“Oh, Trixie, it’s so good to see you.” She disentangled herself to hug the rest of the family, too. “Jim, hello. Are you too big for hugs, Nick? Good to see you. And you, too, Cody. And Mia! You’ve grown so much since I saw you. It’s been far too long. Now, what do you need help carrying?”
Before anyone could answer, another car pulled in beside them.
“Patrick!” one of the boys yelled.
From the newly-arrived car emerged Dan and Di, along with their son and daughter, leading to another round of joyous greetings.
“I thought we were picnicking at the lake,” Dan pointed out, after a few minutes of everyone talking at once. “Come on, everyone. Grab something to carry and let’s move.”
“Thank you, Dan.” Honey smiled at him. “I should have been saying that, but it’s just so good to see everyone that I almost forgot.”
He nodded. “We’re really glad you thought of this. And make sure you thank your parents for all of us for letting us have our party here.”
“It’s their pleasure.” She laughed. “Well, it would be, except they’re actually in Paris right now, so they’re not here to be disturbed by us.”
They took the rear of the procession, with the boys racing ahead at the front.
“Twenty-five years, hey?” Dan commented, as they walked. “Who’d have thought we’d all still be friends now, after some of the things that happened in between.”
Honey nodded. “But they’re mostly a long time ago, now. The last few years have been beautifully peaceful, for the most part, which makes me just so happy.”
“I guess you’ve got a surprise or two up your sleeve?”
She smiled. “Maybe. Or maybe I’ve just planned a relaxing afternoon by the lake for us all, just like old times, except that we’ve all got kids now, and one of mine is older than I was when we started.”
“I wouldn’t go back to being that age if you paid me a million dollars,” Dan commented, just as the lake came into view. “But I’m happy to be here today and to remember that I survived it.”
He moved away from her in order to greet Mart.
“The kids can swim while we’re waiting for Brian, Christine and BJ,” Honey suggested, when absolutely everyone had greeted everyone else. “And any adults who want to swim, of course.”
The four boys whooped with joy and raced off to get changed. Meanwhile, the two smaller girls were huddled together, deep in conversation and did not appear to have noticed anything else.
“Do you want to swim, Eva?” Di called to her daughter.
“No, thank you.”
Di and Trixie exchanged a look.
“We’d better keep an eye on them; they’re up to something.”
Di nodded. “Definitely.”
Honey let out a contented sigh. “I’m so glad they all get on so well together.”
“It’s just a pity that there’s no one the same age as Alyssa.” Trixie nodded in the direction of her niece, who was talking with the men.
Honey giggled. “It’s a bit late to be regretting that. If you’d wanted her to have a companion, you should have started on that a lot earlier.”
“I wasn’t volunteering,” Trixie replied. “And at the time, having a baby was the last thing on my to-do list. No, wait. It wasn’t on the list at all. At least, not for the immediate future. Oh, you know what I mean.”
“And don’t look at me. I wasn’t even seeing Dan, when you got pregnant with Alyssa.” Diana turned her eyes in her husband’s direction. “In fact, I don’t think it had even crossed my mind, at that stage, that he might be the one.”
Trixie looked over that way, too, a speculative look in her eyes. “Do you think that you ever would have, if what happened didn’t happen?”
Di laughed. “Do you mean, if we hadn’t bumped into each other in the dark and each thought the other was our current significant other?”
“I never really understood how that could have happened,” Honey commented. “I mean, I know it must have been really, really dark, but I’ve never quite got how you could have mistaken Dan for… what was his name? I keep wanting to call him Herman, but I know that’s not right.”
“Dexter,” Di supplied.
“How is Herman anything like Dexter?” Trixie wondered.
“I don’t know. It just is, somehow.” Honey waved the matter away. “Anyway, I can’t understand how Di mistook Dan for Dexter and Dan mistook Di for Sophie–”
“So, you remember Sophie’s name, but you don’t remember Dexter!”
Trixie laughed. “Di, you dated him for about five minutes. Dan was with Sophie for nearly eighteen months.”
“It was nearly six weeks!”
“After fifteen years, it’s about the same,” Trixie answered. “And sorry, but he was pretty forgettable.”
“But anyway,” Honey continued, “I don’t understand how they could each mistake the other for someone else and decide to start kissing, without saying anything first, or… I don’t know… feeling around a bit.”
Trixie and Di both hooted with laughter.
“Feeling around a bit?” Trixie asked. “That sounds a lot more extreme than just a kiss.”
“It was a party game,” Di reminded her. “You were supposed to find your partner and kiss them, without being able to see them, and you weren’t allowed to talk. I didn’t even know that Dan and Sophie were at the party.”
“You knew it after you kissed him.”
“Did I ever!”
“But you never answered my question. Would you have ever thought of him that way, without that incident?”
Di looked over to Dan once more. “Eventually, I think. But that kiss sped things up. A lot.”
Honey nodded. “I think you would have, too. And it might not have taken as long as you think it might have, because things were already very shaky between Dan and Sophie, and you had…”
“Gone through a lot of boyfriends in the few months leading up to that?”
“I wouldn’t have said it that way.”
“No, but when my daughter… Oh, no. Where are the girls?” Di asked. “I forgot to keep an eye on them.”
“So did I,” Trixie answered, jumping up and beginning to search. “They’re not in the boat house.”
“I don’t think they’re in the water,” Di added.
“Here they are!” Honey called. “Where have you been, girls? I thought we’d asked you not to wander away.”
“Not far,” Mia answered. “Just over there a bit.”
“Well, please stay where we can see you, from now on,” Honey urged them. “Your mothers were worried.”
“Sorry,” the two chorused and Honey smiled at them.
She, Trixie and Di settled back in their seats.
“As much as I hate it that they don’t see each other often, I think it’s probably good that they don’t see each other often,” Trixie commented. “They cause entirely too much trouble.”
“And who knows what they’ve been up to,” Di added.
Trixie nodded. “I’m sure we’ll find out in good time.”
Brian’s family arrived soon after that, making the gathering complete. He and his wife Christine, the most newly-married of the group, had a three-year-old son they had named Xavier but who was mostly known as BJ – for Brian Junior, because he was so like his Dad. They were still hoping he’d grow into his own name.
“Lunch!” Honey called, once the last set of greetings was complete. “Time to get dried off, boys!”
The four boys splashed their way to shore, but soon cried out in outrage.
“Where are our TOWELS?” Zach bellowed at the top of his lungs. “They were right THERE and now they’re NOT.”
“Well, I think we have part of the answer to our question about the girls,” Trixie observed, ignoring her sons’ outraged yelling, as they joined in with their cousin. “Next up, where did they put them?”
Honey’s eyes narrowed. “Somewhere in that direction. I’ll go and look. In the meantime, you calm them down.”
“You can swim for another couple of minutes while we sort this out,” Trixie told the boys. “Don’t look at me like that. I’ve just given you a treat.”
“But I’m hungry,” her older son Nick complained.
“A couple of minutes won’t hurt you. Now get back in that water and have fun.”
“With that tone of voice, you sound like you’re sending him to his room,” Brian commented, his eyes shining with amusement. “But they’re obedient, at least,” he added, as Nick returned to the water with an almighty splash.
“I’m not sure for how long,” Trixie answered. “But I’ll take what I can get.”
Honey appeared on the path a minute or two later and beckoned to Trixie.
“I can’t find them anywhere,” she explained, when Trixie got close enough. “What do you think? Do we try asking the girls where they hid them, or do I just go to the house and get more towels?”
Trixie thought for a moment. “Did you check the old clubhouse?”
Honey shook her head. “They couldn’t have gone that far, could they?”
“They could, if they ran all the way, both ways,” Trixie replied. “You stay here and I’ll run down there and check.”
Honey nodded and watched as Trixie did just that. She returned a few minutes later, towels held triumphantly above her head.
“And look what else I found,” she added, holding out something small.
“Right after I get those boys out of the lake,” Honey promised, taking the towels. “Okay! Lunch, attempt two.”
The boys cheered and splashed out of the lake to claim their towels.
“Just look what I found while I was in the clubhouse,” Honey told her friends, holding out her hand. “It was down on the floor and the light just kind of caught it.”
Di gasped. “I’d wondered where that went!”
She picked up the pink, heart-shaped charm and ran her fingers over the raised lettering, which said ‘My Valentine’.
“Did Daddy give that to you when you were young?” her daughter Eva asked.
Di shook her head. “No, sweetie. I was very young when I got this.”
“Didn’t you know Daddy yet, back then?” Eva persisted.
“I knew him, but he was just my friend,” Di explained. “But it’s time for lunch, so we can’t go into that right now.”
“Even if I didn’t know where that had come from, I’d know it wasn’t from you,” Trixie told Dan, as they each helped themselves from the vast spread. “Not your style.”
“Thanks. I think.”
“There’s more than one way to be romantic, I suppose,” Brian’s wife Christine suggested. “It doesn’t always have to be roses and love letters.”
“Oh, that reminds me of something that happened once – and no, this wasn’t Dan’s style, either..” Honey smiled. “We were travelling, just us three girls, and the day after we got to a particular hotel there was a letter, which had been following us for a week or more, and when we opened it…”
Trixie groaned. “I wished that the floor could swallow me.”
“It wasn’t even your letter!”
“Well, I was embarrassed in sympathy,” Trixie explained.
“What was in this letter?” Mart wondered. “Or shouldn’t I ask?”
Honey glanced at Di, who grimaced and ushered Eva out of hearing of the conversation.
“Let’s just say that Di had gained an admirer, but not the sort of admirer that she would ever in a million years consider even having a conversation with, let alone anything else.” She giggled, remembering. “He’d enclosed a picture of himself holding out a rose – which is why roses and love letters reminded me of this, incidentally – in case she didn’t remember him.”
Trixie shuddered. “We remembered him just fine. We’d spent days avoiding him. And then he wanted Di to meet him somewhere… in Rome, I think.”
“That sounds like a story from your graduation trip,” Brian commented. “You did spend time in Italy, didn’t you? Or you imagined you did, at least. I’m not sure it would have mattered to you, so long as it was exciting.”
Trixie laughed. “Probably. But we really did go there. I thought I was living out Lucy Radcliffe’s Rendezvous in Rome.”
“You sent me a postcard of the Colosseum with a scribbled note on the back that said something like ‘The perfect place to meet a secret agent’,” Mart recalled. His expression shifted. “And when you all came home, Di had brought me a floaty pen with three coins in it and a generic picture of a fountain as a souvenir.”
“I thought you’d like it.” She shrugged. “Or maybe I just liked it.”
“It was the spiritual twin of that pink heart,” Brian commented, smiling.
Di’s eyes widened. “You know, you’re absolutely right.”
Brian looked away, apparently into the past. “That trip changed a lot of things. I remember that being a very difficult time for the group.”
“It was,” Trixie agreed. “If you’d asked me then, I’d have probably said it was completely impossible that we’d all be friends still now. I thought we were splintering into a thousand pieces and nothing could put us back together.”
Mart nodded. “But that infuriating adage about time healing all wounds turned out to be true, in our case, of which I have always been glad.”
“So have we all,” Di agreed. “At the time, I was horrified at what I’d done, because I thought that breaking up with Mart meant that I’d broken up the Bob-Whites, but looking back, I think it made us stronger.”
“There were things that belonged to our teenage years that needed to be left behind.” Brian glanced at Honey. “There was growing that we all needed to do.”
Honey smiled back at him. “Some of it hurt at the time, but I agree that we’re all better off for those experiences.” She looked around the group and made a judgement. Raising her voice to include the kids, she said, “Last call on seconds, or thirds, or sevenths, before I put lunch away.”
The adults all stayed where they were and of the kids only the ever-hungry pre-teen boys took anything else from the table. Honey then began the task of packing up the leftovers.
“Does this all need to be carried back to the house?” Trixie asked, lending a hand next to her.
Honey shook her head. “Mart will do it. He’s got something to do up there anyway.”
“Does Mart agree with this plan?” Trixie wondered.
“Yes, Mart certainly agrees with the plan,” he told her, “on account of knowing what it is that I’m supposed to do when I get back to the house.”
“In that case, I bow to your superior knowledge,” she answered with a grin.
Mart pretended to stagger in place. “Do my ears deceive me? Does my sister finally – finally – accept that I know things that she does not?”
Trixie rolled her eyes and handed him a plastic container. “Don’t get too carried away. I’m sure I’ll know all about your secret mission in no time at all, and then we’ll be even.”
Mart shook his head. “Not even. I still know a multitude of things, of which you have not dreamed.”
“So? I know a lot of things that you don’t.”
“Such as?”
She cast around for an example. “Such as what happened with Di and a cranberry scented candle that made her hate them. And the difference between a raccoon’s footprint and a skunk’s – don’t tell me that you know that, too, because I know that you don’t. Oh, and the place where Jim hides things, that he thinks I don’t know about. Also, the number of steps–”
Mart held up a hand to stop her. “I didn’t ask you to write an entire essay.”
His sister laughed. “I think I probably could. It’s amazing, the number of things I know, which you don’t. Which is why I don’t need to feel inferior any more.”
He nodded. “I am glad of that. But now, I do believe that I have an important errand to run.”
When Mart returned, he carried a couple of containers of ice cream.
“Dessert is served,” he announced, as he placed them ceremoniously on the table. “Beside the delectable treats already before you, we have two kinds of ice cream: vanilla and peppermint. Who would like some?”
Predictably, he was immediately surrounded by kids.
Brian side-stepped them and helped himself from the cheese platter. Moments later, he dropped his cracker and intercepted an incoming object, being held aloft by his own son.
“What’s that you’ve got there?” he asked, in a calm voice but while manoeuvring the boy away from the food. “And where did it come from?”
“Patrick found it; it’s amazing,” BJ declared. “Everyone! Look!”
He made another lunge for the table.
“You’re going to put that WHERE?” Mart demanded, making the little boy jump back in surprise.
“Easy,” Brian warned his brother.
Mart made a gesture with the spoon he was using to scoop ice cream. “It looks like it came out of the lake. It’s covered in mud. And he wants to put it between the cupcakes and the cookies.”
“I think Uncle Mart means that you shouldn’t put it on the table,” Brian explained to his son. “How about if we find somewhere else for it?”
“But it’s amazing and everyone should look at it,” BJ insisted.
“Yes, we can all look at it after dessert,” Brian explained. “Let’s put it over here for now. And then you can clean your hands and have something to eat.”
“It looked like a rock. From the bottom of the lake,” Di commented, when he came back. “Boys! I’ll never understand them.”
Brian shrugged. “It was an interesting rock. And I understand it was your son who gave it to him.”
“That figures.” She shook her head and changed the subject. “The cupcakes look fabulous, Honey. Did you make them?”
Honey nodded. “Try one. It’s a new recipe and I think it’s a winner.” She waited while Di delicately peeled off the paper and took a bite. “What do you think?”
“Mmm,” Di moaned. “I think I’m in love.”
“That’s you put in your place, Mangan,” Mart quipped.
Dan shrugged. “Am I supposed to care? If I know anything about it, Honey will give Di the recipe, and then I’ll have cupcakes, too.”
Honey nodded. “It’s true. I’d already bought Di a copy of the cookbook before I even tried these, because everything else I’ve tried in that book has been good.”
“See?”
“You’ve got to admit, Mart, that he’s got a good point,” Brian commented, as he finally reclaimed his cheese and cracker.
“I admit nothing.” Mart looked around the group. “Anyone else for ice cream? You can help yourselves. But don’t leave it too long, or it will melt.”
He settled into a chair and turned his back on the tubs, to better talk to his sister. But only a few moments later, her attention moved away from him to something happening behind his back.
“Mia! Hold on a minute,” Trixie told her daughter, whose arm was disappearing into the nearly-empty peppermint ice cream tub. “You need to use a spoon, not a cookie.”
“But why do I have to do it that way?” Mia whined. “It’s not like anyone else it going to eat it.”
Trixie frowned. “Because it’s rude to do it the other way.”
“Yes, but why is it rude?” Mia demanded.
“Because Aunt Alicia said so,” her mother answered.
Mart snorted. “And you always did things the way Aunt Alicia said, when you were her age.”
“Mart!”
“What?” He lowered his voice to a whisper. “She won’t understand sarcasm for at least two more years. I’m not undermining your authority at all.”
“It’s funny,” Dan put in, changing the subject slightly, “but until I met her at Mart and Honey’s wedding, I didn’t really believe your Aunt Alicia was real. And even then, I couldn’t believe she was like the way Trixie used to talk about her.”
“Oh, believe me, she was.” Trixie rolled her eyes. “When I was twenty, she tried to teach me how to embroider tablecloths. Tablecloths! She said I’d need them when I got married, which she expected to be any minute, apparently.”
“And then I got married before you did, and not for a few years,” Honey recalled.
“Well, she didn’t need to teach you how to embroider. You could have taught her.”
“That’s not right! I learned lots of things from Aunt Alicia, including some new embroidery stitches.”
“And I never did need embroidered tablecloths,” Trixie finished, “so it’s just as well that she didn’t succeed in teaching me. It would have been a waste of everyone’s time.”
“Is this when you wanted me to take the kids?” Christine asked, some time later, as Honey made a half-hearted attempt to tidy up the scant remains of dessert.
Honey glanced at the time. “Only if you don’t mind, because really, it will be okay, either way, only–”
“It’s perfectly okay, Honey. I don’t mind at all,” she replied, smiling. “I think it’s a wonderful idea for you to have some time together and I’m more than happy to do my part to make it happen.”
“I’ll help keep an eye on them all,” Alyssa promised.
Brian’s wife picked up their son and helped herd all the rest of the kids away. A silence fell as their voices faded into the distance.
“When was the last time it was just the seven of us, and all seven of us?” Mart wondered. “It must be years; over a decade, I’d think. Before Alyssa was born, most likely.”
“Probably,” his sister agreed. “Because by the time she was old enough to not be with you, there were other kids as well.”
“And I’ve been absent far too often,” Brian added.
“You were doing important things,” Honey told him. “Or facing troubles of your own. And we’re not supposed to be apportioning blame.”
He shook his head. “I was just reflecting on the last twenty-five years of my life. There will always be things that could be improved, and some of them are clamouring for my attention right now.”
Di looked around and caught all their eyes. “We’re here now; we all have good lives now; we don’t need to regret things that are in the past, because we don’t know what would be different now, if those things were different then.”
“Very true,” Brian replied. “So, what did you have in mind for this time, Honey?”
She pulled a basket out from under one of the tables and dropped it in her husband’s lap.
“Just hold those, for the moment,” she told him, then turned to look around the group. “I’m so glad that we could all be here to celebrate this milestone. And I’m just so grateful to have each of you in my life.”
“We’re all grateful,” Trixie added. “I don’t think I ever thanked you for suggesting we have a club. It’s been the best decision of my entire life, because it led on to lots of other important things, like my family.”
Di nodded. “It led on to so many good things.”
“Yes. And so I thought I would do something that reminded us of those sorts of things.”
“Hence these,” Mart deduced.
“You can probably hand them out, now,” Honey told him. “There should be names on them. But don’t open them just yet, okay?”
Mart took the basket and started digging through it to find the right one for each recipient. He had gotten about halfway around the circle when Honey called a halt.
“That can’t possibly be right.” She crossed to Jim and gently took the gift from his hand. “What have I done wrong? This one is the wrong shape.” She looked around, then poked through the basket until she found what she was looking for. “Sorry, Jim. This one is for you. And this other one is for Trixie.”
When everyone held a gift, Honey began to explain.
“Once we actually decided that we were going to meet today, I started thinking about how best to commemorate the best things about these last twenty-five years and I thought that this was a good opportunity to give you each a little reminder of what has come before.”
“Like Mart’s account for how many fines he had to pay into the Bob-White treasury for spilling food on his jacket?” Dan asked.
Mart shrugged. “For some mysterious reason, those records are no longer available.”
“You mean, for the reason that you made sure they were destroyed?” Trixie answered. “That’s not very mysterious.”
“I wasn’t trying to remind us of the bad things,” Honey clarified. “I was actually aiming for us to remember the good times, mostly.”
“So, can I open this and find out what it is?” Trixie asked, while surreptitiously prodding it through the paper.
Honey nodded and her best friend tore into the paper. The others followed suit, at various speeds. Before half of them had finished, Trixie held up her gift with a laugh of delight. A small frame held a cross-stitch of a bevy of bob-whites, who somehow managed to display the characters of those present. Trixie’s own bird held a magnifying glass.
“Did you make this, Honey?” she asked, displaying it for all of them to see. “It’s adorable.”
“So is mine,” Di echoed. Hers was similar to Trixie’s, but with the Diana-bird posing in centre stage.
“Yes, I made them,” Honey admitted. “I saw the pattern, which already had exactly seven bob-whites, and it didn’t take a lot to alter it to suit. But I did feel a bit worried when Trixie started complaining earlier about embroidery.”
“You can embroider whatever you want,” her friend told her. “I can appreciate your work; I just don’t want to do it myself.”
“These are great, too,” Dan commented, holding up a metal bottle-opener with a bob-white on the handle. His had a pair of dark sunglasses and looked cool.
“You can thank Alyssa for it later,” Mart told him. “They started life as misshapen chickens and she repainted them to be us. Mine has a dictionary.”
“Is this a pruning saw on mine?” Brian asked. “And Jim’s has a hammer, I think.”
“Well, those are things you used, a time or two,” Dan pointed out. “And I know exactly where I’m going to keep this. It’s a great keepsake, Honey, and useful, too.”
“I’m glad you fixed the problem with the labels before we opened them,” Jim quipped, while looking at his wife’s gift. “It’s pretty neat, but I’m not sure how I would have felt about embroidery when the other men got bottle-openers.”
“Yes, I’m glad too,” Honey answered. She looked around the group. “I’ve loved being a Bob-White these twenty-five years. Thank you all so much for being Bob-Whites with me.”
“The feeling is so mutual,” Trixie answered, pulling her into a hug. “It was your best suggestion, ever.”
Author’s notes: A big thank you to Mary N./Dianafan, for editing. Your help is very much appreciated!
This story was written for challenge 1 of CWE 29: Twenty-five Years of Jix, and meets the harder set of rules — ten elements from ten different old CWPs, as opposed to five set elements. But choosing just ten elements was a bit too difficult for me, so there are quite a few more than ten. So, the story contains the following elements (original challenge plus details in parentheses): Mention or appearance of secondary character from the books (CWP1.1, Aunt Alicia), special occasion (1.2, 25th anniversary of the formation of the BWGs), dairy product (1.3, cheese), a kiss by mistake (1.4, Di and Dan in the dark), a seecrud (1.5), stolen towels (1.6), cookbook (1.7), something hidden in the gatehouse (1.8), holiday scented candle (1.9), cupcake (1.10), the phrase "You're going to put that WHERE?" (1.11), sending a postcard (1.12), new recipe (2.1), essay (2.2), mislabeled gifts (2.3), finding a sweet memento from someone's past (2.4), historical edifice etc. (2.5, the Colosseum), unwanted piece of mail (2.6), relatives you don't see often (2.7), floaty pens (2.8), peppermint ice cream (2.9), the phrase "Because [so-and-so] said so" (2.10), afternoon at the Wheeler lake (2.11), a last chance (2.12), mention of a Lucy Radcliffe book, canon or own creation (Anniversary 1, Rendezvous in Rome, which I made up).
I originally intended to post this during the 25th Jixanny (happy belated birthday, Jix!), but quite a lot of RL stuff got in the way and I forgot all about it. That said, CWE#29 is intended to stretch out the birthday celebrations to the whole year, so I am totally not late (my story and I'm sticking to it).
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