FOUR AND A HALF YEARS LATER

"Know anything about Sasha's boyfriend? Has your dad met him?"

Tom shook his head. "They're staying there tonight and through dinner tomorrow, then going back up to school. I guess he must be somebody she met at school. Another vet school student, probably." He laughed. "Wonder if she found a guy who could beat her in arm wrestling. I'm not sure I could do it."

Wendy shook her head wonderingly. "Hard to think how she found time to get involved with a boy. Didn't you say she never even went on a date, all through high school?"

"Of course I wasn't living with her then, but Dad mentioned that once. I know he doesn't know anything about this guy. You talked to her on the phone. What'd she say then?"

Wendy shrugged and smiled. "She was being real coy. All she said was 'I've got somebody special I want you to meet. Okay if we come by for dinner?' " She giggled. "I was thinking she sounded like me when I called Daddy to see if I could bring you over."

Tom grinned. "What, you said I was 'somebody special'?"

Wendy rolled her eyes. "Yeah, what was I thinking?" She slipped her arm around Tom's waist and kissed him.

She glanced through the kitchen towards the "dining room" of the new wing of the house, in which the older kids were finishing their dinner one by one and departing, either to play in the yard or watch TV in one of the two new bedrooms. Tom's sister Donna, who had been a house slave in charge of taking care of the kids since turning eighteen two years ago, picked up the older kids' plates while her litter-mate and bed partner Dierdre was getting the five two-year-olds, Cayla, Charlotte, Cammie, Cori, and Crystal, settled down in the kitchen at a smaller table for their own dinner. Gail, wiping her brow while humming a tune, had shifted to working on the dinner for Tom, Wendy, and the evening's two guests.

At the sound of a car scraping the gravel along the edge of the street in front of the house, Wendy moved to the window. "Yeah, that's Sasha's car." With savings from various part-time jobs as an undergraduate, Sasha had managed to scrape up enough funds to purchase a battered but serviceable auto, from which she was now emerging, as the passenger door was also opening. Wendy leaned towards the window for a better look, and suddenly put her hands to her mouth and squeaked, then giggled. "Oh, not exactly what I was expecting." Tom approached the window, but Wendy waved him away. "You'll see in a minute. Get the door, sweety."

At the sound of footsteps on the porch, Tom swept the door open, trying to be ready for anything. With help from Wendy's warning, he managed to keep the friendly expression on his face, but stumbled over the greeting. "Hi, S... uhhh, hi." He smiled and blinked at Sasha's "somebody special": a tiny wisp of a girl with an angelic face, probably not five feet tall and certainly not eighty pounds, about eighteen or nineteen, tightly clutching Sasha's left hand in both of hers, smiling shyly while looking down at the porch, seeming to be trying to melt down into the floorboards. Tom debated internally whether to offer his hand to shake, and decided it looked unlikely the girl would let go of Sasha's anytime soon. He backed away from the door and said, "Come on in. I take it this is your friend."

Sasha grinned. "This is Marie." She looked down at the girl, who looked up intensely into Sasha's eyes. "Marie, this is my brother Tom, and his wife Wendy."

The girl's eyes passed quickly over Tom and Wendy, and she flashed the pretty smile again and said, almost inaudibly, "Hi."

Wendy, using her most inviting voice, suggested, "Why don't you come in and we can sit in the living room. Dinner's almost ready."

Sasha and Marie established themselves on the sofa, Marie pressing herself tightly against Sasha, still holding her hand, as Tom and Wendy took chairs across from them. Sasha pointed towards the kitchen with her free hand, telling Marie, "That's where I converted my sister Sandy to a girlcow -- my first surgery!" She smiled at the memory, while Marie looked towards the kitchen with wide-eyed wonder, as if it were giving off some magical aura. "Later I can show you the barn, where I helped deliver Sandy's baby, while Dr. Follett was busy delivering my sister Sally's kid."

Marie looked at Sasha in puzzlement. "Girlcows with babies?"

Sasha smiled. "Well, we didn't know they were pregnant already when we converted them."

Tom, feeling almost guilty for invading a private conversation, said, "You know those babies are starting kindergarten Monday."

Sasha gasped. "For real?" She laughed. "Babies are funny about that. They grow up."

Wendy, sorting through the types of questions one always asks on such occasions, came up with, "So, how did you two meet?"

Sasha fielded it, not surprisingly. "I was working in the tutoring center at school, and Marie was having some problems with her freshman calculus homework." She looked back at Marie with an adoring smile. "She's a pre-med major."

Wendy, still looking for a way to draw Marie into the talk ever so slightly, had been noticing Marie's attractive clothes and decided to go with that. "That really is a cute top you're wearing, Marie. Where did you get that?"

Marie flashed the smile again and freed up one hand to finger the garment self-consciously, a gauzy white blouse with puffy short sleeves that left her shoulders bare. "Sasha bought it for me."

Tom shot his wife a startled look, struck dumb by the concept of Sasha buying clothes for someone. And not a simple t-shirt, something really pretty -- without even having Sarah along to help. Sasha herself was dressed normally, for her -- a sleeveless half-shirt that left about six inches of space between its bottom seam and her shorts, the shorts themselves those stretchy knit things she'd been favoring for a few years. He marvelled at how feminine she could look in spite of not trying to, in spite of, or possibly because of, the muscular build that made her easily capable of fighting off the guys who must have regularly flown at her as if she were a dude-magnet.

Marie bit her lip. "Excuse me, could I use your bathroom?"

Wendy pulled herself out of her own astonishment at Sasha's previously unsuspected facets. "Oh, sure." She pointed. "Just right down the hall." She blinked again as Marie gave Sasha a quick kiss and walked quickly into the hallway, disappearing into the bathroom.

Tom found his voice. "She's, uhhh..."

Wendy tried to elaborate. "She's really sweet. Though..."

Sasha grinned. "A little shy?"

Tom grunted at the understatement. "A little, yeah."

Wendy found the attraction between the two girls fascinating. "So you started out tutoring her in math?"

Sasha smiled, thinking back. "Yeah. The first day she came in... she was looking around, kind of a scared little mouse. I remember she saw me, and kind of gasped, like she thought she knew me, and I tried to think where I might know her from. We spent about an hour together, and she'd keep coming up with math questions. She came back the next time I was working there, and it was like she was running out of questions, but just wanted to be there. After the first few times, I tried to decide if I needed to find a nice way to get her to stop so I could help some other kids, but... I thought about it and I realized I didn't want to stop seeing her." She laughed. "So I solved the problem by asking her if she wanted to go to lunch."

Wendy nodded. "So you were attracted to each other right off?"

"Well, there was kind of a reason, for her. See..." Sasha frowned. "When she was a little kid, she was always really small, and shy like she is now. So she was always getting pushed around and beat up. So she learned to seek out the biggest, strongest girl in the class and make friends with her, so she'd have a protector."

Tom could understand how the first sight of Sasha would have set the strong-girl alert bells screaming in Marie's head. "But girls, mainly, not boys?"

"Well, not enough of them to choose from, of course, and..." Sasha's face darkened further. "She doesn't like men much now anyway. She has a brother and... there was some... sexual abuse." Her jaw clenched in obvious anger.

Wendy, eager to steer back to the original subject, asked, "What about from your end? You were attracted to her too, right?"

Sasha relaxed. "Oh, definitely. She was just so sweet, and she's really smart." She giggled. "And I didn't know at the beginning, but she's really imaginative in bed."

Startled, Wendy exclaimed, "Oh! So you're living together?"

Sasha nodded. "Three weeks now. We at least want to try it out and see how it goes."

Tom nodded mutely, and Wendy looked down the hallway. "Is she okay? She's been in there awhile."

Sasha followed Wendy's gaze. "I thought she'd probably do this. You know, it's not as hard for her having impersonal interactions -- sitting in a classroom, or asking a waitress if she can get the girlmeat special cooked medium. Things where people are dealing with her without really thinking of her in particular. But if it gets to be a very personal thing, like..." She smiled. "Well, meeting your girlfriend's family, say, where they're asking you questions about yourself, that really kicks the shyness up another notch. What she's really doing in there is working on getting her nerve back. Of course, she's not like this at home."

Suddenly concerned about her sister-in-law's new partnership, Wendy said, "Ummm... I guess you know one thing that goes wrong with relationships sometimes is... well, one partner tries to change the other, and the other doesn't want it. You'll be careful you aren't... pushing too hard, won't you?"

Sasha looked surprised. "What... oh! You're thinking... Actually, being here was Marie's idea! She really wanted to meet the people who are important to me. Wendy, really, I'll never push her into anything she doesn't want to be in. Even..." She grinned. "I didn't push her at all to have sex, either. I knew I had to wait till she was ready, after the... stuff with her brother."

Gail looked in. "Master, dinner is ready."

Sasha jumped up from the sofa. "I'll go get Marie." Wendy watched as Sasha knocked lightly at the door, saying softly, "You about done, sweety? Dinner's ready." The door opened, and Marie again attached herself to Sasha's offered hand, walking with her as they followed Tom into the kitchen, from which Dierdre had just steered the babies into their own bedroom.

The back door slammed open and Beth hurtled into the room. "Daddy, Adrienne just..." She gasped and pulled up short. "Aunt Sasha!! I didn't know you were here!" She ran at full speed into Sasha and hugged her around the waist, rocking Sasha back on her heels as she laughed and patted her niece's shoulder.

Wendy said sharply, "Beth, you need to let Aunt Sasha have dinner with us. She'll have some time to spend with you later."

Sasha bent and kissed the top of Beth's head. "I'll be out there in awhile, sweety. Okay?"

"Promise?"

She gave Beth a playful swat as the girl detached herself. "Promise."

As Beth ran back out, Sasha looked at Marie and grinned. "Hope you've got a lot of energy."

To Wendy's surprise, Marie giggled. "If I can borrow some of yours."

SUNDAY NIGHT

As they lay in bed, naked, holding each other, each with the top of her right thigh gently rubbing against the other's pussy, their skin damp with perspiration from their just-finished lovemaking, Sasha stirred sleepily and brushed back a strand of Marie's hair that had fallen over her eyes. Marie smiled, kissed her, and asked again, "So you think your dad liked me?"

Sasha returned her kiss. "I could tell he loved you. He could see how happy I am when I'm with you. And Wendy said the same thing about last night."

Marie blinked. "When did she say that?"

Sasha smiled patiently. "I called her when you were at the library this morning. She said they really enjoyed meeting you and they were glad I had such a good friend."

Marie glanced at the clock, and that reminded her. "Oh, I've got an 11 o'clock class in the morning. Can we get together and have lunch after that?" She bit her lip with the inevitable uncertainty -- she never seemed completely convinced that Sasha would continue wanting to be with her.

"I've got..."

Both girls twitched and gasped at the sound of a knock on the door.

Sasha looked wide-eyed at Marie. "Who the hell could that be at this time of night?" Marie shook her head mutely, mystified.

Sasha groaned and got out of bed, grabbing her robe from the back of a chair and putting it on, tying the cloth belt to close it. She leaned over the bed and kissed Marie. "You stay here, sweety. I'll go check." Marie nodded and lay back as the knock was repeated a little more sharply.

Sasha opened the door, deciding on her what-can-I-do-for-you look instead of her go-away-idiot look, on the chance that it might be some university functionary on official business. She blinked at the sight of a small man, shorter and less weighty even than Clarence, wearing a formal-looking white shirt and tie, glaring up at her. She cleared her throat. "Yes?" She decided it was safe to put a little irritation in it.

The man said coldly, "I've been told that my daughter is here. Is she?"

Sasha tried not to react to the gasp she heard from the bedroom. She matched his coldness. "I guess that depends on who your daughter is."

"Marie Fallon. Is she here?"

She turned quickly at the sound of footsteps behind her. Marie, now wearing her robe, asked in a shaky voice, "Daddy, what are you doing here?"

The man took a step as if to go around Sasha, but Sasha moved quickly to the side to cut him off. His eyes narrowed. "Get out of my way, young lady."

With a quick look down the hallway, Sasha decided this meeting would be better for everybody behind a closed door. She stepped back, staying between Marie and her father. "Come in." Once he had come far enough that she could throw the door closed behind him, she did so and said, "Far enough."

After Sasha countered another move to go around her, the man spoke to Marie, his jaw set. "Marie, I want you to come home with me."

Her voice still trembling, she responded, "Classes start tomorrow, Daddy."

"You were supposed to come home during the break between summer and fall term. I haven't even heard a word from you!"

She was breathing hard now. "Daddy, I have to start classes. It's too late to come home."

His mouth was a thin line. "You made sure of that, didn't you? I couldn't even find out where you were until tonight!"

Her voice suddenly firm, she said, "I'm not going home anymore."

Quietly, hoping somehow to bring the tension down a notch, Sasha interjected, "Why don't we all wait and talk about this in the morning?"

He gave her an indignant look. " 'We'? I don't think this is any of your business."

Stung, Sasha shot back, "She's over 18. She's not really your business either." Sasha knew it was safe to offend him. Marie didn't need his money for tuition; she was on a full scholarship.

The blood rushed to his face so fiercely Sasha thought he might solve the problem by having a stroke. He tried to move around her once more, and she side-stepped again. Few opposing players had managed to get around her on the basketball court in high school. He wasn't any match for her that way.

He looked up at her and snarled, "Get out of my way. I'm taking my daughter home."

With a quick hand movement, Sasha brushed through the tie of her belt robe, letting the robe fall open, at the same time flexing her leg, abdominal, and shoulder muscles in the way body-builders do, in competition, to maximize their muscular definition. In a quiet voice, she said slowly, "I don't think so."

He sucked in a strangled breath, his jaw hanging open. He collected himself and sputtered, "I'll come back. With the authorities. She may be over 18, but she's still my daughter and the law is on my side."

Behind her, she heard Marie draw a breath to speak, and a shock ran through her as she realized what the girl was about to say. She gathered her own breath, and by the time Marie had managed "Daddy, I'm..." Sasha quickly shouted "We're married!"

The man gasped and shot Sasha a wide-eyed look, stunned. "W-What?" The possibility simply hadn't occurred to him. Two cohabiting women rarely took the trouble to make it official. When they did, it was a sign of a deep, lifetime commitment.

Behind her, Marie had stopped breathing. Sasha seized her father's eyes with hers and held them, not wanting him to look at Marie and see whatever astonished look she might be wearing. "I said we're married. You do understand that idea, right?"

She felt a small hand on her right hip -- Marie had come up behind her. Still trying to catch her breath, Marie stammered, "Th-that's right, Daddy. Sasha and I are married." Sasha chanced a quick look behind her, and saw Marie's face, pale, looking as if she might faint soon.

He was looking quickly back and forth, from one of them to the other. "Sweetheart... why didn't you tell me?"

"It... it just happened really fast."

Sasha nodded her head in emphatic agreement with that, stifling a laugh. "Look... we're all tired here. Why don't we call it a night? She can tell you more about it another time."

He closed his eyes, seeming to be trying to recover from a physical blow. He knew that his ultimate justification for taking her had been mortally wounded, and that he had no alternatives to put in place of it. "Uhhh... Yes... That may be..."

Sasha nodded, finishing for him. "Best for everybody." She pulled her robe closed and re-fastened the belt, noting in amusement that he had put his hand in his trousers pocket, undoubtedly to hide his erection. Another advantage. She patted him on the shoulder. "We've all had a long day, and my partner and I both have classes tomorrow, so..." She let her voice trail off.

He was blinking back tears of frustration. "Ummm... Yes. Tomorrow is... I'll..." He took a deep breath. "C-Congratulations, sweety. I'll talk to you... ahh, soon. Okay?"

Sasha patted him again. "No hurry. We're not going anywhere. But you really do need to check in with the House Associate if you want to come visit. Well, nice meeting you and all that." He mustered no resistance as she ushered him to the door and closed it behind him, locking it.

She turned and quickly put her finger to her lips as Marie began, "Sasha, I..." and steered her towards the bedroom, closing the door in case there was a chance he was still close enough to hear them.

She put both hands on the girl's shoulders. "Honey, I knew what you were about to tell him. You were going to say you were my slave, weren't you?"

Marie's jaw dropped. She whispered, "How could you know that?"

Sasha smiled. "I just knew. We would have had to make it official, you know. It'd be easy enough for him to check on, and he would have been back. You'd have to really be my slave, and drop out of school... I really, really couldn't let that happen."

Marie's face fell. "So you didn't really mean... but..." Tears rolled down her cheeks. "He -- he can check on that too. The marriage records."

Sasha put her hands gently on either side of Marie's face. "Darling, I think there's something you're missing here. I told your father you and I were married." She held Marie's eyes. "I don't say stuff I don't mean."

She watched, and her smile grew bigger as Marie's eyes grew wider with understanding. "So you... you want..."

Sasha nodded, her smile almost too big for her face. "We can go to the City Clerk's office in the morning before class, and get the licence, and take the vows. There's no blood test for two women marrying, of course. Wait! I'm getting ahead. I need to ask something first."

Her stomach filled with butterflies, and she took a deep breath. "Honey... Do you want to get married? Will you... marry me?"

Marie's face had paled again, and Sasha thought for sure she was going to faint this time, but instead the girl threw herself against Sasha, hugging her so tight that Sasha had the novel experience, for her, of having the breath squeezed out of her. Muffled by the front of her robe, she could hear Marie repeating, "Yes, yes, yes, yes...."

MONDAY AFTERNOON

"Gail, what time is it?"

"Five minutes later."

Sally continued pacing the stall. "Kindergarten ends an hour early, right? The girls should be home by now."

Sandy shifted from one hoof to another. "Gail, could you get Wendy to call the school? I bet something's wrong. I just have this feeling."

Gail sighed. "Would you guys relax? Are you going to be like this every day?"

As Clarissa passed by the stall, overhearing the conversation, she laughed. "Only on school days. For the next thirteen years." Natalie giggled. Tom had come to trust Gail's and Sarah's supervision enough that he let them leave the stall gates open during daylight hours. Clarissa and Natalie had just been returning to their own stall from Rachel's and Rhiannon's, converted to girlcows just last month and the first ever occupants of the sixth and final stall. Clarissa was still trying to get caught up on their lives; she'd last seen them when they were eight years old. Rachel and Rhiannon, who with Rena, Roxanne, and Rhonda back home in dad's barn, were the youngest of all the sisters, would likely be the last new girlcows in Tom's barn until Tom and Wendy's daughters were old enough to join the herd.

Sandy glared at Clarissa. "Clary, you're not a mom. You don't know what it feels like."

"Talk to Wendy, then. With fourteen kids, she probably knows."

Sally shook her head wonderingly. "I don't know why she hasn't gone totally nuts. I can't stand being away from even one kid! Why do they have to go to school anyway?"

Natalie rolled her eyes. "Sally, everybody knows why there's schools. It's to get kids out of their parents' hair! That's why Wendy hasn't gone nuts."

"But we could..."

Sally stopped as Sandy shushed her. "I think I'm hearing the bus."

While they concentrated, trying to decide whether the receding groaning sound was a school bus or simply a large truck, they both jumped as the back door of the house banged open, and the sound of thumping of small feet came running across the yard, their owners giggling breathlessly. Clarice pounded into the stall first, followed closely by Natalya, each girl with one hand on her head trying to steady some sort of hat. Each girl hugged her respective mother and giggled again as their mothers covered their cheeks with kisses.

Sandy leaned her head back to get a better look at her daughter's headgear. It was made from blue construction paper wrapped and glued into a circle to fit around the head, the top edge cut into notches to make it look like a crown. "Whatcha wearing, Tally?"

Natalya reached up to feel her head again to make sure the crown was still there. "It's a hat like the high... tribal... p..." She screwed up her eyes, trying to remember. "Princess..." She looked at her sister for help.

Clarice, or "Reesy," shook her head, so vehemently her crown slipped down around her eyes, and she pushed it back up. "Not princess. Pee... piestess!"

Sally narrowed her eyes. "Priestess?"

Reesy nodded energetically, though a little more carefully. "Yeah, priestess! High tribal priestess! She wore one like this!"

Sandy wrinkled her brows. "What priestess?"

Tally exclaimed, "Our teacher told us a story in a big book with pictures, all about the tribe, and the priestess, and the... verging feets!"

Sandy tried for an interpretation on this one. "Virgin feast?"

Tally nodded. "Yeah, that! Where they ate the virgin. Mommy, what's a virgin?"

Sandy responded, "Uhhhh..." and Sally broke in, "It's a very good girl."

Sandy whispered "Thanks" under her breath, and asked, "So did you both make your... uhh, priestess hats yourself?"

"Yeah! Most of the kids made a circle of flowers like the virgin sack of ice wore..."

"Sacrifice?"

"Yeah, teacher called her that. But Reesy and me liked the priestess crown. It was pretty! You should see the picture. And we didn't want to get eated up like the virgin."

Sandy laughed. "Tally, you're a girl, you're supposed to get eaten."

"Not till we're growed up."

Sandy sighed and smiled. "Well, of course, not till you're grown up." She grinned, and kissed and blew on Tally's neck until the girl doubled up with giggles. "Unless I just eat you up myself!"

Sally laughed, turned to Reesy. "What's your teacher's name, honey?"

"Oh, it's Miss Garrison, and she's tall and so pretty! Tally had to tell her how to say 'NaTALya,' though."

"You can tell her to call you Reesy and Tally. That's easier." The family had adopted the names that the girls had called each other when they were two years old. Their mothers called them by their given names on occasion, wanting to make sure they would always remember they were named for their two special aunts.

Sally sat back on her haunches. "So you girls want a snack? You must be pretty thirsty after your long day at school."

Tally and Reesy exchanged a look. Tally drew herself up with pride. "We're too big for that now."

Sally's head jerked back as if she'd been slapped. "What?"

Reesy explained, "We're in school, and when you're big girls in school then you don't have to eat from mommy anymore."

Sandy shot a look at Clarissa and Natalie, who had been standing quietly off to the side, and both of them looked back at Sandy wide-eyed, giving her a little head shake, not sure what to tell her. She half heard Tally asking, "Mommy? Mommy?"

She looked back at her daughter. "What, sweety?"

"Can we go out and play in the yard?"

"Ummm... yeah, sure. Gimme kiss," she responded automatically. Both girls quickly kissed their mothers on the lips and disappeared out the door.

Sally turned to Clarissa and Natalie, tears starting to form in her eyes. "Where did that come from?"

Natalie shook her head. "I imagine Ashley might have told her that. Most of Wendy's older girls don't have time for them, but Ash pays attention to them."

Sandy sighed. "Yeah, I know." She'd seen Tally and Reesy following Ashley around like baby ducklings. "So what are we supposed to tell them?" Her lip was quivering.

Clarissa cleared her throat. "Wellll... Maybe it's time to let that go."

Sally gave her a stunned look. "Let it go? They're our daughters! You don't know what it feels like to feed your own child!"

Natalie picked out her words carefully, trying to negotiate the minefield of emotions. "Sally... You weren't thinking they'd still be breast-feeding when they're, like... sixteen?"

"I... no, but... they're only five!"

Clarissa said slowly, "But then, somewhere in between there... they're going to stop doing it. I know you're their moms and Ashley isn't, but... maybe Ashley's kind of right. Wendy's... look, I'm not saying like 'Wendy's a better mom,' or anything like that, but you know she's not still nursing her older kids."

Sandy was breathing hard through gritted teeth. "Clary, we're girlcows. Our milk is the only thing we can give them." She choked, and the tears started flowing freely.

Rubbing her cheek against Sally's wet one, as Clarissa did the same for Sandy, Natalie couldn't find words.

Wendy's older kids, the B-kids in third grade, the A-girls in fourth, came an hour later than the kindergarten bus carrying Tally and Reesy. Natalie could tell the bus had arrived from the sound of high-pitched voices and laughter coming across the yard, distinguishable from the squeals of the two-year-old C-girls. Wendy and Tom had agreed to wait until the first nine were in school before having another litter, and also to wait until Tom and his dad had completed the new rooms attached to the house; now Wendy was pregnant again, so another four or five girls were probably in the offing.

As a dozen running footsteps drummed on the floor of the barn, Natalie was already sitting up facing the stall gate, waiting. Belinda's cherubic face appeared at the gate first, followed by Bonnie, Becky, and Beth, along with Ashley and Adrienne, and of course with Ashley came Tally and Reesy, all of them pouring into the stall as if the floodgates in the river downtown had sprung open. Abby and Annie, as usual lately, were missing, probably meeting as their two-member secret society up in the treehouse. Bret, most likely, had sought out his dad and was now riding with him on the tractor or sharing the wonders of the toolshed. Adrienne burst out breathlessly, "Are you going to tell us a story today, Aunt Natalie?"

Natalie grinned. "What makes you think I've got a story for you?"

In unison, several voices shouted, "It's Monday!"

Natalie opened her eyes wide. "Oh, you're right! Well, I guess maybe I could come up with something."

"Yay!" The girls all scrambled for a spot on the floor of the stall facing Natalie. While she waited for them to settle down, Natalie listened to make sure Sandy and Sally, in the stall next door, had turned their TV off. They usually listened in, as did Monica and Jill on the other side, all of them expressing the wish that they could capture the kids' attention the way Natalie could. Natalie tried to give them some pointers and passed along a story or two, but there was something in her way of telling them that they had been unable to imitate. Natalie knew she had gotten the gene from her mother; often her stories were the ones her mother had told her as a child, but not all of them; she made up some of her own.

Beth spoke up first. "What's the story called?"

Natalie began, "It's called 'The Long Winter,' and it happened a long time ago, in a tiny village called Revelle."

Becky sighed. "That's a pretty name."

Natalie smiled. "It was a pretty little village too, with just four families living in tiny huts, way up north where it gets cold."

Bonnie asked in a voice of wonder, "Where it snows?"

Tally wrinkled her nose, "What's snoze?"

Clarissa smiled. Her accepted role during story time was answering the questions unrelated to the story. "Snow is water that's so cold it makes ice, and it falls out of the sky just like rain. It covers the ground all over and makes it white. That doesn't happen here, but in some places it does."

Adrienne looked wide eyed at Natalie. "Did it snow in Revelle?"

Natalie nodded. "It sure did. And one year it snowed so early in the year that the families only got part of the harvest in before the snow covered it all up!"

Several of the girls gasped. They were all sitting with their ankles crossed, their elbows on their knees, their chins resting on their fists, and looks of total absorption on their faces. Beth asked in a worried voice, "Did they get enough to eat for the winter?"

Natalie shook her head sadly. "Not from the crops. But they did have some girls, so they knew they could eat one of them to help them get through."

As the sighs of relief passed through her listeners, Natalie said, "But..."

The worried look was back in Beth's eyes. "But what?"

Natalie looked around the room seriously. "But then they started thinking about it, and they realized it wasn't as simple as that. See, they were all young families, and most of the girls weren't old enough. Two of the families didn't have mommies, because they already ate them. And the other two mommies were pregnant, so they couldn't eat them either."

Reesy wanted to make sure she didn't lose the thread. "Does that mean they're going to have babies? Like Aunt Wendy?"

Natalie nodded and smiled. "And you know nobody eats pregnant mommies, right?" Reesy nodded emphatically.

Natalie went on, "Now, two of the families each had a daughter old enough to eat. One of them was a great big girl named Zelda." Natalie furrowed her brow and puffed out her cheeks, giving a momentary impression of a fat, angry girl. The girls laughed. Belinda chortled, "Zelda! That's a silly name!"

Natalie agreed. "Yes, it's silly. I'll bet you girls will never have a sister named Zelda." Adrienne and Ashley got the joke first, and laughed, followed soon by the others.

Bonnie asked, "So did they eat Zelda?"

Natalie pursed her lips. "Well, they wanted to, because she was such a big girl and she could give them a lot of meat that should last them through the winter. And she was kind of a nasty girl too, always yelling and fighting, and they thought maybe eating her would quiet her down a little." All the girls laughed again, as well as Clarissa. Beyond the partition, Natalie could hear Sandy and Sally giggling, and smiled.

"Now, there was one other daughter in one of the families who was old enough to eat, and her name was Emily."

Adrienne said dreamily, "Another pretty name."

Natalie nodded. "And she was really a pretty girl, too. Everybody liked her, because she was very loving and thoughtful, and did nice things for people, like gathering flowers and leaving them on people's doorsteps, just because she thought they might be happy to see pretty flowers when they came out in the morning. But nobody thought they should eat her."

"Because they didn't want to lose her?" asked Bonnie.

Natalie shook her head. "That's not why. In fact, they knew that when they ate her, all her sweetness and love would be part of them, and they knew that would be good. But there was one problem."

"What was that?" came from Ashley.

"Well, Emily was just such a tiny girl. She was nineteen, but she had almost no meat on her bones at all. Not nearly enough to help the families last through the cold months ahead."

Belinda nodded slowly. "So they decided to eat Zelda."

Natalie raised her eyebrows. "Well, not so fast. See, it was a really big decision, important for all of the families, and whenever something like that happened they always asked the oracle what they should do, because it always told them the right thing."

All of the girls wrinkled their brows. Becky spoke for them. "What's an oracle?"

Natalie shot a quick look over to Clarissa to see if she wanted to handle that one, but Clarissa was already speaking. "An oracle is an ancient spirit that lives inside a tree, and it's so old and so smart it always knows the answer to every question."

Natalie smiled at Clarissa and gave her a tiny nod, as if saying "Nice one."

Belinda looked puzzled. "How can it live inside a tree?"

Adrienne poked her. "It's a spirit, silly, it can live in anything."

Ashley frowned. "Well if it's so smart, it wouldn't tell them to eat Emily, would it?"

Natalie continued, "Well, that's what they wanted to find out. They didn't trust themselves to make the right decision nearly as much as they trusted the oracle, so they thought they'd better ask it. So at night they put on their heavy coats, and lit a campfire, and they all sat out in a ring around the tree, with a cold wind ruffling their hair, and the oldest father in the four families, who was the one who always spoke to the oracle, said, 'Oh great oracle, we are facing a hard winter, and must eat one of our daughters. Should it be Emily, or Zelda?'

"Well, the smoke from the campfire whirled around the tree, like it always did when the oracle was about to speak, and from deep inside the tree a voice said, 'My children, you must cook Emily! After you have cooked her, you shall keep her meat in a great earthen bowl, and share it each night, each family eating from it and then taking it to another. After eating, you shall leave the bowl by this tree.'

"Well, the families all looked at each other, and they knew the oracle was never, ever wrong. So Emily gave her father a tight hug, and all her little sisters, and then she hugged everybody from all the other families, even Zelda, who never liked being hugged. And right away she put her head on the chopping block, so her father could cut it off. Then they cooked her over the campfire, and they cut her up and found a big earthen bowl, and put her meat in it, just like the oracle said to do."

Beth looked sad. "I guess it didn't last very long, did it?"

Natalie's eyes widened. "Well, after that a very strange thing happened." She waited until several of the girls had whispered "What?"

Natalie's face was alight with wonder. "Every night, they did what the oracle said to do: one family would bring the bowl into their house, take some of Emily's meat and heat it up, and put it on their dinner plates along with a few meager portions of the crops they'd saved before the snow fell, and then they'd take the bowl to another family. And somehow, there was always more meat in the bowl! After a few days, each family started taking bigger portions, because they were getting hungry, and still, when they took the bowl to the next family, it was nearly full! And that kept happening all through the winter, and on into spring, until they had raised enough crops in the field and didn't need Emily anymore. When that happened, they all got together and had a big feast, and got so full they thought they'd pop. And at the end, when they looked in the bowl, the meat was finally gone. But they decided to have a feast every year on that same day, to celebrate Emily's gift to the families. Every year, the night before the feast, they would leave the bowl under the oracle's tree. And when it came time for the feast to begin..." She looked around expectantly.

Becky burst out, "The bowl was full!"

Natalie grinned. "And they still have the feast every year. Now, do you know why the oracle said to choose Emily and not Zelda?"

The girls all stared at her blankly, each one wishing she could answer but not quite knowing what to say.

She looked at them expectantly. "Well, did Emily have a lot of something that Zelda didn't?" She focussed on Tally and Reesy, having a feeling they would know.

The light went on in Tally's and Reesy's faces together, and they both said, "Love?"

Natalie beamed at them. "Exactly! Because love is like that. You can give all of it you have, and somehow there's always still more of it!" She looked up at all the girls. "Like the way your mothers love you. They'll always give you all their love today, and then there'll be more of it tomorrow." She looked back down at Tally and Reesy. "Right?"

The two girls exclaimed, "Right!" and jumped up to give Natalie a hug. Wendy's girls, in turn, hugged Natalie, several of them saying "Love you, Aunt Natalie!" As they started one by one to bolt out of the stall, Ashley turned to Tally and Reesy. "Want to go down by the creek and look for snails?"

Together the two shouted "Sure!" and ran out of the stall with Ashley.

Natalie turned to Clarissa, who was staring at her open-mouthed. Clarissa shook her head. "I thought I was used to you doing this, but that was just..." She searched fruitlessly for a word, until she saw a movement out of the corner of her eye.

Sandy and Sally were walking slowly into the stall, tears streaming down their cheeks. They pressed their cheeks against Natalie's from both sides. Sandy whispered huskily "Thank you," as Sally choked out, "I guess we do have something we can give them."

Natalie kissed them both. "Of course you do."